I sat there for a while—maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe longer. None of the guards said a word, and I said nothing either. They gave me nothing to do, and with every minute that passed, my anxieties intensified. My mind raced through a thousand what-if scenarios, each more chilling than the last. Finally Abu Khalif entered the room and took his seat across from me while his bodyguards took up positions around the room.
“Now, Mr. Collins, it is time for me to ask you some questions,” he began, still without a hint of emotion in his voice. “How is your mother doing? Maggie, yes? What a lovely home she has there in Bar Harbor—Waldron Street, isn’t it?”
My stomach clenched. Why was this monster bringing up my mother? And how did he know what street she lived on? I said nothing.
“And your brother—Matt, I believe; and his wife, Annie—how are they? And those precious little children. Is everything well with them? A healthy family is so important. Don’t you agree?”
Now it was clear. This was a warning. A direct threat, in fact: play ball or sentence those closest to me to death.
“Feeling a little quiet today, are we?”
I clenched my jaw and said nothing.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the time for your resistance, Mr. Collins,” Khalif continued. “There are certain things I want to know from you, and I will get answers. To begin with, are the rumors I’m hearing from my sources in Jerusalem and Ramallah true? Is the criminal Zionist Lavi about to sign a treaty with that Palestinian traitor Salim Mansour?”
The question startled me. I’d braced myself for more questions about my family, but it seemed that was just the sadistic preamble to what he really wanted to discuss.
“Why do you ask that?” I inquired.
“No, Mr. Collins, you’re not asking the questions today—I am,” he shot back, his eyes glaring, his voice thick with emotion for the first time.
My pulse began to quicken. It was not wise to make this lunatic angry, but what was the right answer? What did he want to hear?
“Yes, they’re true,” I replied, concluding if I was going to die anyway, it wasn’t going to be for telling foolish lies.
Yet rather than make him angrier, my answer seemed to calm him considerably. He eased back in his seat. The emotions in his face and in his voice seemed to drain away.
“You’re saying Lavi and Mansour have hammered out a treaty?”
“I believe they have.”
“And it’s done, final, complete?”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“Why haven’t you reported it yet?”
“That’s not my beat, and I was coming here instead.”
“To Iraq?”
“Yes.”
“Direct from Israel?”
“No.”
“From Jordan?”
I hesitated for a moment but then nodded.
He seemed to chew on that for a moment, then asked, “How soon will the treaty be signed?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
“I hear there’s going to be a signing at the White House sometime later this month,” I said, avoiding any reference to the announcement ceremony that was going to be held within days, presumably in Jerusalem.
“And they will all be there—at the White House—Mansour, Lavi, and President Taylor?”
“Yes.”
“And King Abdullah, as well?”
“I believe so.”
“That would make sense, would it not, as he has been a key broker of the deal, correct?”
“I’m not sure how the king would characterize his involvement,” I said, which was technically true and yet the closest thing to a lie I had uttered so far in this bizarre conversation.
“You don’t think the king sees himself as the true author of this treaty?” Khalif pressed. “After all the private meetings he had with the Zionists like Lavi and with a kafir like Mansour and with sheer infidels like your president, over and over again for the last few months, you really don’t think Abdullah—the betrayer of the Prophet and all that he stood for—not only sees himself but prides himself as the godfather of this so-called peace deal?”
“I really can’t say,” I replied.
“You can’t say, or you won’t say?” he asked. “There is a difference, Mr. Collins.”
“I can’t,” I replied. “I have not spoken to the king about this or about anything else. He and I don’t know each other. I’ve never met or interviewed him.”
“Your grandfather interviewed his great-grandfather, did he not?”
I found myself both intrigued and unnerved by the intelligence Khalif had on this most top secret of Mideast initiatives, not to mention my own family history. So far as I was aware, not a single reporter in the region, the U.S., or the rest of the world knew the peace deal was done or that the Jordanian monarch was its broker, except me. If some other reporter in any news organization, including my own, had the information, they certainly would have published it. Yet nobody had—not yet, anyway. The Jordan Times was furthest out front, giving hints that a deal was in the making. But even they had not been definitive.
How, then, had Khalif gotten such insider information? If it wasn’t coming from a reporter, could it be coming from a mole inside one of the four governments involved—American, Israeli, Palestinian, or Jordanian? And how was this lunatic going to use the information?
“Actually, my grandfather never got the—”
But before I could finish my thought, Khalif cut me off. “Oh yes, how could I forget? Fate stepped in. The king was murdered. How sad . . . for your grandfather.”
Just then I heard a phone ring several times. An aide entered the living room from a doorway to my right and handed Khalif a satellite phone.
He took it and spoke into it in Arabic, slowly and deliberately. “Not yet. . . . But your preparations are proceeding? . . . Do you foresee any obstacles? . . . And you’ve briefed the others? . . . Very well, call me again in two hours.”
Khalif gave the satphone back to the aide, who now handed over several pieces of paper.
He read them carefully and then passed them to me. They were printouts off the Times website. My articles were both lead stories.
“The news is breaking, Mr. Collins,” Khalif said with a slight smile. “But there is so much more to come.”
Then he changed directions. “I want to ask you about your profile of me,” he said calmly. “Something about it is bothering me a great deal.”
I tensed immediately.
“You stated that I ‘claimed’ to have possession of chemical weapons ‘allegedly’ captured from a Syrian military base near Aleppo several weeks ago. Why did you use the words claimed and allegedly?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” I replied as diplomatically as I could.
“Of course you do,” he said. “It’s a very straightforward question. Why did you use these words to describe my statements?”
I was still not following but tried to answer nonetheless. “When I asked you about the chemical weapons back at the prison, you did claim to have them, and you did say your forces captured them from that base.”
“Exactly.”
“So that’s what I wrote.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I countered. “That is what I wrote.”
“No, you qualified what I said,” Khalif replied. “You made it seem like I merely said that I had WMD—as if I were making up a story—when the fact is we do have these weapons, and we will use them when the time is right.”
“I was only reporting what you said.”
“I get the impression you don’t believe me.”
“It’s not a matter of what I believe,” I said. “I was just trying to be a careful reporter of the actual facts.”
“ISIS has chemical weapons—that is a fact, Mr. Collins.”
“So you say.”
“Yes, I d
o say, and that makes it a fact.”
“Not in my world.”
“My confirming the story doesn’t make it true?”
“Not without proof.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “I reported what you said. I showed it to you ahead of time. You e-mailed it to my editor as is. How can you now be upset?”
“I’m not upset,” Khalif said. “I just want a story that makes it clear to the infidels that we are not talk, not spin doctors. We don’t simply issue press releases and audiotapes and videos on YouTube. I am not Zawahiri. This is not hype. We are the true mujahideen for Allah, and we want the world to know this clearly.”
With this, he stood. “Come, Mr. Collins; I have something to show you.”
Two guards pulled me to my feet. They blindfolded me and reapplied duct tape over my mouth, and before I knew it I was being shoved into the back of a car. When we began to drive, someone turned on the radio full blast so I couldn’t hear anything but some wretched music the others in the car all seemed to love. I couldn’t hear street noises or birds or construction equipment or anything that might give away our route or destination. I couldn’t even hear what the others were saying.
I would estimate that we drove for fifteen or twenty minutes, though without any points of reference it was difficult to maintain an accurate sense of time. Finally, however, we came to a stop. The music stopped. I heard doors open. I heard Khalif giving orders in Arabic, and then I was pulled from the car.
When the blindfold was removed from my eyes, I found myself inside a dark garage. By the time my eyes adjusted, I saw a hulk of a man in the shadows and realized Jamal Ramzy was standing in front of me, at Abu Khalif’s side.
“Welcome to Mosul, Mr. Collins,” Ramzy said. “What an honor. You’re the first infidel ever to be permitted inside not just one ISIS base but two.”
I nodded slightly but said nothing.
“Now, put this on,” Ramzy said, handing me a gas mask.
“Why?” I asked.
“So you don’t die—at least not prematurely,” he said, and I complied.
Ramzy, too, put on a gas mask, as did Khalif and the dozen armed guards around us. Then Ramzy led the group through a dark corridor and down several flights of stairs to the basement of whatever facility we had come to. We headed through one set of doors that were nothing special, but we quickly came to another set of doors that obviously served as an air lock into some sort of research laboratory. Though my gas mask was fogging up a bit, I could see lots of scientific equipment of various kinds and at least a half-dozen men wearing white lab coats and masks.
Ramzy ushered Khalif and me and one armed guard into a separate room. There was nothing in there—no chairs, no tables, no furniture of any kind—but in front of us on the far wall was a rectangular window with glass that appeared several inches thick. On the other side of the glass was a concrete bunker of sorts. It too was empty, but as I watched, someone with a lab coat entered from a side door to our right. He was carrying a wooden chair. He set it down and went to retrieve another and another and then finally a fourth chair. Working quickly and methodically, he lined up the chairs in a row facing us. Then he was gone.
My heart was racing. Sweat was beginning to drip down the back of my neck. I was feeling claustrophobic in this mask and struggling to breathe. But there was no way out. Abu Khalif was standing immediately to my left. Jamal Ramzy was immediately to my right. And an ISIS thug was standing behind me, in front of the door, holding an AK-47.
Through the window—which I assumed was a two-way mirror—I saw three prison guards from Abu Ghraib appear, along with the prison’s warden, whom I recognized immediately. They were all handcuffed and shackled together. When they had been led into the room on the other side of this window, they were unchained and ordered to strip. It was clear that each of them had been tortured severely. They were bloodied and bruised. Their faces were swollen. Two of them had broken noses.
Once they were naked, they were ordered to sit down on the chairs, which they did, each of them trembling. Abu Khalif rapped his knuckles on the glass, apparently giving an order to the man in the gas mask and lab coat, who nodded and quickly left the room.
A moment later, a canister dropped into the room from somewhere above the ceiling. It was emitting something that looked like tear gas, but it quickly became apparent that this was not tear gas. As I watched the men behind the glass, I suddenly realized it was sarin gas. Khalif was going to murder these men just to prove to me that ISIS really did have the Syrian weapons.
Before long the prison guards and the warden were on the ground. They were writhing in pain. They were foaming at the mouth, convulsing violently. The chamber they were in was soundproof, so I couldn’t hear their screaming. But when I tried to look away, Ramzy grabbed my gas mask and smashed it against the window, forcing me to watch these men suffer a grisly, painful, horrible death. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t. I was there to witness these murders, to be able to tell the world what had happened and how. This was my job. This was why I was here. As much as I didn’t want it to be true, I now had proof that ISIS had chemical weapons, and I had to be a faithful witness. Who else would do it? These men deserved it. And the world had to know the truth.
I stood there, my bloodless face pressed to the window, for what seemed like hours, horrified as I watched these men die a slow, agonizing, excruciatingly painful death. And I must admit that as much as I didn’t want any of them to perish, for me they couldn’t die soon enough. That seemed a terribly selfish thought, but I couldn’t bear to watch them grasp for life any longer.
Eventually it ended. Only then did Ramzy let me leave the observation room and step back into the larger laboratory. I repeatedly felt like I was going to be sick, but I think the fear of vomiting in my mask and suffocating as a result kept down all that was trying to force its way through my esophagus.
Finally Ramzy took me by the arm and led me back through the air lock. Only then was I permitted to remove my mask. Everyone else removed theirs as well.
No one said a thing, not even Khalif. But perhaps that was because Ramzy was not finished. He led the group to a large warehouse next door. To my astonishment, the rectangular building was filled with artillery shells and missile warheads, most of which were neatly and carefully stacked in crates bearing Syrian military markings, sitting on pallets. Some of the pallets were being loaded onto nondescript trucks.
“This is just a small portion of the chemical weapons and delivery systems we captured near Aleppo,” Ramzy told me. “These are awaiting the emir’s orders. The rest are being pre-positioned to strategic locations, even as we speak.”
When Ramzy was finished speaking, Khalif turned to me and, standing less than a foot from my face, gave me a simple order.
“Write this story, Mr. Collins,” he said. “Write that we’re coming after the infidels. Write that we have the motive. We have the means. All we’re waiting for now is the opportunity, and I am supremely confident it will show itself soon. Write that, and then I will decide what happens to you.”
45
AMMAN, JORDAN
My flight from Erbīl landed in Amman.
I still couldn’t believe they had let me go.
I had tried to sleep on the flight but couldn’t even close my eyes. Every time I did, my thoughts were filled with the most ghastly images. The flight attendants had served me a snack, but I couldn’t eat. They’d offered me water and soda, but I couldn’t drink. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t make them stop.
I powered up my phone and checked texts and e-mails. I saw none that looked urgent. But as we taxied to the terminal, I sent three messages of my own. The first was to my mom, letting her know that whatever else she might read, I was safely out of Iraq and out of the hands of ISIS. The second was to Allen MacDonald, essentially saying the same thing and asking him to coordinate a conference call between him, me, and the
chief counsel for the Times. I was ready to go to the FBI, to do anything I could to put these monsters behind bars, but I wanted to know if my actions had put me in any legal jeopardy. The third text was to my brother, saying I’d just landed back in Amman and asking if he would come pick me up at the airport as soon as possible.
Then I sent a fourth, to Yael.
Grabbing my things from the overhead bin, I made my way off the plane as I scanned the latest headlines on my phone. My two articles—the first on Abu Khalif and his escape from Abu Ghraib and the butchery of a prominent Iraqi government official, the second on the murder of Abu Ghraib’s warden and several staff members during an ISIS demonstration of its sarin gas stockpiles—were the lead stories on the Times website.
The other major story on the front page was by Alex Brunnell, the Times bureau chief in Jerusalem. Its headline read, Peace Deal ‘Close but Not Yet Done’ between Israelis and Palestinians, Says Senior U.S. Official.
The lead story in the Washington Post was by their chief White House correspondent: President Taylor Announces Surprise Summit on Mideast Peace.
A Haaretz headline out of Jerusalem announced, Israelis Roll out Red Carpet, Prepare to Welcome Air Force One.
Meanwhile a Jerusalem Post headline was more negative: Right-Wing Cabinet Members Furious with Lavi over Rumors of Secret Negotiations with Palestinians.
A tweet from Al Arabiya claimed, Sources close to PA President Mansour say they are “cautiously optimistic” a deal for a Palestinian state could be closed this week.
Finally, the Jordan Times was reporting, Aides to King Say He Is ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ about Peace Process, Open to Attending Peace Summit in Jerusalem, if Needed.
Clearly events were moving rapidly. I had missed my window for an exclusive on the peace deal, but I didn’t care. I was just glad to be out of Iraq, alive and safe and free. The question was for how long? For the moment, I was useful to Khalif and Ramzy. But that calculus could change any minute. What’s more, I was terrified for Matt and his family. They had to get out of Jordan as fast as possible.