The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “But there’s something I don’t get,” Wells said. Playing the naïf, as they all seemed to expect of him. Whitby turned his frozen blue eyes on Wells.

  “You were in charge of 673?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I helped set it up. It ran autonomously.”

  “But you saw the take.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know what tactics they used?”

  “It ran autonomously.”

  “I didn’t ask if you okayed them. I asked if you knew of them.”

  “We’re not here to talk about this.”

  “Bear with me,” Wells said. “My question is, how can you be so sure of the information that 673 developed without knowing exactly what they did to the prisoners?”

  “The information was incontrovertible. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “Did it come from the missing detainees?”

  “What missing detainees?”

  “The two who aren’t in the system. The two who don’t exist.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do. There are twelve prisoner numbers mentioned in the letter. Ten match detainees. The other two don’t go anywhere.”

  “That letter is nothing but rumor. It’s quite possible whoever wrote it decided to put in fake PINs to cause this kind of trouble.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “I am through discussing the letter, Mr. Wells. It should have been destroyed.”

  Wells wondered if he should push further, bring up Jim D’Angelo, the former NSA software engineer who’d gotten the no-bid contract. Then decided to wait. They still didn’t know exactly what D’Angelo might have done for Whitby, or why. They didn’t know where Duto stood. They needed evidence, not hunches.

  “So, that’s it,” Shafer said. “We leave it alone.”

  “You leave it alone.”

  “And what if somebody picks up the phone, calls us with a tip?”

  “You refer them to the FBI.”

  “And if we happen to stumble on some bit of evidence—”

  “You give it to the FBI.”

  “Got it,” Shafer said. “Got it, John?”

  “Got it, Ellis.”

  “So, we’re done here?”

  “Most certainly.”

  Shafer pushed himself back from the table. Wells followed.

  “Gentlemen,” Whitby said. “I’m not sure I’ve made myself clear. Don’t press me on this. Director Duto can’t protect you. Your reputations won’t protect you. You are to stay away from this investigation. That is a direct order. Understood?”

  Wells raised his hand. “Question.”

  Whitby stared at Wells’s upraised arm as if he wanted to chop it off. “Is this funny to you, Agent Wells?”

  “I’m just used to a more direct threat. Drop your gun or I shoot you in the head. That kind of thing. I can be a bit slow. And you’re being, you know—”

  “Vague—” Shafer said. “He’s being vague, John. And that’s unhelpful. I, too, want to know exactly what’s at risk here. Will we be losing our parking passes at Langley? Our per diems on road trips?”

  Whitby smiled. And Wells saw that they weren’t close to cracking him. “I’ll bring you in as material witnesses, hold you until the FBI finds the killers. Worst case, you two get stuck in detention for years and even the agency can’t get you out.”

  Whitby slid a thin, red-bordered file folder across the table to Wells. Wells opened it. Gruesome photographs, a crime scene in Moscow. Wells recognized the men. He’d killed them.

  “Murder, plain and simple,” Whitby said. “Not a CIA operation. Just a rogue agent, out of control, killing FSB agents. The same man who just went to Cairo and pissed off our closest Arab ally. Make for some interesting reading in the Post, wouldn’t it? Or Vanity Fair. It’s more a Vanity Fair kind of story, the hero with the feet of clay. And you’re in jail, no way to explain yourself.”

  “The same rogue agent who stopped a nuclear attack on Washington—”

  “That didn’t happen, Mr. Shafer,” Whitby said. “Or did it? It’s so highly classified, it’s practically a myth. And it’s going to stay that way. Could provoke national hysteria otherwise.”

  “Times Square wasn’t classified.”

  “Times Square was a long time ago. What’s he done lately?”

  Whitby slid another red-bordered folder to Shafer. “As for you — I’ve got twenty years of you giving classified information to the French, Israelis, Saudis. Even the Russians.”

  “Trading. Not giving.”

  “Was it authorized? In writing?”

  “We always got as much back as we gave,” Shafer said. “Or more.”

  “I’ll bet I can find a couple exceptions. Those might be tough to explain to a jury. Or the Post. Yes. Strikes me as more of a Post story. Nothing operatic about this one. Meat-and-potatoes espionage.”

  Wells slid back the file.

  “Director Whitby,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

  “The same. Agent Nieves will show you out.”

  THAT NIGHT, Shafer and Wells sat high in the upper deck at Nationals Park. D.C. had once been home to the famously lousy Washington Senators. Sportswriters had joked that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” before the Senators decamped to Minnesota in 1960 and became the Twins.

  Now Washington had a new team, the Nationals, itself a refugee from Montreal, with a new name and a new six-hundred-million-dollar ballpark. But the Nationals were no better than the Senators had been. And Nationals Park was three-quarters empty even on sunny days, making it an excellent place to avoid eavesdroppers.

  Wells stretched his long legs on the seat in front of him. He and Shafer were in the upper deck, with an entire section to themselves. “So?”

  “He can make it messy for sure. He knows how to work the press. Knows your stuff is classified and tough to leak. It really would be a problem if people knew how close we cut it last year. Meanwhile, Whitby goes to town. Bold move. Instead of dancing around your reputation, he attacks it straight on.”

  “Paints me as out of control and dangerous.”

  “Thinking you’re above the law. Yep.”

  “How could he be so wrong?”

  Shafer laughed. They both knew Whitby’s accusations had more than a grain of truth.

  “What about you?”Wells said.

  “He’s got ammo. You see it in context, it makes sense, but if he takes a couple examples, Shafer gave this satellite imagery to the Saudis, this NSA intercept to the French — it would take some time to explain to a jury. More important, money. Probably all I have.”

  “And Vinny’s locked up tight.”

  “Looks that way,” Shafer said. “Though I have a theory on that.”

  “You think he set us up.”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s all done. I promise. So, what do you think, John? Do we quit? Walk away? Give the man what he wants?”

  Wells didn’t bother to answer.

  “I didn’t think so,” Shafer said.

  Far below them, a Nationals batter — a slim black guy who reminded Wells of Darryl Strawberry circa 1986, tall and lean and quick — stroked a scorching line drive to right field. It spun into the corner, and by the time the Brewers outfielder corralled it, the batter was rounding second, eating up the basepaths with smooth, long strides. The right fielder fired a strike from the corner, but by the time the third baseman got the tag down, the runner had touched the bag for a triple. The crowd, such as it was, cheered.

  “Nice,” Wells said.

  “You used to be able to run like that. Must be hard to get old for an athlete like you. Feel the reflexes go.”

  “I still have enough left to toss you over the railing.”

  Shafer squeezed Wells’s biceps. “Maybe. How about putting that muscle to good use?”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

 
“We have to go to Jim D’Angelo. As soon as possible. Find out who asked him to replace those names. And why.”

  “But won’t he run straight to Whitby?”

  “Not if we play him right.”

  PART THREE

  21

  SWAT VALLEY, PAKISTAN. AUGUST 2008

  The white Mitsubishi van bumped through the center of Derai, a dusty farm town in the heart of the Swat Valley, one hundred miles northwest of Islamabad. The road through Derai was wide and potholed, lined with swaybacked two-story buildings that leaned on one another as unwillingly as employees at a team-building exercise.

  The streetlights were out, and the stores were closed, their metal gates pulled down. The streets were empty aside from an old man slowly pedaling a bike ahead of the van, his skinny brown calves rising and falling under his robe. The only proof of life came from the televisions playing in the apartments above the stores.

  Given what they’d seen on the road into Derai, the lack of activity wasn’t surprising, Dwayne Maggs thought. Maggs sat in the back of the Mitsubishi, massaging his aching right leg, which hadn’t fully recovered from the bullet he had taken two months before. In the front seat were two Delta operatives, both able to pass for local.

  A skinny white cat skulked across the road, head low, fur matted by the summer rain that had been pelting down for an hour. The cat ignored the van with the studied nonchalance of a Manhattan jay-walker and disappeared into an alley on the other side of the street, beside a blown-out police station, its windows gone, concrete hanging at odd angles from its walls. The cops had fled across the river, to Mingora, a bigger and marginally safer town. A gray-and-white cat surveyed the street from between two sandbags atop the station. The cat was probably about as effective as the Paki cops had been, Maggs thought.

  Outside Derai, the van turned southeast on the narrow road that dead-ended at their ultimate objective, a tiny farming village called Damghar Kalay. Maggs snuck a glimpse at his watch. Ten fifteen. Right on schedule. On the edge of town, a necklace of lights flickered on a minaret, glistening in the rain-streaked sky.

  Aside from the minaret, Damghar was dark. A couple miles beyond it, on the opposite bank of the Swat River, the lights of Mingora glowed. Mingora was the regional capital. With one hundred seventy-five thousand residents, it retained hints of vitality that Derai had lost. Mingora, Derai, and the villages around them lay on a belt of flatland that the icy Swat River had carved from the mountains of the Hindu Kush. With hot summers and plenty of water, the southern Swat Valley was surprisingly fertile, an agricultural oasis. The mountains around it were largely uninhabited, a trackless and beautiful wilderness that in happier times had been called “the Switzerland of Pakistan.” Just seventy-five miles north of here, the massive peak called Falaksair topped twenty thousand feet, a stone fist punching through the sky.

  Yet the mountains had not buffered the Swat from the upheaval shaking Pakistan. For years, Talib militants had encroached into the valley from their strongholds on the Afghan border, one hundred miles west. By the summer of 2008, their takeover was nearly complete. Police and government officials hunched in their compounds as black-turbaned Talibs patrolled the streets of Mingora, enforcing their own version of sharia — Islamic law — from the backs of their pickups. They taxed store owners, burned girls’ schools, beat anyone they suspected of crimes against Islam. In June 2008, they even destroyed Pakistan’s only ski resort, at Malam Jabba, twenty-five miles west of Mingora. The Talibs didn’t take kindly to frivolities like snow sports. No one would confuse the Swat Valley with Switzerland anymore.

  The Taliban’s control of the Swat did not yet extend to the main road into the valley. Traffic to and from Islamabad flowed without roadblocks. Still, driving up here was risky, especially for Maggs. All six of the Deltas on this mission had rough brown skin and long black beards and spoke Arabic, Pashto, or both. On the road, they didn’t stand out. As a black man, Maggs didn’t have that camouflage. The Mitsubishi was a cargo van, no side windows. Maggs had spent much of the trip lying on his seat, invisible to anyone outside.

  Behind the van, the other four Deltas followed in George Fezcko’s favorite armored Nissan sedan. Its trunk held AKs, Glocks, and a handful of grenades. In contrast, the van’s cargo area was empty, aside from a three-speed bicycle identical to a million others in Pakistan — and a black bag that held the most important piece of equipment of all.

  THE DELTAS HAD COME in from Bagram a week before. They were good soldiers, tough and experienced. But the fact that they were here at all highlighted the problems the CIA was having in the new world. After rotating for six-plus years through Afghanistan, the Delta ops had picked up the language and looks to blend in. To survive.

  Meanwhile, in Islamabad, too many of the CIA’s best and brightest were still stuck in the cold war model. They rarely left the Diplomatic Enclave. They told themselves they were cultivating sources inside the ISI and the army. But from what Maggs saw, they got played by their Paki counterparts as often as not. Fezcko, his old deputy chief of station, was the only senior operative who’d gotten outside the wire and put himself in harm’s way on a regular basis.

  Maggs had to admit he missed Fezcko. He missed Nawiz Khan, too, wished Khan could have come on this mission. But a month before, in July, Khan had been sent to Lahore, on the India-Pakistan border. He’d called Maggs with the news. He didn’t have to explain the reason. He was being punished for the success of the raid where they’d caught bin Zari and Mohammed.

  Khan had nearly managed to avoid the backlash. His team stayed loyal to him, sticking to the story he’d devised. Only four terrorists were in the house, and all were killed during the attack. No one mentioned bin Zari or Mohammed, much less the Americans involved in the raid.

  The physical evidence at the house didn’t match the story. But the Islamabad police knew better than to get involved. Truck bombs were the ISI’s turf. But anyone at the ISI who knew that bin Zari had been at the house could hardly say so, since aiding the attack he’d been planning would have been the only way to know. Khan seemed to be on the verge of escaping punishment. Then he was told of the transfer.

  “Sounds like you got off okay,” Maggs said.

  “Not so much, my friend. I shan’t have my men with me,” Khan said in his British accent. “Down there I can’t trust anyone.”

  Maggs heard cars and trucks in the background. He wondered where Khan was. Not his house, certainly. Khan would never call Maggs from his house. “Maybe you ought to take a trip,” Maggs said. “See the States. Visa won’t be a probem.”

  “Generous but entirely unnecessary,” Khan said. “How’s your leg?”

  “No more marathons, but not bad,” Maggs said. He’d been lucky. The bullet had missed bone and major nerves. His doctor had promised him that if he took his rehab seriously, he could expect a full recovery. Not that Maggs needed an excuse to exercise.

  “And how’s George?”

  “Good,” Maggs said. “I’ll make sure he knows where you are.”

  “And our friends? Have you heard anything yet?”

  “Not yet. Roaches go in, but they don’t come out.”

  “Roaches?”

  “I promise, I hear anything, I’ll let you know. It was a wild night, wasn’t it?”

  “It most certainly was.”

  “Be safe down there, Nawiz. You need help, you send a flag up the pole, I’ll rustle up the cavalry, come get your ass. International incident or no.”

  “I believe you would. Salaam alekeim, my friend.”

  “Alekeim salaam.”

  FOR THE NEXT MONTH, Maggs waded through boring assignments, managing security for a congressional delegation, overseeing the installation of new cameras inside the CIA’s floor of the embassy, bringing in two new guards. And, of course, rehabbing his leg.

  Then, in mid-August, Nick Ulrich, the chief of station, was called to Kuwait for an urgent meeting. Maggs wasn’t invited, but he heard through the grapevi
ne that the other guests were the chiefs of station from Delhi and Kabul and two lieutenant generals from Centcom. An all-star cast.

  Ulrich was gone a day. When he got back, their operational pace picked up markedly. For two days in a row, Bagram ran up Predators to take out weapons caches hidden in the North-West Frontier. On the third day, Indian security forces arrested four members of Ansar Muhammad, Jawaruddin bin Zari’s old group, at a house in Delhi. And Maggs wondered if bin Zari had been broken.

  The answer came the next morning, just as he was settling at his desk for his second cup of coffee. Ulrich’s secretary buzzed him.

  “COS wants to see you.”

  “Of course.”

  Ulrich could have called, himself, but he wasn’t the type. Maggs walked down the hall, and Ulrich’s secretary waved him. Without getting up, Ulrich handed him a sheet of the blue paper used only for the most urgent messages.

  “Came in this morning.”

  TOP SECRET/SCI/CHARLIE BRAVO RED/COS C1 EYES ONLY

  LAPTOP BURIED IN KITCHEN OF HOUSE IN DAMGHAR KALAY, SWAT VALLEY. PROVES SENIOR ISI OFFICIALS HAVE DIRECT LINKS TO PAK TERRORIST ATTACKS. ISI UNAWARE. TARGET BELIEVED UNGUARDED. CIVILIANS ONLY. LOC/ADDINTEL TO FOLLOW.

  SOURCE: HUMINT (D)

  R/C: 2/5

  IAR

  “LOC/ADDINTEL” stood for location/additional intelligence.

  “HUMINT (D)” meant that the information had come from a human source, rather than an electronic intercept or another spy agency. “D” meant that the informant was a detainee.

  “R” stood for the reliability of the source, “C” for corroboration. Both were scored on a scale of 1 to 5. In this case, the information was considered likely to be accurate even without independent confirmation.

  And “IAR” meant immediate action required.

  * * *

  MAGGS HANDED BACK the cable. He had lots of questions. Why were the interrogators sure the laptop existed without independent corroboration? Had this come from bin Zari, or someone else? And why did the coding have a “Charlie Bravo” handle? Charlie Bravo meant that the note had come from Centcom through Bagram. But information from bin Zari should have run through Langley, not the military. After all, he and Fezcko were the ones who’d caught the guy.