John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Wilson stared down into the water. He watched the choppy waves form and re-form. It seemed like chaos, and yet, it was anything but. Like everything else, the swell and crash of the sea was amenable to rational analysis. The movements of the water were a function of the wind’s force and direction, the sinuous shoreline and undersea currents, the temperature of water and air, the moon’s pull and the flux of the ships, lolling at anchor… in just… that… way.

Not chaos, then, but God, or something like it.

They were spectacular, in their way.

Lying on the floor, doing her yoga exercises, Andrea Cabot could see the Petronas Towers gleaming in the distance. Monumentally modern, the buildings were the city’s erectile glory, proof positive in Malaysian eyes that the future belonged to Islam. A Westerner could not be in KL for more than an hour, if that, without being told that these were “the tallest freestanding twin towers in the world.” Left unsaid now was that the Towers were taller, even, than the World Trade Center.

Sorry about that.

To Andrea, who’d taken the bungalow in spite of the view rather than because of it, the Towers were a constant admonition. Built on the site of what had once been a racetrack, the steel-and-glass structures paid homage to Islam in both large and small details. The buildings’ footprint consisted of two squares superimposed upon each other at an angle, so that they formed an eight-pointed star. Within the confines of that footprint were a six-story shopping center; a mosque for six thousand worshippers; offices for the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Bloomberg; and a Mandarin Oriental Hotel. In a peculiar gesture of architectural piety, care had been taken to ensure that the urinals were oriented in the general direction of Japan, so that when the buildings’ occupants peed, they did so with their backs toward Mecca.

At the embassy, which gave Andrea her thin veneer of diplomatic cover, the consensus seemed to be that the Towers’ most important architectural feature was the sky-bridge, a gimballed contraption connecting the buildings near their midsection, forty-two floors above the street. This was, by all accounts, a safety feature. Should some lunatic fly a plane into one of the buildings, office workers could escape from one tower to the next.

Which was neat, but did little to mitigate the fact that in this sexually repressed society, the Towers, when seen from a distance, resembled nothing so much as gigantic vibrators aimed at the heavens.

Andrea’s bungalow was situated in the center of a gated and well-guarded compound on the edge of the luxe Ampang district. Built by CIA contractors in the late 1980s to house the chief of station, it had a palmy garden, a lighted swimming pool, and a luxurious safe-room that did double duty as a bath.

It wasn’t just that the safe-room was “safe.” It more or less was a safe. Linen wallpaper concealed a hardened steel lattice, sandwiched around bullet-resistant Kevlar. The ceiling and floor were reinforced concrete, the door capable of stopping anything less than a round from an RPG. There was a closed-circuit television monitor tuned to cameras throughout the house and grounds, and a radio transmitter hardwired directly to a hidden antenna across the street. Like the open telephone line in the living room, the transmitter was monitored twenty-four/seven by the communications duty officer at the U.S. embassy.

So it was as safe as any place could be in a city that served as a convention center for jihadists from all over the world. Not for Andrea the fate of William Buckley, the chief of station kidnapped in Beirut during the 1980s.

She kept Buckley’s picture in a silver frame on the dresser in her bedroom. It was there among pictures of her family: mom and dad, her sister, niece, and… Bill. Anyone who saw the picture would assume that the man in the frame was a relative, a husband, or a boyfriend. But the truth was, they’d never met. He was there on the dresser as a daily reminder, an object lesson in what not to do.

In the short time that she’d been chief of station in Kuala Lumpur, Andrea had given a lot of thought to Buckley. A patriot who built miniature dioramas of Revolutionary War battles, he’d spent much of his life abroad, moving from one flyblown Muslim capital to another, fighting a precocious and dirty war against what the Arabs were beginning to call “al-Qaeda” – The Base.

A grim and secretive man, he owned neither house nor apartment. Home was a suite in an executive hotel in downtown Washington.

And he was obviously his own worst enemy. Reading the reports, it was clear to Andrea that Buckley was as much a victim of his own hubris as he was of the terrorists who’d kidnapped him. His sense of immunity was as profound as it was mistaken. Living in the midst of an urban guerrilla war, in a city where mortar attacks were commonplace, Buckley chose to live in a penthouse. In West Beirut! To say it was the wrong side of town was to understate the matter.

Beirut was cleft in two by the Green Line, a bombed-out no-man’s-land that divided the city into East and West, Christian and Muslim. In East Beirut, people prayed to Jesus. In West Beirut, they prayed to Allah.

What was he thinking? Andrea wondered. A penthouse in West Beirut? He might as well have put up a tent on a firing range.

Andrea moved from one asana to another. With glacial grace, she performed the Sun Salutation, raising her face toward the Petronas Towers. Buckley! she thought. How macho! The most important spook in the Middle East didn’t even have a chase car to follow him to work.

In the end, his abduction took less than a minute. Buckley’s car, a beige Honda, was parked outside his apartment building on the Rue Tanoukhi. As he pulled away from the curb, a white Renault cut in front of him, blocking the way. Two men jumped from the Renault, waving guns and shouting. One of the kidnappers pulled Buckley from his car. Another grabbed his briefcase.

Pushed onto the floor of the Renault, the CIA man was covered with a blanket and told to keep his mouth shut. The Renault took off, turned a corner, and headed for the Corniche. Within minutes, it was stopped at a checkpoint run by an Islamic militia. Gunmen waved the gunmen on. From the checkpoint, it was a short drive to the slums. There, the chief of station was taken to a windowless basement, where he was blindfolded and chained to an eyebolt in the floor.

A report from an agent in Hezbollah stated that Buckley’s interrogation lasted months. The source reported that the American had been tortured with the help of a Palestinian doctor, who administered drugs and monitored the prisoner’s vital signs.

The interrogation was said to focus on CIA operations in Lebanon, including kidnappings and assassinations that the Agency had “outsourced” to allies in the Lebanese armed forces and Christian militias.

From there, the area of inquiry expanded to include Buckley’s earlier assignments. He’d worked in Egypt and Syria, and served on the CIA review board that evaluates agents in the Middle East. That in itself should have disqualified him from serving in the area, because once he was kidnapped, it ensured that the cover of every agent in the Middle East was blown.

They got him back in a coffin. Whether Buckley had been tortured to death or died of malignant neglect was uncertain. Neither was it known where he’d been kept during his long months of imprisonment or how often he’d been moved.

Andrea had read the accounts of other hostages who told of being moved from one dungeon to another in the cruelest of possible ways. Bound and gagged, the prisoners were wedged into boxes attached to the undersides of trucks. The only air available to them was a mixture of diesel fumes and dust.