The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  Shafer sat on his desk — and knocked over a bottle of Diet Coke. He hopped up like he’d been scalded. Wells grabbed the bottle while it was still mostly full and set it on the coffee table.

  “Still have your reflexes,” Shafer said.

  “I try.” Wells didn’t mention the endless games of Halo he’d played in New Hampshire, trying to stem the inevitable decline in hand speed that came with age. He didn’t know if the games would do him any good in a gunfight, but he was an impressive killing machine on planet Reach.

  “You can’t say you trust Duto or don’t,” Shafer said. “His value system doesn’t include trust. Your interests overlap, he’s your friend. He may even tell you the truth. Once he stops needing you, that’s that. It’s like, I read about this Hollywood producer, he wrote two memos every time he made a movie. One about how great the movie was, the other about how bad. When the movie came out and he saw how it did, he decided which memo to keep. It wasn’t that one was right and the other was wrong. They were both true, until they weren’t. Get it? ”

  “I get it was a stupid question.”

  Shafer’s phone rang. He listened, grunted, hung up. “Let’s go,” he said.

  They walked out of Shafer’s office, Tonka trotting after them. “Can I make one request? Can we leave the dog here? ”

  “Not a chance.”

  DUTO MET THEM in the executive quarters on the seventh floor of the New Headquarters Building, a conference room down the hallway from his suite. Wells guessed Duto had been warned about Tonka and didn’t want the dog in his office.

  Duto had upgraded his wardrobe in the year Wells had been gone. He wore a blue suit that fit like it was hand-tailored, a white shirt, and a crisp red tie.

  “Running for something? ” Wells said.

  “You’re going to want to shave that beard now that you’re back in civilization, John.”

  Despite his distrust of Duto, Wells found himself strangely relieved that the man was still in charge. At least they didn’t have to pretend to be friendly. “And this is Tonka,” Wells said.

  “She trained any better than you? ”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “Too bad. Can we start, or you have any other pets I need to meet?”

  They sat. Tonka sighed and lay down at Wells’s feet.

  “Ellis got a little bit of this earlier, so I’ll start with you,” Duto said. “Ever heard of Task Force 673? ”

  Wells shook his head.

  “Joint army-agency group. Interrogated terrorists, high-value detainees.”

  “I didn’t know we and the army ever did that together.”

  “Everybody’s fighting the same war.”

  “What Vinny means is that Rumsfeld kept pushing into our turf, and creating these teams was the only way to protect it,” Shafer said.

  “Anyway, starting in 2004, we had a bunch of these squads. They went through various permutations, different names and squad numbers.”

  “Translation: we and the army kept wiping them out and reconstituting them to make it harder for Amnesty or Congress or anyone to follow the thread,” Shafer interrupted. “I wish I could answer your questions, Senator, but Task Force 85 doesn’t even exist.”

  “Do you want to explain, or should I? ” Duto said.

  “You go ahead.”

  “Thank you, Ellis. In late ’05, when the Abu Ghraib blowback was really bad, we eliminated all the black squads. But then at the beginning of ’07 we put one more together. Six-seven-three. The final iteration. Ten guys. Seven army, three agency. It ran out of Poland, a barracks on a Polish base there.”

  “Okay,” Wells said, picturing the setup: the concrete building at the edge of the base, the one everyone pretended didn’t exist. Planes landing late at night, guards shuffling prisoners in and out.

  “The army picked the commander. A colonel with a lot of experience in interrogations. Martin Terreri. And because of all the pressure we were under from the Red Cross and everybody else, we saved 673 for the toughest guys. This was not for routine cases.”

  “Because of the tactics they were allowed to use.”

  “In general, the way it worked, detainees came to 673 one of two ways. Some were in the system already — say, in Iraq — and somebody decided that they needed more pressure. The others, they were sent direct after capture.”

  “Ghosts,” Shafer said. A ghost prisoner was a detainee whose existence the United States refused to confirm to outsiders, like lawyers or wives or Red Cross monitors.

  “But not entirely. They were all in the system,” Duto said. “Legally, they had to be.”

  “Got it,” Wells said. “Who oversaw Terreri? ”

  “Nobody, really,” Duto said. “Six-seven-three, they were kind of ghosts themselves. Theoretically, Terreri reported to the deputy commander of Centcom”—Central Command, which oversaw all army operations in the Middle East and central Asia. “At the time, that was Gene Sanchez.”

  “Isn’t Sanchez a lieutenant general? A colonel reporting to a three-star?”

  “That was intentional. Sanchez wasn’t keeping a close eye on 673. It wasn’t on his org chart. The point was to let these guys do what they needed to do. In reality, the intel got chimneyed straight to the Pentagon.”

  Chimneying — sometimes called stovepiping — meant moving raw intelligence straight to senior leaders instead of sending it through the normal analysis at Langley and the Pentagon. In theory, chimneying saved important information from being lost inside the vortex of the CIA and gave decision makers the chance to judge it for themselves.

  “So, short version of the story, this 673 was a black squad with a straight line to the Pentagon,” Wells said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “They report to you also? ” Shafer said. “Or anyone on our side? ”

  “Not directly.”

  “What does that mean, Vinny? ”

  “We saw the take after the army.”

  “Even though you had guys on the squad? ” Wells said.

  “That’s right.”

  Wells didn’t get it, and then he did. “You didn’t like this squad. But you wanted to be sure you were involved, just in case they wound up with something good. You put a couple guys in, nobody important, protected yourself from whatever it was they were doing, but made sure you had a hand in the game.”

  Duto was silent and Wells saw he’d scored.

  “Always so clever, Vinny. Always playing both sides.”

  “Guess you never broke the rules the last few years, John. Always please and thank you. May I go on, or you have more ethics lessons? ”

  Wells laid his hands on the smooth polished wood of the table. He stared at Duto, and Duto stared back. The triple-thick windows and carpeted floors of the seventh floor swallowed conversations. Only Tonka’s panting spoiled the room’s silence.

  “Vinny,” Shafer said. “You might take a different tone. Since it’s possible none of us would be here without John.” A reference to the bomb that Wells had stopped a year earlier.

  “We would have found it,” Duto said, without any conviction. “We were close.” He tugged his tie loose, opened his briefcase, pulled out a folder, a physical effort to put the conversation back on track. “Like I said, 673 reported to the army, but we got their take.” Duto opened the folder, slid across a sheet with ten names on it. “Anybody on there ring a bell? ”

  One name jumped at Wells. Jeremiah M. Williams, a soldier he’d met at Ranger training fifteen years before. “Jerry Williams,” Wells said. “I knew him a long time ago. Nice guy. Quiet. My ex-wife said something funny about him once. I can’t remember when it happened. But I remember her telling me he was built like a Greek god. You know, we’d just gotten married, so it was sort of a funny thing for her to say, but she was right. He was. Like a black Greek god. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Your wife met him; you were friends with him.”

  “Friendly.” Williams was tough to get close to. Or maybe
Wells hadn’t tried.

  “But you didn’t stay in touch.”

  “When I started here, I didn’t stay in touch with anyone from the army.”

  Wells wasn’t sure why he was going into so much detail about his non-relationship with Jeremiah Marquis Williams. Maybe to explain to himself how he’d gotten to this point in his life with so few people he could trust.

  “He was a good man, Jerry. The type of guy who made training easier. Always pulled more than his weight.” Even as Wells said the words, he realized they sounded like a eulogy.

  “He’s the only name you recognize? ”

  “At first glance. Where is Jerry these days? ”

  “Missing.”

  “Jerry’s missing? All those guys are missing? ”

  “Jerry’s missing. Presumed dead. The other six names with the asterisks, they’re dead for sure.”

  Now Wells wished he hadn’t jerked Duto’s chain by bringing the dog. Headquarters brought out the worst in him. Acid rose in his throat. Another good soldier dead.

  “How? ”

  “In order. Rachel Callar killed herself in San Diego ten months ago. Overdose.”

  Duto handed over two photographs. The first showed Callar in her army dress uniform. She was pretty and trim, her brown hair cut in bangs that covered her forehead. A practical-looking woman, freckles and a wide chin.

  “Six-seven-three had a woman? ”

  “She was the squad doctor. A psychiatrist.”

  The second photo had been taken by the San Diego police at the scene of Callar’s suicide, a plastic bag pulled tight over her head. Wells passed the photos to Shafer without comment.

  “Husband found her,” Duto said. “No note, but no reason at the time to believe it was anything but suicide. She was in the army reserve. Had done a couple of tours in Iraq, counseling soldiers there. Three months later, two Rangers, the most junior guys on the squad, were killed by an IED in Afghanistan.”

  Duto slid across three photographs. The first two were similar, shots of broad-shouldered men in camouflage uniforms, both smiling almost shyly. The third focused on a blown-out Humvee, its armored windows shattered, smoke pouring from its passenger compartment.

  “This one, we don’t know if it was related to the others — it was on a stretch of road where another convoy got hit the next week. Still, they were part of the squad, so it’s possible.”

  “First the doctor in San Diego, then the two Rangers in Afghanistan,” Shafer said.

  “Correct. Then we’re back stateside.”

  Duto handed Wells two more photographs, the same macabre before and after. The first was a standard CIA identification shot. A paunchy man in a sport coat, striped tie, thick black hair. The second photo, a D.C. police shot. The same man, faceup on a cracked slab of sidewalk, dress shirt stained black with blood. His wallet sat open and empty on the curb, a few inches from his shoes.

  “Three months after that was Kenneth Karp. Shot in D.C., east of Logan Circle, four months ago. About one thirty in the morning. Outside an ATM. He was one of ours, so it was reported to us, of course, but nobody made the connection. The cops figured it for a robbery gone bad, and so did our security officers. The ATM tape doesn’t show anything.”

  “He live in D.C.? ” Shafer said.

  Duto shook his head. “Rosslyn. Next question, why was he pulling five hundred dollars from an ATM in the District in the middle of the night? There’s a strip club a block from the bank. Karp had a weekly poker game in Adams Morgan. Apparently he had a routine. Leave the game at one, make a pit stop, get home at three. Wife never knew.”

  “He did the same thing every week? ”

  “That’s what his buddies told the cops.”

  “Somebody could have figured out the routine, waited for him.”

  “In retrospect, yes. At the time, we had no reason to think so.”

  “What’d he do for 673? ” Wells said.

  “He was the senior translator,” Duto said. “Spoke Arabic, Pashto, Urdu.”

  Duto handed over a photograph, a bald-headed black man whose uniform stretched tight across his massive shoulders. Jerry Williams. No second picture, since Williams was missing, not dead.

  “Williams’s wife reported him missing in New Orleans two months ago. Last seen at a bar in the Gentilly district. North of the French Quarter. He retired last year, after the squad broke up. He knew Arabic from his Special Ops training, so he worked with Karp on the translations. He was having marital problems, and the cops down there didn’t look too hard for him. If he’s alive, he’s laying low. He hasn’t been seen since, hasn’t used his ATM card or credit cards, hasn’t called his family, hasn’t flown under his own name. The cops haven’t officially ruled out his wife, but she’s not a suspect.”

  Wells looked at the smiling man in the photograph and wondered if he was dead. “Let me make sure I have it straight. Callar, the doctor, hangs herself in San Diego. The two Rangers die. Nothing happens for a while. Then Karp dies here. Then Williams disappears in New Orleans.”

  “Correct,” Duto said.

  “Five missing or dead from a ten-person squad, nobody put it together?”

  “Why would we? A suicide, an IED in Afghanistan, a robbery, a missing person. Four army, one agency. Hard to see a pattern. Until this.”

  Duto slid two more sets of photographs across the table.

  “Jack Fisher and Mike Wyly. Both killed two days ago. Fisher in San Francisco in the morning. Wyly in Los Angeles near midnight. Both shot at close range. No witnesses, and even though they were in residential areas, none of the neighbors heard shots. The cops are assuming a silencer.”

  Duto didn’t need to explain further. Silencers were illegal, and good ones were hard to come by. A silencer meant a professional, or at least a semiprofessional, killer.

  “Same gun in both shootings? ” Shafer said.

  “Yes. Same as the one that got Karp, by the way.”

  “Who were they? ”

  “Wyly was a sergeant, a Ranger. Good guy, by all accounts.” He looked like a good guy to Wells. Tall, blue-eyed, big square jaw. He belonged on a recruiting poster. At least in the before shot. The after wasn’t so nice. He lay sprawled across a bare wooden floor, eyes dull, his hands covered with his own blood. Four shots in his torso, two in the abdomen, two up high in the chest. The shooter had wanted to be sure.

  “Where was this? ” Wells said.

  “His house, the San Fernando Valley. He’d just gotten divorced. The cops talked to his ex, but she has an alibi. Given the pattern of the shootings, there’s no reason to believe she’s involved.”

  Wells handed the photos of Wyly to Shafer. He looked at Fisher, who was bald and offered a smile that revealed prominent canines. Wells hadn’t remembered the name, but the face was familiar.

  “Rat Tooth,” Wells said. “I kind of liked him, but that was a minority view.”

  “Rat Tooth? You knew him? ”

  “He was an instructor at the Farm when I was a trainee. Even back then he was bald. Specialized in what he liked to call ‘tactical physical arts.’ Eye gouging, finger breaking. Halfway through, he disappeared. There were rumors he’d, quote/unquote, engaged in inappropriate physical contact with a trainee.”

  “Bingo,” Duto said. “After that, we put him on the road where he belonged. He was in Colombia in the late nineties, the Philippines for a couple of years after nine-eleven. The places you could run without a lot of eyes on you. He liked it messy.”

  Messy. The second photograph of Fisher was messy. He was slumped against a driver’s seat, head torn open by a close-range pistol shot. His jaw was open, and Wells couldn’t help but notice his teeth, long and sharp and nearly vampiric.

  “Fisher had a reputation, I can’t deny it,” Duto said. “But he had his uses.”

  He was as much as telling Wells and Shafer that Fisher had been the squad’s designated torturer. Though the United States didn’t torture, Wells reminded himself. Torture was
wrong. And illegal. So whatever Fisher had or hadn’t done for 673, he hadn’t tortured. QED.

  “You put all this together yesterday? ”

  “The San Francisco police got the call on Fisher in the morning, two days ago. Once they figured out who he was, they got in touch with the FBI, which reached out to us. We didn’t know if his murder was connected to Karp, but we figured we’d better check on the other members of 673. We called Wyly’s house yesterday morning. An LAPD detective answered the phone.”

  “What about the other three guys, the rest of the squad?” Wells said.

  “All safe. Murphy, the number two, still works for us. He’s at CTC now”—the Counterterrorist Center. “Terreri, the colonel, he’s in Afghanistan serving at Bagram. The last guy, Hank Poteat, is an army communications specialist. He’s at Camp Henry in South Korea now. None of them have noticed anything off.”

  “Is Murphy under guard? ”

  “Yes.”

  “The FBI is leading the investigation? ” Shafer asked.

  “Correct. They’ve classified the murders as a possible terrorist attack. They’re putting together a task force. We’re assisting, and so’s the army. But the Feebs have jurisdiction. No different than the Kansi shootings.” In 1993, Mir Amal Kansi, a Pakistani graduate student, killed two agency employees near the main entrance to Langley. The FBI had led the investigation, capturing Kansi in Pakistan in 1997. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in Virginia in 2002.

  “And the local police departments are cooperating,” Shafer said.

  “Of course.”

  “So, John and me,” Shafer said. “Help us out here, Vinny. Where do we fit in? Since we’re not part of the task force, and the agency’s got no jurisdiction anyway.”

  “I’ll get to that,” Duto said. “But first, let me ask, this sound like AQ”—Al Qaeda—“to you? Or any of the usual offshoots? ”

  “It’s too subtle,” Wells said. “Too much work for the payoff. It’s not like shooting a Cabinet secretary.”

  “Did anybody outside know we’d set this squad up?” Shafer asked.

  “You might have noticed, there’s no shortage of articles about our interrogation techniques.”