The Afghan

He was quoting from an ancient commentary. The other three knew it well and nodded.

“So what would a modern Muslim and a senior operative in Al Qaeda mean by it?” This was the first time the academics had been given an inkling as to the source of the documents. Not an intercept but a capture. “Was it fiercely guarded?” asked Harrison.

“Two men died trying to prevent us seeing it.”

“Ah, well, yes. Understandable.” Dr. Jolley was studying his pipe with great attention. The other three looked down. “I fear it can be nothing but a reference to some kind of project, some operation. And not a small one.”

“Something big?” asked the man from Homeland Security. “Gentlemen, devout Muslims-not to say fanatical ones-do not regard al-Isra lightly. For them, it was something that changed the world. If they have code-named something al-Isra, they intend that it should be huge.” “And no indication what it might be?”

Dr. Jolley looked round the table. His three colleagues shrugged. “Not a hint. Both the writers call down divine blessings on their project, but that is all. That said, 1 think I can speak for us all in suggesting you find out what it refers to. Whatever else, they would never give the title al-Isra to a mere satchel bomb, a devastated nightclub, a wrecked commuter bus.” No one had been taking notes. There was no need. Every word had been recorded.

This was, after all, the building known in the trade as “the Puzzle Palace.” Both professional intelligence officers would have the transcripts within an hour, and would spend the night preparing their joint report. That report would leave the building before dawn, sealed and couriered with armed guard, and it would go high. Very high. As high as it gets in the USA, which is the White House.

Terry Martin shared a limousine with Ben Jolley on the ride back to Washington. It was bigger than the sedan in which he had come, with a partition between front and rear compartments. Through the glass, they could see the backs of two heads: the driver and their youthful escorting officer. The gruff old American thoughtfully kept his pipe in his pocket and stared out at the passing scenery, a sea of the russet and gold of autumn leaves. The younger Britisher stared the other way and also lapsed into reverie. In all his life, he had only really loved four people, and he had lost three of them in the past ten months. At the start of the year, his parents, who had had their two sons in their thirties and were both over seventy, had died almost together. Prostate cancer had taken his father, and his mother had simply been too brokenhearted to want to go on. She wrote a moving letter to each of her sons, took a bottle of sleeping pills in a piping hot bath, fell asleep and, in her own words, “went to join Daddy.”

Terry Martin was devastated but survived by leaning on two strong men, the only two he loved more than himself. One was his partner of fourteen years, the tall, handsome stockbroker with whom he shared his life. And then, one wild March night, there had been the drunken driver, going crazily fast, and the crunch of metal hitting a human body, and that body on a slab, and the awful funeral, with Gordon’s parents stiffly disapproving of his open tears. He had seriously contemplated ending his own by-now-miserable life, but his elder brother, Mike, seemed to sense his thoughts, moved in with him for a week and talked him through the crisis.

Hed hero-worshipped his brother since they were boys in Iraq, and through their years at the British public school at Haileybury, outside the market town of Hertford.

Mike had always been everything he was not. Dark to his fair, lean to his plump, hard to his soft, fast to his slow, brave to his frightened. Sitting in the limousine, gliding through Maryland, he let his thoughts return to that final rugby match against Tonbridge, with which Mike had ended his five years at Haileybury.

When the two teams came off the field, Terry had been standing by the roped passageway, gri

Terry had been seized by gut-wrenching fear when the moment had come to tell his brother that he now knew he was gay. The older man, by then an officer in the Paras and just back from combat in the Falklands, had thought about it for a moment, cracked his mocking grin and handed back the final line given by Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

From that moment, Terry’s hero worship of his elder brother knew no limits.

In Maryland, the sun set. In the same time zone, it was setting over Cuba, and on the southwestern peninsula known as Guanta-namo a man spread his prayer mat, turned to the east, knelt and began his prayers. Outside the cell, a GI watched impassively. He had seen it all before, many times, but his instructions were never, ever to let his watchfulness slip.

The man who prayed had been in the jail, formerly Camp X-Ray, now Camp Delta, and in the media usually “Gitmo,” short for Guantanamo Bay, for nearly five years. He had been through the early brutalities and privations without a cry or a scream. He had tolerated the scores of humiliations of his body and his faith without a sound, but when he stared at his tormentors even they could read the implacable hatred in the black eyes above the black beard so he was beaten the more. But he never broke.

In the “stick and carrot” days when inmates were encouraged to denounce their fellows in exchange for favors, he’d remained silent and earned no better treatment. Seeing this, others had denounced him in exchange for concessions, but as the denunciations were complete inventions he had neither confirmed nor denied them.

In the room full of files kept by the interrogator as proof of their expertise, there was much about the man who prayed that night, but almost nothing from him. He had civilly answered questions put to him years earlier by one of the interrogators who had decided on a humane approach. That was how a passable record of his life existed at all.

But the problem was still the same. None of the interrogators had ever understood a word of his native language and had always relied on the interpreters, or “’terps,” who accompanied them everywhere. But the ‘terps had an agenda, too. They also received favors for interesting revelations, so they had a motive to make them up.

After four years, the man at prayer was dubbed “noncooperative,” which simply meant unbreakable. In 2004, he had been transferred across the gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down, permanent-isolation unit. Here, the cells were smaller, with white walls, and exercise was allowed only at night. For a year, the man had not seen the sun.

No family clamored for him, no government sought news of him, no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees round him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.

“Goddamn Arab,” said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.

“He’s not Arab,” he said. “He’s an Afghan.”

“So, what do you think of our problem, Terry?”

It was Ben Jolley out of his daydream, staring at Martin across the rear of the limo.

“Doesn’t sound good, does it?” Terry Martin replied. “Did you see the faces of our two spook friends? They knew we were only confirming what they had suspected, but they were definitely not happy when we left.” “No other verdict, though. They have to discover what it is, this al-Isra operation.”