cut an arc across the lawn toward a path through the woods that would take them out via the Avenue Victoria.
“Now,” said Kirby into his sleeve. “Close on him.”
Two members of the team entered the wooded path and traversed it seventy yards to the end, where they waited. There were a few people along the path; Kirby had hoped it would be empty by that hour, but they had to work with what they had.
Sabah entered the canopy of trees, the two plastic bags swinging from his hand. Kirby and the other following members of the team were coming up behind. They were on either side of him now, keeping pace. Sabah looked at them, blankly at first, but then more anxiously as they matched his steps. They were in the middle of the wooded area. Kirby looked ahead and behind. He saw only two Belgians, sitting on benches, tired from their walks. This was their best chance.
“Go,” he said. The two men astride Sabah continued to flank him, but now the two at the far end moved rapidly toward them. Sabah was looking anxiously, left and right and ahead, and the dog was barking. One of Kirby’s men in the forward team bumped Sabah as he passed, jabbing him with a needle.
Sabah cried out and the dog yammered, but a moment later the target’s body was crumpling and the two men astride quickly converged to prop him up, pulling his arms over their shoulders and putting a cloth to his mouth so he couldn’t make any more noise. One of the Belgians looked up for a moment. But the team kept going, as if helping a friend home. The dog’s yelps ended suddenly, thanks to another needle, and one of Kirby’s men picked him up and cradled him in his arms.
Kirby called for the driver who had been idling just outside the park to meet them at the Avenue Victoria where it curved toward Franklin Roosevelt. His van was marked with the insignia of the Belgian Croix-Rouge.
The driver was there waiting, clad in the yellow vest of an emergency worker, when they emerged from the grove of trees: two men supporting a sagging body between them; a third carrying a small, furry animal. The door of the van was open, and the group quickly entered. Several passersby stopped to watch, in the curious way people do when they see something unusual happening, but they didn’t attempt to intervene. The van pulled away. Fifty yards up the road, another car picked up the other two members of the team, and in an instant they were off, heading south on the N5 toward Waterloo.
31
It was a tidy locale for a messy endeavor: The house was on a quiet street near a suburban golf club. The residence had a wrought-iron fence, a plush, spongy lawn and ivy growing up the brick facade. The Brussels station kept a tenant there normally, so that the place wouldn’t look empty and suspicious, but the tenant had been temporarily evicted so that this respectable Flemish address could momentarily serve as a “black site,” where an undocumented and certainly illegal event could be handled discreetly.
Kirby’s team had hooded the prisoner, as much to protect their identities as to frighten him. He had revived on the way, thanks to an antidote that counteracted the effects of the tranquilizer. His first query in the van was about his dog, and he seemed very happy when the curly-haired poodle was placed in his lap, even though little Emile was still out cold. He asked a few more frantic questions-where he was, who had taken him, what he had done-but Major Kirby had been instructed not to talk to him, and Sabah eventually gave up.
The ersatz Croix-Rouge van pulled into the driveway around eight p.m. The garage door cranked up to receive them, and the hooded man was gingerly removed from the vehicle and trundled indoors to the living room, where the hood was exchanged for a blindfold and he was offered food and drink.
The interrogator, who called himself “Sam,” sat across from Sabah. He had flown in that day from the big CIA station in Paris. Sophie Marx sat in the next chair, a notebook on her lap.
Sam turned on a tape recorder. His voice was deep and insistent. He spoke stiff French, with a noticeable accent.
“Nous sommes prets a commencer, Monsieur Sabah. Si vous cooperez et vous nous donnez des informations correctes, ce sera un processus tres simple, et vous serriez libre. Mais si vous resistez ou mentez, vous serriez en grand difficulte, je vous assure. Vous vous merderiez!”
He paused, to let the gravity of his words sink in, but Sabah was smiling.
“You are American!” the prisoner said in English. “I am not so frightened now. I thought you might be Al- Qaeda.”
Sabah’s smile widened incongruously below the blindfold. He looked genuinely relieved to have been abducted by Americans.
The interrogator looked at Sophie Marx. She shrugged: She didn’t understand it, either.
“We are nobody,” said the interrogator, speaking now in English. “The question is: Who are you?”
“My name is Joseph Sabah. I work at SWIFT, in the data processing center. But you know that, of course. I am your man.”
Marx opened her hands, palms up, as if to say, I don’t get it.
“We have some questions for you, Mr. Sabah,” continued the interrogator. “Are you ready to talk with us now?”
“Yes, of course. Why not? Can I take off this blindfold?”
The interrogator slapped Sabah across the cheek, almost knocking him from the chair. His cheek reddened immediately as blood rushed to the skin.
“No questions from you, Mr. Sabah, just answers. Got that?”
“Yes, okay, sorry.” He was sniffling away tears.
“How long have you worked at SWIFT?”
“Eleven years. No, twelve years.”
“In that time, has anyone from outside SWIFT ever asked you for help in accessing wire-transfer records?”
“Yes, of course. Twice.”
The interrogator looked at Marx again. She gave another shrug, then rolled her finger as if to say, Let’s keep going.
“The first time was, I don’t know, it was several years after September 11, maybe in 2005. There was a group of us at SWIFT. It was official. Secret, yes, but the management had agreed to help trace the money of Al- Qaeda. But you know this.”
Sam looked to Marx for guidance. She motioned that he should join her outside the room. Sabah waited, mute in his blindfold, while they conferred. They returned a minute later.
“We know about the Terrorist Surveillance Program,” said the interrogator. “The Treasury Department organized it. It was in the newspapers. But it was stopped. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, that was the first time I was asked for help on wire transfers. It was very official, no problem. I was not important in that. They needed someone who spoke Arabic. I had a security clearance from SWIFT, so I was okay. I processed some requests, so I was cleared into the program.”
Marx held up two fingers. Sam nodded.
“What about the second time? When did that begin?”
“About a year ago. I do not have the exact date, but I can get it for you.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Okay, but you know. One of your people contacted me. His name was George. He said that you, America, were starting the program again but this time it had to be very secret. I could not talk about it with anyone at SWIFT. My contact said that he would give me account numbers and ask me to trace any transfers from them. That was it. I probably did twenty or thirty in the last year, maybe more.”
“How did you know he was an American?”
“He said so. He had an American name. He was calling from an American cell phone number, “seven-oh- three,” in Virginia, I think. And he knew about the earlier program. He said he had been a consultant before. He
