Страница 2 из 94
This place, on the other hand, looked like an insurance agency.
The ski
“Who’s behind this weapon? Al-Qaeda? The Koreans? Iranians?”
“One of our enemies. That’s all we know at this point…So, we need you to find out about it. Money is no object, of course.”
“Any leads?”
“Yes, a good one—an Algerian who knows who formulated the weapon. He met with them last week in Tunis. He’s a professor and journalist.”
“Terrorist?”
“He doesn’t seem to be. His writings have been moderate in nature. He’s not openly militant. But our local sources are convinced he’s had contact with the people who created the weapon and plan to use it.”
“You have a picture?”
A photograph appeared as if by magic from the slim man’s briefcase and slid across the desk like a lizard.
Colonel Peterson leaned forward.
Tuesday
Chabbi music drifted from a nearby café, lost intermittently in the sounds of trucks and scooters charging frantically along this commercial street of Algiers.
The driver of the white van, a swarthy local, stifled a sour face when the music changed to American rock. Not that he actually preferred the old-fashioned, melodramatic chabbi tunes or thought they were more politically or religiously correct than Western music. He just didn’t like Britney Spears.
Then the big man stiffened and tapped the shoulder of the man next to him, an American. Their attention swung immediately out the front window to a curly-haired man in his thirties, wearing a light-colored suit, walking out of the main entrance of the Al-Jazier School for Cultural Thought.
The man in the passenger seat nodded. The driver called “Ready” in English and then repeated the command in Berber-accented Arabic. The two men in the back responded affirmatively.
The van, a battered Ford that sported Arabic letters boasting of the city’s best plumbing services, eased forward, trailing the man in the light suit. The driver had no trouble moving slowly without being conspicuous. Such was the nature of traffic here in the old portion of this city, near the harbor.
As they approached a chaotic intersection, the passenger spoke into a cell phone. “Now.”
The driver pulled nearly even with the man they followed, just as a second van, dark blue, in the oncoming lane, suddenly leapt the curb and slammed directly into the glass window of an empty storefront, sending a shower of glass onto the sidewalk as bystanders gaped and came ru
By the time the crowds on rue Ahmed Bourzina helped the driver of the blue van extricate his vehicle from the shattered storefront, the white van was nowhere to be seen.
Neither was the man in the light suit.
Wednesday
Colonel James Peterson was tired after the overnight flight from Dulles to Rome but he was operating on pure energy.
As his driver sped from DaVinci airport to his company’s facility south of the city, he read the extensive dossier on the man whose abduction he had just engineered. Jacques Be
Peterson looked impatiently at his watch. He regretted the day-long trip required to transport Be
IAS was like hundreds of small businesses throughout the Washington area that provided everything from copier toner to consulting to computer software to the massive U.S. government.
IAS, though, didn’t sell office supplies.
Its only product was information and it managed to provide some of the best in the world. IAS obtained this information not through high-tech surveillance but, Peterson liked to say, the old-fashioned way:
One suspect, one interrogator, one locked room.
It did this very efficiently.
And completely illegally.
IAS ran black sites.
Black site operations are very simple. An individual with knowledge the government wishes to learn is kidnapped and taken to a secret and secure facility outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. The kidnapping is known as extraordinary rendition. Once at a black site the subject is interrogated until the desired information is learned. And then he’s returned home—in most cases, that is.
IAS was a private company, with no official government affiliation, though the government was, of course, its biggest client. They operated three sites—one in Bogotá, Colombia, one in Thailand and the one that Peterson’s car was now approaching: the largest of the IAS sites, a nondescript beige facility whose front door stated Funzione Medica di Riabilitazione.
The gate closed behind him and he hurried inside, to minimize the chance a passerby might see him. Peterson rarely came to the black sites himself. Because he met regularly with government officials it would be disastrous if anyone co
Despite his fatigue, he got right to work and met with the man waiting in the facility’s windowless main office upstairs. He was one of several interrogators that IAS used regularly, one of the best in the world, in fact. A slightly built man, with a confident smile on his face.
“Andrew.” Peterson nodded in greeting, using the pseudonym the man was known by—no real names were ever used in black sites. Andrew was a U.S. soldier on temporary leave from Afghanistan.
Peterson explained that Be
“Doesn’t matter,” Andrew said with a sour smile. “I’ll get you everything you need to know soon enough.”
Jacques Be
The soldier returned the gaze with no emotion, assessing the subject, noting his level of fear. A fair amount, it seemed. This pleased him. Not because Andrew was a sadist—he wasn’t—but because fear is a gauge to a subject’s resistance.
He assessed that Be
The room in which they sat was a dim, concrete cube, twenty feet on each side. Be
Andrew was not a physically imposing man, but he didn’t need to be. The smallest person in the world need not even raise his voice if he has power. And Andrew had all the power in the world over his subject at the moment.
“Now,” he said in English, which he knew Be