The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “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 from 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.

  By the end of her stay at the center she was eating normally again. Though Dr. Appel warned her that they’d never go away entirely, that in moments of great stress, her twin black dogs — anorexia and the depression that circled it — might come back.

  By the time she left New Beginnings, she’d decided to become a psychiatrist. She’d also decided to break from her parents. She stopped seeing them, stopped cashing her dad’s checks, paid for the last two years of medical school herself. Before residency, she joined an army program that gave her a monthly stipend in return for a promise to join the reserves. Part of her knew she’d signed up to piss off her dad, who’d been a lifelong member of the ACLU and burned his draft card during Vietnam. Not the best reason to join, but the decision worked out. She liked being part of the reserves. As a shrink in Southern California, she saw more than her share of borderline personalities, narcissists and drama queens who suffered mainly from boredom and spent their sessions wheedling for Xanax. Talking to soldiers and vets offered a valuable reminder that some twentysomethings faced traumas worse than having nasty stepmoms.

  BUT SOMETIME IN 2006, her second tour in Iraq, she started coming unwound. Just as in med school, her problems increased incrementally. She had trouble sleeping, and when she did she dreamed incessantly about the soldiers she was treating, especially the ones who’d been hurt. She exercised more and more, telling herself she’d sleep better if she tired out her body. She started to count calories in the mess line.

  Then she lost Travis. He was a good-looking kid. A good-looking man. Broad-shouldered, not too tall, sandy blond hair. When he smiled, which wasn’t often, his eyes crinkled. He could have been Paul Newman’s younger brother. His looks shouldn’t have mattered, but of course they did. And he was funny. In a laconic, Texas way. One time, she’d asked him his favorite food.

  He’d smirked and said, “Barbecue, ma’am. Favorite car, an F-150. Black with a number-eight bumper sticker. Favorite activity, drinking beer. Favorite music, well, I like both kinds. Country and western. I mean, ma’am, when you’re born in Fort Worth, and your parents name you Travis, you don’t have much choice in the matter. You can fight it, but why bother? Can you guess my favorite hat?”

  It was the longest speech Travis ever gave her.

  She liked him. She looked forward to seeing him.

  She’d thought sending him home was the right move. He wasn’t ready to go back to his unit. He’d started to get paranoid, as severely depressed patients sometimes did. He complained that some of the other guys in his bunk were making fun of him. For a few weeks, she tried antidepressants, but they didn’t help. She didn’t want to force-feed him an antipsychotic like Zyprexa that would make him gain thirty pounds and sleep fifteen hours a day. He’d be branded as mentally ill for the rest of his life. She knew she was running out of time to help him. Her tour was almost over, and he was pressing every day to go back to the field. And the army was so short on frontline guys that they wouldn’t have said no. But she knew he wasn’t ready. He needed to get away from Iraq, from the heat and the wind and the constant reminders of his dead squadmates. She told him she was send
ing him stateside, where he could get the help he needed.

  But Travis Byrne, private first class, disagreed with her diagnosis. And proved her wrong in the most irreversible way possible. And since the night Travis said good-bye to her and the world with a two-word note, she’d felt herself cramping, obsessing over him. “I failed,” he’d written. She felt the same. And after a few months back in San Diego, she decided she needed another mission.

  NOW HERE SHE WAS, in Stare Kiejkuty, watching Kenneth Karp beat on Jawaruddin bin Zari. From what she could see, Karp wasn’t having much luck. Which meant that he and Jack Fisher would be asking to use the punishment box soon enough. After that, maybe, the fifth cell.

  She couldn’t stand Karp. With his constant pacing, his tight energy, he reminded her of a monkey. She’d bet he was covered in thick, black hair. And yet he did carry himself with power. He would be an energetic lover, if not a good one.

  Ugh. Was she really thinking about what Ken Karp might be like in bed? She’d been here far too long. Like everyone else.

  Karp walked out of the interrogation room. He was coming up here, she knew. He liked to work detainees over and then leave them alone to imagine what their next punishment might be. “Let them stew,” he said. “Builds the dread.” As a psychiatrist, Callar had to agree. Anxiety twisted the mind, forced it in on itself. As a human being, she wasn’t so sanguine. Her own dread seemed to be getting worse.

  Before Karp could reach the office, she walked into the hall, down the stairs that led to the steel front door of the barracks. When she stepped out, the late-winter sun caught her full in the eyes. She blinked, raised a hand to shield her face.

  It was day. She’d forgotten.

  16

  SAN DIEGO

  Seven seventy-two Flores was an oversized Spanish colonial, two stories, red tile roof, thick white walls. In typical Southern California style, it nearly filled its lot. A steel-gray Toyota SUV sat in the narrow driveway along its left side.