Locked On Part 3

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 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 gla.s.s part.i.tion twenty-four hours a day.

The HRT men know the inmate's true ident.i.ty, 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 gla.s.s 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs 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 salat and sat back on the thin mattress on his concrete bed. He checked the plain white calendar on his desk by his left elbow, and saw that today was Tuesday. The calendar had been given to him so that he could hand his laundry out through the electric-operated steel hatch for cleaning at the proper times. Tuesday, Yasin knew, was the day his wool blanket needed to go through the hatch to be cleaned. Dutifully he rolled it into a tight ball, walked past his steel one-piece toilet-and-sink unit, took another step that moved him past a shower that worked on a timer so that he would not be able to cover the drain and flood his cell.

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 gla.s.s, 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, a.s.shole. We love this game, and we can play it each and every f.u.c.kin' day." The microphone switched off with a loud click, and the big guard returned to the gla.s.s 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.

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 a.n.a.lysis. Princ.i.p.ally 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 cla.s.ses 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 her supervisor's office with a paper that she had put together on her own time.

It was t.i.tled "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 doc.u.ment. She'd spent months of late nights and weekends creating and using phony profiles of Arab men to gain access to pa.s.sword-protected Islamist forums. She'd gained the trust of Egyptians in these "cyber coffee shops," and these men let her into the fold, discussed with her Muslim Brotherhood speeches at madra.s.sas across Egypt, even told her of Mo-Bro diplomats going to other nations in the Muslim world to share information with known radicals.

She contrasted all she learned with the benevolent facade the Brotherhood was projecting to the West.

She finished her paper and handed it over to her immediate supervisor. He sent her in to Phyllis Stark, chief of her department. Phyllis read the t.i.tle, nodded curtly, and then tossed the brief onto her desk.

This frustrated Melanie; she had expected some show of enthusiasm from her chief. As she'd walked back to her desk, she'd hoped, at least, that her hard work would get pa.s.sed upstairs.

Two days later, she got her wish. Mrs. Stark had pa.s.sed it on, someone had read it, and Melanie Kraft was called into a fourth-floor conference room. Her supervisor, her department chief, and a couple of suits from the seventh floor that she did not recognize were already there when she entered.

There was no pretense about the meeting at all. From the looks and gesticulations of the men at the conference table, Melanie Kraft knew she was in trouble even before she sat down.

"Miss Kraft, what is it you thought you would accomplish with your moonlighting? What is it you want?" a seventh-floor political appointee named Pet.i.t asked her.

"Want?"

"Are you trying to get a new gig around here with your little term paper, or do you just want it to circulate around so that, if Ryan wins and brings in his own people, you will be the flavor of the month?"

"No." That had not occurred to her in the slightest. Theoretically, an administration change should have next to nothing to do with someone at her level in the Agency. "I just have been reading what we've been putting out on the Brotherhood, and I thought it could stand some countervailing data. There is open-source intelligence-you'll see in the brief I cited everything-that points to a much more ominous-"

"Miss Kraft. This isn't grad school. I'm not going to check your footnotes."

Melanie did not respond to that, but she didn't bother continuing her defense of her paper, either.

Pet.i.t continued, "You have overstepped your boundaries at a time when this agency is at its most polarized."

Kraft didn't think the Agency was polarized at all, unless the polarization was between the seventh-floor graybeards who stood to lose their jobs with a Kealty defeat and the seventh-floor graybeards who stood to move into better positions with a Ryan win. That world was far removed from her own, and she would have thought Pet.i.t could have seen that.

"Sir, it was not my intention to cause any rift here in the building. My focus was on the realities in Egypt, and the information that was-"

"Did you prepare this doc.u.ment while you were supposed to be working on your daily reports?"

"No, sir. I did this at home."

"We can open an investigation into you, to see if you used any cla.s.sified resources to create-"

"One hundred percent of the information in that doc.u.ment is open-source. My fict.i.tious Internet ident.i.ties were not created from actual Agency legends. Honestly, there is nothing I have access to on a daily basis that would have been any help to me in preparing my paper."

"You have a strong opinion that the Brotherhood is nothing but a gang of terrorists."

"No, sir. That is not the conclusion of my paper. The conclusion of my paper is that the rhetoric in the English-speaking world runs counter to the Masri rhetoric put out by the same organization. I think we should just keep track of some of these websites."

"Do you?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you think we should do this because there has been an official finding of some sort, or you think we should do this because . . . because you just think we should do this."

She did not know how to answer.

"Young lady, the CIA is not a policy-making organization."

Melanie knew this, and the paper was not intended to steer U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt in any direction, but instead to offer a dissenting view to conventional wisdom.

Pet.i.t continued, "Your job is to generate the intelligence product that you are asked to generate. You are not a Clandestine Services officer. You have stepped out of your lane, and you have done so in a way that looks very suspicious."

"Suspicious?"

Pet.i.t shrugged. He was a politician, and politicians a.s.sumed everyone else thought only about politics as well. "Ryan is ahead in the polls. Melanie Kraft happens to-in her free time, no less-create her own covert operation, and thereby shoot off on a tangent that would serve the Ryan doctrine."

"I . . . I don't even know what the Ryan doctrine is. I am not interested in-"

"Thank you, Miss Kraft. That's all."

She'd walked back to her office humiliated but still too confused and angry to cry. But she cried that night back in her little apartment in Alexandria, and there she asked herself why she had done what she'd done.

She could see, even at her low level in the organization and with her limited view of the big picture, that the political appointees in the CIA were molding the intelligence product to suit the desires of the White House. Was her brief her own, small, bullheaded way to push back against that? In that moment of reflection the night of her fourth-floor meeting, she admitted that it probably was.

Melanie's father had been an Army colonel who instilled in her a sense of duty as well as a sense of individuality. She grew up reading biographies of great men and women, mostly men and women in the military and government, and she recognized through her readings that no one rose to exceptional greatness exclusively by being "a good soldier." No, those few men and women who went against the establishment from time to time, only when necessary, were what ultimately made America great.

Melanie Kraft had no great ambition other than to stand out from the pack as a winner.

Now she was learning another phenomenon about standing out. Nails that stuck out often were hammered back into place.

Now she sat in her cubicle, sipping an iced coffee and looking at her screen. She'd been told the day before by her supervisor that her brief had been squashed, destroyed by Pet.i.t and others on the seventh floor. Phyllis Stark had angrily told her the deputy director of the CIA, Charles Alden himself, had read a quarter of it before he tossed it in the trash and asked why the h.e.l.l the woman who wrote it still had a job. Her friends there at the Office of Middle East and North Africa a.n.a.lysis felt for her, but they didn't want their own careers to be sidetracked by what they saw as an attempt by their colleague to leapfrog ahead of them by working on intelligence on her own time. So she became the office pariah.

Now she was, at twenty-five, thinking about leaving the Agency. Finding a job in sales somewhere that paid a bit more than her government salary, and getting the h.e.l.l out of an organization that she loved but that clearly did not love her back at present.

Melanie's desk phone rang, and she saw it was an outside number.

She put down the iced coffee and picked up the receiver. "Melanie Kraft."

"Hi, Melanie. It's Mary Pat Foley at NCTC. Am I catching you at a bad time?"

Melanie almost spit her last swallow of coffee across her keyboard. Mary Pat Foley was a legend in the U.S. intelligence community; it was impossible to exaggerate her reputation and the impact her career had had on foreign affairs or on women at CIA.

Melanie had never met Mrs. Foley, though she'd seen her speak a dozen times or more, going back to her undergrad days at American. Most recently, Melanie had sat in on a seminar Mary Pat had given to CIA a.n.a.lysts about the work of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Melanie stammered out a reply: "Yes, ma'am."

"I am catching you at a bad time?"

"No, excuse me. You aren't catching me at a bad time." The young a.n.a.lyst kept her voice more professional than her emotions. "How can I help you today, Mrs. Foley?"

"I wanted to give you a call. I spent the morning reading your brief."

"Oh."

"Very interesting."

"Thank y-. . . How so?"

"What kind of response are you getting from the graybeards on the seventh floor?"

"Well," she said, as she frantically searched for the right words. "Honestly, I'd have to say there has been some pushback."

Mary Pat repeated the word slowly. "Pushback."

"Yes, ma'am. I did expect some reticence on the part of-"

"Can I take that to mean that you are getting your a.s.s kicked over there?"

Melanie Kraft's mouth hung open for a moment. She finally closed it self-consciously, as if Mrs. Foley were sitting in her cube with her. Finally she stammered an answer. "I . . . I would say I have been taken to the woodshed over my work."

There was a brief pause. "Well, Ms. Kraft, I think your initiative was brilliant."

A return pause. Then, "Thank you."

"I have a team going over your report, your conclusions, your citations, looking for information relevant to the work we do here. In fact, I'm planning on making it required reading among my staff. Beyond the Egypt angle, it shows how someone can hit a problem from a different slant to shed new light on it. I encourage that from my people over here, so any real-world examples I can find are very helpful to me."

"I am very honored."

"Phyllis Stark is lucky to have you working for her."

"Thank you." Melanie realized she was just saying "Thank you" over and over, but she was so focused on not saying anything she would regret, it was all that came out.

"If you ever are looking for a change of pace, just come and talk to me. We are always on the hunt for a.n.a.lysts who aren't afraid to upset the apple cart by delivering the cold, hard truth."

Suddenly Melanie Kraft came up with something to say. "Would you be available this week sometime?"

Mary Pat laughed. "Oh, G.o.d. Is it that bad over there?"