The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  He was stopped at a light at the corner of Braddock and Guinea when he heard the helicopter coming in fast and low. He peeked through the windshield, saw it directly overhead. Black, no more than three hundred feet up. Intentionally intimidating, letting him know he was being watched. No wonder the Caprice had let him go so easily.

  Then he heard the sirens.

  The light changed as the Caprice and Tahoe reappeared. Wells eased the WRX over. Best to settle this now. Spare himself the foolishness of trying to outrun a helicopter.

  The Tahoe pulled in front of him, the Caprice behind, boxing him. Two men stepped out of the Caprice. Suits. White shirts. Blue ties. Hands on hips. Federal agents. Or so Wells hoped. Otherwise, he’d made a very big mistake.

  19

  STARE KIEJKUTY.AUGUST 2008

  The Midnight House had five cells. Four were standard prison cells in the basement of the barracks. The fifth was a level down, a single subbasement room. Kenneth Karp had immediately realized its potential.

  With a dozen Polish soldiers, Karp and Jack Fisher and Jerry Williams and his Rangers had poured thick concrete walls on all four sides. By the time they were done, the cell was something close to a vault: dark, silent, nearly airless.

  Prisoners in the other cells faced all manner of minor indignities and irritations. Karp piped in music while they tried to sleep, sometimes loudly, sometimes so quietly it could barely be heard. He particularly favored Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All,” once putting it on a loop for five nights straight, until even the Poles begged him to stop. He and Fisher forced prisoners to stand on one leg for hours at a time, woke them at 2 a.m. for interrogations.

  But in cell five, a prisoner was simply. left alone. In the void. Monitored by infrared cameras and microphones. Fed at random intervals through a slot in the two-inch-thick steel door, a tasteless gruel in a plastic bowl with a cup of lukewarm water to wash it down. The cell had no bed, only a metal chair bolted to the floor. A prisoner who tried to injure himself by banging his head against the walls lost even the tiny privilege of being allowed to move around the cell. Instead, his hands and legs were cuffed tightly to steel loops embedded in the floor and a hood pulled over his head. Darkness inside darkness. The true Midnight House.

  A cell five prisoner could not shower or exercise. He was removed only for interrogation sessions and never told in advance when he’d be taken. The Rangers fired tear gas through the meal slot, stormed in, and dragged him out. But Karp believed that a prisoner should be left alone as long as possible once he’d been moved to cell five. Even interrogation, even Tasers and stress positions and waterboarding, came as a relief from the void.

  In fact, cell five was so psychologically punishing that Rachel Callar had forbidden 673 from using it for more than four weeks straight. On this rule, she had refused to waver. A prisoner who wouldn’t talk after four weeks of pure solitary confinement could not be broken, only driven insane, she said.

  AFTER TWO WEEKS interrogating bin Zari, Karp and Jack Fisher asked Terreri for permission to move him to cell five. Normally, they would have waited longer. The cell was the squad’s last resort. They’d used it only twice before. Once it had worked, in just over a week. Once it hadn’t, on a Yemeni who’d refused to speak even after four full weeks. They’d had to declare him intractable and ship him to Guantánamo. The Yemeni had been their only real failure, not counting Mokhatir, the Malaysian who’d had the stroke in the punishment box. And the stroke was plain bad luck.

  But after running bin Zari through their standard treatments, Karp and Fisher had realized that he seemed to relish them, to view them as a form of combat. They couldn’t break him directly. They would have to come at him sideways, hope that he broke himself. The tactic hadn’t worked on the Yemeni, who had simply locked down. But bin Zari was smarter than the Yemeni, more social — and therefore, theoretically anyway, more susceptible to the isolation of cell five.

  FOR A WHILE, bin Zari didn’t seem to mind it. He paced back and forth, regular steps, as if he was trying to measure minutes with his feet. He ran his fingers along the thick pads on the door. He sang. He fell to his knees and prayed. Once he seemed to be reciting an entire cricket match, play by play. He leaned against the door and told him that they would never break him.

  They left him for six days. Then they took him out, and Karp promised him that he would remain in the cell until he answered their questions. No threats, no violence. Just the promise of a lifetime in the dark.

  His second week wasn’t as pleasant. He walked less, talked less. He spent hours each day standing at the door, waiting for any hint of motion outside. He ran his hands along the smooth concrete walls, looking for cracks. He let his food sit for long stretches, though he always ate eventually. Karp was surprised he didn’t try a hunger strike. His body temperature rose and fell unpredictably, and his breathing became labored, both signs of stress.

  After eight more days, they brought him out again. He’d lost weight. Two weeks of darkness had left his skin pallid, his eyes dull, his lips soft and loose. He blinked in the light of the interrogation room and tried to spit at Karp. But the saliva barely left his mouth.

  Karp reached into the bag on the table, brought out an apple and a Swiss Army knife. Bin Zari jerked forward, straining against his chains. Karp sliced the apple slowly. He popped a slice into his mouth. The hunger in bin Zari’s eyes was frank and pitiful. His mouth opened, and a thin spool of drool dribbled out before he caught himself and licked his lips.

  “Do you have any idea how long you’ve been in that room?”

  Bin Zari was silent. He tried to keep his eyes off the apple, but he couldn’t.

  “Fourteen days. Two weeks. And yet you look — well, see for yourself.”

  Karp held up a mirror, gave bin Zari a look.

  “It isn’t right,” bin Zari said. “What you do.”

  It was the first time bin Zari had complained, the first time he’d shown weakness.

  “You can make it stop,” Karp said, soothing now. “Just tell us.”

  “Tell you what?”

  Karp finished eating the apple, put the core in the bag. “Who gave you the uniforms and the passes. Who told you how to get through security. Just that. Start with that. And if that’s too much, give us one of your safe houses in Peshawar. Then you can stay up here in the light. Have an apple.”

  Karp reached into his bag, extracted a second apple, smiling faintly, a magician pulling rabbits from a hat. See? There’s no end to them.

  “But I tell you, Jawaruddin, before you decide, think about it. Because some questions we ask, we know the answers. We use those to double-check, make sure you’re telling the truth. And if we catch you lying, we’ll put you back down there and you’ll never get out. No matter how much you beg. The rest of your life. And you won’t die soon. We’ll make sure of it.”

  Bin Zari leaned forward — and spat at Karp.

  Back into the cell he went. For two days, the burst of hatred he’d summoned in the interrogation room seemed to strengthen him. He went back to pacing, back to praying. But inevitably, his energy faded. He lay on the floor, trying to see through the crack in the door. On the fifth day, he began to pound his head against the wall, a steady chunking that even Karp found awful, madness distilled to a single echoing thud. Terreri sent in the Rangers. They chained him down, put an IV in his arm with a glucose drip to feed him.

  AT THIS POINT, Callar protested to Terreri.

  “You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said.

  “He’s lying in his own filth. Deprived of any stimuli. This is how you provoke a complete psychotic break. Irreversible.”

  “You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said again. “We’re nineteen days in. I’m going to give Karp the last nine days.”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “Major, believe it or not, I listen to you. If not for you, I’d keep him in there forever.”

  “That supposed to
make me feel better, sir? Because it doesn’t.”

  Callar walked out of the barracks and into the cold night air, across cracked concrete to the edge of the base. Stare Kiejkuty didn’t have much security. An eight-foot fence, a few spotlights, guard towers at the four corners, usually unmanned. It didn’t need more. Poland was its own security. There were no Chechens here, almost no Muslims at all. And after centuries of being batted back and forth between Russia and Germany, Poland had finally found a protector it could trust, a protector with no interest in swallowing it whole. No wonder the Poles loved the United States.

  Outside the fence, life. Peasants sitting around their kitchens, eating boiled pierogi dipped in runny applesauce. The old ones gossiping about their children’s children. The young ones drinking buffalo grass vodka and texting one another — yes, even here — as they looked for their escape, to Warsaw or even farther west.

  Did the peasants have any idea what was happening here? Would they care if they knew? No, Callar decided. Two generations before, they’d watched the Nazis feed Jews into ovens. They hadn’t protested. They hadn’t cared. More than a few had helped. The Poles were not a sentimental people. The tread of foreign armies had stamped the sentiment out of them long before World War II.

  Nine days. They’d put bin Zari through hell for nineteen days already. What were nine more? Nine more might break him. It might.

  “Nine days,” Callar said aloud.

  She thought of how she’d gotten here: her decision to join the reserves, her tours in Iraq, Travis’s suicide. Along the way, each step had made sense, or seemed to. But taken together, they had the empty logic of a dream.

  When they’d signed up for this squad, they’d all been promised two two-week leaves, recognition of the intensity of the work. Callar had taken one, halfway through. The trip had not gone well. Steve loved her, she knew. The blunt truth was that he loved her more than she loved him. He’d grown up in an army family, raised to obey. Unlike most kids, he had accepted the rules without question. His parents had died while he was in community college, his dad of a heart attack and his mother of breast cancer that had refused to answer to chemotherapy. After they were gone, Steve had retreated into himself while he waited for someone new to obey. Probably he should have been a soldier, but the military’s machismo didn’t suit him. So he went to nursing school and moved to California, where he found his way to the VA hospital where they’d met.

  He was a handsome man, Steve, but he’d had only one previous girlfriend, and their relationship had ended badly. She said I was too in love with her, Steve said. That I never said no. I don’t understand how you can be too in love. Rachel hadn’t tried to explain. But she knew how his ex had felt.

  Still. He was smart and funny in his sly way, a simple and good cook, a considerate lover — sometimes too considerate; sometimes she wanted to tell him to hurt her a little, but she never did because she knew he wouldn’t understand — and he supported her without question. He was the opposite of her father, who sucked all the oxygen out of every room he was in, who demanded unending attention as the price of his love. When Rachel went away, Steve wrote her every night, the quotidian details of life on the ward where he worked, misbehaving patients and hospital politics. She cherished the letters, cherished the knowledge that life went on back home. But she hardly wrote back. And he never minded, or if he did, he never complained.

  Children would have changed him, she thought. Children would have given him a new focus. He would have been a wonderful dad. But she’d miscarried and then had an ectopic pregnancy and miscarried again, and after that, the docs said she couldn’t risk another pregnancy. They’d talked about adoption but hadn’t done anything, not yet, so it was just the two of them.

  He’d argued with her, really argued, only once, when she’d told him she wanted to go to Poland. He’d warned her: You’re more fragile than you think, Rach. What if it’s too much? What then?

  It won’t be too much, she said. And if it is, I can always leave. It’s only fifteen months — eighteen, max.

  Please, he said. Listen to me on this.

  But she’d never listened to him before, and she wasn’t about to start.

  * * *

  NOW SHE KNEW how right he’d been. And yet she couldn’t tell him. Not over e-mail, not over the phone, not during those unbearable two weeks at home. Not because of anything he would have said. He would never have held his rightness over her, never tried to punish her for her mistake. And not because she’d be breaking every secrecy oath she’d signed, either.

  Because she was humiliated at her weakness. Terreri and Karp and the others in the squad saw the bigger picture. They saw that breaking these detainees might help them dismantle terrorist networks that were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, nearly all civilians, nearly all Muslims.

  But she could see only the prisoners themselves, screaming as they were Tased or locked for hours in a box smaller than a coffin. Watching them suffer tore against her instincts and her medical training. But she’d signed up for it, and she couldn’t quit. She would finish this tour, whatever it cost her. Just like the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to leave wasn’t hers to make.

  She needed to tell Steve all this, but when she tried to, she couldn’t. They’d passed her leave in silent agony. He’d bought Padres tickets for them her second night back, and she’d forced herself to go. After that, she spent most days at home. She made plans with her friends and canceled them. She hardly slept. One night, at 2 a.m., she got into her 4Runner and drove east into the desert to the Arizona border and turned around and drove back, listening to the mad conspiracy theories high on the dial the whole way.

  When she got back, she smelled eggs in the pan, onions sizzling, toast browning. In the kitchen, two plates were set, two glasses filled with orange juice. She sat down and watched him cook.

  “Breakfast? ”

  “Sure.”

  He filled the plates and sat across from her. They ate in silence. She hadn’t eaten in two days, and she tried to savor every mouthful, to be present with him and not at the Midnight House. But she couldn’t help herself.

  “This is great,” she said.

  “You like it?”

  “I do.” She shoveled scrambled eggs into her mouth, and before she could help herself she was crying.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Rach, please.”

  “I can’t.”

  He turned away from her, went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it down before he spoke, still facing away.

  “Watching you like this. I can’t take it.”

  “You should leave me, Steve.” The baldness of her words surprised her. “I’m no good.”

  He turned to look at her. Panic was in his eyes. “Do you want that?”

  She didn’t trust herself to speak. She shook her head.

  “I’d die first,” he said.

  He was desperate to help her, desperate to make her happy. Instead, her misery echoed in him. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t unburden herself to him. And she couldn’t explain. She couldn’t talk.

  She almost laughed at the irony. What she needed was a few hours with Kenneth Karp and his stun gun.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Let me get through this, okay? I promise. I’ll get through it. I’ll come back to you.”

  * * *

  BUT INSTEAD SHE’D SPUN further and further away. Now she was left with nothing but the base around her and the fence in front of her. Then even the fence seemed to shimmer and dissolve. She needed a moment to realize why. She was crying, not a few tears but spigots. She stood and cried until she had no tears left. Then she walked back to the barracks to do her job. To make sure that Jawaruddin bin Zari stayed alive.

  AFTER FOUR DAYS LOCKED on his back with nothing but his own mind for company, bin Zari broke.

  “All right,” he moaned into the silence. “All right. I will tell. Please. I will tell
.”

  Even then they didn’t get him. They left him another twenty-four hours. Then the Rangers brought him up to the interrogation room, dressed only in a loose diaper, stinking of his own waste. They pulled off his hood and locked him to the chair and hosed him down.

  He was crying when Karp walked into the room, and Karp knew he had won. Karp uncuffed bin Zari’s hands and offered him a bottle of water. He tried to uncap it, but his hands and feet trembled uncontrollably. Karp unscrewed it, tipped it gently to bin Zari’s mouth.

  “It’s too much,” bin Zari said.

  Karp put a hand to bin Zari’s head, found the skin hot and clammy. They’d have to get him treated. But first—

  “I know,” Karp said, soothing now. “I know.”

  “I will tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “Of course.”

  “Things you can’t imagine. About the ISI. About Pakistan.”

  Karp was wary of these grand pronouncements. “Don’t lie, Jawaruddin. If you lie—”

  “It’s true. Please.”

  “All right.” Bin Zari seemed serious. Karp wondered what he could be hinting at. They’d find out soon enough.

  “You promise.”

  “We’ve never lied to you, have we, Jawaruddin? We’ve hurt you, but we’ve never lied.”

  And, in fact, Karp tried not to lie to detainees. They had to believe that once they decided to cooperate fully, they would no longer be punished.

  “That’s true.”

  “If you are honest, you answer our questions”—Karp carefully avoided phrases like “work with us” or even “tell us,” for fear they would force bin Zari to confront the reality of his betrayal—“then I promise, not another minute in there.”

  “A regular cell.”

  “A regular cell. A shower. A toilet and lights and a bed and solid food. All the things a man should have. Even a radio and a television.”