DURANGO, MEXICO
The tin roof on the ramshackle house was getting pelted by a pre-dawn rainstorm. Back when the former DEA had a more formidable presence in Latin America, they had seized the tiny house off Mexican Highway 40 from a group of marijuana growers. The drug dealers wouldn’t need the place while serving ten to twenty years in a Mexican prison.
The two CIA officers had taken the Cypriot captain and his three mates to this place on the orders of the Mexico City station chief, who had simply relayed the message from Langley. The orders were immaterial, really, because Steve Nelsen was leading the investigation and had already planned on his special form of “suspect awareness,” as he called it.
Ricardo Garcia was in a back room with the Cypriot, asking questions and trying to soften him for what he knew would be an interesting interrogation. At least from what he had heard about Nelsen in a few days. It didn’t take long for rumors to spread.
Two former DEA agents, who now worked in the criminal intervention department of the CIA, and also two former FBI special agents, working in that same department, stood around the periphery of the main room, their guns hanging prominently from leather holsters under their arms. In the old days, it would have been cooperation by three agencies that none of them had seen before. Now all six of the men were part of the CIA. Nelsen didn’t like it one bit, even though he was in charge.
The three young seamen had been separated and interrogated. They spoke very little English, and only one of the CIA officers, Nelsen, could understand the Turkish. Nelsen spoke Turkish, Arabic, Spanish and Italian. None of the seamen knew a thing, Nelsen was sure. Answers from them had come easy, with only a few initial smacks across the head. They had been hired in Famagusta, Cyprus late one night after getting drunk with the captain, who had continued to buy them drinks. The next morning they had found themselves below decks on the fishing boat, pitching heavily, as they steamed through the Mediterranean. They had all come to fear the captain, and knew they were stuck. He would have knocked them over the head and thrown them to the sharks if they had rebelled. They were unanimous on that point.
Garcia pulled the Cypriot captain into the room, and strapped him to a wooden chair with leather belts. The remaining agents surrounded him to intimidate him. Nelsen was sure the captain knew something. Nelsen’s men had found an abandoned skiff five miles up the coast from Novillero. There were four sets of footprints in the sand leading to truck tracks. Someone had carried something heavy, since their footprints were so deep, and their steps shifted sideways at short intervals.
Nelsen had asked Langley to run the captain’s name through the Agency database. Just a few minutes ago he received a fax with the information. He sat across the small room now reading the curled pages.
The captain was really Atik Aziz. The name he had given was one of many aliases. He was fifty-two. Had been a captain in the Turkish marines when he took part in the invasion of Northern Cyprus in 1974. He had continued to fight there, helping set up an independent state through brutal suppression of anyone who opposed him. When the independent Turkish Cypriot government became more moderate over ten years ago, Aziz set out on his own to make his fortune. But by then he had left behind more bodies than any of his peers. Old habits were hard to break, Nelsen noticed in the report. Aziz was used by the highest bidder to ferry terrorists from Lebanon to strike the Israeli coast. He ran arms for the Palestinians from Syria. Aziz was a new-age pirate, and he looked the part with long, disheveled black hair, streaked with gray, and his scruffy face. His jeans and cotton jacket were frazzled, and his deck boots scuffed beyond repair. But more than the external was wrong with this man. He seemed to have this knowing radiance that emerged from a turned up smirk that exposed crooked yellow teeth. Nelsen would soon wipe that from him.
Nelsen rose from the wooden chair across the room and ripped off his jacket. His thick muscles rippled through his T-shirt as he adjusted his pants on his hips and checked for his 9mm under his left arm. He slowly approached the Cypriot, his eyes centered directly on the pirate’s ugly scowl. He knew how to play the game. Intimidation. Make the guy feel like his next breath depended on him.
Stopping a few feet from the Cypriot, Nelsen stretched his six-four frame, and then cracked his knuckles. He was a tall, imposing figure.
Rain smashed against the roof overhead.
“Where’s the weapon, Aziz?” Nelsen asked with a deep snarl. He wasn’t only big, but he could act with the best of them. Not even agents who knew him could tell if he was really pissed off, or simply playing the game.
The Cypriot gave him a bewildered look, as if he didn’t understand English.
Nelsen looked at his partner, Garcia, who shrugged. Nelsen grabbed the man’s hair, raising him and the chair from the ground, the leather straps cinched tightly across his chest. The man screamed. Nelsen dropped him and then pinched and twisted his left ear.
“Listen you fucking little terrorist,” Nelsen said in Turkish. “I’ll start ripping pieces from your body if you don’t start talking. I want to know who hired you? Who has the weapon? Where’s the weapon now? And what these men plan on doing with the weapon.”
There was pain on the Cypriot’s face as sweat appeared on his forehead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man answered in broken English.
Nelsen tightened his jaw. “So, the briefing was right. You do speak English.”
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Nelsen let the man’s ear go, and then slapped him across the head. “I ask the questions, fuckhead.” He paused to let Aziz feel the pain. “Now. Which question do you want to take first? How about, where’s the weapon?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Nelsen smacked him again. “Wrong answer. Try again.”
The man looked at Nelsen sideways with his eyes, as if to say that he’d kill him if he got the chance. “I was never told that. That was not my job.”
“And what was your job, exactly?”
“Delivery,” the Cypriot said softly.
“I believe that,” Nelsen said. “You’ve done such a good job for the Syrians in the past. Did the Syrians hire you?”
The man shook his head swiftly. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit! You don’t know who wired a hundred thousand dollars into two separate Swiss accounts?”
This riled Aziz. He shifted his eyes away quickly. Then, realizing he’d opened himself up, he slowly turned his gaze back to the American. “I never ask names. Deals are worked through middle men.”
“So you simply take the money and do as you’re told.” Nelsen went to hit the man, and pulled up short. The man flinched backward. Nelsen smiled inside. He had been trained to intimidate through psychology, and his size had given him a great advantage.
The other officers in the room had been silent, their faces grave with concern. It was a carefully planned game, and they all knew the rules.
Nelsen pulled a pair of pliers from his back pocket. They were shiny and new with sharp teeth. He clamped them open and closed a few times to make sure they worked fine, then he slowly lowered them toward the man’s crotch. He stopped for a moment six inches away from his penis, and imagined how it must have been shrinking to hide between the man’s legs.
“I suppose you’d like to keep that one piece of equipment,” Nelsen said smiling.
The Cypriot shifted his eyes downward, the sweat on his forehead bubbling out. “Please, I don’t know anything else,” he pleaded desperately.
Nelsen moved the pliers closer. “Give me the names of the men you picked up at Johnston Atoll.”
“I don’t know them.”
“Bullshit! You spent seven days on the Pacific with those men, and you never caught their names?”
The man thought hard, keeping an eye on the pliers. “They only used single names,” he forced out.
“First or last names would be nice.”
Although there was a tape covering the entire interrogation, one of the former FBI agents pulled out a notebook and prepared to write.
“Go ahead,” Nelsen said.
The man shifted in his chair and looked around the room. “They’ll kill me, you know.”
Nelsen knew that was a possibility, and didn’t really give a shit. The man helped terrorists escape with over a hundred nerve gas bomblets. Maybe he deserved to die. “Let’s hear the names.”
“Mahabad,” the man said slowly, deliberately, as if the words themselves would kill him. “Ragga. Baskale. Ruwanduz.”
Nelsen looked at the officer taking down the names, and he indicated he had them written down. Something wasn’t right with the names. “What nationality? Are they Turks?”
The man didn’t answer.
Nelsen clamped down on Aziz’s trousers and started pulling upward. “Answer.”
“Various,” the man screeched in a higher pitch. “I didn’t understand their language.”
He didn’t understand, but he knew. Nelsen was sure. “Who were they?”
The man refused to answer.
Nelsen reached down deeper into the man’s crotch, grabbed something soft, and clamped down lightly.
Aziz screamed. “They were Kurds. They were Kurds.”
Nelsen let up. “Kurds?” He thought for a moment. What in the hell were Kurds doing in the North Pacific? And now in Mexico? What did they want with the nerve gas? He had a feeling Aziz, the Cypriot, would remember a little more than he was telling, but it would take time to get the answers. Nelsen knew he had one advantage. He had softened him. Opened him up. Answers always came easier after that.