Inside Out: A novel

by Barry Eisler

  “She works for me, all right? Or she did, when I represented the vice president’s office. Now I’m more of an asset for her because of my connections. Or, she’s my asset. Sometimes it gets hard to tell.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I knew the FBI was going to be involved in this thing, okay? I knew as soon as it broke, and I needed someone I could trust. So I pulled some strings and had Lanier assigned. She’s been reporting developments to me. Including the involvement of a mysterious operative who wouldn’t even acknowledge his affiliations.”

  “Who sent those contractors to Costa Rica? Who sent the two Ground Branch guys?”

  “That was a CIA op.”

  “But you knew about it.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I make it a habit to know about everything.”

  Ben thought. Someone had followed him from the airport that afternoon. The only person outside of Hort who knew he’d been selected as the courier was Paula. He could have kicked himself for his stupidity, for letting his guard down. She’d played him. And he’d fallen for it.

  “What about the two guys who followed me from National today?”

  “Ground Branch again.”

  “Who the hell’s running the CIA? You?”

  “It’s not a question of who’s running it. People have common interests. We work together.”

  “And your common interest on the tapes is the Caspers.”

  “That’s everybody’s common interest. Every American’s, anyway.”

  “What are they?”

  “Why are you asking me? You work for Horton, right? He knows as much as I do. Christ, he was responsible for their orderly disposition.”

  Ben was surprised but didn’t show it. “I’ll ask him when I’m ready to ask him. I’m asking you now.”

  Ulrich looked at him. “What do you think is on those tapes?”

  Ben shrugged. “Waterboarding. Torture.”

  Ulrich laughed. “Waterboarding and torture aren’t even news anymore. Over half the country supports torture, didn’t you know? And over sixty percent of Evangelicals.”

  “Video would be different.”

  “Well, that’s probably true. Seeing what American soldiers and spies had to resort to in the war on terror would have been painful. It would have damaged our self-image as a country, weakened our will to do what needs to be done. But the Caspers were the real problem. Asking the country to accept what we had to do about them … that would have been too much. People wouldn’t be able to understand. And they shouldn’t be forced to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll give me the tapes?”

  “For the truth.”

  Ulrich nodded. “You know about the ghost detainees, don’t you?”

  Ben thought about what he’d heard. “Rumors. Detainees the CIA was holding without acknowledging their capture or detention. Shuttling them through Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo and the rest so the Red Cross couldn’t verify their existence, or keeping them at the black sites. That’s what the Caspers were?”

  Ulrich wiped blood from his mouth, then regarded his hand. “If you want to keep secret prisoners, you have to build secret prisons. After 9/11, we tasked the CIA with doing exactly that. And then we populated what they built.”

  “With the Caspers.”

  “Among others. Now, the way you hear about it in the media today, you’d think all the people we picked up in the war on terror were innocent. Because once the Supreme Court decided terror detainees had the right to petition for habeas corpus, we had to start letting a lot of them go.”

  Ben thought of the Manila city jail. “Well, if you couldn’t prove they’d done anything—”

  “Just because we couldn’t prove it in a court of law didn’t mean it wasn’t so. And look, okay, maybe some of them were innocent. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. But now they have a grudge. Meaning, even if they weren’t dangerous before, they are now. You want to be the one who lets one of these guys go and then have him slaughter more Americans? You’re JSOC, not the ACLU, I thought you’d get this. It’s why I’m telling you.”

  Ben didn’t answer. Not so much earlier, he would have gotten it. But now, hearing it out loud, he wasn’t sure.

  “So you captured these ghosts. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, the way they were interrogated might have offended the sensibilities of the armchair quarterbacks who’ve already forgotten 9/11.”

  “You waterboarded them?”

  Ulrich tugged on his beard. “At first.”

  Ben had been waterboarded during his SERE—survival, evasion, resistance, escape—training. He’d consented to it, the people who’d done it had been his own instructors, he’d been provided with a safe word and a tennis ball he could just drop at any time to stop the whole thing, and it had only been once—and still it was one of the most unpleasant things that had ever been done to him, instantly stripping away his will and replacing it with paralyzing, childlike terror. He’d held out for fourteen seconds, which made him practically the class champion. And the Caspers had gotten the real thing, and who knows how many times.

  “What do you mean, ‘at first’?”

  “Let’s just say that, by the end, they wished they were just being waterboarded.”

  Ben looked at him, trying to imagine what you would have to do to a man to make him long to be waterboarded, instead. He couldn’t come up with anything. He said, “And the CIA videotaped it.”

  “You got it. There’s no genius like a CIA genius. Fundamentally, they created a whole line of government snuff films.”

  Ben imagined a bunch of guys watching God knows what through a viewfinder, recording it, watching it again later on a screen in a dark room. Rewinding it. Pausing. He thought of what Hort had said, about how torture is always about something else. He felt sick.

  “And you’re worried that if the public ever sees the videos, they’re not just going to go after the people who filmed and starred in them, they’re going to go after the producers, too.”

  Ulrich looked at him. “If I were you, I’d be a little more concerned about Muslim audiences on this than I would be with domestic ones.”

  “Yeah, I get that. But you’re not me.”

  Ulrich didn’t answer.

  Something was tickling at Ben’s mind. There were a lot of things you knew when you were in the unit, or at least that you’d hear about. But the Caspers … not a word. How had they covered it up so completely?

  “What did you do with them?” he said. “The Caspers. When you were done with them. Done filming.”

  Ulrich didn’t answer.

  Ben said, “Tell me you didn’t.”

  “Look, these were genuinely dangerous men—”

  “Oh, man—”

  “—who couldn’t just be released. But they couldn’t be tried, either, or they would have gone public with tales of torture. And besides, they’d go free in the end anyway because people would say their confessions had been coerced.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “They were disposed of.”

  “You mean, the CIA just executed them? Prisoners?”

  “Not the CIA. JSOC. Your commander. Horton.”

  Ben blinked despite himself. “What? Why?”

  “JSOC was being run out of the Office of the Vice President. The Caspers were just one of the operations your people were involved in. They were ghosts anyway—no records of their capture, movement, detention, or imprisonment. It was as though they hadn’t existed. We just had to make de jure what was de facto. And now it is. They don’t exist. They never did.”

  “Except for the tapes.”

  “Yes. That’s why we wanted those tapes back. You ought to get a medal for recovering them.”

  For some reason, the thought of this guy proposing a medal, and for this, made Ben want to hit him again.

  “What was Ecologia, then?”

  “A company th
at devised an innovative way to dispose of cadavers. The Ecologia machine freeze-dries Aunt Betty in liquid nitrogen, vibrates her into dust, vacuums off the water, removes any dental or surgical metals with a magnet, and leaves you with nothing but compost. They recommend you plant a tree using Aunt Betty as the fertilizer. A memory tree, I think they call it.”

  “That’s how you got rid of the Caspers. You killed them and then freeze-dried them.”

  “Actually, as I understand it, the Caspers were run through the machines alive. Drugged first. They didn’t feel anything. They weren’t afraid. They didn’t know what was coming.”

  Ben shook his head. He’d been involved in some dark things, some things that crossed the line, he knew. But this … it was extreme.

  “Are you starting to get it now?” Ulrich said. “Imagine videos worse than Abu Ghraib, worse than what’s described even in the nonredacted version of the CIA inspector general’s report. Videos that would have implicated our brave men and women in activities the liberal media would call murder. If those tapes had gotten out, it would have been a national security calamity.”

  Ben thought for a minute. He said, “Who signed off on acquiring the Ecologia units? That must have been a big purchase, right? Liquid nitrogen, high-powered vibration, and magnets … and there would have been training, too, right? It’s not like you bought a toaster oven with an instruction booklet. This was big. Whose fingerprints are on the authorization paperwork?”

  Ulrich didn’t answer.

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  “If your point is that I’m motivated because I’ve got my own skin in the game—”

  “That was my point. Yeah.”

  “—you should know that my own exposure or lack of exposure is hardly the point. The national security risk exists either way.”

  “Can you really tell the difference between one and the other?”

  “Just give me the tapes. I’ll make sure they’re properly disposed of. And you might have noticed, I’m pretty well connected in Washington.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You’re a lobbyist. That’s, what, one level higher on the food chain than a telemarketer?”

  “I’m talking about influence. And if you don’t think I have it, you’re not paying attention. I’d say you deserve a promotion for what you’ve done. The posting of your choice. Maybe an assignment to the National Security Council, how would that be? The national security adviser is a personal friend. You’d have his ear, you could see how policy is really made. From the inside.”

  Ben looked at Ulrich’s ego wall. His urge to hit the guy had evaporated, leaving behind a sediment of dull nausea and a nameless feeling of being somehow … tainted.

  “I’ve seen it,” he said. He turned and walked toward the door.

  “Wait,” Ulrich said. “What about the tapes?”

  Ben didn’t answer. He opened the door and kept on walking.

  Ulrich hurried to his side. “Then tell me what you want,” he said, his voice low. “Money? The government was prepared to pay a hundred million to have those tapes back. You can have that, too.”

  Ben hit the down button in the elevator bank. His head hurt. He wanted to be alone.

  “Just tell me what you want,” Ulrich said.

  A chime sounded. The elevator doors opened. Ben stepped inside.

  “I’ll let you know,” he said.

  “Wait, you can’t just walk away. We’re talking about the property of the U.S. government. You can’t—”

  The doors closed. Ben hit the button for the third floor. He’d take the stairs from there.

  He considered that phrase, property of the U.S. government. He wondered if Ulrich intended, or even recognized, its sudden ambiguity.

  39

  More Inside

  Ben walked through downtown D.C., feeling exhausted, adrift. This thing had seemed so straightforward at first. Why didn’t it now? Nothing had really changed. There were tapes. If the tapes got out, it would be a terrorist recruitment bonanza. He’d been tasked with locating the tapes, and he’d carried out his orders. He hadn’t managed a neat, final conclusion, there was no real victory to declare, but under the circumstances he’d achieved the best possible outcome, or anyway the least bad one. The information he’d uncovered had enabled Uncle Sam to avoid a checkmate in favor of a stalemate. And for purposes of keeping those tapes under wraps, a stalemate was just as good as a win.

  So why did he feel so … empty? And unclean?

  What had Larison said? How can there be a conspiracy when everyone is complicit?

  He called Hort. One ring, then, “Where have you been?”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t check in earlier.”

  “Damn, son, don’t make me hear from Larison before I hear from you. I’m old enough for that kind of shit to give me a heart attack.”

  “You heard from Larison?”

  “I left him a note with the diamonds. I needed to tell him what you gave him wasn’t the genuine article.”

  Ben was so surprised he shook his head as though to clear it. “What?”

  “Yes, I know that’s a surprise. I’ll brief you on the rest when you’re ready.”

  “They were fake? Do you know what he would have done if he’d realized?”

  “I told you, I’ll brief you—”

  “I’m ready right now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Downtown D.C.”

  “I’m at the Pentagon. Platform, Farragut West Station? That’s four stops for me, I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  He clicked off. For some reason, beyond the obvious fact that Hort had put him in danger without warning him of it, it bugged him that Larison hadn’t gotten what he was supposed to. Maybe it was a brothers-in-arms thing. Maybe it was because what Hort had done felt exactly like the kind of manipulation Larison had warned him about. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was, he didn’t like it.

  Hort showed up on time. “Are you hungry?” he said, walking over to the wickets, where Ben was standing. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a good steak.”

  They headed west on K Street, then north on Nineteenth, against traffic both ways. It was a small thing, but Hort had trained Ben never to give the opposition something for free, and Ben wasn’t surprised he lived what he taught. After about five minutes, they arrived at a place called the Palm. White-linen-covered tables and booths, polished wood floors, cartoons of the celebrities who’d eaten there plastered on the walls. Seated maybe a hundred people and looked pretty full. The manager greeted Hort as “Colonel Horton.” Told him not to worry that he didn’t have a reservation. Ben wondered what it was all about. Hort didn’t ordinarily debrief him at places like this one. Whatever. The aroma of well-seasoned steak was suddenly incredibly inviting.

  They ordered a pair of sixteen-ounce New York strips. Hort chose a bottle of wine, too, a California Cabernet from a place called Schlein Vineyard.

  “I don’t get it,” Ben said quietly after the waiter had departed. He had to suppress his irritation. “How could you give Larison fakes? Isn’t he going to find out and just release the tapes?”

  “I can’t guarantee that he won’t. But I couldn’t guarantee it the other way, either. Overall, I think we’re safer if he gets his payout as an annuity instead of as a lump sum. A modified version of your proposal.”

  “Safer for whom? You know what he would have done if he’d figured it out while we were still together?”

  “You would have handled that.”

  “Come on, Hort, what was it, three days ago you were telling me I wasn’t at his level?”

  “Yet.”

  “Yet. I caught up to him in three days?”

  “You were supposed to be just the courier. If you’d known, it would have affected your demeanor. Larison would have spotted that. So you would have been in more danger knowing than you were in ignorance. It was a calculated risk. And from the results, I’d say it was
the right one.”

  Ben shook his head, wanting to say more, not knowing what. It was true, it had turned out well. And it wasn’t the first time he’d been sent into the shit without knowing everything he would have wanted to, or felt he was entitled to. But still, that feeling of being … manipulated. It was settling in more deeply.

  “I guess,” he said, after a moment. “But I’ll tell you, having seen the guy in action twice now, I wouldn’t want to piss him off unnecessarily.”

  “You forget. I know him.”

  Ben thought of that phrase Hort had used on the flight from Manila: I know people. At the time, he’d thought he understood. Now he realized Hort hadn’t been talking about contacts, or at least not only. He was talking about people’s natures. He wondered, uncomfortably, what Hort thought he knew about him. Ben could be manipulative when he needed to be—he had been with Marcy Wheeler, in fact—but it had never been second nature to him. The thought that Hort’s whole approach to everyone he knew involved assessment, and maneuver, and exploitation, and the realization that Hort probably wasn’t atypical in that regard, at least among a certain class of player … it was making him feel naïve, and concerned, and disgusted, all at the same time.

  The waiter brought the wine. Hort tasted it and nodded. The waiter filled their glasses and moved off.

  Hort raised his glass. “Good work.”

  They touched glasses and drank. Ben barely tasted the wine. What he really wanted was a hot shower. And about thirty hours of sleep. And to not think anymore.

  Ben set down his glass. “I was followed from the airport.”

  Hort nodded. “I wondered. There was something on the news about a shooting in Arlington. You think I had something to do with that?”

  Ben shook his head. “No.”

  “Good. Although I wouldn’t blame you.”

  It was awkward feeling so suspicious of Hort. He supposed he needed to get used to it. “I need to ask you some questions,” he said.

  “I want you to. It’s why I brought you here. So we could talk.”

  “Larison told me about the Caspers. About Ecologia.”

  Hort took a sip of wine. “I thought he might.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”