ONE NIGHT HIS MOTHER CALLED his cell phone. She called him almost every day. He was closer to his mother than he was to anybody, and once, when I asked him if he had any code of conduct, he said, “No women. No children. And I don’t lie to my mother.” Now he talked to her for a few minutes and handed me the phone. “Well, I’m glad someone’s finally writing about Billy, because he’s an American hero,” she said, in a strong old-woman’s voice. Then I handed the phone back to Zeke, but he was sitting on the couch, looking sick to the soul. “She’s so happy that I have this job at the plant,” he said. “I don’t have the heart to tell her that I hate it. So I lie to her, like I lie to everyone else.”
I STAYED AT HIS HOUSE THREE TIMES. The first time, last August, I stayed with him for two nights. I stayed with him for two nights again in September. When I visited in December, I cut my trip short—I stayed one night instead of two—but by that time the process of revelation that he’d started in the summer threatened to go out of control. He had revealed secrets about himself from the moment I introduced myself to him, and yet over the course of four months he had always managed to up the ante, to suggest that behind every secret there loomed another whose revelation would prove dangerous not only to him but to me.
In August, he told me about his handler and about the remorselessness his handler expected of him. He detailed his methods as a sniper and called himself an assassin. And he told me that he lived in fear of being arrested for what he’d done for Blackwater—and, by extension, his country—in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In September, he said that it was in Iraq where he had crossed the line that had made him lose “the stomach” for killing. “In all my years as a professional, I’ve seen a lot of conflicts,” he said. “I never committed murder until I went to Iraq.” When I pressed him about what he meant, he said, “You’re going to get me indicted, Tom.” And when I asked him why, he replied, “War crimes, man. War crimes.”
And yet he kept talking, driven by his guilt and his compulsive need to tell me that he was not like mere contractors—that he was both better and far worse. In November, I sent him a book about Blackwater and asked him to read it. When I called for his comments, he said that it was accurate, but only so far as it went. “The guys in that book are really sort of knuckle draggers,” he said. “I operate on a much higher level.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I’ll tell you the next time you come up.”
And so I visited him again, one last time, in December. It was 12 degrees in Michigan, and the phone books and old cardboard boxes that had littered his driveway in the summer were now stuck there, frozen solid. He was wearing all black, black jeans and a black ribbed mercenary sweater, and he told me that something had changed since the last time I spoke to him. He told me that he had gotten married.
THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE HIM ARE REAL. He has a mother and father, still alive. He has two brothers. He has an ex-wife, Linda, to whom he was married for thirty years. He has a son, Rick—Linda’s son, whom Zeke adopted when he was four years old. And he has a new wife, a woman he calls Baby Doll. They all love him, but he is afraid they wouldn’t if they knew who he really was and what he had really done.
Does he love them in return? He said he did, while acknowledging that a man who couldn’t tell the truth about himself to those closest to him was going to have trouble with his relationships. He had, for instance, a photograph of one of his brothers on his bookshelf, but he said that he hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years. And he hadn’t spoken to his son, Rick, since the divorce, and although Rick lived on an Air Force base not five hours away, Zeke had never met his grandchildren. And although he still spoke to Linda as often as twice a day—as often as he spoke to his mother and Baby Doll—he viewed his divorce from her as the ultimate cost of his lifestyle and its necessary secrets. In his darkest moments, he even intimated that his handler had gotten to her, had called her and told her, well, everything, for why else would he have come home from the hell of New Orleans and heard from his wife that she wanted out after thirty years?
He had met her in high school, in Tulare, California, in the Central Valley, south of Fresno. She was his English teacher his senior year. She was eleven years older than he was. They got married in 1975, when he was still in the Army. They did not live together at first—he was at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, and she remained in Tulare, teaching—but she was always available to him, as she had to be, for even as a young man he was haunted by his past, he said, and in this case his recent past was Vietnam. These were the last shadowy years of the war. There was a period when he just disappeared—when neither his mother nor Linda knew where he was—and when he resurfaced, he had a story to tell, except that he couldn’t tell it. He was bound not to tell it, though of course it leaked out over the years, both to Linda and to Rick, as did all the others. It was hard on Linda, Zeke said, because she had to guard his secrets as closely as he did. She was even liable to be polygraphed, as he was, and so after a while he made it easy for her—he stopped telling her things, and she stopped asking questions. She just knew—and it was her unspoken knowledge of who he really was that led him to say that she was his “real wife,” no matter what, and to keep the gold band from his wedding with Linda up on his bookshelf, right next to the picture of Baby Doll.
Baby Doll was his nickname for a woman he met on eHarmony in 2006. Her real name was Terri, but she had a small, breathy voice, so he called her Baby Doll. She was divorced, living with two teenaged sons, and she described herself as a “wounded soul,” for she had multiple sclerosis. Zeke was a wounded soul, too, she said, and their relationship seemed to enter a new stage with each visit: In August, they met; in September, she’d just visited him in Michigan for the first time, and he was deciding whether to “take on” a woman with such a debilitating illness; in December, he’d just married her, because she’d saved his life. He’d been all alone on Thanksgiving 2006, eating a frozen pizza, waiting for the phone to ring and determined to “eat the barrel” of one of his handguns if it didn’t. It did, and it was Baby Doll. Her voice gave him something to live for, and he married her a week later. She wasn’t living with him, but she called his cell phone all day long, and one night, when we were out to dinner, he passed the phone to me. Terri’s voice was just as Zeke said it was, and in answer to my question, she confirmed that she had met Zeke on eHarmony. Then she said that she had a question of her own: “Is he wearing his ring?” I told her that he was, although as soon as she hung up, he said he was going to take it off when he got home and put it on the bookshelf next to the ring from his marriage to Linda.
ZEKE TRIED TO CONTINUE the affair with the volunteer he met in New Orleans after they both returned home. One day, she even received an e-mail from Zeke’s wife, Linda, while Linda and Zeke were still married. It was an admission of failure—an admission that Linda had never been up to the adventure of living with someone like Zeke, an admission that she simply wasn’t as passionate as he was. Linda wished the volunteer luck and expressed hope that Zeke had finally met a woman who was his equal. How extremely gracious, the volunteer thought, and how extremely odd, for the e-mail was marred by elementary misspellings and grammatical errors. Wasn’t Linda Clark an English teacher? Then she realized something, in a flash of alarm: The letter had been written by Zeke, from his wife’s account and in his wife’s name.
She began trying to extricate herself from the relationship, but there was a problem: He threatened her and he threatened her husband. He said that he had no qualms about killing women—that when he was in Iraq, the locals had been prohibited from doing so by their religious scruples, and that the dirty business had fallen to him and had become a specialty. He even told her exactly how he’d kill her, sticking the knife above her collarbone and flicking it toward her feet, so that, with just the barest nick, her jugular and carotid would bleed out.
And then, when threats failed, he said he was going to kill himself. He told her he was spending
Thanksgiving 2005 alone, eating frozen pizza, and that he was going to eat the barrel of one of his handguns if he didn’t get a call from the volunteer, whom he called his Baby Doll.
HE MADE A LOT OF THREATS. Some of them were just avowals of lethal capacity—“Hey, I’m a trigger puller,” he said when I first met him. “I’ll put a round in your eye.” Others were the result of him playing around, as when I was watching TV in his living room in August and the red dot of a laser pointer started dancing around the walls. He was standing behind me, in the kitchen, pointer in hand, and when I said, “Um, Zeke?” he answered, “Oh, sorry. But don’t worry—if I ever wanted to kill you, you’d never see the red dot.” Others were more specific. When he first told me about his handler, he said that he’d told his handler about me—with the assurance that if I revealed information he didn’t want revealed, “I’ll hunt you down and kill you.” Another time, on the subject of journalistic betrayal, he said, “Never betray someone who can kill you from a thousand yards away.”
And yet for a long time I was not scared of him, because on some level he was not a scary guy. He was a lonely guy. He was a pathetic guy. He was a recently divorced guy who, like every other recently divorced guy in America, had a George Foreman grill in his kitchen and a stack of DiGiorno pizzas in his freezer. He was too hangdog to be threatening, and when he finally did scare me, it was not because he threatened me. It was because I thought he was going crazy.
HE HAD A PHOTOGRAPH of a sniper on his living-room wall. It was poster sized, and it was framed, and the man it portrayed was carrying a gauze-wrapped long rifle and wearing a hood that hid everything but his eyes and the bridge of his nose. He looked like a primordial executioner, rising out of the swamp, and as soon as I saw the photo, I thought it was Zeke. He had always said that I would never be able to trace him to Afghanistan or Iraq—that his participation there, though ostensibly part of a Blackwater contract, was a “black op,” with no paper trail. Now there was a poster in his living room whose copyright line—“Steve Raymer, National Geographic Image Collection, 2005”—made me think that I had found an image linking Zeke to Iraq, right there on his wall.
He was cagey when, during my September visit, I asked who it was. “A friend,” he’d said. “Misunderstood. You’d like him if you got to know him, but not too many people get to know him.” And so I went home and did a search for Steve Raymer. His name came up right away, and so did the photograph, which was available for sale, tagged with the following information: “French Soldier, 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion, Djibouti, Horn of Africa, 1988.” I called Steve Raymer, and he said yes, he was sure of the photo’s provenance—that he remembered being out in the desert on a Foreign Legion training exercise and all these snipers rose up all around him, in terrifying silence. Raymer didn’t say a word to the sniper, and the sniper didn’t say a word to him—he just took his picture, and eventually National Geographic put it up for sale.
It was the first thing I asked Zeke about when I visited him in December, because—even though he’d made no claims for the photo—now I thought I’d somehow caught him in a lie. “Tell me about the guy in the poster,” I said.
“You don’t want to know that guy,” he answered. “He’s a guy going through a very bad time.”
“Zeke, I know who it is.”
“You do?”
“It’s a soldier with the French Foreign Legion in the Horn of Africa.”
He didn’t miss a beat. Standing in front of the poster, he said, “Second Para, out of Corsica,” meaning the Legion’s Second Paratroop Regiment, which is indeed out of Corsica. “That’s where we mobilized out of.”
“You were in the French Foreign Legion?”
“Among other things,” he said.
“So that’s you?”
“That’s me.”
“I don’t get it. I don’t get why you’re so coy about it.”
“I don’t like talking about Africa. Those were the bad years.”
“Zeke, what are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of going to jail, man. Have you ever been arrested?”
“No.”
“Well, I have. I was arrested for attempted murder when I was a Ranger. McIntosh County, Georgia. You can look it up if you want to. It’s a matter of public record.”
He was defending a friend, he said. The friend had gotten beaten up at a notorious brothel called the S&S Truck Stop. With a few other soldiers, Zeke had gone back and put an incendiary device on the roof, with the intention of “burning up everyone inside, including the whores.” The bomb didn’t go off, he said, but he and the others were arrested anyway and spent nine days in jail before an FBI agent investigating the S&S for drug trafficking set them free. The incident ended his career as a Ranger, but he said it also might have played a role in the call he received a few years later: for he had demonstrated a willingness not only to kill but to incinerate a room full of undesirables.
“DO YOU HAVE THINGS in your life that you’re ashamed of?” Zeke asked. He had gone from the photo of the sniper to the couch and was stretched out on it, with his hands covering his face. I told him I did; of course I did. He said, “Well, you probably don’t do them anymore. But I do. I keep doing them. I seek them out.” He was finally paying the price; he’d had a mild heart attack the month before, on account of the stress of living with his secrets. I told him that maybe he had received a sign that he should begin talking, starting with Africa. He said, “You might not like me very much after I do,” and asked if I thought he was a bad person. “I think you’re trying to be a good person,” I said, “or else I wouldn’t be here.” He got up and told me to follow him. He opened the door to his basement and turned on the light. He went halfway down the stairs and then stopped and looked at me over his shoulder. “Have you ever been around pure evil?” he asked. I paused. I’d been around pure evil before. I had just never followed pure evil down to the basement, and when I got there, I expected to be greeted by the grinning ricti of other journalists who’d pursued Zeke’s story and wound up preserved in pickle jars. But no: It was just a basement, and Zeke couldn’t find the photographs of the evil he had done in Africa. He did find, however, a big cardboard box full of the plays and screenplays he’d been writing since he got out of the Army, some of them faded with the passage of time.
THE WIND WAS MAKING NOISES The noises were making Zeke jumpy. He was sitting up on the couch, doing what he was always doing—watching Fox News on the big-screen TV and revealing his secrets. On this night, however, he was saying that everything had changed since he’d married Baby Doll. “I have something to lose now, man,” he said, by which he meant Baby Doll, by which he also meant his house, his job, his life. He had told me about everything. He had told me about Africa, about Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d also told me about the Philippines, about Indonesia, about Somalia, about Yemen, about Angola, about Nigeria, about Guatemala, about Haiti and El Salvador and Honduras. He had continued raising the stakes on his secrets until they all bled together. Indeed, he really had only one secret, because over the last twenty years he’d had only one job. He did not really work for Blackwater, and he did not really serve in the French Foreign Legion, and he wasn’t a missionary for World Vision, and he wasn’t a diplomatic observer for the State Department. Those jobs were just covers for his real job, which was something he called “direct sanction.” No matter where he was, he worked for his handler, and his handler paid him to kill people. He was, in his words, “a national-security asset,” “one of the best in the world at what I do”—a one-man death squad.
He had revealed his secrets in order to survive them, but now he thought he had made a mistake. He wondered if I had endangered him, and if it was the revelation, not the secrets, that would be impossible to survive. I told him that he had no choice now but to go all the way—that going public was the only way he could protect himself. “Do you mean testify?” he said, like a snake handler who had fallen from his trance an
d realized what he had been holding. “No way, man. I have nightmares about Charles Schumer asking me questions. You ever raise your right hand? I have, and it’s a life-altering experience. My mother couldn’t stand it….”
Suddenly he stood up. The wind had gusted, and there was a noise. He went to the refrigerator and came back with a handgun. He cocked it and went to the garage door, peeking outside while standing next to the jamb, his back pressed against the wall. When he returned to the couch, he did not uncock his gun. Instead, he started transferring it from hand to hand and told me that I didn’t know who I was dealing with: “If they want to get you, they get you. Or they don’t get me. They get Baby Doll. They rape her, they sodomize her. It’s called a break-in. Random violence. But it’s not, and I know it’s not. So no fucking way. I’m not going to get my Baby Doll raped and sodomized so Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton can make political hay!”
HIS HANDLERS WERE REAL, Zeke was talking to them on the phone. I was sitting across the table from him. It was the next day, and we were having breakfast at a restaurant in South Haven. At 9:30, he picked up the cell phone and dialed. He said, “Clark, William,” and then a number, 553. Then he said what sounded like a last name. And then he was talking to his handler, whom he called Larry. He was telling Larry that he was sitting with the writer from Esquire. He cringed at his handler’s response. Then, as he explained later, he was transferred immediately to his handler’s subordinate, who read him his secrecy oath and threatened him with the penitentiary. The subordinate’s name was Kyle. Zeke complained about the way he was being treated by Kyle, then he began complaining about the way he was being treated by Larry. When he was finally transferred back to Larry, he said this: “Hey, Larry, thanks for the kick in the balls.” He said that if he ever saw Kyle in the street, he’d “take him out,” and then he promptly apologized for the threat. He hung up, and when he called back, a secretary answered and told him that Larry was at a meeting. “I just talked to him two minutes ago,” he said, and she put him through. “Larry, how much longer do I have to be in purgatory?” he said, and accused Kyle of selling him out years earlier. His tone softened after that; he said, “Hey, I’ll do it, I’m a good soldier,” and hung up. He finished his coffee but not his eggs, and when we got back to the car, he said, “I fucked myself. I stayed in too long, now they have their hooks in me. I have a new house, a new wife, a new job, and it’s all fake. They can punch through it whenever they want to, and they just did. The thing is, you don’t know what they can do—so they can do anything. If you ever hear that I’ve committed suicide, investigate the hell out of it.”
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Page 30