The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “I love California.”

  “Love. Sure. That word again. You wouldn’t know love if it gave you a hundred bucks to suck it off.” He guessed he was angrier than he knew. He’d never said anything like that to her before.

  She tossed back her hair and tried to slap him again. “You’re a pig, Michael. Bart says you’re a Fascist, just like the Germans.”

  Wyly felt his heart race. For a few seconds they were both quiet, and then he spoke, slowly, carefully. “This guy I’ve never met says I’m a what? Like the who? ”

  “He says you and your unit, what you did to those detainees, it was criminal and you should be in jail—”

  Wyly took a breath, stepped away from her so he wouldn’t do something he’d regret. They were in deep waters here. “What did you tell him about me, Caitlin? You know I don’t talk about that.” Not now, and not ever, Wyly didn’t add. He didn’t talk about it, and he didn’t think about it. Different guys had different ways of handling it. He’d decided as soon as he got out that the best way for him would be just to forget it. That plan was working pretty well so far.

  “I said you were on an interrogation unit. That’s all.” She sounded defensive. Then her face hardened. “I didn’t have to tell him anything else. He says everybody knows what you did. He says we broke the Geneva convention—”

  “You know what the Geneva convention is, Cate? You have any idea? ”

  “He says you embarrassed the whole country—”

  Ugly words went through Wyly’s mind, slurs about this guy Bart, but he didn’t say them. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. He summoned his Ranger discipline and kept his voice even.

  “He doesn’t know what it was like over there, and you don’t, either.”

  “Just like Apu Grab, Bart says.”

  “You mean Abu Ghraib? You don’t have a clue.”

  “I know you think I’m stupid, but I have a college degree, Michael. Unlike you.”

  “Physical therapy is not a college degree. Even if NC State says it is. Tell your boyfriend we were interrogating top-level terrorists. The guys who pulled the strings. Not random Iraqi farmers who got caught in raids.”

  “Just answer me one thing. If you’re so proud of what you did, how come you never talk about it? How come you always change the subject?”

  And despite himself, Wyly was carried back to the barracks in Poland. He pushed the images out of his mind. Past was past. “I’m a soldier, Cate. I did what they told me, my superior officers. That’s how it works.”

  “Bart said you’d say that. You were the muscle, you followed orders. He said that’s an old story.”

  Wyly stepped toward her, raised his hand high. Then he turned away, grabbed a T-shirt and shorts and his running shoes. Los Angeles had a chain of gyms called 24 Hour Fitness. He’d joined a couple of weeks back. If he wasn’t going to get arrested for assault, he needed to get out of this house.

  * * *

  HE RAN SEVENTEEN MILES that night, stayed on the treadmill until 2 a.m. When he got home, Caitlin was gone. A month later they finalized the divorce, a quick no-fault that split their assets — the two cars and the four thousand dollars in their savings account — right down the middle. Wyly celebrated by going to Hollywood and going home with the first girl drunk enough to say yes. She didn’t have Caitlin’s body, but she was a much better lay.

  A week later, he saw a posting on a military-only chat board looking for ex-soldiers to do stunts on a television show. He thought maybe the post was a scam, but he applied anyway. It was real. And he got the job.

  Now he was working regularly. Making decent money. Enough to pay the rent on the house and have a few bucks left over for this Mustang. Nothing fancy, a gunmetal-gray convertible with the six-cylinder engine. He would have liked a V-8, but he couldn’t make the math work. The odometer on this one read eighty-five thousand miles, which probably meant one hundred eighty-five thousand. It needed a little bit of work, had some rust on the right quarter panel, but nothing major.

  He got a loan from the friendly bankers at Wells Fargo and picked it up for eleven-five. After a couple of weekends, he had it running smooth. Of course, it was no good for anything longer than a trip to the beach. These old engines overheated in a hurry, and the six-cylinder was underpowered by modern standards. He needed a week to go zero to sixty. But he could run it back and forth to work, and that was all he wanted.

  Yeah, he couldn’t complain. California was all right. He thought about Caitlin less than he would have expected. A couple of weeks back he’d seen her at a club in Burbank, looking pissed, standing with another girl who could have been her twin. No guys around. He wondered if Gruber had dumped her already. He’d ducked out before she saw him, blown the fifteen-dollar cover. He had nothing to say to her.

  Once in a while he remembered what Caitlin had said to him on their last night together. No, he couldn’t say he was proud of everything 673 had done. Especially at the end. But he was done now. He lived in the Valley and played drill sergeant to overpaid actors, none of whom cared about his time in the army. If they asked, he said, “Yeah, I was a Ranger.” People in Hollywood preferred to talk about themselves anyway, so most of the time he didn’t need to say anything else. On those rare occasions when somebody pushed him for details, he’d say, “I wish I could tell you. But it’s all classified. Maybe in fifty years.”

  WYLY STOPPED at an In-N-Out Burger, thinking he’d refuel, then head out to one of the bars near his house, have a beer, watch the end of the Lakers game. While he was waiting to order, he changed his mind. He was eating too much junk these days. He’d noticed this morning that he’d gained a couple of pounds. Out here, that mattered. Being an ex-soldier wasn’t enough. He needed to look the part.

  He pulled out of line, headed home. He had a date tomorrow night, a nurse he’d picked up at a Starbucks the week before. Girls out here were easy. He was pretty sure that if he paid for dinner and half listened to whatever she told him, they’d wind up back at her place. Playing doctor. Though he better not make that joke. He’d tried it with another nurse a month back. She hadn’t laughed.

  At the Safeway on De Soto, he picked up a premade salad and low-fat turkey. The guys he’d served with would be laughing. So be it. If everything went right, in a year or two he might start getting regular acting gigs. He could deal with a few tasteless dinners.

  Chatsworth was a dull middle-class neighborhood, built in the 1960s and 1970s as Los Angeles expanded into the northern end of the Valley. Houses here were packed tightly on small lots, separated by walls or hedges for privacy. Wyly made a left onto Lassen, a right onto Owensmouth, another left and right, the streets getting shorter and shorter, and finally swung into his driveway. The place had two narrow bedrooms, a galley kitchen, and a living room that barely fit a couch and a coffee table. Wyly didn’t mind. After living for years in army housing, and then that barracks in Poland, he was just glad to have a place of his own.

  He caught the very end of the Lakers game, then flipped on ESPN. At about 11:30, he was watching SportsCenter, nursing a Corona Light, and slapping mustard on the low-fat turkey to make it go down easier, when the doorbell rang.

  “Yeah,” Wyly yelled. “Who’s there? ”

  “Domino’s.”

  Wyly hadn’t ordered any pizza. A month before, Pizza Hut made the same mistake. Maybe someone was pranking him. But as a prank, ordering pizza for someone was lame. The Pizza Hut guy left, no argument, when Wyly said he hadn’t ordered it.

  “Not mine,” he said. He pulled open the door, saw the Domino’s box—

  And then his stomach was torn in half. The pain was worse than the worst punch he’d ever taken, not just his skin or his abs but tearing deep into his gut.

  “Oh, God,” he said. He dropped his beer and stumbled backward. His upper body jackknifed, closed on itself, as he instinctively tried to protect the wound. He put his right hand to his belly and felt blood, his own blood, trickling through his fingers
. Barely a second had passed. Wyly didn’t understand exactly what was happening, much less why it was happening, but he knew he was in trouble.

  Wyly tried to raise his arm to defend himself, though he felt the power leaving his legs. In a few seconds, he’d be on the floor—

  “No—” he said. “Ple—”

  He didn’t even get to beg. The second shot caught him higher up, breaking two ribs and tearing into his right lung. His muscles collapsed. He went down hard, no acting job, no slow-motion fall into the beer puddling on the clean wood floor. No noise from the shots. A silencer. The gun, the pistol, hidden under the Domino’s box. Wyly got that much but no more. He understood the how, but not the who or the why. Wyly tried to raise his head and look at the shooter, the killer, since he knew now that he was dying, would be dead very soon.

  Then the pistol spoke its lethal whisper twice more. Wyly twitched and died. Behind him, the ESPN anchors introduced SportsCenter’s top ten plays of the day.

  THE SHOOTER SLIPPED the pistol, silencer still attached, into the empty pizza box, and pulled the door shut and walked to the Toyota in the driveway and slipped inside. And the car rolled out and disappeared into the blurry Los Angeles night.

  4

  BERLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  D on’t take your guns to town. ”

  Wells was pulling himself up a steep rock face, when Johnny Cash’s voice erupted from his cell phone. The dream left him, and he found himself in his cabin. He couldn’t remember why he’d been climbing, or what waited for him at the peak. He squeezed his eyes, hoping to recover the mountain. But the phone kept ringing — or, more accurately, singing — until Wells swept an arm across the bedside table and grabbed it.

  “Hello.” The word stuck in his throat. His tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. His pulse hammered in his skull, a metronome gone mad. He wondered how much he’d drunk the night before. Three beers, a couple shots. Hadn’t seemed like all that much. He supposed he wasn’t used to drinking.

  “I wake you? ” Shafer sounded amused. “Long night, John? ”

  Wells lifted his head, an inch at a time, peeked at the clock by the bed: 12:15. He hadn’t slept past noon in at least twenty years. Then he remembered the martini. The martini had done him in. Anne had ordered it for him at last call, over his protests. Shaken not stirred, she’d told the bartender. Then she’d winked at him. He’d wanted to be irritated, but the truth was he’d been flattered. He’d told her who he was two beers before. She was twenty-nine, a cop in Conway, divorced two years before and remaking her life. She seemed amused that he’d wound up in a cabin in New Hampshire.

  “Shouldn’t you be in the other Berlin? Chasing Russians? ”

  “The cold war’s over, sweetheart.” Sweetheart said like a 1950s movie star.

  “Germans, then. Back in high school, I wanted to go to Berlin, see the Love Parade.”

  “That big rave? ”

  “That big rave. I read about it, and it sounded like the coolest thing ever. Remember, I was sixteen. Instead, I got stupid, fell in love, married Frank Poynter, and now look at me. Stuck in a bar with a guy pretending to be John Wells.”

  “I am John Wells. At least I think I am.”

  “Sure you are. I bet you run this scam all the time.” She laughed and kissed him. Even before the martini, they both knew she was going back to the cabin.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT, ELLIS?” But he knew, without knowing, what Shafer wanted. This call was overdue. He ignored the jackhammer in his skull and sat up. Anne reached out, ran a hand down his back.

  “I want you,” Shafer said. “Your presence is requested down here.”

  “Mmmph.”

  “Soon as possible. If you can tear yourself away from your social obligations.”

  Wells didn’t bother asking how Shafer had guessed he wasn’t alone. “Unless you want to send a plane, it’s going to be tomorrow,” he said. “That too late? ”

  “Tomorrow’s fine.”

  Wells hung up. His first thought, he couldn’t help himself: Something wrong with Exley? But Shafer would have told him. This was business.

  Anne slid her hand over his chest.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  She ignored his objection and pushed him down.

  When they were done, they lay still for a minute. She got up before he did and reached for the rainbow-striped panties bunched under the bed beside his jeans. Fifteen minutes later, she stood at the door to the cabin and pressed a folded-up piece of notebook paper into his hand before she left. “My e-mail address,” she said. “You’re leaving town? ”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Gonna do some super-secret stuff? ”

  “Only kind of stuff I do,” Wells said, trying to roll with her.

  “All right, then.”

  “All right.” Wells tucked the paper into his pocket. “Look, Anne, you probably won’t believe it, but I don’t do this kind of thing very often. This was my first time in a while—”

  “No, I believe it. You were a little rusty last night.”

  He flushed. She laughed. “Don’t worry. Much better this morning, especially for a man your age—”

  “Ouch,” Wells said.

  “What I’m trying to say is, I had fun. Give me your number, maybe I’ll take a trip to D.C. See the monuments. Isn’t that what tourists do down there? ”

  He found a pen, scribbled his cell number. “There’s no name on it.”

  “Of course there isn’t.”

  She kissed him on the lips, ran a hand through his hair, walked away in her battered hiking boots, her blue jeans cupping her ass. Wells didn’t expect to see her again, but he found himself waving as she got into her Silverado and rolled off. She had style.

  TONKA DIDN’ T LIKE WATCHING him pack. She tugged at his jeans as he filled his duffel bag. He would have to bring her to Langley, he realized. He didn’t know how long he’d be gone, and he could hardly take her back to the pound. He grabbed her bowls, her treats and toys, and threw them in the Subaru beside his bag.

  He took one final look around the cabin. He didn’t feel overly sentimental. It had served its purpose, given him a place to hide and to heal. From the bedside table, he grabbed the book he’d just started, a biography of Elvis. It had been Elvis or Gandhi, and Wells hadn’t felt like Gandhi. And thinking of Gandhi reminded Wells of what he had almost left behind. He reached under the bed for the lockbox with his pistols.

  HE STOPPED ONLY ONCE on the drive down, for a tankard of 7-Eleven coffee and a jug of water. Somewhere outside Philadelphia, the hangover lost its grip on him and he settled in his seat.

  He spent the night in a no-tell motel outside Washington. He assumed Exley was in the house they’d once shared. The motel room stank of smoke, and the bed was bowed like a hammock. Wells brought Tonka in with him, and they slept on the floor back-to-back.

  When he reached Langley in the morning, the gate guards didn’t want to let him in. Aside from the agency’s own bomb sniffers, dogs were not allowed on the campus. Wells told them it was just for a few hours, they’d be doing him a favor. He didn’t have to tell them that after the last couple years, he had a few favors coming. They hemmed and hawed and made a couple of calls and finally waved him through.

  “JOHN—” SHAFER BARELY STOOD before the dog jumped on him. On her hind legs, she was nearly as tall as he was. He ineffectually tried to push her away. She licked his face, eager to play. “I was gonna say I missed you. But this is a new low. I cannot believe you brought a dog in here.”

  “Her name’s Tonka. And she likes you.”

  Shafer pushed the dog aside and hugged Wells. Wells always felt awkward at these moments. Male affection baffled him. His dad had been distant, taciturn, not exactly cold but unemotional. Unflappable. A surgeon, in the best and worst ways. Wells had followed his example, packed away his emotions. Even as a teenager, playing football, a sport where passion was not just tolerated but encouraged, he had resisted showing
off. When he scored, he handed the ball to the referee without a word. As his high-school coach liked to say, quoting Bear Bryant: “When you get to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”

  Now Wells reached down, patted Shafer’s shoulders before disengaging himself. He tapped Tonka’s flank. “Come on, now. Over there.” He pointed to Shafer’s couch. The dog reluctantly complied.

  “It’s good to see you,” Shafer said. “Even if you look like a survivalist. With the beard and the flannel. And this ridiculous dog.”

  I am a survivalist, Wells didn’t say. Survival’s my specialty. Though the people around me aren’t always so lucky. Shafer’s desk was covered with army interrogation manuals, some classified, some not, as well as what looked like a report from the CIA inspector general. Wells decided not to ask. He’d find out soon enough.

  “Actually, you look about ready to head back to Afghanistan,” Shafer said.

  “That what this is about? ”

  “Closer to home. I got the outlines this morning, but I don’t have details. Duto wants to fill us in himself.” Duto, the CIA director, Wells’s ultimate boss.

  “Vincent Duto? What a pleasant surprise.”

  Wells and Duto didn’t get along. To Wells, Duto was a martinet who saw agents as interchangeable parts, pawns in a game that was being played for his glory. And Wells knew that Duto saw him as valuable but uncontrollable, a Thoroughbred with Derby-winning speed and an ego to match. Duto had said as much, leaving out the second half of the analogy: We’ll ride you until you break a leg, John.

  “Then off to the glue factory,” Wells said aloud.

  “What?”

  “Wondering why Duto wants to brief me, instead of letting you do it.”

  “He misses you.”

  “Do you trust him, Ellis? ”

  Shafer’s only response was a grunt. The question didn’t merit an answer.

  “Really,” Wells said, not sure why he was pressing the issue. “Do you? ”