The Sleeper (15 page)

“But a non-American—a nobody—you can do whatever you want with him.”

“That's right,” said Griffin. “Anything at all. And you know what? We might even be able to let him go.”

“You tell me something: Who's my enemy now? The assholes in the cages, or the assholes outside of them?”

“I'm your friend, Kurtovic.”

“I'll remember that.”

“You're damn straight you will.” Without warning the back of his powerful right hand came across my face hard and blinding.

I tasted blood-salt inside my mouth. “You're gonna die, fucker,” I said, spitting red.

“You think so, you uppity piece of shit. Well let me tell you something.” He leaned in close to my face, his teeth bared in anger, but his voice a whisper. “It's you and me against the world right now,” he said. “There's shit coming down inside and outside. And I
am
your friend. Your only friend.”

I just nodded, feeling the tingle fade from my face and jaw and sensing fear in his whisper.

“You awake now, asshole?” he shouted.

I spit again.

“Listen to me, boy,” said Griffin. “You want to get out of here—ever—you got to play the game.” He spit on the floor. “Think it over.”

After a long pause, all I said was “Move farther faster and fight harder.”

Griffin smiled. “Now you got it, Ranger boy.”

“If I get you what you want, you get me out of here. No more bullshit.”

“Roger that.”

“Yeah. Right.” He was lying. But as far as I could see, the only way out of this place for weeks, maybe months or years, was his way. We could count up the lies and settle the scores later on. “Who do you want me talking to?”

“Who we want talking to you is already in a cell next to yours.”

“The Sudanese? The Kuwaiti?”

“A Pakistani—a Baluchi, in fact.”

“The Squatter,” I said.

“They're afraid, the Americans,” the Kuwaiti whispered through the wire after lights out. “Afraid at last! That's why they broke your lip last week, Qibla. That's why they kept me for so long in the question house today. They are, how do they say, shitting in their shorts.”

There was a long silence. Afraid at last. A twisted sentence echoed in my head: Afraid at last. Afraid at last. Great God Almighty, afraid at last. “They know about the weddings,” I said.

“They know nothing.”

“Enough to be afraid.”

“Hamdulillah,”
laughed the Kuwaiti.

“After the weddings, then the
real
jihad,” I said.

“War everywhere,” he said.

“ ‘Are the people of the townships then secure from the coming of Our wrath upon them as a night-raid while they sleep?' ” I quoted one of the verses I memorized long ago from the Qur'an, and that I'd read again from the copy of the Book left in my cage by the U.S. Marines. “ ‘Or are the people of the townships then secure from the coming of Our wrath upon them in the day-time while they play? Are they then secure from Allah's plan?' The words spoken by the Prophet, peace be upon him.”

“Peace be upon him,” said the Kuwaiti.

“Soon Allah's plan will be revealed. But—”

“But?”

“I think one wedding was stopped,” I said. “Maybe more.”

The Kuwaiti was quiet.

“When they ask questions,” I said, “then you learn things. You learn what it is they want to know.”

“Yes.”

“They are asking about boats. And I don't know anything about boats.”

“Yes. They talk about ships.” After a long silence in the next cage, the Kuwaiti said, “They are not so smart.”

“Tell them nothing,” I said. “Silence is jihad.”

About an hour later, when he thought I was asleep, I heard the Kuwaiti at the corner of his cell whispering to the Squatter in a language I didn't recognize. But the tone, even in a whisper, was urgent.

 

The Kuwaiti kept away from me for most of the next day, and I didn't try to talk to him. Whatever he knew, whatever he found out from the Squatter, he'd have to come to me with it in his own time, and I figured he would. He liked to talk, this Kuwaiti kid. What had happened in September and since, I realized, was all kind of unreal to him. I wondered if he'd ever seen a man dead, and if he had, if he'd ever thought about what he saw. The real slaughter in the name of his imagined God was no more real to him than the video gore of a shoot-'em-up game. He talked about the attack on America like a teenager who's just typed in his name for the high score.

The Squatter was almost impossible for me to read. He sat for hours on his haunches looking around him slowly, really slowly, like a bird on a wire. His skin was black, his eyes were black—not like he was African, but like he was charred, like he was a devil who used to sit on some ledge in Hell. I watched him watching for hours at a time, a slime-black toad, a soot-covered carrion crow, and I could feel sometimes, starting to crawl under my skin again, the same ants I'd felt in the hole on the ship. Not until then would I look away, close my eyes, begin again to nail the shingles one by one on the roof of the house by the pond. As far as I could tell, the Squatter didn't speak any English at all, and in the weeks we'd been caged side by side he'd never even looked me in the eyes. But each morning when the chaplain made his rounds, the Squatter, at last, stood up to talk.

 

It must have been two or three nights after the session with Griffin that I heard the Kuwaiti whispering at me again after lights out.

“They say you are American,” he said. “I told them no, you are Bosnian. But they say they are sure.”

“How would they know?”

The kid was silent.

“Did the imam tell them?”

“No, no,” he said too quickly.

“Listen,” I said. “I am Bosnian and I have an American passport. Don't you?”

“My brother has one.”

“And is he American or Kuwaiti?”

“Yes. You are right. But Ahmed does not trust you.”

“Ahmed? Is he that man in the next cage? I do not trust Ahmed. He talks too much to the imam. But I do not want anything from him. So why do I care?”

Silence. “He says you are spying for the Americans.”

“And the imam is not?”

“That is what he says.”

“Then he's not very smart.”

“You are wrong. He is very, very smart. He knows about the weddings. He knows very much about the weddings.”

“Bless him, then. I am his friend whether he believes me or not. Now let's get some sleep while the night is a little cool.”

The Kuwaiti was only quiet for a couple of minutes. “Only two weddings were canceled,” he said.

“Hamdulillah,”
I said. “I can sleep better now.”

Two weeks to the day after Griffin's first visit, thirty-two days after I arrived at Guantánamo, eighty-two days after I got shackled for the first time, Griffin had me strapped to the gurney and wheeled to the interrogation shed for our second meeting. He was leaning against the desk staring down at me as the guards started to strap me to the chair.

“Leave it,” he told them.

“Sir?” said one of the guards.

“Leave it. The interrogator has the prerogative. I'm exercising that prerogative.” Griffin looked at his watch, impatient. The guards left. The door closed behind them and we were sealed in the interrogation shed. I was standing but still shackled. “They'd have stayed if they took off the other shit,” he said. “Can't leave me alone with a dangerous son of a bitch like you.”

“I think I got some of what we need,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“There are six more ships.”

“We knew that.”

“You mean you heard that. I'm confirming it. And there's more. But tell me about Miriam and Betsy.”

“They're good,” said Griffin, and a kind of sadness passed over his face like a shadow.

“What's wrong?”

“Your family is okay.” The discipline snapped back in his voice. “Now tell me what you got.”

“Griffin, man—what's
wrong?
”

“Tell me what you got.” He looked at his watch again, a big steel Rolex. “You got the targets for the hits? How many ships?”

“Six.”

He nodded.

“Port of departure.”

“Somewhere in Indonesia, I think. Can't say what island. But that was a while ago. The idea was to lose them—change the ships' ID completely—on the long trip around the world.”

“Targets?”

“In the United States, two new ones: Houston—because of oil and Bush.”

Griffin nodded again.

“And Chicago, because it's in the middle of the country. ‘The heart of the country' is what they say. But they could change that any time.”

“Where else?”

“New York and Boston, like we knew before. And outside the U.S., Gibraltar and Panama.”

“You're batting a thousand,” said Griffin. “What else you got? Names? Dates? Methods?”

“The Squatter doesn't talk to me. He talks to the Kuwaiti. And the Squatter thinks I'm a spy. Somebody told him I was American. Who the fuck do you think did that?”

“Don't know. I'll check.”

“Well check that fucking imam the Navy sent us.”

“Will do,” said Griffin, but his eyes weren't focused on mine.

“It's slow going,” I said. “And I'm not sure how much the Squatter knows about whatever is happening now. The ships were put in motion in November. Now it's almost March. They're making long, slow trips with lots of stops in little ports. The names of the ships change. The papers get shuffled. But the real cargo stays the same—just like you found near England and Japan, a whole lot of nitrates, and enough radioactive stuff from industrial sources to panic the country when the dust cloud settles and the Geiger counters go off. You haven't caught the other ships yet 'cause they're hanging back. The first ones you got were almost like trial runs. The next six are just waiting for the order.”

“When's that coming? Who's it coming from?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure anybody here knows. But I'll tell you what they think. They think the man with the plan is inside the United States.”

Griffin looked at his watch. He looked into my eyes. “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head gently. “A sleeper,” he said.

“Maybe
the
sleeper,” I said. “The brains. The guy who blends in and nobody notices, and who runs the whole show. Or maybe it's just some kind of story they made up in the Afghanistan camps.”

Griffin looked at me. Waiting.

And then the lights went out.

The little interrogation shed didn't have any windows, so now we were in total darkness. The air conditioner stopped, too.

“Don't move,” said Griffin. His voice echoed in the sudden silence. “The mikes and cameras are off as long as the power's out. But the power will be back in a couple of minutes. Right now we can talk straight.”

I thought this might be some kind of show for me, a little psy-op to secure my trust. “So talk,” I said.

“There's a war inside the government right now,” he said. “A war about the future of the war. That's what I was trying to tell you when I saw you the last time.”

“What do you mean ‘war about the future of the war'?”

“You fight to win, right? That's my business. That's your business. You fight to win so you won't have to fight anymore—at least not the same enemy. Ain't that right?”

“Hell yes.”

“Well, some people don't see things that way. They want the war to go on, and if this one ends, they want a new one.”

“That's fucking crazy.”

“Yeah, but it's a fact. I haven't really figured out why. Power? Money? A message from God? They live in their own weird inside-the-Beltway universe. But the fact is, the war-makers in Washington think they're going to cook up a whole new world. And to do that, they got to keep the fire burning.”

The blackness closed in around me. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because these assholes don't seem to care about the bad guys—the
real
bad guys. We're hunting them. We're catching some. You got the biggest prize so far. But the war lobby doesn't give a shit about Abu Zubayr. You know what I think? I think if we caught Osama himself they'd be rip-shit because that might end support for their war.”

“Go on.”

“So the ones who know about you—”

“You said nobody knew I was here.”

“Almost nobody. There ain't many, but the ones who do are powerful, and some of them don't want you out of here.”

“You mean they don't want me hunting down the bad guys. Well I didn't do it for them anyway. And if it helps, I won't do it anymore. Send me home. I'll stay there.”

“Kurt, listen, I am your friend. I got to tell you it's going to be hard as hell to get you out of here.”

“Ah shit. Shit!”

“And there might be some big trouble on the way. They need some victories to keep up the appetite for war. They're looking for sleepers inside the U.S.A., people they can point to as ‘the enemy within.' ”

“There
are
sleepers, and they're dangerous as hell.”

“But they can't find them.”

“Okay, then I can find them.”

“You don't understand. They can't seem to find the real ones, or maybe they don't want to—but they got to point the finger somewhere and fast. With your background, with some of the things you've done, I think they're going to point the finger at you. If that happens, you're going to be a public ‘captured American,' some kind of ‘American Taliban.' And you ain't ever going to be free.”