Murphy had told Terreri that a month back, late on a Thursday night, in his office, as they knocked back pints of Zywiec, the local beer. It wasn’t half bad once Terreri got past the faint formaldehyde smell.
“Two million?” Terreri said. “You serious?”
“Yeah.” Murphy sucked down his beer. “There’s something else, too.”
Terreri took a sip, waited.
“Nobody’ll care if we send it home,” Murphy said. “Fact is, they won’t even notice it’s gone.”
Murphy hadn’t said any more that night, but Terreri could guess where he was going. Soon enough they’d have another conversation. The only question was how much they would lift and how’d they’d split it. Terreri wouldn’t feel guilty. The agency was practically begging them to skim.
SO TERRERI HAD A million reasons, give or take, to slog through the last couple of months of this job. But now he had to deal with Jawaruddin bin Zari. Their newest problem. The worst mooch they’d had yet. Since he’d arrived a week before, they’d treated him decently. Terreri’s orders. He always gave the detainees a chance to talk. But bin Zari had made clear he wasn’t interested. He seemed to want to provoke them into getting tough.
So be it. Terreri buzzed Jerry Williams in the basement. “Major. Please take prisoner eleven”—bin Zari—“to room A.”
“Yessir. Full shacks?”
“Hands and hood only, unless you believe he’s a risk.”
Ten minutes later, Williams and Mike Wyly led bin Zari into a cinder-block room, white, twelve feet square, lit by a hundred-watt bulb. A steel conference table and two steel chairs, all bolted to the floor, were the room’s only furnishings.
Bin Zari didn’t complain as Williams pushed him into a chair and snapped shackles around his legs. Only then did Williams uncuff him and tug off his hood. Bin Zari blinked, opened and closed his hands. A week of confinement hadn’t shaken his self-assurance. He appeared calm, almost bored. He had heavy, round features and relatively light skin for a Pakistani, more beige than brown. His slack skin and big lips promised decadence. He could have been a nightclub promoter in London, a hash dealer in Beirut.
“Jawaruddin bin Zari,” Terreri said in Arabic. “We captured you in June in Islamabad. Put you on a plane. Now you’re in what we call a secret undisclosed location. I know you understand me. I know you speak Arabic.”
Terreri let a minute go by. But bin Zari remained silent.
“We’ve treated you with dignity.”
“Is that what you call breaking my friend’s ribs? Injecting us with drugs?”
“What happened to you before you arrived, that wasn’t my doing.”
“Have you given him medical treatment?”
“Not your business,” Terreri said. “But yes, we have. Tell me, have we not treated you fairly? Would you have done the same for us? In return, I ask only that you answer our questions. Which you have not done.”
Silence.
“You may be asking yourself, ‘Why is this American wasting his breath? Is he so stupid as to think I’m going to speak?’ ”
Terreri dropped the safety on his pistol, snapped back the slide to chamber a round. Bin Zari’s eyes widened, but his breathing stayed steady. Terreri raised the gun, pointed it at bin Zari’s face.
“My friend. This speech is for me. Not for you. So that when we hurt you, when we break you, I won’t feel guilty. I won’t say to myself, ‘Maybe we didn’t give him a fair chance. Maybe he would have talked on his own.’ ”
“Do it, then,” bin Zari said.
Terreri flicked the safety on, put the gun back in his holster.
“You think I’d kill you, Jawaruddin? No. We want what’s in there.” Terreri tapped his temple. “That fat head of yours. Your organization, your e-mail addresses, your contacts in the ISI, your safe houses, all of it. And you’re going to give it to us.”
Bin Zari shook his head. And smiled, his wide lips spreading into a rubbery grin. Terreri felt a bloom of rage surge into his chest, his heart taking three beats where one would do. This fool. His bravado, real or fake, would lead only to more agony. You’re going to make us hurt you. Why are you going to make us hurt you?
He was so tired of this.
“Your choice.” Terreri nodded to Williams.
“Full shacks?” Williams had seen this speech before.
“Nice and tight.”
Williams pulled the hood over bin Zari’s head.
THREE MINUTES LATER, Terreri sat alone, staring at the empty chair across the table. He laughed, a low chuckle. His rage had faded. That poor deluded asshole.
Then the door opened. Terreri found himself looking at the shrink. Rachel Callar. Another irritation. From the start, Terreri had wondered if she was tough enough for the job. But Whitby had insisted that they had to have a real doctor, preferably a psychiatrist. And Callar had volunteered. Before she’d signed up, Terreri had interviewed her, asked her if she understood what she was getting into.
She told him about a private she’d met in Iraq, a guy from the First Cav, two kids and another on the way. Guy’s name was Travis. An IED hit his Humvee. He walked away with a bad concussion and a broken hand. But the other guys in the Humvee both got wasted. The gunner’s leg landed in Travis’s lap. Travis blamed himself for getting hit. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he heard his gunner cursing him out. His hand healed, and he wanted to get back to his squad. Callar told him, “We’re gonna send you stateside, get you the help you need.” Three a.m. on the day he was set to go home, he put his.45 in his mouth and blew his head off. Left a two-word note: I failed.
“I let him down,” Callar said. She told Terreri she was tired of playing defense, trying to fix guys. This way she could be part of the fight, get the intel that they needed to save lives.
The story bugged Terreri. He wasn’t seeing the connection. She wanted in on interrogations because this guy offed himself? But they had to have a doctor, and she said she’d move to Poland. So he signed her up.
She’d been fine the first four months. But then something had happened. Okay. Terreri knew what had happened. They’d had a problem with this nasty little Malaysian named Mokhatir. He’d come to them from a raid in the southern Philippines. A Delta/Philippine army team had caught him in an apartment with three soda bottle-sized bombs that looked just about right for taking down an airplane. The other two guys in the apartment had been killed, so Mokhatir was all they had. He wouldn’t talk, and after a month the Deltas sent him to the Midnight House.
He insisted he hadn’t made more than three bombs. Karp and Fisher hadn’t believed him. They’d pushed him harder than any prisoner they’d had before. Over Callar’s objection, they’d locked him in the punishment box for fourteen hours straight. When they opened the cell, Mokhatir couldn’t move his legs or left arm. At first they thought he was faking, malingering, but after a few minutes they realized he wasn’t.
When they called for Callar, she said he’d had a stroke, probably the result of infective endocarditis. Bacteria had built up in a heart valve and caused Mokhatir’s blood to clot inside his heart. Then the clot had traveled to his brain, blocking blood vessels there and causing a stroke. Callar said he needed to get to a hospital for real care, but Terreri refused, told her to do what she could on the base. Without an MRI or CAT scanner or clot-busting drugs, she was reduced to the basics. She gave him aspirin and antibiotics, kept him hydrated, elevated his legs. She knocked down the infection, and eventually the clot seemed to break. A few days later, Mokhatir regained the use of his arm. But he never walked again. After a month, they put him on a plane, sent him to the Philippines, said he’d had a stroke, cause unknown.
The day after they flew him out, Callar knocked on Terreri’s door, said they needed to report what had happened.
“To who,” Terreri said. “Whitby? Sanchez? You think they care?”
“He’s permanently disabled.”
“He’s got a limp.”
“He can’t walk.”
“One of those bombs of his had blown up in his face, he’d be disabled.”
“Colonel—”
“Major, I have heard your advice, and I will consider it. Anything else?”
“No, sir.” Callar didn’t argue further. But her attitude changed. Twice since then, she’d interfered during interrogations, made Karp and Fisher pull detainees out of the punishment box. The squad had to have a doctor, so Terreri couldn’t dismiss her. But she was yet another reason this deployment couldn’t end soon enough.
NOW SHE WALKED into the interrogation room, sat across from Terreri. “Colonel.”
“Major.”
“You seem tired.”
“So do you.” Tired, and getting old like a local. She seemed to have aged a decade in the last year. And lost about fifteen pounds. She wasn’t bad-looking, but her skin was tight on her face and her arms painfully thin.
“Why were you laughing just now, Colonel?”
He considered blowing off the question. Then decided, might as well tell her.
“Jawaruddin was in that chair just now. Playing tough. I was thinking what we’re going to do to him, and it seemed funny.”
“Why did it seem funny?”
“Figuring out how to break guys without leaving a mark. It’s a strange way to spend your life.”
“Are you uncomfortable with the idea of hurting him?”
“Are you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“The answer is no. I’m plain sick of these guys. That’s all.”
“Do you think you’ve lost the ability to empathize with them? Does that bother you?”
For the second time in five minutes, Terreri found himself laughing. She didn’t say anything. He laughed as long as he could. Then his laughter petered out and they stared at each other in silence.
“That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.
“Why?”
“You really are a shrink. I say you’re stupid, and you say why. I don’t want to empathize with them. I want to break them. If you can’t handle it, you let me know.”
“We both want the same thing, Colonel. But I see disturbing tendencies in some of the interrogators. Even in you. I’m worried about depersonalization.”
Terreri felt his stomach tighten, rage bubble up. This woman, this reservist with some fancy letters behind her name, telling him what to do.
“Three months left and we’re done. I don’t need this crap right now, Major.”
“Sir. Three months is a significant length of time. I am responsible for monitoring the mental health of the members of this squad. As well as the physical health of the detainees.”
“That speech you gave me when you signed up, that private you didn’t save. Guy who decided to find out how a bullet tasted.”
“Travis.”
“Travis. That was his name. Now, Travis, he got depersonalized. He depersonalized himself with a.45. And I warned you it wasn’t going to be easy, but you signed for it, and now we’re almost through. Jawaruddin bin Zari, we caught him with a truck bomb. His buddy Mohammed put a bullet in one of our guys. Your job is to help us get these men to talk. You understand that?”
She didn’t say a word. Just nodded. Good. Terreri had enough to worry about. They were going to go hard at bin Zari, and she was going to have to be involved. Whether she wanted to be or not.
“Thank you for your concern, Major. You are dismissed.”
14
NEW ORLEANS
Noemie Williams and her sons lived in a two-story house in Gentilly, the northeast corner of New Orleans, near Lake Pontchartrain. During Katrina, levees had failed on both sides of the neighborhood. The floodwaters had topped ten feet.
Even now, even at night, the scars from the storm were obvious. The house beside Noemie’s was vacant, plywood over its windows, a jagged crack slicing through the bricks on its front-right corner. A lot one block down was simply empty, no sign that a home had ever existed on it. On another, only a poured concrete foundation remained. Traffic was sparse and pedestrians nonexistent, though a few blocks south, toward the Ninth Ward, an open-air drug market was in full swing. The neighborhood made Wells think of a proud old man who’d had a heart attack and hadn’t decided yet whether to try to rehab or lie back and let nature take its course.
Noemie Williams was fighting, though. Her house had a fresh coat of white paint and what looked like a new porch, complete with a rocking horse painted red, black, and green. She had asked Wells to come at 10 p.m., saying she needed to put her sons to bed. He gave her a little extra time, knocked on her door at 10:15. She slid the dead bolt back immediately, and he realized too late that when Williams said ten, she meant ten.
The door pulled just an inch, a soft creak, chain still on the hook. Wells flipped open his wallet, showed her his identification.
“May I?” she said. Wells handed it through the crack in the door. She glanced at it, handed it back, opened up. She was tall and light-skinned, cornrows tight across her skull. She wore cropped black pants and a black T-shirt with “Forever New Orleans” stenciled in gold on the chest. The lines on her forehead said she was at least forty, though she had the legs of a woman a decade younger.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Sit.” She nodded to the living-room couch, protected by a plastic cover. In the reports of their interviews with her, the FBI agents wrote that Noemie Williams had been “calm and composed.” Wells agreed already.
“Get you anything?” Noemie said. She had the marbles-in-mouth south Louisiana accent: half Birmingham, one-third Boston, one-sixth Bugs Bunny.
“I’m fine.”
“Chicory coffee? Local specialty. Along with po’boys and heart attacks. Got a pot brewing.” Indeed, the sweet smell of chicory filled the house.
“If you’re having some, sure.”
Noemie disappeared, leaving Wells to examine the room, which was decorated — to a fault — in the motif of proud African American. On one wall, posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali shared space with family pictures. Another wall was given over to a framed poster of Barack Obama standing in front of the White House.
Noemie carried in a tray, two steaming mugs of coffee and a jug of milk, along with a plateful of cookies. “Come to Louisiana, you will get fed,” she said. The cookies were lemon and sugar and cinnamon, and fell into buttery pieces in Wells’s mouth. He had to make a conscious effort to stop after three of them. The coffee had a bite that pulled Wells back to Pakistan, tiny cups of sweet, strong coffee brewed in battered metal pots, half sugar and half crunchy grounds, the only antidote to the chill of winter in the North-West Frontier.
“So, you knew my husband.”
The past tense jumped at Wells. Jerry Williams was missing, not dead. Officially, anyway.
“We were friends. Trained as Rangers together.”
“That was a long time back. Before he met me.”
The windows were open, and a light breeze stirred the humid air through the curtains. But the city around them was anything but romantic. Police sirens screamed down Elysian Fields Avenue, four blocks away. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter buzzed.
“Lot of action,” Wells said.
“Bangers banging. This neighborhood’s not too bad, but the city’s so small you can’t get away from it. Unless you live in one of those mansions in the Garden District. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Soon enough, another ’cane will make our acquaintance and even us Louisiana lifers will have to admit this place isn’t meant to be. And that will be a shame.” She closed the window and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan.
“You and Jerry have three boys.”
“Asleep. Or pretending to be. Maybe reading comic books under the covers. Long as they’re reading.”
“What are their names?”
“Unfortunately, Jerry was a member of the George Foreman school of naming. The boys are named Jerry Jr., Johnny,
and Jeffrey.”
Wells couldn’t think of any way to spin that.
“Every so often he’d have an S-A-N moment, and that was one.”
“S-A-N?”
“S for stupid, A for ass, and N for a word I don’t use around white people, no matter how well I know them. And I don’t know you too well.”
“You seem pretty calm about what’s happened.”
“The boys are used to Jerry being gone. He shows up tomorrow, they’ll think this was just another mission. No need to upset them just yet. Though we’re two months on. They’re wondering.”
“You don’t think he’s coming back.”
“You don’t shine it up before you spit it out, do you? No. I do not. Let me tell you why. We were having some troubles, no two ways about it. But Jerry Williams, Major Jeremiah Williams, he was very conscious that he was a man with three sons. A black man with three black sons. And everything that entails. Very conscious of all those boys whose daddies never even see them enter this world. You see those posters.” She nodded around the room. “My husband insisted on them. He would not have walked out on his boys. Whatever happened to him, he’s not with us anymore.”
Her voice had stayed even through this explanation. Now tears sprung from her eyes, slid down her cheeks. Wells put his hand on her shoulder.
“Mrs. Williams—”
But she shook him off and walked out of the room.
Wells shifted on the couch, listening to the fan rustling overhead, and tried to figure what he’d done. Someone else — Exley, say — could have asked the same questions without inciting such a ferocious response. But Wells seemed to have lost his sense for the give-and-take of human interaction.
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