The Midnight House jw-4
Page 12
“I can’t wait.”
The cabbie drove through a short tunnel that ran under the avenue and opened into the cemetery. He stopped in front of four nut-brown men sitting in folding chairs, passing a sheesha.
Wells paid the driver, unfolded himself from the cab. The men in the chairs looked curiously at him as it pulled away, trailing diesel smoke. Hani wasn’t among them, and Wells didn’t recognize any of them from the mosque. They were arranged in front of a store whose shelves, as far as Wells could tell, held only cardboard boxes of spark plugs.
“Salaam alekeim.”
“Alekeim salaam.”
The men’s galabiyas were gray with dust, their bodies limp, as if they had been sitting for so long that they were molded to the chairs. They could have been forty, or seventy. They struck Wells as the Egyptian equivalent of the old men who had — in the days before Wal-Mart and air-conditioning — sat in town squares in the South and watched the world go by.
“May I sit?” Wells asked the man on the far right. He seemed younger, or at least more awake, than the others.
“Sit, sit.”
Wells plopped down. Based on the regularity of the traffic passing them, the road through the cemetery seemed to be a major route to eastern Cairo. Wells couldn’t help feeling that running roads through a graveyard was somehow disrespectful. Yet did the dead prefer the loneliness of the immaculately maintained cemeteries in the United States? At least this way they were connected to the city where they had lived.
What nonsense, Wells thought. In truth, if this place proved anything, it was the foolishness of ghost stories. Wells didn’t claim to know where the dead went. But he was sure they weren’t here. Their bones might be, but their spirits were long gone.
The man next to him moved a few degrees toward vertical.
“I am Essam.”
“Nadeem.”
“You visit the cemetery?”
“Yes.”
“Now? At this hour?”
“Why not?”
Essam didn’t seem to know what to say next. He slumped in his seat, reached for the sheesha. Its coals were out. He whistled sharply. A very small and very dirty boy, no more than ten years old, emerged from the spark-plug store, carrying tongs and a brass brazier trailing white smoke. He plucked two red-black coals from the brazier, arranged them on the sheesha.
“You like to smoke?” the boy said to Wells. “Very good smoke. Apple, cherry, strawberry, melon—”
“No, thank you.”
“Very good smoke.” The boy tugged at Wells’s galabiya with a small hand black with coal dust. “You Kuwaiti?”
“Not you, too. Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Then Wells realized why the boy had asked. “Yes. Kuwaiti. You have something for me?”
The boy ran inside the store, reemerging with a piece of paper. “For you. One pound.”
“Who gave you this?”
“One pound.” One Egyptian pound was about twenty cents.
Wells gave him a pound, received the note in return. “Keep walking,” it said in Arabic. Nothing more. “Who gave you this?” But the boy had already gone back to spark-plug heaven.
“Who left this?” Wells said. “A fat man?” As an answer, Essam put the sheesha pipe to his mouth and took a long draw. He closed his eyes as the coals glowed red and the sheesha burbled happily. Wells stood, looked at the crumbling brick buildings around him, wondering if he was being watched, by the muk or the jihadis or both. But nothing moved.
Wells was gripped by a feeling he had never heard properly named, the sense that he could stay with these men for a thousand years, waiting for something to happen. Anything. And nothing would. Yet every moment would be as pregnant with anticipation as the one before, even as his feet took root in the earth, even as he turned into a living statue. The opposite of déjà vu. A state of permanent expectation.
“Good-bye,” Wells said.
Essam exhaled a cloud of white smoke. “Come back. Smoke sheesha with us.”
I know where to find you, Wells didn’t say.
“Ma-a-saalama.”
“Ma-a-saalama.”
THE STREET CURVED LEFT and then right. The dead were all around him — the living, too — huddled inside one-room mud-brick houses that reached the edge of the road. The neighborhood’s poverty was obvious here. The houses had uneven holes for windows. Mangy dogs slept fitfully in garbage-strewn lots, their ribs visible under thin brown fur. At the sight of Wells, they stirred but didn’t bother to stand.
Around the next turn, a narrow alley ran perpendicularly from the street. As Wells walked past it, a boy in dirty brown sweatpants hissed at him. “Are you the Kuwaiti?”
Kuwaiti. The magic word. The password for tonight’s adventures.
“Yes.”
“Follow me.”
Wells turned down the alley, following the boy. This section of cemetery sloped north to south. They headed south, down a narrow staircase, concrete steps crumbling. The alley shrank as it continued, buildings pressing on both sides, leaving just enough room for two men to stand side by side. Wells wasn’t happy. An ambush here would be lethal. He peeked over his shoulder but couldn’t see anyone.
“How much farther, boy? ” he said. The kid ignored him, trotting ahead.
* * *
THEY PASSED AN OPEN SQUARE filled with tombstones and one large mausoleum, the first evidence Wells had seen of an actual cemetery in the Northern Cemetery. Ahead, the alley swung left, a blind turn. The boy whistled and ran. Here it comes, Wells thought. As he made the turn, he felt rather than saw a man in a black mask stepping out of a hole in the wall behind him. He tried to turn, to protect himself, but something hard and metal crashed into the side of his head—
A sap—
His last thought — and then his legs sagged underneath him and he was out.
9
The letter was a single white page, typewritten, undated, no letterhead.
To: Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense
CC: Frederick Whitby, Director of National Intelligence
CC: Vincent Duto, Director of Central Intelligence
CC: Lucy Joyner, Inspector General, Central Intelligence Agency
Dear Mr. Gates:
This letter is in reference to the illegal activities of a unit operated by the army and the Central Intelligence Agency. Squad 673. This unit operated in Poland. Based at Stare Kiejkuty army base in eastern Poland. It had the job of interrogating “enemy combatant” detainees. Those known as high-value.
This squad 673 was led by COL Martin Terreri of the Fourth Special Operations Brigade. The second-in-command was Brant Murphy. A CIA officer. The unit had ten members. You should know that Brant Murphy and Colonel Terreri stole at least $1 million from the unit. They received kickbacks from Europa West Aircraft in return for hiring Europa West for Charter Flights. Flights #11, #19, and #27 never took place.
Dr. Rachel Callar and other members of Squad 673 knew about the stealing by BRANT MURPHY and COLONEL TERRERI. However they did not profit from it. They did not want to report the leaders of the squad. You should ask them!
Also, the unit did do acts of torture on its detainees. Including Waterboarding, Electric Shock, Stress Positions, Prolonged Sleep Deprivation, Mock Executions. And other bad acts.
I am not making this up. For proof, here are the prisoner identification numbers (PINs) of the detainees:
3185304876—3184690284—4007986133—4013337810—4042991331—4041179553—4192578423—5567208212—6501740917—6500415280—7298472436—7297786130
I know the Department of Defense is a law-abiding and ethical institution. I appreciate your attention to these matters.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Not surprisingly, the letter was unsigned. The envelope carried a Salt Lake City postmark and the same Courier twelve-point font. No return address.
Four thick lines of classification were stamped across the top of the letter:
TOP SEC
RET/SCI/ PLASMA/76G
NOFORN/NOCON
DISTRIBUTION BY DCI ONLY
And just in case the message hadn’t gotten through: PRINCIPALS ONLY.
Shafer read the letter through twice. He was examining it a third time when Lucy Joyner, the CIA inspector general, reached across the table. “Time’s up,” she said.
Joyner was a tall, round Texan whose curly hair was dyed a striking platinum blond. She investigated internal allegations of wrongdoing at the agency, a job that made her as popular at Langley as a police officer at a pro-hemp rally. She couldn’t fit in, so she’d taken the opposite route. Her hair was defiance in a Clairol bottle. We’re here, we’re the IG’s office, get used to it.
“I’m a slow reader,” Shafer said.
She waggled her fingers at him, and he handed it over. They were in a conference room in Joyner’s office suite, on the sixth floor of the Old Headquarters Building. A framed map of Texas hung on one wall, beside a photo of Lyndon Baines Johnson wearing a cowboy hat and holding his dog, Little Beagle Jr.
“Can I see the original?” Shafer said.
Joyner had shown him a high-resolution copy of the letter, which was locked in her safe. “Nothing on it,” Joyner said. “No fingerprints or DNA. Whoever sent them was awful careful.” Joyner hadn’t lived in Texas in twenty-five years, but she sounded like she’d just gotten off a plane from Amarillo. Shafer wondered if she practiced at home. Bar-be-cue. Fixin’s. Largemouth bass.
“What about the other letters?” Shafer said. “To Gates and Duto and Whitby?”
“Destroyed. I asked Duto about it; he told me his office gets all kinds of crazy mail. Can’t check everything. Yeah, well, my office gets nutjob letters, too, but we know when one’s real. And so do they.”
“Except when they’d rather not.”
“This conversation shouldn’t be happening,” Joyner said. “Lucky for me, you have that super-fancy clearance.”
“They keep forgetting to take it away.”
“So, I don’t need permission to show you this. And I remember how they treated you after nine-eleven, Ellis. Which is to say I think we’re on the same side. But most of what you want to know, I can’t tell you. You have to go to the source for that.”
“A couple of questions.”
“Just a couple.”
“Murphy told me you’d cleared him.”
“Did he, now.”
“I’m guessing that isn’t exactly accurate.”
“It is and it isn’t.”
“How far did you get?” Shafer asked.
“He came in for a prelim—”
“A prelim?”
“A preliminary interview. No lie detector, no lawyers. It’s optional, but most folks agree to ’em, because if we can get our questions answered then, nothing gets into your file, nothing for the boards”—the promotion boards—“to see. Anyways, he came in. I showed him the letter, asked him if he could tell me anything. He said he couldn’t. I asked him whether 673’s records would exonerate him. He said it didn’t matter, because they were DD-and-above clearance”—that only deputy directors and Duto himself could see them. “I asked him about the torture. He told me that he was administrative, didn’t run interrogations. Then I asked him about receipts and he laughed. Literally. Laughed out loud. Asshole. That was it. He left. I figured I’d better check it out. But before I got anywhere, Duto called.”
“When, exactly?”
“Maybe two days after I spoke to Brant. He told me to find something else to do, that he was invoking the NSE”—the national security exemption, which allowed the director to overrule the inspector general and stop internal investigations if they were likely to damage vital national interests.
“Duto didn’t tell you what was behind the NSE.”
“He did not.”
“And that was it?”
“I’m not like you, Ellis. I get a direct order from the director, I listen. I called Murphy, told him not to worry. A couple of days later, his lawyer called, told me that wasn’t good enough, that Murphy wanted all records of the investigation destroyed.”
“Smart.”
“Yes. Too bad for him, I was able to tell him that wouldn’t be possible, that I had to hold the letter because of the allegations of torture, et cetera. So the lawyer asked me to certify that I had cleared Murphy of any wrongdoing related to 673. As an insurance policy, he said.”
“Without specifying what the wrongdoing actually was.”
“Correct, Ellis.” She paused. “So, I wrote it. Murphy had Duto on his side, and I figured it was more important to make sure this”—she looked at the letter—“survived. Then I locked that letter up and forgot about it. Though not entirely. I knew somebody would call. Sooner or later. Stuff like this doesn’t stay down forever.”
“You heard what’s happened with 673,” Shafer said. “The murders.”
“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
“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.”