The Midnight House (44 page)

“I would,” Callar said.

“Would you, now, sweetheart?” Fisher stepped toward her, blew a stream of smoke in her face.

“Enough, Jack,” Terreri said. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Good. And on that happy note, let’s go outside, take a couple pictures. Something to remember when we’re old and gray.”

 

 

DOWNSTAIRS, MOHAMMED PULLED HIMSELF
atop the cot, wormed his head into the vent. The tube was cracked and rusted, the air inside hot and stale. He wanted to pull out his head. He wanted to lie on the floor and close his eyes and sleep. And wake up in the room in Haji Camp he shared with his brothers, wake up before the Jaish had touched him. He was so tired.

But the djinns didn’t care about his excuses. They had chosen him for the mission. As he wavered, their voices rose, a cacophony of curses and threats, filling him until he couldn’t breathe.
Go on,
the djinns said.
Leave it behind.

Mohammed balanced himself on top of the cot. He pushed himself into the vent and found the cross-passage that ran horizontally through the ceiling of the cell block. To his right, the passage led to the front of the block and the guard station. To the left, it ran toward the rear wall and Jawaruddin’s cell.

Left,
the djinns whispered.
Left
.

Mohammed put the knife into the passage to his left. He reached for the ridges of metal where the ventilation pipes had been welded together and pulled himself left, pushing the knife before him. For a moment he was stuck, and then he wriggled his shoulders sideways and freed himself and squirmed forward with the syncopated twists of a snake. He slid over the vertical vent that dropped into the cell beside his and wriggled along until he reached the fourth and final cell. In the cell below, he heard Jawaruddin. He looked down and saw Jawaruddin’s bulky body through the grate. “Monkey. Are you up there?”

Now,
the djinns said.
He’s the devil. The devil, the devil, the devil. And if you don’t do what we say, you’ll be the devil, too.

Mohammed dropped down and kicked through the grate and slid out.

 

 

IN THE CELL BELOW,
bin Zari looked up almost in awe as Mohammed’s feet emerged from the vent. “Crazy monkey. Where did you think you were going? Trying to escape?”

Bin Zari reached out and tugged at Mohammed’s legs and pulled him down. Centimeter by centimeter, Mohammed’s belly and neck and head came out of the grate. His arms were over his head, the last part of him to emerge—

And so bin Zari had only an instant to react when Mohammed’s arms came free and Mohammed’s right arm swung down at his face with something that looked like a lightning bolt wrapped inside his brown fingers. Bin Zari grunted and twisted his head and let go of Mohammed—

But he was too late. The sharpened edge of the cot leg caught his left eye and tore through the lid and the cornea and into the meat of the eyeball. Bin Zari lifted his arms and tried to scream, but Mohammed shoved the leg deep into his brain, and before bin Zari knew what had happened the pain spread from his eye to everywhere and nowhere and he couldn’t hold himself and—

He collapsed beneath Mohammed, dead before he touched the ground.

 

 

BUT MOHAMMED AND THE DJINNS
weren’t finished. Mohammed slashed at Jawaruddin’s face and belly until the big man’s guts covered the floor of the cell and his nose and ears lay stacked on what was left of his chest.
Now eat,
the djinns told him.
Eat.

“No,” Mohammed said aloud.

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.

W
e 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 about 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.