“You know who I am,” Karp said. “What’s my name? Look at me. Tell me my name.”
“You say your name is Jim. But I know that’s not your name.”
Indeed, Karp used “Jim” as his alias with detainees.
“Why do you say that?”
“The others, they tell me.”
Karp controlled his surprise. No one else in 673 spoke Pashto. And no one should have told Mohammed about the aliases, anyway, though most prisoners guessed.
“Who? ”
“The ones that come when you go. They talk to me. They tell me you stand up too straight.”
“Stand too straight? What are you talking about?”
Karp let him go. Mohammed slumped down the wall. When he reached the floor, he raised his head, locked eyes with Karp. He seemed to be back in the cell, at least temporarily.
“Are you a dancer?”Karp said.
Mohammed shook his head.
“You know what I’m asking, Mohammed?”
“No.”
“A dancer, that’s someone who says whatever comes into his mind, doesn’t tell me the truth.”
“I tell the truth, sir. Always.”
“What’s my name?”
“Ishmael.”
“Ishmael.”
“You’re a prophet. Like me.”
“You’re right,” Karp said. “I’m a prophet. And I predict pain for you, you keep this up.” He reached for Mohammed—
“JIM.”
Karp turned to see Rachel Callar outside the cell.
“I need to talk to you.”
Karp seemed about to argue but instead turned and walked out, locking the cell. She led him into the empty unlocked cell next to Mohammed’s.
“Doctor,” Karp said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You need to be careful with him.”
“How’s that again?”
“He’s in trouble, Ken. He’s got an axis-one disorder, and it’s getting worse.”
As she’d expected, Karp had no idea what she meant, though she knew he would sooner submit to a night in the punishment box than admit his ignorance.
“Axis one. Schizophrenia, major depression with psychotic symptoms. Severe mental illness. The way he sits in the corner, talking to himself. The way he won’t take care of himself. He’s coming unglued.”
“How would you know? You don’t speak Pashto.”
“I’ve picked up a little, the last year. Anyway, it’s obvious.”
“He could be faking.”
“He’s not smart enough.”
“I’ve seen more of these guys than you.”
“And I’ve seen more schizophrenics than you.”
“Congratulations.”
Callar shook her head. Blowing up at Karp wouldn’t serve her. Doctors in general and psychiatrists in particular were supposed to stay serene. I’ve seen everything, and nothing fazes me. She’d mastered the drill in residency. She’d even kept her cool in the emergency room one Thanksgiving night when a drunk sat up in his cot and projectile-vomited a mix of liquor-store rum and soup-kitchen turkey in her face.
But now she wished she felt as calm as she looked. This relentless antagonism, not just from Karp but from Terreri and Jack Fisher, was grinding her down. Last night she’d dreamed that she stood atop an endless tightrope, nothing below her, not a net or flat ground or even a canyon, nothing but a black void. Nothing to do but keep walking. And then she fell.
She hadn’t had that dream since medical school.
“Ken. Let’s just talk it out. Mohammed hasn’t given us anything.”
“Not yet.”
“And when you talk to him, he doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Sometimes.”
“And odds are he doesn’t have much for us. Given his age, given his probable role in the bombing—”
“We won’t know unless we ask.”
“This place is incredibly stressful for him. He knows he can be punished at any time. He has no control over his sleep, his eating—”
“It’s called prison.”
“Even if you’re mentally healthy, prison is difficult. And that’s if you know how long you’re in, where you are. I don’t know whether it’s genetic or whether he had some serious trauma as an adolescent, but he’s in no shape for this place.”
“Serious trauma as an adolescent.” Karp actually laughed. “Like every other kid in Pakistan. Doc-tor”—Karp made the word sound ridiculous—“this kid shot one of our guys. He’s a terrorist.”
“I’m not saying he’s not.”
“Good. Then let me do my job. You have an objection, talk to the colonel.”
And Karp walked out.
A flush rose in Callar’s cheeks. She tilted her head, looked at the chipped concrete ceiling, and counted seconds until her emotions vanished and she turned clear as a plate-glass window. Steve had been right. She shouldn’t have taken the job. But she couldn’t let it beat her, couldn’t let them beat her. She couldn’t fail. Not again.
KARP LOOKED INTO Mohammed’s cell. The kid lay on his cot, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving. Karp reached for the cell door and then hesitated. The truth was that the shrink was half right. Mohammed didn’t belong here. Not because he was crazy, whatever nonsense he was sputtering.
“Axis one, my ass,” Karp mumbled in Callar’s direction. Trying to assert her authority with this psychiatric mumbo jumbo. Of course Mohammed was stressed out and paranoid. He was supposed to be. He was here for an interrogation, not spa treatment.
No, Mohammed didn’t belong here because he didn’t know anything. The CIA had traced him to a madrassa in Bat Khela that produced suicide bombers as efficiently as a meatpacking plant turned steers into hamburger. Beyond that, his life was a cipher. Another lost boy in a country full of them.
But they couldn’t move Mohammed anywhere, especially not Guantánamo, not until they got bin Zari to talk. Since 2006, the President had said repeatedly that America was no longer holding detainees incommunicado. Technically, he wasn’t lying. Technically, Mohammed and bin Zari were even now on their way to Guantánamo. Their stay at the Midnight House was merely a stopover for “processing.”
But when Mohammed got to Guantánamo, he’d be given a lawyer. And once he told the lawyer that he’d been held at a secret prison along with Jawaruddin bin Zari, the lawyer would demand to know where bin Zari was and whether his rights were being respected. The United States was in no position to answer that question.
So, Mohammed couldn’t be split from bin Zari. And bin Zari wasn’t leaving the Midnight House, not as long as he wouldn’t talk. So far he hadn’t cracked, despite a half-dozen interrogation sessions and two nights in the punishment box. Karp and Fisher were already talking about their next step. Meantime, Mohammed would have to wait. Though Karp’s sympathy was limited. Mohammed had been willing to die as a suicide bomber. Three hots and a cot, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, was a decent bargain.
MOHAMMED FARIZ’S BAD LUCK had started more or less at birth. He’d entered the world in 1991, the youngest of six children, the product of a pinhole leak in a Chinese condom. His father, Adel, eked out a living ferrying laborers around Peshawar in a battered Toyota pickup.
Adel charged one rupee, about twelve cents, a ride. After gas and traffic tickets, some real, some imagined by underpaid cops, he cleared four dollars a day, enough to rent an apartment in the Haji Camp neighborhood, a warren of narrow streets around Peshawar’s grimiest bus station. The eight members of the Fariz family piled into four rooms in a six-story building that now and again dumped chunks of concrete on the heads of anyone unlucky enough to be walking by. Even in the summer, when Peshawar hit one hundred twenty degrees, Nawaz forbade her children from opening the apartment’s windows, which overlooked an alley that stank of sewage and stray dogs.
By the standards of Haji Camp, the Fariz family was middle-class. For a decade, Afghans had flooded into the North-West Frontier to flee the Taliban
. Many wound up in Peshawar, destitute and desperate. They turned to heroin to salve their misery and prostitution to pay for their heroin. They were nearly all male. The sexual abuse of boys and young men was endemic in the North-West Frontier, in part because unmarried men and women could be killed simply for being seen together.
Prostitution and heroin use were illegal in Pakistan. But the Peshawar police had other concerns. They spent most of their time dodging suicide bombers, and the rest looking for bribes. They rarely came to Haji Camp. By 2003, the neighborhood’s disorder had attracted the attention of the self-appointed soldiers of the Jaish al-Sunni, the Army of the Sunni.
The Jaish were a ragged group of young men who called themselves an Islamic militia but were really a street gang, Bloods without the bandannas. Every few months, they descended on Haji Camp for flying raids, their hands heavy with chains and knives. Their leaders carried pistols but preferred not to use them. Guns were too easy. The Jaish wanted blood to flow. Sirens announced their raids, warning residents of Haji Camp to get into their homes. Anyone who remained outside was assumed to be an addict and fair game.
The day after he turned thirteen, Mohammed was caught in a raid. When the siren sounded, he was escaping Pakistan as best he could, playing World of Warcraft at a computer shop around the corner from his family’s apartment. To pay for the game, he dragged wheelbarrows of bricks at construction sites. Four hours of work brought him five rupees, enough to play for two hours on a slow computer, or an hour on a fast one. On the night of the raid, Mohammed had found a Shield of Coldarra, which promised him protection from even the toughest monsters. Then the siren sounded.
Around him, boys groaned to one another. “Tonight.” “Why tonight?” “Just got started and now this bastard.” “Ten rupees down the drain, man.”
One boy raised his hand and asked Aamer, the owner, if they could save their games and come back when the raid was over. “What the sign say?” Aamer said. There were seven signs, each painted a different color. They all had the same message, in English and Pashto:
“NO Refund EVER.”
“But it the Jaish, Aamer. The Jaish come, we should be having a refund.”
“What the sign say?”
The boys got up from their keyboards and hurried out. But not Mohammed. Mohammed had his new shield and five minutes left on his hour, and he planned to use both. Somewhere on this level, a Blessed Blade of the Windseeker was hidden. Mohammed meant to find it. The Jaish needed fifteen minutes to get this far into the neighborhood. Anyway, he was barely two blocks from his house.
Two minutes later, still three minutes left to play, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s chair from under him. “Boy, you got to go,” Aamer said. “They coming now. Coming quick.”
“But—”
Aamer pulled the plug on Mohammed’s PC, and the screen went black. Then Mohammed heard the shouting of the Jaish, angry voices rumbling like a motorbike. Close by, a glass shattered and a woman screamed, a high-pitched whine that broke off abruptly—
Mohammed realized his mistake. They’d taken a different route this time, found their way in faster. They were close. “Let me stay, Aamer. Please. Please.”
Without a word, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s skinny arm and shoved him out the front door. The street was narrow and smeared with crumpled plastic bottles, scraps of wax paper, indefinable bits of metal and concrete. At the end of the block, in front of the halal butcher shop, a man dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt spotted Mohammed and circled a black baton over his head.
Mohammed ran. He could hear the Jaish behind him, heavy footsteps closing on him. They yelled at him to stop, told him they’d show him mercy if he did. But Mohammed was slight and quick and didn’t have far to go. He could feel his Shield of Coldarra protecting him. He almost got home.
Almost.
But he slipped. Slipped on a patch of oil invisible in the Haji Camp darkness. Fifty feet from his building. He got up, but they were on him. He tried to punch and kick. But he was small, and they were big and there were five of them. Then the biggest one, the one in blue, clubbed him on the side of the head with a steel baton, and he couldn’t fight anymore.
“Whore,” the man in blue said to Mohammed.
The five of them surrounded him. He couldn’t see anything but their legs and their dusty black sneakers. The soldiers of the Jaish always wore black sneakers. They were practically the only requirement for joining. The men were panting in their excitement, and Mohammed knew what they planned.
“No, I live here, sir,” he said.
“You’re a whore.”
“Please, sir—”
They dragged him into the alley behind his building, so narrow that even the tuk-tuks couldn’t fit through it. Above him, a woman, a black scarf wrapped around her head, looked down from the third floor. He yelled to her for help, but a hand covered his mouth. He pleaded silently for relief, for his father to realize what was happening and come outside. But even at thirteen, he knew Adel wouldn’t save him, that Adel was as frightened of the Jaish as everyone else.
The men grew serious. Two held his legs apart and the one in blue pulled down his cheap brown sweatpants. What came next hurt so much that Mohammed thought his insides were on fire. He screamed through the hand on his mouth and kicked his legs as hard as he could. The man didn’t stop. The others laughed and one peed on his face.
The man in blue finished, and the other four took their turns. The rest didn’t hurt so much, or maybe they did but he didn’t care. Before they ran off to find a new victim, they gave him a going-away present, pouring a vial of hydrochloric acid onto his legs, searing their cruelty onto him. In a way, they’d been kind. They could have burned out his eyes.
When Mohammed got home, blood dripped out of him. Nawaz gave him a Coca-Cola. Adel took it away and slapped his face and told him that he’d shamed them all. Three days later, still bleeding, he was packed off to a madrassa in Bat Khela, a town of fifty thousand, sixty miles northeast of Peshawar.
FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, he was given endless hours of instruction in the Quran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. He didn’t believe a word. He’d seen the truth of the men who called themselves warriors. His parents never visited. He imagined, hoped, that his mother wanted to see him. But without his father’s permission, she could no more travel to Bat Khela than the moon.
At the madrassa, Mohammed rarely spoke. He couldn’t be bothered to argue when boys called him stupid. When he talked too much, the scars on his legs burned. He preferred silence. Fortunately, the teachers didn’t mind. At night he sat, pretending to study his Quran, on his cot in the whitewashed third-floor hall where sixty boys slept side by side. In reality, he endlessly replayed the night the Jaish had caught him. If only he had quit the game a few minutes earlier . . . If only he had seen the pool of oil on the street . . . If only he’d fought harder. If only . . . But the story always ended the same way.
ON MOHAMMED’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, the imams passed the word. Two students were wanted for a “special mission.” Everyone at school understood the code. Mohammed asked to join, surprising the imams. They hadn’t known he was so pious. Of course, they misunderstood entirely. Without ever hearing the word, Mohammed had become an ironist par excellence. Raped. Blamed for being raped. Disowned by his family. Finally, as punishment, sent to learn from the men who’d trained his rapists.
So Mohammed had decided to buy his way out of the hell of his life by giving himself to his namesake. When the bomb went off, his classmates would call him a hero. In heaven he’d be given a truck-load of virgins to pummel as he pleased. Or else . . . he’d just be dead. Either way, he’d come out ahead.
FOR TWO WEEKS, nothing changed. He went to class, ate, pretended to pray. The other boys didn’t say anything to him, but he could see in their faces they knew what he’d agreed to do and they respected him. Fools. One night at dinner, just as he was wondering if he’d been rejected, he felt a tap on the shoulder: Pack your ba
gs.
He was taken to a house in western Peshawar. Haji Camp wasn’t far away, and Mohammed wanted to say good-bye to his parents, at least his mother, but he knew better than to ask. He expected they’d show him how to make a bomb, but they didn’t. Eventually he figured out why: given his life expectancy, why teach him?
On the third night, a mud-encrusted SUV parked in front of the house. A fat man stepped out. Once, in Haji Camp, Mohammed had seen a television show about Japanese men who wore robes and wrestled with one another. Sumos, they were called. This man was Pakistani and wasn’t as big as the sumos. But he moved the same way they did, a sidestep waddle. He came into the house and sat next to Mohammed. The couch creaked under his weight, and Mohammed tried not to smile. He could tell the man was important. The man looked at him for what seemed like a long time.
“Do you know me?”
“No, sir.”
“I am Jawaruddin bin Zari. Have you heard of me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know why you’re here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you scared?”
No one had asked Mohammed that question before. He considered. “No, sir.”
“Do you understand the mission?”
“Not exactly, sir.”
“But you know you will die as a soldier for Allah.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man patted his shoulder. “Good.”
THE TRUCK SHOWED UP a week later. It was empty and shiny. It drove away and came back filled with bags of fertilizer and barrels of oil. The next day the men drove it to a house on the edge of Islamabad. Mohammed had never left the North-West Frontier before. He spent most of the drive with his face pressed against the passenger window.
The Midnight House Page 21
