empty swimming pool, and then only after undergoing a strip search and a walk in cuffs and leg irons while escorted by two guards.
One to hold the chains, the other to hold a baton.
Still, H Unit is not the highest-security wing. That is Z Unit, the “ultramax” disciplinary unit, where the bad boys go to think about their transgressions, should they violate any of their SAMs. Here there is no recreation and no visitors, and minimal contact with even the guards.
Remarkably, even Z Unit has a special section, where only the worst of the worst are sent. It is called Range 13, and at this moment only three prisoners are housed there.
Ramzi Yousef was put here for violations of his SAMs while in Z Unit, where he thit, whe was staying due to violations of his SAMs in H Unit.
Tommy Silverstein, a sixty-year-old career inmate who was convicted of armed robbery in 1977, was put here long ago for killing two inmates and a prison guard at another maximum-security prison.
And a third prisoner, a male inmate who was brought here by masked FBI agents some months prior only after an existing Range 13 cell was specially sealed off from the rest of the ultramax subunit, making it even more restrictive. The new cell is known only to Range 13 personnel, and only two have seen the new resident’s face. He is guarded not by BOP officers but by a special ad hoc unit from the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, fully armed and armored paramilitary officers who observe their one prisoner through a glass partition twenty-four hours a day.
The HRT men know the inmate’s true identity, but they do not speak it. They, and the few Range 13 personnel who are aware of this odd arrangement at all, refer to the man behind the glass only as Register Number 09341-000.
Prisoner 09341-000 does not have the twelve-inch black-and-white television allowed most other inmates. He is not allowed out of the room to go to the concrete rec yard.
Ever.
Most inmates are allowed one fifteen-minute phone call a week, provided they pay for it out of their own trust fund account, a prison banking system.
Prisoner 09341-000 has neither telephone privileges nor a trust fund account.
He has neither visitor nor mail privileges, either, nor access to the psychological or educational services afforded the other prisoners.
His room, his entire world, is eighty-four square feet, seven feet by twelve feet. The bed, the desk, and the immovable stool in front of the desk are poured concrete, and other than the toilet-sink combo designed to shut off automatically if intentionally plugged, there are no other furnishings in the cell.
A four-inch-wide window on the back wall of the cell has been bricked over so that the inmate inside has neither a view to the outside nor any natural light.
Prisoner 09341-000 is the most solitary prisoner in America, perhaps the world.
He is Saif Rahman Yasin, the Emir. The leader of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council, and the terrorist mastermind responsible for the deaths of hundreds in a series of attacks on America and other Western nations, and also the perpetrator of an attack on the West that easily could have killed one hundred times that number.
The Emir climbed up from his prayer rug after his morning
One more step brought him to the window with the hatch. There, two men in black uniforms, black body armor, and black ski masks stared blankly through the Plexiglas back at him. On their chests, MP5 sub-guns hung at the ready.
They wore no badges or insignia at all.
Only their eyes were visible.
The Emir held their gazes, one after the other, for a long moment, his face not more than two feet from theirs, though both men were several inches taller. All three sets of eyes broadcast hatred and malevolence. One of the masked men must have said something on the other side of the soundproof glass, because two other masked and armed men sitting at a desk in the back of the viewing room turned their heads toward their prisoner, and one flipped a switch on a console. A loud beep rang out in the Emir’s cell, and then the small access hatch opened below the window. The Emir ignored it, continued the staring contest with his guards. After a few seconds he heard another beep, and then the amplified voice of the man at the desk came from a speaker recessed in the ceiling above the Emir’s bed.
The masked guard spoke English. “Put your blanket in the hatch.”
The Emir did not move.
Again, “Put your blanket in the hatch.”
Nothing from the prisoner.
“Last chance.”
Now Yasin complied. He had made a small show of resistance, and here that was a victory. The men that had held him in those first weeks after his capture were long gone, and Yasin had been testing the fervency and resolve of his captors ever since. He nodded slowly, dropped his blanket into the hatch, and then the hatch shut. On the other side, one of the two guards close to the window retrieved it, opened it up and looked it over, and then walked toward the laundry basket. He walked past the basket and tossed the wool blanket into a plastic garbage can.
The man at the desk spoke into the microphone again: “You just lost your blanket, 09341. Keep testing us, asshole. We love this game, and we can play it each and every fuckin’ day.” The microphone switched off with a loud click, and the big guard returned to the glass to shoulder up next to his partner. Together they stood as still as stones, staring through the eyeholes in their masks at the man on the other side of the window.
The Emir turned away and returned to his concrete bed.
He would miss that blanket.
7
Melanie Kraft was having an exceptionally bad week. An intelligence reports officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, Melanie was only two years out of American University, where she received her B.A. in international studies, and her master’s in American foreign policy. This, augmented with having spent five of her teenage years in Egypt as the daughter of an Air Force atta-che, made her a nice fit for the CIA. She worked in the Directorate of Intelligence — more specifically in the Office of Middle East and North Africa Analysis. Principally an Egypt specialist, young Ms. Kraft was bright and eager, so she occasionally reached out a little from her daily duties to work on other projects.
It was this willingness to stick out her neck that now threatened to derail a career that was barely two years old.
Melanie was accustomed to winning. In language classes in Egypt, as a soccer star in high school and then during her undergrad years, and with perfect grades in school. Her hard work won her fawning appreciation from her professors and then exemplary performance reviews here at the Agency. But all her intellectual and professional success had come to a screeching halt one week ago today, when she leaned into hee lr supervisor’s office with a paper that she had put together on her own time.
It was titled “An Evaluation of Political Rhetoric by the Muslim Brotherhood in English and in Masri.” She’d combed English and Egyptian Arabic (Masri) websites to chronicle the growing disconnect between Muslim Brotherhood public relations with the West and their domestic rhetoric. It was a hard-hitting but well-sourced document. She’d spent months of late nights and weekends creating and using phony profiles of Arab men to gain access to password-protected Islamist forums. She’d gained the trust of Egyptians in these “cyber coffee shops,”
