The Midnight House

by Alex Berenson

  “If we needed to. But we preferred to go one at a time. As you know, the squad was all men, except for the psychiatrist, Rachel, Dr. Callar. The org chart, LTC Terreri was the CO”—the commanding officer. “I was XO”—the executive officer, the number two. “Karp was the lead interrogator. Jerry Williams did swing duty; he knew Arabic, so he could handle interrogations. And also he oversaw the three Rangers, who were the muscle. And then Callar.”

  “What about Hank Poteat?”

  “He was technically part of the squad, but he was only there a couple of months, at the beginning. He helped set up our coms, and then he left. So that’s everybody.”

  “It isn’t, though,” Shafer said. He flipped back through his reporter’s notebook. “CO is Terreri. XO is you. Karp is the interrogator. Callar’s the doctor. Williams and his three Rangers make eight. Poteat counts as technically part of the squad, even though he wasn’t there long. That’s nine. You forgot Jack Fisher.”

  “Right,” Murphy said. “Fisher helped Karp with the interrogations. He would stay up late with the prisoners. If they wouldn’t talk, they needed an extra push. Sometimes Jerry Williams helped. The Midnight House, we called it sometimes. Fisher, he’d tell the detainees when they got there, ‘Welcome to the Midnight House.’ ”

  “Funny.”

  “We were trying to take the edge off. Stuck in Poland for a year and a half.”

  “How tough was Fisher?”

  “I don’t know. Specifically.”

  “Friendly persuasion. Cup of cocoa. Tell me about your mother.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “You were the second-in-command and you didn’t know.”

  “I told you, I wasn’t operational.”

  “You strike me as the type who prefers to lead from the rear.”

  Murphy stared at Shafer as if Shafer were a misbehaving brat he wanted to spank but couldn’t. In turn, Shafer made faces at Murphy, raising his eyebrows, throwing in a wink.

  “I’m sorry,” Murphy said finally. “I didn’t hear a question.”

  “Try this. Did the unit have internal tensions?”

  “We were a small group living in close quarters in a foreign country. We couldn’t tell anyone what we were doing. Of course, we didn’t always get along. But nothing you wouldn’t expect.”

  “Did you believe that the detainees were treated fairly?”

  “From what I saw, yes.”

  “Did 673 ever uncover actionable intel?”

  For the first time, Murphy smiled. “Definitely.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “I can’t say. Vinny Duto wants to tell you, it’s his business.”

  “But it was valuable.”

  “You could say that.”

  Shafer made a note. “Fast-forward,” he said. “The squad breaks up, a bunch of guys retire. You stay.”

  “With the intel we’d gotten, I wanted to see where I’d be in a year or two.”

  “Any idea why so many guys decided to leave?”

  “Ask them.”

  “Guilty consciences?”

  “I’m not a mind reader. Not now or then.” Murphy looked at his watch. “The FBI’s coming tomorrow, and I’m sure they’ll be asking all the same questions as you, and more besides. Can we finish up later?”

  “A few more minutes,” Shafer said.

  “A few.”

  “After you got back, did you stay in touch with the rest of the unit?”

  “Colonel Terreri and I had lunch a couple times before he got sent to Afghanistan. I saw Karp upstairs once.”

  “How about Fisher?”

  “Talked to him once or twice. No one else. It was an ad hoc deployment, and we got scattered.”

  “You didn’t know what was happening to the unit. The deaths.”

  “Of course I did. We all heard about Rachel. Not right away, but we heard. Then Terreri sent me an e-mail that Mark and Freddy”—the two Rangers—“were KIA. Then Karp. By then we were all wondering a little bit. I remember saying to Fisher, ‘What’s the story? Somebody put a curse on us?’ But we didn’t know that Jerry was missing. I know it looks obvious in retrospect.”

  “You don’t seem nervous.”

  “Should I cry for Mommy?”

  “Can you think of any reason someone might be after the squad?”

  “Beyond the fact that we put the screws to some bad actors?” Murphy drummed his fingers on the table. In contrast with his neatly tailored clothes, his nails were jagged, bitten nearly to the quick. “My ass on the line. I’ve thought about it. I don’t know.”

  “What about Alaa Zumari? ” Shafer said.

  “I can’t tell you anything that’s not in the file.”

  “Haven’t seen the file,” Shafer muttered into his teeth.

  “Say again?”

  “I said I haven’t seen it. Not yet.”

  “You’ll have to work that out with Vinny.”

  “How about you walk me through it?”

  “How about not?”

  Shafer wanted to reach across the table and slap Murphy, but in a way he was right. Duto had started this charade, asked him and Wells to try to find a killer without the background information they needed.

  “Any chance Alaa Zumari’s connected to this?”

  “If we thought he was a terrorist, we wouldn’t have let him go.”

  “Maybe he lied. Withstood the pressure somehow. Could he have figured out who was on the squad? Your real names?”

  “We were pretty tight about opsec. Never used real names with the detainees.”

  “The Poles? Could they have leaked your names?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Could anyone inside the unit be responsible for the killings?”

  “You asking if I’m the killer? I’m gonna have to say no.”

  “How about Hank Poteat? Or Terreri? Or Jerry?”

  “I told you, Poteat wasn’t part of the squad. The colonel’s in Afghanistan. Jerry’s dead.”

  “What if he’s not?”

  The question stopped Murphy. He ran a hand down his tie, flipped up the tip, looked at it as if the fabric might hold the answer. “Jerry had a temper. And he was having problems with his wife, we knew that. And he thought he deserved a promotion. He quit when he didn’t get it. But I don’t see him taking it out on us.”

  Murphy pushed himself back from the table. “Mr. Shafer. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I have to get to work. I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  “Before you go,” Shafer said. “Tell me about the C-one drop.”

  “What about it?”

  “Eight million for ten guys for sixteen months? Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Two hundred grand a month to the Poles to rent the barracks and the guards. Payments whenever we landed a jet. A million for coms gear that we bought over there. Charter flights.”

  “You keep receipts?”

  “Of course. We wanted to leave a nice long paper trail for all those congressional investigators. And the Justice Department.”

  “I take it that’s a no.”

  “You take it correctly.”

  Shafer leaned forward in his chair, flared his nostrils like a terrier on the scent of a rat.

  “Let me make sure I understand. You worked for a guy who stole one-point-two million dollars in Iraq. This squad, you’re in charge of eight million. And you don’t keep receipts.”

  “I got verbal approval for anything over twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “From who?”

  “Somebody in Sanchez’s office, usually.”

  “Anybody keep records of those conversations?”

  “Colonel Terreri knew where the money was going.”

  “Terreri. He’s not dead yet, right?”

  “You have something to ask, ask it,” Murphy said. The vein on his forehead had popped out again, visible proof that Shafer’s bluff had scored.

  “Maybe I’ll wait until
tomorrow, when the Feebs come to town.” Suddenly, Shafer understood. Every so often he had a flash like this, the pieces fitting together all at once. “Six-seven-three was your career saver? Guess again. You put in for it figuring on the unrestricted drop. Figuring you could skim. You saw Gessen’s mistakes. And you would have gotten away clean, if not for the murders.”

  “Only one problem with that theory. It’s been investigated. And I’ve been cleared. No evidence of wrongdoing, and that was that. I’ve got it in writing. Now, you want to talk to me again, you call my lawyer.”

  Murphy pulled open the conference-room door, walked out, slammed it shut behind him hard enough to leave a hairline crack in its porthole-shaped window.

  “New construction,” Shafer said to the empty room. “Can never trust it.”

  8

  CAIRO

  For two days, Wells cooled his heels at the Lotus, leaving only for a quick trip to the Intercontinental. The move was risky, but if his room stayed empty too long, the hotel’s managers might get nervous. Wells stayed an hour, long enough to muss his bed, take a shower, and have a brief conversation with Shafer on an innocuous Long Island number that routed through to the agency.

  “Mr. Barber,” Shafer said. “How’s business?”

  “I’m worried our client has another bidder. A local agency.”

  “Maybe you should work together.”

  “I think our needs are different.”

  “You’re the man on the ground, so I defer to you.”

  “Your man in Havana.”

  “You’ve been reading again, I see,” Shafer said.

  “Despite your warnings.”

  “I recommend The Comedians. It’s excellent. Anything else I should know?”

  “Probably, but I don’t feel like telling you.”

  Shafer sighed. “Your honesty, so refreshing.”

  “Have you learned anything new about my client?”

  “No, but I did have an interesting talk with our friend Mr. Murphy,” Shafer said. “I’ll fill you in when you get back.”

  “Something to look forward to. How’s Tonka?” After much protesting, Shafer had agreed to take the dog while Wells went to Cairo.

  “She’s developed a taste for the rug in the living room. Aside from that, fine.”

  “She miss me?”

  “Without a doubt. Every day she leaves a note at my door asking when you’re coming back.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Wells left his air-conditioned room unwillingly. No question, he was getting soft. “A luxury once tasted becomes a necessity.” Wells didn’t know who’d popped that kernel of wisdom—someone richer and wit-tier than he, no doubt—but he had to agree. He needed to spend a few months in Haiti or Sudan, unlearn his bad habits.

  Back at the Lotus he passed the time watching Al Jazeera and Lebanese soap operas. He figured he could wait a week, at most. If he was right and Hani was a mukhabarat agent, the Egyptians would put a tail on him soon enough—or just break down his door and arrest him. Part of him wondered why they hadn’t done so already. Probably because they didn’t want to scare him back to Kuwait, blow their chance at Alaa.

  Or maybe Wells had gotten paranoid as well as soft. Maybe Hani was just what he seemed to be, a dedicated Islamist who had nothing to do with the police.

  THE ENVELOPE APPEARED BENEATH his door on the third day, during the call to afternoon prayer. Inside, a single sheet of paper: 1 a.m. Northern Cemetery. Bring the camera. Nothing more.

  Wells read the note twice to be sure he understood. The Northern Cemetery was a huge and ancient graveyard east of the Islamic quarter. Over the centuries, thousands of poor families had nested in the cemetery’s mausoleums and built one-room houses over its graves. Space was precious in Cairo, and the dead didn’t charge rent. Now, with fifty thousand residents, as well as paved streets and power lines, the cemetery was a city within a city, as crowded as the rest of Cairo. And so as an instruction for a meeting place, “Northern Cemetery” was strangely nonspecific, the equivalent of naming an entire neighborhood in an American city, like Buckhead in Atlanta.

  Still, Wells had no choice but to obey and hope that the imam could find him. For dinner he had two plain pitas and two bottles of Fanta, the Egyptian version of his usual pre-mission meal of crackers and Gatorade, light and sugary and easy to keep down. And at 11:30, he slipped on his galabiya, tucked his camera into his backpack.

  But at the door he stopped, took out the camera. He popped open the battery compartment and pulled out the flat black battery. Sure enough, a radio transmitter about the size of a nickel was taped to its underside. The bug was oldish, Russian, nothing fancy. Probably had a range of a few hundred yards, enough to help a search team track down a fugitive once he’d been treed.

  Wells guessed that the mukhabarat had put the bug on the battery when he met with Hani and the imam. Wells was happy to be rid of it, happy his instincts were still sharp. Even so, finding it was a bad sign. For the first time since China, he was facing a professional secret police force. He reached a dirty fingernail under the tape and detached the bug. He’d toss it on the way to the cemetery, after he lost the tail that was surely waiting for him.

  OUTSIDE THE LOTUS, the downtown streets bustled. Couples strolled side by side. A few even held hands. Discreetly, of course. A mother and a daughter, wearing matching pink head scarves, giggled as they bought Popsicles from a stooped man pulling an ice-cream cart. The lack of alcohol gave the streets a pleasant, relaxed feeling. The crowds were lively but not rowdy, the sidewalks free of broken bottles and shouting matches. And Wells walked, his hands at his sides, split from the ordinary lives around him by a wall only he could see. The curse of the spy, at once present and absent. He walked, and he wondered whether anyone was on him.

  Build countersurveillance into your schedule. If you don’t have time for it, you don’t have time for the meet. Even if you don’t think anyone’s on you. Even if you’re sure no one’s on you. The life you save may be your own.

  Guy Raviv, one of Wells’s favorite instructors at the Farm, had given him that lesson a lifetime ago. Raviv had striking blue eyes and a smoker’s hoarse voice and hair too black to be anything but dyed. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, though he could have been older. My children, he called his trainees. My precious, precocious youngsters. He’d been introduced to Wells’s class as a legend who had shucked whole teams of Stasi agents in East Berlin. Wells assumed that the story was exaggerated. Instructors at the Farm had a habit of embellishing their résumés, perhaps with the agency’s encouragement. Far better for new recruits to believe that they were learning from stars than from failed ops put out to pasture.

  But whatever Raviv had or hadn’t done in East Berlin, he was a master teacher, as Wells learned firsthand when he and a team of recruits chased Raviv through the crowded streets of Philadelphia on a Saturday in July. Raviv lost them twice in two hours. He didn’t run—Please remember that anything more than a brisk walk is reserved for emergencies—but he had what Wells’s linebacker coach at Dartmouth called “quick feet,” the ability to change speed and direction almost instantly. Coming back from Philly, Raviv stopped at a McDonald’s on I-95 and distributed a full tray of bon mots along with his Happy Meals.

  Your first goal is to make your pursuer show himself. He knows you. You don’t know him. Before you can lose him, you have to find him. And give yourself time. Listen to the wisdom of Mick Jagger, children: Time is on your side; oh, yes it is. More time equals more moves. More moves equal more chances to make your pursuer show himself. Will you be eating those fries?

  In retrospect, Wells was shocked that the agency had allowed Raviv near them. Langley had always been a tribal place, unfriendly to oddballs. In the 1980s, the agency had become especially macho, spending its energy and money running guns to tinpot Central American dictators, operations that didn’t exactly match Raviv’s skill set. Wells supposed that Raviv had survived the Reagan years by bobbing, weaving, a
nd staying low to the ground, skills as useful at Langley as in East Berlin. He’d become an instructor around 1990, and by the time Wells’s class of recruits arrived, he had his act perfected.

  After his stint at the Farm, Wells never saw Raviv again. Wells always imagined he would. He tried to look Raviv up after he got back from Afghanistan. But Raviv seemed to have shed the agency. Wells assumed he was retired, living someplace warm with his wife. If he had a wife.

  “Whatever happened to Guy Raviv?” he asked Shafer.

  “Good old Guy,” Shafer said. “Died. Lung cancer.”

  “When?”

  “You were in Afghanistan. Maybe three years ago. Don’t look so shocked.”

  “You’re a sweetheart, Ellis. Real humanitarian.”

  “He smoked like two packs a day is all I’m saying. Pretty good at CS, though.”

  And that was Raviv’s epitaph.

  WELLS WALKED toward Midhan Tahrir, the heart of Cairo, a big, brightly lit square formed by the intersection of a half-dozen avenues. A pedestrian walkway ran under the square, leading to a subway station and offering a dozen exits—a nightmare for a surveillance team. Once Wells got underground, any tail would have to stay close or risk losing him.

  At the square’s northeastern corner, a waist-high railing blocked pedestrians from crossing at street level, forcing them to use the underground passageway. Wells stopped, apparently lost, as an old man walked slowly by. Wells touched his arm. “Salaam alekeim.”

  “Alekeim salaam,” the man murmured, his voice barely audible above the traffic.

  “Sorry to bother you, my friend. What street is this?”

  “Talaat Harb. Of course. Very much so.”

  “I’m looking for the movie theater.”

  “The Cinema Metro?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “This way.” The man pointed up the street. “Past the next traffic circle. And then a few more streets. But I must tell you, there aren’t any more films tonight.”

  “My mistake. Shokran.”

  “Afwan.” Welcome.

  The man walked on. But the conversation had given Wells what he wanted. From the mass of pedestrians around him, he’d picked out five possible tails. Two men in dark blue galabiyas, their arms interlinked, walking slowly down Talaat Harb. A tall, light-skinned man in a striped blue button-down shirt, lighting a cigarette just a few feet away. Another, glancing at a shoe store as he dialed his cell phone. And a fifth, younger, drinking a Pepsi, casually watching the traffic roll by. They weren’t the only possibilities, but they were the most likely.