The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [97]
“So I spend years overseas, dealing with assholes like the Taliban, risking my life, then I come home and an asshole like you steals my identity. How did you get my credit cards?”
She looked at me, mumbled that she didn’t know anything.
“Oh, you know. You know, bitch.”
Here, I was channeling a multitude of TV cop shows.
“Tell me. I can go easy on you, or I can go hard. It’s up to me how this case is prosecuted. If you cooperate, I’ll go easy. If you don’t, you’ll wish you never were born.”
“Yeah,” interjected one of the officers, who had adopted the role of good cop. “Help yourself.”
Eventually, I was able to get the name of the man who had allegedly given her my stolen cards, and the time of day she had allegedly got them. Not much, and no idea if it was true, but the experience was good training for a new career.
I walked out of the room with the two cops. We all started laughing. The lead detective was congratulatory.
“Man, you’re good,” he said. “You got more out of her in fifteen minutes than we did in six hours.”
I had still not dropped my fake-cop persona.
“Well, you know—I kind of do this for a living. We’re all on the same side.”
Where was I getting this? I left the cop station in time to see the Cubs lose. My thief would eventually be sentenced in a plea bargain, to about thirty minutes in jail.
But no matter. I soon heard my best news in months, the news I had been waiting for. Sean and Sami had been released after three months in captivity. Sean was spirited out of Pakistan to London, and Sami had crossed back to Afghanistan. After a flurry of e-mails with friends, I managed to get Sean’s new phone number in London—he was trying to lay low. While driving to Springfield to meet people from the Illinois National Guard, about to deploy to Afghanistan, I called Sean and left a message. He called back almost immediately. He sounded manic, jumping from subject to subject like a fly in a roomful of candy, tasting each one briefly before moving to the next.
“Hey, do you remember the last conversation we had?” he asked.
“You mean the one when I told you that you were a fucking idiot and were gonna get kidnapped?” I asked. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I kept thinking about that.”
But most of our conversation was one-sided, just a monologue from Sean, a run-on sentence.
“I lost some teeth,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“At one point, I was inside one safe house. I heard BBC on a radio outside, and they were doing a story on Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials were denying any training camps, but I couldn’t hear the story that well because of all the gunfire from the Taliban training camp outside my door.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Sami almost lost it, at one point he was convinced we were going to be killed, and he just didn’t want to translate anymore, and without him, I had no way to communicate, so I had to tell him to pull it together.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Altogether, between driving to Springfield and back to Chicago, through various phone calls, I talked to Sean for almost four hours. Or I listened to Sean. Sami and Sean had been kidnapped almost as soon as they met their crucial contact, although they didn’t realize it at first. They had been moved several times—their captors would torture them, by doing things like brandishing guns, even pretending to shoot them in the head with an unloaded weapon. Sean didn’t know if he would ever be released. What got him through, he said, was thinking about his two sons, about what that would do to them, and about getting home. He felt guilt so heavy it threatened to smother him. He rarely felt hope.
It was unclear who