Moments later, with Abdel at the wheel, we were working our way through traffic. Abdel was careful to maintain the speed limit, careful not to attract attention, and before I knew it, we were on the Ring Road heading north.
As we drove, I told Abdel and Yael everything that had happened in excruciating detail. She had me on speakerphone with a secure line directly back to her team at the Ramat David air base and Shalit at Mossad headquarters. They were firing questions at me left and right. Had I seen the men who had fired the RPG that killed Hussam? How good a look had I gotten at the Audi that had followed me? Did I know what color it was? What specific model? What was the license plate number? Could I remember any other details about the attack?
Unfortunately the answer to everything was no. I hadn’t seen anything. I couldn’t remember anything. I had nothing specific, much less actionable, to report. And then I began firing questions back at them. How in the world could ISIS have tracked me to Cairo? How could they have known I was with Hussam? How could they have known my exact location? Even on the off chance that ISIS had picked up some whiff of intelligence that I was in Cairo, how could they have possibly known I would be at that café at that moment?
I was angry, and I was scared. The attack made no sense whatsoever. I could count on one hand the number of people who had known precisely where I’d be that morning and when. No one on this call had known. Not even I had known.
“Maybe there’s a mole inside the Egyptian palace?” one of the analysts mused.
The very notion sent a chill down my spine, especially as I explained to them everything I had just discussed with Hussam and the general and President Mahfouz. Shalit wanted to know what exactly Hussam and Mahfouz had said about the Baqouba brothers and whether I believed the Egyptians had specific intelligence on their whereabouts. He wanted to know if I had admitted, confessed, hinted at, or intimated in any possible way that I was working with the Mossad. He wanted to know why I’d destroyed my wire and flushed it down Hussam’s toilet. And on and on it went.
I answered every question numerous times, but Shalit and the others kept asking in different ways, from different angles, both trying to force me to remember every single little detail but also trying to break my story. It was clear that some of them—Dutch and Fingers in particular—didn’t believe me. “Why would you discard the wire unless you were planning to give them information you didn’t want us to know?” Fingers demanded.
At that I went ballistic. “What exactly do you think would have happened when the general’s men searched me? How would I have explained a wire? El-Badawy is the head of the Egyptian special forces, for crying out loud. If he caught me trying to secretly record our conversation, he would have had me thrown into a cell!”
Yael finally intervened and cut off the call. As we exited the Ring Road onto the highway bound for the Egyptian city of Ismailia, she turned to me and repeated the question Shalit had asked me. “Did you believe Mahfouz when he said he had solid intel on the Baqouba brothers?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I can’t give you anything definitive. Call it intuition. Call it a gut instinct. All I can say is, I’ve been doing this for a long time—interviewing subjects, assessing their honesty, assessing their motives and reliability—and I’m telling you, this is legit.”
“So you think they know something important.”
“I do.”
“Because they’re scooping up bad guys in the Sinai?”
“Among other places.”
“Human intel?”
“You mean as opposed to a telephone intercept or an e-mail?” I asked.
“Or a hard drive or pocket litter or anything else,” Yael replied.
“You want to know if they have an actual source with firsthand knowledge of where one or both of the Baqouba brothers are?”
“Right.”
“That I can’t say,” I confessed. “I don’t know what they have, and I don’t know how they got it. But it’s something. It’s big. It’s real. But I have no doubt it’s perishable.”
“Meaning if we don’t get it today, it might not be true tomorrow?”
“Exactly.”
Yael was quiet for several minutes. Then Abdel piped up as he drove. “You think Mahfouz is serious about helping bag these guys?” he asked.
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
“He really wants to take down Abu Khalif?”
“Not directly,” I said. “He said his hands are full with the jihadists inside Egypt and in the Sinai. But he’s got something he wants to give to somebody. He just feels he has to be careful who that somebody is. He wants to work with the Americans, but they’re not playing ball, and he doesn’t trust them anymore. Why else would he meet with me? I wasn’t asking for a meeting with him or the general. I only wanted to talk to Hussam because Khachigian told me to. Even you guys weren’t sure if Hussam was an active player.”
“Turns out he was,” Yael said.
“I’ll say—the man was working directly for President Mahfouz. It was Mahfouz who learned ISIS had chemical weapons. It was Mahfouz who wanted to get that intel to President Taylor. It was Mahfouz who wanted the world to know what Abu Khalif was planning. So he gave the intel to Hussam. Hussam gave it to Khachigian. And Khachigian leaked it to me.”
“That was months ago,” Yael said. “Doesn’t mean they’ve got the goods now.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But look at the article my colleague Bill Sanders wrote. The Egyptians told him they had photographs of Khalif getting into Red Crescent ambulances going in and out of Raqqa. Did you guys have that?”
“No,” Yael conceded.
“Do you believe it?” I asked.
Yael shrugged.
“Well, do you?” I pressed.
“Probably.”
“Then Mahfouz and his team are doing their job. They’ve got the sources. They want to help. They’re willing to play ball. But not unless I tell them who I’m working for. Which is why I need to tell them.”
“Absolutely not,” Yael said. “That’s never going to happen.”
“We don’t have any choice,” I countered. “I need to call them back and make sure they don’t suspect me for Hussam’s death. And I need to tell them I’m working with you guys and why we all need to work together. I can’t wait until noon. If ISIS really was responsible for that attack, then they could very well know what I’m fishing for, and that means the Baqouba brothers know or will soon. Whatever hard intel Mahfouz has on them is going to be useless unless we move fast.”
75
Abdel dropped us off at the Ismailia airport just before 11 a.m. local time.
The business jet lifted off minutes later, bound for Dubai. As soon as we were in the air, I demanded Yael get Ari Shalit back on the phone. At first, she told me this was impossible, but when I threatened to call Carl Hughes at the CIA and get ahold of Shalit through him, she finally relented and put me on a secure phone to Mossad headquarters.
For much of the first hour of our three-hour flight to the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates, Shalit and I battled over the efficacy of informing the Egyptian government of my connection to the Mossad. I was adamant that every minute going by was wasted time that could blow the only real lead we had to the killer of the Israeli prime minister, not to mention thousands of Americans. Shalit, however, countered just as forcefully that the future of the entire Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty lay in the balance.
“Listen, James,” he said, “if Mahfouz thought for a split second that Mossad was running operations inside Egypt, the entire treaty could come unglued. Yes, it’s that sensitive. And don’t forget: your involvement has already led—directly or indirectly—to the death of Walid Hussam. Israel has enough crises to worry about without opening up an entire new front with the Egyptians.”
I could not dissuade him, and when I raised my voice, Shalit hung up on me. Had I been a politi
cian, I might have turned to Yael and spun the whole thing as a stalemate. But I wasn’t a politician. I had no energy or desire to call this anything other than what it was—a complete and utter defeat. I’d made my case, and I’d lost, and now I was done. I’d put my life on the line to try to make a difference, to find leads that could help the Mossad crack this case and find Abu Khalif. And now we had a lead. With a single phone call from Ari Shalit to General El-Badawy, we had the potential to blow this thing wide-open. Yet Shalit refused to listen. He had his reasons, of course, but they weren’t nearly good enough for me.
I slumped into a seat in the back of the plane and stared out the window at the vast expanse of the Saudi desert below us. I could see no cities, no towns, no villages—not even bedouin outposts. There were no trees, no rivers, no vegetation, no signs of life in any direction as far as the eye could see. I saw no roads, no cars, no people, no power lines. No evidence of human existence at all. It was like I was staring down at the surface of the moon. Uninhabited. Uninhabitable. Barren. Empty. And unforgiving.
In that moment, I felt more alone and helpless than at any other time in my life. I was doing everything I could to bring Abu Khalif to justice, to safeguard my family, to give us a chance at a life of freedom and security. But I was failing. I’d almost died—again. I’d seen far too many others die before my eyes—again. And for what? What good had any of it done? What, if anything, had I accomplished?
I thought about that as I looked down at the desert from thirty-nine thousand feet. I thought about that as we streaked through the atmosphere at five hundred miles an hour. And nothing at all came to mind. A half hour went by. Then an hour. And then two.
We were approaching the Gulf. We were told that in a few minutes we would need to fasten our seat belts and prepare for our descent. Absentmindedly I did both, but I just kept staring at the desert floor, and try as I might, I couldn’t see any good that had come from this mess. Nor could I see a way forward. I was out of plays. Out of options. Yael had shut down on me and I didn’t know why and she wouldn’t say. Shalit wasn’t listening to me and I did know why, but I wasn’t wrong, yet I couldn’t budge him. I owed the president of Egypt an answer I wasn’t allowed to give. So what was the point of it all? I had no idea.
I was suddenly overwhelmed by the intense desire to get back to Matt and Annie and Katie. I missed them so badly it was physically painful. I’d wasted so much of my life covering other people’s lives that I’d blown much of my own. My marriage. My relationship with my mom. My relationship with Matt and his family. I knew I couldn’t go back and change the past. But maybe I could start fresh. Maybe, at the very least, I could go home, or to whatever passed for home at the moment, and make amends. Or try, anyway. At that moment, I resolved to book my flight back to St. Thomas the moment we landed in Dubai, and only then did I finally begin to breathe again.
I turned away from the window and found myself glancing at Yael. She was sitting toward the front of the plane, hunched over her laptop. I was dying to know what had gone wrong between us. Whatever spark I’d felt in Istanbul and then in Amman and even on that base in eastern Jordan just before we’d headed into Iraq was long gone. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to make it right. I wanted to go back to the way it was before, when even the mere prospect of a few moments with this fascinating, beautiful, mysterious woman was tantalizing and electric.
This was the moment. I had to know. And I had to know now—before we landed, before I boarded a flight back to the Caribbean, before I walked out of her life forever, never to see her again.
76
I was about to unbuckle my seat belt and go talk with her when we hit some serious turbulence.
The plane began to shake violently, lurching from side to side. The pilot came on and insisted we remain in our seats with our seat belts fastened and not attempt to move about the cabin. Yael’s laptop suddenly slid off the tray in front of her and went crashing to the floor. I could see her trying to decide whether she should grab it or not, but as the jet shook even more intensely, she decided against it. She glanced back to make sure I was all right. I nodded that I was fine, but it wasn’t true. Not even close.
I was feeling nauseated. I was beginning to perspire. I reached up and opened the vent above me to get more air, and then I closed my eyes and leaned back and tried to steady my nerves and my stomach. I was not prone to air- or sea- or carsickness, but I remembered that on the few occasions I had experienced motion sickness as a kid, my mother had always told me to focus on something else, something specific, something good. Now, as I closed my eyes, it was my mother’s face that came to mind—not hazy and gauzy and distant but as crisp and vivid as if she were really with me. It wasn’t a mystical experience. She wasn’t speaking to me. I wasn’t hearing her from the grave. It was just a memory, and after a split second the image faded, replaced by a feeling of intense regret. I missed my mom. I wanted to see her. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted her to tell me everything was going to be okay.
From the time I’d left for college at the age of eighteen, I’d always been a man in a hurry. Always on the go. Always making excuses why I couldn’t come home, couldn’t see her, couldn’t even call home enough and say hi. And the sadness I felt was excruciating.
And then I began to cry. Sob is more like it. I felt embarrassed and ashamed but I couldn’t help it, though I did everything to stay quiet and not draw Yael’s notice. Still, I was completely overcome with emotion—with loss, with regret, with fear—and from the inner depths of my soul I wept. It wasn’t only for my mother. I think it was for all the people I’d lost in recent months. I hadn’t really grieved for any of them. Not properly. But at that moment all that I had kept buried came rushing to the surface.
Wave after wave swept over me, the tears accompanied by images. My father storming out our front door when I was twelve—the last time I ever saw him. Me walking past my mother’s room when I was seventeen and seeing her on her knees, praying through tears. My friend and photographer Abdel Hamid stepping on a land mine in Homs. Omar Fayez starting the rental car in Istanbul and it blowing to smithereens. Matt in Amman, driving me to the airport, pleading with me not to go to Iraq.
All these and many others flashed like a strobe light through my mind and heart. There didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason, no theme or common thread that bound them all together.
The last image in the rapid-fire series was my mom’s pastor, speaking at her memorial service back in Bar Harbor. In my mind I again heard one of the last things he’d said.
“Maggie and Josh are gone, but they are not dead. They are more alive today than they have ever been. . . . But your only hope of seeing them again is to give your soul to the God they entrusted their souls to, and to do it before you breathe your last.”
Those words thundered in my heart. They shook me to my core. And in that moment, I knew they were true. I can’t explain how. I just knew that everything I’d heard the pastor say that morning was true. Everything Matt had been trying to explain to me for years was true. All of it. Jesus’ life. His death. His burial. His resurrection. The way to heaven. The way of salvation. My sins. My need for a Savior. It all made sense. All at once, everything I’d been reading in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament began to click into place. For the first time in my life, I could see it. And I wanted it. I wanted him. I wanted to be saved. To be adopted into God’s family. To know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I would spend eternity with him and with my family.
So through my tears—silently but earnestly—I begged God to forgive me, to change me, to fix me, to rescue me and adopt me.
And something happened. I didn’t see a vision. I didn’t hear angels singing. I didn’t see fireworks or have some out-of-body experience. But I felt clean in a way I’d never felt before. I had peace I couldn’t begin to explain.
I was different. One moment I was lost and dead and grieving and alone. And the next moment I wasn’t. In the blink of an eye. In th
e space of a prayer. I was different.
I was free.
77
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
We touched down at Dubai International Airport at precisely 4 p.m.
It was sunny and breezy and eighty degrees, and as we taxied, I composed myself and tried to process all that had just happened to me. I wanted to call Matt. I wanted to tell him what I’d done. I wanted him to pray for me, and I had so many questions. But first I wanted to talk to Yael. Not about my newfound faith. Not yet. I just didn’t want there to be any bad blood between us. Whatever I’d done wrong, I wanted to apologize to her and do what I could to make it right. She clearly didn’t have any feelings for me. That hurt more than I cared to acknowledge, especially to her, but I wasn’t going to make a thing of it. I just wanted to book my flight back to St. Thomas and say my good-byes on good terms.
Ignoring the still-lit seat belt sign, I moved up to the seat next to hers. She had just recovered her laptop and was putting it into her carry-on bag, but before I could start the conversation, her satellite phone rang. She answered it, then handed it to me, a surprised look on her face.
“Don’t tell me that’s Ari calling to reconsider,” I said.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Calling to fire me, then?” I asked. “No need. I’m done.”
She shook her head. “Quiet—it’s not Ari.”
“Then who?” I asked.
“It’s the prime minister,” she whispered.
A moment later I found myself on the line with the new Israeli premier, Yuval Eitan.
“Mr. Collins,” the prime minister began, “I understand we have a problem.”
“I guess we do, sir,” I replied. “But I’m sorry you had to be bothered with this.”
“Well, I’m not sure how it works in Washington, but around here the head of the Mossad tends to get the PM involved when, you know, the fate of a treaty with a major Sunni Arab neighbor is on the line.”