The Prisoner - Couverture rigide

Prologue
 
Harran, Turkey
 
The horses knew.
They shied and stumbled as the Syrian smuggler named Mahmoud led them out of the battered trailer.  Four brown geldings, wide-eyed and frightened.  Resigned to trouble ahead.  Kareem Batta didn’t know how, but they knew.
The tallest of the four, a handsome youngster with a white blaze on his left flank, was bolder than the others, or more skittish.  As his front hooves touched the crumbly Anatolian soil, he swished his head, pushed back up the ramp.  But Mahmoud jerked his reins and muttered at him.  After a moment he quit the protest.
The beasts feared the men around them even more than the trip they were about to take.  They were gentle animals.  Batta didn’t like using them this way.  But he had no choice.  They were the best way over the border into Syria, the only realistic way to avoid the Islamic State’s jihadis.  Those modern-day trolls watched the roads from every angle, with checkpoints and rolling patrols and even drones.  They needed no excuse but their black flags to snatch unlucky travelers.
Batta circled the geldings, examining them like a trainer at a yearling auction.  He was hardly an expert on horses.  He’d grown up in a two-bedroom apartment in Detroit.  But he’d ridden enough in the last five years to spot trouble.  These four looked strong, sturdier than the ones Mahmoud had brought before.  They breathed easily despite the early afternoon heat.  Their backs were straight, their eyes bright.  Not like other nags smugglers had tried to foist on him.  Batta had learned to check the hard way, after a mount dropped under him on a rocky trail in the Anti-Lebanon Range, two hundred miles and a dozen front lines southwest of here.  He had left the four-legged corpse behind and staggered out of Syria on a broken foot.
“Think I bring losers?” Mahmoud said in English.  “When my brother and I go, too?”  He was a skinny twenty-something who wore black jeans and motorcycle boots.  His brother Ajmad was even skinnier and even younger, with a wispy mustache and smooth cheeks.  They had taken Batta to Syria twice before, first to meet a Kurdish commander, an easy run, then a riskier mission to scout a warehouse where hostages were supposedly being held.  The warehouse had turned out to be an ammunition depot, but the brothers brought Batta back to Turkey with his head attached.  A win.  A tie, anyway.
Batta still didn’t entirely trust Mahmoud.  But Batta didn’t entirely trust anyone over here except his brothers-in-arms from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Group.  Even the Turkish intelligence service played both sides.  The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Free Syrian Army, the Martyrs of Syria Brigades, the Soldiers of Islam, the People’s Protection Unit, and a hundred others...  In Syria and Kurdistan, outsiders couldn’t tell the players with a program.  Sometimes even the combatants were confused.  Batta had once seen a firefight sputter out after the commanders realized that their bosses had agreed to a cease-fire the week before.  A cosmic joke, even if the guy who’d been shot in the head wasn’t laughing.
Mahmoud pulled a bag of sugar cubes, gave two to each gelding.  “Good boys,” he said to Batta. “A little scared, but they’ll be fine once we move.”
“They’re not bad,” Batta said in Arabic.  Though he’d been born in Michigan, he was fluent, thanks to his parents, immigrants from Jordan who spoke the language exclusively at home.  “I’ve seen worse, anyway.”  He ran his hand over the blaze on the tall gelding’s flank.  Sorry, buddy.  If it makes you feel any better, I’m nervous too.  “What’s his name?”
“Buraq.  Why, you want to buy him?”
“Only if he can grow wings.”  In the Quran, Buraq was the name of the steed who had flown Muhammad to Heaven to meet Allah.
“Naturally.  Money-back guarantee.”
On that note... Batta handed Mahmoud a backpack, cheap blue nylon with a faded Mickey Mouse logo.
“M-I-C-K-E-Y...”  Mahmoud unzipped it, thumbed the stacks inside.  “This is one hundred,” he said in English.  “We said three fifty.”  Three hundred fifty thousand dollars.  A fair price for two days’ work, considering the risk of beheading or worse by the friendly folks south of the border.
The man they were bringing out was worth far more than that much to Batta’s bosses at Langley.  Batta knew him as Abu Ibrahim, an Islamic State bureaucrat who had helped the CIA track the group’s oil-smuggling routes.  He now promised information about its secret bank accounts in the United Arab Emirates, if the agency could just get him out alive.
“Three hundred fifty,” Mahmoud repeated, with the slight sulk that came so naturally in Arabic.  “Wahid, ithnan, thalatha...”  One, two, three...
“The rest, when I come back,” Batta said.  They both knew the terms, and they both knew Batta wouldn’t stiff Mahmoud.  The agency would never have another safe trip over the border.
“What if you don’t?”
Exactly.  “I thought you planned to bring me home.”
“Insh’allah.  But things happen.”
“In that case send an after-action report explaining the lessons learned with a self-addressed stamped envelope and request payment within sixty days.”
Batta saw that Mahmoud didn’t get the joke, but the smuggler smiled anyway.  “All right, Kareem.  I trust you.”  He called to Ajmad, and together the brothers trotted to the Mitsubishi pickup pulling the trailer.  A burly man in his fifties stepped from the truck and hugged them both.
“If they don’t come back, I’ll kill you,” the man yelled to Batta.
If they don’t come back, you won’t have to worry.  I’ll be dead already.  Batta just waved.
Mahmoud tossed the knapsack into the truck.  The man stepped in, gunned the engine, pulled out with the trailer rattling behind him.  Then the brothers were alone with Batta and his partner, Bill Girol.
Girol had joined the agency after nine years in the Marine infantry, mostly in Recon.  He and Batta made a strange pair.  Batta was huge, six-seven and two-forty, with fencepost arms, tight curly hair, and a beard that had faded from brown to reddish-blonde in the Turkish sun.  Girol had prematurely grey hair and calm brown eyes.  He was five-six and easy to underestimate.  He weighed one-fifty, benched three-fifty, and seemed to need no sleep at all.  After four years around Syria, he spoke decent Arabic, too.  But he would never pass for a local, and he preferred to let Batta do the talking.  Even back at the CIA base in Gazientep, Girol kept quiet.  Batta had once made the mistake of asking him about his Navy Cross, which ranked second only to the Medal of Honor as an award for military valor.
For bravery in the course of my divorce, Girol said.  Any more questions, genius?  After that he always called Batta Genius.  Batta called him Mighty, as in Mouse.  Batta figured they’d each take a bullet for the other.  He hoped not to find out.
“Ready?” Mahmoud said.
“Let’s go over it once more.” They’d talked over the plan three times already, but a final run-through never hurt.
Mahmoud pulled a battered map from his jeans, unfolded it against Baraq’s flank like a cowboy, then changed his mind and laid it on the ground as Girol and Batta squatted on either side.  “Okay, we’re here, yes.  Harran.”  He pointed to a spot north of the border.
Harran was ancient enough to have earned a mention in Genesis for playing home to Abraham in his pre-Isaac days.  As far as Batta could tell, the village hadn’t changed much since.  It lay about twenty kilometers north of Akcakale, a dusty Turkish town so close to the border that the crossing split it in half, like El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.  The Syrian side was called Tal Abad and had changed hands repeatedly during Syria’s war.  Kurdish militias had recently retaken it from the Islamic State.
This region was something of an afterthought in the Syrian conflict.  The serious fighting took place to the west, as the Islamic State battled Bashir al-Assad’s army and other militias for control of big cities like Homs.  But despite its relative unimportance, Tal Abad was the border crossing closest to Raqqa, a city of two hundred thousand that was the de facto capital of the Islamic State.  Abu Ibrahim lived and worked there.
The Islamic State could almost certainly have retaken Tal Abad from the Kurds by shifting a couple of thousand jihadis from the front lines.  But its commanders had chosen not to try.  For now, anyway.  They were almost inviting an attack on Raqqa.  They seemed to believe the city’s defenses were impenetrable.  Or maybe they didn’t think they could spare fighters from the battles to the west.  Whatever their logic, Batta wasn’t arguing.  By backing off the border, the Islamic State had made this mission possible.
Mahmoud moved his finger to the border, left of the Akcakale/Tal Abad crossing.
“Nine kilometers west of Tal Abad, a new cut in the wire.”  To defend itself against the Islamic State, Turkey had moved thousands of soldiers into Anatolia and extended fences around the border crossings to the west.  But the border stretched almost a thousand kilometers.  Monitoring it all was impossible.  In the eastern half of the country, strings of razor wire were all that separated the two countries.  “Big enough to ride through.  Some Kurds put it there.  Maybe three weeks ago.  Daesh, they don’t know.”
Arabic-speaking enemies of the Islamic State called it Daesh.  The nickname denied the group’s Muslim legitimacy by stripping the word “Islamic” from it.  Jihadis hated the name and had been known to cut the tongue out of anyone they caught saying it.
“You sure they don’t know?”
“The Kurds control down to Ain Issa now.  Daesh, they stick to the crossing.”  In other words, Islamic State spies still watched the vehicles that passed through Tal Abad, probably putting every license plate into a database.  But by giving up the border, they had lost their chance to patrol the fence.   “We cross after dark, no one’s there, and if they are it’s only Kurds.  Ride to Ain Issa, seventy-five kilometers from here in all.”  Ain Issa was a speck of a town northwest of Raqqa.  The Kurds had taken it from the Islamic State a few weeks after winning Tal Abad.  In other words, it was friendly territory.  “Rest tomorrow, a warehouse my friend owns, make sure the horses are fine, nobody bothers us.”
“Then tomorrow night – ”
“Yes.”  Mahmoud stroked a finger across the map, following the east-west road, the M4.  “Everything down here is Daesh, Daesh, Daesh.”  He spoke the forbidden name with the relish of a child cursing.  “All around Raqqa, checkpoints.  What we do, tomorrow, after sunset, we ride south from Ain Issa.  Different dirt paths we can take, quiet, no one out there, farmers, they won’t bother us.  They don’t like Daesh either, they want everyone to leave them alone.  We get close to the river – ” the Euphrates.  “Good cover there, palm groves and canals.  Close to fifty kilometers.”
He ran his finger down and hooked it to the right.  “Now, I told you two weeks ago, Daesh knows this way.  Of course.  It’s Raqqa, they know every way in.  But a friend of mine went through last week with cigarettes, and again three nights ago, he didn’t see anyone. Most of the time they don’t guard it.  No cars come, only horses, so it doesn’t bother them much.  Anyway they like cigarettes too. We have fifty cartons, in case we run across them.”  As a cover story and also for bribes.
“And if they won’t take the cigarettes?”
“They’re men, they take bribes.”
Batta stared at Mahmoud.  They both knew that plenty of Islamic State jihadis were true believers and couldn’t be bribed.
“Let me handle it,” Mahmoud said.  “I know these men.  If I see a problem, a real problem, I say, everyone likes Lucky Strikes.  In English, so this one – ” Mahmoud nodded at Girol – “understands.  That means we get out, no matter what.”
“Everyone likes Lucky Strikes.”
“Nam.  But insh’allah, they watch somewhere else tomorrow night.”
Insh’allah, insh’allah, insh’allah.  God willing.  Like God paid any attention to this ugly little war.  Like its endless barbarity and cruelty wouldn’t have made Him sick in the unlikely event he noticed it.  Insh’allah.  Batta heard the phrase a hundred times a week, a tic of language he couldn’t escape.  He hated it more each time.  Truly he had grown to hate everything about this place.  He wasn’t sure why he stayed, except that he hated the Islamic State most of all.  The week before, an aid worker who specialized in assisting female refugees had told him about three girls who’d clawed out their own eyes after months of being passed among the jihadis.  Girls, not women.  One was thirteen, the others eleven.  They had independently decided to blind themselves rather than endure more rapes.  I thought, they’ll kill me now, the oldest girl had told the aid worker.  They’ll have to.  Even they won’t want a girl with holes in her face.  Instead the jihadis had dumped her at a border crossing, literally thrown her off the back of a pickup truck.  It’s better now, though.  This way I can’t look at myself.
“Remember, the cigarettes are last,” Mahmoud said.  “If they stop us, first they want to see our cards – ” identity cards.  Batta’s claimed he was from Lebanon, and Girol’s from Bosnia, a way to explain his less than perfect Arabic.  “They ask us to pray, we pray.”  Mahmoud looked at Girol.  “You can pray?”
“Nam.”  Yes.
“Show me.  The Fatiha – ” the Quran’s first surah, or verse – “and another.”
Girol turned south to face Mecca.  “Bismillah al-Rahman ah-Raheem Al hamdu’lillahi rabbil’alameen –”
“Enough,” Mahmoud said.  “They don’t really care, once they hear a few words they just want to make sure you’re a Sunni.”  The two sects prayed in slightly different ways.  The most obvious difference was that Shias kept their hands by their sides, while Sunnis held them together at the waist.
“Good,” Girol said.  “I only know one more verse.”
“A prayer to be named later,” Batta said.  He wished Girol had practiced more.  But even if Girol memorized the Quran cover to cover, anyone who stopped them would know they didn’t belong near Raqqa.  Their cover identi...

Praise for The Prisoner

“Berenson delivers some surprises along the way...Another strong mix of finely turned suspense and subtle character development.”—Booklist

“Deeply researched, fast-paced, and believable.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“The Prisoner reinforces Berenson’s status as one of today’s steadiest practitioners of quality spy fiction...The action culminates smartly [and] Wells is an appealing combination of brains and brawn.”—Publishers Weekly

“The John Wells series never gets old ... Berenson is a marvel, purely and simply."— Bookreporter.com
 
“[Takes] readers beyond where journalism can take them, even if the scenes and plots are imagined.”— The San Antonio Express News
 
“Berenson delivers another strong mix of finely tuned suspense and subtle character development in this latest book.”— Crossville-Chronicle

"[A] riveting thriller that channels the very best of both John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth. This is a thinking man’s (or woman’s) thriller, distinguished by a combination of pitch perfect plotting and chillingly on-point geopolitical issues. A throwback to the golden age of spy novels, THE PRISONER is also an existential study of the price of duty and its inevitable toll. A stunning success in all respects.” —Providence Sunday Journal


Praise for The Wolves

“Exhilarating...when the call of duty summons, Wells rises to the occasion; his emotions may be mixed, but he still puts on a great show for readers.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“[An] adrenaline-filled thriller...Fans of the John Wells series won’t be disappointed. They’ll agree with his enemies that if Wells isn’t Superman, he’s super something.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
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“Masterful...The Wolves is driven by a terrific and well-executed plot, but where Berenson truly shines is in his explanation of how certain parts of the world work. These would include spycraft and the dark tradeoffs made by governments at the highest and lowest levels.”—Bookreporter.com
 
“Berenson’s John Wells series has lost none of its power, novelty, and excitement. Wells is unique in contemporary thriller fiction [and] has become a richer character with each new story.”—Connecticut Post
 
“Berenson’s style is as seductive as his storytelling, and The Wolves has a bite that doesn’t let go from the first page straight through to the last.”—The Providence Journal