He has kept stuff, over the years, because he knows that nobody will believe him. He has kept the stubs from all the boarding passes, the keys from all the hotel rooms. There are hundreds of them, and he keeps them in thick wads and piles. He has kept a business card for one of his aliases, Zeke Senega, a reporter for The Irish Times in Dublin. He has kept his passports, including the diplomatic one that was required for the work he did for the State Department. And he has photographs. He has a folder full of photographs from what he calls an “operation” in Iraq—an operation that ended with two jihadists slumped dead in the front seat of an Opel, their car windows spiderwebbed with the ghosts of two precision gunshots. He also has a photo album, which he calls the Book. The Book is not very different from a lot of photo albums—it is a record, in snapshots, of the places he’s been and the people he’s met—except that the mostly unsmiling men staring at the camera are usually wearing camouflage and armed to the teeth. And in the middle of the Book, there is one photo, black-and-white and larger than the rest, of William E. Clark cradling a rifle to his chest in what appears to be a jungle. He does not seem to be posing, and indeed he looks a little sick—his mouth slightly slack and his long face droopy with exhaustion. And yet when he remembers the circumstances of the photo, he relishes them: “That picture was taken in El Salvador in 1996. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Nobody was. Suddenly this UPI photographer shows up, taking pictures. I said, ‘If you don’t put that camera down and give me the film, I’ll shoot you. I’ll kill you and get away with it. Because I don’t exist.’”
THE VOLUNTEER IS REAL— so real that her name cannot be disclosed, nor any identifying details. She is one of the Americans who volunteered their time after Hurricane Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast in 2005. She worked at a makeshift shelter where people were very sick and couldn’t be evacuated. There were drugs at the shelter, a store of narcotics, to keep the sick people comfortable. There had to be protection, and Blackwater USA supplied it, through a government contract. The volunteer was happy that Blackwater was there, because she kept hearing stories of what was happening in New Orleans—its descent into lawlessness. It was a very scary time. In fact, one night one of the Blackwater contractors at the shelter said he had received intelligence to the effect that a New Orleans gang had found out about the drugs at the shelter and was on its way. He assured her that she would be safe, because he had just come from Iraq, and after what he’d been through there with the jihadists, he wasn’t about to be scared by American lowlifes. He was a senior member of the Blackwater team, and he made sure that if anyone so much as even parked around the block from the shelter, there was a Blackwater contractor in his face. Nothing happened that night, and nothing ever happened, for she had her own personal protector.
His name was William E. Clark, but he told her to call him what everyone called him—Zeke. She was struck by the apparent contradictions in him. He made her feel secure, but he seemed so terribly wounded, both literally and metaphorically. He had a problem with his neck, an injury that occasionally caused him to pass out. When she asked him how he got it, he told her that he couldn’t say, that he was prohibited from saying. Little by little, though, it came out, because secrets come to light during the night shift, and stories get told in the dark. He’d done terrible things for his country. He’d had to do terrible things, but that was because of his willingness to do them. He wasn’t so willing anymore. He was doing the worst thing someone like him could do: He was growing a conscience. No, worse than that: He was talking about it. He was talking to her. He had never talked to anyone about the terrible things he’d done, not even his wife of thirty years. He felt safe with the volunteer, as she felt safe with him.
He scared her a little, of course. She had never met anyone like him. He showed her how to use one of his guns. She had never fired a gun before and was surprised how much she liked it. But she also felt that he was watching her. He even said that he was. He would call her on her cell phone, in the middle of the night, when she couldn’t see him. “I’m sick of just watching you,” he would say and describe everything she was doing, so that she knew she was being watched. It was obsessive, and once they came together, they came together obsessively. She was in thrall to him, as he was in thrall to his stories and his terrible past. She didn’t know whether to believe his stories, but when she got home, he sent her videotaped footage of people being executed in what he said was Iraq. There were voices on the video, and one of them sounded exactly like Zeke’s.
DEATH IS REAL. Its reality is unsurpassed, and the people at the disaster-relief conference in Houston last July were on intimate terms with it. They were morticians, they were forensic anthropologists and forensic dentists, they worked suicide hotlines, and they handled the public relations when airplanes went down. Now they were all standing up and saying who they were and where they came from and why they were interested in doing work that few people wanted to do—why they wanted to take care of the dead left behind by mass disasters. As the attendees were introducing themselves to one another by both name and profession, a man stood up and said, “My name is William Clark, and I’m a designated marksman for Blackwater.”
He stood out as soon as he stood up. He was lean and he was lanky, with his face and everything else about him aligned on a vertical axis—he had a full head of springy hair rising straight up off his scalp in a kind of modified brush cut and a Fu Manchu mustache bracketing his rabbity front teeth. There was an arrogance in his military bearing and a desire to shock secreted in the monotonal nonchalance of his voice. I was one of the people who gave him the reaction he was looking for, and when I asked him if I could speak with him, he seemed as though he’d been waiting for me to ask the question.
We met in a small room away from the main auditorium and away from the other attendees of the conference. I was well aware of Blackwater and its reputation as a private security company whose armed contractors had changed the rules of engagement in Iraq and elsewhere, even in New Orleans. I was also well aware of the reputation its contractors had for not talking, and so I was surprised when William Clark sat down and, in the same manner he used when he was introducing himself in the auditorium—a manner at once matter-of-fact and challenging—he started not only talking but confessing. Yes, he said, he was one of them—a “merc,” or mercenary, for Blackwater. He was a sniper. He had been a countersniper for the security details assigned to protect Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Paul Bremer, the former American proconsul, in Iraq. He did overwatch, which meant he sat up on rooftops and shot people who looked dangerous. “Hey,” he said, “thirty-seven Al Qaeda and twenty-one Baathists can’t be wrong.” At first, he was blithe on the subject of killing, saying that the Blackwater contract was “perfect for a guy like me—a thousand bucks a day, and you get to kill people legally.” Then he said that he must be “missing a chromosome or something—I don’t have the moral firewall that keeps normal people from killing.” He had met people doing body-retrieval work when he was in New Orleans for Blackwater, and when they told him what they did, he said, “You’re a taker-outer? That’s funny—I’m a putter-inner. Maybe we can work together.” It was a joke, of course—the kind of bitterly defensive joke he liked to make—but then he’d started giving the matter some thought. He was fifty-three years old. He was old for the kind of life he led, the life, in his words, of “an operator,” “a shooter,” “a trigger puller.” In effect, he had given his life to take lives, and it had cost him almost everything, including, he said, as he held up his left hand and displayed a denuded ring finger, his thirty-year marriage. He was trying desperately to adjust to civilian life, but a lifetime habit of chasing headlines didn’t die easily. He was at the conference because he was hoping that maybe there was a way to chase headlines without having to kill anybody.
I CALLED THE NUMBER he gave me a few days later and asked for William Clark.
“Who?” a voice said.
“William Clark.”
“
Who is this?”
I told him I was the reporter he met at the disaster-relief conference. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I remember. You just threw me off, asking for William.”
“Your name isn’t William?”
“It is. But everybody calls me Zeke. The only person who doesn’t is my mother, and she calls me Billy.”
THERE WAS A STORY HE TOLD about his first day at Palisades. He was already at his desk when his boss came in. His boss said, “I just want you to know you’re not my first choice for the job, so if you’re in over your head, please tell me.” Zeke couldn’t help himself. He answered, “Well, you’re my first choice to throw out the window.” The boss beat an immediate retreat, and later, it had to be explained to Zeke that threats are taken very seriously in the modern corporate workplace. “But yeah, he knew who he was hiring,” Zeke said when I asked him if his boss at Palisades knew what he had done for a living. “He knew he hired an assassin.”
He had been screened, and the screening was real. He had been checked and vetted. The screening was standard but rigorous—it was the same screening everyone got when they were applying for a job that gave them complete freedom of movement and access at a nuclear power plant. His piss was checked, and so were his finances. He was given a psychological test and a polygraph. His references were called. Zeke claimed to have extremely high-level security clearances—a TS/SCI with the Department of Defense and a Q clearance with the Department of Energy—but Randy Cleveland, who’s in charge of employee screening for the company that operates Palisades, said that he doesn’t generally check security clearances, because he’s in the business of granting security clearances of his own. Besides, he said, “I don’t know how much work Zeke did that by its nature you wouldn’t be able to validate. Some of these operations, he tells us, were of such a covert nature that you have to do an extreme amount of digging to find out about them, if you can find out at all.”
So they knew. What’s more, they all seemed to know. On the first day I visited Zeke at Palisades, some of his security guards were receiving special-operations training at the plant’s practice range, and all day long the people who came to observe the training seemed to know not only Zeke but also his history. The idea for the training was based on his history—based on his certainty that the jihadists he’d fought against in Afghanistan and Iraq would be able to take Palisades without much of a fight if the security guards weren’t given the proper training. He wound up convincing the owners of Palisades to pay $50,000, he said, for the creation of an elite strike force from the ranks of his security guards, which he would call the Viper team. He wound up inviting Aaron Cohen, a former Israeli commando Zeke had seen giving commentary on Fox News, to come to Michigan and provide Viper training. He wound up convincing a local agent from the FBI and a local agent from the Department of Homeland Security to participate in the training and become members of the Viper team. He wound up convincing representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to come and observe the training, which he called the first-ever partnership between a private security team and federal law-enforcement agents for the purpose of critical-infrastructure protection. And so they all came to the practice range, and they all gave Zeke credit for making Viper training happen, although a senior manager at Palisades confided that Zeke was far better at creating elite strike forces than he was at doing paperwork and dealing with corporate politics. But this was not surprising, the manager said, given who Zeke was and where he’d been—given that Zeke had gone to Afghanistan and Iraq looking to die and had instead wound up a security manager at Palisades.
HE WAS STILL NEW TO HIS HOUSE. On his refrigerator door, he still had a drawing a little boy down the block had sent him, a stick figure emblazoned with the words MR. ZEKE, WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD. He hadn’t met the little boy yet, nor any of his other neighbors. After all, he had not bought the house because he wanted to make friends but rather, he said, because it was at the end of a dead-end street and offered an advantageous line of fire. The house was two stories, with dormer windows, and contained a small arsenal. There were bullets everywhere—in boxes, in the bathroom, on bookshelves, a few scattered on the floor—like candy in the home of a fat man. There were a lot of knives, too, the fighting kind, with handles like brass knuckles. There was a handgun secreted away in the couch that faced the forty-three-inch TV screen, another next to the computer keyboard, and another on top of the refrigerator. In Zeke’s bedrooms, there were two handguns on his nightstand and a black pump-action shotgun propped in the corner. In one of the spare bedrooms, there was an empty black case, very long and designed to carry the long rifle—Zeke said he preferred a Remington 700—that snipers use. There was a Ruger .22-caliber Mark II long-rifle target pistol. There was a scope next to a pair of black gloves. There were a dozen empty magazines, a magazine half filled with bullets, and three magazines that were fully loaded. There were a couple of holsters, a stock, a shooting brace, and a metal case filled with 7.62 mm shells. On the floor, there was a pair of handcuffs and a big box filled with smaller boxes of bullets. On the shelf bracketing another wall, there were two Kevlar helmets, a set of pads for a shooter’s knees and elbows, and a long coiled rope. In the corner, there was a backpack, ready to go, and then a duffel bag, olive-green and already packed with clothing and gear, so that if Zeke ever got called on a mission, he would be able to leave—and leave everything behind, including his new house and his new wife and his very real job at the nuclear plant—at a moment’s notice.
HE LIVED IN FEAR, because he was not in control of his life. He had a handler, he said. Did I know what a handler was? A handler was a person who handled him and who handled things for him. He’d had a handler since 1984. He’d been in the Army, been in Vietnam, been a Ranger, with marksman as his particular skill set. He’d gotten into some trouble, so he’d gotten out in 1977. He’d become a cop, outside of L.A. He was SWAT. He was, by his own description, “hard charging,” maybe too aggressive. He made a lot of arrests. He also spent a lot of time at the range. One night, he said, the phone rang at his house. “Friend of a friend. ‘We hear you’re a hell of a shot. Why don’t you come and talk to us?’ I told him I had a job. He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll pave the way.’ The next day I got to work and was told to take a leave of absence. I went for training in northern Virginia, and six months later I was in Honduras. ‘There’s your target. Handle it.’”
He handled it, and from then on he had a handler. It wasn’t always the same guy, and one time, about five years ago, it was a woman. But the handler always did the same thing. Made sure he was current on his piss test. Made sure he was current on his polygraph. Made sure he could get insurance and a mortgage. Made sure that Zeke had a reference when he went for a job and had to explain the gaps in his résumé. Made sure that Zeke knew where to go and knew what to do once he got there. Made sure that Zeke followed orders. Made sure that Zeke was still handling it, which meant that he wasn’t talking to anyone—whether wife or friend or shrink or reporter. Handling it was what Zeke was good at, until he wasn’t. Now, for the first time in his life, he was scared. He couldn’t sleep at night. He had nightmares. He was afraid that he was too old. He was afraid that no one was going to call him with another mission. He was afraid that he was going to get called on another mission tomorrow. He was afraid that he was never going to go back to Afghanistan or Iraq. He was afraid that he was going to go back to Afghanistan or Iraq and die there. He was afraid of losing his job at the nuclear plant and winding up on a park bench. He was afraid that he was going to spend the rest of his life at the nuclear plant, a washed-up old operator “with a lot of stories that no one believes till they see the scars.” He was afraid of being betrayed, afraid of disappearing, afraid of being afraid forever. “I’ve hurt a lot of people, Tom,” he said. And he knew he would hurt a lot of people again if he didn’t burn his bridges to the handler who ordered him to hurt them. “And there’s only one way I’m going to burn my bridges, and that’
s by talking to someone like you.”
HE HAD THE MOST AMAZING THINGS to say about hurting people, about the reality of sitting up on high and hunting them, about the quiet deliberation of it, about the stillness of it, about watching a man “through the glass”—the scope—about watching him smoke and drink coffee and talk to friends even as you know the order is in and he’s already dead, about taking aim at his lip or his teeth—“teeth are always good, because you can always see them”—or between his buttons and concentrating only on the shot, on the tumbling piece of paper that helps you determine which way the wind is blowing, and then on the soft squeeze of the trigger, only that, before the kick of the rifle brings you back to life with almost more adrenaline than you can bear.
He’s always lived for the adrenaline. We were watching an NFL game one night at his house, and he got up and assumed the stance of a defensive back, but with his elbow up high, as if ready to drop the hammer. He said that he’d been a cornerback in high school, all county, and that he still remembered what it was like, watching a play develop, watching the whole field, the movement of the ball both chaotic and marked by a sense of inevitability, because it had to come to an end, and it came to an end when he made the hit. He was the end. He was a hitter, and nothing could match that feeling of intervention—that feeling of being the instrument of inevitability—until later in his life, when he felt the kick of the Remington 700 and heard his spotter say, “Man down.”
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Page 29