{"product_id":"the-prisoner-of-guantanamo-isbn-9781400096145","title":"The Prisoner of Guantanamo","description":"When the body of an American soldier is discovered in Cuban waters near the U.S.  detention facility at Guantánamo, Revere Falk, a former FBI agent, is reassigned  from his job interrogating an accused al-Qaeda operative to investigate the soldier’s  mysterious death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Falk soon finds himself in a deadly game of intrigue that stretches  from the charged waters of Guantánamo Bay to the polished halls of Washington. Every  move Falk makes could be costly, and to make matters worse, a dark figure from his  past reappears, brandishing a secret he thought he had safely buried. \u003ci\u003eThe Prisoner  of Guantánamo\u003c\/i\u003e is a daring look at life behind the barbed wire of Gitmo and a riveting  portrayal of what goes on in the most secret levels of our government.“A tantalizing, timely thriller. . . . Powerful.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A superb spy thriller worthy of sharing shelf space with the novels of John le  Carré and Ken Follett.” —\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Fast-paced. . . . A page-turning thriller.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Heart-breakingly believable . . . Falk is a character  of depth and fascination.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eDan Fesperman \u003c\/b\u003eis a reporter for \u003ci\u003eThe Baltimore Sun \u003c\/i\u003eand has covered the civil war in  the former Yugoslavia and the recent war in Afghanistan. He is the author of three  novels. \u003ci\u003eThe Small Boat of Great Sorrow\u003c\/i\u003es won the Crime Writer's Association of Britain's  Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller writing in 2003 and \u003ci\u003eLie in the Dark \u003c\/i\u003ewon the John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel in 2000.CHAPTER ONEOn the first day of his transition from captor to captive, Revere   Falk stood barefoot on a starlit lawn at 4 a.m., still naively   confident of his place among those who asked the questions and   hoarded the secrets.Falk was an old hand at concealment, trained from birth. The skill   came in handy when you were an FBI interrogator. Who better to pry   loose the artifacts of other lives than someone who knew all the   hiding places? Better still, he spoke Arabic.Not that he was putting his talents to much use at Guantanamo. And at   the moment he was furious, having just returned from a botched   session that summed up everything he hated about this place: too few   detainees of real value, too many agencies tussling over the scraps,   and too much heat—in every sense of the word.Even at this hour, beads of sweat crawled across his scalp. By the   time the sun was up it would be another day for the black flag, which   the Army hoisted whenever the temperature rose beyond reason. An apt   symbol, Falk thought, like some rectangular hole in the sky that you   might fall into, never to reappear. A national banner for Camp   Delta's Republic of Nobody, populated by 640 prisoners from forty   countries, none of whom had the slightest idea how long they would be   here. Then there were the 2,400 other new arrivals in the prison   security force, mostly Reservists and Guardsmen who would rather be   elsewhere. Throw in Falk's little subculture—120 or so   interrogators, translators, and analysts from the military and half   the branches of the federal government—and you had the makings of a   massive psychological experiment on performing under stress at close   quarters.Falk was from Maine, a lobsterman's son, and what he craved most   right now was dew and coolness, moss and fern, the balm of fogbound   spruce. Failing that, he would have preferred to be nuzzled against   the perfumed neck of Pam Cobb, an Army captain who was anything but   stern once she agreed to terms of mutual surrender.He sighed and gazed skyward, a mariner counting stars, then pressed a   beer bottle to his forehead. Already warm, even though he had grabbed   it from the fridge only moments earlier, as soon as he reached the   house. The air conditioner was broken, so he had stripped off socks   and shoes and sought refuge on the lawn. But when he wiggled his toes   the grass felt toasted, crunchy. Like walking on burned coconut.If he thought it would do any good, he would pray for rain. Almost   every afternoon big thunderheads boiled up along the green line of   Castro's mountains to the west, only to melt into the sunset without   a drop. From up on this scorched hillside you couldn't even hear the   soothing whisper of the Caribbean. Yet the sea was out there, he   knew, just beyond the blackness of the southern horizon. Falk sensed   it as a submerged phosphorescence pooling beneath coral bluffs, aglow   like a candle in a locked closet. Or maybe his mind was playing   tricks on him, a garden-variety case of \u003ci\u003eGuant\u003c\/i\u003eá\u003ci\u003enamo loco\u003c\/i\u003e.It wasn't his first outbreak. Twelve years ago he had been posted   here as a Marine, serving a three-year hitch. But he had almost   forgotten how the perimeter of the base could seem to shrink by the   hour, its noose of fencelines and humidity tightening by degrees. A   Pentagon fact sheet for newcomers said that Gitmo—the military's   favorite slang for this outpost—covered forty-five square miles.   Like a lot of what the brass said, it was misleading. Much of the   acreage was water or swamp. Habitable territory was mostly confined   to a flinty wedge of six square miles. The plot marked out for Camp   Delta and the barracks of the security forces was smaller still,   pushed against the sea on fewer than a hundred acres.Falk stood a few miles north of the camp. By daylight from his   vantage point, with a good pair of binoculars, you could pick out   Cuban watchtowers in almost every direction. They crouched along a   no-man's-land of fences, minefields, wet tangles of mangrove, and   scrubby hills of gnarled cactus. The fauna was straight out of a   Charles Addams cartoon—vultures, boas, banana rats, scorpions, and   giant iguanas. Magazines and newspapers for sale at the Naval   Exchange were weeks old. Your cell phone was no good here, every   landline was suspect, and e-mail traffic was monitored. Anyone who   stayed for long learned to operate under the assumption that whatever   you did could be seen or heard by their side or yours. Even on the   free soil of a civilian's billet such as Falk's you never knew who   might be eavesdropping, especially now that OPSEC—Operational   Security—had become the mantra for Camp Delta's cult of secrecy. It   was all enough to make Falk wish that Gitmo still went by its old   Marine nickname—the Rock. Like Alcatraz.He took another swallow of warm beer, still trying to calm down. Then   the phone rang in the kitchen. He ran to answer in hopes of not   waking his roomie, special agent Cal Whitaker, only to be greeted by   the voice of Mitch Tyndall. Tyndall worked for the OGA, or Other   Government Agency, which even the lowliest buck private could tell   you was Gitmo-speak for the CIA.\"Hope I didn't wake you,\" Tyndall said.\"No way I'd be sleeping after that.\"\"That's what I figured. I was hoping to mend fences.\"\"The ones you just tore down?\" Falk's anger returned in a hurry.\"Guilty as charged.\"Tyndall sounded sheepish, new ground for him, although for the most   part he wasn't a bad guy. A tall Midwesterner with a long fuse, he   generally aimed to please as long as no sharing was required. Falk   tended to get more out of him than others if only because they were   part of the same five-member \"tiger team,\" the organizational   equivalent of a platoon in Gitmo's intelligence operation. There were   some twenty-five tiger teams in all, little study groups of   interrogators and analysts that divvied their turf by language and   home country of the detainees. Falk's team was one of several that   specialized in Saudis and Yemenis.\"Look, I spaced out,\" Tyndall continued. \"Just blundered in there   like a bull in a china shop. I wasn't thinking.\"Occupational hazard with you Agency guys, Falk thought but didn't   say. Unthinking arrogance came naturally, he supposed, when you were   at the top of the food chain, rarely answerable to anyone, the   Pentagon included. Teammates or not, there were plenty of places   Tyndall could go that Falk couldn't. The CIA sometimes used a   different set of interrogation rooms, and recently the Agency had   even built its own jail, Camp Echo. It was Gitmo's prison within a   prison, and its handful of high-priority inmates were identified by   number instead of by name.\"Yeah, well, there seems to be a lot of mindlessness going around,\" Falk said.\"Agreed. So consider this a peace offering. Or an apology, at any   rate. We might as well kiss and make up, considering where things are   headed.\"\"The rumors, you mean? Spies in our midst? Arab linguists on a secret jihad?\"\"It's not just rumor, not by a long shot.\"Coming from Tyndall, that was significant, so Falk tried to goad him   into saying more.\"Oh, I wouldn't believe everything you hear, Mitch.\"Tyndall seemed on the verge of rising to the bait, then checked   himself with a sigh.\"Whatever. In any case. No hard feelings?\"\"None you couldn't fix with a favor or two. And maybe a few beers at   the Tiki Bar. It's Adnan's feelings you should be worried about. I'll   be lucky to get two words out of him after that little explosion.   It's all about trust, Mitch. Trust is everything with these guys.\" He   should have quit there, but his memory flashed on a slide they always   showed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, a screen full of big letters   saying, \"Interrogation is overcoming resistance through compassion.\"   So he pushed onward, a sentence too far: \"Maybe if you guys would   stop stripping 'em naked with the room at forty degrees you'd figure   that out.\"\"I wouldn't believe everything you hear,\" Tyndall snapped.\"Whatever. Just stay away from Adnan. He's damaged goods as it is.\"\"No argument there. Tomorrow, then.\"\"Bright and early. And remember, you owe me.\"Falk stared at the phone after hanging up, wondering if anyone   bothered to tune in at this hour. Whitaker was no longer snoring down   the hall.\"Sorry,\" Falk offered, just in case. \"It was Tyndall. From the goddamn Agency.\"No reply, which was just as well. The fewer people who knew about   their little dustup, the better. People who ran afoul of Mitch   Tyndall soon found themselves being shunned. It wasn't the man's   winning personality that turned everyone against you, it was the   perception that he was privy to the big picture, while all you had   was a few fuzzy snapshots. So if you were on the outs with Tyndall,   there must be an important reason, even if no one but him knew what   it was. Falk had long ago concluded that Tyndall wasn't fully aware   of his mysterious powers, and it probably would be unwise to clue him   in.The subject of their dispute this evening was a nineteen-year-old   Yemeni, Adnan al-Hamdi, a pet project of Falk's if only because he   would talk to no one else. Adnan had been captured in Afghanistan   nearly two years earlier, during a skirmish just west of Jalalabad.   He and sixty other misfit jihadists from Pakistan, Chechnya, and the   Gulf States had been rounded up by Tadjik fighters of the Northern   Alliance in the wake of the Taliban's mad-dash retreat to the south.   They wound up rotting in a provincial prison for six weeks until   discovered by the Americans. Adnan attracted special interest mostly   on the word of a fellow traveler, an excitable old Pakistani who   swore that Adnan was a ringleader. Adnan, in his usual monosyllabic   way, said little to confirm or deny it, so into the net he fell,   joining one of Guantanamo's earliest batches of imports. He arrived   blindfolded and jumpsuited in the belly of a roaring cargo plane,   back when the detention facility had been a rudimentary collection of   monkey cages known as Camp X-Ray.By the time Falk came aboard more than a year later, Adnan had been   deemed a lost cause by Gitmo's resident shrinks, the Behavioral   Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit. He was a mute head case   who regularly threw his own shit at the MPs, sometimes after mixing   it with toothpaste or mashed potatoes.So he was unloaded on Falk, whose linguistic specialty was the   dialect of Adnan's hometown of Sana, only because Falk had visited   the place during the Bureau's investigation of the bombing of the USS   \u003ci\u003eCole\u003c\/i\u003e, back in 2000.Falk set about taming the young man with gossip and lies, tales   embellished by bits of color recalled from Sana's dusty narrow   streets. Before long Adnan at least was listening instead of shouting   back or clamping hands over his ears. Occasionally he even spoke, if   only to correct details that Falk got wrong. Progress was slow, but   Falk knew from experience that hardness at such an early age didn't   mean there were no remaining soft spots. Unlike most detainees, Adnan   couldn't even grow a full beard, and to Falk the scruff on his chin   was almost poignant, like an undernourished bloom in an abandoned   garden.Perhaps Falk also recognized a fellow loner. At age thirty-three he,   too, was nominally alone in the world. He had no wife, no kids, no   dog, and no fiancée waiting back in Washington. The Bureau's   personnel file listed him as an orphan, a conclusion left over from a   lie Falk had told a Marine Corps recruiter fifteen years ago in   Bangor, half out of spite and half out of a runaway's yearning for a   complete break. The recruiting sergeant could have easily flushed out   the truth with a little more digging. But with a monthly enlistment   quota to meet and a bonus of a week's leave hanging in the balance,   he hadn't been inclined to question his good fortune once Falk walked   through the door.Besides, it had almost been true. Falk's mother left when he was ten.   Shortly afterward his father began a love affair with the bottle. By   now, for all Falk knew, the man really was dead, drowned by either   alcohol or seawater.His earliest memories of home weren't all that bad—a white clapboard   farmhouse along a buckled road on Deer Isle, birch trees out back   with leaves that flashed like silver dollars. There were five Falks   in those days—an older brother, an older sister, his parents, and   him. To stay warm in winter they slept head to toe in bedrolls around   an ancient woodstove, arranged like dominoes on a creaking pine   floor. At bath time they hauled in an aluminum washtub and poured hot   water straight from the kettle, his mom scrubbing his skin pink while   his sister laughed and covered her mouth.When spring arrived his dad rode daily into Stonington, where the   lobster boat was moored. He awakened at four, revving the Ford pickup   until it rumbled like a B-17 on takeoff, its muffler shot from the   salt air. After age twelve Falk accompanied him on summer mornings,   although he remembered little of those harsh working days on the   water apart from the chill of the wind in early June and the bitter   cold of the sea, and the way his hands and feet never quite recovered   until late September. Or maybe he didn't want to remember more,   because by that time his father was drinking and his mother was gone.Within a year they lost the house and moved to the woods, onto a   stony lot of goldenrod and thistle where home was a sagging green   trailer, the walls lined with flattened cereal boxes for insulation.   In storms it heaved and moaned like a ship at sea. There were no more   community sleeps. Everyone scattered to separate corners, and his   brother and sister escaped as soon as they were old enough.Falk sought refuge where he could find it—in the woods, on a cove,   or at libraries, the tiny clapboard ones you came across in every   community on the island. He took a particular liking to the one in   the island's namesake town of Deer Isle, not only because it was   closest but because it was the realm of steely-eyed Miss Clarkson.   She demanded silence—exactly what Falk needed—and brooked neither   nonsense nor intrusion, especially not from drunken males who came   raging up the steps in search of wayward sons. In recalling her now,   Falk realized she was the kind of woman he would always be attracted   to—one who could glean the most from minimal conversation, as if she   had an extra language skill. It was a little bit like being a good   interrogator.","brand":"Vintage Crime\/Black Lizard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305087357157,"sku":"NP9781400096145","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400096145.jpg?v=1767741081","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-prisoner-of-guantanamo-isbn-9781400096145","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}