Free The Prince of Bagram Prison by Alex Carr

was, the same name as the signature on her orders. And, on the floor in front of the car's passenger seat, Jamal's file, Kat's own words oddly unfamiliar to her after three years.
    I suggest you take a look at that. And she had understood, correctly, that the three-hour drive to Dulles would be her only chance to do so.
    The plane braked to a stop and the passengers leaped from their seats, smoothing the creases from their clothes, jockeying for position, taking what few extra inches they could get. Kat squeezed into the aisle and slid her bag from the overhead bin. After a long, sleepless night, she'd made the mistake of dozing for an hour at the tail end of the flight. Now she felt as if someone had rubbed a handful of sand into her eyes.
    You will find someone waiting for you at the hotel in Madrid, Morrow had told her on the curb at Dulles before handing her a small brown envelope. Plane tickets and a hotel reservation. Five hundred euros in medium-sized bills. Put the money in your billfold, please. It looks better that way. Better to whom? Kat had wondered.
    Someone jostled Kat from behind and she felt herself being swept forward, down the aisle, out through the narrow abattoir of the ramp, and into the terminal.
    Pleasure, she reminded herself, sliding her passport from her purse, repeating her lines in her head one last time. A Spanish vacation. Tapas and dancing. The obligatory afternoon at the Prado.
    Nothing to worry about. But, as she handed her passport to the young man at immigration, she had to fight to keep her hands from shaking.
    “W ELCOME TO PARADISE ,” Kurtz's roommate, a fellow Agency recruit whose real name was Jonathon Pope, but who went by the unfortunate nickname of Digger, had remarked on their first night at Monterey.
    Kurtz had heard plenty of stories about the Defense Language Institute, about the after-class beach parties and the women, but he hadn't really believed any of them. With the exception of a handful of older students, State Department civilians like Kurtz and Pope, most of whom were actually destined for intelligence careers of one form or another, the majority of the students appeared to have come straight from boot camp. It was an odd mix, the military's brightest, kids who hadn't necessarily shown promise in the civilian world but who had been handpicked from the sea of recruits. They were all young and tan, their bodies military lean.
    “You gotta feel sorry for those assholes in Spanish,” Kurtz observed, taking a swig of his beer. Spanish was one of the shortest courses at the institute, while Arabic, to which both Kurtz and Pope had been assigned, was notoriously long. From where Kurtz stood, a year's stint at the institute didn't look so bad.
    “You think if we screw up badly enough they'll make us repeat the course?” Pope asked hopefully.
    “I have a feeling these girls are just a bit out of our league,” Kurtz said, realizing too late that Pope was the kind of man who undoubtedly had never felt such a thing in his life. “Agewise, I mean.”
    Pope shook his head and squinted, showing his Kennedyesque wrinkles—a sign, in his world, not of age but of luxury: summers on the water and winters at Stowe or Chamonix. The well-earned ravages of a perpetual tan.
    Kurtz let his eyes drift with Pope's toward the far end of the beach, where a group of female students were playing volleyball.
    “That one, for instance,” Pope announced, pointing to a brunette in an orange bikini who had just stepped up to the service line.
    She couldn't have been more than eighteen, Kurtz thought, tall and lanky, with the lingering awkwardness of a teenager, her hair pulled back into a long dark braid. When she tossed the ball into the air and jumped to meet it, her body arced perfectly, legs and chest and arm in one fluid and graceful motion of power.
    It was Kurtz's first glimpse of Kat, and he would never forget it. He had an undeniable urge to possess her, as if by doing so he could