The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  No, Mohammed didn’t belong here because he didn’t know anything. The CIA had traced him to a madrassa in Bat Khela that produced suicide bombers as efficiently as a meatpacking plant turned steers into hamburger. Beyond that, his life was a cipher. Another lost boy in a country full of them.

  But they couldn’t move Mohammed anywhere, especially not Guantánamo, not until they got bin Zari to talk. Since 2006, the President had said repeatedly that America was no longer holding detainees incommunicado. Technically, he wasn’t lying. Technically, Mohammed and bin Zari were even now on their way to Guantánamo. Their stay at the Midnight House was merely a stopover for “processing.”

  But when Mohammed got to Guantánamo, he’d be given a lawyer. And once he told the lawyer that he’d been held at a secret prison along with Jawaruddin bin Zari, the lawyer would demand to know where bin Zari was and whether his rights were being respected. The United States was in no position to answer that question.

  So, Mohammed couldn’t be split from bin Zari. And bin Zari wasn’t leaving the Midnight House, not as long as he wouldn’t talk. So far he hadn’t cracked, despite a half-dozen interrogation sessions and two nights in the punishment box. Karp and Fisher were already talking about their next step. Meantime, Mohammed would have to wait. Though Karp’s sympathy was limited. Mohammed had been willing to die as a suicide bomber. Three hots and a cot, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, was a decent bargain.

  * * *

  MOHAMMED FARIZ’S BAD LUCK had started more or less at birth. He’d entered the world in 1991, the youngest of six children, the product of a pinhole leak in a Chinese condom. His father, Adel, eked out a living ferrying laborers around Peshawar in a battered Toyota pickup.

  Adel charged one rupee, about twelve cents, a ride. After gas and traffic tickets, some real, some imagined by underpaid cops, he cleared four dollars a day, enough to rent an apartment in the Haji Camp neighborhood, a warren of narrow streets around Peshawar’s grimiest bus station. The eight members of the Fariz family piled into four rooms in a six-story building that now and again dumped chunks of concrete on the heads of anyone unlucky enough to be walking by. Even in the summer, when Peshawar hit one hundred twenty degrees, Nawaz forbade her children from opening the apartment’s windows, which overlooked an alley that stank of sewage and stray dogs.

  By the standards of Haji Camp, the Fariz family was middle-class. For a decade, Afghans had flooded into the North-West Frontier to flee the Taliban. Many wound up in Peshawar, destitute and desperate. They turned to heroin to salve their misery and prostitution to pay for their heroin. They were nearly all male. The sexual abuse of boys and young men was endemic in the North-West Frontier, in part because unmarried men and women could be killed simply for being seen together.

  Prostitution and heroin use were illegal in Pakistan. But the Peshawar police had other concerns. They spent most of their time dodging suicide bombers, and the rest looking for bribes. They rarely came to Haji Camp. By 2003, the neighborhood’s disorder had attracted the attention of the self-appointed soldiers of the Jaish al-Sunni, the Army of the Sunni.

  The Jaish were a ragged group of young men who called themselves an Islamic militia but were really a street gang, Bloods without the bandannas. Every few months, they descended on Haji Camp for flying raids, their hands heavy with chains and knives. Their leaders carried pistols but preferred not to use them. Guns were too easy. The Jaish wanted blood to flow. Sirens announced their raids, warning residents of Haji Camp to get into their homes. Anyone who remained outside was assumed to be an addict and fair game.

  The day after he turned thirteen, Mohammed was caught in a raid. When the siren sounded, he was escaping Pakistan as best he could, playing World of Warcraft at a computer shop around the corner from his family’s apartment. To pay for the game, he dragged wheelbarrows of bricks at construction sites. Four hours of work brought him five rupees, enough to play for two hours on a slow computer, or an hour on a fast one. On the night of the raid, Mohammed had found a Shield of Coldarra, which promised him protection from even the toughest monsters. Then the siren sounded.

  Around him, boys groaned to one another. “Tonight.” “Why tonight?” “Just got started and now this bastard.” “Ten rupees down the drain, man.”

  One boy raised his hand and asked Aamer, the owner, if they could save their games and come back when the raid was over. “What the sign say?” Aamer said. There were seven signs, each painted a different color. They all had the same message, in English and Pashto:

  “NO Refund EVER.”

  “But it the Jaish, Aamer. The Jaish come, we should be having a refund.”

  “What the sign say?”

  The boys got up from their keyboards and hurried out. But not Mohammed. Mohammed had his new shield and five minutes left on his hour, and he planned to use both. Somewhere on this level, a Blessed Blade of the Windseeker was hidden. Mohammed meant to find it. The Jaish needed fifteen minutes to get this far into the neighborhood. Anyway, he was barely two blocks from his house.

  Two minutes later, still three minutes left to play, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s chair from under him. “Boy, you got to go,” Aamer said. “They coming now. Coming quick.”

  “But—”

  Aamer pulled the plug on Mohammed’s PC, and the screen went black. Then Mohammed heard the shouting of the Jaish, angry voices rumbling like a motorbike. Close by, a glass shattered and a woman screamed, a high-pitched whine that broke off abruptly—

  Mohammed realized his mistake. They’d taken a different route this time, found their way in faster. They were close. “Let me stay, Aamer. Please. Please.”

  Without a word, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s skinny arm and shoved him out the front door. The street was narrow and smeared with crumpled plastic bottles, scraps of wax paper, indefinable bits of metal and concrete. At the end of the block, in front of the halal butcher shop, a man dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt spotted Mohammed and circled a black baton over his head.

  Mohammed ran. He could hear the Jaish behind him, heavy footsteps closing on him. They yelled at him to stop, told him they’d show him mercy if he did. But Mohammed was slight and quick and didn’t have far to go. He could feel his Shield of Coldarra protecting him. He almost got home.

  Almost.

  But he slipped. Slipped on a patch of oil invisible in the Haji Camp darkness. Fifty feet from his building. He got up, but they were on him. He tried to punch and kick. But he was small, and they were big and there were five of them. Then the biggest one, the one in blue, clubbed him on the side of the head with a steel baton, and he couldn’t fight anymore.

  “Whore,” the man in blue said to Mohammed.

  The five of them surrounded him. He couldn’t see anything but their legs and their dusty black sneakers. The soldiers of the Jaish always wore black sneakers. They were practically the only requirement for joining. The men were panting in their excitement, and Mohammed knew what they planned.

  “No, I live here, sir,” he said.

  “You’re a whore.”

  “Please, sir—”

  They dragged him into the alley behind his building, so narrow that even the tuk-tuks couldn’t fit through it. Above him, a woman, a black scarf wrapped around her head, looked down from the third floor. He yelled to her for help, but a hand covered his mouth. He pleaded silently for relief, for his father to realize what was happening and come outside. But even at thirteen, he knew Adel wouldn’t save him, that Adel was as frightened of the Jaish as everyone else.

  The men grew serious. Two held his legs apart and the one in blue pulled down his cheap brown sweatpants. What came next hurt so much that Mohammed thought his insides were on fire. He screamed through the hand on his mouth and kicked his legs as hard as he could. The man didn’t stop. The others laughed and one peed on his face.

  The man in blue finished, and the other four took their turns. The rest didn’t hurt so much, or maybe they did but he didn’t care. Before t
hey ran off to find a new victim, they gave him a going-away present, pouring a vial of hydrochloric acid onto his legs, searing their cruelty onto him. In a way, they’d been kind. They could have burned out his eyes.

  When Mohammed got home, blood dripped out of him. Nawaz gave him a Coca-Cola. Adel took it away and slapped his face and told him that he’d shamed them all. Three days later, still bleeding, he was packed off to a madrassa in Bat Khela, a town of fifty thousand, sixty miles northeast of Peshawar.

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, he was given endless hours of instruction in the Quran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. He didn’t believe a word. He’d seen the truth of the men who called themselves warriors. His parents never visited. He imagined, hoped, that his mother wanted to see him. But without his father’s permission, she could no more travel to Bat Khela than the moon.

  At the madrassa, Mohammed rarely spoke. He couldn’t be bothered to argue when boys called him stupid. When he talked too much, the scars on his legs burned. He preferred silence. Fortunately, the teachers didn’t mind. At night he sat, pretending to study his Quran, on his cot in the whitewashed third-floor hall where sixty boys slept side by side. In reality, he endlessly replayed the night the Jaish had caught him. If only he had quit the game a few minutes earlier. If only he had seen the pool of oil on the street. If only he’d fought harder. If only. But the story always ended the same way.

  ON MOHAMMED’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, the imams passed the word. Two students were wanted for a “special mission.” Everyone at school understood the code. Mohammed asked to join, surprising the imams. They hadn’t known he was so pious. Of course, they misunderstood entirely. Without ever hearing the word, Mohammed had become an ironist par excellence. Raped. Blamed for being raped. Disowned by his family. Finally, as punishment, sent to learn from the men who’d trained his rapists.

  So Mohammed had decided to buy his way out of the hell of his life by giving himself to his namesake. When the bomb went off, his classmates would call him a hero. In heaven he’d be given a truck-load of virgins to pummel as he pleased. Or else. he’d just be dead. Either way, he’d come out ahead.

  FOR TWO WEEKS, nothing changed. He went to class, ate, pretended to pray. The other boys didn’t say anything to him, but he could see in their faces they knew what he’d agreed to do and they respected him. Fools. One night at dinner, just as he was wondering if he’d been rejected, he felt a tap on the shoulder: Pack your bags.

  He was taken to a house in western Peshawar. Haji Camp wasn’t far away, and Mohammed wanted to say good-bye to his parents, at least his mother, but he knew better than to ask. He expected they’d show him how to make a bomb, but they didn’t. Eventually he figured out why: given his life expectancy, why teach him?

  On the third night, a mud-encrusted SUV parked in front of the house. A fat man stepped out. Once, in Haji Camp, Mohammed had seen a television show about Japanese men who wore robes and wrestled with one another. Sumos, they were called. This man was Pakistani and wasn’t as big as the sumos. But he moved the same way they did, a sidestep waddle. He came into the house and sat next to Mohammed. The couch creaked under his weight, and Mohammed tried not to smile. He could tell the man was important. The man looked at him for what seemed like a long time.

  “Do you know me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I am Jawaruddin bin Zari. Have you heard of me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know why you’re here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you scared?”

  No one had asked Mohammed that question before. He considered. “No, sir.”

  “Do you understand the mission?”

  “Not exactly, sir.”

  “But you know you will die as a soldier for Allah.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man patted his shoulder. “Good.”

  THE TRUCK SHOWED UP a week later. It was empty and shiny. It drove away and came back filled with bags of fertilizer and barrels of oil. The next day the men drove it to a house on the edge of Islamabad. Mohammed had never left the North-West Frontier before. He spent most of the drive with his face pressed against the passenger window.

  The house in Islamabad had a television, a treat the madrassa had lacked. Mohammed lay in front of it for hours, watching cricket matches. The men ignored him. They treated him as ignorant and stupid, and he supposed he was.

  Mohammed hadn’t been told the plan, but he knew he wouldn’t be in the truck when it exploded. His death would be a diversion. He would wear a bomb vest and walk as close as possible to the main Diplomatic Quarter checkpoint before blowing himself up. In fact, bin Zari planned to blow the vest himself, via a cell phone, though he hadn’t bothered to tell Mohammed.

  That final night they ate a simple meal, grilled lamb and diced cucumber and tomato. They prayed together. Mohammed fell asleep in front of the television. He was dreaming of World of Warcraft when a heavy hand shook him awake. Bin Zari, holding a pistol.

  “Can you use this?”

  Mohammed nodded. At the madrassa, he’d learned the basics of handling pistols. Bin Zari shoved the gun into Mohammed’s hand.

  “They’re coming,” bin Zari said.

  “Who?”

  Bin Zari slapped Mohammed’s face. “Stupid. The police. And the Americans.” He ran out, and Mohammed heard his heavy steps headed to the roof. Mohammed peeked outside the window and saw a Nissan and a van rolling into the front yard. Men jumped out of the van and ran for the house. Then the shooting started.

  He hardly remembered what happened next. Somehow, he got to the big room at the back of the house. But it was filled with fog that burned Mohammed’s eyes and nose and mouth. He tried not to breathe, but he couldn’t help himself.

  He hid under a crate and put his T-shirt over his mouth and waited. An American, a black one wearing a strange black mask, came in. Mohammed lifted the pistol and pulled the trigger. He could hardly see, but he knew he’d hit the black man, because the man fell down. The floor shook when he hit it. Then another man in a mask came in. Mohammed fired the rest of his bullets, but by then he was so blind he could have been two meters away and he would have missed. He threw the pistol away and raised his hands and stood.

  The Americans took him and put a hood over his head and gave him to the Pakistani police. He knew they were Pakistani because they smelled like his dad and they yelled at him in Pashto. They put him in a truck and told him he was stupid, a stupid jihadi, and that he’d killed an American and that he was going to a very bad place. And then they hit him. They hit him in the arms and the legs and the stomach with sticks. Two of his ribs came loose and wagged in his belly. He asked them to take the hood off, but they laughed, and with the laughing he was back in the alley with the Jaish, not remembering it but actually back in the alley. Only this time he was wearing a hood.

  Later, the truck stopped. They took him out and took the hood off him. They were at an airport, planes all around and a sweet smell. Mohammed had never seen an airplane up close. They were bigger than he imagined, and not as smooth, metal bits sticking from the wings. Bin Zari was there, too. The police took off his clothes and put the hood back on. And then someone stuck him with a needle. The poison ran through his body and into his head and got stuck there. Then they put him on an airplane. Even with his hood on, he could tell when the plane took off.

  He wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t, and if he closed his eyes he couldn’t move at all, like he was inside a box, only the box was made of his own skin. And the scars on his legs itched and itched, but he couldn’t touch them because his hands were locked together and it was all happening at once and when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see and—

  But when he banged his head against the floor, he felt better. So, he banged his head. Finally, the men took off the hood. Bin Zari was next to him in the plane, and he told Mohammed to calm down, that the Americans had them now and they needed to be strong, be soldiers for Allah. The p
oison would wear off eventually, he said. Mohammed didn’t trust bin Zari anymore, but he bit his lip and held himself steady until the plane landed.

  THE DAY AFTER HE ARRIVED, they wrapped his ribs up with cloth. Since then they’d mostly left him alone. They were supposed to be human. They looked like people. Two were black, and the rest were white. One was a woman, and the rest were men. One of them, the one who said his name was Jim, could talk to him in Pashto. The others talked only in English or other languages he didn’t understand.

  But they all had something in common. They held themselves straight when they walked. Too straight.

  In the night now, the djinns came for him and told him that real people didn’t walk so straight. These men, the captors, weren’t human at all. They were devils, and he was in hell. Mohammed argued with the djinns. He told them he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead, because he was supposed to die when the belt around him blew up, and the Americans had caught him before he could put on the belt. He told them he knew what dead people looked like. In Peshawar, people died all the time. Mohammed had seen plenty of them. He told them that the Americans were people. They hadn’t hurt him since he’d been here. They fed him. They gave him a blanket and the Quran to read.

  Sometimes Mohammed could convince the djinns to stay away for a day or two. Then he could eat his food and look around and wonder about Haji Camp, if his friends still played World of Warcraft or if they had a new game. He could almost believe that he might get out.

  But the djinns came back. Always. At first they spoke quietly, calmly, and they came only in the night, when he was trying to sleep. But now they stayed all day. They didn’t leave when he asked. They told him that if he wouldn’t listen, they would put the hood back on and make him drink the poison, nothing but poison, and leave him here forever. He would never die, because he was dead already, never escape this place.