At altitude, the big gray and green C5A flew smooth as silk, even filled with two tanks, five armored vehicles, tons of crated cargo and twenty passengers. Two military brats—a seven-year-old boy and his ten-year-old sister—were running up the aisles between the seats, trying to play basketball with a tied-up roll of plastic bags. The constant throbbing low-level growl of the gigantic turbo-fan engines had lulled most of the other passengers to sleep.
Farrow had driven William Griffin to Andrews to join the flight from Georgia on its way to Washington state. The FBI had quickly wrangled an Air Mobility Command ticket.
William slumped in his seat. His eyes were heavy-lidded and he was fighting to stay awake, but he had refused coffee as the cargo officer had worked her way aft with a steel pot and a stack of foam cups. He did not want to sharpen his jagged emotions.
The basketball brats were now goggling at the tie-downs and chains that imprisoned two Stryker armored vehicles. William had flown AMC twice as a young boy, on much smaller aircraft. They had spent some time in Thailand and then in the Philippines. His father had been gone for much of the time, leaving them to fend for themselves in spartan base housing at Subic that dated back at least to the 1950s. All he remembered now of those years was his mother hoisting him up into a garishly decorated Jeepney and his father cleaning volcanic ash off their Subaru station wagon.
The cargo officer walked back down the aisle again and asked William if he was FBI. ‘We have a satcom relay for William Griffin,’ she explained, and handed him a wireless headset. ‘SCA Keller.’
‘SAC Keller,’ William corrected with a thin smile. ‘Special Agent in Charge.’
‘Right,’ the officer said, and stood back with her arms folded.
‘William Griffin here.’ He listened. Griff had been pulled out of the wreckage. Life Flight had transported him to Seattle. He was in critical condition, but he was alive.
‘Does my mother know?’ William asked. ‘They were divorced. She doesn’t live with him…she’s moved out of our old house, too.’
‘I’ve notified your mother,’ Keller said. ‘She says she’s not well enough to travel. You’ll have to represent the family.’
‘Thanks.’ William stared straight ahead again. Then he frowned. ‘How could he have survived? How is that even possible?’
‘They haven’t found your father’s partner, Alice Watson,’ Keller said. ‘Two State Patrol bomb techs were crushed in their truck. One’s dead. Another FBI agent, Rebecca Rose, was pulled from the back of the truck with minor injuries. She’s at Harborview with Griff. Luck of the blast. I’m stuck here in Washington until tomorrow. You will check up on your father, attend a courtesy briefing from the investigation team, and then you will immediately report to your probationary assignment, wherever that may be. Your creds are being shipped to my office in Seattle. Watch over your dad for me until I get there, will you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ William said.
He returned the headset to the officer.
The flight droned on.
The C5A was banking. The cargo officer told the kids to stop playing bag-ball and take their seats. ‘Strap in,’ she
instructed as she walked along the short aisle. Behind and in front, the armored vehicles and cargo containers groaned under new stresses. It was like flying inside a long church, William thought. Strykers and boxes full of weapons filled almost all the pews.
But there were still the children.
For some reason, thinking of them brought tears to his eyes.
At the very end, William had aced Rough-and-Tough. In the simulated raid he had sent twelve bad guys to ‘God’s courtroom,’ as Farrow had called it—twelve swift and positive kills. Farrow had marked him down for some sloppy moves but had still checked his box.
William had behaved the way he thought his father would have, and that night, he hadn’t joined the others in the boardroom to drink a beer or two, and he hadn’t slept a wink.
Fouad sat in the passenger seat of the hybrid Ford Preamble, watching the trees and fields and suburbs go by on 95. The gray man driving was mostly silent, intent on traffic. He wore a black suit and a narrow tie and though his face was unlined his hair was gray and he had a grayish pallor. But then to Fouad, many European-Americans appeared slightly gray. It was working indoors, perhaps.
Fouad had been instructed to ask no questions until he arrived. ‘Your driver isn’t part of BuDark. And if you want to be, you’ll play by the rules. Remember. We need folks like you. Folks with your expertise.’
And that was…? Fouad had not asked what expertise they were looking for. He presumed language. There had been plenty of rumors during his twenty weeks at Quantico about ‘sudden career abductions.’
Now, the gray man turned the car onto an onramp and led them through an industrial park. Young maples lined the well-trimmed lawns bordering the newly blacktopped roadway. They were still in Virginia, and if the interview went badly, he might make it back to Quantico to join his fellow agents in the cafeteria for the Wednesday night dressup dinner and next day’s graduation.
Fouad wondered how William Griffin was doing. Such a thing, to watch one’s father caught in such a disaster. It should not have happened. Fouad could not imagine seeing his father die in such a way.
The gray man parked the car in a nearly empty strip before
a large, rectangular white building. ‘First glass door on the left,’ he told Fouad.
Fouad exited the car, said thank you, and stepped up to a blank gray door. A small black sphere mounted over the door hummed as he approached. A bar of red light swept over his face.
The door sighed, clicked, and popped open a crack.
‘Come in,’ said a tinny voice through a plastic speaker grill.
A young trim blond man in blue jeans and a white business shirt stood on the opposite side, wearing a smile and a pistol in a shoulder holster. ‘Mr. Al-Husam, welcome to Building 6. My name is Swenson. I’ll be your escort during your visit. Please stay close to me until we reach your destination.’
‘Thank you,’ Fouad said. ‘I am told I will be meeting with a Mister—’
‘All a sham,’ Swenson said, gesturing for Fouad to follow. A long hall stretched past nine unmarked doorways. The lighting was bright and cold. There was no carpet on the floor. Fouad guessed, from the way their voices echoed, that the walls were concrete. ‘I’m taking you to a room where you’ll fill out some forms. After that, Agent Dillinger will interview you.’
Fouad could not help but smile. ‘Dillinger?’ he inquired, over his shoulder. ‘That is a sham, as well.’
Swenson’s face turned serious. ‘That’s his real name. Quentin T. Dillinger. Fine Virginia family.’ Then he winked, and Fouad had no idea what was true and what was not. Swenson took out a key and unlocked one of the doors. ‘I’ll leave this open and stand right outside,’ he said.
There were many forms waiting on a heavy steel table in another featureless room. The forms repeated what he had already revealed about himself when applying to the FBI, and added some questions that had not been asked
that first time: whether he supported the House of Saud in the current crisis, his opinions of American foreign policy in Iran and Iraq over the last fifty years, what he knew about Mossadegh and Shah Reza Pahlavi and John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. He knew a fair amount. And finally, whether he would truthfully translate the communications of any Muslims, without regard to their shared faith or their well-being or whether or not the details they were providing were in his opinion relevant or simply embarrassing.
That had been a nagging problem with Muslim translators—their loyalty to the
umma
, the community of Muslims.
Fouad wrote steadily for an hour, filling five pages with close, neat prose, then considered perhaps he was being too candid. The FBI did not appreciate show-offs, or shows-off. He still did not always know the correct form for such plurals. Courts-martial, for example.
The door to the small room opened.
‘We’re ready, Mr. Al-Husam,’ Swenson said.
‘I do not need to finish?’ Fouad asked, lifting his pencil.
‘No, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ Fouad said.
Swenson stacked the papers and passed them through the door to an anonymous pair of female hands.
Twenty minutes later, Fouad was sipping from a bottle of Pure American Springs water. He pondered the ubiquity of flags on food packaging and drink containers, and the almost Semitic quest for purity Americans lavished on their indulgences. Swenson returned, rapped lightly on the door, and asked him to follow.
And now they came to the end of the hall and a double doorway, one side of which opened as they approached.
‘Nothing of this meeting will be discussed with anyone outside, ever,’ Swenson said.
‘So I agreed,’ Fouad said. The way Swenson eyed Fouad’s
features—with a critical, unabashed perceptiveness—made him uneasy.
‘Don’t mind me,’ Swenson said. ‘New people give me the willies. Dillinger is expecting you.’
Special Agent Dillinger—he did not say in which bureau of federal law enforcement he served—sat behind a steel desk. He had thinning hair and a sleepy look and his tie was rumpled and loose. His lips were full and slightly slack. To Fouad, he resembled a used-car dealer at the end of a day without customers. A slim telepad and a small, disorganized stack of papers were the only things on his desk. The room’s lighting was cold and ancient—two ranks of naked fluorescent tubes. Two chairs waited in front of the desk, turned toward each other at forty-five degrees. Fouad sat in the left-hand chair. Swenson closed the door on them.
‘Talk to me,’ Dillinger instructed, blinking as if something was irritating his eyes. ‘Personal history first.’
‘I am an American citizen soon to finish twenty weeks of training at the FBI Academy,’ Fouad said.
‘Tell me about your grandfather.’
‘Perhaps you know of him.’
‘Give me your perspective.’
‘He left Iran in 1949. He had been an operative in the American OSS during World War Two, but after the deposing of Mossadegh, he quit and returned to Beirut. He was killed there in 1953. My father was ten years old at the time.’
‘Did the CIA assassinate your grandfather?’
‘I believe—I have been told they did.’
‘So he rusticated. He deserted.’
Fouad shrugged. ‘I do not know details.’
‘But you are still willing to serve the United States.’
‘Yes. Of course. I am an American citizen.’
‘Naturalized, shortly after your birth.’
‘Yes. My father also worked for the CIA, in the nineteen
seventies. He retired in 2003 and he and my stepmother now live in North Carolina, with a second home in Colorado.’
‘Tell me about your travels, as a boy.’
‘My father served in Lahore and in Riyadh. He was in Kuwait during the invasion, and that was where I was born. My mother nearly died giving me birth, because Iraqi troops had stripped the hospital of necessary equipment. My father shot three Iraqi soldiers who were looting and raping nurses. He hid us in the basement of a mansion belonging to a Kuwaiti businessman. He came back for us after the Americans pushed Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait. My mother died when I was ten. My father remarried in 1998, to a Filipino Muslim servant. Thereafter, until his retirement, he worked in Cairo, Jordan, and in Gaza. I was with him in Cairo until I was sent to my aunts and uncles in California. He returned there after his retirement, missing one arm and one eye.’
‘That’s quite a story.’
Fouad tipped his head to one side. ‘It is mostly my father’s story.’
‘I hear you have a gift for languages.’
‘I grew up speaking English and Cairo Arabic, and later I acquired Tagalog. I also picked up Pashtun, Farsi, and Aramaic from servants and teachers. Later, I studied international relations and languages at Georgetown University. I speak five Modern Southern Arab dialects.’
‘You don’t happen to have a degree in accounting, do you?’ Dillinger was grinning. The expression did not suit him.
‘No. Military science. I had hoped for a time to join the army, Special Forces.’
‘Excellent. Do you know who requested this interview?’
‘No,’ Fouad said.
‘Your father’s former boss. He was an officer as well, but he now works for us. He has immense respect for your father.’
‘My father would be very glad to hear that,’ Fouad said.
‘Good. Do you know what BuDark hopes to accomplish?’
Fouad leaned forward. ‘Am I allowed to guess?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘You wish to find common ground with the parties and groups now invading Saudi Arabia, out of Sudan, Yemen and Iraq. They are likely to be victorious. It is possible, though I do not know this, that the United States is supplying aid and arms to some of these factions, in order to maintain future supplies of oil. You wish to have those who speak the language infiltrate and relay information.’
‘Astute analysis,’ Agent Dillinger said. ‘That’s not what we’re up to.’
Fouad leaned back. ‘No?’
Dillinger shook his head and drew his lips down at the corners. ‘We put out nasty little fires that show signs of spreading. All sorts of fires. We need special people in the Middle East, flexible people trained in law enforcement—military training is helpful, too—and of course with exceptional language skills. If there’s a fire…you’ll be in the thick of it. Have you ever been on Hajj?’
‘You know I have not.’
‘Perhaps you’ll get your chance,’ Dillinger said. ‘You will not graduate tomorrow. You will vanish and even your stepmother and brothers will not know where you have gone.’
‘I see,’ Fouad said. ‘And my father?’
Dillinger shook his head.
‘The Academy?’
Dillinger smiled. ‘Be ready to pack your things and leave immediately. I have your creds.’
‘I am accepted?’
Dillinger nodded. ‘This will be your probationary assignment. Lucky boy.’ He removed a small folding vinyl case from the desk drawer and passed it to Fouad.
Fouad opened the case.
‘Welcome to BuDark, Special Agent Al-Husam.’
Fouad weighed the case in his hands. He looked up at Dillinger. ‘Am I other than FBI?’
‘You’re definitely Feeb-Eye. BuDark is interdepartmental. We all play ball for the time being.’ He stood. ‘You’ll join a select team with a tight focus. Stay flexible. You’ll get jerked around at first; prove your value and go with the flow. You’ll likely travel to a few southwestern Asia hellholes in the company of some reasonably excellent folks. Me, I’m stuck here. I envy you.’ Dillinger waved his hand imperiously and the door opened. ‘Mr. Swenson will take you across the river. Good luck.’