Don Pendleton - Ripple Effect

And his place in Paradise would be assured.

That vision made him strong—or stronger than he might have been without it.

Escape wasn’t an option, Khaled realized, and while some other inmates of the camp had been released to satisfy the Red Cross or the media, once he was questioned under medication there would be no possibility of freedom. Once they heard his secret, Khaled might be whisked away to the American mainland for further questioning, until the heathen bastards satisfied themselves that they knew everything.

And would it be enough to save them?

Possibly.

Khaled couldn’t be sure. He knew only a name, a fragment of a rumor shared by comrades in the dead of night. He had no details of the master plan itself, but once the name was given to his enemies, the rest might be superfluous. The scouring of dossiers and databases would begin, and ultimately they would have the man himself.

Khaled couldn’t permit it.

There were no weapons in his cell, of course—or none, at any rate, regarded by his captors as a weapon. But the simple cotton robe he wore could serve him as an instrument of suicide.

And when he’d finished with it, they could use if for his shroud.

There was no privacy in Camp X-ray, but neither was Khaled exposed in fact to round-the-clock surveillance. When he pulled the plain white robe over his head, no one except the occupants of two adjoining cages saw him do it. Neither spoke as he stood tall on tiptoes, double-knotting one sleeve of the robe to bars that formed the ceiling of his cage.

Neither adjoining prisoner called out for help as Khaled tied a makeshift noose around his neck and pulled it tight. They offered no objection as he checked the simple hang-man’s rope for length, then climbed the nearest barred wall of his cage for altitude.

The bars were slippery. He almost lost his grip and tumbled back, but that wouldn’t provide enough impact to stun him and prevent his hands from rising to the noose as he began to choke. In case his will to live proved stronger than his faith, Khaled was banking on a sharper drop to render him insensible.

A few more inches now. That should be high enough. The floor seemed far below him, like the bottom of a canyon. All illusion, in his present agitated state.

With one last prayer, Hasam Khaled released his grip and plummeted toward Paradise.

BOB ARMSTRONG DIDN’T CARE much for the spit-and-polish military types. He tolerated them whenever necessary, wore a smiling mask to hide his general contempt for amateurs who meddled in intelligence, and he never under any circumstances gave away the information his superiors had classified as need-to-know.

Sometimes, like now, he’d flatter certain officers with lies or slick evasions when they had to work in tandem toward specific goals, but he would no more tell a grunt in uniform what he was really thinking than he’d drop his pants and wag the weasel at a formal diplomatic function.

Some things were simply not done by professionals. Full stop. Case closed.

But sometimes you had to prime the pump, and so he said, “The truth, Lieutenant Lewis—may I call you Joseph, by the way?”

“It’s Jordan.”

“Ah, my apologies. Then, may I—?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Big smile. “The truth, Lieutenant Lewis, is that Langley’s under fire right now with accusations that we overlook the little things. Nobody seems to care much if a war goes on for years with no result, but we catch hell if we don’t know the dictator of the day’s zip code. You follow me?”

“Not yet,” the Marine said.

“My point is that we want to dot our i’s and cross our t’s, make sure we don’t miss any little thing, regardless of how insignificant it seems.”

“And that affects me…how?” the lieutenant asked.

“I’ve been asked to start from scratch with some of the neglected prisoners. Not my word, mind you. From the top, you know? Wish I could duck it. Big pain in the neck, I realize, but there it is.”

“No problem,” the lieutenant answered somewhat stiffly. “Do you have a list, or are we starting over alphabetically?”

“I have a list,” Armstrong admitted, “but it’s more like alphabet soup. They’ve been prioritized somehow, by someone. You can ask me how, why, who, but I don’t know. God’s truth.”

He was about to put a hand over his heart, but thought that might be overdoing it.

“I don’t require an explanation, Mr. Armstrong,” Lewis said. “When did you want to start?”

“This morning, if that’s feasible.”

“I’ll need your list.”

“Of course.” Armstrong retrieved two sheets of folded paper from an inside pocket of his jacket, passing them across the desk. Lewis unfolded them, blinked once, then tried to mask his surprise as he surveyed the twin columns of small, single-spaced type.

“This looks like nearly half the men in camp,” the lieutenant said.

“Is it?” Armstrong cocked an eyebrow, as if mildly curious. “I couldn’t say.”

“And these have been prioritized, you say? Does that mean that the first, say, dozen on the list are now prime terrorism suspects?”

Armstrong shrugged, his face contorting into something that approximated puzzlement. “Beats me,” he said. “For all I know, they could have ranked them in reverse order, with small-fry at the top. I really couldn’t say.”

“Mm-hmm.” Lewis looked skeptical, to say the least. “And you want to begin with number one, meaning top left on the first page?”

“Correct.”

“And work your way down column one, then back up to the top of column two? Or zigzag down the page?”

Armstrong pretended not to know that the jarhead was making fun of him. “Straight down, I think. If that’s all right with you.”

“Whatever,” Lewis said. “These clowns aren’t going anywhere. You want to start right now?”

“Ideally, yes,” Armstrong replied.

“Suits me. I’ll see if we have an interpreter available.”

Armstrong relaxed and watched the officer go through his pantomime. In fact, as he well knew, Camp X-ray always had interpreters available. It couldn’t function otherwise, with prisoners who spoke at least three languages aside from Arabic.

After another moment on the telephone, Lewis cradled the receiver, donned a tight-lipped smile and said, “I have a man you can use to get started this morning. Later on today, we’re jammed up pretty tight.”

“Where there’s a will….”

“I’ll see what I can do. No promises.”

“Of course.” He didn’t feel like flexing any hidden muscles at the moment. If the jarhead still felt prickly around lunchtime, Armstrong would reach out and pull whatever strings it took to scorch his lazy ass.

“In that case,” Lewis said, “we’re just waiting for the interpreter. He’s coming over from the barracks as we speak.”

“That should be—”

Sudden rapping on the office door distracted him. The sergeant from the outer waiting room entered, flicked a distracted glance at Armstrong, then told Lewis, “Sir, we’ve had another…incident.”

“Explain,” Lewis commanded. When the sergeant looked again at Armstrong, the lieutenant added, “Sergeant, please speak freely.”

“Yes, sir. It’s another suicide attempt. One of the inmates tried to hang himself.”

“Which one?”

The sergeant looked down at his cupped left hand, where Armstrong saw a sticky note not quite concealed. “His name’s Hasam Khaled, sir. Just a nobody, as far as we can tell. One of the men on walk-through found him hanging in his cell and cut him down.”

“You said he tried to hang himself. How badly is he hurt?” Lewis inquired, sounding as if he didn’t really care much either way.