John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Catch a cold, and you could be dead.

The only way to get through something like that was to zombie out. Andrea had trained for precisely that contingency. Like every other CIA officer sent to a danger post, she’d been subjected to mock interrogations at the Farm, the Agency’s training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia. As a part of that training, she’d been “encrated.” That’s what they called it when they stuffed you into a box and left you to think about it for a couple of hours. Or a couple of days.

And that was why she did yoga exercises every morning. It wasn’t so much the stretching as the breathing. After years of practice, she found that she could lower her resting heartbeat to fewer than thirty beats a minute. Any lower, and she’d have been hibernating or dead. Which was more or less what you wanted to be if you woke up in a box.

A quavering beep floated up from the watch on her wrist, reminding her that it was time to get going. She had an appointment at the regional interrogation center that morning, and she didn’t want to be late. A man was being tortured on her behalf. The least she could do was watch.

As the embassy’s Mercedes wound its way through the hills outside the city, Andrea sat in the backseat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, reading a report. The report was four days old, and this was the third time she’d gone over it.

In the front seat, Marine sergeant Nilthon Alvarado adjusted the rearview mirror, ostensibly to see if they were being followed, in fact to admire the chief of station’s legs.

The report was from the MSB, the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysia Police. It concerned a CIA-MSB operation targeting a thug named Nik Awad, who was known to be a liaison between the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). These were terrorist networks hell-bent on making Malaysia part of an Islamic republic whose borders would stretch from northern Thailand to the farthest island in the Philippines. The CIA’s interest was parochial. Awad was thought to be planning an attack on the American military base in Sumatra.

Recently, telephone surveillance had generated an interesting lead. In a call from Berlin, Awad was asked to facilitate the visit of “a friend from Beirut.” The friend was identified only as “Aamm Hakim,” and Awad was to meet him at Subang Airport.

Since Awad was going to be detained anyway, the Special Branch decided to wait for the friend’s arrival. A day or two would make no difference, and Subang Airport was as good a place as any to take Awad down. When the time came, plainclothes MSB officers fell in step behind Awad as he waded into the crowd in the Arrivals terminal. When he exchanged abrazos with a man coming out of Customs, they swooped.

Which is when it got interesting. “Aamm Hakim” was traveling on a Syrian passport issued to a man named “Badr Faris.” The passport appeared to be valid, and Mr. Faris was not on any of the lookout lists. From an intelligence standpoint, he was cherry. And having just entered the country, he’d done nothing wrong, so there were no real grounds for holding him. Not even under the Internal Security Act.

Special Branch was disappointed. With hopes of netting a big fish, instead, they had a businessman who claimed to be looking for a site on which to build a condom factory. They were skeptical, but there was nothing they could do. The man’s political views were unknown, and he didn’t seem particularly religious. On the contrary, “Faris” was a clean-shaven businessman who obviously enjoyed himself. His suitcase contained a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a photomagazine called Beaver Hunt, and a business card for an erotic massage and escort service in Beirut.

As to the call from Berlin, Faris claimed he knew nothing about it. “A friend in Beirut offered to put me in touch with Mr. Awad. Said he could be helpful. I thought, okay, why not? I assumed my friend placed the call himself, but… apparently not. As to who he called in Berlin, I have no idea. I’ve never been there.”

So how had Awad recognized him?

Oh, you know how it is… I was looking for him, he was looking for me. We saw each other looking around…

Andrea looked up from the report. So why did they call him “Aamm Hakim”? she wondered. “Aamm” was an Arab honorific, referring to an uncle on the paternal side. If Faris was the uncle, who was the nephew? Was it the guy in Berlin who’d placed the call? Or was it Awad himself? It had to be one or the other, and yet, according to Faris, he didn’t know either of them. Obviously, Faris was lying.

Andrea’s eyes returned to the report.

After an hour of questioning, the MSB agents were about to let Faris go, when one of the detectives noticed something about his shirt collar. “What is that?” he asked, reaching for the collar.

All hell broke loose. Coming out of his chair, Faris drop-kicked the detective in the balls, and bolted for the door. That was as far as he got. One cop dragged him to the floor, while another pinned him by the arms. He had something in his hand that he wouldn’t let go of – until the detective with the sore balls stomped on his elbow, snapping the ulna.

A pill rolled onto the linoleum and, suddenly, it was clear that Mr. Faris was no ordinary businessman.

Since then, Andrea had visited the interrogation center on two occasions. Each time, she sat outside Room 11, listening through headphones to what the Malaysians called a “disciplinary interrogation.” If she had a question, she would ask it of Jim Banerjee, MSB’s liaison to the Agency, and Banerjee would put the question to the interrogators in the room. In this way, Andrea could truthfully say that she had not participated in Mr. Faris’s questioning (or “so-called torture”).

By then, “Faris” was more subdued than he’d been at the airport. No more shouts of “God is great!” Instead, there was a lot of heavy breathing, punctuated by questions posed in a voice that was alternately angry and cajoling. The answers came with a quaver, sometimes followed by a crackle of electricity as Mr. Faris’s inquisitors lit him up with a stun gun.

So far, they’d learned almost nothing. However, the fingerprint check had come back positive. The detainee’s real name was Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi. Special Branch files identified Mussawi as a fifty-four-year-old Egyptian who’d been expelled from the Muslim Brotherhood twenty years earlier for excessive militance. Since then, he had been implicated in the activities of the KMM, Jemaah Islamiyah, and the Baalbek-based Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth. There were warrants for him in his homeland and five other countries. Both the Ministry of the Interior in Oman and the FBI were offering rewards.

But if Andrea had anything to say about the matter, it would be a while before they’d learn about Hakim. There was no point in making a splash – it would just send Hakim’s friends packing. Better to keep him under wraps. Maybe she could leverage him.

The interrogation center was a complex of modern buildings about twenty miles from Kuala Lumpur. Built with U.S. funds in the aftermath of 9/11, it lay at the end of a two-lane access road, behind a juggernaut of concrete barriers and electrified fences topped with concertina wire.

Banerjee was waiting for her at the registration desk on the mezzanine. He was a tall, ethnic Indian with a pockmarked face and a razor scar under his chin, where a thief had tried to kill him. Andrea had met him in the States two years earlier, when he’d attended an antiterrorist training module at the Farm. A Special Branch lieutenant in his early thirties, Banerjee liked to skydive on weekends, jumping out of the plane with his pet python, Roosevelt, draped over his shoulders.