The Midnight House

by Alex Berenson

  “The day after Fisher and Wyly got killed, Duto called me to his office. I knew something was up, because normally he prefers to stay as far from me as possible. Anyway, he told me. Said there was an investigation starting up.”

  “So, the FBI has the letter.”

  Joyner shook her big blonde head. “Not exactly. Duto asked me whether I’d talked to the bureau. I said, how could I have done that when you just told me there was an investigation going. Then he told me that he was not authorizing distribution of the letter to anyone outside the agency.”

  “Including the bureau.”

  “Correct. Nobody had the clearance, he said. I had the distinct impression he wanted me to destroy the letter, but he didn’t come out and say so.”

  “Did he ask you to purge it from your memory? Eternal sunshine, et cetera?”

  “Not yet. That’s probably next.”

  “He tell you his logic for hiding evidence in a criminal investigation?”

  “He did not. If I’d asked, no doubt he would have pulled out the ol’ national security exemption, but I did not ask.”

  “And he didn’t explicitly tell you to destroy it.”

  “You know Vinny Duto better than that, Ellis. That would have needed to be in writing, and he wasn’t interested in having this in writing. And then, to my not quite surprise, you called.” She paused. “Wish I could be more helpful, but that’s pretty much all I have.”

  “Do you think there’s a connection between the torture allegations and the theft?”

  She tilted her head and clucked—chk-chk. “Aside from the fact that the same person’s making them? No. I mean, Murphy was worried about the money. Less so about the torture. You’d expect it would be the other way around.”

  “It’s a strange letter,” Shafer said.

  “Very strange. It reads like the writer didn’t grow up speaking English. The bolding, the capitalized words. But I think all that’s fake. It feels like it’s from somebody inside the squad. I can’t think how else anyone would have the specifics, the prisoner numbers.”

  “If you worked for a foreign intelligence agency.”

  “Maybe the Brits,” Joyner said. “But probably not even. Now do me a favor, figure this out, since I’m not allowed to.”

  “I’ll do that, Lucy. But I need something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Really.”

  “No. Not even close to anything.”

  “It would be very helpful to me if you could freshen up. As they say in Texas and other such genteel places.”

  She put a finger on the letter. “You can’t have it, Ellis.”

  “It’ll be right here when you get back.”

  “You’re very fortunate to have that clearance.” She stretched her arms over her head. “Well. I do believe I need to freshen up,” she said. “Be right back.”

  She disappeared. And Shafer thumbed twelve ten-digit numbers into his BlackBerry:

  3185304876—3184690284—4007986133—4013337810—4042991331—4041179553—4192578423—5567208212—6501740917—6500415280—7298472436—7297786130

  The letter was just where she’d left it when she got back. Ellis wasn’t. He stood, examining the L.B.J. poster.

  “What’s this about, Lucy? Texas pride or something deeper?”

  “Wish I could tell you, but it’s a secret I never share,” she said.

  “We seem to be heavy on those.”

  10

  CAIRO

  An ocean and a continent away, Wells woke to cool water trickling down his neck. He lay on a mud floor, his hands bound behind his back, shoes and camera bag gone. His head throbbed, and the base of his skull had grown a soft sticky lump. Two identical imams sat on two identical chairs above him, pouring water onto him from two identically cracked pitchers.

  Wells closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten in Arabic: “Wahid, itnayn . . .” When he opened his eyes, he found that the two imams had merged into one. He moved his head carefully, taking in the room. It wasn’t much, a ten-foot square with smooth, windowless walls and a single naked bulb above. He saw only the imam and Ihab, not Hani.

  “Kuwaiti,” the imam said.

  “My name is Nadeem,” Wells said. His voice was low and cracked. “And it wasn’t necessary to hit me.”

  “You woke up quickly.”

  “I have a hard head. Inshallah. May I ask, sheikh? How did the boy find me? How did you know I’d come that way?”

  The imam smiled. “He wasn’t the only boy, Kuwaiti. All over the cemetery they watched for you.”

  “Where’s Hani?”

  The imam set down the pitcher, knelt beside Wells, squeezed Wells’s cheeks between his fingers. “Why do you care? You miss him?”

  Wells hesitated. Should he speak badly of the imam’s right-hand man? For all Wells knew, they’d been friends from birth and insulting Hani would cost him his shot at Alaa. But he didn’t see any other move. “I don’t trust him, your friend Hani.”

  The imam’s eyes flicked to Ihab, then back to Wells.

  “I don’t know how long you’ve known him, but I fear he’s one of the pharaoh’s men. I almost didn’t come tonight.”

  “Why would you say such things about my good friend?”

  “I’ve dealt with muk before.”

  “Dealt with, Kuwaiti? Or worked with?”

  Wells pushed himself against the wall, forcing himself into a sitting position before nausea overtook him. “I risked my life to come to you. And I’ve done what you’ve asked, everything. So, please, if you still don’t trust me, let’s end this charade.” He turned to Ihab. “In the truck, you asked me why I’d chosen your son. Don’t you see? I didn’t choose him. The Americans did. Do you want him to tell his story? Because if you do, I need to speak to him tonight. I can’t stay longer.”

  The imam squeezed Wells’s shoulder. “Close your eyes, Kuwaiti. Sleep a bit.” The two men turned off the light and left.

  WELLS WOKE to find his hands free. A third man had entered the room. Deep-set eyes, a soft chin, close-cropped black hair, a gentle face. Alaa Zumari. He didn’t look like a man who could have ordered a half-dozen murders.

  The imam pulled a chair beside Wells. “Can you sit?”

  Wells pushed himself up, took the chair. His stomach turned a somersault. He touched his skull, found his fingertips wet. He was still leaking.

  “Salaam alekeim,” Alaa said.

  “Alekeim salaam. You’re Alaa Zumari? I’m Nadeem.”

  His camera bag and shoes had materialized at his feet. He pulled out the camera, mounted it on the tripod. He turned on the camera, then turned it off.

  “First, you tell me your story without the camera, Alaa. Then we do it again, on tape. It will go more smoothly.”

  “I understand,” Alaa said. He was his father’s son, quiet and collected. Wells wondered if his interrogators had misunderstood his composure as arrogance.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five. I was born in Alex”—Alexandria. “We moved to Cairo when I was six.”

  “Are you very religious?”

  “Not so much. He”—Alaa glanced at his father—“always told me to study the Quran, study, study, but I didn’t like it.”

  “How did you end up in Baghdad?”

  “Four years ago, when I was twenty-one, I was a waiter in the Sofitel.” The Sofitel was one of the bigger Cairo hotels, a tall, cylindrical building on an island in the Nile. “Sometimes I drove a Mercedes for a rich man who visited there with his girlfriends. A very rich man.”

  “An Egyptian?”

  “Yes. I worked hard. I wanted to save money, to get married. I drove for this man a lot. After a year, his son, at the time he was nineteen, he came to me and said, ‘Alaa. My father likes you. He trusts you. I trust you, too. I want you to go to Baghdad and start a mobile-phone business with me.’ He said, ‘You carry in the phones, and when you get there, you do an agreement with the Iraqicom’ ”—the biggest mobile-ph
one company in Iraq. “ ‘You buy minutes from them, a lot, millions. They give you a discount. Then you sell the phones with the time attached. If it works, we make a lot of money.’ That’s what he said.”

  “But he didn’t want to go to Baghdad himself?”

  “He’s not a fool. Unlike me.”

  “So you said yes.”

  “It’s a risk, okay, but I need the money. I said yes. He gave in fifty thousand U.S. and I gave in five thousand pounds.” Five thousand Egyptian pounds, about one thousand dollars. “All my money. We bought five hundred cell phones, cheap ones, in Qatar. The rest of the money was to buy the minutes.”

  “And you went to Baghdad.”

  “Yes. Over the border through Jordan. Very dangerous. I didn’t know how dangerous until too late. We drive in a convoy. Six cars, GMCs. Halfway through, the middle of the desert, one of the GMCs, it gets hijacked, the driver shot. The passengers kidnapped. Killed, probably. I don’t know. But we were lucky, we made it to Baghdad. And my rich friend, he has found a place for me to stay, because the hotels are too dangerous. He has a second cousin there. Named Amr.”

  Alaa paused, hunched back against the wall, as if reliving his arrival in Baghdad.

  “Have you ever been to Iraq?”

  “Iraqis don’t like Kuwaitis.”

  “Right. So. Baghdad. At first it seems okay. For a few days, I try to get an appointment with Iraqicom. But I can’t. Then one night two men come to the house where I’m staying. Jihadis. Fighting the Americans. They heard about my cell phones. They say, you must pay us a tax.”

  “They heard. Who told them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe Amr. Maybe your partner.”

  “I don’t know!” For the first time, Alaa raised his voice. “So, they say, a tax. They take a hundred of the phones. And ten thousand of the money.”

  “Did you argue with them?”

  “No one argues with these men. I think they would have taken it all, but the man I’m staying with, he stops them. And a few days later, they come back, take more phones, more money.”

  “You didn’t want them to? You weren’t there to help them? Tell me the truth.”

  “I went there to do business! After they come the second time, I call my friend to ask him, maybe I should just come home. He tells me to stay. Tells me, ‘Stay with Amr. Do the deal. Sell the rest of the phones. We can still make money.’ A very good friend.” His voice was low and bitter.

  “You couldn’t go home?”

  “They told me, don’t try. They said they watch the bus stations, GMCs. They’ll kill me if I try.”

  If the story was true, Alaa had been either betrayed by his host or, more likely, set up from the start as an unwitting courier. Wells imagined this quiet man in Baghdad in late 2007, with Iraq teetering close to anarchy. Markets and roads and police stations under attack daily. Wandering into the wrong neighborhood meant certain death. And Alaa, holed up in a house, unable to trust his host, waiting for the insurgents to return, and return again, until the money and the phones were gone and he was left with only his own skin to give them.

  Unless, of course, he hadn’t been set up at all. Unless he’d gone to Baghdad to deliver cell phones and money to the jihadis. But if that was his goal, why hadn’t he dropped off his cache and gone back to Cairo to pick up another load?

  “What happened next?” Wells said.

  Alaa ran a hand through his hair. “What happened? Two days later, the Americans came. Many of them, maybe fifteen. It was the middle of the night. Amr went for his AK, and they shot him.”

  “Were there any Iraqis with them?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Just Americans.”

  By that point all the regular combat operations were joint Iraqi-American, so American-only meant a Special Forces unit.

  “They tie me up and put a bag on my head and put me in a helicopter. They say I’m a jihadi, they’re going to throw me out if I don’t tell them the truth. I tell them no, I’m there for the cell phones, I don’t know anything about the jihadis. The jihadis stole my money; they would have killed me if you hadn’t come. But the Americans didn’t believe me. When the helicopter landed, they beat me. This went on for a few days. I told them to look at my passport, my name. But they said they found a computer at the house with messages from Al Qaeda. They said Amr was a big man in the insurgency. To this day I don’t know whether what they were saying was real. Amr never said anything about jihad to me. They told me, just tell us the truth.”

  “But you lied.” Wells understood now how Alaa had ended up in 673’s hands.

  “I told them about what happened,” Alaa said. “But I didn’t say who sent me.”

  “You made up a name.” Wells still wondered why Alaa had been so reticent to give it up, but he decided not to press. The answer would come.

  “Yes. This was when I was still in Iraq. They beat me; they kept me in a room like this, no windows, very hot. Finally, I told them a name so they would stop. And they were happy; they stopped beating me. Then a few days later they got angry. They told me they knew I was lying and that I wasted their time. And they said they were going to send me someplace I wouldn’t like. Then the next day they put a hood on me and tied my arms and gave me a shot—”

  “With a needle—”

  “Yes, with a needle. And I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was on a plane. And then I was somewhere very cold.” Alaa shivered at the memory. “I don’t know where. Since I got out, I tried to figure it out. I think somewhere like Germany. But maybe not.”

  “They never said.”

  “No. And I couldn’t see anything about it, where they kept me. If I ever left the building, they put a hood on me. But it was Americans who ran it, I’m sure of that. It had a special name. They told me. They were proud of it. They called it ‘The Midnight House.’ ”

  “Midnight House.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why they called it that?”

  “They said it was always midnight for the prisoners.”

  “Were there a lot of prisoners?”

  “Not that I saw. Mostly, I was alone.”

  “And they hurt you?”

  “These men, they were much different than the ones in Iraq.” He closed his eyes, took a slow, deep breath. “I know I must talk about it, what they did, but—”

  He broke off. The room was silent, the only sound the faint buzzing of the bulb overhead. Somewhere outside, a dog barked fiercely.

  “They told me, it’s very simple to hurt you. And it was. They make me stand all the time with my arms out, make me stay awake, hit me with the electricity. They put me in a very small cell, so small I can stand only like this—” Alaa hunched over. And even though he held the position for only a few seconds, his face went slack in fear and pain, the muscle memory overwhelming him. He stood up, slowly.

  “Nothing that ever left a mark,” he said. “I would look at myself and wonder if I had dreamed it all. Yes, sometimes, when they stopped, brought me back to my cell and I fell asleep, I thought the sleep was real and the torture was the dream. I said, ‘Allah, Allah, help me, help me escape these evil dreams, sleep in peace.’ But he never helped. And you must see, they never stopped. Not like Iraq. In Iraq, the guards and soldiers, they came and went. They had many prisoners. But in this place, this house, it was only me, and they never stopped. And after a while, I don’t know how long, maybe three weeks, I couldn’t resist anymore. I didn’t know if they would kill me or send me back to Iraq or what they would do, I only knew I couldn’t resist.”

  “Anyone would have done the same,” Wells said. “But what I don’t see, even now, is why you protected this man who sent you to Iraq at all.”

  Alaa laughed, low and bitter. “Not to protect him. To protect my family. Do you know who it was, the man I drove? Samir Gharib. He owns half of Heliopolis”—a wealthy neighborhood in northeast Cairo. “His daughter is married to Mubarak’s grandson.”

 
“And it was his son who sent you to Baghdad?”

  “Do you see now, Kuwaiti?” the imam said.

  Wells saw. The American government supported Hosni Mubarak, for all his flaws, because he was viewed as a reliable ally against radical Islam. If his family had been connected to the Iraqi insurgency, the outcry in Washington would have been immediate and intense. Congress might have ended the billions of dollars of aid the United States gave Egypt every year. And Mubarak would have lashed out, setting his men on Alaa’s family. Angering a pharaoh was never wise.

  What Alaa hadn’t realized was that his confession would be so toxic that the agency and the army had no alternative but to bury it. Then, with no reason to keep him, they’d told 673 to let him go.

  Amazingly enough, the truth had set Alaa Zumari free.

  IN THEORY, Alaa might still be responsible for the 673 murders. But why? His captivity had lasted only a few months and had ended with his regaining his freedom. Now he simply wanted to be left alone. Nonetheless, Wells figured he should ask about the murders.

  “Are you angry with the Americans?” he said.

  “The ones who hurt me? Sure, I’m angry.” Though Alaa’s voice was even. “I wish that they would see how it feels. But not the woman. She was kind.”

  “The woman.”

  “One was a woman. A doctor.”

  “Did she talk to you?”

  “Only a few words. I don’t think she knew so much Arabic. But she had a kind face. That’s the only way I know how to say it.”

  “Do you know what’s been happening to them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This unit that held you.” Wells paused. “They’re dying.”

  “I don’t understand.” The surprise in his voice was genuine.

  “They went back to the United States. And now someone is killing them.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Alaa said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  Wells was sure now that Alaa hadn’t been involved in the killings. He couldn’t be a skilled enough actor to fake this.

  And then a distant high-pitched whistle breached the room, a long, warning cry. The imam stepped forward, cupped a hand around the wound on the back of Wells’s head. “They’re coming.”