The Deceivers

by Alex Berenson

  “I cannot.”

  “Will you be asking me why I need what I need? Gear, cash, op support, anything else?”

  “I will not. Tell me or don’t, your choice.”

  “And if I choose to tell you and you think I’m making a mistake—”

  “I will tell you so and then deliver what you’ve requested.”

  “Sounds perfect. Except for the part where you tell Vinny everything.”

  “You think he doesn’t find out if the ask comes from Shafer? You think all that cash and all those guns don’t get logged?”

  Point, Tarnes. Wells liked to pretend the agency’s help came for free. It didn’t.

  “You do what I ask before you tell Vinny. You okay with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t say yes unless you’re sure.”

  A pause. “Okay.”

  Wells decided to trust her. A little. “Vinny tell you anything specific about what I might need?”

  She shook her head.

  “Clean pistol, a clean passport, and, say, fifteen thousand dollars delivered to a hotel in Bogotá tomorrow.”

  “I thought you were going to ask for something complicated.” She tapped his hand with two elegant fingers, her touch light enough to mean anything he wanted. “Any preference on the pistol?”

  “Loaded.” Wells thought of Anne, pregnant with his son. Was he flirting with this woman? He didn’t want to be, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “The best kind. You have the hotel yet?”

  “I’ll let you know.” He stood. “Nice to meet you, Julie. Don’t screw me.”

  She saluted. And grinned.

  4

  COLFAX, WASHINGTON

  Nothing had ever come easy for Tom Miller.

  His dad split the day after Miller turned five, ditched him and his mom to move to Florida. Time to start fresh, he said. Conveniently forgetting what he’d already spoiled. Veronica and Tom spent the next decade near poor. Like poverty was a place, a barren land easy to enter, hard to leave. They were never evicted. But sometimes they moved in a hurry. Tom never went hungry. But sometimes Veronica came home with a pizza on Tuesday, and he knew it would have to last them both until her next check on Friday.

  Lucky him, she didn’t eat much.

  They lived in Chula Vista, Phoenix, Las Vegas. Dusty, overgrown desert cities where dreams went to wither, in apartments built to code but never better. By ten, Miller knew what they’d look like before he saw them. Two little bedrooms, a toilet that needed careful handling, a kitchen with a wall-mounted microwave and an electric range.

  Veronica mostly worked telemarketing. When Miller was in ninth grade, she met a trucker named Jared over the phone, pitching life insurance. Jared lived in Colfax, the southeastern corner of Washington State, and to Colfax they went. It was a town of three thousand people, better and worse than the desert cities Miller knew. It was pretty. Not the forests he’d expected, more open. Big rolling hills that rose to the Idaho mountains.

  But it was seriously hick. The nearest city of any size was Spokane, sixty miles north. And Spokane hardly counted, anyway. At least in Vegas, Miller and his mom went to the Strip once in a while, checked out the limos and the strippers handing out nudie postcards. Once, outside Caesars, a guy in a Hawaiian shirt pushed two tickets on Veronica—I can’t, he said. Long story, my wife. Anyway, Cirque du Soleil, the Bellagio. You look like you could use it. Go.

  For an afternoon, life was magic.

  Nothing like that could ever happen in Colfax. Colfax was white guys in pickup trucks. Miller was brown. His mom was Mexican. He had a white name from dear old Dad, the only proof the guy had ever existed. Miller didn’t make friends easily, had never bothered to try since he always figured he’d be moving again soon enough. The handful of Hispanic kids at Colfax Junior-Senior High didn’t know what to do with him. The white kids ignored him.

  He had acne scars and a voice so quiet the teachers asked him to speak up. He was sturdy, though, and tougher than he looked. After his first fight, the bullies left him alone. He was physically exceptional in only one way, his eyesight, 20/9, the edge of the curve. He could see the spin of a baseball as soon as it left the pitcher’s hand, though he still couldn’t hit it. In a luckier life, he would have been a fighter pilot.

  He was an average student, lousy at math. A slow reader with his good eyes, though he loved to read, loved it all the more because he was slow. The Harry Potter books gave him a full year of pleasure. Senior-year English he wrote looping strange stories. After a while, he realized they weren’t good, and he didn’t know how to make them better. He was devastated. He’d thought about community college, trying to write. He realized he’d have a better chance at being an astronaut.

  Jared had a house, the first time Miller had lived in a house. Even had a lawn. But it didn’t feel like his. His mom was home all the time. She said she was tired of working. And Jared made enough money for them, anyway, so why bother? Once in a while, he’d hear them screwing and wonder how they managed. Jared was three hundred pounds of rest-stop fried chicken and waffles. He couldn’t possibly be lying on top of her. Were they on all fours? Gross.

  Jared was all right otherwise. He treated Veronica decently. But he’d made clear he wouldn’t be paying for college or anything else for Miller.

  Time to go.

  Miller decided to enlist. He’d probably wind up in Afghanistan, the war was hotting up, but why not? He wondered if his mom would try to talk him out of signing up. She didn’t. Jared was all for it, of course. Miller checked out the Marines first, but they were a little in love with themselves. The Few. The Proud. The whatever. Miller wasn’t that proud. He went with the Army and, from the start, he liked it. He didn’t mind the yelling. The sergeants seemed to care about him. Or at least about making him a better soldier. Case you didn’t notice, there’s a war on, dummy!

  After Basic, Miller signed for the infantry, the real Army. He spent 2011 patrolling villages in Kandahar Province. March through October, the insurgents showed up for firefights once a week. Like they were punching a clock. Maybe they were. Two guys from the company died in IED attacks. A sniper paralyzed another. It wasn’t fun, exactly, especially when the Talibs got around to mortaring their combat outpost, but it was fine. Miller’s eyesight came in more than handy. On patrol, he spotted bombs and hidey-holes everyone else missed. Enemy fire didn’t rattle him. If anything, he felt calmer after the shooting began. Confirmed kills were tough to come by because the Talibs pulled their corpses after skirmishes, but he wound up with two. He was pretty sure of three more, even if the Army didn’t give him credit.

  On base, he found the Game of Thrones series, five beautifully long novels. After a couple months reading about Sansa Stark, he made the mistake of telling a couple of the guys that he was a virgin. Women had always been a foreign country to him. The mockery that followed was good-natured but relentless. It peaked when Miller’s platoon sergeant, a Kentucky fireplug with the up-country name of Willie Coole, paid a late-night visit to his hutch, leading a donkey wearing a big red ribbon.

  Got her greased for you, PFC. No soldier of mine dies without getting his dick wet. ’Course, you’ll have to wear this. Coole wagged a condom at Miller. Maybe you didn’t know, but Mexicans and donkeys can breed.

  He was surprised to realize that the guys liked him, and he liked them. He would realize later the tour had been the best year of his life.

  When it ended, Miller’s captain told him he should go to Sniper School, a five-week course at Fort Benning. Soldiers didn’t have to be in the Rangers or other elite units to apply. Regular infantry needed snipers, too.

  Think I can be a Ranger, Captain?

  Start with Sniper School.

  The shooting wasn’t the problem. His eyesight gave him a natural advantage. But his ghillie suit never looked quite
right. And though he was great at spotting enemy positions, he couldn’t figure out the best spots for his own hides. Just try to imagine what they’re seeing, his instructors said. What you’d see if you were on the other side. He tried. But he couldn’t. He knew he was bumping up against the limits of his brain. He remembered those stories senior year, how flat they’d seemed when he reread them. He couldn’t make them work, couldn’t figure out how to tell the world what was in his head.

  He wished he was smart enough to understand. Or dumb enough that his failure wouldn’t bother him.

  Still, in the real world, snipers set up inside buildings and on rooftops, where a ghillie suit didn’t mean much. And no one could argue with his aim. Miller passed, barely. Three months later, he signed for Ranger training. Back to Fort Benning. He survived the preliminaries. The instructors liked him. But he couldn’t lead patrols for all the money in New York. He moved his men the wrong way, called in artillery on his own positions. He was overwhelmed rather than afraid. But from the military’s point of view, the reasons hardly mattered. After he flunked the second time, he thought about begging for one more shot.

  But he knew he’d fail again.

  He told himself he didn’t care. He did. Being a Ranger would have meant really succeeding for the first time in his life. The Army respected its Rangers. Instead, Miller would be just another grunt who couldn’t earn his tab.

  While he was at Ranger School, the Army broke up his company. He was reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, at Fort Hood, Texas. He’d been there seven long months when his phone buzzed with a middle-of-the-night call. A 509 area code. Colfax.

  “Mr. Miller?”

  Strange to hear Mr. rather than Specialist. “Yes, sir.”

  “This is Deputy Drew Caprin of the Whitman County Sheriff’s Department. Any chance you can come down to headquarters?”

  “I’m in Texas, sir.”

  “In that case, I have some bad news.”

  Deputies had found his mother and Jared dead in their living room. Heroin. At least now Miller understood why Veronica had acted so weird the last time he’d seen her. Sleepy, mumbly, hardly interested in what he was saying.

  “What about your mother’s body? Should we hold it for burial?”

  Miller hesitated, realized he was furious with her for leaving him this way. “Cremation’s fine.”

  He flew to Colfax to clean out her stuff, got one surprise. Jared and Veronica hadn’t married, so Miller wasn’t entitled to anything of his. Veronica’s life savings consisted of two thousand dollars he found stuffed in her panty drawer.

  But Jared had bought a new pickup a month before the overdose. A Ram 1500 Quad Cab with all the trimmings. Fifty-five grand. Jared had borrowed against the house instead of taking out a note, so it was free and clear. And for reasons only Jared and Veronica knew, they’d titled it in her name. Jared’s crummy kids moaned to high heaven when they found out, since the pickup was worth more than the house. But the sheriff left no room for argument. Her truck, so it belonged to Miller now.

  On the way back to Fort Hood, he stopped in Vegas, dumped Veronica’s ashes into the Bellagio fountain. Maybe the lights and the noise would give her something to do. Inside, he met a girl. Chloe, so she said. She was taller than he was. Long brown hair. Breasts too perfect to be anything but fake. Sixty seconds in, she whispered, Six hundred for an hour, two grand for the night. Her fingers stroked his wrist, and he wanted her as he’d never wanted anything. Even the Rangers.

  In the room, she made him show her the money before she undressed. He blurted out that he was a virgin, and she laughed. Nobody’s a virgin. Miller hadn’t cried since his sixth birthday, when he’d realized his dad wouldn’t be coming home to take him to McDonald’s. He didn’t cry now. But he wished he could. His mom hadn’t been perfect, but he’d loved her. He’d trusted her. Wrong. He couldn’t trust anyone. Not even a woman he’d bought and paid for.

  Chloe must have seen he was telling the truth and decided to go easy on him. Guess it’s your lucky day, then, soldier. No condom. Normally, that’s double.

  An inheritance well spent.

  Three months later, the pickup was in storage, and Miller was back in Kandahar. The war had changed, for the worse. Fewer soldiers, more insurgents. The Talibs were bolder, the bombs bigger. And this time around, Miller’s company captain was a jerk. Guy seemed to think he could win the war all by himself. We’re taking it to them, he said. High ops tempo. Move to contact. So they moved to contact. Which mostly meant IEDs. They rode in mine-resistant armored protecteds, MRAPs, heavy trucks with steel plates underneath to deflect blasts. But a big enough bomb could bust all that steel.

  The first hit came two months into the tour. Miller had taken off his helmet. Dumb. But the truck’s air-conditioning was out, and he was sweating like a pig, and they were on a stretch of road that had been safe. He heard a whoosh as the truck, all eighteen tons, went airborne. His head slammed against the truck’s steel wall. The world went dark.

  When he came to, he couldn’t figure out where he was. For a few seconds, he was almost giddy.

  “Miller . . . Miller!” A round white face, his sergeant, though Miller couldn’t remember his name—

  Nausea replaced euphoria. Miller tried to vomit, came up with only a thin stream of sour drool.

  The blast had blown the truck’s rear axle, leaving it stuck. Miller watched as the back gate dropped and the rest of his squad piled out. He couldn’t move. He felt like he was inside a video game and whoever was playing him had dropped the controller. His sergeant grabbed him, wrenched him out. The Afghan sun clawed his eyes. He hid them behind his palms and sagged until his knees touched soil.

  At the outpost, the company medic prescribed rest and darkness. Three days passed before his captain came to his hutch and asked how he felt. Miller made the mistake of telling the truth. He still had some buzzing in his ears, but the dizziness was gone.

  “Good. We’re setting a checkpoint on the road to Helmand, and you’re gonna overwatch. I’ve had enough of you lying in here.” The captain looked like he was made of blocks, a square head on square shoulders that filled out his perfect neat uniform.

  The checkpoint was set to last four days. The first three days went fine—they even caught a couple guys—but on the fourth it turned out the Talibs had been watching them, too. The IED was dug deep by the side of the road, a quarter mile before the checkpoint.

  This time, Miller was wearing his helmet, but it didn’t seem to matter. He fell down a hole and vanished. When he woke, his head hurt like somebody had cranked a vise around his skull. A black man in a white coat stood near the bed. “Specialist. How are you this morning?”

  Miller could feel the words forming in his head before he said them. Uncanny. “Head. Hurts.”

  “Believe it or not, that’s a good sign. Remember me?”

  Miller tried to shake his head, decided he’d better not. He was sure he’d never seen this man before.

  “I’m Dr. Morgan. I’ve treated you since you were brought in last week.”

  “Where I am?” The wrong way to say it, but he didn’t know the right one.

  “KAF.” Kandahar Airfield. “Remember anything?”

  The MRAP’s engine rumbled in his ears. “IED.”

  “Good. More than yesterday. You’ll start making new memories soon.”

  The thought didn’t particularly please Miller. He looked around the clean white room. “Sir.”

  “Call me doc.”

  “Doc. When do I go back?”

  “Soon as you’re fit to fly.” Morgan rested a hand on Miller’s shoulder. “Your war’s over, Specialist.”

  Morgan was wrong. Miller’s war had just begun. He spent a month at Walter Reed, where he was officially diagnosed with a moderate traumatic brain injury and post-concussive symptoms. He received a medical discharge
four months later, at Fort Hood. His sensitivity to light had faded. But he still had regular headaches and anxiety attacks.

  The Veterans Administration gave him a sixty percent disability rating, entitling him to a little more than a thousand dollars a month. Miller had never believed that the military would take care of him for life. Being a soldier was a job. No one had made him sign up.

  Even so, the payment seemed stupidly small. Almost disrespectful. His mood swung from angry to depressed to empty. The emptiness scared him most of all. The military shrinks called it loss of affect. He even stopped reading. For a while, he couldn’t make the words stand still. Then his brain recovered enough to put them together in sentences. But they felt as silly as a Halloween costume. Heroes and villains, swords and sorcerers, when the reality was buried bombs and ice-pick headaches. For this, the United States government saw fit to give him not even forty bucks a day.

  After his discharge, he went back to Colfax. He wanted quiet and green. Between the pay he’d saved and the disability check, he figured he could rent a trailer and get by. Wasn’t like he had fancy taste or a wife to worry about. He could always sell the pickup, if cash ran low. Plus the VA had a clinic in Lewiston, just over the border in Idaho. He wouldn’t have to go too far for his meds. The shrinks at Fort Hood had made a point of telling him, Stay connected to the community, isolation kills more soldiers than anything else.

  To which Miller wanted to answer, Try IEDs.

  Mostly, the shrinks gave him meds. They’d put him on half the alphabet: Ambien, Celexa, Depakote, Imitrex, Klonopin, Paxil, Risperdal, Seroquel, trazodone, Valium, Wellbutrin. Usually, he was taking at least four at once. He didn’t know if they made him better or worse. They fogged him up so much that he stopped them cold turkey. Then he couldn’t sleep, and the panic attacks came back. He wound up mixing old and new prescriptions, a one-man psychotropic clinical trial.

  In Colfax, Miller found himself a clean enough trailer east of town for six hundred a month. It had four acres, nestled between a hill and a stream, so he couldn’t see his neighbors. He spent the rest of his monthly check on beer, pizza, and pot. Eastern Washington was home to some of the best dope in the United States and it was now legal. Not medicinal marijuana. Fully legal, thanks to the wisdom of the voters of Washington State. Anyone over twenty-one could buy weed.