Free The Sleeper by Christopher Dickey

choke back the puke and stagger away.
    The room in the hostel was like a cell. The air was still and hot. There was nothing to stop my mind from spinning, and when I was completely awake in the dark, thinking of Betsy, I felt my heart turn to dust.
    I could not give up, I thought—and I thought I could not go on. Could anything be more important than going back to Kansas? If I don’t go home, I might lose everyone I am trying to protect. But how can I protect them from my past? And when the second wave of terror comes, what then? I hoped Griffin and the Agency and even the fucking Feds were doing a better job than I was. I hoped to hell they were. Maybe it was time to pray, I thought, and then hated myself for thinking it.
    After Bosnia, and after the terror that I almost unleashed, I realized men were better off not asking God for help, because the answers they thought they heard were too horrible. I stared at the ceiling. Yes. About that much I was right. It was better to look for God than to find Him. I had searched, and while I was searching I was as good a man as I could be. It was when I thought I’d found Him that I was the worst.
    What you need right now, Kurt, is not prayers, it’s reasoning. There are explanations for what you’ve seen. Al-Shami may be many things—doctor, terrorist, torturer—but he is also a businessman. Import-Export. He trades in spices and foods. Where does he get them? I couldn’t begin to think. But I could begin to work.
    The drunk was heaving his guts out down the hall. I looked in the open door of his room. His passport had fallen on the floor beside the bed.
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    The little hole-in-the-wall cybercafé near the center of Granada was still open and I could hear the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and the groans of death even out on the street. A bunch of teenage boys were on half the terminals playing Quake III or Counter-Strike, interactive shoot-outs in dark passages among mystical enemies and imaginary terrorists. The noise distracted me, rattled me. A couple of other kids were playing interactive American football and every so often I found myself staring blankly at their screens. I felt like a player running downfield waiting for a long pass: I was way out in front of everybody else, but I didn’t know the pattern, didn’t have any blockers, didn’t even know what the quarterback looked like.
    Concentrate. Read. It’s just over two weeks since the attacks on New York and Washington and there is a tremendous amount of information available from public sources: newspaper articles, court documents, endless opinions by instant analysts. At home, Americans are still mourning, still sifting through what they thought they knew about the men in the suicide planes. And it isn’t just the death and destruction that makes them grieve, and it isn’t just revenge that they want. There is a question at the center of their sadness and anger that only Americans would ask: “How did it happen that those nineteen men lived and worked and ate and drank and laughed among us, right here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and they didn’t learn to love us?”
    Overseas, President Bush is focusing everyone’s attention on Afghanistan: Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and all those “evil doers” in Kabul and Kandahar. Meanwhile the Europeans are rounding up the usual suspects—people they’ve been watching for years. But there is a big problem, and you can see it just from reading the papers. The teams that hijacked flights AA077, AA011, UA175, and UA093 didn’t operate out of Afghanistan. They operated out of Europe. And America. And they never were the usual suspects. Now their operation is over. Their lives are over. Their trail is a dead end.
    A lot of the information that was coming out as news was really years old and a lot came from an Algerian caught at the Canadian border in late 1999 with a