The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “How about you walk me through it?”

  “How about not?”

  Shafer wanted to reach across the table and slap Murphy, but in a way he was right. Duto had started this charade, asked him and Wells to try to find a killer without the background information they needed.

  “Any chance Alaa Zumari’s connected to this?”

  “If we thought he was a terrorist, we wouldn’t have let him go.”

  “Maybe he lied. Withstood the pressure somehow. Could he have figured out who was on the squad? Your real names?”

  “We were pretty tight about opsec. Never used real names with the detainees.”

  “The Poles? Could they have leaked your names?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Could anyone inside the unit be responsible for the killings?”

  “You asking if I’m the killer? I’m gonna have to say no.”

  “How about Hank Poteat? Or Terreri? Or Jerry?”

  “I told you, Poteat wasn’t part of the squad. The colonel’s in Afghanistan. Jerry’s dead.”

  “What if he’s not?”

  The question stopped Murphy. He ran a hand down his tie, flipped up the tip, looked at it as if the fabric might hold the answer. “Jerry had a temper. And he was having problems with his wife, we knew that. And he thought he deserved a promotion. He quit when he didn’t get it. But I don’t see him taking it out on us.”

  Murphy pushed himself back from the table. “Mr. Shafer. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I have to get to work. I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  “Before you go,” Shafer said. “Tell me about the C-one drop.”

  “What about it?”

  “Eight million for ten guys for sixteen months? Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Two hundred grand a month to the Poles to rent the barracks and the guards. Payments whenever we landed a jet. A million for coms gear that we bought over there. Charter flights.”

  “You keep receipts?”

  “Of course. We wanted to leave a nice long paper trail for all those congressional investigators. And the Justice Department.”

  “I take it that’s a no.”

  “You take it correctly.”

  Shafer leaned forward in his chair, flared his nostrils like a terrier on the scent of a rat.

  “Let me make sure I understand. You worked for a guy who stole one-point-two million dollars in Iraq. This squad, you’re in charge of eight million. And you don’t keep receipts.”

  “I got verbal approval for anything over twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “From who?”

  “Somebody in Sanchez’s office, usually.”

  “Anybody keep records of those conversations?”

  “Colonel Terreri knew where the money was going.”

  “Terreri. He’s not dead yet, right?”

  “You have something to ask, ask it,” Murphy said. The vein on his forehead had popped out again, visible proof that Shafer’s bluff had scored.

  “Maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow, when the Feebs come to town.” Suddenly, Shafer understood. Every so often he had a flash like this, the pieces fitting together all at once. “Six-seven-three was your career saver? Guess again. You put in for it figuring on the unrestricted drop. Figuring you could skim. You saw Gessen’s mistakes. And you would have gotten away clean, if not for the murders.”

  “Only one problem with that theory. It’s been investigated. And I’ve been cleared. No evidence of wrongdoing, and that was that. I’ve got it in writing. Now, you want to talk to me again, you call my lawyer.”

  Murphy pulled open the conference-room door, walked out, slammed it shut behind him hard enough to leave a hairline crack in its porthole-shaped window.

  “New construction,” Shafer said to the empty room. “Can never trust it.”

  8

  CAIRO

  For two days, Wells cooled his heels at the Lotus, leaving only for a quick trip to the Intercontinental. The move was risky, but if his room stayed empty too long, the hotel’s managers might get nervous. Wells stayed an hour, long enough to muss his bed, take a shower, and have a brief conversation with Shafer on an innocuous Long Island number that routed through to the agency.

  “Mr. Barber,” Shafer said. “How’s business?”

  “I’m worried our client has another bidder. A local agency.”

  “Maybe you should work together.”

  “I think our needs are different.”

  “You’re the man on the ground, so I defer to you.”

  “Your man in Havana.”

  “You’ve been reading again, I see,” Shafer said.

  “Despite your warnings.”

  “I recommend The Comedians. It’s excellent. Anything else I should know?”

  “Probably, but I don’t feel like telling you.”

  Shafer sighed. “Your honesty, so refreshing.”

  “Have you learned anything new about my client?”

  “No, but I did have an interesting talk with our friend Mr. Murphy,” Shafer said. “I’ll fill you in when you get back.”

  “Something to look forward to. How’s Tonka?” After much protesting, Shafer had agreed to take the dog while Wells went to Cairo.

  “She’s developed a taste for the rug in the living room. Aside from that, fine.”

  “She miss me?”

  “Without a doubt. Every day she leaves a note at my door asking when you’re coming back.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Wells left his air-conditioned room unwillingly. No question, he was getting soft. “A luxury once tasted becomes a necessity.” Wells didn’t know who’d popped that kernel of wisdom — someone richer and wit-tier than he, no doubt — but he had to agree. He needed to spend a few months in Haiti or Sudan, unlearn his bad habits.

  Back at the Lotus he passed the time watching Al Jazeera and Lebanese soap operas. He figured he could wait a week, at most. If he was right and Hani was a mukhabarat agent, the Egyptians would put a tail on him soon enough — or just break down his door and arrest him. Part of him wondered why they hadn’t done so already. Probably because they didn’t want to scare him back to Kuwait, blow their chance at Alaa.

  Or maybe Wells had gotten paranoid as well as soft. Maybe Hani was just what he seemed to be, a dedicated Islamist who had nothing to do with the police.

  THE ENVELOPE APPEARED BENEATH his door on the third day, during the call to afternoon prayer. Inside, a single sheet of paper: 1 a.m. Northern Cemetery. Bring the camera. Nothing more.

  Wells read the note twice to be sure he understood. The Northern Cemetery was a huge and ancient graveyard east of the Islamic quarter. Over the centuries, thousands of poor families had nested in the cemetery’s mausoleums and built one-room houses over its graves. Space was precious in Cairo, and the dead didn’t charge rent. Now, with fifty thousand residents, as well as paved streets and power lines, the cemetery was a city within a city, as crowded as the rest of Cairo. And so as an instruction for a meeting place, “Northern Cemetery” was strangely nonspecific, the equivalent of naming an entire neighborhood in an American city, like Buckhead in Atlanta.

  Still, Wells had no choice but to obey and hope that the imam could find him. For dinner he had two plain pitas and two bottles of Fanta, the Egyptian version of his usual pre-mission meal of crackers and Gatorade, light and sugary and easy to keep down. And at 11:30, he slipped on his galabiya, tucked his camera into his backpack.

  But at the door he stopped, took out the camera. He popped open the battery compartment and pulled out the flat black battery. Sure enough, a radio transmitter about the size of a nickel was taped to its underside. The bug was oldish, Russian, nothing fancy. Probably had a range of a few hundred yards, enough to help a search team track down a fugitive once he’d been treed.

  Wells guessed that the mukhabarat had put the bug on the battery when he met with Hani and the imam. Wells was happy to be rid of it, happy his ins
tincts were still sharp. Even so, finding it was a bad sign. For the first time since China, he was facing a professional secret police force. He reached a dirty fingernail under the tape and detached the bug. He’d toss it on the way to the cemetery, after he lost the tail that was surely waiting for him.

  OUTSIDE THE LOTUS, the downtown streets bustled. Couples strolled side by side. A few even held hands. Discreetly, of course. A mother and a daughter, wearing matching pink head scarves, giggled as they bought Popsicles from a stooped man pulling an ice-cream cart. The lack of alcohol gave the streets a pleasant, relaxed feeling. The crowds were lively but not rowdy, the sidewalks free of broken bottles and shouting matches. And Wells walked, his hands at his sides, split from the ordinary lives around him by a wall only he could see. The curse of the spy, at once present and absent. He walked, and he wondered whether anyone was on him.

  Build countersurveillance into your schedule. If you don’t have time for it, you don’t have time for the meet. Even if you don’t think anyone’s on you. Even if you’re sure no one’s on you. The life you save may be your own.

  Guy Raviv, one of Wells’s favorite instructors at the Farm, had given him that lesson a lifetime ago. Raviv had striking blue eyes and a smoker’s hoarse voice and hair too black to be anything but dyed. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, though he could have been older. My children, he called his trainees. My precious, precocious youngsters. He’d been introduced to Wells’s class as a legend who had shucked whole teams of Stasi agents in East Berlin. Wells assumed that the story was exaggerated. Instructors at the Farm had a habit of embellishing their résumés, perhaps with the agency’s encouragement. Far better for new recruits to believe that they were learning from stars than from failed ops put out to pasture.

  But whatever Raviv had or hadn’t done in East Berlin, he was a master teacher, as Wells learned firsthand when he and a team of recruits chased Raviv through the crowded streets of Philadelphia on a Saturday in July. Raviv lost them twice in two hours. He didn’t run—Please remember that anything more than a brisk walk is reserved for emergencies—but he had what Wells’s linebacker coach at Dartmouth called “quick feet,” the ability to change speed and direction almost instantly. Coming back from Philly, Raviv stopped at a McDonald’s on I-95 and distributed a full tray of bon mots along with his Happy Meals.

  Your first goal is to make your pursuer show himself. He knows you. You don’t know him. Before you can lose him, you have to find him. And give yourself time. Listen to the wisdom of Mick Jagger, children: Time is on your side; oh, yes it is. More time equals more moves. More moves equal more chances to make your pursuer show himself. Will you be eating those fries?

  In retrospect, Wells was shocked that the agency had allowed Raviv near them. Langley had always been a tribal place, unfriendly to oddballs. In the 1980s, the agency had become especially macho, spending its energy and money running guns to tinpot Central American dictators, operations that didn’t exactly match Raviv’s skill set. Wells supposed that Raviv had survived the Reagan years by bobbing, weaving, and staying low to the ground, skills as useful at Langley as in East Berlin. He’d become an instructor around 1990, and by the time Wells’s class of recruits arrived, he had his act perfected.

  After his stint at the Farm, Wells never saw Raviv again. Wells always imagined he would. He tried to look Raviv up after he got back from Afghanistan. But Raviv seemed to have shed the agency. Wells assumed he was retired, living someplace warm with his wife. If he had a wife.

  “Whatever happened to Guy Raviv?” he asked Shafer.

  “Good old Guy,” Shafer said. “Died. Lung cancer.”

  “When?”

  “You were in Afghanistan. Maybe three years ago. Don’t look so shocked.”

  “You’re a sweetheart, Ellis. Real humanitarian.”

  “He smoked like two packs a day is all I’m saying. Pretty good at CS, though.”

  And that was Raviv’s epitaph.

  * * *

  WELLS WALKED toward Midhan Tahrir, the heart of Cairo, a big, brightly lit square formed by the intersection of a half-dozen avenues. A pedestrian walkway ran under the square, leading to a subway station and offering a dozen exits — a nightmare for a surveillance team. Once Wells got underground, any tail would have to stay close or risk losing him.

  At the square’s northeastern corner, a waist-high railing blocked pedestrians from crossing at street level, forcing them to use the underground passageway. Wells stopped, apparently lost, as an old man walked slowly by. Wells touched his arm. “Salaam alekeim.”

  “Alekeim salaam,” the man murmured, his voice barely audible above the traffic.

  “Sorry to bother you, my friend. What street is this?”

  “Talaat Harb. Of course. Very much so.”

  “I’m looking for the movie theater.”

  “The Cinema Metro?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “This way.” The man pointed up the street. “Past the next traffic circle. And then a few more streets. But I must tell you, there aren’t any more films tonight.”

  “My mistake. Shokran.”

  “Afwan.” Welcome.

  The man walked on. But the conversation had given Wells what he wanted. From the mass of pedestrians around him, he’d picked out five possible tails. Two men in dark blue galabiyas, their arms interlinked, walking slowly down Talaat Harb. A tall, light-skinned man in a striped blue button-down shirt, lighting a cigarette just a few feet away. Another, glancing at a shoe store as he dialed his cell phone. And a fifth, younger, drinking a Pepsi, casually watching the traffic roll by. They weren’t the only possibilities, but they were the most likely.

  Trust your instincts, Raviv always said. Unless they stink, in which case you shouldn’t.

  But then you shouldn’t be in the field at all. So I’m gonna assume a certain level of competence here. And my point is, you have to guess. And always remember that most of the time there won’t be anyone on you at all. You’ll be playing a little game with yourself. And then sometimes it’s the other thing.

  What other thing? someone had asked.

  If you’re lucky, unlucky, however you want to look at it, at least once in your career you’ll wind up with a whole platoon on you. Cars, motorcycles, helicopters. I know it seems impossible, but it isn’t, not in Moscow or Beijing or Tehran or a few other places where these little games are taken seriously.

  What do we do then?

  Abort your meeting. Head for the nearest house of worship. And pray.

  WELLS HOPPED the railing and picked through the slow-moving traffic on Talaat Harb. Across the street, stairs led to the underground walkway. Wells stepped down them, not quite running, the camera bouncing in his backpack. He made his way along the tiled corridors of the underpass, past a blind man selling packets of tissues, a grimy teenager wearing a New York Yankees cap. Wells turned right, left, and then jogged along a passage and up a stairway. He’d crossed all the way under the square, to its western edge. From here, a wide avenue, three lanes in each direction, ran west toward the Nile.

  Wells stepped around the stairs, positioning himself so he could spot anyone coming up the steps without being seen himself. And sure enough the man in the striped blue shirt emerged from the passageway and jogged up the steps. His cigarette was gone, but he was the same man who was standing next to Wells on Talaat Harb.

  Wells heard Raviv’s raspy voice: You found him. Now lose him. Wells stepped onto the avenue as a bus passed, moving maybe fifteen miles an hour. He moved around the back of the bus, then sprinted along its left side, where its body shielded him from the sidewalk. He kept pace, barely. A taxi honked madly at him, and its passenger-side mirror whacked his ass. He stumbled in his robes but didn’t fall. After thirty seconds, the traffic lightened and he crossed to the south side of the road.

  The move was ugly and unsubtle, but it worked. Wells was two hundred yards from his pursuer, effectively hidden by the traffic. He kept moving, wal
king briskly to the Corniche el-Nil, a three-lane road that ran south along the riverbank. He reached into his pocket and tossed the bug into the Nile. It disappeared without even a splash. He looked back, but the tail seemed to be gone. He extended his arm. A battered black-and-white cab pulled over.

  “The Hyatt,” Wells said. The hotel was a mile down the Corniche. Before they reached it, Wells touched the cabbie’s arm. “Stop here.”

  He paid, waited for the cab to disappear, waited for any sign he’d been followed. But here the Corniche was nearly free of pedestrians and the traffic flowed fast and freely. Wells reached up a hand, hailed another cab. “Northern Cemetery.”

  “Which part?”

  “The entrance.”

  “It has many entrances.” The cabbie looked puzzled but waved Wells in anyway.

  As they drove, Wells closed his eyes and tried to think through the tail and the bug. They had to have come from someone at the mosque. Hani, most likely. Maybe someone else in the imam’s office. Possibly the imam himself. Whoever it was, Wells had to expect the Egyptian police to crash his interview with Alaa. He wondered if he should abort the meeting.

  “Where are you from?” the taxi driver said abruptly.

  Back in America, Wells had forgotten the Arab world’s obsession with ethnicity, its never-ending tribalism. Me against my brother. Us against our cousins. Our family against the family next door. Our block against the next. and on and on, to infinity. Or at least this universe against the next.

  “Kuwait.”

  “Ahh, Kuwait. Of course. You have business here? Maybe you take day off, I take you to the pyramids. Very exciting, very historical. ” He was off and running, and Wells couldn’t help but smile. One day he really would come back here as a tourist. He wondered who’d be with him. Or if he’d be alone.

  THE CABBIE WAS STILL TALKING as they headed up a low rise. Ahead, the road seemed to dead-end at a wide avenue, almost a highway, six lanes of cars heading north and south. Beyond the avenue, a jumble of buildings loomed, darker and lower than the rest of the city. The cabbie pointed at them. “Northern Cemetery.”