The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

Tom Junod: MERCENARY

FROM Esquire

THE PALISADES NUCLEAR PLANT in Covert, Michigan, is real. It produces 778 megawatts of electricity, and the electricity keeps the lights burning for about half a million residents. The nuclear reactor inside the nuclear plant is also real. It gets really hot, and anyone driving on Interstate 196 on his way to Grand Rapids or St. Joe can see thin clouds of steam rising from its cooling towers, as constant a presence as the weather. The steam is real; it’s water from Lake Michigan, pumped in to keep the reactor cool. The nuclear power plant is on the shore of Lake Michigan, right next to the tourist town of South Haven and about eighty miles from Chicago as the crow flies. Lake Michigan is real, definitely, though it comes off as an illusory ocean, offering the horizon as its only boundary. South Haven is real, too, although it empties out in the cold of winter. And Chicago? As real as the millions of people who live there, and the strange American fervor they generate. Chicago is so damned real, and so damned American, that it’s hard to imagine an American reality without it-it’s hard to imagine an American reality if, say, a terrorist attack on Palisades Nuclear contaminated the big lake for the next thousand years or so and emptied out Chicago, not to mention St. Joe and South Haven and Covert.

Which is why it’s a good thing that the security manager at Palisades Nuclear for the last year and a half is real, too, with real qualifications for the job. His name is William E. Clark, and he has been in the Army, he’s been a cop, he’s done some contracting work for the Department of Energy, he’s gone to Kosovo on a diplomatic mission, and after Katrina, he worked for Blackwater, the security company, outside New Orleans. He started at Palisades in early 2006. He has a new house and a new wife and has told people, “I would shed blood to keep this job.” As a statement of determination, this is reassuring…but what if he means it as a statement of fact? What if William E. Clark has told people-told me-that he has in fact shed blood many times, in many places, over the course of many years? What if William E. Clark says that he worked for Blackwater in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as in New Orleans and killed so many people that he considers himself a cold-blooded murderer? What if he says that his job as the security manager of a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan is both a reward for all the killing he’s done and a means for keeping him quiet about it?

THE GUILT IS REAL. The shame is real. He is not proud of the things he’s done, although that doesn’t stop him from talking about them. He’s not proud of what he had to do in Vietnam, his son says. He’s not proud of having to kill someone in New Orleans, his ex-wife says. He wakes up with nightmares, his new wife says, because he’s starting to see the faces of the human beings he once saw through the rifle scope. And so this story represents his attempt to come clean. He is a bad person, he says, but he wants to be a good person-he wants to be thought of as a good person. He wants to be purified, shriven. He is telling his story because he knows it will destroy him. He is telling his story because he knows it will set him free.

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.”

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 and 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.”

A FEW DAYS LATER the phone in my home office rang at eight o’clock in the morning. I didn’t run to get it, though I knew it was Zeke. All that week I’d been on the phone with him, trying to get him to go public with his story, trying to convince him to allow me to use his name. He kept saying that he was going away. He was going back to Afghanistan. He was taking a job with a company that provided security for firms trying to do business in Kabul. He was leaving in January and didn’t know when or if he was going to be back. He hadn’t told Baby Doll, he said, then asked: “Do you think she’s going to be mad?”

When the phone rang, I knew I’d lost him. And sure enough, when I checked the message, this is what it said: “Hi, Tom, this is Zeke. Hey man, I couldn’t sleep at all last night, thinking about this story and stuff. And I gotta tell you, man, I have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan, I have no operational knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have no knowledge of any operational plans that have taken place in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s no record of me ever being in Afghanistan or Iraq, I’m a nonentity, I just don’t exist in any of that kind of thing, I have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. Anything else is fine, but I have no knowledge of, there’s no witnesses, there’s nothing that ties me to Iraq or Afghanistan, never been to Iraq or Afghanistan, I just don’t have anything to do with that, I can’t have anything to do with that, and I’m sorry, I don’t want to have anything to do with my name at all with Iraq or Afghanistan, I don’t exist in that arena, never have, never will, and I just had a sleepless night last night, so I wanted to call and tell you that I don’t know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan and never have been and never will. I hope you’re okay, your family’s okay. I just had to tell you that. So. Thanks, Tom. Bye-bye.”

WAS IT A DENIAL or a confirmation? Was it the lie that told the truth or the truth that told the lie? I called Blackwater, and it was exactly as Zeke had foretold: A spokeswoman said there was no such thing as a “designated marksman” for Blackwater: “It’s not a term we would use, because all our missions are defensive.” She confirmed that a William E. Clark had worked for Blackwater in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina, but that he was “never, ever, ever in Iraq or Afghanistan for us. He was never there on a Blackwater contract.” And then she said, “My understanding is also that he is prone to give false information and is not to be considered a trustworthy source.”

BLACKWATER, OF COURSE, had an interest in proving him a liar, since he’d come home from Louisiana and told his wife and son that he’d killed someone there. Zeke was still married to Linda then. He was still talking to Rick. He pulled both of them aside and told them that some dope addict made a play for the narcotics in storage, and he’d shot him. It wasn’t something he was proud of, because it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t precise. He’d shot him in the dark, and he’d hit him without killing him. The addict died eventually, but still. He was pretty shaken up about it, Rick said-and that’s what gave the story its legitimacy. Rick had grown up with his father’s stories. He’d come to doubt a lot of them, but there were certain ones he believed, because his father wasn’t playing the hero. Ever since Rick was a little boy, his father had told him stories about Vietnam-but the story he believed was the one where the Vietnamese captured and broke him. Why, Rick thought, would someone tell a story like that if it wasn’t true? What kind of man would try to make you believe what he was ashamed of?

DENNIS COLLINS MET William Clark in El Salvador in the mid-nineties. He will not say what he was doing there; he is, he says, prohibited from saying what he was doing there. All he will say is that he was there, and that when he was there, he met William Clark, who called himself Zeke. They were in El Salvador for different reasons, he says, but they became friends, and when they came home, Collins started getting Zeke work. Collins was associated with Nuclear Security Services Corporation, or NSSC. It provided security training for nuclear facilities, and it employed a lot of former operators. Zeke was a perfect fit, because he was so enthusiastic, such a great motivator and storyteller-when clients gave their evaluations, “the number-one guy they talk about is Zeke,” Collins said. Zeke’s success with NSSC led him to find work with DynCorp, the security company that provided manpower for the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission in 1998. And his success with DynCorp led him to find work with a company that contracted with the Department of Energy to provide assault teams-adversary teams, as they’re known-that would stage mock attacks on nuclear facilities for the purpose of exposing their vulnerabilities. Zeke never would have gotten any of these jobs without Dennis Collins-Collins was a critical reference-nor would he have gotten the security-manager job at Palisades, for it was one of Collins’s associates who recommended Zeke for the position.

Zeke called Collins “my best friend in the business,” and Collins knew that Zeke was struggling at Palisades. Zeke was a “shooter and operator,” he said, and like a lot of shooters and operators, he was having trouble accepting that he had become “a desk jockey.” That was why Zeke was so desperate to get to Iraq. He and Collins had gone to Camp Pendleton, California, for counterterrorism training about five or six years ago, and Collins had seen how some of the young marines had responded to Zeke’s stories-they were enthralled. A few years later, when they went back, everything had changed. There was a war on. Now there were young marines who had been to Fallujah, and when Zeke told his stories, they were like, You don’t know what you’re talking about, old man. Zeke couldn’t take it. He became obsessed with getting to Iraq, but then, during one of the training exercises, he hit his head against a wall and passed out. People thought he was playing around, but he wasn’t. He had a neck injury that occasionally cut the flow of blood to his brain. And so he washed out. Nobody’s going to hire a guy with an injury like that. “Believe me, he’s not going to Iraq,” Collins said. “Because if he does go, he’s either going to get killed or get somebody else killed. But it’s tough, because he’s having a real hard time. If you ask me, what happened at Camp Pendleton cracked him.”

LAST OCTOBER. Zeke flew to Washington, D.C., and gave a presentation to the Department of Homeland Security. He went with one of his superiors from Palisades, and with Al DiBrito and Mike Moll, the agents from the FBI and the DHS who had become part of Zeke’s Viper team. That’s what the presentation was about: Viper. It was Zeke’s brainchild, and now he was proposing to create Viper teams at every nuclear power plant in the United States. The presentation was attended by Craig Conklin, the head of the DHS’s nuclear-hazards branch, as well as by other representatives from the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-“about ten people in all,” Conklin says. Zeke did most of the talking and was impressive enough for some of the participants to consider Viper training as a “best practice,” in which case Zeke would be able to take his program nationwide.

ZEKE GOT SHOT IN KOSOVO. Everybody knew about it: He told some of the shooters and operators he’d met when he was staging the mock assaults on nuclear plants. It was part of Zeke’s legend. He’d gone to Kosovo for DynCorp, which had contracted to provide personnel for the State Department’s Diplomatic Observer Mission. He had a diplomatic passport. But he says he was also there as a cover. He was an operative whose mission was to determine the war-fighting capacity of the Kosovo Liberation Army. He would hike into KLA camps with not much more than a box of Marlboros and a medical kit. He should have been shot, but people would line up as soon as they saw him. He would spend all day stitching wounds and get the information he needed. Then he did get shot, and the only thing that saved him was his flak jacket. When he got home, he showed Linda the sweater with the hole in it. Did she believe him? Well, she loved him, she said. And besides, she’d seen the sweater; she’d put her finger in the hole.

THAT WAS THE FIRST THING Linda Clark said to me, the first thing she wanted me to know. They were divorced, but she still loved him. She had known him for so long that being married to him “was almost like raising another child.” He used to ride motorcycles with her first husband, and when she was divorced and became a single mother, he protected her. “He always made me feel secure,” she said. They were baptized together before they were married. But around 1984, he lost his job as a policeman in Visalia, California, for having an affair with another officer’s wife, and they struggled. They struggled financially, as he wrote the six novels that never got published and wrote the stack of plays and screenplays that never got produced-well, one did, at a community theater. And he did make a movie. Did I know that he made a movie? He did, he really did, in the early nineties, with a friend’s workmen’s-compensation check. But of course it never went anywhere, and what kept Bill and Linda afloat, she said, was Bill’s job as a chimney sweep. For twelve years, from ’84 to ’96, he worked as a chimney sweep in his hometown of Tulare, down the road from Visalia. “I’ll bet Bill didn’t tell you about that, did he?”

No, I said, he didn’t. It’s not on his résumé, either, those twelve years representing the gap only his handler could explain. But wait a second-didn’t he go by Zeke?

“Oh, I don’t know where he got that,” she said. “Everybody I know calls him Bill. But then he went on that trip to El Salvador and everything changed. He was always big into skydiving, and though we didn’t have a lot of money, he wanted to go skydiving with the El Salvadoran army. I let him go, because it was so important to him, and that’s where he met Dennis Collins. And when he came home, he wanted me to call him Zeke. I couldn’t do it. He’s still Billy to me.”

Their finances got better after that, Linda said, because Bill started doing work for Dennis, and the work for Dennis led to work for the DOE, and the work for the DOE led to work for security companies like Vance and Blackwater. What got worse was Bill’s…well, his problem, Linda said. He has to make himself more interesting than he is. He can’t bear to be just plain old Bill Clark from Tulare, California, because plain old Bill Clark had dyslexia, and really suffered in school…

“Did he ever play football?” I asked.

“Junior varsity,” she said. “He was too small for varsity.”

Well, was he ever in Afghanistan or Iraq? I asked.

“Oh, heavens no,” Linda said. “He told you that?”

“He also told me that he was in the Horn of Africa with the French Foreign Legion.”

“Well, he did go to Nigeria, back in the early eighties. A Nigerian minister came to Tulare, and Bill went to Nigeria with him as a missionary. He didn’t like it very much, though. He came back in about two or three weeks.”

She said this without malice. Indeed, she was praying for him to see the error of his ways, so that their marriage could be repaired and they could reconcile. She still loved the man. She still spoke to him. As a matter of fact, she had spoken to him just the day before, and he was saying that he wanted to break off his engagement with Terri so that he could remarry Linda.

“Linda, I hate being the one to tell you this, but he and Terri aren’t engaged. They’re married.”

“Oh, my God,” Linda Clark said.

AN OFFICIAL at one of Zeke’s former employers confirmed that he did have a Q clearance with the DOE, which gave him access to top-secret information at nuclear plants. But when two officials with access to Department of Defense databases-one in the DOD, the other a screener for a private security company-checked Zeke’s TS/SCI clearance, they found no record of William E. Clark having DOD “eligibility or access.” That is, they found no record of William E. Clark holding the high-level DOD security clearance he included on his résumé at Palisades Nuclear.

HE HAD NEVER TALKED about his life before, Zeke said, and he was always disdainful of people who did. He was always disdainful of both the “cowboys” who liked to brag and the “wannabes” who were endemic to the world of covert operations. Real operators, he said, never talked about their exploits when they got together. They talked about their wives, they talked about their families, they talked about how much they missed home. It was strange, then, that about seven years ago he held the ultimate wannabe job-he was an auxiliary cop in Kingsburg, California, an unpaid position that called on him only to “assist officers on duty.” And it was even stranger when, last year, he called a cop he knew from Kingsburg named Kevin Pendley. “He tried to recruit me to go to Iraq,” Pendley says. “He called out of the blue. He said he’d been over there for Blackwater and that he’d just gotten back. He said he killed sixty-nine people.”

RICK CLARK KNEW instinctively that his father had remarried. He had, in fact, warned his mother that his father had remarried, although he hadn’t spoken to his father in a year and a half. It was just something he felt, from a lifetime of experience-the familiar vibrations of his father’s falsehoods. “He’s living a movie in which he’s the flawed but sympathetic central character, a really deeply interesting central character,” Rick said. “He’s smart enough to show his flaws, because when he does, he becomes believable, and you become an accomplice in the movie of his life.”

Was Rick one of Bill Clark’s accomplices? “I grew up with the mythology and to some extent defined myself by it,” he said. “One of the reasons I went into the military was to carry on the tradition.” Rick is thirty-five now, about to leave the Air Force, and he doesn’t consider himself an accomplice anymore. “If my father told me the sun was shining, I wouldn’t believe him-even if I lived in the next town over, for God’s sake.” But he did want to know one thing. He wanted me to find out the truth of one story, because he’d been hearing it since he could remember and had built his life around it. He wanted to know if Bill Clark had been a Ranger and had been in Vietnam. “I really need to know that, Tom,” he said. “Because I need to know whether everything has been a lie.”

THERE WAS NO INCIDENT on Zeke’s first day at Palisades; no threat to throw his boss out the window. That’s what the senior manager said, the same one who had told me that Zeke had gone to Afghanistan looking for a high-velocity round between the eyes. When I told him that Zeke had never actually been to Afghanistan or Iraq, he said, “He wasn’t?” And then he said, “You know, I’m really glad you called, because he’s been trying to get me to quit my job and go into business with him. He said that I had the know-how, and he had all the contacts from his years in covert operations.”

THE MOVIE WAS CALLED Team Dragon. Bill Clark got the idea for it when a B-movie company came to Tulare to reshoot some footage on the cheap, and he went out to get some stunt work. He thought it looked pretty easy, making a movie, so he started watching movies obsessively on his VCR, with a notebook in his lap. When he felt ready to direct, he began shooting bits of a script he’d written, featuring guys he knew from Tulare. One of them, Ken Washman, was bothered by the suspicion that if what Clark was shooting ever did become a movie, he wouldn’t get paid a dime, and so he began asking Clark what it would cost to get cut in-to make a real movie whose profits he could share. Clark came up with a figure, which happened to be the amount of the check Washman had recently received in compensation for a workplace accident. And so, in 1990 and 1991, Bill Clark shot Team Dragon in and around Tulare, with Ken Washman as his star. It was about a Vietnam veteran who had to face his demons when he found out that the NVA was selling opium in California, and it cost $25,000 to make. “My wife wasn’t real happy about it,” Washman says now. “She didn’t really like me spending that much time with Bill Clark, and she wanted me to put the money in a piece of property or something. I guess I would have had a better return on my investment if I did, but I wouldn’t have had as much fun as I did running around and shooting guns out there in Tulare. And it was a real movie, you know. We had a premiere at the Elks club in Tulare. Bill showed it and said, ‘Well, Ken, what do you think?’

“I said, ‘Well, Bill-it’s a movie.’ There was not a whole lot much more you could say about it, other than that.”

ZEKE DIDN’T KILL anyone in Louisiana. A former marine who was on Zeke’s Blackwater team said that no one even discharged his weapon, because it was well known that if you did, Blackwater would fire your ass. Besides, they were in the sticks. They weren’t in New Orleans. It was quiet where they were, really sort of boring, except when Zeke told the story that a gang was coming to get at the narcotics. Even then, the former marine listened with half an ear. That guy was always telling stories.

THE VOLUNTEER FROM the shelter in Louisiana received a call one day from Linda Clark. Linda told the volunteer that she’d been speaking to the Lord, and the Lord had instructed her to forgive the volunteer for breaking up her marriage to Bill. By this time, the volunteer was living in fear of the man she knew as Zeke, and so she asked Linda the one thing she really wanted to know: Is he dangerous?

Oh, I don’t think so, Linda said.

But what about the video footage he sent? the volunteer asked. What about the footage of him executing people?

And that’s when the volunteer found out about Team Dragon. That’s when she found out about everything, including the fact that he had never been to Afghanistan or Iraq. She was hoping that she could keep the affair from her husband, but she wound up confessing it all, and once she did, he forgave her, as the victim of a skilled predator.

“So I dodged a bullet,” she told me. “And so did you.”

It was embarrassing to think of it that way, of course-embarrassing to think that Zeke had singled me out the way he’d singled out so many others, embarrassing to think that I was one of his victims.

“Hey, look at it this way,” the volunteer said. “At least you didn’t have sex with him.”

THE OLD SOLDIER was surprised to hear Zeke’s name when I called him on the phone. “William Clark from California?” he asked, and when I told him what I was calling about, he responded immediately. “Well, if he’s the security manager at a nuclear plant, he bullshitted his way into it. He was like that as a teenager. He was one of the most grandiose, storytelling individuals I’ve ever met.”

Indeed, in May 1975, the soldier had been arrested for the sake of one of Clark’s stories. At the time, the most famous mercenary in the world was a man named Michael Hoare, who had raised private armies in the Congo and the Seychelles. Clark said he had been a Ranger, but now, like the soldier, he was in the 34th Infantry. He and a friend told the soldier that they knew somebody who worked for Michael Hoare, and that Hoare was looking for new recruits. First, though, they had to prove that they were brave and that they were ruthless. And so one night, Clark convinced the soldier to throw a bomb at the window of the S &S Truck Stop. It bounced off the bulletproof glass and exploded in the parking lot. They were arrested, along with three others, and spent the night in jail, before their CO got them out the next morning. There was no friend they were defending; there was no FBI agent. There were only a bunch of ignorant kids beguiled by a shot at glory, and in the story the old soldier tells, “I disassociated myself from William Clark as soon as I got back to the base.”

So he was living it, even then-the fantasy that has consumed his life, as well as the lives of everybody who has trusted him. Court records from McIntosh County indicate that there were no charges of attempted murder, as Zeke had said; the charge was “criminal attempt,” and it was dropped when it came to the docket. His military records indicate that although he might have gone to Ranger School, he did not graduate, and although he was assigned to a Ranger battalion, he finished out his career in the 34th Infantry, with an undistinguished rank and without a Ranger tab. There was no career as a Green Beret, as he had told his son; nor had he ever served in Vietnam. The gooks had not broken him, but he had come damned close to breaking Rick, who, when I told him the military records confirmed that he’d been lied to since he was four years old, said simply, “I want to put my head through a wall.”

WHEN ZEKE HAD the cell-phone conversation with his handlers in the restaurant, I knew that his story had only two possible outcomes, and that both were monstrous. If Larry and Kyle were real, then Zeke was an assassin in the employ of a secret governmental agency that had seen fit to give him a job at a nuclear plant just as he was starting to go crazy with guilt and shame. If they weren’t real, then Zeke was not just a liar; he was a liar who was willing to engage in complicated three-way public conversations with people who didn’t exist. He was a liar with an alias and fake passports, a liar who maintained extensive stocks of boarding passes and hotel-room keys, a liar who packed a duffel bag and kept it in his house in order to further the fiction that his next mission was one phone call away. He was a liar who conflated his lies with threats so that skepticism would be conflated with fear. He was a deranged liar, and he was the security manager of a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan.

I have a pretty good idea of what the answer is. After all, Zeke told the volunteer the exact same things about the handler that he told me, with the exact same proviso: that this was the first time he had talked about him to another living soul. And Linda Clark said that when Zeke got phone calls from his girlfriends, he often told Linda that his handler was on the line, and that he had to take the call in private.

There is no handler. There was no Larry or Kyle. And yet sometimes I find myself wishing that there were, because the alternative is harder to accept. In the four months I spent with Zeke, he told me exactly two significant facts, two plain truths uncomplicated by falsehood and fantasy: first, that he was security manager of Palisades Nuclear. And second, that last October he had gone to Washington, D.C., in the company of two federal agents and presented his vision of nuclear security to the head of the nuclear-hazards branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

HE WAS WONDERING if he should tell her. He was wondering if she would love him if he did. I urged him to. It was last December, and he had been married less than two weeks. I was saying goodbye to him for what turned out to be the final time, and I urged him to tell his new wife who he really was, so that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes he’d made with Linda. And then the phone rang. It was Baby Doll. He handed the phone to me, and I asked her why she’d married him. She told me that he was tall, that he was not fazed by her multiple sclerosis, and that he was, in her mind, “a gentle protector. He’s afraid that if I found out what he did, I wouldn’t love him. But that’s not the part of him that I care about. The part that I care about is the courageous part, the part that came to Michigan to start a new life without knowing a soul. The rest-he did what he had to do, what he was asked to do for his country. Others did it, too, and are still doing it. I know he has bad dreams about it. But I want to hold him through his bad dreams. He told me when we first met that we’re both wounded souls, and he’s right. But that’s why I love him.”

IT IS EASY TO THINK OF LYING as a victimless crime, akin to storytelling, akin to performance-after all, wasn’t Zeke performing when he was speaking to his handlers? All those unpublished novels, all those unproduced plays and screenplays; and now, at fifty-three, the chimney sweep finds his true métier, telling tales to a complicit reporter. And yet his victims number more than those whose feelings he’s hurt, whose lives he’s wrecked. When I called Blackwater about William E. Clark, I asked if Blackwater prohibited its contractors from having sex with the people they were supposed to be protecting. “What?” the spokeswoman answered, in disbelief. “Yes. Of course. It’s the first thing they’re prohibited from doing. It’s the worst thing they can do. Does that answer your question?” When I called DynCorp to see if William E. Clark was part of DynCorp’s Kosovo Mission-he was, but he wasn’t shot; no diplomatic observers were-the spokesman was chiefly concerned with Zeke’s claim that he was really in Kosovo for American intelligence. “He’s saying DynCorp was his cover?” he said. “You have to understand-that’s the kind of claim that can put all our guys in jeopardy.” And when I called an FBI agent who until recently had been one of the chief liaisons between the bureau and the CIA, he listened to what I told him about Zeke, then said: “Fuck this guy. Expose him. He’s an asshole.

Guys like that make it much, much harder for the guys who are legit.”

A STORY ABOUT A LIAR always turns out to be about one thing: He lied. Zeke says he doesn’t talk to his brothers anymore? He lied. Zeke says that he threatened a UPI photographer who took his picture in El Salvador? UPI says it never had a photographer in El Salvador at the time in question.

And yet what haunts me are not Zeke’s lies but the truths he told, or tried to tell, from the moment I met him. He was confessing, after all, and though his confession was a failed one, the impulse behind it brought a psychological truth-the momentum of a man unraveling-to his most outrageous falsehoods. He said that he was a nobody. He said he lacked a moral firewall. He said he lied to his mother like he lied to everyone else. He said that his life was a fake. He said that he’d been a lot of people, and that he’d hurt a lot of people. He even said, at length, in a phone message, that he’d never been to Afghanistan or Iraq. I listened, but I didn’t believe him, because as invested as I was in telling his story, I was even more heavily invested in proving him a killer and not just a liar. I was aware, all along, that he was one or the other, but somehow I could not bear to think that he was just a liar, and neither could he. It was too shameful. So he said he was a killer instead, because he knew that somehow human sympathy extends to killing even as it ends at lying.

He said that he was talking to me because he needed to burn his bridges; because he needed to be stopped; because he didn’t want to hurt any more people. I believed him then. I believe him now.

TOM JUNOD lives in Marietta, Georgia, with his wife, his daughter, and his pit bull, a rescued fighting dog named Carson. Though Junod’s been writing for Esquire for ten years, he was shocked by the extent of “Zeke’s” lies, and to a certain degree still is.

Coda

Bill “Zeke” Clark resigned from Palisades Nuclear in early May 2007, the day “Mercenary” was posted on Esquire’s website. The story itself prompted several investigations into the question of how someone like Clark was hired in the first place, and one of his former colleagues at Palisades said, “I suspect it’s going to change the way the entire industry works, when it comes to hiring people.” Then he added, “If you ever talk to Zeke, tell him he didn’t have to lie. We’d have liked him anyway.”

I have not spoken to Clark since the story’s publication, so I have no way of knowing if he’s still lying. I have, however, remained in contact with his ex-wife and his son, who told me that after he resigned from Palisades, he left Michigan and moved to the state where his parents are living. There, he “hit bottom,” sustaining himself as a laborer and a construction worker, until November 2007, when he was contacted by a British security company. Then, as Rick Clark says, “he finally got to Iraq. He was doing security for vehicle convoys. But he got over it pretty quick. He didn’t want to be a trigger puller. He said it was a young man’s game. He even got wounded. He took a piece of shrapnel in his back. All he got was a bad bruise. But if he didn’t have body armor, he’s toast. He’s in Nigeria now. He’s training troops. There are troops all over the world, and they need trainers. It’s what he wants to do; it’s what he’s best at.”

This all sounded uncannily familiar, and I asked Rick Clark if he believed his father. “I decided to believe it,” Rick Clark said. “I have no logical reason. But we’ve pretty much reconciled, and if after everything we’ve gone through he’s still spinning…Well, I want what he’s saying to be true.”

At this writing, Bill Clark is still married to Baby Doll.