The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “You promise.”

  Besides the bottle of water, Karp had brought a briefcase into the interrogation room. He popped the latches, handed over a file. Three copies of a two-page contract, the first in Pashto, the second in Urdu, the third in English, pledging good treatment. No explanation of what bin Zari would have to do in return. Spaces at the bottom for signatures from bin Zari and Karp and Terreri, who had already signed.

  The contracts had been Karp’s own innovation, and they’d proven brilliant. They were unenforceable and meaningless. But printed on heavy stock with fine legal frippery, they gave detainees the illusion of returning to a world of laws and rules. They announced a partnership, sour but real, between jailer and detainee.

  Karp slid a pen across to bin Zari.

  “I promise,” he said. “Take your time. Look it over and decide.”

  But bin Zari had already put his shaking hand to the page.

  THAT NIGHT, KARP KNOCKED on the door to the first-floor room that Callar used as an infirmary. Bin Zari was inside, a drip carrying intravenous antibiotics into his arm, bandages and ointment on pressure sores that dotted his back and legs. His breathing was slow and labored and his eyes dull.

  “He gonna be okay?”

  “Should be. Fever’s coming down,” Callar said.

  “When can he talk?”

  “You cannot be serious. His infection’s still raging.”

  “Serious as a heart attack.”

  Callar was through fighting. “Tomorrow, probably. He won’t be feeling great, but that’s better, right? What we want.”

  “You’re finally getting it,” Karp said. He laid a friendly hand on her shoulder.

  Suddenly she wanted to kiss him, this man who repulsed her. Put her arms around him and take him back to her room and make hate with him. Compound her degradation by betraying her husband. Sink as low as she could. She fought the impulse down. He was smiling, and she wondered if he’d somehow read her mind. But his attention seemed to be focused on bin Zari.

  “Getting it,” she said. “Yes. I think I am.”

  20

  In his rearview mirror, Wells watched the men in suits closing on the Subaru. Their hands were belt-high. Holster-high. With the Tahoe in front of him, the Caprice behind, he’d given up his chance to run. He unlocked his doors, lowered his window, put his hands on the wheel.

  The guy at his window was maybe thirty-three, medium height, with a blue suit, brown skin. He flipped open his wallet, showed Wells an FBI identification badge.

  “Mr. Wells? I’m Agent Joseph Nieves. You need to come with us.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Then you’d best tell me why.”

  “You’re a material witness in a federal investigation.”

  Material witness was a meaningless term, an excuse to pick him up. If you felt like talking, you could have called, Wells didn’t say. Professional courtesy. But they wanted to prove they didn’t need to show him any courtesy at all.

  “I’ll come. But I’m driving.”

  “We’d prefer if you ride with us.” Nieves sounded embarrassed.

  “You made your point. Don’t push it.” Though Wells almost hoped Nieves would.

  Nieves stepped back, murmured into the microphone in his lapel, nodded. “Mr. Wells, will you give me your word—”

  “Yes. Let’s go.”

  THEY CONVOYED NORTH along the Beltway, the Caprice’s siren clearing the road as smoothly as a snowplow. At exit 46, they swung east onto Chain Bridge Road, which led to the Langley campus. But they weren’t going to the CIA. Just past the Dulles toll road, they turned left, heading for a complex that looked like a typical suburban office park, centered around a large X-shaped building.

  In reality, the complex — called Liberty Crossing — was the newest center of power in the American intelligence community. Its low-key appearance was deceiving. The buildings were more concrete than glass, built to survive a truck bomb. A thick-walled guardhouse protected the main entrance, and a hairpin turn in the access road ensured that vehicles would be moving slowly as they approached it. Behind the guardhouse, waist-high steel boluses blocked the road. In block letters, a sign proclaimed: “Pre-cleared visitors only. Visitors without pre-clearance will not be admitted.” And an afterthought: “Welcome to NCTC/ODNI”—the National Counterterrorism Center and the office of the director of national intelligence.

  The Caprice stopped beside the guardhouse. From the Subaru, Wells watched as Nieves handed over his badge and had a short, heated conversation with the guard inside. Another guard in a flak jacket emerged from the back of the house, leading a German shepherd. The dog trotted around the WRX, poking its nose under the bumpers. “Clear,” the handler said. And only then did the boluses behind the guardhouse retract, opening the road to the building.

  Disrespect upon disrespect, Wells thought.

  * * *

  THEY PARKED in the visitors’ spots near the front entrance. Nieves walked to Wells’s door. “You holding?”

  Wells flipped open his jacket to show his Glock.

  “It would be easier if—”

  Wells slipped the pistol under the seat. “Just don’t try to strip-search me.”

  He wasn’t strip-searched, but he did have to pass through a body-imaging scanner at the entrance. “Standard procedure for all visitors,” Nieves said.

  “As long as it’s standard procedure.”

  The building had been finished barely a year earlier, purpose-built for Whitby’s new agency. Its lobby was expensive, crisp, and high-tech, white walls and marble floors so smooth they belonged on the starship Enterprise. Oversized photos of President Obama and Fred Whitby stared down from behind the guard station. Beside them, brass letters proclaimed “Office of National Intelligence: Coordination, Integrity, Transparency.” To Wells, the motto sounded more appropriate for a garage that specialized in windshield replacements.

  Just past the guard station, Nieves waved a keycard at an unmarked steel door that opened into a long concrete hallway. “This way.”

  Wells followed Nieves into a windowless square room with a camera in the corner.

  “Get you a soda or anything?” Nieves said.

  Wells ignored him until he left. After ten minutes, the door opened again and two agents hustled Shafer in. “Whitby’s certainly making a point,” Shafer said, after they left. “Oh, yes, indeed. How’d they pick you up?”

  Wells told him. “You?”

  “Outside my house,” Shafer said. “No helicopter, but they embarrassed me in front of the kids. Idiots.”

  Wells closed his eyes and saw Cairo, the mosques and the minarets and the river that hardly seemed to move. “Have you heard anything about Alaa Zumari?”

  As far as I know, he’s still a fugitive. Unfortunately I can’t call your buddy Hani and ask for an update.”

  “A little intra-agency cooperation.”

  The job was becoming stranger by the day, Wells thought. Arrested, or not quite arrested, by the director of national intelligence for a mission they were carrying out on behalf of the director of central intelligence.

  “We should go to Congress,” Wells said. “Tell them they need to appoint a director of planetary intelligence to sort this out.”

  “Why stop there? I was thinking galactic.”

  “Universal.”

  Wells opened his eyes, saw Shafer peeking out through the narrow window at the door. He sat down. A few minutes later he amused himself by flipping the finger at the camera in the corner. Then he stretched, knee bends and shoulder rolls. Finally, he turned to Wells, who hadn’t moved.

  “Aren’t you bored, John?”

  “What’s the point of being bored?”

  “Maybe I was wrong about you. You’re more of a Buddhist than I thought.”

  “Not a Buddhist. Just patient.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  AFTER TWO HOURS, Nieves reappeared. “
Come with me.” They passed out of the concrete corridor and down a series of halls, each plusher than the next, into a long conference room. This one had windows. And wood-and-leather chairs. And Fred Whitby. Wells hadn’t met him before, but his photo was in the lobby, so Wells was fairly certain. Next to Whitby, Vinny Duto.

  “Gentlemen,” Whitby said. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” He stood and smiled. Duto followed. Whitby was handsome but smaller than Wells had imagined. With his blue eyes and tiny hands, he looked like nothing so much as an elf in a tailored gray suit.

  “Ellis Shafer. And John Wells,” he said. “I wish we could have met on better terms. Please, please sit.”

  “The terms were yours,” Wells said.

  “I’m sorry about the way you were pulled over. When it became clear you were headed for Brant Murphy’s house, my agents felt they had to intercede. It was for your protection as much as ours. One of my men worried you were behaving erratically.”

  “Your men. FBI works for you now?”

  “You can’t seriously be pretending to be worried that we’re threats,” Shafer said. “Even Vinny is too smart to pull that card. I realize you were shining shoes at the Pentagon when John saved Times Square, but you might look it up.”

  “I know Agent Wells’s record intimately,” Whitby said. His voice sounded to Wells as though it had been filtered through a garbage bag fresh out of the box. Smooth and shiny and heavy and plastic. “Yours, too. And that is the reason you sit here as my guests—”

  “Guests—” Shafer said. At the agency, Shafer had crafted a role as a cranky professor, a sharp-tongued genius. Duto had reached a rough accommodation with him, and with Wells. He let them operate unmolested. In turn, they didn’t argue when he took credit for their successes, using them to burnish the agency’s luster, and his own.

  But Whitby didn’t care about the glories of Duto or the CIA. His brief was broader. As director of national intelligence, he ran the entire “intelligence community,” the monster that included sixteen agencies in all, with hundreds of thousands of employees and an annual budget of forty billion dollars. He divvied up the money, set priorities, oversaw turf wars. Whitby, not Duto, reported directly to the President. And if Whitby wanted to, he could make life very difficult for the CIA and everyone in it, including Wells and Shafer.

  Yet Duto had known all this when he’d asked Wells and Shafer to investigate the 673 murders. He’d told them he would handle Whitby. But Duto had been wrong, Wells thought. For this meeting, he and Shafer would do well not to argue. At least until they saw Whitby’s cards.

  Beside Wells, Shafer seemed to make the same calculation. He sat back in his chair, patted his stomach like a man with indigestion. Finally he murmured, “So, we’re your guests.”

  “Anyone but you two would be looking at obstruction-of-justice charges right now,” Whitby said. “Or worse.”

  “We’re obstructing the FBI investigation?” Shafer said. Quietly, not argumentatively. A man trying to get his facts straight. The performance didn’t come naturally, but Shafer was managing. George Smiley as played by Larry David.

  “We’ve got a hundred agents on this—”

  “Impressive,” Shafer said. “The results, if I may be so bold as to point out, have been a little thin so far.”

  “If I may be so bold as to point out”? Shafer just needed a smoking jacket, Wells thought.

  “You don’t know enough to judge our results, Mr. Shafer. We are making progress. We do not need two cowboys disrupting the investigation, disturbing and frightening witnesses. As well as damaging our relationship with a foreign intelligence service that is our ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.”

  Whitby tilted his head a fraction, shifted his attention from Shafer to Wells.

  “Agent Wells? Anything to say? Or you prefer Mr. Shafer to speak for you?”

  The unpolluted blue of Whitby’s eyes reminded Wells of the tint of deep ice on a New Hampshire lake in January. They were a soldier’s eyes. Yet Whitby wasn’t a soldier, just a politician-turned-bureaucrat. He presumed to judge men who had taken risks he would never share. He mistook his bureaucratic squabbles for combat. Explaining this to him would be impossible. He would simply stare with those blue eyes, seeing nothing, believing he saw everything.

  “Nothing to say,” Wells said. “Nothing at all.”

  WHITBY OPENED THE LAPTOP in front of him, tapped the keyboard. On the flat-panel monitor behind him, a map of Pakistan appeared and a dozen red circles lit up.

  Whitby clicked on a circle near Islamabad. A satellite image appeared, a warehouse on a small army base. The photograph was extremely high-resolution, sharp enough to reveal dents on the Jeeps parked beside the warehouse.

  Whitby clicked again. The satellite photograph disappeared, replaced with a blurry image of six large bunkers. “From a Predator with the new radar package,” Whitby said.

  “That’s through the wall?” Shafer said.

  “Yes.”

  Beside the image, acronyms and numbers marched down the side of the screen: “5 (PLU/UA) Y 100/300 GS 400 (UR) PTI Med/High RA High AA Medium OTR High.”

  “Any guesses what we’re looking at? Humor me, Mr. Shafer.”

  “A Pakistani nuclear-weapons depot?”

  “No fooling you.” Whitby ran a pointer down the list of acronyms, reading as he went: “Five weapons. Plutonium. Unarmed. Yield of one hundred to three hundred kilotons each. Four hundred guards on the site. No heavy weapons. Possibility of Taliban infiltration medium to high. Road access high. Air access medium. Overall threat risk high.”

  Whitby clicked back to the main map.

  “We have similar information for every nuke in the Pakistani arsenal. They have eighty-two weapons now, by the way. We knew they’d been moved around, split up, but we had no idea how much. Seems Musharraf”—theformer Pakistani president—“decided that scattered sites would be the best way to save enough weapons to survive an Indian first strike. Now, of course, the Paks have a slightly different problem. As do we.”

  Whitby pointed out the red circles, one outside Rawalpindi, the other near Lahore. “These two bases are our biggest problem. Both with senior commanders who are sympathetic to the Islamist movement.”

  “Why doesn’t the army move them?”Shafer said. “Or replace the commanders?”

  “You know better than that. Every general is his own little power center. And those warheads, they’re prestigious. Tricky to ask a general to give up control. Especially one who might have a line to Al Qaeda.”

  Whitby closed the map. “Mr. Shafer, you’re welcome to examine these estimates for as long as you like. At your leisure. I know you’re a strategic thinker. And in your strategic”—Whitby’s repeated use of the word somehow made it, and Shafer, sound ridiculous—“analysis, is this information precious?”

  “If it’s accurate, sure.”

  “It comes from the very highest levels of the ISI. It’s accurate. They even took us inside six depots. And we’ve checked the others with Predators and satellites, and as far as we can tell, they told the truth.” Whitby paused. “I don’t need to explain what this does for us, do I? Why do you think we bulked up in Afghanistan? Not just to play with the Taliban. We have a QRF”—a quick reaction force—“at Bagram on permanent alert. One of these depots gets hot, we’re in the air in fifteen minutes. For the first time ever, we have the Paki arsenal under control.”

  “A genuine coup,” Shafer said. “But please. I’m a bit slow. How does this connect to 673, the murders? Last I checked, none of the detainees at the Midnight House worked for the Pakistani army. Or the ISI.”

  “I can’t tell you. But I promise, this is related to information that 673 developed.”

  “You promise. Sweet of you.”

  “It’s true,” Duto said.

  Shafer turned his head to Duto. “How long have you known about this? ”

  As an answer, Duto coughed into his hand.

  And then Well
s saw the missing piece. One of them, anyway.

  This map was the reason that Frederick Whitby, former congressman, former mid-level Pentagon analyst, had become one of the most powerful men in Washington. The reason he was the director of national intelligence and Duto was at Langley reporting to him. And it had come out of the Midnight House. But the Midnight House had been rotten. If the FBI’s investigation into the murders of Task Force 673 went the wrong way, Whitby’s triumph would lose its shine.

  Shafer got it, too, Wells saw. He lifted his head, a dog on the scent. “Is this why you’re obstructing the FBI’s investigation?”

  “I’m not—”

  “You blocked them from seeing the letter to the IG.”

  “That letter is nothing but rumor. Totally unsubstantiated.”

  “It’s unsubstantiated because you didn’t let the inspector general investigate it.”

  “It has nothing to do with these murders. Whoever’s killing those men, a foreign terrorist group, a domestic criminal, the FBI has the tools it needs.”

  “Does the FBI know you oversaw 673 at the Pentagon?” Shafer said.

  “Senior bureau officials are aware of my previous position and don’t believe it’s pertinent to their investigation.” Whitby was tense now, falling into bureaucratic jargon, Wells thought.

  “Maybe if they knew about the letter, they’d reconsider.”

  “Mr. Shafer. You and Mr. Wells have not an iota of authority to investigate these crimes. Director Duto made a mistake in thinking otherwise.”

  “I made a mistake,” Duto agreed. Almost cheerfully. Not even an eyelid twitch.

  “We can’t risk letting this leak. If the Pakistani public finds out we’ve been monitoring their nuclear stockpile, there will be riots. The army will face enormous pressure to relocate the weapons. At best, we will then lose our knowledge of where they’re housed. At worst, terrorists will try to steal them as they’re being moved. And none of this has anything to do with the 673 murders. So, I’m asking you now, don’t get in the way. Let the FBI do its job.”