The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “Why would you say such things about my good friend?”

  “I’ve dealt with muk before.”

  “Dealt with, Kuwaiti? Or worked with?”

  Wells pushed himself against the wall, forcing himself into a sitting position before nausea overtook him. “I risked my life to come to you. And I’ve done what you’ve asked, everything. So, please, if you still don’t trust me, let’s end this charade.” He turned to Ihab. “In the truck, you asked me why I’d chosen your son. Don’t you see? I didn’t choose him. The Americans did. Do you want him to tell his story? Because if you do, I need to speak to him tonight. I can’t stay longer.”

  The imam squeezed Wells’s shoulder. “Close your eyes, Kuwaiti. Sleep a bit.” The two men turned off the light and left.

  WELLS WOKE to find his hands free. A third man had entered the room. Deep-set eyes, a soft chin, close-cropped black hair, a gentle face. Alaa Zumari. He didn’t look like a man who could have ordered a half-dozen murders.

  The imam pulled a chair beside Wells. “Can you sit?”

  Wells pushed himself up, took the chair. His stomach turned a somersault. He touched his skull, found his fingertips wet. He was still leaking.

  “Salaam alekeim,” Alaa said.

  “Alekeim salaam. You’re Alaa Zumari? I’m Nadeem.”

  His camera bag and shoes had materialized at his feet. He pulled out the camera, mounted it on the tripod. He turned on the camera, then turned it off.

  “First, you tell me your story without the camera, Alaa. Then we do it again, on tape. It will go more smoothly.”

  “I understand,” Alaa said. He was his father’s son, quiet and collected. Wells wondered if his interrogators had misunderstood his composure as arrogance.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five. I was born in Alex”—Alexandria. “We moved to Cairo when I was six.”

  “Are you very religious?”

  “Not so much. He”—Alaa glanced at his father—“always told me to study the Quran, study, study, but I didn’t like it.”

  “How did you end up in Baghdad?”

  “Four years ago, when I was twenty-one, I was a waiter in the Sofitel.” The Sofitel was one of the bigger Cairo hotels, a tall, cylindrical building on an island in the Nile. “Sometimes I drove a Mercedes for a rich man who visited there with his girlfriends. A very rich man.”

  “An Egyptian?”

  “Yes. I worked hard. I wanted to save money, to get married. I drove for this man a lot. After a year, his son, at the time he was nineteen, he came to me and said, ‘Alaa. My father likes you. He trusts you. I trust you, too. I want you to go to Baghdad and start a mobile-phone business with me.’ He said, ‘You carry in the phones, and when you get there, you do an agreement with the Iraqicom’ ”—the biggest mobile-phone company in Iraq. “ ‘You buy minutes from them, a lot, millions. They give you a discount. Then you sell the phones with the time attached. If it works, we make a lot of money.’ That’s what he said.”

  “But he didn’t want to go to Baghdad himself?”

  “He’s not a fool. Unlike me.”

  “So you said yes.”

  “It’s a risk, okay, but I need the money. I said yes. He gave in fifty thousand U.S. and I gave in five thousand pounds.” Five thousand Egyptian pounds, about one thousand dollars. “All my money. We bought five hundred cell phones, cheap ones, in Qatar. The rest of the money was to buy the minutes.”

  “And you went to Baghdad.”

  “Yes. Over the border through Jordan. Very dangerous. I didn’t know how dangerous until too late. We drive in a convoy. Six cars, GMCs. Halfway through, the middle of the desert, one of the GMCs, it gets hijacked, the driver shot. The passengers kidnapped. Killed, probably. I don’t know. But we were lucky, we made it to Baghdad. And my rich friend, he has found a place for me to stay, because the hotels are too dangerous. He has a second cousin there. Named Amr.”

  Alaa paused, hunched back against the wall, as if reliving his arrival in Baghdad.

  “Have you ever been to Iraq?”

  “Iraqis don’t like Kuwaitis.”

  “Right. So. Baghdad. At first it seems okay. For a few days, I try to get an appointment with Iraqicom. But I can’t. Then one night two men come to the house where I’m staying. Jihadis. Fighting the Americans. They heard about my cell phones. They say, you must pay us a tax.”

  “They heard. Who told them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe Amr. Maybe your partner.”

  “I don’t know!” For the first time, Alaa raised his voice. “So, they say, a tax. They take a hundred of the phones. And ten thousand of the money.”

  “Did you argue with them?”

  “No one argues with these men. I think they would have taken it all, but the man I’m staying with, he stops them. And a few days later, they come back, take more phones, more money.”

  “You didn’t want them to? You weren’t there to help them? Tell me the truth.”

  “I went there to do business! After they come the second time, I call my friend to ask him, maybe I should just come home. He tells me to stay. Tells me, ‘Stay with Amr. Do the deal. Sell the rest of the phones. We can still make money.’ A very good friend.” His voice was low and bitter.

  “You couldn’t go home?”

  “They told me, don’t try. They said they watch the bus stations, GMCs. They’ll kill me if I try.”

  If the story was true, Alaa had been either betrayed by his host or, more likely, set up from the start as an unwitting courier. Wells imagined this quiet man in Baghdad in late 2007, with Iraq teetering close to anarchy. Markets and roads and police stations under attack daily. Wandering into the wrong neighborhood meant certain death. And Alaa, holed up in a house, unable to trust his host, waiting for the insurgents to return, and return again, until the money and the phones were gone and he was left with only his own skin to give them.

  Unless, of course, he hadn’t been set up at all. Unless he’d gone to Baghdad to deliver cell phones and money to the jihadis. But if that was his goal, why hadn’t he dropped off his cache and gone back to Cairo to pick up another load?

  “What happened next?” Wells said.

  Alaa ran a hand through his hair. “What happened? Two days later, the Americans came. Many of them, maybe fifteen. It was the middle of the night. Amr went for his AK, and they shot him.”

  “Were there any Iraqis with them?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Just Americans.”

  By that point all the regular combat operations were joint Iraqi-American, so American-only meant a Special Forces unit.

  “They tie me up and put a bag on my head and put me in a helicopter. They say I’m a jihadi, they’re going to throw me out if I don’t tell them the truth. I tell them no, I’m there for the cell phones, I don’t know anything about the jihadis. The jihadis stole my money; they would have killed me if you hadn’t come. But the Americans didn’t believe me. When the helicopter landed, they beat me. This went on for a few days. I told them to look at my passport, my name. But they said they found a computer at the house with messages from Al Qaeda. They said Amr was a big man in the insurgency. To this day I don’t know whether what they were saying was real. Amr never said anything about jihad to me. They told me, just tell us the truth.”

  “But you lied.” Wells understood now how Alaa had ended up in 673’s hands.

  “I told them about what happened,” Alaa said. “But I didn’t say who sent me.”

  “You made up a name.” Wells still wondered why Alaa had been so reticent to give it up, but he decided not to press. The answer would come.

  “Yes. This was when I was still in Iraq. They beat me; they kept me in a room like this, no windows, very hot. Finally, I told them a name so they would stop. And they were happy; they stopped beating me. Then a few days later they got angry. They told me they knew I was lying and that I wasted their time. And they said they were going to send me
someplace I wouldn’t like. Then the next day they put a hood on me and tied my arms and gave me a shot—”

  “With a needle—”

  “Yes, with a needle. And I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was on a plane. And then I was somewhere very cold.” Alaa shivered at the memory. “I don’t know where. Since I got out, I tried to figure it out. I think somewhere like Germany. But maybe not.”

  “They never said.”

  “No. And I couldn’t see anything about it, where they kept me. If I ever left the building, they put a hood on me. But it was Americans who ran it, I’m sure of that. It had a special name. They told me. They were proud of it. They called it ‘The Midnight House.’ ”

  “Midnight House.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why they called it that?”

  “They said it was always midnight for the prisoners.”

  “Were there a lot of prisoners?”

  “Not that I saw. Mostly, I was alone.”

  “And they hurt you?”

  “These men, they were much different than the ones in Iraq.” He closed his eyes, took a slow, deep breath. “I know I must talk about it, what they did, but—”

  He broke off. The room was silent, the only sound the faint buzzing of the bulb overhead. Somewhere outside, a dog barked fiercely.

  “They told me, it’s very simple to hurt you. And it was. They make me stand all the time with my arms out, make me stay awake, hit me with the electricity. They put me in a very small cell, so small I can stand only like this—” Alaa hunched over. And even though he held the position for only a few seconds, his face went slack in fear and pain, the muscle memory overwhelming him. He stood up, slowly.

  “Nothing that ever left a mark,” he said. “I would look at myself and wonder if I had dreamed it all. Yes, sometimes, when they stopped, brought me back to my cell and I fell asleep, I thought the sleep was real and the torture was the dream. I said, ‘Allah, Allah, help me, help me escape these evil dreams, sleep in peace.’ But he never helped. And you must see, they never stopped. Not like Iraq. In Iraq, the guards and soldiers, they came and went. They had many prisoners. But in this place, this house, it was only me, and they never stopped. And after a while, I don’t know how long, maybe three weeks, I couldn’t resist anymore. I didn’t know if they would kill me or send me back to Iraq or what they would do, I only knew I couldn’t resist.”

  “Anyone would have done the same,” Wells said. “But what I don’t see, even now, is why you protected this man who sent you to Iraq at all.”

  Alaa laughed, low and bitter. “Not to protect him. To protect my family. Do you know who it was, the man I drove? Samir Gharib. He owns half of Heliopolis”—a wealthy neighborhood in northeast Cairo. “His daughter is married to Mubarak’s grandson.”

  “And it was his son who sent you to Baghdad?”

  “Do you see now, Kuwaiti?” the imam said.

  Wells saw. The American government supported Hosni Mubarak, for all his flaws, because he was viewed as a reliable ally against radical Islam. If his family had been connected to the Iraqi insurgency, the outcry in Washington would have been immediate and intense. Congress might have ended the billions of dollars of aid the United States gave Egypt every year. And Mubarak would have lashed out, setting his men on Alaa’s family. Angering a pharaoh was never wise.

  What Alaa hadn’t realized was that his confession would be so toxic that the agency and the army had no alternative but to bury it. Then, with no reason to keep him, they’d told 673 to let him go.

  Amazingly enough, the truth had set Alaa Zumari free.

  IN THEORY, Alaa might still be responsible for the 673 murders. But why? His captivity had lasted only a few months and had ended with his regaining his freedom. Now he simply wanted to be left alone. Nonetheless, Wells figured he should ask about the murders.

  “Are you angry with the Americans?” he said.

  “The ones who hurt me? Sure, I’m angry.” Though Alaa’s voice was even. “I wish that they would see how it feels. But not the woman. She was kind.”

  “The woman.”

  “One was a woman. A doctor.”

  “Did she talk to you?”

  “Only a few words. I don’t think she knew so much Arabic. But she had a kind face. That’s the only way I know how to say it.”

  “Do you know what’s been happening to them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This unit that held you.” Wells paused. “They’re dying.”

  “I don’t understand.” The surprise in his voice was genuine.

  “They went back to the United States. And now someone is killing them.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Alaa said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  Wells was sure now that Alaa hadn’t been involved in the killings. He couldn’t be a skilled enough actor to fake this.

  And then a distant high-pitched whistle breached the room, a long, warning cry. The imam stepped forward, cupped a hand around the wound on the back of Wells’s head. “They’re coming.”

  “I swear on the Prophet it wasn’t me,” Wells said. “Hani saw the note you sent. He works for them.”

  The imam’s silence was answer enough. Wells wondered if they had time to escape. If the mukhabarat had seen the note, they knew he was headed for the Northern Cemetery but not exactly where. They had put a bug and a tail on Wells, figuring it would be easier to follow a Kuwaiti than the imam and Ihab, who knew the local streets. But Wells had lost his bug and his pursuer. Now the police were regrouping. They had tracked him to the sheesha café and were going from there.

  “Leave,” Wells said. “I’ll go the other way, draw them off.” But the imam seemed frozen.

  Wells heard the distant thumping of a helicopter high above. Would the mukhabarat bring in a copter for this op? Apparently so. And no one would be surprised when Alaa was killed during the arrest. A suspected terrorist died early this morning in a counterterrorist operation in eastern Cairo, Egyptian authorities reported.

  No. Wells wasn’t going to help the Egyptians kill this man, or send him back to prison. Alaa had suffered enough. Wells wondered briefly what the agency would make of his helping a fugitive who’d been connected to the Iraqi insurgency, and decided he’d care later.

  Another whistle, this one closer. Wells stood, braced himself against the wall. He didn’t know how far he could run, but he’d have to try. “Follow me or don’t,” Wells said to Alaa. “But decide.”

  Wells stepped out of the hut and found himself in the alley where he’d been sapped. Alaa followed. A helicopter buzzed overhead, but Wells couldn’t see it. Good. Like the bumper stickers on eighteen-wheelers said, If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you. American helos had see-through-walls radar, but Wells didn’t think that technology had come to Cairo yet.

  He pulled himself up to the roof of the one-room house where he’d been held, then squatted low and oriented himself. Alaa followed. They were in a tough spot. The cemetery was a long rectangle that ran more or less north-south. Its east and west perimeters, the long sides, were hemmed in by broad avenues that formed natural bulwarks, easily patrolled and defended. Getting to the northern or southern edges, where the cemetery blended more naturally into the the city, meant running a half mile or more through the alleys full of police, or over the rooftops — in full view of the helicopters. Two lurked over the cemetery, one to the north, one to the south, shining their spotlights in tight circles.

  Despite the helos, Wells thought their best bet was to stay high for as long as possible. The rooftops were filled with debris and scrap metal. The police would avoid them and stick to the alleys. If Wells and Alaa could just get through the first cordon, they might be able to disappear.

  Still bent over, Wells scrambled crabwise south along the rooftops. The helicopter to the south was shining its light in a slow, looping pattern, moving slowly north, trying to catch any movement on the roofs. It paused. Wells saw that a
dog was caught in its beacon, barking madly upward. Then it moved on. Wells and Alaa reached a two-story building, a ruined mosque, with a low wall that offered concealment.

  To the west, three motorcycles streaked along the avenue, their red-and-blue lights flashing, a flying patrol cutting the cemetery off from the city. In the alleys around them, flashlights popped up and disappeared. To the north, a whistle sounded. A man shouted, “You! Raise your hands!”

  Between the helicopters, the motorcycles, and the men on the ground, one hundred or more mukhabarat officers had to be on this mission. Wells realized now that he’d unwittingly put Alaa in special peril. Lost in the Cairo slums, Alaa was no problem for Mubarak. But now that Alaa was a threat to tell his story to the world, the police were determined to find him.

  Overhead, the helicopter closed in, the chop of its blades and growl of its turbine growing louder each second. A wave of nausea pulled Wells sideways, and he braced himself to keep from falling over. That crack on his skull was the gift that kept on giving. Right now he ought to be lying in a dark room with a compress against his head and a friendly nurse rubbing his shoulders. Forget the nurse. Forget the compress. He’d settle for the room. He almost laughed, then bit his tongue to stop himself.

  He tried to stand and couldn’t. Too dizzy. He couldn’t get much farther.

  “Nadeem,” Alaa shouted. “It’s coming.”

  “I’m going into the spotlight. Pull it away. You go south, get out of here.”

  “But—”

  “Go.”

  Wells bit his cheek, hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to jolt himself with adrenaline. He stood and ran along the uneven wall of the mosque. He stepped down, into an alley. He jogged through a narrow archway and found himself in a courtyard filled with crumbling graves. The spotlight swung at him and night became day. So much dust filled the air that the light seemed almost liquid, white fire pouring down from the heavens, setting the gravestones ablaze.

  Wells tried to dodge, hiding behind a grave, knowing he couldn’t. The spotlight settled on him. He stumbled a few steps farther and then fell to his knees and raised his hands in surrender and waited for the police to come. He hoped they wouldn’t shoot him on the spot. He hoped Alaa had followed his instructions and run south. He closed his eyes, let the furious thrum of the helicopter’s turbine fill his ears and shake his skull until he disappeared.