The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “No,” Mohammed said aloud.

  Then we’ll never leave you alone.

  But Mohammed had the answer for that. He wiped the cot leg as best he could against bin Zari’s blanket. When the blood was gone and he could see the edge of the blade he’d made, he tilted back his neck and tore at himself. The cutting wasn’t easy. The blade was dull now and he wouldn’t have imagined his poor, wretched body would fight its own destruction so desperately. But the djinns were quiet at last. So he cut and cut until his own warm blood covered his hands and his chest and washed him clean.

  28

  We took pictures for a while and sat outside and had a couple beers. Then we came back in and found the bodies. Callar did. She went downstairs, and we heard her screaming.”

  Wells and Murphy had circled the neighborhood as Murphy explained how bin Zari was captured and tortured and finally broken. How he’d told them about the laptop. How the Deltas had found the computer in the Swat Valley. And what it had held.

  Somehow they wound up sitting on the driveway where Wells had parked his WRX. The two agency guards watched from the van.

  “So who killed them?” Wells said. “Jack Fisher?”

  “No. Mohammed.”

  “The boy?”

  “He snuck into bin Zari’s cell through the overhead vent and killed bin Zari and then himself. They were alone for close to an hour. Plenty of time.”

  “How? ”

  “A blade from his cot leg. Must have made it at night when the Polish guards were sleeping.”

  “You’re sure Fisher didn’t do it.”

  “Why would I lie? Guy’s dead. And we could see what happened. Mohammed unscrewed the grate in his cell, got into the heating system, crawled across to bin Zari’s cell. Anyway, if you’d seen the bodies—” Murphy shook his head. “Bin Zari was torn up like wild dogs had gotten him. His body was in about eighty-five pieces. And Mohammed had bled out so badly. We practically needed waders to get to him. He was still holding the knife.”

  “But it was convenient. Since you didn’t know what to do with them.”

  “It was a nightmare. The most important prisoner since Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, more important, and this crazy kid offs him because we got sloppy. Lazy. We were there too long, all of us. We’ve been fighting this war too long.”

  “Did you ever figure out why Mohammed did it?”

  “No reason. Kid was nuts. Psychotic. Callar thought so all along.”

  Psychosis, insanity in all its forms, was the thread, Wells thought. The madness had traveled from Mohammed Fariz to Rachel Callar to her husband like a kids’ game of telephone. If kids played telephone anymore.

  Murphy reached into his pocket, withdrew a canister of Copenhagen. He extracted a wad of dip the size of a knuckle and stuffed it in his lower lip. “I’m not sorry we did what we did to Jawaruddin. We had to break him. But he shouldn’t have died that way, and Mohammed shouldn’t have either.”

  Wells wasn’t interested in hearing Brant Murphy’s opinions on right and wrong. “You found the bodies. Then what?”

  “Must be hard to be perfect, John.”

  “Finish your story so I can tell you who I caught and get out of here and never have to see you again.”

  Murphy spat a stream of dip into the driveway. “It was Terreri who realized what we had to do. Terreri and Fred Whitby.”

  “Whitby knew that the tape you’d gotten from bin Zari—”

  “Would make his career. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff. All along, he told us to do whatever we wanted to the detainees, long as the take was good and we didn’t leave marks. If they didn’t have scars or burns or missing fingers, nobody would care. That was the way Fred figured it. And he was right. But two dead bodies, especially in that condition, that would be hard to explain. Either we were negligent or just plain murderers.”

  “You had to make them disappear.”

  “We bought a couple of bank safes in Warsaw. We chopped up the bodies. Bin Zari was pretty well chopped up already. We put the pieces in the safes and borrowed a Polish military helicopter and flew out a hundred miles over the Baltic Sea on a cloudy night and dumped them. Boom. Boom. Problem solved.”

  Wells didn’t trust himself to speak. Americans. Soldiers. Tossing human bodies away like garbage.

  “Nobody on the squad protested,” Wells said.

  “The only one who would have was Callar, and she wouldn’t speak to any of us by that point. But there was still one loose end to clear up.”

  “The prisoner numbers.”

  “I flew home. I’d met D’Angelo a couple times and I had a feeling about him, that he could be bought. At least rented. He was the kind of guy, always going somewhere fancy, getting somebody else to pick up the tab.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  Murphy spat dip, another long stream.

  “And he cleaned the database,” Wells said. “Jawaruddin bin Zari and Mohammed Fariz were never in U.S. custody. But he got too cute on the payoff.”

  “We should never have agreed to the paper trail.”

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Wells said. “The video with bin Zari and Tafiq. Wouldn’t it be less valuable without bin Zari to authenticate it?”

  “I get why you’d think that. But follow the chain. Don’t you think the ISI would do anything to keep that video secret?”

  Now Wells saw. “We made a deal with Tafiq. Keep the video secret in return for access to the Paki nuke depots. Benazir Bhutto was murdered, and we know who’s behind it, and we haven’t told anyone.”

  “I believe the term is realpolitik. We make the tape public, Pakistan goes crazy. Total anarchy. Sure, the ISI is dirty. They killed Bhutto, they fund terrorism. They’re despicable. But we can manage them. Those nukes are all the Pakis have. Without them, Pakistan’s got nothing on Bangladesh. They don’t have oil, and we’ve had about enough fighting in Muslim countries for a while. All we want is to keep an eye on those nukes. The rest of Pakistan can rot.”

  “Justice for Bhutto.”

  “Good one, John.” Murphy’s grin revealed the flecks of dip between his teeth. “And Tafiq, he knows, the video comes out, the Pakis string him up. He tries for exile, who’s going to take him? Not the French. Not the Arabs. Not even the Russians. He’ll be stuck someplace like Somalia. He wants to make sure the tape stays in a vault somewhere. What’s he going to do? Tell us he was misquoted, he wants to see bin Zari to talk it over? He knows it’s real.”

  “And he assumes bin Zari’s still alive. Somewhere in custody.”

  “Correct. Everybody wins.”

  Wells was silent. The pieces fit together now. The mystery solved. Yet ash filled his mouth. There would be no justice here, not for Benazir Bhutto, not for Jawaruddin bin Zari or Mohammed Fariz. Maybe not even for the members of 673 who had died at Steve Callar’s hand.

  “You know all this for sure, or are you guessing?”

  “Only the principals know for sure. But I saw the video, and I know about the nukes. The connection’s there. The greatest good for the greatest number.”

  Murphy sounded cheerful now. He’d received a great gift, the chance to confess his sins without facing punishment. Without even chanting a dozen Hail Marys. The chance to rub Wells’s face in the reality of power politics at the highest level.

  “Now I’ve told you everything. Time for your side of the bargain. And please don’t say it’s some government hit squad. I wouldn’t know whether to piss myself or slap you across the face.”

  “One last question. You said the principals know. Who would that include? ”

  “I would think all the obvious names. The President, the Vice President. The head of NSC and the SecDef. Whitby for sure. Duto, probably.”

  “Duto? ”

  “I’m guessing, but this kind of deal, don’t you think they ask the DCI for his opinion?”

  Duto’s fingerprints were everywhere now, Wells thought. Only one thread left to unravel. Had Duto known abou
t the dead prisoners all along? Had he set Wells and Shafer on the trail knowing even before they started what they would find?

  “Did you tell Duto what happened to bin Zari and Mohammed?” Wells said.

  “Of course not. The squad and Whitby were the only ones who knew.”

  “Could he have found out some other way?”

  “You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “So,” Murphy said. “A deal’s a deal.”

  “It’s Steve Callar.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “He already confessed.”

  “But he was in Phoenix—”

  Wells explained.

  WHEN HE WAS DONE, Murphy nodded. “I see it,” he said. “Callar wore down. We got rough, and she couldn’t take it. We all knew she was depressed. Karp asked Terreri to send her home, but Terreri wouldn’t. He was stubborn, said we needed a doctor, and unless she requested a transfer he wouldn’t give it. And then at the end, finding the bodies sent her over. She told us we were all murderers, just like the Nazis, that she was going to report us. Terreri told her to go right ahead, betray us. She spent most of the last two months in her room. She kept telling us how she’d failed, how all of us had failed. Terreri would have sent her home by then, but the tour was practically done. Yeah, I see it.”

  “But you couldn’t care less.”

  “She knew what she was getting into. No one’s fault but her own that she freaked out. She comes home, offs herself, the coward’s way out. Then her whack-job husband decides he deserves revenge. On us. Like we’re responsible for her mental problems. I never laid a finger on her, never even raised my voice to her. You want me to feel sorry for her? I don’t think so.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “There’s another? Lemme guess. Poor little Rachel felt more deeply than the rest of us. Oh, the humanity.” Murphy stood. “The bad guys in this are Jawaruddin bin Zari and Steve Callar.” He walked down the driveway. “It’s time for me to go home.”

  “Don’t you want to know where Callar is?”

  Murphy gave him a mocking salute. “I leave him to you. I trust you’ll do the right thing. You always do.”

  WELLS STAYED CALM on the surface roads, but when he reached the Beltway he pushed his foot to the floor and the WRX rocketed through the Virginia night. A childish escape, but it was all he had. For the first time in months, Springsteen filled his ears: “And there’s a darkness in this town that’s got us, too. ” “Independence Day.” The song’s hero was getting ready to move away, leave his life behind. Wells wondered if he had the strength to do the same.

  Back in room 112, he found Callar and Shafer watching HBO, an early-season episode of The Sopranos. Callar’s cheek had bled through all the towels and most of two pillowcases, but he looked oddly comfortable as he grinned at Wells.

  “Come outside with me,” Wells said to Shafer.

  They sat in the WRX as Wells recounted what Murphy had told him.

  “We make it official, he’ll be in custody the rest of his life,” Shafer said. “We’ll call him a material witness. An enemy combatant. He’ll never get a trial. We’ll never let that video come out.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then that’s how it’s going to be. If the President makes that choice and signs those orders and Callar’s lawyers can’t get a judge to look at the case.”

  “There’s another way.”

  “No. Ellis, you’re the one who told me we needed to get the answers.”

  “That was before I knew what they were. We go back in there and give him his one bullet. He’ll do it. I know he will. It’s all he’s been talking about.”

  “No.”

  “It’ll be easier. For him and for us.”

  Wells gripped the steering wheel tight. “Easy is what got us here. We’re following the law this time.”

  “And when the law fails?”

  “I’d rather see the law fail than put my own judgment ahead of it. It ends here.”

  “At the Budget Motor Inn.”

  “That’s right.”

  Wells stepped out of the car, walked into the room. Callar looked up from the television. “I want to see my wife.”

  “Not tonight,” Wells said. “Tonight we’re taking you in.”

  EPILOGUE

  Wells wasn’t expecting a happy ending, and he didn’t get one.

  To be sure that Whitby wouldn’t be able to make Callar disappear, Wells and Shafer brought him directly to Langley from the motel. In the days that followed, the FBI and Justice insisted that Callar had to be formally charged so the murder cases could be closed. The CIA and Defense argued that a trial, or even an indictment, would cause a media frenzy that would bust open the deal that the United States had cut with the ISI. Anyway, Callar wasn’t contesting his guilt, so a trial would be pointless.

  Whitby stayed out of the fight. He was holed up with the defense lawyer he’d hired the day after Wells and Shafer brought in Callar. The lawyer, Nate Marmur, was a former solicitor general who specialized in cleaning up these messes, cases where guilt and innocence hardly mattered, or even existed.

  The argument festered for a week. Then the President stepped in. Callar would plead guilty to four counts of murder in federal court in New Orleans for killing Jerry Williams, Kenneth Karp, Jack Fisher, and Mike Wyly. He would avoid execution, instead spending life in prison.

  Callar initially refused to agree to the deal and demanded a trial. He relented after being told that if he didn’t agree, he would be held at sea for the rest of his life held in the brigs of American aircraft carriers. He was also promised, in writing, that he’d be allowed to visit his wife’s grave once every other year.

  The plea agreement, which was unusually short for a federal criminal case, said only that Callar’s wife had killed herself after working with the men on a secret deployment. The murders were revenge for her suicide. Task Force 673 and the Midnight House were never mentioned. After signing confidentiality agreements, the families of the four men were brought to FBI headquarters and allowed to see a redacted version of Callar’s confession and the physical evidence against him.

  A week after Callar pled guilty, Whitby resigned as director of national intelligence, saying that he wanted to spend more time with his family. The President accepted his resignation with great regret and named Bobby Yang, an assistant deputy director of operations at the CIA, to replace him. Articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post explained that Yang’s appointment showed that Vinny Duto had beaten back Fred Whitby and retaken control of the American intelligence community.

  Murphy resigned from the CIA the same day, his twenty-third anniversary at the agency. He and Whitby joined Strategies LLC, a K Street lobbying firm that specialized in representing defense and private security companies. Jim D’Angelo was never charged for erasing the names from the NSA database, though he was barred from future federal contracting work, the slightest of slaps on his oversized wrists.

  THEN ONLY DUTO, Shafer, and Wells were left. A week afer Whitby’s resignation, Duto invited Wells and Shafer to his office. They arrived to find Duto holding a bottle of Dom Pérignon and three glasses.

  “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “All your hard work.”

  “Don’t rub this in our faces, Vinny,” Wells said.

  “Aren’t you wondering if I knew what happened to bin Zari and Mohammed?”

  “I’d break your jaw, but you’re not worth the punch.”

  “I had no idea. So help me God. I mean, the deal with the ISI, yes, I knew. And there were rumors that the Midnight House, at the end, something was wrong. But I didn’t know what.”

  “If you didn’t it’s only because you didn’t want to,” Shafer said. “Protect yourself from the scandal.”

  “Don’t be such a cynic, Ellis,” Duto said. “Karp and Murphy never told me, and Whitby shut me down after we got that le
tter.”

  It was at these moments that Wells felt his limits most keenly. These raw power games left Wells cold, and so he refused to play them. That attitude was a strength, but a weakness, too. It left him as a pawn for men like Duto.

  “So, you called us,” Shafer said.

  “I knew, I wound you up, you wouldn’t stop spinning until you solved the case.”

  “And you figured the answer had to be bad for Whitby. Whatever it was. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to interfere.”

  Duto twisted the champagne cork until it exploded across the room. Bubbly sunlight poured from the bottle. He poured the glasses full. Duto was in an expansive mood, Wells saw. His triumph filled the office like fog. Wells didn’t think he’d ever be able to drink champagne again.

  “From the beginning, I should have been more involved with the Midnight House,” Duto said. “I knew we had to be in the mix, but I didn’t like the setup. Thought it could all blow up.”

  “You figured, let the Pentagon handle it.”

  “Then they hit the lottery, find this tape. And Fred Whitby rides it all the way to DNI. You think that’s good for the agency?”

  “Now Whitby’s gone,” Wells said. “You’re right back where you belong. Top of the anthill.”

  “Justice has been served, John. The killer caught. Congratulations. Have a drink. Well deserved.”

  “A couple years ago, after China, I was so beat up. Exley, she told me, if I wanted to quit, I could. No one would judge me. Back then I thought, I can’t. I can’t be weak. But now I’m strong enough to be weak. I quit, Vinny. Effective immediately.”

  “John—”

  “Because it’s not about being weak. I’m sick of this game, that’s all.”

  “Is this about Exley? I wouldn’t count on her taking you back.”

  Exley. The magic word. Just hearing her name when he wasn’t prepared was enough to suck the air out of Wells’s lungs. “This has got nothing to do with Jenny.” Which was true in the strictest sense. Wells still hadn’t called Exley; he was headed for New Hampshire. Though everything was always about Exley. “This is about the stench coming off you. This is about the Midnight House. And that we know who killed Benazir Bhutto. And we’re not going to do anything about any of it.”