turn to watch it go.
He found himself on an elevated highway, staring east, into the rising sun. To the north and south were endless zigzag blocks of misshapen concrete buildings. Many seemed unfinished, their roofs turned into dumps filled with half-melted tires and lumpy plastic bags of garbage. He must still be in Cairo, somewhere on the ring road that had once marked the outer edges of the city.
A Mercedes sedan nearly knocked him over. He turned to look for the exit ramp — and saw, looming over the city on a plateau to the west, the three great pyramids, just beginning to reflect the glow of the morning sun. Wells understood immediately why European adventurers had thought that they’d been built by aliens. They were immense, so much larger than the buildings around them that they seemed to be governed by entirely different laws of physics. Wells stared at them until a honk brought him back to the highway. He walked slowly down the ramp until the city swallowed up him and the pyramids.
HEADING BACK to the hotel, Wells saw the scope of the city at last. Close to twenty million people lived in Cairo, though no one, not even the Egyptian government, knew exactly how many. The shabby concrete and brick buildings went on block after block, mile after mile, unrelieved by parks or gardens or even palm trees. The place was overwhelming, ugly, primordial, Los Angeles without highways, Rio without the ocean. Year after year it had grown east and west into the desert and south along the Nile, swallowing every settlement in its path.
Wells had seen only one other city as big and dense, as noisy and smoggy: Beijing. But in Beijing the hand of the Chinese state touched every alley and dumpling stand. Beijing was order disguised as chaos. Not Cairo. Cairo was chaos, undisguised. Cairo lacked any organizing principle. Except Islam.
A minivan pulled in front of them, and the cabbie banged his brakes to avoid a collision. Wells stifled a groan as the seat belt grabbed his shoulder. The van, improbably enough, seemed to have a load of goats as passengers.
Suddenly, Wells badly wanted to find his way to the Intercontinental for air-conditioning, a hot shower, and a cold beer. He reminded himself that he’d spent a decade living without any of the three. No, he would go back to the Lotus, where he belonged. And as the traffic inched forward, he smiled to himself. The
7
The Counterterrorist Center was the CIA’s fastest-growing unit. To make room for it, the agency had built offices in a subterranean maze carved from the foundations of the New Headquarters Building. The fight against Al Qaeda ate a disproportionate share of the agency’s budget, so the new space had bells and whistles the rest of the CIA lacked: flat-panel screens, dedicated teraflop-speed connections to the National Security Agency and Department of Defense, and videoconferencing equipment capable of projecting in three dimensions. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden was quaking in his boots.
Or not.
Brant Murphy met Shafer at the main entrance to CTC, a miniature version of the agency’s main lobby, two guards overseeing a bank of turnstiles. The official logic behind the secondary checkpoint was that CTC needed extra security because it so frequently hosted visitors from other federal agencies and foreign spy services. In reality, the second guard post was further proof that the unit held itself apart from the rest of the agency.
Murphy was handsome and compact, with deep blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair that had lost its grip on his temples and was fighting a rearguard action against its inevitable fate as a widow’s peak. He had a firm two-pump handshake, friendly but manly. Shafer couldn’t understand how Murphy had ended up with 673. Spending a year-plus in Poland interrogating detainees didn’t seem like his idea of a great time.
“Ellis Shafer,” Murphy said. He had a clipped Yankee accent, a relative rarity at the agency, which recruited more from the South and Midwest.
“Good to meet you,” Shafer said. “I appreciate this.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Murphy said. He didn’t look pleased. “If the director asks, I’m glad to accommodate. And of course your reputation precedes you.”
“Follows me, too.”
Murphy led them into a high-ceilinged conference room, the walls of which were lined with expensive black-and-white photographs of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Nice digs.”
Murphy looked around as if he’d never seen the photos before. “You spend as much time in here as we do, you hardly notice.”
“Just like Poland?”
“Not exactly, but sure.”
Shafer set a digital tape recorder on the table. “Do you mind?”
“And here I thought this was a social call. You don’t mind, I’d prefer we keep it informal.”
The room itself was almost certainly wired, but Shafer didn’t argue. He slipped the recorder away, reached into his pocket for a pen and a reporter’s notebook, its pages filled with an illegible scrawl.
“Tell me how you became part of 673.”
“Have you seen my file?”
Shafer grunted noncommittally.
“So, you know a couple years back I did a tour in Iraq. Mosul. My COS”—chief of station—“there was Brad Gessen. Remember him?”
“Yeah.” Gessen had been arrested for stealing 1.2 million dollars from a fund used to bribe Sunni tribal chiefs in Iraq. Starting in early 2006, the CIA and army had thrown cash at the tribes, hoping to turn them against the insurgency, or at least buy their neutrality. More than one billion in cash was distributed through the program, with only the barest accounting. Rumors of thefts were rampant. But only Gessen had been arrested, probably because he’d stolen so much money that some of the tribal leaders had complained to the army about the missing payments.
“Brad and I were tight,” Murphy said. “I mean, I had no idea what he was up to—”
“Sure about that?”
“I don’t appreciate that question.”
“One-point-two million, and the guy was your boss and you didn’t know?”
Murphy controlled himself, the effort visible. “There was a full investigation. The IG cleared me. But my career took a hit. Started hearing that I might get moved to Australia”—not exactly the agency’s hottest theater. “So 673, when it came up, I figured it was a chance to turn the page. High-risk, high-reward, but we get the right intel, we’re all heroes.”
Shafer started to like Murphy a tiny bit more. The man hadn’t sugarcoated this explanation. No talk of taking the battle to the enemy, broadening his experience. He’d made a clear-eyed analysis that going to Poland might rescue his career. He was a hopelessly ambitious careerist, but at least he wasn’t pretending otherwise.
“And what did you do in Poland?”
“Ran admin and logistic,” Murphy said, calm again. “Nine-person unit on a foreign base, plus the detainees, there’s a lot to do.”
“Thought it was ten.”
“I’ll get to that. I handled our relationships with the Poles, set up the supply chain. When there was significant intel, I summarized it and passed it to the Pentagon.”
“With so few men, how did you watch the prisoners continuously?”
“We had help from the Poles. They supplied food, picked up garbage, handled security around the building. At night they helped us monitor the cells.”
“But they weren’t actively involved in the interrogations.”
“No.”
“How often did you visit the detainees?”
