“The others, they were shot with a silencer,” Wells said, thinking out loud. “Somebody could have done it on the street and then taken his body. Not a lot of lights out there.”
“They were killed all different ways, though. The woman, the doctor, somebody snuck into her house, made it look like a suicide,” Noemie said. “Somebody been creeping.”
“Last question.”
“You already got your last question.”
“I promise. I don’t want to upset you again, but—” Wells hesitated. She nodded to him. “Is there any chance that Jerry’s the one behind this? That he’s faked his own death. You said he was upset—”
“I said he was in a mood. Come on, Mr. Wells. You knew my husband. You cannot be serious. He was angry that he didn’t get a promotion, angry that they made him retire. He wasn’t a killer.”
You’re wrong, Wells didn’t say. He was a soldier. A Ranger. He was nothing more or less than a trained, professional killer.
Just like me.
“And now I have to put this boy in his bed,” Noemie said. She picked up Jeffrey, put him over her shoulder. His eyes blinked open, and he looked suspiciously at Wells.
“Thank you, Noemie. If I have more questions, can I call you?”
“Uh-huh. And if you check out the Pearl, keep your back to the wall. They don’t like white people much in there.”
“I don’t blame them.”
THE PEARL WAS CHEAP and flashy, Hennessy posters on the walls, faded red vinyl booths, and a half-dozen Mercedes hood ornaments hanging from the ceiling. Wells didn’t get any smiles when he walked in. Not from the bartender, a tall, skinny man with a Saints cap pulled low on his forehead. Not from the three boys in the corner booth who wore identical gold studs. Not from the two old heads deep in conversation at the bar. And not from the woman in the silver bikini dancing listlessly on the back counter to the heavy slow sounds of rap that sounded like it was being played at half speed.
Whatever had happened in Poland had upset Jerry Williams more than a bit, Wells thought. The Pearl wasn’t a place Jerry would have favored when Wells knew him. Wells debated staying, forcing the issue, maybe taking a seat with the boys in the booth. But what was he trying to prove? He would come back tomorrow and get the same stiff non-answers about Jerry Williams as the New Orleans cops.
“You lost?”the bartender said.
Wells shook his head. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for what?” the bartender said. Then, under his breath, “Dummy.”
Wells knew he ought to walk away. But after Cairo, he was in no mood to get pushed around. “I’ll take a Bud,” he said.
“We’re all out.”
“Miller.”
“Out of that, too.”
“Then a gin and tonic. Tanqueray.” A half-full bottle of Tanqueray sat on the back counter directly across from Wells.
The bartender turned down the music. “You dumb or just playing that way?”
“There’s no call for this.”
“Go back to the Quarter where you belong.” He took two steps toward Wells, his hands loose at his sides.
Wells turned toward the door, as if he were leaving. Then he spun back and with his right hand grabbed the bartender’s skinny left arm and pulled him down onto the scarred wood of the bar and knocked off his glasses. Wells stepped forward and with his left hand reached down the bartender’s back for the pistol that he knew would be tucked into the man’s jeans. He grabbed the pistol, a Beretta knockoff that fit snugly in his hand. Still holding the bartender down, he turned to cover the room. The action had taken less than three seconds, and the kids in the corner hadn’t moved. Yet.
“You are either a cop or a damn fool,” the bartender mumbled. “And I know you ain’t no cop.”
Wells let go of the bartender’s arm, stepped back from the bar. “Slowly. Put your hands on top of your heads. All of you.”
They complied. Wells knew he didn’t have long. Soon enough, one of the bangers would do something stupid, and then he’d have blood on his hands for this stunt.
“Quicker you answer my questions, the quicker I’m gone. I’m trying to find a friend of mine. He came in here for a beer a couple months back. Been missing ever since. Named Jerry Williams. Big guy. Ring any bells?”
“That what you hassling me for? I told the cops, I don’t know nothing about it,” said the bartender.
“Jerry and I were Rangers together. Now he’s missing. This is the last place anybody saw him. Do me a favor, answer my questions, I get out of here.”
Unwillingly: “Ask what you gotta ask.”
Wells tucked the pistol into his jeans. “Ever see anybody with Jerry?”
“Not hardly. He drank quiet. Put a twenty on the bar, nod when he wanted a hit. He put out two twenties, then I knew he needed some relaxation. Once or twice, late night, we got to talking; he told me he was a vet. Said nobody understood what it was like over there, you had to be there. Nothing more.”
“He ever say anything about disappearing, getting out of New Orleans?”
“Not to me.”
“He seem nervous ever? Like somebody was after him?”
The bartender shook his head.
“Ever talk about his wife?”
“Men don’t come in here to talk about their wives.”
“And you’re sure nobody ever struck up a conversation with him?”
The bartender hesitated. “There was a guy, came in once or twice around that time Jerry was here. Never saw him since. It struck me, ’cause he was white.”
“Could you recognize him?”
“I reckon not. Like I said, he was here twice at most. I think he was tall.”
The kids in the corner booth were grumbling at one another, waggling their heads. Time to go. “You have a nice night,” Wells said.
“Gimme back my gun.” Wells backed away. “Come on, man. I answered what you asked.”
“It’ll be in the river. Hope you can swim.”
Wells pulled open the front door, backed out. He scuttled around the corner, then ran for his car, waiting for footsteps. Shots. But nobody came after him, and the sighing of the city was all he heard.
AT 7 A .M. the next morning, his sat phone jolted him awake. No mystery about who was on the other end. Only Shafer and Exley had the number, and Wells was fairly certain Exley wasn’t calling him at this hour.
“How’d it go?”
Wells filled him in.
“Think she was straight with you?”
“I do.”
“And he’s dead?”
“Most likely.”
“Anybody else for you to talk to down there? Girlfriend, anyone like that?”
“I don’t think so. He didn’t have many friends down here. What about you?”
“Getting some threads here. Mainly about Whitby. Looks like our director of national intelligence knows more about 673 than Duto let on at first.”
“How’s that?”
“You know how Duto told us the intel from the Midnight House went to the Pentagon? He neglected to mention that Whitby was on the other end.”
“Say again, Ellis?”
“Whitby ran the unit where Brant Murphy sent his reports. It was called the Office of Strategic and Intelligence Planning. Big name, but there were only three people in it. Whitby, a deputy, and an assistant. When Whitby left to become DNI, the Pentagon closed the office, took it off the org charts. It’s not exactly a secret, but you have to know where to look. I’m not sure the FBI knows about it. Though they must.”
“How’d you find it?”
“Amazing but true, Duto told me. I went to him about the missing prisoner numbers, and he told me he didn’t know anything about them. He told me it was Whitby who made him kill the inspector general’s investigation into the letter. Then he told me that Whitby had been in charge of 673 at the Pentagon.”
“Back up, Ellis. Why did Whitby make Duto stop the IG investigation?”
“
Duto says Whitby wouldn’t tell him.”
“Whitby made Vinny Duto end an internal CIA investigation and didn’t tell him why. And Duto agreed? That’s impossible, Ellis. Duto would never do that.”
“Normally, I’d agree with you. But this isn’t a normal situation.”
“What are you saying, Ellis?”
Twelve hundred miles away, Shafer sighed. “Whitby’s got a lot of juice, and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. Let’s talk about it in person.”
“I’ll be back this afternoon. We need to talk to Duto and Whitby. No more pussyfooting.”
“Not yet. First, I need to talk to the NSA. They’re the ones who ran the registry. Find out if they have anything on the missing detainees. Meantime, you go to California, talk to Steve Callar. Rachel’s husband.”
“Why would Callar talk to me? It’s not like Noemie. I don’t know him. Or his wife.”
“I’ll send you the FBI interviews. You’ll see. I checked. American has a flight to Dallas at nine thirty, on to San Diego at noon.”
“Thanks for letting me decide for myself,” Wells said.
But Shafer had already hung up.
15
STARE KIEJKUTY.JULY 2008
There is actor and acted upon, you understand, Jawaruddin? In this room. And I’m the actor. Which makes you the—work with me here—the acted upon.”
In his right hand, Kenneth Karp held a stun gun, a sleek gray box no larger than an electric razor. He pushed a button on its side. A tiny lightning bolt arced between the prongs at the gun’s head.
Karp was skinny, with wiry black hair and dark brown eyes. When he got excited, his hands twitched and words poured out. He was excited now, pacing the room. Angry. Or pretending to be. With Karp, the distinction could be difficult to make.
Jawaruddin bin Zari, the object of Karp’s attention, sat shackled to a chair. Steel chains wrapped around his chest, forearms, and shins. A U-shaped band of steel extended from a rod behind the chair, holding his head in place. Unlike Karp, he seemed calm, his breathing steady.
The room around them was cinder-block, no decoration of any kind. With one exception. An American flag filled the wall in front of bin Zari. He could escape it only by closing his eyes.
Karp finally stopped pacing, knelt beside bin Zari, ran a hand down his biceps. “For ten days now, you have been our guest,” Karp said, speaking Arabic now.
“Guest,” bin Zari said. He hardly moved his lips. His voice was soft, nearly inaudible.
“Yes, guest.” Karp pulled a half-dozen grainy photographs from the file folder on the table behind bin Zari. He held them up one by one. “Your truck. Your truck bomb. Very nicely put together. The house where we arrested you. Three Paki army uniforms, found inside the house, genuine. Three army identification cards, also genuine. And a pass for the building where your president was to meet White”—Sir Roderick White, the British foreign minister. “This wasn’t just any operation. This was well planned. Well organized. The heart of Islamabad. A senior British official. And you would have pulled it off, if not for bad luck.”
Karp put the photos aside. “Yet when we ask you, you tell us you don’t know anything about it. Where’s the pride of ownership? The pleasure a man takes in his craft?”
Bin Zari shifted sideways, clanking his chains against the chair.
“You don’t respect us enough even to lie to us. Make something up. Pretend to answer our questions.”
A tiny smile flickered across bin Zari’s face.
“The idea of lying pleases you. Let me tell you again. You don’t want to be in this room. This is not a good room. You don’t want me to ask you questions. You don’t want to be the acted upon. So I’ll ask you one last time. We both know you didn’t put this together alone. Who gave you the security plans? The uniforms, the ID cards?”
Silence.
“Are other elements of your cell still operational?”
Silence.
“Do you want me to hurt you?” And without waiting for an answer, Karp jammed the stun gun into bin Zari’s jowls. Bin Zari screamed and the muscles in his neck bulged, but the restraints held him tight. Karp counted aloud. “One Miss-iss-ippi. Two Miss-iss-ippi. Three Miss-iss-ippi . . .”
At five, Karp stopped, stepped away from the chair. Spittle ran down bin Zari’s chin. He reached out his tongue to wipe it off and then seemed to change his mind. He pulled back his tongue and snapped his mouth shut.
“Here’s what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I can get used to it. I’m strong. I’m not Craig Taylor”—the aid worker bin Zari had kidnapped and killed in Karachi. “I’m a son of the Prophet. They can’t break me with a stun gun.”
Karp knelt beside bin Zari. “What you don’t understand. You might get used to this.” Again, Karp jammed the gun into bin Zari’s neck. Zari tried to pull his head forward, but the band around his temple held him tight. He squeezed his eyes closed, grunted, as the electricity poured into him.
“I’ve got a hundred different ways to hurt you. They all hurt in a different way. It’s not a fair fight.”
Karp left the gun in place until bin Zari screamed and his eyes rolled back and he slumped into the side of the world. Only the thump of his pulse in his neck proved he was still alive. Karp reached under bin Zari’s chair for a plastic gallon jug, uncapped it, poured it over bin Zari’s head.
Bin Zari snapped awake. The fear in his eyes flared and faded as fast as cheap fireworks. ”Do it again,” he said, his lips barely moving. “Again.”
“I’m going to let you think things over,” Karp said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
ONE FLOOR ABOVE, Rachel Callar watched Karp at work on twin closed-circuit television screens that ran a live feed from the interrogation room. Hank Poteat had installed the room’s cameras before leaving Poland for Korea. They offered high-quality video, almost high-definition. Callar could see everything. She could see they were losing themselves. They were all id, no superego. She didn’t know anymore why Terreri had brought her here. He didn’t respect her or listen to her. None of them did. Now they were heading for Lord of the Flies territory. They’d been here too long. Each day they dug themselves in deeper. Soon enough they’d be using a conch shell to decide who could speak.
Callar’s dad was a doctor, an oncologist who specialized in lung cancer. He’dalways wanted her to follow him. Doctorswere respected, he told her. Doctors were educated. Doctors cheated death. He didn’t mention that doctors lived in Beverly Hills and bought new BMWs every year, but then she could see that for herself. She spent her first semester at Berkeley painting and then gave in and went pre-med.
Her second year in med school, the pressure got to her. She stopped sleeping. She lay in bed jamming her brain with beta cells and lipoproteins. She tried to memorize the pages of her textbooks exactly, as though her mind were a hard drive that could store every word. She was afraid to stop studying, afraid she’d flunk out. Or worse, would kill a patient because she hadn’t studied enough. Her fault, her fault, her fault . . .
Anyway, she stopped eating.
An itty-bitty case of anorexia. She’d had one in high school, too, like at least half the senior girls, but she was more serious this time around. She started by skipping dinner. More time to study. Then she decided that lunch would be her only meal. The rest of the day, she restricted herself to water, coffee, and sugarless gum. At lunch she had a green salad, no dressing, a couple of croutons, a cup of yogurt, and berries on the side, maybe eight hundred calories in all. Very healthy.
She lost forty pounds in three months, went from one hundred fifty to one hundred ten. People told her she looked good. Then they told her she looked great. Then they told her maybe she was getting a little thin. Then they stopped talking to her about it, and she knew she was in trouble. But she felt great. In total control.
She finished the year, went back to Los Angeles for the summer. She was sitting in a bikini by the pool of her parents’ house when her mom got home fro
m yoga, saw her, and started to cry. Her parents convinced her to spend six weeks in a “facility” that specialized in the treatment of eating disorders. “It’s called the New Beginnings Center,” her dad said.
“Are there any other kind of beginnings?”
The NBC, as the patients—or “guests,” in the center’s jargon—called it, wasn’t a mental hospital. Not officially, anyway. So it didn’t show up on her medical records, an omission that would come in handy later. The place was more of a spa, really. A spa with a locked front door.
But despite its New Age fripperies, the place did her good. Mainly because of her psychiatrist, Dr. Appel, a small and entirely bald man who wore the same threadbare tweed jacket to every session. He never said so openly, but he seemed to regard the center’s affectations as a joke. Maybe that was why she liked him. Or maybe it was because of the way he listened to her without judging her, without trying to impose his will on her. In his office she could step out of herself, see the connections between her need to control her eating and her fear of being overwhelmed, never measuring up to her father.
“Fear of failure drives my life.”
“You’ve put yourself in an impossible position, then. All of us fail eventually.”
“So what do I do?”
“I must admit I fail to have the answer. Proving my point.” He arched an eyebrow.
“Was that a joke?” He smiled, the first time she’d ever seen any hint of emotion from him. “It was, wasn’t it? Don’t quit your day job, Dr. Appel.”
He nodded gravely, the edges of his lips tipping into a smile, and she felt somehow she’d succeeded.
Day by day she relaxed, opened up to him about her fears and feelings of inadequacy. Just naming the emotions helped her enormously. One morning, about ten days before she was due to leave the center, she came down to the little cafeteria where she and the rest of the “guests” ate their meals under the watchful eye of nurses and dieticians. And as she smelled the eggs cooking in the kitchen behind the double doors at the far end of the room, she realized that she was so very hungry.
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