The Midnight House (37 page)

“No. But I’ve been waiting, all this time, for somebody to ask.”

“Lucky us for being first,” Shafer said. “You remember the names of the guys you deleted?”

D’Angelo shook his head. “But they were both Paki, I’m sure of that. One was in his early thirties and the other was like seventeen. I think they were caught in Islamabad. And both booked the same day, and it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, not that long before I erased them. Summer ’08, maybe.”

“And did your guy tell you what had happened to them?”

“He said they weren’t around. Which could have meant rendition, but I didn’t think so. Because then why go to all this trouble?”

“You figured they were dead.”

D’Angelo nodded.

“But your guy, how did you know you could trust him, he wasn’t setting you up?”

“I knew he was real. Partly because it was such a weird request,” D’Angelo said. “Too weird to be anything but real. I mean, who would come up with a sting like that? The FBI? The NSA IG? Didn’t make sense. And I knew the guy was a real op. I mean, I’d met him before. In Kuwait.”

“So, what’s his name? ”

D’Angelo shook his head.

“Come on, Jim. You’ve been calling him somebody, that guy. No more. We need his name.”

D’Angelo was still. Wells wondered if they’d have to come at him again. But then he nodded. “He worked for you guys,” D’Angelo said. “I think he still does. His name’s Brant Murphy.”

Wells and Shafer looked at each other. “We know him,” Shafer said. “Who was he working for?”

“He never said,” D’Angelo said.

“You’re lying.”

“It’s true. Why would I lie? I didn’t ask, didn’t want to push.”

“But the money, when you got paid, came from CNF. Which gets most of its money from the DNI.”

“Honestly, I was surprised to find out it was a DNI contract. Fact is, I always assumed it was Langley that wanted the names gone.”

Duto and Whitby. Whitby and Duto. Two scorpions in a jar, Wells thought. Playing a game only they understood.

“Why’d you go through such an elaborate scheme?” Wells said. “Why not just take the cash?”

“When he agreed to the million, I told him to give me a hundred thou in cash up front, the rest through a shell. I wanted the money to look legal. I knew they could do it that way. He said fine. But I was stupid. Should have gone with the cash. Instead, I left this trail.”

“Without which you wouldn’t have the chance to unburden yourself to us,” Shafer said. “Lucky you.”

D’Angelo didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm. “Anyway, I got the first hundred. I went in, cleaned out the registry. And about six months after I retired, Murphy called, told me there’d be a no-bid contract coming my way. Theoretically, I’m doing database analysis for the DNI.”

“So, the money is from Fred Whitby?”

“Yes, but I’m telling you I don’t know whether he was in on it. For that, you’re going to have to ask Murphy.”

“I guess we will.”

T
he road into Damghar was muddy but passable, hard-packed by tractors bringing wheat to market. The rain fell steadily, dampening Snyder’s robe, cooling his hands. Overhead, the clouds had thickened and the sky was black. He hit a pothole, and the bike dropped under him and nearly skidded out. He slowed, lowered his eyes to the road, tried not to think of the odds they faced, of the thousands of militants holed up in this valley. He’d decided already that if they got pinned down here, he was saving the last bullet in his Glock for himself. He wasn’t leaving himself to the tender mercies of the Talibs.

He passed one house, another, and then he was in Damghar proper. The village’s buildings were a muddle of crumbling brick and concrete. He swerved around a rusted-out motorcycle engine to find his front tire in a pile of something soft and fetid. The silence was absolute. The place felt more like a half-unearthed ruin than a living village. Even the dogs were quiet. The Talibs had decreed that any dog on the streets could be shot on sight. Like many devout Muslims, they considered dogs
haram,
forbidden. The strays that had survived the first culling had hidden themselves away.

Thanks to the practice on the simulator, the streets felt familiar to Snyder. Without slowing, he turned left, around the mosque in the center of the village, and then left, again, onto the cart track that led to the target house.

Two minutes later, Snyder reached the house. He slowed as he rode by, listening for a television, a baby’s cry, a man’s footsteps. Any sign of life. But he heard only the hum of rain against the road, the faint squeak of the bike’s tires.

He rode another hundred yards before turning back. He’d reached what pilots called V1, the last chance to abort takeoff. He could still go back to the squad. No one would question him. They would go back to Islamabad, try again another night. But once he got off the bike, they’d be committed. If anything happened to him, the rest of the squad would come for him. Then they’d have to fight their way out, and that would be little more than suicide.

He stopped in front of the house, counted backward from five. To the south, thunder boomed. He breathed his fear in deep, exhaled it into the rain. And he went. He set down the bike, grabbed the black bag from the basket. He ran low along the edge of the property, protected by a wall that was a four-foot-high jumble of mud and stone. At the front left corner of the house, he ducked around the tractor, flattened himself against the wall.

He waited five seconds, and five more, listening for movement inside. The house was still. Before his fear could rise, he moved again, creeping along the wall, feeling the the brick against his back. A window was cut halfway into the wall, really just a hole in the concrete. Snyder ducked low and kept moving. As he did, the rain picked up and another thunderclap broke the night, closer this time, though still miles away.

Two nights before, the agency had repeated its thermal scan with the Predator. The people in the house showed up in the same places they’d been the first time around. Two in the back-left corner of the house, three close together in the middle. They couldn’t be sure, but the best bet was that Mommy and Daddy were in one room, the kids in another. What really mattered, though, was that they knew which rooms were occupied.

Snyder inched around the corner of the house and dropped to his hands and knees. Behind the house, the wheat stretched high in carefully cultivated rows. The village was a mess, but the fields were immaculate. The rain hissed down, and the river burbled a mile off. A dog barked in the distance. Snyder froze, waited. But he didn’t hear it again.

He edged to the window, peeked inside. In the darkness he saw the outlines of a mattress on the floor, a thin sheet covering two pairs of legs. Now, at last, he heard breathing, steady and ragged.

He leaned against the wall, unzipped his bag, pulled out a canister, as big around as a dinner plate, three inches high. A long rubber tube extended from a nozzle on the side of the canister, ending in what looked like a bicycle needle. The needle was the problem. If he threw the tube inside the house, the needle would clatter against the floor. Then Snyder saw the jagged hole in the wall, a foot above the ground, where a brick had crumbled into dust. He knelt down, poked a finger into the hole. It ran the width of the brick. He pushed the needle into the hole inch by inch, as carefully as a surgeon making the morning’s first cut, until he’d threaded the tip through. Then he pressed down the panel on top of the canister.

The canister didn’t look like much, but its simplicity was deceptive. It had cost the CIA seven million dollars to develop. It held tubes of compressed nitrogen, an electronic flow meter, and two vials. The vials contained a mixture of propofol and fentanyl, two potent anesthetics that were normally given intravenously. Making the propofol inhalable had been the project’s most significant scientific hurdle. Propofol was liquid at room temperature, a chalky white fluid that anesthesiologists called “milk of amnesia.” Doctors had used it for decades to knock out patients for minor surgeries. A twentieth of a gram of propofol would put a man to sleep in seconds. Normally, it could only be given intravenously, but by attaching it to a chlorofluorocarbon compound, the agency’s scientists produced a chemical that was a gas at room temperature but retained propofol’s anesthetic qualities.

Fentanyl, the other compound in the mix, worked more slowly than propofol but had a wider safety margin. Three agency scientists, all Ph.D.s in toxicology, had experimented with different combinations of the two drugs, seeking a safe mix that would work in less than five seconds. At first they’d tested the gas on dogs and monkeys. But eventually they needed to find out if the gas was safe for human use. Outsiders weren’t an option, since trying it on humans, even if they were volunteers and informed of the risks, would be unethical. The scientists organized a do-it-yourself study in their lab in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building, testing it on themselves a dozen or so times, with an agency doctor standing by. Aside from one minor incident—a three-hour coma—the stuff had worked. They’d declared it ready for battle.

As Armstrong had pointed out to Maggs, the idea of knockout gases wasn’t new. In 2002, Chechen terrorists took eight hundred fifty hostages in an opera house in Moscow, promising to blow up the building if they were attacked. After negotiations failed, Russian special forces poured fentanyl and halothane, an older anesthetic, into the building’s ventilation system. The good news was that the soldiers retook the building without having to fire a shot. The bad news was that the gas killed at least 129 of the hostages.

To reduce the risk of overdoses, Maggs and Armstrong had agreed to use the lowest possible dose, just enough to knock the family out for fifteen minutes. After that the people in the house would have to be, in the dry language of the mission, “mechanically restrained.” Bound and gagged.

 

 

THE CANISTER HISSED SOFTLY
as Snyder pressed the top panel. The engineers at the Directorate of Science and Technology had built it to work without mechanical parts, on the assumption that it would be used in places where silence was essential. The compressed nitrogen mixed with the fentanyl and propofol in a cylinder about the size of a small spark plug. Then the gas poured through the tube and into the needle, which was another marvel of engineering, designed to disperse the gas as widely and quickly as possible. After consulting with aerospace engineers from Boeing, the Langley engineers had designed a series of superfine titanium mesh sheets at the tip of the needle. The propofol and fentanyl molecules bounced wildly off the mesh, careening in every direction as they entered the open air. They filled a one-hundred-cubic-foot room—twelve feet by ten feet by eight feet three inches—in less than a minute.

The hiss faded. A thumbnail-sized LCD on the side of the canister flashed yellow and then turned green, indicating that the gas was flowing freely, no blockages inside the canister or at the tip. Snyder peeked in the window, but nothing inside had changed. He was faintly surprised. He realized that he had expected to see or smell the gas, though he knew it was both odorless and invisible. Then the man in the bed kicked his legs convulsively. Seconds later his breathing changed, slowing and settling, and Snyder knew that the gas had hit him.

He scuttled along the wall to the next window. He peeked inside, saw three pairs of skinny legs. Based on their size, two were children, one was a teenager. And at least one was awake.

“Faisal? Faisal?” a boy said in Pashto, his voice small, querulous. “Do you hear it? Faisal?”

An older boy answered grumpily. “Hush, Wadel. It’s thunder only. Don’t be a woman.”

Snyder couldn’t find a crack in the wall. He pulled the second canister from the bag. He flicked a switch on the canister to set the pressure at high and pressed the panel and tossed the tube in the window.

The tube slapped against the cement floor and the gas leaked out with a loud hiss. Inside, one of the kids rolled to his feet. “See it, Wadel?”Steps came toward the window. “There. The snake.”

The tube went taut. Snyder imagined the boy must have grabbed it. He held tight, hoping the tube wouldn’t tear. The tube stretched—

And then went slack as the boy collapsed, banging against the concrete as lifelessly as a sack of potatoes.

“Faisal?” the second boy, Wadel, said. He stepped toward the window. “Faisal?” He wasn’t yelling, not yet, but his voice was rising. “Fath—”

His voice ended. It didn’t trail off. It fell dead as suddenly as a radio being unplugged. A fraction of a second later, Snyder heard Wadel’s body thump against the floor beside his brother’s.

“Guess it works,” Snyder whispered. He backed away from the house to be sure he wouldn’t get more than a whiff of the gas. He pressed the send button on his transmitter.

“Echo One,” he said into his microphone. “This is Echo Five. Target is secure.”

“Roger that,” Armstrong said.