“No,” Amal said. “Also, I was asked to tell you, blasting gel’s pretty stable, but all the same it’s not a great idea to drive over it.”

“Thanks, we’ll pass that along,” Mustafa said. Sinbad’s car had just pulled up to the police cordon at the end of the block. The car had suffered severe front-end damage—two broken headlights, a crumpled grill and hood—but through the cracked windshield they could see that Sinbad had a passenger. A live passenger.

“Hear me, O Israel!” Samir called out, as Sinbad pulled Costello from the vehicle. “You are the man!”

“He led me quite a chase,” Sinbad said. “Did you catch my German?”

“We got him,” Mustafa said, not wanting Costello to know that Martin Hoffman was dead. “He’s inside.”

Sinbad read the truth in Mustafa’s eyes. “Ah . . . That’s good, then.”

The right front tire of Sinbad’s car had been punctured and was beginning to deflate. “So, David,” Mustafa said. “Can we get you a ride to the airport?”

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

Miranda warning

A Miranda warning is a statement of legal rights that must be read to any criminal suspect taken into police custody within the United Arab States, before the commencement of questioning that seeks to elicit potentially incriminating information. Incriminating statements made by a suspect who has not been properly “Mirandized” are not admissible as evidence.

The exact text of the Miranda warning varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the following script, used by police in the state of Iraq, is typical: “By the grace of God the All-Merciful and Compassionate, you have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, where, God willing, justice will be done. By the grace of God the All-Merciful and Compassionate, you have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you by the court. Do you understand these rights as I have described them to you?”

The warning gets its name from the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda v. Morocco. The case concerned Arturo Miranda, a Catholic of Spain arrested in Marrakesh for the kidnapping and rape of a young Berber woman. Miranda admitted his guilt to the police and was subsequently tried and convicted. His lawyer argued on appeal that as a non-citizen who did not speak Arabic, Miranda had been unaware of his right to silence under the UAS Constitution, and that therefore his confession should have been excluded. The Supreme Court agreed, in a landmark 5–4 decision.

The Court’s majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Alim al Warith. Among other authorities, Al Warith cited a traditional saying of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be unto him) which states, “None of you truly believes, until you desire for your brother what you desire for yourself.” Wrote Al Warith: “Surely any man, when confronted by the overwhelming power of the state, would want, at a minimum, to be made aware of his inalienable rights.”

Law enforcement reaction to the ruling was initially negative, with some police and prosecutors predicting a total collapse of the justice system. Al Warith had anticipated this in his opinion: “There are those who will say that by advising suspects of their right against self-incrimination, we eliminate any chance of obtaining a confession. In the case of innocent suspects, of course, this is a desirable outcome. As for the guilty, by treating them with honor and dignity, we hope to reawaken their consciences and lead them back to the righteous path; but those who persist in wickedness will, we believe, be undone by their own moral weakness. Though they be warned ten thousand times not to speak, still Satan will loosen their tongues and bring them to doom.”

Although the wisdom of the ruling continues to be debated, a 1976 study by the Arab Civil Liberties Union, Ten Years of Miranda, found no significant decline in the number of confessions obtained by police. The report did note a drop in the percentage of convictions overturned on appeal, which it attributed in part to the use of signed Miranda waivers to document suspects’ consent to be questioned.

As for Arturo Miranda, he received a new trial. Even without his confession, prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him for a second time. Miranda served 7 years in Rabat State Prison; upon his release, he was deported to Spain. The judge who signed the deportation order urged Miranda to consider the fate of his soul on Judgment Day and mend his ways.

This particular “Miranda warning” went unheeded. In 1974 Miranda was implicated in the hijacking of a bank truck carrying Spanish government funds, including a rumored 6 million pesetas from the personal account of General Francisco Franco. The Madrid police, in an effort to get Miranda to divulge the whereabouts of the truck, subjected him to a brutal interrogation. He died in custody. The stolen money was not recovered.

Arab Homeland Security’s regional Baghdad headquarters was located in an eight-story building within shouting distance of Ground Zero. The building, formerly owned by the underwriter who’d insured the twin towers, had undergone extensive renovation since 2001. Part of the remodel had been the addition of a state-of-the-art “interview suite”: three interrogation rooms surrounding a single, central observation room.

The basic setup would have been familiar to anyone who’d ever watched a television police procedural. But unlike the interrogation rooms on Law & Order: Halal or CSI: Damascus, these came with million-riyal price tags. The bulk of the money had gone towards special sensors that turned each room into a walk-in polygraph machine. In addition to the lie-detecting equipment, there were multiple cameras and microphones; these were supposedly on a closed circuit, but Mustafa had long suspected the existence of an undocumented line out that allowed the higher-ups in Riyadh to monitor the questioning.

Other aspects of the interrogation rooms would have given a civil libertarian pause. The climate controls could be set for temperatures outside the normal human comfort range. Shutters in the air vents allowed the rooms to be hermetically sealed; this was billed as a safety feature for preventing the release of smuggled-in biological or chemical weapons, but a cynical mind could not help asking whether there might not be some other reason for restricting a detainee’s air supply.

And then there was the matter of the wall outlets. The ceiling lights provided more than adequate illumination, and there were, as noted, plenty of built-in recording devices. So why had the designers opted to include so many electrical sockets?

“Well, you know how it is,” Samir had said, when Mustafa pointed this out to him. “Some power drills have really short cords.”

Now, as he looked through the one-way glass into interrogation room A, Mustafa tried to map out an interrogation strategy that did not involve the use of power tools.

“Abdullah,” he said. “Did you remember to offer Dr. Costello a Bible?”

“I did, Mustafa,” Abdullah said. “But you see how he’s sulking in there. He wouldn’t even look at the cart.”

Whatever other rights might be stripped from them in the name of state security, every prisoner was entitled to a holy book. This could be a thorny proposition where Christians were concerned, for while there is only one Quran, there are many Bibles. Woe unto the Muslim who gave an angry crusader the wrong translation or selection of apocrypha.