Please, he said. Listen to me on this.
But she’d never listened to him before, and she wasn’t about to start.
NOW SHE KNEW how right he’d been. And yet she couldn’t tell him. Not over e-mail, not over the phone, not during those unbearable two weeks at home. Not because of anything he would have said. He would never have held his rightness over her, never tried to punish her for her mistake. And not because she’d be breaking every secrecy oath she’d signed, either.
Because she was humiliated at her weakness. Terreri and Karp and the others in the squad saw the bigger picture. They saw that breaking these detainees might help them dismantle terrorist networks that were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, nearly all civilians, nearly all Muslims.
But she could see only the prisoners themselves, screaming as they were Tased or locked for hours in a box smaller than a coffin. Watching them suffer tore against her instincts and her medical training. But she’d signed up for it, and she couldn’t quit. She would finish this tour, whatever it cost her. Just like the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to leave wasn’t hers to make.
She needed to tell Steve all this, but when she tried to, she couldn’t. They’d passed her leave in silent agony. He’d bought Padres tickets for them her second night back, and she’d forced herself to go. After that, she spent most days at home. She made plans with her friends and canceled them. She hardly slept. One night, at 2 a.m., she got into her 4Runner and drove east into the desert to the Arizona border and turned around and drove back, listening to the mad conspiracy theories high on the dial the whole way.
When she got back, she smelled eggs in the pan, onions sizzling, toast browning. In the kitchen, two plates were set, two glasses filled with orange juice. She sat down and watched him cook.
“Breakfast? ”
“Sure.”
He filled the plates and sat across from her. They ate in silence. She hadn’t eaten in two days, and she tried to savor every mouthful, to be present with him and not at the Midnight House. But she couldn’t help herself.
“This is great,” she said.
“You like it?”
“I do.” She shoveled scrambled eggs into her mouth, and before she could help herself she was crying.
“Tell me,” he said. “Rach, please.”
“I can’t.”
He turned away from her, went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it down before he spoke, still facing away.
“Watching you like this. I can’t take it.”
“You should leave me, Steve.” The baldness of her words surprised her. “I’m no good.”
He turned to look at her. Panic was in his eyes. “Do you want that?”
She didn’t trust herself to speak. She shook her head.
“I’d die first,” he said.
He was desperate to help her, desperate to make her happy. Instead, her misery echoed in him. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t unburden herself to him. And she couldn’t explain. She couldn’t talk.
She almost laughed at the irony. What she needed was a few hours with Kenneth Karp and his stun gun.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Let me get through this, okay? I promise. I’ll get through it. I’ll come back to you.”
BUT INSTEAD SHE’D SPUN further and further away. Now she was left with nothing but the base around her and the fence in front of her. Then even the fence seemed to shimmer and dissolve. She needed a moment to realize why. She was crying, not a few tears but spigots. She stood and cried until she had no tears left. Then she walked back to the barracks to do her job. To make sure that Jawaruddin bin Zari stayed alive.
AFTER FOUR DAYS LOCKED on his back with nothing but his own mind for company, bin Zari broke.
“All right,” he moaned into the silence. “All right. I will tell. Please. I will tell.”
Even then they didn’t get him. They left him another twenty-four hours. Then the Rangers brought him up to the interrogation room, dressed only in a loose diaper, stinking of his own waste. They pulled off his hood and locked him to the chair and hosed him down.
He was crying when Karp walked into the room, and Karp knew he had won. Karp uncuffed bin Zari’s hands and offered him a bottle of water. He tried to uncap it, but his hands and feet trembled uncontrollably. Karp unscrewed it, tipped it gently to bin Zari’s mouth.
“It’s too much,” bin Zari said.
Karp put a hand to bin Zari’s head, found the skin hot and clammy. They’d have to get him treated. But first—
“I know,” Karp said, soothing now. “I know.”
“I will tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Of course.”
“Things you can’t imagine. About the ISI. About Pakistan.”
Karp was wary of these grand pronouncements. “Don’t lie, Jawaruddin. If you lie—”
“It’s true. Please.”
“All right.” Bin Zari seemed serious. Karp wondered what he could be hinting at. They’d find out soon enough.
“You promise.”
“We’ve never lied to you, have we, Jawaruddin? We’ve hurt you, but we’ve never lied.”
And, in fact, Karp tried not to lie to detainees. They had to believe that once they decided to cooperate fully, they would no longer be punished.
“That’s true.”
“If you are honest, you answer our questions”—Karp carefully avoided phrases like “work with us” or even “tell us,” for fear they would force bin Zari to confront the reality of his betrayal—“then I promise, not another minute in there.”
“A regular cell.”
“A regular cell. A shower. A toilet and lights and a bed and solid food. All the things a man should have. Even a radio and a television.”
“You promise.”
Besides the bottle of water, Karp had brought a briefcase into the interrogation room. He popped the latches, handed over a file. Three copies of a two-page contract, the first in Pashto, the second in Urdu, the third in English, pledging good treatment. No explanation of what bin Zari would have to do in return. Spaces at the bottom for signatures from bin Zari and Karp and Terreri, who had already signed.
The contracts had been Karp’s own innovation, and they’d proven brilliant. They were unenforceable and meaningless. But printed on heavy stock with fine legal frippery, they gave detainees the illusion of returning to a world of laws and rules. They announced a partnership, sour but real, between jailer and detainee.
Karp slid a pen across to bin Zari.
“I promise,” he said. “Take your time. Look it over and decide.”
But bin Zari had already put his shaking hand to the page.
THAT NIGHT, KARP KNOCKED on the door to the first-floor room that Callar used as an infirmary. Bin Zari was inside, a drip carrying intravenous antibiotics into his arm, bandages and ointment on pressure sores that dotted his back and legs. His breathing was slow and labored and his eyes dull.
“He gonna be okay?”
“Should be. Fever’s coming down,” Callar said.
“When can he talk?”
“You cannot be serious. His infection’s still raging.”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
Callar was through fighting. “Tomorrow, probably. He won’t be feeling great, but that’s better, right? What we want.”
“You’re finally getting it,” Karp said. He laid a friendly hand on her shoulder.
Suddenly she wanted to kiss him, this man who repulsed her. Put her arms around him and take him back to her room and make hate with him. Compound her degradation by betraying her husband. Sink as low as she could. She fought the impulse down. He was smiling, and she wondered if he’d somehow read her mind. But his attention seemed to be focused on bin Zari.
“Getting it,” she said. “Yes. I think I am.”
20
In his rearview mirror, Wells watched the men in suits closing on the S
ubaru. Their hands were belt-high. Holster-high. With the Tahoe in front of him, the Caprice behind, he’d given up his chance to run. He unlocked his doors, lowered his window, put his hands on the wheel.
The guy at his window was maybe thirty-three, medium height, with a blue suit, brown skin. He flipped open his wallet, showed Wells an FBI identification badge.
“Mr. Wells? I’m Agent Joseph Nieves. You need to come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then you’d best tell me why.”
“You’re a material witness in a federal investigation.”
Material witness was a meaningless term, an excuse to pick him up. If you felt like talking, you could have called, Wells didn’t say. Professional courtesy. But they wanted to prove they didn’t need to show him any courtesy at all.
“I’ll come. But I’m driving.”
“We’d prefer if you ride with us.” Nieves sounded embarrassed.
“You made your point. Don’t push it.” Though Wells almost hoped Nieves would.
Nieves stepped back, murmured into the microphone in his lapel, nodded. “Mr. Wells, will you give me your word—”
“Yes. Let’s go.”
THEY CONVOYED NORTH along the Beltway, the Caprice’s siren clearing the road as smoothly as a snowplow. At exit 46, they swung east onto Chain Bridge Road, which led to the Langley campus. But they weren’t going to the CIA. Just past the Dulles toll road, they turned left, heading for a complex that looked like a typical suburban office park, centered around a large X-shaped building.
In reality, the complex—called Liberty Crossing—was the newest center of power in the American intelligence community. Its low-key appearance was deceiving. The buildings were more concrete than glass, built to survive a truck bomb. A thick-walled guardhouse protected the main entrance, and a hairpin turn in the access road ensured that vehicles would be moving slowly as they approached it. Behind the guardhouse, waist-high steel boluses blocked the road. In block letters, a sign proclaimed: “Pre-cleared visitors only. Visitors without pre-clearance will not be admitted.” And an afterthought: “Welcome to NCTC/ODNI”—the National Counterterrorism Center and the office of the director of national intelligence.
The Caprice stopped beside the guardhouse. From the Subaru, Wells watched as Nieves handed over his badge and had a short, heated conversation with the guard inside. Another guard in a flak jacket emerged from the back of the house, leading a German shepherd. The dog trotted around the WRX, poking its nose under the bumpers. “Clear,” the handler said. And only then did the boluses behind the guardhouse retract, opening the road to the building.
Disrespect upon disrespect, Wells thought.
THEY PARKED in the visitors’ spots near the front entrance. Nieves walked to Wells’s door. “You holding?”
Wells flipped open his jacket to show his Glock.
“It would be easier if—”
Wells slipped the pistol under the seat. “Just don’t try to strip-search me.”
He wasn’t strip-searched, but he did have to pass through a body-imaging scanner at the entrance. “Standard procedure for all visitors,” Nieves said.
“As long as it’s standard procedure.”
The building had been finished barely a year earlier, purpose-built for Whitby’s new agency. Its lobby was expensive, crisp, and high-tech, white walls and marble floors so smooth they belonged on the starship Enterprise. Oversized photos of President Obama and Fred Whitby stared down from behind the guard station. Beside them, brass letters proclaimed “Office of National Intelligence: Coordination, Integrity, Transparency.” To Wells, the motto sounded more appropriate for a garage that specialized in windshield replacements.
Just past the guard station, Nieves waved a keycard at an unmarked steel door that opened into a long concrete hallway. “This way.”
Wells followed Nieves into a windowless square room with a camera in the corner.
“Get you a soda or anything?” Nieves said.
Wells ignored him until he left. After ten minutes, the door opened again and two agents hustled Shafer in. “Whitby’s certainly making a point,” Shafer said, after they left. “Oh, yes, indeed. How’d they pick you up?”
Wells told him. “You?”
“Outside my house,” Shafer said. “No helicopter, but they embarrassed me in front of the kids. Idiots.”
Wells closed his eyes and saw Cairo, the mosques and the minarets and the river that hardly seemed to move. “Have you heard anything about Alaa Zumari?”
As far as I know, he’s still a fugitive. Unfortunately I can’t call your buddy Hani and ask for an update.”
“A little intra-agency cooperation.”
The job was becoming stranger by the day, Wells thought. Arrested, or not quite arrested, by the director of national intelligence for a mission they were carrying out on behalf of the director of central intelligence.
“We should go to Congress,” Wells said. “Tell them they need to appoint a director of planetary intelligence to sort this out.”
“Why stop there? I was thinking galactic.”
“Universal.”
Wells opened his eyes, saw Shafer peeking out through the narrow window at the door. He sat down. A few minutes later he amused himself by flipping the finger at the camera in the corner. Then he stretched, knee bends and shoulder rolls. Finally, he turned to Wells, who hadn’t moved.
“Aren’t you bored, John?”
“What’s the point of being bored?”
“Maybe I was wrong about you. You’re more of a Buddhist than I thought.”
“Not a Buddhist. Just patient.”
“Is there a difference?”
AFTER TWO HOURS, Nieves reappeared. “Come with me.” They passed out of the concrete corridor and down a series of halls, each plusher than the next, into a long conference room. This one had windows. And wood-and-leather chairs. And Fred Whitby. Wells hadn’t met him before, but his photo was in the lobby, so Wells was fairly certain. Next to Whitby, Vinny Duto.
“Gentlemen,” Whitby said. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” He stood and smiled. Duto followed. Whitby was handsome but smaller than Wells had imagined. With his blue eyes and tiny hands, he looked like nothing so much as an elf in a tailored gray suit.
“Ellis Shafer. And John Wells,” he said. “I wish we could have met on better terms. Please, please sit.”
“The terms were yours,” Wells said.
“I’m sorry about the way you were pulled over. When it became clear you were headed for Brant Murphy’s house, my agents felt they had to intercede. It was for your protection as much as ours. One of my men worried you were behaving erratically.”
“Your men. FBI works for you now?”
“You can’t seriously be pretending to be worried that we’re threats,” Shafer said. “Even Vinny is too smart to pull that card. I realize you were shining shoes at the Pentagon when John saved Times Square, but you might look it up.”
“I know Agent Wells’s record intimately,” Whitby said. His voice sounded to Wells as though it had been filtered through a garbage bag fresh out of the box. Smooth and shiny and heavy and plastic. “Yours, too. And that is the reason you sit here as my guests—”
“Guests—” Shafer said. At the agency, Shafer had crafted a role as a cranky professor, a sharp-tongued genius. Duto had reached a rough accommodation with him, and with Wells. He let them operate unmolested. In turn, they didn’t argue when he took credit for their successes, using them to burnish the agency’s luster, and his own.
But Whitby didn’t care about the glories of Duto or the CIA. His brief was broader. As director of national intelligence, he ran the entire “intelligence community,” the monster that included sixteen agencies in all, with hundreds of thousands of employees and an annual budget of forty billion dollars. He divvied up the money, set priorities, oversaw turf wars. Whitby, not Duto, reported directly to the P
resident. And if Whitby wanted to, he could make life very difficult for the CIA and everyone in it, including Wells and Shafer.
Yet Duto had known all this when he’d asked Wells and Shafer to investigate the 673 murders. He’d told them he would handle Whitby. But Duto had been wrong, Wells thought. For this meeting, he and Shafer would do well not to argue. At least until they saw Whitby’s cards.
Beside Wells, Shafer seemed to make the same calculation. He sat back in his chair, patted his stomach like a man with indigestion. Finally he murmured, “So, we’re your guests.”
“Anyone but you two would be looking at obstruction-of-justice charges right now,” Whitby said. “Or worse.”
“We’re obstructing the FBI investigation?” Shafer said. Quietly, not argumentatively. A man trying to get his facts straight. The performance didn’t come naturally, but Shafer was managing. George Smiley as played by Larry David.
“We’ve got a hundred agents on this—”
“Impressive,” Shafer said. “The results, if I may be so bold as to point out, have been a little thin so far.”
“If I may be so bold as to point out”? Shafer just needed a smoking jacket, Wells thought.
“You don’t know enough to judge our results, Mr. Shafer. We are making progress. We do not need two cowboys disrupting the investigation, disturbing and frightening witnesses. As well as damaging our relationship with a foreign intelligence service that is our ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.”
Whitby tilted his head a fraction, shifted his attention from Shafer to Wells.
“Agent Wells? Anything to say? Or you prefer Mr. Shafer to speak for you?”
The unpolluted blue of Whitby’s eyes reminded Wells of the tint of deep ice on a New Hampshire lake in January. They were a soldier’s eyes. Yet Whitby wasn’t a soldier, just a politician-turned-bureaucrat. He presumed to judge men who had taken risks he would never share. He mistook his bureaucratic squabbles for combat. Explaining this to him would be impossible. He would simply stare with those blue eyes, seeing nothing, believing he saw everything.
The Midnight House Page 24
