Retribution (9781429922593) (16 page)

“Otto said that you were bringing someone special.”

“Nothing to do with Cuba this time,” Mac said.

“Nothing much does anymore, comp,” Martinez said. “We lost the revolution, could be we're losing the peace. Who'd you bring?”

McGarvey explained about Engel and Schlueter and SEAL Team Six. “Last night was just a temporary fix.”

“The bastards just keep coming, and yet they expect us to treat them like they've got civil rights,” Martinez said with disgust.

Pete, who Martinez knew, came down the stairs with Wolf. Mac introduced the German BND officer.

“Have you ever been involved with this type of interrogation?” Martinez asked.

“No,” Wolf admitted.

The Cubanos went aboard and brought Engel out between them, the man's feet dragging on the ground, and loaded him into the van.

“We can find you a secure hotel. Might be best for your career all around if you don't get involved, you know what I mean?”

“It's too late for that, I think,” Wolf said.

Martinez shook his head. “Where the hell do you find these people, Mac?” he asked, but there was no answer, because none of them knew if he was talking about Engel or Wolf.

*   *   *

Little Torch Key, about one hundred miles from Miami, was a series of low mangrove islets that extended northward up into the Gulf. Isolated, lightly inhabited, and nearly impossible to reach by road or water without detection, Government 312 was a listening post for Cuban radio and television broadcasts. It had figured big during the Bay of Pigs invasion, but ever since then it had languished.

Outwardly. But before and since the Bay of Pigs the tiny facility—only three concrete block buildings, a generator shed, and a diesel tank on stilts behind a tall razor wire fence—had in fact been used as an enhanced interrogation outpost. Far from the prying eyes of the media or other governmental agencies, the CIA, which denied its existence, had from time to time made use of the place. Completely extrajudicially.

It was broad daylight when they showed up, the morning steamy, already in the nineties. The Cubanos brought Engel inside one of the windowless block buildings furnished only with a leather-covered interrogation bench complete with straps. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and a hose was connected to a faucet in one corner. In the middle of the floor directly beneath the bench was a drain hole covered by a grate.

The Cubanos laid Engel on the bench and secured the straps around his legs, hips, and torso so that that he couldn't move to defend himself.

Martinez went out and started the generator and the light came on. He brought back a thin towel and a bucket, as Engel was starting to come around.

“You guys might want to wait outside,” he told his Cubanos, and they left without a word. “You too,” he told Pete.

“This guy would have killed two of our people and their families if Mac hadn't stopped him,” she said. “And there would have been even more deaths tonight.” She looked at Engel and the others. “I'll stay.”

Mac closed the door; almost instantly the room became stifling.

Martinez filled the bucket with water, and Pete went to Engel's side. “I'll do this,” she told Mac and the others.

McGarvey stepped aside with Wolf. Pete's reputation inside the CIA was beauty and brains. Only a handful of fellow officers who'd watched her in action during interrogations realized that she was much more than that. She was fierce enough that no one felt right about giving her a nickname. She made most people who knew her nervous. But not McGarvey because he of all people understood that what she was giving up for her country was every bit as dear as what the SEAL Team Six guys had given up.

She patted Engel on the cheek a couple of times. “Hey, Steffen, can you hear me?” she asked gently.

Engel's eyes were open, fixed on hers.

“You were given a sedative. It's wearing off now. Do you understand?”

After several moments he nodded. He turned his head as far as the restraints would allow and looked at McGarvey and Wolf, and then at Martinez.

“I'm going to ask you a few questions,” Pete said, her tone still reasonable. “If you cooperate this will be easy. You'll be transferred to a federal cell somewhere in the D.C. area where you'll be held until your trial for attempted murder and acts of terrorism.”

Engel looked at her again, the expression in his eyes and face one of utter contempt.

Pete patted him on the shoulder. “But it's not going to be easy, is it?” she said. “Let's start with your name, please.”

Engel said nothing.

“Give me just that much, okay?”

He looked away.

“So here's the deal. We're going to waterboard you, which you understand will not be pleasant. In some cases subjects have actually died. At the very least you will be faced with pain, of course, but also possible damage to your lungs, some brain damage because of oxygen deprivation, and perhaps even a few broken bones as you struggle against your restraints.”

Her tone was sad, her voice apologetic, low, even sexy. She understood what he was about to experience, and she conveyed the feeling that she was genuinely sorry for him, even afraid.

“What is it we want to know?” she asked, not turning away from Engel.

“We know that you and the others were hired by Pam Schlueter to kill the SEAL Team Six guys who took out bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “We want to know who hired her. Who is her paymaster? Who is her contact?”

“You heard, so I don't need to repeat the question,” she told Engel. “A name is all Mr. McGarvey needs, and then it'll be off to a jail cell—pleasant compared to your present circumstances.”

Engel stared at her but said nothing.

“No?” Pete said. “Too bad for you.”

She took a towel from Martinez and draped it over Engel's face. He flinched.

“One name, Steffen. It's all that we ask of you.”

Martinez placed a strap across Engel's forehead; despite the man's struggles he managed to tighten it down, holding the assassin's head firmly in the face-up position. He began pouring water directly onto the towel covering Engel's face. Slowly, but in a steady stream.

The German lay perfectly motionless for nearly fifteen seconds, his training and control perfect, until suddenly his chest spasmed and he bucked violently against the leather straps.

Pete, her mouth set, motioned for Martinez to continue pouring water on the towel, and Engel convulsed more violently. His brain was telling him that he was drowning, and he could no longer control his body, which had dropped into a primal defense mode.

Mac, who had been waterboarded himself, knew what it was like, what was at stake, and he felt the man's pain. But he didn't give a good goddamn. Engel was an assassin for hire. A freelance. Not for a country or a religion or even for an ideal, but simply for money.

Martinez stepped back and Pete pulled the towel off Engel's face.

“Here we are at the start of a long road. Are you ready?”

Engel was working to catch his breath.

“Steffen?”

“Fuck you,” Engel said.

Pete replaced the towel, and Martinez, who had refilled the bucket, poured the water again, with the same results.

“A name,” Pete said when she'd removed the towel for the second time.

Engel tried to say something, but Pete draped the towel over his face again. This time she got the hose, turned it on to an even flow, and held it a couple of inches above his mouth and nose. She held it there, seemingly forever, until Engel's movements began to subside as he lost consciousness.

Tossing the hose aside, Pete ripped the towel off the German's face and got close. “Last time, Steffen. A name, or I set the hose on you again and walk away.”

Wolf stepped forward, but McGarvey held him back.

“
Sprechen zu mir, Kommando!”
Pete said. Speak to me! “A name. Just that.”

The sound of the running water falling on the concrete floor, and just then an osprey or some other hunting bird flying overhead, dropping for a kill, seemed suddenly loud in the close confines. Even louder than the noise of the diesel generator, and of Engel's desperate gasps for breath.

“Steffen,” Pete whispered close to his ear.

“Naisir,” Engel croaked, his voice barely audible, scarcely understandable.

“Naisir who?”

“Major Naisir. ISI. In Berlin, Warsaw. Guernsey.”

 

Pakistan

Ali Naisir had led a charmed life up until August 2008 when Pervez Musharraf was forced to resign from the presidency of Pakistan and leave the country because of death threats from the Taliban, and other political considerations.

Naisir was a lieutenant in an ISI special detail tasked with protecting Musharraf not only from the Taliban and the angry mobs outside parliament, but from himself and his own ambitions as well.

“The general has done Pakistan a great and honorable service, but it is time for him to step aside,” Colonel Akhtar Ahmed told him. Ahmed was director of the Joint Intelligence Bureau, which was responsible for collecting political intelligence inside and outside the country.

Naisir had been called to the colonel's office at headquarters in Islamabad, though he had no earthly idea why. “Yes, sir.”

“In fact he means to leave this very night, and already various parties want to stop him from going. By any means.”

“I can arrange for a military detail to escort him every step of the way, sir. He still has many friends at the PMA and NDU.” The PMA at Kakul was Pakistan's military academy and the NDU—the National Defense University—in Islamabad was where officers learned strategy, leadership, and statecraft. Nearly all the powerful officers in the military and the ISI were graduates of both institutions. Naisir was in his fourth year at the NDU and was considered one of its rising stars—which was why he'd been given the important job of seeing to the overall welfare of a president.

Ahmed waved his response aside. “That would call too much attention to him. He wants to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and you will see that he makes it safely to the border, at which point your obligation will be completed. Is this clear, Lieutenant?”

“A private flight—”

“Would be shot down within sight of the airport. He'll be expected by friends in Jalalabad.”

“A convoy?” Naisir suggested, though he knew what the colonel would say and why.

Ahmed shook his head. “You'll leave under darkness tonight. Just you and a couple of men, no fanfare, no special precautions.”

Through Peshawar, which was a hundred and fifty kilometers from Islamabad, it was another one hundred plus klicks over the mountains to the relative safety of the Afghan town—the highway in many spots nearly impassable and almost always choked with truck traffic.

It had dawned on Naisir that he was never expected to cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, let alone reach Jalalabad. And when his body was found with Musharraf's, he would be branded as a traitor.

“Do you understand, Lieutenant?”

“Perfectly,” Naisir had said. He got to his feet, crashed his boot heels together, and saluted in the British fashion—palm out.

“Understand something else. In this case the mission is as important as the man. What happens in the next twenty-four hours will have a great effect on the future of our country, and on yours.”

*   *   *

Naisir drove a Range Rover, an indifferent even aloof Musharraf alone in the backseat, while three enlisted men rode behind in a Toyota pickup truck, one of them in the back manning a machine gun on a swivel mount.

Their departure from Islamabad shortly before midnight had gone without incident and although Naisir had been extremely nervous on the run west to Peshawar, the last big town before the mountains along the Afghan border, the drive was a nonevent.

To that point traffic had been reasonable, but then the highway began its climb up to the pass which at a bit more than three thousand feet was one of the most heavily traveled highways in the world—and had been since the days of the ancient Silk Road—and everything slowed to a crawl.

Trucks were backed up as far as the eye could see in either direction. Those heading into Afganistan were transporting fuel and other supplies for the American war effort, while the trucks heading into Pakistan were empty, returning for supplies.

The Taliban had controlled much of the highway over the past several years, sometimes closing it for days at a time, despite the Pakistani military presence.

Naisir figured that if they were going to run into any sort of trouble it would be on the last stretch before the actual summit, which was about three miles inside Pakistan. Once across the border, the highway was controlled by American forces and would be relatively safe.

The mountains rose steeply on the other side of the road. Around one switchback Naisir caught a glimpse of the big stone gate that straddled the highway; a short distance to the right was one of the squat towers that the Khyber rifle detail used as a lookout.

Most of the trucks were pulled over and parked just on this side of the gateway, but Naisir could not make out any people; no truck drivers nor the soldiers who manned the border were anywhere in sight. His inner radar came alive.

He got on the walkie-talkie to warn Sergeant Brahami that something might be coming their way. “Unit Two, copy?”

“This is Two.”

“Something odd is going on at the border. Keep alert.”

The pickup was ten yards back, and behind it the line of supply trucks had begun to slow down and spread out. Naisir had the strong feeling that they were heading into a trap.

“I see it, Lieutenant,” Brahami radioed back. “What do you want to do?”

Naisir had never worked with the sergeant or the other three men in the pickup. They had been assigned to him for this detail at the last minute with written orders.