The Midnight House

11

The Gulfstream jet’s itinerary had taken it at forty-one thousand feet over a half-dozen countries, all avoided by anyone with a lick of sense. Exceptions included oil workers, who made good money for their trouble, and Special Forces operatives, who knew how to take care of themselves. The natives, too. They didn’t have a choice.

After leaving Faisalabad and climbing northwest over Pakistan, the G5 crossed into Afghanistan roughly at the Khyber Pass. For an hour it flew over the Hindu Kush, jagged snowcapped peaks glittering in the cloudless sky. Eventually the Kush gave way to the steppes of Turkmenistan, a vast expanse hardly touched by roads or cities. Even the most intrepid travelers rarely visited Turkmenistan. The country existed mainly as a bridge between more appealing destinations, nations with amenities such as oceans, reliable electricity, and the rule of law. The ultimate flyover country.

Had the jet kept on the same route, it would have entered Russia next. But the other men in the G5 preferred to avoid Russia. Instead, the jet veered left, over the Caspian Sea, a vast blue-black expanse broken only by an occasional oil platform. Then over Azerbaijan. The less said about Azerbaijan, the better. And into Georgia, not the former heart of the Confederacy but the former (and perhaps future) Russian republic.

After Georgia came the Black Sea, the jet chasing the setting sun at five hundred miles an hour, invisible to the trawlers and freighters dotting the water below. The Gulfstream had a range of more than six thousand miles, so fuel was no problem. Halfway across the Black Sea, the G5 doglegged northwest, a forty-five-degree right turn that took it to Ukraine.

Aside from a few bumps over Afghanistan, the trip was smooth for five of the seven men in the cabin. Wearing black sweatshirts, jeans, and steel-toed boots, they sat in the jet’s leather chairs, keeping watch on the reason for the trip: the two prisoners who lay prone on the floor, legs and arms shackled, wearing orange T-shirts and diapers. Detainees were not allowed to take bathroom breaks during these flights.

In Faisal, the prisoners had received sedatives: two milligrams of Ativan, five of Haldol, and fifty of Benadryl, injected intramuscularly. Emergency-room psychiatrists called the combination a B-52 and used it to restrain psychotic patients. The Haldol caused extreme sedation and reduced muscle control. Essentially, the drug produced temporary paralysis. The Benadryl acted as another sedative, as well as a counter to the nastier side effects of the Haldol. The Ativan was more pleasant, a tranquilizer that reduced anxiety.

But the smaller prisoner didn’t seem to be getting much relief from the Ativan. As the jet crossed into the Ukraine, he began to moan through his hood and toss his head side to side like a dog with a mouse in its jaws.

The men guarding him watched him silently and without sympathy. They didn’t know exactly what he’d done, or even his name, but they knew he was a terrorist, else he wouldn’t be on this plane.

The guards were ex-soldiers, now employed by a private security company called Ekins Charlotte. Little Eight Enterprises, a Maryland shell company, owned the jet. Little Eight’s nominal president was Tim Race, a former CIA deputy section chief. Retired now, Race lived near Tampa and spent his days fishing in the Gulf. As a favor to his old bosses, Race had signed certain necessary documents — aircraft leases, insurance forms, and corporate records. He did not know exactly how the agency planned to use the jet, though he guessed it wouldn’t be for golf outings.

Little Eight put a legal veil between the CIA and the Gulfstream, though a veil sheer enough to allow the agency to track the jet minute by minute. Everyone involved with these renditions agreed that official U.S. government aircraft shouldn’t be used for the transfers, though no one could fully explain why. The answer seemed to be a combination of secrecy and plausible deniability. Not to mention the faint but definite odor of brimstone attached to the process of stealing men from their homelands without the approval of even a kangaroo court.

AS THE JET PROGRESSED over Ukraine, the smaller prisoner began to hammer his forehead against the cabin floor. A kick to the ribs stilled him, but after a few rattling breaths he started again, regular as a metronome, the flat, dull sound echoing through the jet.

Joe Zawadzki, the former Ranger captain in charge of the transfer, grabbed the man’s hood and held his head. Despite the Haldol, the prisoner’s shoulders and neck revealed tremendous agitation. But he neither cried nor spoke. Zawadzki was holding a vibrating bowling ball. After a few seconds, Zawadzki let go. Immediately, the prisoner banged his head, harder this time. And again.

Zawadzki had been in charge on dozens of these flights, and he’d never had a prisoner seriously injured. “All right,” he said. “Take off the hood, sit him up.”

They pulled on latex gloves, flipped the prisoner on his back, stuck a pillow under his head so he couldn’t do any more damage. Then Zawadzki pulled off his hood and tugged him up.

The prisoner’s lip was split and his nose was bleeding, not a gusher but a steady flow from the left nostril. Zawadzki was glad for the gloves. He grabbed the first-aid kit and a water bottle. The prisoner shook his head side to side, sending a trickle of blood on the floor. If he kept up this nonsense, they were going to have to hit him with another dose of Ativan, or more Haldol. Zawadzki kept syringes in his pack.

He poured water onto the Paki’s face, rubbed away the remaining blood with a gauze pad, taped a cotton ball into the prisoner’s nostril. Zawadzki poured a few drops of water into the guy’s mouth and waited to see if he would spit or swallow. He swallowed. The water seemed to have calmed him a little.

“Relax,” Zawadzki said. “No one’s gonna hurt you.”

The prisoner seemed unconvinced. He opened his mouth wide. A shiny spit bubble stretched between his lips, popped, re-formed. He mumbled something, and then repeated it more loudly. It wasn’t Arabic. Probably Pashto. Whatever it was, Zawadzki couldn’t understand.

“Quiet or the hood goes back on,” he said to the guy. “Come on, don’t you speak any Arabic?”

“He only knows Pashto. I know what he’s saying,” the second prisoner, the fat one, said in Arabic through his hood. “Take this off and I will tell you.”

Zawadzki pulled the fat guy’s hood half off so his mouth was visible.

“He says his ribs are broken, that the Pakistani police broke them when they took us to the airport. They beat us in their van. Like the animals they are. And these drugs you gave us are very bad. Poison.”

“Tell him he’ll get medical care when we land.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes.” In fact, the guys running the detention center would make that decision. But Zawadzki wasn’t going to explain that right now. “Tell him to relax. He’s got to calm down.”

“All right,” the fat prisoner said. He craned his head toward the first prisoner, and the two men had a short conversation before Zawadzki pulled the hood back over the fat prisoner’s head. But the talk seemed to have done the trick. The first guy was breathing more normally. Zawadzki lowered him to the floor of the cabin and laid him down. Probably better for his ribs that way, if they really were broken. Zawadzki didn’t believe in hurting prisoners. His job was transport, not interrogation.

TOUCHDOWN WAS BUMPY. The runway needed to be repaved, but Szczynto-Symanty wasn’t a working airport. It opened only for these ghost flights. The Gulfstream taxied for a minute before its engines spooled down and the jet halted. The copilot opened the cabin door. “Looks like you guys had fun,” he said.

Zawadzki lifted the prisoner, shackled him again, and pulled the hood over him. The prisoner grunted and bobbed his head a couple of times, but the fight had gone out of him. For now. Zawadzki and another guard wrapped him in a black blanket and walked him to the cabin door and down to the runway. The other guards handled the second prisoner.

Outside, two black Jeeps and a Range Rover waited in the dark. Jack Fisher stood at the foot of the stairs. Zawadzki had run a couple of other prisoners to this squad over the last year. From what Zawadzki could see, they weren’t afraid to knock the prisoners around a little bit, maybe too much. But that wasn’t his business.

“Any trouble?”

“This one,” Zawadzki said. “Knocking his head against the floor, got a bloody nose. Says the Paki police broke his ribs on the way to the airport.” Zawadzki hesitated. “He needs medical treatment, maybe.”

“Poor little angel,” Fisher said. “You know, him and his buddy shot one of our guys last night.” Fisher reached behind the prisoner and pulled up his shackled hands, dragging his arms out and back and twisting his shoulders in their sockets. The prisoner groaned. “That’s right,” Fisher said. “You weren’t a good boy.” He let go. The prisoner flopped down, nearly falling over. Zawadzki propped him up.

“Let’s get them back to base, settle the paperwork there,” Fisher said. “Get him a deep-tissue massage.” He lifted the prisoner’s hood. “Lemme get a look.” He pushed back the prisoner’s lips, looked at his teeth and nose like he was inspecting a horse.

“Banged himself up nice, didn’t he? Good. Less work for us.”

12

Wells came back to Langley spoiling for a fight.

He’d spent a night in Cairo locked in an empty office at the mukhabarat headquarters in Abdeen, while the Egyptians verified his identity. Oddly, the room was festooned with Egyptian tourist posters, their slogans in English and French: Leave London behind, come to Cairo for Christmas! Les Pyramides d’Egypte: Une Merveille du Monde! Wells dated the posters to the late seventies: the men wore mustaches and checked short-sleeve shirts, the women blown-out hair and brightly colored miniskirts.

He had just fallen asleep, his head on the desk, when Hani walked in and poured a bucket of freezing water over his head and down his galabiya. Wells was covered in so much dust from the cemetery that he didn’t mind.

“I knew you were no Kuwaiti. I knew.”

I did you a favor, Wells didn’t say. You were getting nowhere fast. Now you can blame me for this mess.

“You knew I was muk,” Hani said.

“I thought so.”

“You should have told me who you were.” Hani banged a flashlight against the desk, sending vibrations oscillating into Wells’s damaged skull.

Wells sat up. “Did Alaa get away?”

“For now.”

“Good.”

This time Hani brought the flashlight down on top of Wells’s head. Not a full swing, and not in the same place as Wells had been sapped. But more than a love tap. Wells counted Mississippis in his head until the ringing stopped.

“What did you want from him?”

“I can’t remember.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Mainly, we talked soccer.”

Hani raised the flashlight over his head, turned toward Wells, measured his swing like a batter in the on-deck circle. One practice swing, another—

Then another swing, this one for real, the flashlight whistling through the hot, dry air at Wells’s face—

And stopping just short of his left eye. Wells didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. He burrowed into the core of himself and waited.

A thin trickle of sweat dripped down Hani’s left temple. He stared at Wells and then sighed and sat on the side of the desk and lit a cigarette. “I’ll be glad to have you gone,” he said.

WELLS SLEPT FITFULLY until the morning, when Hani brought in a doctor — or a man in a dirty white coat who said he was a doctor — who poured rubbing alcohol on Wells’s scalp, setting his broken skin on fire, and then taped a gauze pad to the wound. Hani was the only mukhabarat agent Wells saw. He guessed the case was so toxic that no one wanted to be near it. Day turned to evening, and finally Hani returned.

“You leave tonight.”

Wells didn’t argue.

At midnight they put a hood over his head and bundled him into a van. When they pulled it off, he stood on the tarmac of Cairo International, staring at the blinking lights of a Delta 767. Delta ran a flight to New York four times a week.

Hani took Wells’s fake passports and the digital camera and arranged them neatly on the tarmac. He pulled a red plastic canister from the back of the van, splashed gasoline over the pile. He lit a cigarette and dropped it on the pile. The flames danced sideways on the tarmac, and the acrid smell of the camera’s melting battery filled the hot night air.

“Burn, baby, burn,” Wells said in English. “Got any marshmallows?” Hani hadn’t given him food or water since his arrest, a full day ago now. He was unsteady, feverish, his temperature spiking and diving like a Blue Angels pilot showing off for a new girlfriend.

“Marshmallow? What is that?”

Wells poked at the dying fire with his foot. “That wasn’t strictly necessary,” he said. “Can I go now?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice in the matter,” Hani said. “Our American ally. But if you ever come back to Egypt. We have so many accidents in Cairo. I know how I would suffer if Mr. John Wells were hit by a truck.”

“If I ever come back to Egypt, you’ll be the last to know,” Wells said. His voice tore his throat like ground glass. No more talking, in any language. He turned away and stumbled across the tarmac. At the jetway, he made sure to give Hani a wave.

FROM NEW YORK, he flew to D.C., where an army doc met him and stitched him up properly. The doctor told him he needed to spend a day at Walter Reed, but Wells turned him down. He took a cab to the apartment that Shafer had arranged as a crash pad and slept for eighteen hours straight.

When he woke the next morning, his fever was gone. He still had a headache, a dull pounding behind the eyes, but he felt just about human for the first time since the Northern Cemetery. Two messages waited for him on his cell phone, which he’d left in Washington. The first: “John. It’s Anne. Hope you and my friend Tonka are all right. Wherever you are.” She laughed nervously. “Don’t shoot anybody I wouldn’t shoot, okay? And call me sometime.”

The second message was nothing but a few seconds of breathing, followed by a hang-up. Wells wanted to believe he could recognize the fluttering of Exley’s breath. But the line didn’t have a trace, so he had no way to know. He listened twice to Anne’s message and three times to the hang-up and then saved them both.

He showered and shaved and sped to Langley, his headache growing more intense as he approached the front gate. For once, he wanted to talk to Duto. But when he got to Shafer’s office, he found out he wouldn’t have the chance.

“Duto going to see us?” Wells said. “Talk about Alaa Zumari? Tell me what an idiot I am, how I should have gotten the Egyptians involved from the get-go?”

“Nope.”

“Have a full and frank exchange of views?”

“Nope.”

“Because I’ve got a few things to say to him.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“He had to have known the details of Alaa Zumari’s interrogation. Had to. That Zumari gave up Samir Gharib. Why didn’t he tell us? It’s like he’s deliberately inciting us.”

Shafer cocked his head sideways and grunted.

“Are you trying to speak, Ellis? Because that’s not English.”

“Thinking.” He tilted his head to the other side. No other response.

Wells lowered himself onto Shafer’s couch. “You talk too much or not enough,” he muttered. “I have no idea how she”—she being Exley—“survived all those years with you.”

“I could say the same.”

Shafer had only three photographs on his desk: him and his wife, his family together, and him with Exley, standing side by side in front of the polar-bear cage at the Washington zoo. Shafer held up his right hand with the fingers hidden, as if a bear had just chomped them. Exley’s mouth was open in a wide O, a mock-horrified expression. The picture had been taken at least five years before, Exley and Shafer visiting the zoo with their families. A purely platonic trip. And yet Shafer’s face betrayed a depth of emotion for Exley that ran past simple friendship. Did you love her? Wells wondered. Do you still? Do you blame me for her quitting? Or am I just projecting?

Shafer seemed to read Wells’s mind. “You’ll never be free of her as long as you work here.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be.”

“Maybe you don’t.” Shafer turned the picture facedown on his desk.

“Meantime. Setting ghosts aside. I know you’re angry, John, but I think we ought to wait on Duto until we have a better idea of the game he’s playing. Because this whole thing just keeps getting stranger. While you were sunning yourself in Cairo, I was keeping busy.” Shafer explained his meeting with Murphy and then the anonymous letter that Joyner, the inspector general, had gotten.

“You think Murphy was stealing?”

“Yes. But that’s not the strangest part. The letter had twelve PINs. I copied them all.”

“PINs.”

“Every detainee gets a unique prisoner identification number, a ten-digit serial number. Most of the time, the PINs are matched to a name, date of birth, home country — the basics of identity. If detainees aren’t carrying ID when we arrest them, and we can’t figure out who they are, the PIN won’t be matched to any biographical information. In that case it’s called a John Doe PIN and the first three digits are always 001.”

“Did 673 have any of those?”

“No,” Shafer said. “They always knew at least the name of the person they were interrogating. But whether or not we have any biographical details, once a prisoner is assigned a PIN, it’s entered in what’s called the CPR. Stands for Consolidated Prisoner Registry. The worldwide detainee database. And the CPR includes everybody, without exception. If you’re in U.S. custody, whether you’re at Guantánamo or the black sites, you are required to be in it. Even the base in Poland. Which was called the Midnight House, according to Murphy.”

“Zumari said the same.”

“Must have been proud of their ingenuity if they were telling prisoners.” Shafer sat at his desk and tapped keys until a blue screen with a white title appeared: “Consolidated Prisoner Registry — TS/SCI/ BLUE HERON — FOR ACCESS CONSULT OGC—” Office of the General Counsel.

“I got the passcodes two days ago,” Shafer said. “In between explaining to Cairo Station why you were there and why you hadn’t told them. You can imagine.”

“If only I cared.”

Shafer entered the codes. A new screen popped up, a black word on a white background. Query. Beneath it, a space for a name or a PIN. Shafer typed in a ten-digit number—6501740917. A brief pause, and then Alaa Zumari’s name and headshot appeared on-screen. “That’s him, right? Zumari.”

“Yes.”

Shafer flicked to the next screen, which had rows of acronyms and dates. “DTAC — that’s date taken custody. CS, confinement site. Et cetera. You can see, he was arrested in Iraq by something called Task Force 1490. Then a couple of weeks in custody at BLD — that’s Balad.”

“Says BLDIQ SC-HVD.”

“We do love our acronyms. I don’t know for sure but figure it means something like ‘secure custody, high-value detainee.’ Then he’s transferred to 673-1. We can safely assume that’s the Midnight House. Then, a month after that, transferred back to Iraq, held again at Balad. This time not as a high-value detainee. They’d decided he didn’t have anything. And two months after that, they release him. The final note is AT-CAI.”

“Air transfer to Cairo International?”

“Probably. This match what he told you?”

“More or less.”

“And you see, the record is confined to movements and detention sites. Nothing about what he actually said.”

“I get it, Ellis. So how’s this help us?”

“That letter to the inspector general. It had twelve ID numbers. Six of them, they’re like this. Complete, with a reference to 673-1 as a detention site. Four of them, they have some gaps in time. And no mention of 673.”

“And the other two?”

“See for yourself.” Shafer typed in a ten-digit number: 5567208212. This time the screen went blank for several seconds. Then: Record not found. He retyped the code. Same result.

“And this is the other missing PIN.” Shafer typed it in. Record not found.

“Ellis. You’re sure—”

“I’m sure. They went right in my BlackBerry like the others.”

“Maybe those two were fake.” Wells knew he was stretching.

“Ten real and two fake. It’s possible. Sure.”

“Or they were so high-value that — maybe there’s another database.”

Shafer shook his head. “I checked. There’s a couple guys like that, cases where we don’t want to disclose anything about where we caught, where we’re holding them. Even in here. But it’s about four guys. And then you get something like this—” He typed in another number and the screen flashed: Restricted/Eyes Only/SCAP. Contact ODD/NCS—the office of the deputy director for the National Clandestine Service, the new name for the Directorate of Operations. “There’s always a record. Precisely because we don’t want guys to disappear from the system.”

“But two of them did,” Wells said. “How easy is deleting these records?”

“I don’t know yet,” Shafer said. “I’m guessing not very. And probably you’ve got to be very senior.”

“Senior like Vinny. But then why get us involved?”

“Guilty conscience.”

“Good one, Ellis.”

“Truly, I don’t know,” Shafer said. “There’s too many angles we can’t see yet. You’re sure Zumari’s not behind the killings?”

“I’d bet anything. He’s been hiding from the Egyptian police since he got home. And if you’d seen him — he’s not a terrorist.”

“Then it’s all pointing the same way. Inside.”

“Inside meaning somebody who was part of the squad? Or inside meaning bigger, like a conspiracy?”

“I don’t think we know that yet.”

They sat in silence, the only sound the hum of the computers under Shafer’s desk. “So you don’t want to go to Vinny?” Wells said eventually.

“Anything we tell him now isn’t going to come as much of a shock.”

Shafer was right, Wells realized. Even if Duto hadn’t deleted the numbers himself, the letter to the inspector general would have tipped him. He knew much more than he’d told them.

“WE NEED TO GO BACK to the beginning, find out what we can about 673,” Shafer said. He pulled a folder from his safe, handed it to Wells. “These are the individual personnel records for members of the squad. I warn you it’s less than meets the eye.”

Wells flicked through the file. The personnel files hadn’t been put off-limits, because they predated the creation of 673 and weren’t part of its record. They held basic biographical information on the members of the squad — names, unit histories, birthdays, home addresses.

“No obvious pattern,” Wells said. “They’re from all over. Mostly not interrogators.”

“That is the pattern. Only four of the guys have experience handling interrogations. Terreri, the LTC who ran it. Jack Fisher. The lead interrogator, Karp.”

“And my old buddy Jerry Williams.”

“Even those four, they were all over the map. None of them knew each other before 673 was formed. It’s all spare parts.”

“You think we wanted a clean break from other units.”

“Remember the legal situation at the time. Post-Abu Ghraib. Post-Rumsfeld. Pressure to close Guantánamo. The Red Cross accuses us of torturing detainees. Torture. That’s their word. And it’s the Red Cross. Not Amnesty International. Everybody knows the score. This stuff isn’t supposed to happen anymore,” Shafer said.

“But we still need intel.”

“And we think we have to get rough to get it. So, we make this new group, a few old hands and a few new ones. They’ve got a connection to the Pentagon, but nobody’s exactly responsible for it. That was the point. The whole reason for the structure.”

“Maybe so, but these guys, they’re not dumb. They would have wanted legal protection. There’s got to be a finding”—a secret Presidential memo that authorized 673 to operate. “Even if they destroyed the interrogation tapes, or didn’t make any, there’s transcripts.”

“Forget the records,” Shafer said. A note of irritation crept into his voice. “They’re gone. Focus on what we know.” Shafer held up his fingers. “One: Ten guys on the squad. Six are dead, one’s missing. Two: Millions of dollars can’t be accounted for. Murphy and Terreri, the guys who allegedly took the money, are two of the only three to survive. Three: Two detainees have vanished. Their records, anyway. Four: Duto — maybe on his own, maybe on orders from Whitby — stopped the IG from investigating. And then, for some reason, pulled us into this to do our own investigation. Five: According to the FBI, the remaining members of the squad have airtight alibis. Terreri’s been in Afghanistan for a year. Poteat’s in South Korea, and like Brant Murphy told us, he wasn’t part of the squad for long anyway.”

“And Murphy?”

“He was at Langley last week when Wyly and Fisher were killed in California. Our own surveillance tapes prove it.”

“Maybe he outsourced.”

“Doubtful.”

“Doubtful.” Contract killers were popular in the movies. In the real world they were greedy, incompetent, and more often than not police informants.

Wells stared at the ceiling. Everything Shafer had said was true, but he couldn’t see how it fit together. “What about the FBI interviews? Anything yet from them?”

“So far, no.”

“There is one other mystery,” Wells said. “Jerry Williams. We keep assuming he’s dead. What if he’s not? What if he disappeared because he got wind that someone was after 673?”

“There’s another explanation,” Shafer said.

“Not possible,” Wells said. “I know Jerry.”

“You knew Jerry. I asked Murphy about him. He said Jerry was disgruntled, thought he deserved a promotion, hadn’t gotten it—”

“So, he’s stalking his old unit?”

“Deep breath, John.”

Wells nodded. Shafer was right. He liked Williams, but they hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years.

“Either way, you’ve got your next move,” Shafer said.

“Noemie Williams.”

“Beats hanging around here waiting for FBI reports, trying to figure out what Duto’s really up to.”

“Amen to that,” Wells said. “But do me one favor. Next time you talk to him, tell him to make the Egyptians go easy on Zumari if they ever catch him. I’d do it myself, but you know it would be counterproductive.”

“Done. Can I run any other chores, my liege?”

“Mind holding on to Tonka a couple more days?”

“The kids like her. Anyway, I think she’s forgotten all about you. Doesn’t even know who you are anymore.”

“I’m going to pretend I don’t get that analogy.”

13

Three months left on the tour. As far as Martin Terreri was concerned, it couldn’t end soon enough. He was done with Poland. Sick of the whole damn country.

Terreri was sick of their living quarters. The Polish government had given his squad two barracks in Stare Kiejkuty, a military intelligence base near the Ukrainian border. The Poles on the base shared a mess hall with Terreri and his men and provided overnight security for the prisoners but otherwise kept their distance. The hands-off attitude was the reason that the United States had chosen to operate here. But the freedom came at a price. Terreri had never felt so isolated. They could leave for day trips, but the Poles required them to return each night, since they hadn’t cleared Polish immigration and officially weren’t even in Poland. And ironically, they lived under harsher conditions than American soldiers almost anywhere else. Bases in Iraq and Afghanistan had the amenities that U.S. troops had come to expect: decent grub, live satellite television, well-equipped gyms. But the Polish army wasn’t much for creature comforts. The showers had two temperatures, scalding and freezing. The food in the mess was sometimes fried, sometimes boiled, always tasteless.

Terreri was sick of the Polish countryside. Not that all the women here were ugly. In Warsaw they were gorgeous, a magic combination of blue-eyed Saxon haughtiness and wide-hipped Slavic sensuality. But the peasant women aged at warp speed. They wore ankle-length dresses to hide their boxy bodies and sat by the side of the roads selling threadbare wool blankets. They had stringy hair and tired, stupid eyes. The men were worse, sallow, with faces like topographic maps and brown teeth from their cheap cigarettes. They rode sideways on diesel-belching tractors, pulling bundles of logs on roads that were more pothole than pavement. No wonder the Russians and the Germans had taken turns beating up on them all these centuries.

Terreri was sick of being alone. He’d promised to e-mail Eileen and the kids every day. He’d even attached a Webcam to his computer for video chats. But the calls, the instant messages, the seeing-without-touching of video, they made him more depressed, reminded him of what he’d left stateside. He almost preferred the old days, when being on tour meant checking in for five minutes once a week.

Terreri was sick of his squad. The Rangers were fine. But the CIA guys, they weren’t soldiers. He could tell them what to do, but he couldn’t command them. He couldn’t give an order, get a salute, and know that what he wanted would be done quickly and without question. That instant response was the essence of military discipline. The CIA guys didn’t have it. He had to negotiate with them, explain his decisions to them. A pointless chore. And Rachel Callar, the doc, she was about two minutes from turning into a real problem. She didn’t have the stones for the job. Literally or figuratively.

Terreri was just plain sick. Probably because he wasn’t sleeping right or exercising right or eating right. And because of the dirt and lead and chemicals in the air, the stale gray clouds that coated his tongue with a metallic tang that he couldn’t shake no matter how much Listerine he swigged. For a month he’d been fighting a sore throat, a low fever. Callar said he had a virus and antibiotics wouldn’t help. But she was a shrink, not a real doctor, even if she did have an M.D. What did she know about treating sore throats? He bitched at her for antibiotics until she gave him a course. The meds didn’t help his throat, but they gave him diarrhea for a week. He didn’t tell Callar, didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, but he knew she knew.

Most of all, Terreri was sick of the work. Which surprised him. He’d been in the interrogation business since 2002. He’d run a squad in Iraq in 2004, when the army and the agency were just learning how to break guys. When Fred Whitby came to him, told him about 673, told him the army and the agency wanted him to run it, he’d jumped at the chance. He believed in the mission. They were doing what couldn’t be done at Guantánamo. Not with the lawyers and the reporters bitching and even the Supreme Court getting involved. The liberals could complain all they liked, but sometimes you had to let the bad guys know they weren’t in charge anymore and the ride was going to hurt.

What he hadn’t expected, though maybe he should have, was that he’d finally lost his taste for wrangling these jihadis. In the last six months, he’d burned out, plain and simple. He was sick of playing Whac-A-Mole with them. Of their lies. Of their historical grievances. Of hearing about the perfection of the Quran and the greatness of the Prophet. They all were reading from the same script, and none of them had any idea how boring it was. They were by and large a bunch of jerk-offs who ought to be herding sheep. But they considered themselves soldiers because they’d gotten a couple of weeks of training with AKs and grenades. The real geniuses, the big winners, they could mix oil and fertilizer to make a truck bomb, something any tenth-grader with a chemistry book could do. They thought that made them terrorist masterminds.

Terreri, he’d never been a cop, but he figured he knew how those LAPD officers in South Central felt. He was wasting his life with a bunch of losers who didn’t understand anything except a closed fist. When this tour was over, he was done with interrogations.

Being here did have a few compensations. Like at no place else he’d ever been, Terreri had free rein. Nominally, he was on special assignment for General Sanchez, but Sanchez had made clear from day one that as far as he was concerned, 673 was nothing more than a line on an org chart. The intel went up to the Pentagon and only then was funneled to Centcom. Basically, nobody in Washington or at Centcom headquarters in Tampa wanted to know anything about their tactics. They wanted only intel.

Terreri agreed. In 2003, 2004, lawyers for the CIA and army spent a lot of time talking about what was legal and what wasn’t. Lots of conference calls, lots of memos. Lots of ass-covering. Now some of those memos had wound up on the front page of The New York Times. The less in writing, the better. Instead of a list of do’s and don’ts, Terreri had a simple two-page document — a secret memorandum signed by the President.

I hereby authorize Task Force 673 to interrogate unlawful enemy combatants, as defined by the Department of Defense, using such methods as its commander deems necessary. I find that the operations of Task Force 673 are necessary to the national security of the United States. Pursuant to that finding, as commander-in-chief of the United States, I find that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to the members of 673 for any actions they shall take against unlawful enemy combatants.

Task Force 673 shall operate only outside the states and territories of the United States. Outside those states and territories, only the Uniform Code of Military Justice and not the laws of the United States shall govern the actions of Task Force 673.

In other words, 673 was in legal limbo, exempt from both military and civilian law in its treatment of detainees. Of course, they weren’t completely off the radar. Their detainees were listed in the prisoner registry, and eventually most of them wound up in Guantánamo. So Terreri’s men had to be sure that they didn’t do too much visible damage. Still, they had plenty of room, and Karp and Fisher, especially, had found ways to take advantage of it.

Then there was the money. The army’s accountants were strict. But the CIA was funding this operation, and the CIA had different rules. In fact, as far as Terreri could see, when it came to spending money on black projects, the CIA had no rules at all. Brant Murphy, who handled logistics for the squad, never turned down a request for gear. He bought flat-screen TVs, computers, even a couple of Range Rovers for prisoner transport, quote/unquote. Still, the money was piling up. At this rate, they’d have two million bucks in their accounts when the tour was done.

Murphy had told Terreri that a month back, late on a Thursday night, in his office, as they knocked back pints of Zywiec, the local beer. It wasn’t half bad once Terreri got past the faint formaldehyde smell.

“Two million?” Terreri said. “You serious?”

“Yeah.” Murphy sucked down his beer. “There’s something else, too.”

Terreri took a sip, waited.

“Nobody’ll care if we send it home,” Murphy said. “Fact is, they won’t even notice it’s gone.”

Murphy hadn’t said any more that night, but Terreri could guess where he was going. Soon enough they’d have another conversation. The only question was how much they would lift and how’d they’d split it. Terreri wouldn’t feel guilty. The agency was practically begging them to skim.

SO TERRERI HAD A million reasons, give or take, to slog through the last couple of months of this job. But now he had to deal with Jawaruddin bin Zari. Their newest problem. The worst mooch they’d had yet. Since he’d arrived a week before, they’d treated him decently. Terreri’s orders. He always gave the detainees a chance to talk. But bin Zari had made clear he wasn’t interested. He seemed to want to provoke them into getting tough.

So be it. Terreri buzzed Jerry Williams in the basement. “Major. Please take prisoner eleven”—bin Zari—“to room A.”

“Yessir. Full shacks?”

“Hands and hood only, unless you believe he’s a risk.”

Ten minutes later, Williams and Mike Wyly led bin Zari into a cinder-block room, white, twelve feet square, lit by a hundred-watt bulb. A steel conference table and two steel chairs, all bolted to the floor, were the room’s only furnishings.

Bin Zari didn’t complain as Williams pushed him into a chair and snapped shackles around his legs. Only then did Williams uncuff him and tug off his hood. Bin Zari blinked, opened and closed his hands. A week of confinement hadn’t shaken his self-assurance. He appeared calm, almost bored. He had heavy, round features and relatively light skin for a Pakistani, more beige than brown. His slack skin and big lips promised decadence. He could have been a nightclub promoter in London, a hash dealer in Beirut.

“Jawaruddin bin Zari,” Terreri said in Arabic. “We captured you in June in Islamabad. Put you on a plane. Now you’re in what we call a secret undisclosed location. I know you understand me. I know you speak Arabic.”

Terreri let a minute go by. But bin Zari remained silent.

“We’ve treated you with dignity.”

“Is that what you call breaking my friend’s ribs? Injecting us with drugs?”

“What happened to you before you arrived, that wasn’t my doing.”

“Have you given him medical treatment?”

“Not your business,” Terreri said. “But yes, we have. Tell me, have we not treated you fairly? Would you have done the same for us? In return, I ask only that you answer our questions. Which you have not done.”

Silence.

“You may be asking yourself, ‘Why is this American wasting his breath? Is he so stupid as to think I’m going to speak?’ ”

Terreri dropped the safety on his pistol, snapped back the slide to chamber a round. Bin Zari’s eyes widened, but his breathing stayed steady. Terreri raised the gun, pointed it at bin Zari’s face.

“My friend. This speech is for me. Not for you. So that when we hurt you, when we break you, I won’t feel guilty. I won’t say to myself, ‘Maybe we didn’t give him a fair chance. Maybe he would have talked on his own.’ ”

“Do it, then,” bin Zari said.

Terreri flicked the safety on, put the gun back in his holster.

“You think I’d kill you, Jawaruddin? No. We want what’s in there.” Terreri tapped his temple. “That fat head of yours. Your organization, your e-mail addresses, your contacts in the ISI, your safe houses, all of it. And you’re going to give it to us.”

Bin Zari shook his head. And smiled, his wide lips spreading into a rubbery grin. Terreri felt a bloom of rage surge into his chest, his heart taking three beats where one would do. This fool. His bravado, real or fake, would lead only to more agony. You’re going to make us hurt you. Why are you going to make us hurt you?

He was so tired of this.

“Your choice.” Terreri nodded to Williams.

“Full shacks?” Williams had seen this speech before.

“Nice and tight.”

Williams pulled the hood over bin Zari’s head.

THREE MINUTES LATER, Terreri sat alone, staring at the empty chair across the table. He laughed, a low chuckle. His rage had faded. That poor deluded asshole.

Then the door opened. Terreri found himself looking at the shrink. Rachel Callar. Another irritation. From the start, Terreri had wondered if she was tough enough for the job. But Whitby had insisted that they had to have a real doctor, preferably a psychiatrist. And Callar had volunteered. Before she’d signed up, Terreri had interviewed her, asked her if she understood what she was getting into.

She told him about a private she’d met in Iraq, a guy from the First Cav, two kids and another on the way. Guy’s name was Travis. An IED hit his Humvee. He walked away with a bad concussion and a broken hand. But the other guys in the Humvee both got wasted. The gunner’s leg landed in Travis’s lap. Travis blamed himself for getting hit. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he heard his gunner cursing him out. His hand healed, and he wanted to get back to his squad. Callar told him, “We’re gonna send you stateside, get you the help you need.” Three a.m. on the day he was set to go home, he put his.45 in his mouth and blew his head off. Left a two-word note: I failed.

“I let him down,” Callar said. She told Terreri she was tired of playing defense, trying to fix guys. This way she could be part of the fight, get the intel that they needed to save lives.

The story bugged Terreri. He wasn’t seeing the connection. She wanted in on interrogations because this guy offed himself? But they had to have a doctor, and she said she’d move to Poland. So he signed her up.

She’d been fine the first four months. But then something had happened. Okay. Terreri knew what had happened. They’d had a problem with this nasty little Malaysian named Mokhatir. He’d come to them from a raid in the southern Philippines. A Delta/Philippine army team had caught him in an apartment with three soda bottle-sized bombs that looked just about right for taking down an airplane. The other two guys in the apartment had been killed, so Mokhatir was all they had. He wouldn’t talk, and after a month the Deltas sent him to the Midnight House.

He insisted he hadn’t made more than three bombs. Karp and Fisher hadn’t believed him. They’d pushed him harder than any prisoner they’d had before. Over Callar’s objection, they’d locked him in the punishment box for fourteen hours straight. When they opened the cell, Mokhatir couldn’t move his legs or left arm. At first they thought he was faking, malingering, but after a few minutes they realized he wasn’t.

When they called for Callar, she said he’d had a stroke, probably the result of infective endocarditis. Bacteria had built up in a heart valve and caused Mokhatir’s blood to clot inside his heart. Then the clot had traveled to his brain, blocking blood vessels there and causing a stroke. Callar said he needed to get to a hospital for real care, but Terreri refused, told her to do what she could on the base. Without an MRI or CAT scanner or clot-busting drugs, she was reduced to the basics. She gave him aspirin and antibiotics, kept him hydrated, elevated his legs. She knocked down the infection, and eventually the clot seemed to break. A few days later, Mokhatir regained the use of his arm. But he never walked again. After a month, they put him on a plane, sent him to the Philippines, said he’d had a stroke, cause unknown.

The day after they flew him out, Callar knocked on Terreri’s door, said they needed to report what had happened.

“To who,” Terreri said. “Whitby? Sanchez? You think they care?”

“He’s permanently disabled.”

“He’s got a limp.”

“He can’t walk.”

“One of those bombs of his had blown up in his face, he’d be disabled.”

“Colonel—”

“Major, I have heard your advice, and I will consider it. Anything else?”

“No, sir.” Callar didn’t argue further. But her attitude changed. Twice since then, she’d interfered during interrogations, made Karp and Fisher pull detainees out of the punishment box. The squad had to have a doctor, so Terreri couldn’t dismiss her. But she was yet another reason this deployment couldn’t end soon enough.

NOW SHE WALKED into the interrogation room, sat across from Terreri. “Colonel.”

“Major.”

“You seem tired.”

“So do you.” Tired, and getting old like a local. She seemed to have aged a decade in the last year. And lost about fifteen pounds. She wasn’t bad-looking, but her skin was tight on her face and her arms painfully thin.

“Why were you laughing just now, Colonel?”

He considered blowing off the question. Then decided, might as well tell her.

“Jawaruddin was in that chair just now. Playing tough. I was thinking what we’re going to do to him, and it seemed funny.”

“Why did it seem funny?”

“Figuring out how to break guys without leaving a mark. It’s a strange way to spend your life.”

“Are you uncomfortable with the idea of hurting him?”

“Are you?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“The answer is no. I’m plain sick of these guys. That’s all.”

“Do you think you’ve lost the ability to empathize with them? Does that bother you?”

For the second time in five minutes, Terreri found himself laughing. She didn’t say anything. He laughed as long as he could. Then his laughter petered out and they stared at each other in silence.

“That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“Why?”

“You really are a shrink. I say you’re stupid, and you say why. I don’t want to empathize with them. I want to break them. If you can’t handle it, you let me know.”

“We both want the same thing, Colonel. But I see disturbing tendencies in some of the interrogators. Even in you. I’m worried about depersonalization.”

Terreri felt his stomach tighten, rage bubble up. This woman, this reservist with some fancy letters behind her name, telling him what to do.

“Three months left and we’re done. I don’t need this crap right now, Major.”

“Sir. Three months is a significant length of time. I am responsible for monitoring the mental health of the members of this squad. As well as the physical health of the detainees.”

“That speech you gave me when you signed up, that private you didn’t save. Guy who decided to find out how a bullet tasted.”

“Travis.”

“Travis. That was his name. Now, Travis, he got depersonalized. He depersonalized himself with a.45. And I warned you it wasn’t going to be easy, but you signed for it, and now we’re almost through. Jawaruddin bin Zari, we caught him with a truck bomb. His buddy Mohammed put a bullet in one of our guys. Your job is to help us get these men to talk. You understand that?”

She didn’t say a word. Just nodded. Good. Terreri had enough to worry about. They were going to go hard at bin Zari, and she was going to have to be involved. Whether she wanted to be or not.

“Thank you for your concern, Major. You are dismissed.”

14

Noemie Williams and her sons lived in a two-story house in Gentilly, the northeast corner of New Orleans, near Lake Pontchartrain. During Katrina, levees had failed on both sides of the neighborhood. The floodwaters had topped ten feet.

Even now, even at night, the scars from the storm were obvious. The house beside Noemie’s was vacant, plywood over its windows, a jagged crack slicing through the bricks on its front-right corner. A lot one block down was simply empty, no sign that a home had ever existed on it. On another, only a poured concrete foundation remained. Traffic was sparse and pedestrians nonexistent, though a few blocks south, toward the Ninth Ward, an open-air drug market was in full swing. The neighborhood made Wells think of a proud old man who’d had a heart attack and hadn’t decided yet whether to try to rehab or lie back and let nature take its course.

Noemie Williams was fighting, though. Her house had a fresh coat of white paint and what looked like a new porch, complete with a rocking horse painted red, black, and green. She had asked Wells to come at 10 p.m., saying she needed to put her sons to bed. He gave her a little extra time, knocked on her door at 10:15. She slid the dead bolt back immediately, and he realized too late that when Williams said ten, she meant ten.

The door pulled just an inch, a soft creak, chain still on the hook. Wells flipped open his wallet, showed her his identification.

“May I?” she said. Wells handed it through the crack in the door. She glanced at it, handed it back, opened up. She was tall and light-skinned, cornrows tight across her skull. She wore cropped black pants and a black T-shirt with “Forever New Orleans” stenciled in gold on the chest. The lines on her forehead said she was at least forty, though she had the legs of a woman a decade younger.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Sit.” She nodded to the living-room couch, protected by a plastic cover. In the reports of their interviews with her, the FBI agents wrote that Noemie Williams had been “calm and composed.” Wells agreed already.

“Get you anything?” Noemie said. She had the marbles-in-mouth south Louisiana accent: half Birmingham, one-third Boston, one-sixth Bugs Bunny.

“I’m fine.”

“Chicory coffee? Local specialty. Along with po’boys and heart attacks. Got a pot brewing.” Indeed, the sweet smell of chicory filled the house.

“If you’re having some, sure.”

Noemie disappeared, leaving Wells to examine the room, which was decorated — to a fault — in the motif of proud African American. On one wall, posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali shared space with family pictures. Another wall was given over to a framed poster of Barack Obama standing in front of the White House.

Noemie carried in a tray, two steaming mugs of coffee and a jug of milk, along with a plateful of cookies. “Come to Louisiana, you will get fed,” she said. The cookies were lemon and sugar and cinnamon, and fell into buttery pieces in Wells’s mouth. He had to make a conscious effort to stop after three of them. The coffee had a bite that pulled Wells back to Pakistan, tiny cups of sweet, strong coffee brewed in battered metal pots, half sugar and half crunchy grounds, the only antidote to the chill of winter in the North-West Frontier.

“So, you knew my husband.”

The past tense jumped at Wells. Jerry Williams was missing, not dead. Officially, anyway.

“We were friends. Trained as Rangers together.”

“That was a long time back. Before he met me.”

The windows were open, and a light breeze stirred the humid air through the curtains. But the city around them was anything but romantic. Police sirens screamed down Elysian Fields Avenue, four blocks away. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter buzzed.

“Lot of action,” Wells said.

“Bangers banging. This neighborhood’s not too bad, but the city’s so small you can’t get away from it. Unless you live in one of those mansions in the Garden District. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Soon enough, another ’cane will make our acquaintance and even us Louisiana lifers will have to admit this place isn’t meant to be. And that will be a shame.” She closed the window and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan.

“You and Jerry have three boys.”

“Asleep. Or pretending to be. Maybe reading comic books under the covers. Long as they’re reading.”

“What are their names?”

“Unfortunately, Jerry was a member of the George Foreman school of naming. The boys are named Jerry Jr., Johnny, and Jeffrey.”

Wells couldn’t think of any way to spin that.

“Every so often he’d have an S-A-N moment, and that was one.”

“S-A-N?”

“S for stupid, A for ass, and N for a word I don’t use around white people, no matter how well I know them. And I don’t know you too well.”

“You seem pretty calm about what’s happened.”

“The boys are used to Jerry being gone. He shows up tomorrow, they’ll think this was just another mission. No need to upset them just yet. Though we’re two months on. They’re wondering.”

“You don’t think he’s coming back.”

“You don’t shine it up before you spit it out, do you? No. I do not. Let me tell you why. We were having some troubles, no two ways about it. But Jerry Williams, Major Jeremiah Williams, he was very conscious that he was a man with three sons. A black man with three black sons. And everything that entails. Very conscious of all those boys whose daddies never even see them enter this world. You see those posters.” She nodded around the room. “My husband insisted on them. He would not have walked out on his boys. Whatever happened to him, he’s not with us anymore.”

Her voice had stayed even through this explanation. Now tears sprung from her eyes, slid down her cheeks. Wells put his hand on her shoulder.

“Mrs. Williams—”

But she shook him off and walked out of the room.

Wells shifted on the couch, listening to the fan rustling overhead, and tried to figure what he’d done. Someone else — Exley, say — could have asked the same questions without inciting such a ferocious response. But Wells seemed to have lost his sense for the give-and-take of human interaction.

Noemie stepped back in.

“I’m sorry,” Wells said. “I can come back.”

“Just ask your questions, Mr. Wells.”

“Let me start again, then. You were married in, what, ’99?”

“Correct. You knew Jerry before that?”

“In Ranger training. You know, I was gone awhile.”

“I know who you are.”

“But before I went to Afghanistan, I remember him saying he was getting married, his wife was ten times as beautiful as he deserved.”

Noemie gave him the tiniest of smiles.

“You’re from New Orleans?”

“No. Came here for college, got my degree in social work from Tulane. After I met Jerry, we jumped around base to base. But I always wanted to come back. Last year, when Jerry retired, I told him after all that time in North Carolina and Texas and what all, he owed me. He didn’t want to, but eventually he agreed.”

“But you are from Louisiana.”

“Grew up in Lafayette. Couple hours west of here on the Ten. Mom was black and dad was white, which accounts for this cracker accent. They were both from this swamp town, Morgan City, deep in the bayou. Back when they met, it wasn’t so safe for a white boy and a black girl to be in love down there. Though better that than the other way around. So, they moved to Lafayette. The metropolis. You know how to tell the size of a town in Louisiana?”

Wells shook his head.

“Count the McDonald’s. Morgan City only has but one McDonald’s. Lafayette has a whole bunch of ’em. Are you married, Mr. Wells?”

“I was.” Wells felt the need to say something more. “The job sort of took over.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was a whole speech in those two syllables, Wells thought. “Tell me about Jerry’s last tour, in Poland.”

“A few months before, he’d gotten back from a deployment in Afghanistan. I was worried they were going to send him there again. He wouldn’t have argued. He wasn’t the type to say no. Then he got this call, a special assignment in Poland, working with detainees.”

“You know why they chose him?”

“In Afghanistan, he’d done some interrogations.”

“How did you know?”

“I was, I am, his wife. He told me enough; I got the picture. They were trying to put a new unit together, one that wouldn’t have any connection to the old squads. Or Guantánamo. One that could run more or less on its own.”

“That’s about right.”

“I know that’s right, Mr. Wells. I wasn’t asking.”

“Did you mind having him over there?”

“Matter of fact, I didn’t. Figured he was safer in Poland than anywhere else.”

“But did you have a problem with what he was doing, the interrogations?”

“These men who want to blow us up? Kill my husband? And then they cry for lawyers soon as we catch them? Start talking about their rights? You are not seriously asking me that.”

“Jerry felt the same.”

“Of course.”

“But not everyone on the squad agreed. Somebody thought they were going too far.” Wells was guessing, chasing the defensiveness in her voice.

“That what somebody told you?”

“Yes,” Wells lied.

“I don’t know all that much about it. But I do know there were arguments. And they got worse as the tour went on. My husband, he went over there with the attitude that they didn’t have to give these guys feather pillows. I don’t got to tell you, Mr. Wells. If there’s one person who knows, it’s you. But it’s strange, ’cause he came back with a different attitude.”

“Like how?”

“It’s hard to explain.” She edged away from Wells on the couch, turned to look at him full-on. “Mr. Wells. Do you think my husband did something wrong? If you do, tell me now.”

“Look. Somebody’s killing the squad. We don’t know why. The logical assumption is that it’s because of something that happened over there. So, we need to know what that was. And there’s only three guys left from the squad, not counting Jerry, and they aren’t talking much—”

“Why—”

“Maybe they’re worried they’re gonna get prosecuted for torture. And the records of what they did, they’re buried deep. So, the best bet is talking to you and the other families. You have my word, whatever Jerry did, I’m not after him. I’m not a cop or FBI. I’m working for the agency, and only the agency, to figure this out. And I’m a friend of your husband’s. I know it may not seem that way, since we’ve never met before, but believe me, Ranger training, the guys in your unit, by the end you either can’t stand the sight of them or they’re friends for life. And Jerry was a friend. If he’d called me two months ago, said, ‘I’m in trouble,’ I would have been on the next plane down, no questions asked. That’s just how it is.”

Not a bad speech, Wells thought. Even if the reality was more complicated. After fifteen years, he probably would have asked at least a couple questions before buying his ticket. But Noemie seemed to like it. She patted his arm, leaned in.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know much.”

“Anything.”

“They were rough. And I think near the end, something went wrong.”

The FBI interview report didn’t have anything like this from her. Wells waited. “What gave you that impression?” he said finally. “Something he said?”

“He changed. The last couple months, he didn’t want to talk. Stopped e-mailing. He was hiding something, like he was having an affair. But Jerry would never have done that. Anyway, it was Poland.”

“He never said anything about what had actually happened?”

“No.”

“What about the information the squad developed? Did he ever talk about that? ”

“No.”

“Mom-mom!” From the second floor. A boy’s voice.

“Jeffrey,” she said. “He has nightmares. Since Jerry’s gone. He knows what’s up. The others don’t, but he does.”

She hurried upstairs.

I don’t got to tell you, Mr. Wells, she’d said. If there’s one person who knows, it’s you. Was he a torturer? A killer, yes. But never a torturer. Though he’d come close, that night in the Hamptons with Pierre Kowalski, the arms dealer. Another bit of unfinished business. Close to a year before, Wells had found himself outside Kowalski’s mansion in Zurich, pacing, hand on the Makarov tucked into his pants. Then he’d walked away. He’d made a deal with Kowalski, and he’d keep his word. For now.

NOEMIE RETURNED, trailed by a small boy, a miniature Malcolm Gladwell, a shock of curly hair springing from his head. His T-shirt, printed with a caped Will Smith from the movie Hancock, reached to his knees.

“This is Jeffrey,” she said.

“Hi, Jeffrey. Did you like Hancock? ”

“Mommy wouldn’t let me see it! ”

“Touchy subject,” Noemie said.

Jeffrey tugged on his mother’s pants. “I’m sleepy, Mommy.”

“If you’re sleepy, why weren’t you sleeping?”

“Want to sleep in your bed.”

“You know that’s not allowed.” She put him on the couch, settled beside him. He curled into her lap, his face just visible.

“Please.”

“Go to sleep here, and when you wake up, it’ll be morning. Deal?”

Jeffrey nodded happily.

“We’re going to go from twenty to zero. Promise to be asleep by zero.”

“Promise.”

“Close your eyes. Twenty, nineteen. ” She rubbed his forehead as she counted, and by the time she was done, the boy’s mouth had dropped open and his breathing was as steady as the fan overhead.

“You’re a magician,” Wells said.

She glanced at her watch. “Anything else you need to know, Mr. Wells? I should get him to bed.”

“Tell me about what Jerry was like when he got back.”

“He was quiet, not talking much.”

“And you read into that what?”

“I told you. That something happened he didn’t want to talk about.” She leaned back against the couch. The boy in her lap stirred, and she ran a finger down his arm to calm him. “One time.” She broke off, and Wells waited. “One time, I got home early from work, and he was reading a book about the Nazis. When I saw him with it, it was like I’d caught him looking at I don’t know what. He tried to hide it from me double-quick. I asked him about it, and he told me to mind my business. Which was not usual for him, even at that time. But I let it go. And I never saw the book again.”

“The Nazis. Do you remember the name of the book?”

“I do not.”

Again the boy stirred in her lap, and again she soothed him. “All right, Mr. Wells. I think it’s time for this one to go to bed. Me, too.”

“Just a couple more questions.”

“A couple.”

“You said a while back, you two were having problems before he disappeared. What was that about?”

“I loved Jerry, and I know he loved me. But like I said, he was different when he came back. And after we moved here, he had a tough time finding work. I guess I figured, a major in the Special Forces, a man like that could always find a job, even in New Orleans. But the corporate stuff — there’s not a lot of companies down here for that work. He did some bodyguard work, but he wanted to be a director of security somewhere. Thought he’d earned that. He told me we should move. I wanted him to give it time. It’d hardly been six months. New Orleans can grow on you.”

“But you’re sure he wouldn’t have walked out.”

“I’m sure.”

“The night he disappeared?”

“He told me he was going down to the market, pick up a six-pack. He’d been drinking more, too, since he got back. That was around seven p.m. Ten or so, I tried to call him and he didn’t answer.”

“Were you worried? ”

“It’d happened a couple of times recently. So, no. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t worried. Figured he was on the corner, hanging out. Watching dice get rolled. When midnight came and he didn’t come home, I decided to see for myself. So, I put my shoes on and I slipped my little.22 in my purse—”

“You have a gun—”

“Mr. Wells, you think those bangers out there care about Mace?” She laughed, her voice losing an octave and filling the room. “Mace? This is New Orleans. Mace? Anyway, I went out there, and Harvey, who runs the market, he said he hadn’t seen Jerry in a few hours, said he had himself a quart of Budweiser and went off to the Pearl, a few blocks away.”

“The Pearl?”

“The real name is, I believe, Minnie’s Black Pearl. But everyone just calls it the Pearl. A high-class establishment. Get shot in there for wearing the wrong hat. I was in no mood to visit the Pearl, so I went home. I figured Jerry would get home eventually and we would have it out, say some things that needed saying. Like my daddy said, sometimes a big storm clears the air. Though my daddy was full of it.”

“But Jerry never came home.”

“He did not. And the next morning, soon as the Pearl opened at eleven, I went over there, showed them the picture, asked if they knew him, and that S-A-N bartender, he started in with, ‘We don’t snitch around here.’ I said, ‘I’m not the cops, I’m the man’s wife,’ and you know what he said. He said, ‘That might be worse.’ So I said, ‘Look, my husband didn’t get home last night, and if you don’t tell me what you know, I will stand outside your bar tonight shouting about Jesus and sinners until you’re the one calling the cops to get rid of me.’ And so I found out what they knew, which was hardly worth the trouble. Jerry drank until eleven, by himself. And then he left. Said he was going home. And that was it. He left the Pearl and turned to smoke.”

“So, you called the cops?”

“They said Jerry was a grown man and that if he didn’t turn up in a couple of days I could file a missing-persons report. Which I did, soon as I was allowed. The detectives talked to the bartender down there for about five minutes and then forgot it. I begged The Times-Picayune to write something, and after a month they finally did, some little thing that didn’t even have his picture.”

“Too bad he wasn’t an eighteen-year-old girl.”

“You mean a white girl. With blond hair and a big smile. CNN would have been all over it then. But I don’t think it matters, Mr. Wells. I think he died that night.”

“Why?”

“My husband, you know how big he was. I don’t think anybody would take a chance keeping him alive. Too easy for him to mess you up.”

Wells couldn’t disagree.

“Something else, too,” she said. “I think he knew whoever did this. I don’t think it was Al Qaeda or any of them rats.”

“Why?”

“Nobody would go at him straight up, see? Look at the man. And Jerry wouldn’t just be getting in a car. Come on, even little kids know better. So, no, it had to be somebody he knew, make him drop his guard.”

“The others, they were shot with a silencer,” Wells said, thinking out loud. “Somebody could have done it on the street and then taken his body. Not a lot of lights out there.”

“They were killed all different ways, though. The woman, the doctor, somebody snuck into her house, made it look like a suicide,” Noemie said. “Somebody been creeping.”

“Last question.”

“You already got your last question.”

“I promise. I don’t want to upset you again, but—” Wells hesitated. She nodded to him. “Is there any chance that Jerry’s the one behind this? That he’s faked his own death. You said he was upset—”

“I said he was in a mood. Come on, Mr. Wells. You knew my husband. You cannot be serious. He was angry that he didn’t get a promotion, angry that they made him retire. He wasn’t a killer.”

You’re wrong, Wells didn’t say. He was a soldier. A Ranger. He was nothing more or less than a trained, professional killer.

Just like me.

“And now I have to put this boy in his bed,” Noemie said. She picked up Jeffrey, put him over her shoulder. His eyes blinked open, and he looked suspiciously at Wells.

“Thank you, Noemie. If I have more questions, can I call you?”

“Uh-huh. And if you check out the Pearl, keep your back to the wall. They don’t like white people much in there.”

“I don’t blame them.”

THE PEARL WAS CHEAP and flashy, Hennessy posters on the walls, faded red vinyl booths, and a half-dozen Mercedes hood ornaments hanging from the ceiling. Wells didn’t get any smiles when he walked in. Not from the bartender, a tall, skinny man with a Saints cap pulled low on his forehead. Not from the three boys in the corner booth who wore identical gold studs. Not from the two old heads deep in conversation at the bar. And not from the woman in the silver bikini dancing listlessly on the back counter to the heavy slow sounds of rap that sounded like it was being played at half speed.

Whatever had happened in Poland had upset Jerry Williams more than a bit, Wells thought. The Pearl wasn’t a place Jerry would have favored when Wells knew him. Wells debated staying, forcing the issue, maybe taking a seat with the boys in the booth. But what was he trying to prove? He would come back tomorrow and get the same stiff non-answers about Jerry Williams as the New Orleans cops.

“You lost?”the bartender said.

Wells shook his head. “Thanks.”

“Thanks for what?” the bartender said. Then, under his breath, “Dummy.”

Wells knew he ought to walk away. But after Cairo, he was in no mood to get pushed around. “I’ll take a Bud,” he said.

“We’re all out.”

“Miller.”

“Out of that, too.”

“Then a gin and tonic. Tanqueray.” A half-full bottle of Tanqueray sat on the back counter directly across from Wells.

The bartender turned down the music. “You dumb or just playing that way?”

“There’s no call for this.”

“Go back to the Quarter where you belong.” He took two steps toward Wells, his hands loose at his sides.

Wells turned toward the door, as if he were leaving. Then he spun back and with his right hand grabbed the bartender’s skinny left arm and pulled him down onto the scarred wood of the bar and knocked off his glasses. Wells stepped forward and with his left hand reached down the bartender’s back for the pistol that he knew would be tucked into the man’s jeans. He grabbed the pistol, a Beretta knockoff that fit snugly in his hand. Still holding the bartender down, he turned to cover the room. The action had taken less than three seconds, and the kids in the corner hadn’t moved. Yet.

“You are either a cop or a damn fool,” the bartender mumbled. “And I know you ain’t no cop.”

Wells let go of the bartender’s arm, stepped back from the bar. “Slowly. Put your hands on top of your heads. All of you.”

They complied. Wells knew he didn’t have long. Soon enough, one of the bangers would do something stupid, and then he’d have blood on his hands for this stunt.

“Quicker you answer my questions, the quicker I’m gone. I’m trying to find a friend of mine. He came in here for a beer a couple months back. Been missing ever since. Named Jerry Williams. Big guy. Ring any bells?”

“That what you hassling me for? I told the cops, I don’t know nothing about it,” said the bartender.

“Jerry and I were Rangers together. Now he’s missing. This is the last place anybody saw him. Do me a favor, answer my questions, I get out of here.”

Unwillingly: “Ask what you gotta ask.”

Wells tucked the pistol into his jeans. “Ever see anybody with Jerry?”

“Not hardly. He drank quiet. Put a twenty on the bar, nod when he wanted a hit. He put out two twenties, then I knew he needed some relaxation. Once or twice, late night, we got to talking; he told me he was a vet. Said nobody understood what it was like over there, you had to be there. Nothing more.”

“He ever say anything about disappearing, getting out of New Orleans?”

“Not to me.”

“He seem nervous ever? Like somebody was after him?”

The bartender shook his head.

“Ever talk about his wife?”

“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

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 sending 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

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.

The house lay in the heart of the prosperous and placid precincts of northern San Diego. To the west, closer to the ocean, homes were even now selling for millions of dollars. But 772 Flores didn’t fit with its neighbors. Blackout shades covered its windows. Brown patches dotted its front lawn. It looked like a foreclosure. But the loss at 772 went deeper than an unpaid mortgage.

Wells parked his rented Pontiac behind the Toyota. He reached for his Glock, tucked it under the driver’s seat. For this visit, he preferred to be unarmed.

The front door was heavy and oak, with an old-style brass knocker. A wooden sign proclaimed “Casa Callar.” No bell. Wells knocked solidly. But the house stayed dark. “Mr. Callar?”

Nothing. Wells heard faint music from upstairs. Classical, a mournful dirge.

“Mr. Callar?” Wells yelled. “Steven? It’s John Wells. I called last night.”

He knocked harder. Still nothing. Fine. He was sure Callar was inside. Wells would just have to wait.

He settled into the Pontiac and flicked on the satellite radio, the car’s main perk, flipping between the all-Springsteen channel and a couple of the alt-rock stations that played the stuff Anne had shown him on their night together. Death Cab for Cutie and The Hold Steady and the rest. Wells liked the songs, but they were too pretty for him, music for overage children whose biggest problems were drugs and love. Though even Springsteen had gone soft these days. Or just gotten old, the desperate anger of his early albums burning down to a quiet melancholy.

He’d listened twice more to the message Anne had left him, but he hadn’t called her. He figured that he’d wait until the mission was over to decide whether to see her again. Right now, though, he missed her, wondered where she was, what she was doing. He hadn’t wondered that about anybody except Exley for a long time. And he felt vaguely disloyal. But still he wondered.

AFTER A HALF HOUR, the front door to 772 swung open. A man strode out, nearly running, holding a baseball bat loosely.

“Off my property. I’ll call the cops.”

You wanted to call the cops, you would have called them, Wells thought. The guy was about six feet, with long arms, skinny and muscular. He looked like a pit bull kept hungry so he’d fight better. A barbed-wire tattoo knotted his right biceps. His hair was short and flecked with gray, his face long and flecked with pain.

“Mr. Callar? I’m John Wells. We spoke yesterday.”

Callar cocked his head sideways as if he’d caught Wells lying but couldn’t be bothered to argue. He lifted the bat, took a practice swing, a cutting, long arc that stopped just short of the Pontiac’s driver’s-side mirror.

“What would you do if I put a hole in your windshield?”

“It’s a rental.”

For a moment, Callar smiled, and Wells could see the man he’d been. Then the smile was gone. Callar walked back to the house. At the door, he tossed the bat aside, turned, looked at Wells. Waved him in.

The blackout shades left the house almost spookily dark. Callar led Wells into the kitchen. Wells could dimly see a chef’sisland, a brushed-steel fridge, tall, white cabinets. Given the messy front lawn, Wells imagined the house would be chaotic. Furniture upended in the dark, bugs underfoot. But when Callar flipped on the lamp on the counter and filled the room with the cool gray light of a compact fluorescent, Wells saw that the place was clean, plates and glasses neatly stacked in the cabinets.

Wells was reminded of a mausoleum. The house was carefully tended but lifeless, the mirror image of the Northern Cemetery. The great graveyard had been stolen by the living. Seven seventy-two Flores now belonged to the dead.

“Nice house,” Wells said.

“My wife had good taste. I’d offer you a drink, but the house is dry.”

“Water’s fine.”

Callar pulled a jug of water from the fridge and leaned against the kitchen counter. He took a long swig and wiped his mouth. He didn’t offer the jug to Wells.

“What exactly do you want to know, John? You don’t mind if I call you John. Seeing as you’ve come all this way in your rental Pontiac.”

“I want to hear about your wife.”

“Rachel. Her name was Rachel. Call her that, please.”

This meeting was already stranger, harsher, than Wells could have expected. “I want to hear about Rachel.”

“You want the fairy-tale version, how we met when she was a resident and I was a nurse and it was love among the crazies? For our first date we went to a Dodgers-Astros game. Jeff Bagwell hit a foul ball our way and I snagged it. And I’d never caught a ball before in my life, and I wanted it. But I gave it to this six-year-old three seats over because I wanted to impress her. And it worked, even though Rachel told me afterward she knew I only gave the kid the ball to show off. We were married two years to the day after that game. Or you want the real version, how she was dating this ER doc when we met? And she didn’t bother to tell me that until a month later, when the guy got up in my face. You want to know how we afforded this house? Shrinks do pretty well out here, all these rich housewives. Plus Rachel got a few bucks when her grandma died. You want to know her favorite color? What she called me in the middle of the night?” Callar had kept his dark eyes locked on Wells for this litany. Now, finally, he looked away.

“You don’t care about any of that. Not you or those FBI androids. They look human, but they’re not. All you want is how she died, yeah? How she looked when I found her on the bed with a plastic bag on her head? How she smelled after two days alone? Dead and alone? Because she sent me to Phoenix because she knew she was going to do it and she didn’t want me to interrupt her. That’s what you want to know.”

Callar was an open wound, pouring pain out with every word. Yet Wells couldn’t escape the feeling that he was watching a performance, Bereaved Husband of a Suicide. The guy was too furious to be so articulate. Or too articulate to be so furious. Or maybe he had just had too much time to chew his grief into mush, compose his feelings into this angry melody.

“Whatever you want to tell me,” Wells said.

“What I don’t get, man, what I don’t get is why you’re here at all. Seeing as how I told everything to the cops and the detectives. And then two days ago to these robots from the FBI. They left me their card and told me to call if anything occurred to me. If I remembered anything that could be useful in the investigation. Now you show up to kick some more dirt on it. John Wells. You don’t have anything better to do?”

“The FBI, they told you what happened. To the rest of the squad.” Wells hoping to keep Callar a little bit on track.

“Yeah. Before I kicked them out. You gonna take notes?”

“This is informal. I don’t have any authority.” Callar had probably guessed as much already, Wells thought.

“I can tell you to get lost whenever.”

“Sure.”

“Well, that calls for a drink.” Callar looked at a cabinet over the fridge.

“I thought—”

“I keep a little something on hand. For special occasions.” He clambered onto the counter and pulled open the cabinet, revealing a dozen bottles of Jack Daniel’s, the oversized square ones.

“Special occasions.”

“Empty, empty, empty. ” Callar rooted through the cabinet. “Here we go.” He pulled down a half-full bottle, the brown liquid sloshing against the glass as though it wanted to escape.

“I didn’t offer this to the federales, but you strike me as at least half human,” Callar said. He slopped whiskey into a glass, stopping only when the brown liquid neared the rim. “This way if anyone asks, you been drinking, I say, just one or two a day.”

“Clever.”

“Say when.” Callar started to pour.

“When.” But Callar didn’t stop until Wells’s glass was as full as his own.

“In for a penny.”

“You want to get me arrested for a DUI.”

“You? Please.” Callar raised his glass. “Got a toast for us, John?”

“Just hoping it’s not spiked with rat poison.”

“That would be too easy.” Callar drank half his glass. Wells followed, wondering how far down the rabbit hole they would go this afternoon.

“Rachel was a shrink. Ever go to a shrink, John?”

The question surprised Wells. “Not really, no.”

“Not really or no?”

“No,” Wells said, lying. “How’d Rachel end up in the army?”

“The military has these programs, they give you extra cash during residency. You serve when you’re done. Money’s not great, but the benefits are nice. She signed up third year of residency, wound up in the reserves, and after the war started, she rotated in and out.”

“By choice.”

“Pretty much. You’re a doc in the reserves, especially a woman, you don’t want to go into a hot zone, army’s not dragging you over. It doesn’t look good.”

“Tell me more about the two of you.”

“First, I want to hear how you got involved in all this,” Callar said.

“Last week the CIA director, Vinny Duto, asked me to take a look. I’m getting up to speed. If you talked to the FBI last week, you probably know as much as I do about the case.”

“The FBI didn’t have time to tell me much before I kicked them out.”

“But you know, seven members of 673 are dead or missing. Professional hits. No leads, no suspects, no motive. The bureau is going on the theory it’s probably Qaeda. Qaeda or a detainee looking for revenge.”

“And you agree?”

“I can’t figure it out. None of it makes sense. But it started with your wife.”

“Rachel killed herself,” Callar said. “If you read the autopsy, the police report, then you saw. She took that Xanax and she lay down on her bed and put that bag on her head. And she died.”

“She have a prescription for the pills?”

Callar sipped his drink. “Sure. She was having a lot of trouble, anxiety attacks, insomnia. Ever since she got back from Poland.”

Wells decided to let that thread alone for now. “Police report says she didn’t leave a note.”

“Maybe she did. Maybe I burned it before I called the cops. Maybe she blamed me for being such a crappy husband.”

“Were you a crappy husband?”

“No.”

“Was there a note?”

“Listen to me. Listen. Nobody could have gotten those pills into Rachel if she didn’t want to take them.”

“How about the same nobody who’s killed soldiers and ops without leaving a clue? Maybe somebody shot her up with a sedative, liquid Xanax, dumped the pills down her throat.”

“Or maybe aliens landed from planet TR-thirty-six and killed her and flew off. It didn’t happen. She killed herself. You drag it up, rub my face in it.”

Wells found his attention wandering to the light sneaking in the edges of the windows where the blackout shades didn’t quite reach. He hadn’t eaten lunch, and the whiskey was hitting him hard.

“What doesn’t make sense to me,” Wells said. “Most husbands. They’d want to believe this. They’d want the police to investigate. And if they got any whiff it was real, they’d want whoever did it strung up. But you, you’re fighting it hard as you can. And not ’cause you’re a suspect, either. The police, FBI, they say your alibi’s airtight. You were working in Phoenix the entire weekend. Only got about eight hours’ sleep the whole time.”

“I want Rachel left in peace.”

“Her or you?”

“Both of us.”

“Even if someone drugged her and put a bag on her head for you to find.”

In the silence that followed, Wells knew he’d gone too far.

CALLAR SUCKED down the rest of his whiskey. “You got a way with words, John.”

“I’m sorry. Truly.”

“Ought to put my foot in your ass, send you on your way.” But Callar didn’t. Maybe he was tired of drinking alone. Or maybe, despite all his denials, he wondered what had really happened.

“I have to ask,” Wells said.

Callar’s half-shut eyes warned Wells to be careful.

“Before she died, Rachel, she get any threats? Did you notice anything unusual? Cars outside the house?”

“Dumb question. But I’ll answer anyway. No.”

“All right. So, how’d she wind up over there?”

“In 2005 and 2006, she went to Iraq. Four-month tours. Mainly the big hospital there, at Balad, the air base. Evaluating soldiers for psychiatric problems.”

Callar broke off. He poured two glasses of water, slid one to Wells.

“She saw a lot,” Callar said. “Eighteen-year-old kids, faces melted off. Guys with PTSD so bad that they got locked in rubber rooms. After the second time, she was a mess. Angry. She lost weight. She would hardly talk to me. Then she heard about this new squad getting put together. Six-seventy-three. Dealing with guys they couldn’t send to Gitmo. She wanted a job where she could get something back for the red, white, and blue.”

“You weren’t in favor.”

“I thought she didn’t know what she was getting into. But she never listened to me. I was hoping they wouldn’t take her. She was high-strung after that second tour, and I hoped somebody would notice. But she’d been in Iraq, so she had the clearances. And docs weren’t exactly lining up for the work. And shrinks, they know how to fake it. Couple months later, she was on a plane to Warsaw.”

“What was she doing?”

“She didn’t tell me much. I had the impression they wanted her to make sure they pushed the prisoners to the limit but no further. And to fix them up if they did go too far.”

“How did she feel about that?”

“Look. I was only getting snapshots. Talking to her a couple times a week. I think. part of her rolled right through it. Maybe even liked it for a while. Then something happened, a few months in, and she hated herself for liking it. And she’d volunteered, so that was worse. She couldn’t put it on anybody else.”

Callar stopped, but Wells didn’t think the story was done. “Then, near the end, there was another incident.”

“Incident.”

“Before you ask, I don’t know what. Not a clue. But when she got back, she was in bad shape. Taking a whole pharmacy worth of stuff. Ambien, the sleeping pills. Antidepressants. Then Xanax, Klonopin. She was prescribing it for herself and getting docs she knew to give it to her.”

“That doesn’t prove she killed herself,” Wells said. Callar’s eyes flickered and his face softened. “All I’m saying is, whatever happened, it came out of something over there. You’re sure you don’t know what it was.”

“Have you not been listening to me? She didn’t talk about anything operational. She was a good soldier girl. You want to know what happened over there, check the records. If you can find them. Talk to the rest of the squad, everyone who’s left.”

“Rachel ever discuss the rest of the squad? Hint who was pushing too hard?”

Now the uncertainty disappeared from Callar’s eyes. “One time. She said, ‘Steve, you’ll never believe what that nasty colonel did today. Ripped out a prisoner’s heart. Reached right into his chest. Fried it up and ate it.’ What have I been saying? She didn’t talk about anything operational. You’re just like those FBI dweebs. You pretend to listen, but you don’t.”

Callar slopped more whiskey in his glass, sucked it down. Though he didn’t seem drunk to Wells. The months in this dark house must have turned his liver into an alcohol-processing machine.

“You have a gun?” Wells said. Apropos of nothing.

“Do I have a gun? No.”

“Did you ever?”

“Yeah. Put it in a safe deposit a couple months back. Came to the conclusion that a nine and finding your wife dead don’t mix. How ’bout you, John? You must be carrying.”

Wells opened his jacket to reveal the empty holster. “In the car.”

“Not scared of me?” Callar laughed. He drank the last of his whiskey, pushed himself up. “Where are my manners? Lemme show you around.”

Callar led Wells up the solid wooden stairs, leaving the light behind. Wells stepped carefully in the dark. Upstairs, Callar opened a door and flicked on another of the ghostly fluorescent lights that he favored. The bed was a modern version of an old sleigh, dark wood and a rounded headboard. The mattress was bare.

“Do you believe in God, John?”

“Used to pray every day. Now I’m not sure.”

“I am. I’m sure. It’s all void. Sound and fury signifying nothing. An accident of biology. Cosmic joke. Whatever you want to call it.”

Wells didn’t feel like arguing. “Ever think about opening a window? Let that California sun in? Stop creeping out the neighbors. You know what they called the prison, don’t you, Steve? The Midnight House. You’ve got your very own version going.”

“See the stain? On the mattress?”

But the thick white top of the mattress seemed spotless.

Callar flipped on the ceiling light. Still, Wells couldn’t understand what he meant. The bedroom was as bloodless as the kitchen. A handful of framed pictures on the bedside table provided the only evidence of life. Callar and Rachel at a baseball game. Callar and Rachel in a rain forest somewhere.

“Pretty.”

“Think that makes me feel better?” Callar nudged Wells. “See the stain.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s ’cause it’s not there,” Callar said. “There’s nothing left of her. Not even that. Nothing but what I have in my head. And if I leave this house, that’s gone, too.”

“You’ll have your memories wherever you are.”

“Then I may as well stay here.”

“Let me ask you—”

Callar put a not-very-friendly hand on Wells’s arm. “No more. Come on, Johnny. Time to go.”

Wells turned to Callar. He had more questions: Could she have been having an affair? How come you never had kids? And, most of all, Were you always this crazy? But the set of Callar’s face left no room for argument.

“When should I come back?”

“When you find the real killer. You and O. J.” Callar squeezed Wells’s biceps, digging his fingers into the muscle. Callar would be an ugly fighter, fueled by alcohol and rage. Wells let him squeeze.

“This thing you’re living, I’m sorry for it. For you. But whoever did this, they’re still out there. You can help us. Help yourself.”

“Please leave my house.”

WELLS LEFT CALLAR’S HAUNTED castle behind. Ten minutes later he stopped at a Starbucks, ordered a large black coffee — he could never bring himself to say venti. He found a table in the corner and spent an hour poring over the police and FBI files on crazy Steve Callar, trying to figure out if Callar could have killed his wife. For whatever reason.

But he couldn’t have. Not unless he’d figured out how to teleport the six hundred miles from Phoenix to San Diego. During his weekend in Arizona, he’d only been off shift once, between midnight and 8 a.m. on Sunday. The last flight from Phoenix to San Diego was at 9:55 p.m. Callar couldn’t possibly have made it.

SO WELLS HEADED UP the 5, leaving San Diego behind and heading for Los Angeles and a red-eye back to Washington. But he made one stop along the way, at a bookstore in Anaheim, where he leafed through a shelf of histories about Germany and World War II, wondering what had provoked Jerry Williams to start reading about the Nazis.

17

When Kenneth Karp stepped into Mohammed Fariz’s cell, Mohammed sat in his usual position, rocking back and forth in the right rear corner. He closed his eyes as Karp slid the door shut.

“Come on, dude,” Karp said. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

Mohammed was the forgotten detainee, the second Pakistani arrested during the raid in Islamabad, the seventeen-year-old in the Batman T-shirt who’d shot Dwayne Maggs in the leg and made a fuss on the flight between Pakistan and Poland.

In his month at the Midnight House, Mohammed had been difficult. Some days he read his Quran, prayed on a regular schedule, ate his meals without complaint. But others he spent mumbling to himself and squatting in a corner of his cell. Two days before he had refused his dinner, violating 673’s rules, which required detainees to eat every day.

The Rangers called Karp to find out why.

“It’s poison,” Mohammed said.

“It’s the same as we eat,” Karp said. Which wasn’t exactly true. Mohammed and bin Zari got the leftovers from the base cafeteria. Breakfast was an overripe banana, hunks of bread, and a strange sugary jam. Lunch was toast and soup. Dinner was overcooked mystery meat with soggy rice or french fries that seemed to be made out of cardboard. And the portions were small, a deliberate effort to ensure that the prisoners were always slightly hungry.

But even if the food wasn’t gourmet, Karp could promise it hadn’t been spiked. He wasn’t a fan of giving prisoners LSD or PCP. The effects were too uncertain. Some guys even enjoyed the trips.

Karp picked up the blue plastic bowl that held Mohammed’s dinner, lifted a piece of meat to his mouth. Salty, leathery, tasteless, with bits of gristle that had a sandy texture. “Yummy,” he said, the meat still in his mouth. He choked it down. “See. It’s fine.”

He handed the bowl to Mohammed, who tossed it against the wall.

Under other circumstances, that misbehavior would have earned Mohammed a week in a punishment cell. But Karp and the rest of 673 were busy with bin Zari. Karp couldn’t deal with another problem.

“Fine, Mohammed,” he said in Pashto. “You want to be hungry, your choice.” For two days, Mohammed went back to eating, and Karp thought he had learned his lesson. But now he was back in the corner.

IN CIA JARGON, detainees like Mohammed were “dancers.” They weren’t the most openly resistant prisoners. But their unpredictable cycles of defiance and cooperation made them among the most difficult detainees.

Some dancers were mentally unstable, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Others used the technique as a form of passive resistance, a way to incite their jailers. Openly angry prisoners invited brutal retaliation. By alternating—“dancing”—between resistance and compliance, a canny jihadi could slow an interrogation, giving himself time to resist.

Within the agency, the most famous dancer was a Taliban commander who went by the single name Jadhouri. In 2006, a Ranger platoon in Afghanistan captured Jadhouri in anattack on a Talib-controlled village near the Pakistan border. The raid had been routine, except at the end, when Jadhouri ran out of a one-room hut, his hands raised in surrender. Seconds later, a grenade blew out the hut. When the Rangers checked inside, they found fragments of a laptop. Jadhouri had apparently taken the time to strap a grenade to the computer’s case before giving up. The Rangers did what they could to recover the laptop, but the explosion had launched it to computer heaven.

Jadhouri was sent to the prison at Bagram, the American air base north of Kabul, where the interrogators took over. For a week, he insisted that the Rangers were mistaken about the laptop. The grenade had blown up accidentally, he said. His questioners lost patience, threatened to send him to Guantánamo, doused him with buckets of cold water. Jadhouri stopped talking. In response, he was kept awake for sixty hours straight. Still, he refused to speak.

Then, on a December Sunday a week before Christmas, a lung-burning wind blowing off the Kush, Jadhouri produced a single piece of toilet paper that became known as the Square. On it he had drawn squiggles and crosses — representing streams and mountains — and written the names of three North-West Frontier villages. At its center, a small X, which Jadhouri claimed represented a hideout used by Osama bin Laden. Jadhouri said he was in regular touch with bin Laden’s bodyguards and that he had destroyed the laptop because it held messages from bin Laden.

The interrogators at Bagram viewed the Square skeptically. Still: bin Laden. And Jadhouri must have had some reason for blowing up the laptop.

Unfortunately, the Square itself was too small and badly drawn to be deciphered. Giving Jadhouri access to mapmaking software was unthinkable, so the interrogators made him redraw the map on a whiteboard. When Jadhouri pronounced himself finished, the whiteboard was photographed and the images uploaded to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department unit responsible for mapping the world.

Two days later, the NGIA’s verdict came back. The map was worse than useless. Intentionally or accidentally, Jadhouri’s version of the North-West Frontier included roads that didn’t exist and a river that seemed to be in Tajikistan. Even disregarding those errors, the target area covered four hundred square miles. Either Jadhouri had a terrible sense of direction or the map was entirely fictitious.

Against their better judgment, the interrogators took one more shot, bringing in an NGIA mapmaker who specialized in central Asian geography. After a day, the mapmaker reported back that the more questions Jadhouri answered, the vaguer the map became. Jadhouri spent two weeks in an isolation cell as punishment.

When he was released, he had a gift for his captors: another square, this one supposedly revealing bin Laden’s “true and correct” location. By then even the most humorless of the interrogators got the joke. Jadhouri was returned to the general prison population and encouraged to use toilet paper for its intended purpose. The mystery of the exploding laptop was never solved.

The legend of the Square quickly passed from Bagram to Guantánamo and the rest of the secret prisons the CIA had scattered around the globe. Along the way, it acquired flourishes meant to prove its ridiculousness. In one, Jadhouri had marked the Square in blood rather than ink. In another, the toilet paper was already partially used. And in a third, the fiction wasn’t discovered until two Special Operations teams had been put in the air for an attack on the hideout.

KARP DIDN’T FIND the stories funny. The interrogators in Bagram should never have believed such an obvious lie. Even worse, they’d failed to punish Jadhouri properly for embarrassing them. The test of wills between detainees and interrogators never ended. Whenever a prisoner won, even for a single day, his victory encouraged other detainees to resist. Isolating prisoners destroyed that dynamic, one reason that the Midnight House worked so well. Here, detainees couldn’t depend on a big group to sustain them.

For interrogations to succeed, detainees had to feel — not just understand but feel—that they were beaten, Karp thought. They had to wake up every day knowing that their captors controlled every choice they made. Only then would they tell the truth.

In the years immediately after 9/11, Karp’s view had been standard at the agency and the Pentagon. But now Langley and the army had — officially, anyway — backed away from using force or coercion on detainees. At Guantánamo, the FBI’s hands-off model was the default. The Feds argued that rough tactics were illegal, made prosecutions impossible, and didn’t work anyway. Ill treatment made detainees more resistant, not less. The way to get information was to build relationships with prisoners and reward them for help.

In the FBI model, a dishonest detainee was subject to steady questioning that made him layer lie upon lie on his answers. Eventually, his story collapsed of its own weight. At that point, the agents demanded the truth, and the detainee — knowing that he’d been beaten — gave in. The technique was a classic investigative strategy that detectives in the United States had used for generations.

To which Karp could only say, What planet are you on? He had never seen a prisoner who minded being caught in a lie. Arabs and Afghans, especially, loved to tell tales. Catch them lying, break down their stories, and they apologized, smiled, and started all over again.

And only a few detainees could be bribed, in Karp’s experience. Most jihadis sneered at offers of books, or better food, or extra time to exercise. Nor were they frightened by the threat that they’d spend their lives in prison, especially not at Guantánamo, where they lived among fellow Muslims. No, they needed to know they would be punished for lying, or refusing to talk. They needed to feel fear. They needed to be broken. Then they would tell the truth. Sometimes.

Anyone who thought that the FBI’s tactics would work against jihadis needed to look at American prisons, which were filled with criminals who had accepted long jail terms instead of testifying against friends or relatives in return for shorter sentences. Stop snitching. Hell, Barry Bonds’s trainer had gone to jail instead of admitting what he knew about Bonds’s steroid use. And the guy had won. Eventually, the Feds had let him out. Which was fine, as far as Karp was concerned. Steroid use wasn’t a capital crime.

But if the trainer kept his mouth shut for no better reason than to protect Barry Bonds, nobody should be surprised when religious fanatics weren’t helpful to their interrogators. When Karp pointed out these inconvenient facts to his counterparts at the FBI, and asked, “So, what do we do with the seventy percent of the jihadis who flat-out refuse to talk?” their answer was, “We lock ’em up and keep working.”

That argument had carried the day, more or less. Coercive interrogations had once been discussed at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Langley, and the White House. No longer. The secret charter that 673 had received from the President said only that the members of the unit couldn’t be prosecuted. The charter said nothing about why such an exemption might be necessary. The people in charge still wanted the information that 673 could provide, but they no longer wanted to know how 673 was getting it. Karp understood. September 11 had faded. Most Americans had forgotten Osama bin Laden existed.

But the threat hadn’t changed, Karp thought. Just because Al Qaeda hadn’t pulled off an attack on American soil since 2001 didn’t mean it had stopped trying. And Pakistan was more volatile than ever. If it fell to an Islamist coup, Al Qaeda would have a nuclear bomb within its grasp. Karp sometimes thought that his mission was to make himself the most hated man in America, because he’d be hated only as long as the threat seemed unreal.

So, Karp counted himself lucky to be at the Midnight House, where he could operate the way he needed to. The top guys at the agency, the army, they knew the truth. Even if they would no longer admit it. They knew the United States needed one prison where its interrogators wouldn’t have lawyers or the Red Cross watching them.

KARP STEPPED close to Mohammed, stood over him.

“Mohammed.”

“Who are you?” Mohammed said in Pashto. “Why do you bother me?”

Karp picked him up, shoved him against the rough wall of the cell. Mohammed’s muscles twitched, and Karp wished the kid would fight him a little, come back to earth. But he didn’t. His black eyes were dull, his breath bitter, as though something inside him was rotting. He had left Poland, gone somewhere Karp couldn’t reach.

“You know who I am,” Karp said. “What’s my name? Look at me. Tell me my name.”

“You say your name is Jim. But I know that’s not your name.”

Indeed, Karp used “Jim” as his alias with detainees.

“Why do you say that?”

“The others, they tell me.”

Karp controlled his surprise. No one else in 673 spoke Pashto. And no one should have told Mohammed about the aliases, anyway, though most prisoners guessed.

“Who? ”

“The ones that come when you go. They talk to me. They tell me you stand up too straight.”

“Stand too straight? What are you talking about?”

Karp let him go. Mohammed slumped down the wall. When he reached the floor, he raised his head, locked eyes with Karp. He seemed to be back in the cell, at least temporarily.

“Are you a dancer?”Karp said.

Mohammed shook his head.

“You know what I’m asking, Mohammed?”

“No.”

“A dancer, that’s someone who says whatever comes into his mind, doesn’t tell me the truth.”

“I tell the truth, sir. Always.”

“What’s my name?”

“Ishmael.”

“Ishmael.”

“You’re a prophet. Like me.”

“You’re right,” Karp said. “I’m a prophet. And I predict pain for you, you keep this up.” He reached for Mohammed—

“JIM.”

Karp turned to see Rachel Callar outside the cell.

“I need to talk to you.”

Karp seemed about to argue but instead turned and walked out, locking the cell. She led him into the empty unlocked cell next to Mohammed’s.

“Doctor,” Karp said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You need to be careful with him.”

“How’s that again?”

“He’s in trouble, Ken. He’s got an axis-one disorder, and it’s getting worse.”

As she’d expected, Karp had no idea what she meant, though she knew he would sooner submit to a night in the punishment box than admit his ignorance.

“Axis one. Schizophrenia, major depression with psychotic symptoms. Severe mental illness. The way he sits in the corner, talking to himself. The way he won’t take care of himself. He’s coming unglued.”

“How would you know? You don’t speak Pashto.”

“I’ve picked up a little, the last year. Anyway, it’s obvious.”

“He could be faking.”

“He’s not smart enough.”

“I’ve seen more of these guys than you.”

“And I’ve seen more schizophrenics than you.”

“Congratulations.”

Callar shook her head. Blowing up at Karp wouldn’t serve her. Doctors in general and psychiatrists in particular were supposed to stay serene. I’ve seen everything, and nothing fazes me. She’d mastered the drill in residency. She’d even kept her cool in the emergency room one Thanksgiving night when a drunk sat up in his cot and projectile-vomited a mix of liquor-store rum and soup-kitchen turkey in her face.

But now she wished she felt as calm as she looked. This relentless antagonism, not just from Karp but from Terreri and Jack Fisher, was grinding her down. Last night she’d dreamed that she stood atop an endless tightrope, nothing below her, not a net or flat ground or even a canyon, nothing but a black void. Nothing to do but keep walking. And then she fell.

She hadn’t had that dream since medical school.

“Ken. Let’s just talk it out. Mohammed hasn’t given us anything.”

“Not yet.”

“And when you talk to him, he doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Sometimes.”

“And odds are he doesn’t have much for us. Given his age, given his probable role in the bombing—”

“We won’t know unless we ask.”

“This place is incredibly stressful for him. He knows he can be punished at any time. He has no control over his sleep, his eating—”

“It’s called prison.”

“Even if you’re mentally healthy, prison is difficult. And that’s if you know how long you’re in, where you are. I don’t know whether it’s genetic or whether he had some serious trauma as an adolescent, but he’s in no shape for this place.”

“Serious trauma as an adolescent.” Karp actually laughed. “Like every other kid in Pakistan. Doc-tor”—Karp made the word sound ridiculous—“this kid shot one of our guys. He’s a terrorist.”

“I’m not saying he’s not.”

“Good. Then let me do my job. You have an objection, talk to the colonel.”

And Karp walked out.

A flush rose in Callar’s cheeks. She tilted her head, looked at the chipped concrete ceiling, and counted seconds until her emotions vanished and she turned clear as a plate-glass window. Steve had been right. She shouldn’t have taken the job. But she couldn’t let it beat her, couldn’t let them beat her. She couldn’t fail. Not again.

KARP LOOKED INTO Mohammed’s cell. The kid lay on his cot, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving. Karp reached for the cell door and then hesitated. The truth was that the shrink was half right. Mohammed didn’t belong here. Not because he was crazy, whatever nonsense he was sputtering.

“Axis one, my ass,” Karp mumbled in Callar’s direction. Trying to assert her authority with this psychiatric mumbo jumbo. Of course Mohammed was stressed out and paranoid. He was supposed to be. He was here for an interrogation, not spa treatment.

No, Mohammed didn’t belong here because he didn’t know anything. The CIA had traced him to a madrassa in Bat Khela that produced suicide bombers as efficiently as a meatpacking plant turned steers into hamburger. Beyond that, his life was a cipher. Another lost boy in a country full of them.

But they couldn’t move Mohammed anywhere, especially not Guantánamo, not until they got bin Zari to talk. Since 2006, the President had said repeatedly that America was no longer holding detainees incommunicado. Technically, he wasn’t lying. Technically, Mohammed and bin Zari were even now on their way to Guantánamo. Their stay at the Midnight House was merely a stopover for “processing.”

But when Mohammed got to Guantánamo, he’d be given a lawyer. And once he told the lawyer that he’d been held at a secret prison along with Jawaruddin bin Zari, the lawyer would demand to know where bin Zari was and whether his rights were being respected. The United States was in no position to answer that question.

So, Mohammed couldn’t be split from bin Zari. And bin Zari wasn’t leaving the Midnight House, not as long as he wouldn’t talk. So far he hadn’t cracked, despite a half-dozen interrogation sessions and two nights in the punishment box. Karp and Fisher were already talking about their next step. Meantime, Mohammed would have to wait. Though Karp’s sympathy was limited. Mohammed had been willing to die as a suicide bomber. Three hots and a cot, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, was a decent bargain.

MOHAMMED FARIZ’S BAD LUCK had started more or less at birth. He’d entered the world in 1991, the youngest of six children, the product of a pinhole leak in a Chinese condom. His father, Adel, eked out a living ferrying laborers around Peshawar in a battered Toyota pickup.

Adel charged one rupee, about twelve cents, a ride. After gas and traffic tickets, some real, some imagined by underpaid cops, he cleared four dollars a day, enough to rent an apartment in the Haji Camp neighborhood, a warren of narrow streets around Peshawar’s grimiest bus station. The eight members of the Fariz family piled into four rooms in a six-story building that now and again dumped chunks of concrete on the heads of anyone unlucky enough to be walking by. Even in the summer, when Peshawar hit one hundred twenty degrees, Nawaz forbade her children from opening the apartment’s windows, which overlooked an alley that stank of sewage and stray dogs.

By the standards of Haji Camp, the Fariz family was middle-class. For a decade, Afghans had flooded into the North-West Frontier to flee the Taliban. Many wound up in Peshawar, destitute and desperate. They turned to heroin to salve their misery and prostitution to pay for their heroin. They were nearly all male. The sexual abuse of boys and young men was endemic in the North-West Frontier, in part because unmarried men and women could be killed simply for being seen together.

Prostitution and heroin use were illegal in Pakistan. But the Peshawar police had other concerns. They spent most of their time dodging suicide bombers, and the rest looking for bribes. They rarely came to Haji Camp. By 2003, the neighborhood’s disorder had attracted the attention of the self-appointed soldiers of the Jaish al-Sunni, the Army of the Sunni.

The Jaish were a ragged group of young men who called themselves an Islamic militia but were really a street gang, Bloods without the bandannas. Every few months, they descended on Haji Camp for flying raids, their hands heavy with chains and knives. Their leaders carried pistols but preferred not to use them. Guns were too easy. The Jaish wanted blood to flow. Sirens announced their raids, warning residents of Haji Camp to get into their homes. Anyone who remained outside was assumed to be an addict and fair game.

The day after he turned thirteen, Mohammed was caught in a raid. When the siren sounded, he was escaping Pakistan as best he could, playing World of Warcraft at a computer shop around the corner from his family’s apartment. To pay for the game, he dragged wheelbarrows of bricks at construction sites. Four hours of work brought him five rupees, enough to play for two hours on a slow computer, or an hour on a fast one. On the night of the raid, Mohammed had found a Shield of Coldarra, which promised him protection from even the toughest monsters. Then the siren sounded.

Around him, boys groaned to one another. “Tonight.” “Why tonight?” “Just got started and now this bastard.” “Ten rupees down the drain, man.”

One boy raised his hand and asked Aamer, the owner, if they could save their games and come back when the raid was over. “What the sign say?” Aamer said. There were seven signs, each painted a different color. They all had the same message, in English and Pashto:

“NO Refund EVER.”

“But it the Jaish, Aamer. The Jaish come, we should be having a refund.”

“What the sign say?”

The boys got up from their keyboards and hurried out. But not Mohammed. Mohammed had his new shield and five minutes left on his hour, and he planned to use both. Somewhere on this level, a Blessed Blade of the Windseeker was hidden. Mohammed meant to find it. The Jaish needed fifteen minutes to get this far into the neighborhood. Anyway, he was barely two blocks from his house.

Two minutes later, still three minutes left to play, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s chair from under him. “Boy, you got to go,” Aamer said. “They coming now. Coming quick.”

“But—”

Aamer pulled the plug on Mohammed’s PC, and the screen went black. Then Mohammed heard the shouting of the Jaish, angry voices rumbling like a motorbike. Close by, a glass shattered and a woman screamed, a high-pitched whine that broke off abruptly—

Mohammed realized his mistake. They’d taken a different route this time, found their way in faster. They were close. “Let me stay, Aamer. Please. Please.”

Without a word, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s skinny arm and shoved him out the front door. The street was narrow and smeared with crumpled plastic bottles, scraps of wax paper, indefinable bits of metal and concrete. At the end of the block, in front of the halal butcher shop, a man dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt spotted Mohammed and circled a black baton over his head.

Mohammed ran. He could hear the Jaish behind him, heavy footsteps closing on him. They yelled at him to stop, told him they’d show him mercy if he did. But Mohammed was slight and quick and didn’t have far to go. He could feel his Shield of Coldarra protecting him. He almost got home.

Almost.

But he slipped. Slipped on a patch of oil invisible in the Haji Camp darkness. Fifty feet from his building. He got up, but they were on him. He tried to punch and kick. But he was small, and they were big and there were five of them. Then the biggest one, the one in blue, clubbed him on the side of the head with a steel baton, and he couldn’t fight anymore.

“Whore,” the man in blue said to Mohammed.

The five of them surrounded him. He couldn’t see anything but their legs and their dusty black sneakers. The soldiers of the Jaish always wore black sneakers. They were practically the only requirement for joining. The men were panting in their excitement, and Mohammed knew what they planned.

“No, I live here, sir,” he said.

“You’re a whore.”

“Please, sir—”

They dragged him into the alley behind his building, so narrow that even the tuk-tuks couldn’t fit through it. Above him, a woman, a black scarf wrapped around her head, looked down from the third floor. He yelled to her for help, but a hand covered his mouth. He pleaded silently for relief, for his father to realize what was happening and come outside. But even at thirteen, he knew Adel wouldn’t save him, that Adel was as frightened of the Jaish as everyone else.

The men grew serious. Two held his legs apart and the one in blue pulled down his cheap brown sweatpants. What came next hurt so much that Mohammed thought his insides were on fire. He screamed through the hand on his mouth and kicked his legs as hard as he could. The man didn’t stop. The others laughed and one peed on his face.

The man in blue finished, and the other four took their turns. The rest didn’t hurt so much, or maybe they did but he didn’t care. Before they ran off to find a new victim, they gave him a going-away present, pouring a vial of hydrochloric acid onto his legs, searing their cruelty onto him. In a way, they’d been kind. They could have burned out his eyes.

When Mohammed got home, blood dripped out of him. Nawaz gave him a Coca-Cola. Adel took it away and slapped his face and told him that he’d shamed them all. Three days later, still bleeding, he was packed off to a madrassa in Bat Khela, a town of fifty thousand, sixty miles northeast of Peshawar.

FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, he was given endless hours of instruction in the Quran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. He didn’t believe a word. He’d seen the truth of the men who called themselves warriors. His parents never visited. He imagined, hoped, that his mother wanted to see him. But without his father’s permission, she could no more travel to Bat Khela than the moon.

At the madrassa, Mohammed rarely spoke. He couldn’t be bothered to argue when boys called him stupid. When he talked too much, the scars on his legs burned. He preferred silence. Fortunately, the teachers didn’t mind. At night he sat, pretending to study his Quran, on his cot in the whitewashed third-floor hall where sixty boys slept side by side. In reality, he endlessly replayed the night the Jaish had caught him. If only he had quit the game a few minutes earlier. If only he had seen the pool of oil on the street. If only he’d fought harder. If only. But the story always ended the same way.

ON MOHAMMED’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, the imams passed the word. Two students were wanted for a “special mission.” Everyone at school understood the code. Mohammed asked to join, surprising the imams. They hadn’t known he was so pious. Of course, they misunderstood entirely. Without ever hearing the word, Mohammed had become an ironist par excellence. Raped. Blamed for being raped. Disowned by his family. Finally, as punishment, sent to learn from the men who’d trained his rapists.

So Mohammed had decided to buy his way out of the hell of his life by giving himself to his namesake. When the bomb went off, his classmates would call him a hero. In heaven he’d be given a truck-load of virgins to pummel as he pleased. Or else. he’d just be dead. Either way, he’d come out ahead.

FOR TWO WEEKS, nothing changed. He went to class, ate, pretended to pray. The other boys didn’t say anything to him, but he could see in their faces they knew what he’d agreed to do and they respected him. Fools. One night at dinner, just as he was wondering if he’d been rejected, he felt a tap on the shoulder: Pack your bags.

He was taken to a house in western Peshawar. Haji Camp wasn’t far away, and Mohammed wanted to say good-bye to his parents, at least his mother, but he knew better than to ask. He expected they’d show him how to make a bomb, but they didn’t. Eventually he figured out why: given his life expectancy, why teach him?

On the third night, a mud-encrusted SUV parked in front of the house. A fat man stepped out. Once, in Haji Camp, Mohammed had seen a television show about Japanese men who wore robes and wrestled with one another. Sumos, they were called. This man was Pakistani and wasn’t as big as the sumos. But he moved the same way they did, a sidestep waddle. He came into the house and sat next to Mohammed. The couch creaked under his weight, and Mohammed tried not to smile. He could tell the man was important. The man looked at him for what seemed like a long time.

“Do you know me?”

“No, sir.”

“I am Jawaruddin bin Zari. Have you heard of me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know why you’re here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you scared?”

No one had asked Mohammed that question before. He considered. “No, sir.”

“Do you understand the mission?”

“Not exactly, sir.”

“But you know you will die as a soldier for Allah.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man patted his shoulder. “Good.”

THE TRUCK SHOWED UP a week later. It was empty and shiny. It drove away and came back filled with bags of fertilizer and barrels of oil. The next day the men drove it to a house on the edge of Islamabad. Mohammed had never left the North-West Frontier before. He spent most of the drive with his face pressed against the passenger window.

The house in Islamabad had a television, a treat the madrassa had lacked. Mohammed lay in front of it for hours, watching cricket matches. The men ignored him. They treated him as ignorant and stupid, and he supposed he was.

Mohammed hadn’t been told the plan, but he knew he wouldn’t be in the truck when it exploded. His death would be a diversion. He would wear a bomb vest and walk as close as possible to the main Diplomatic Quarter checkpoint before blowing himself up. In fact, bin Zari planned to blow the vest himself, via a cell phone, though he hadn’t bothered to tell Mohammed.

That final night they ate a simple meal, grilled lamb and diced cucumber and tomato. They prayed together. Mohammed fell asleep in front of the television. He was dreaming of World of Warcraft when a heavy hand shook him awake. Bin Zari, holding a pistol.

“Can you use this?”

Mohammed nodded. At the madrassa, he’d learned the basics of handling pistols. Bin Zari shoved the gun into Mohammed’s hand.

“They’re coming,” bin Zari said.

“Who?”

Bin Zari slapped Mohammed’s face. “Stupid. The police. And the Americans.” He ran out, and Mohammed heard his heavy steps headed to the roof. Mohammed peeked outside the window and saw a Nissan and a van rolling into the front yard. Men jumped out of the van and ran for the house. Then the shooting started.

He hardly remembered what happened next. Somehow, he got to the big room at the back of the house. But it was filled with fog that burned Mohammed’s eyes and nose and mouth. He tried not to breathe, but he couldn’t help himself.

He hid under a crate and put his T-shirt over his mouth and waited. An American, a black one wearing a strange black mask, came in. Mohammed lifted the pistol and pulled the trigger. He could hardly see, but he knew he’d hit the black man, because the man fell down. The floor shook when he hit it. Then another man in a mask came in. Mohammed fired the rest of his bullets, but by then he was so blind he could have been two meters away and he would have missed. He threw the pistol away and raised his hands and stood.

The Americans took him and put a hood over his head and gave him to the Pakistani police. He knew they were Pakistani because they smelled like his dad and they yelled at him in Pashto. They put him in a truck and told him he was stupid, a stupid jihadi, and that he’d killed an American and that he was going to a very bad place. And then they hit him. They hit him in the arms and the legs and the stomach with sticks. Two of his ribs came loose and wagged in his belly. He asked them to take the hood off, but they laughed, and with the laughing he was back in the alley with the Jaish, not remembering it but actually back in the alley. Only this time he was wearing a hood.

Later, the truck stopped. They took him out and took the hood off him. They were at an airport, planes all around and a sweet smell. Mohammed had never seen an airplane up close. They were bigger than he imagined, and not as smooth, metal bits sticking from the wings. Bin Zari was there, too. The police took off his clothes and put the hood back on. And then someone stuck him with a needle. The poison ran through his body and into his head and got stuck there. Then they put him on an airplane. Even with his hood on, he could tell when the plane took off.

He wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t, and if he closed his eyes he couldn’t move at all, like he was inside a box, only the box was made of his own skin. And the scars on his legs itched and itched, but he couldn’t touch them because his hands were locked together and it was all happening at once and when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see and—

But when he banged his head against the floor, he felt better. So, he banged his head. Finally, the men took off the hood. Bin Zari was next to him in the plane, and he told Mohammed to calm down, that the Americans had them now and they needed to be strong, be soldiers for Allah. The poison would wear off eventually, he said. Mohammed didn’t trust bin Zari anymore, but he bit his lip and held himself steady until the plane landed.

THE DAY AFTER HE ARRIVED, they wrapped his ribs up with cloth. Since then they’d mostly left him alone. They were supposed to be human. They looked like people. Two were black, and the rest were white. One was a woman, and the rest were men. One of them, the one who said his name was Jim, could talk to him in Pashto. The others talked only in English or other languages he didn’t understand.

But they all had something in common. They held themselves straight when they walked. Too straight.

In the night now, the djinns came for him and told him that real people didn’t walk so straight. These men, the captors, weren’t human at all. They were devils, and he was in hell. Mohammed argued with the djinns. He told them he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead, because he was supposed to die when the belt around him blew up, and the Americans had caught him before he could put on the belt. He told them he knew what dead people looked like. In Peshawar, people died all the time. Mohammed had seen plenty of them. He told them that the Americans were people. They hadn’t hurt him since he’d been here. They fed him. They gave him a blanket and the Quran to read.

Sometimes Mohammed could convince the djinns to stay away for a day or two. Then he could eat his food and look around and wonder about Haji Camp, if his friends still played World of Warcraft or if they had a new game. He could almost believe that he might get out.

But the djinns came back. Always. At first they spoke quietly, calmly, and they came only in the night, when he was trying to sleep. But now they stayed all day. They didn’t leave when he asked. They told him that if he wouldn’t listen, they would put the hood back on and make him drink the poison, nothing but poison, and leave him here forever. He would never die, because he was dead already, never escape this place.

LUCKY FOR HIM, the djinns promised a way out.

18

Wells heard Tonka’s barking even before he opened the door of Shafer’s house. When he walked in, she put her paws to his chest and licked his unshaven chin joyously.

“Yes. It’s good to see you, too.”

“You inspire loyalty in one creature, at least,” Shafer said from the top of the stairs. His ripped cotton undershirt and plain white briefs somehow managed to be both baggy and revealing. “I’d ask how your flight was, but I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it’s totally binary. You land, it was fine.”

“You know what I like about you, Ellis? You make such great small talk.”

“We have that in common.” Shafer stepped down the stairs, headed for the kitchen. “Come. I need some coffee, and you need to tell me about Steve Callar.”

“I’d really prefer you put some pants on.”

“My house, my rules.”

OVER COFFEE, Wells recounted his conversation with Callar, the darkness inside the house and the man.

“He’s crazy enough to be the killer. If only we could find the tele-porter he used to get back from Phoenix.”

“And the FBI checked the airline records to see if he flew to D.C. when Karp was killed or Louisiana when Jerry Williams disappeared. They didn’t see anything.”

“Don’t they need a warrant for that?”

“Where have you been? It’s a matter of national security. So they send out NSLs”—national security letters—“asking the airlines for help. It’s not a demand, it’s a request.”

“But nobody says no.”

“Not in our brave new world.”

“When did you turn into a libertarian, Ellis?”

“I just want to be able to get on a plane without being felt up.”

“At your age you ought to be happy about it.”

“Anyway, the FBI didn’t find Callar’s name in the records.”

“Maybe he drove.”

“Maybe. Meantime, we have nothing on him. Or anyone else.”

“Have the Feds talked to Terreri and Hank Poteat?” The other two surviving members of 673.

“They’re trying to send a team to Afghanistan to interview Terreri, but the army isn’t cooperating. Says he’s planning an op and can’t be interrupted, even for this. They have talked to Poteat in Korea, but he didn’t give them much. Like Murphy told us, he wasn’t in Poland long. They’d barely started the interrogations when he left.”

“What about the registry? You figured out who the missing guys were?”

“I’m making progress. I spent yesterday over at NSA — they run the registry — talking to Sam Arbegan. The head of database analysis. He couldn’t come up with names for the detainees. But he did give me an idea who might have deleted the records.”

“How? ”

“You want the technical explanation?”

“No, I want it in crayon.”

“The registry has multiple layers of security. There’s no external access. It’s only available over an internal DoD network. Physically separate from the Internet and basically impossible for anyone outside to hack in. So, assume it was someone inside. A couple thousand people can see the database. At Langley, the Pentagon, the prisons themselves. But most of them, the access is read-only. To change records — for example, if a detainee moves between prisons — you have to have what NSA calls ‘administrative access.’ That’s restricted to a few dozen officers at the prisons. The NSA approves them individually. But even they can’t delete records. To do that, you have to have something called clearance access.”

“And that would be senior people, like Duto or Whitby?”

“Not even them. Really, only the software engineers at the NSA who run the database. On top of that, the registry has a spider, an automated program that tracks the registry. If I look up a prisoner record, my request is permanently stored in the spider, with my user ID and access code. If somebody changes a record, that gets stored, too.”

“Deletions, too?”

“That’s trickier. Deletions aren’t supposed to happen at all. But the guys with clearance access are the same engineers who created the database. They could probably turn off the spider, even though they’re not supposed to. But in theory, yes, if the spider stays on, nobody can delete a record without leaving a trail.”

“Let me guess,” Wells said. “The spider doesn’t show anybody monkeying with the database.”

“Correct. And Arbegan confirmed the registry doesn’t show the extra ID numbers we have. If they were in there, they were scraped out completely.”

“Do the guys who ran the database have connections to 673?”

“They’re mostly NSA lifers. But one of them, Jim D’Angelo, retired a few months ago. He set up shop on his own, started a company called AI Systems Analysis. Based in Chevy Chase. Tough to find it. Very sketchy information in the Maryland corporate records. Doesn’t seem to have a working office or phone or a Dun and Bradstreet report. But I did come across one sentence in an online newsletter that covers the federal contracting business. Last year, AI Systems was hired as a subcontractor for a company called CNF Consulting. Want to guess who CNF’s biggest client is?”

“Considering what you told me two days ago, about how Fred Whitby was the guy who ran 673 at the Pentagon, I’m going to go with. Fred Whitby, the director of the Office of National Intelligence.”

“Ding-ding-ding,” Shafer said. “You are correct. Every few months, CNF gets no-bid contracts for technical support for Whitby’s office.”

“So you think Whitby used CNF Consulting to pay off D’Angelo. For cleaning out the database.”

“Looks like it. D’Angelo quits the NSA and right away gets this contract? You have a better explanation?”

Wells didn’t.

“Then I asked Arbegan if the database ever showed any unusual outages or problems. When he looked, he found out that about eighteen months ago, during routine maintenance, the spider shut down for half an hour. Plenty of time for somebody inside to delete the records and then cover his tracks.”

“But that was way before the IG got the letter with all the accusations,” Wells said. “Six-seventy-three wasn’t even finished with its tour.”

“Which tells you that whatever happened to the detainees, they knew they had a problem right away. And that they had enough juice to make it disappear.”

Wells sat at Shafer’s kitchen table, trying to make sense of the picture taking shape. They’d done a fine job eliminating suspects. At least as far as he was concerned, they could write off Jerry Williams and Alaa Zumari. Steve Callar had an airtight alibi.

But Whitby’s name kept coming up.

The idea that the director of national intelligence could be involved with these murders struck Wells as bizarre. Those conspiracies happened only in bad movies. And yet the evidence seemed to be pointing toward Whitby.

“What do we know about Whitby?”

“Not enough. He was a congressman for twelve years, served on the House Select.” Both the House and the Senate had committees to supervise the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. “The agency considered him a friend. Supported our budgets, didn’t ask too many questions. He lost in 2004, wound up in the Pentagon, a civilian appointee. And, according to our friend Vinny, sometime in 2006 he wound up with responsibility for the secret prisons. Including the Midnight House.”

“Why him?”

“Probably because nobody else wanted to touch them.”

“So, he got stuck with them.”

“Correct. You know, a former congressman, they usually end up lobbying. Playing golf for a living, boring themselves and everybody else to death. This guy is a mid-level appointee at the Pentagon, and out of nowhere he got promoted to DNI. Duto’s boss. Something went right for him.”

“We have to hit him.”

“He’s the director of national intelligence,” Shafer said. “You don’t hit him.”

“Let’s go back to Duto. Find out what he knows. What 673 really got.”

“First, I want to talk to Brant Murphy again. With you there.”

“I thought you said he’s insisting we go through his lawyer.”

“He is.”

WELLS AND SHAFER STOOD OUTSIDE the unmarked staircase that served as a back entrance to the Counterterrorist Center. Besides serving as a fire escape, the stairs were a shortcut between CTC and the main cafeteria at Langley. They were protected by two sets of double steel doors, built like an airlock and separated by a short hallway.

At the first set of doors, Shafer swiped his ID through a reader, put his eye to a retinal scanner. The red light on the lock beeped twice — and then stayed red. Shafer tried again. Same result.

“What part of all-access don’t you understand?” Shafer muttered to the lock.

Along with the agency’s most senior officers, Wells and Shafer had “all-access” privileges throughout headquarters. The term was a misnomer. No one, not even Duto, had carte blanche to enter every room at Langley. Most individual offices were key-locked, not electronically accessed. No master key existed, for reasons of privacy as much as security. Officers hated the idea that their bosses could walk in on them without notice. Key locks preserved the illusion of privacy, though in reality, the agency kept duplicate keys to every office and its general counsel regularly authorized searches.

But all-access privileges did allow Wells and Shafer to enter every common area and conference room — no matter how highly classified the section or the program. Now, though, Shafer’s access to CTC seemed blocked.

“You try,” Shafer said.

Wells ran his ID through the reader, stooped, matched his eye to the retinal scanner. The red light blinked green and the magnetized lock clicked open.

“Murphy blocked me somehow,” Shafer said.

“I thought that was impossible.”

“So did I.”

They walked down the stairs and into CTC itself, looking for Murphy’s office. Wells had never been to CTC before. Its size surprised him. Three long hallways held dozens of offices each.

“Busy bees down here,” Wells said.

“With all of them working so hard, I’m surprised we didn’t catch Osama years ago. Of course, then they’d be out of a job.”

“Be nice, Ellis.”

The door to Murphy’s office was closed. Without knocking, Shafer walked in. Wells followed. Murphy was poring over a report as they entered.

“Excuse me, can I—” Then, snapping the file shut, “How did you get in here?”

“Have you met John Wells, Brant?”

Wells extended his hand.

“You need to leave. Both of you.”

“Give us two minutes. It’s not about the money. I promise.”

Murphy picked up his handset. “Please don’t make me call security, embarrass all of us.”

“You’re lucky it’s not about the money, because otherwise I might have some questions about those mortgages of yours—”

“What?”

“Public records. Anybody can find them. Even those dopes at the FBI. Start with your place in Kings Park West. The refi from 2005. My memory’s a little fuzzy, but I think it was five hundred thirty thousand? Your wife’s idea, I’ll bet. ‘We’re sitting on a pile of cash. Let’s live a little. Go to Europe. Take the kids.’ Then you had a better idea. Take the equity, double down. Get a vacation place. Eastern Shore. Real estate, in this market, the only way to lose is not to play. The mortgage on that was what, another four hundred? But lo and behold, guess what, six months ago, a year after you’re back from Poland, you paid off both mortgages. I’ll bet if you ever have to take a poly on that, you’ve got a story, some rich aunt left your wife a million bucks. But why would you have to take a poly? Nobody’s ever gonna notice.”

Shafer delivered this recital without stopping for breath. Murphy flushed, faintly, but didn’t say a word or move, just held the phone to his ear as if it might have news better than what Shafer had delivered.

“Two minutes, Brant.”

Murphy lowered the phone. “Two minutes.”

“How many detainees at the Midnight House?” Shafer said.

“I told you, ten.”

“That’s not what the letter said. To the IG. It said twelve. Twelve prisoner identification numbers. But two of them are gone.”

“I don’t know what the letter said.”

“What happened to the two missing detainees?”

“The letter’s wrong. Anything else?”

“What was it like over there?”Wells said. “Did you get along?”

“I went over this already. With the FBI, and your buddy, too.”

“Jerry Williams’s wife, Rachel Callar’s husband, they both told me the squad was having problems. And that something went wrong at the end.”

“I can’t help you.”

“We’re trying to save your life, Brant,” Wells said. “Why won’t you let us?”

“Six of your guys dead and you don’t seem worried for your own safety,” Shafer said. “A cynic might wonder.”

“Full-time guards for me and my family.”

“Maybe Duto should pull them,” Shafer said. “If you’re not going to cooperate.”

“Let him try,” Murphy said. He stood. “Now you need to leave. Or I really will call security.”

“THAT WENT WELL,” Shafer said when they were back in his office.

“He’d rather get killed than tell us what happened over there.”

“Or maybe he’s got nothing to worry about from the killer.”

“You think that’s possible.”

“I don’t know. It’s time to go at him. I’m going to get Duto to open up his 600s”—the financial disclosure forms CIA employees had to file. “His polys. We don’t need a warrant for that. You, you’re going to talk to his neighbors. Don’t sugarcoat it, either. Tell them Mr. Brant Murphy is under investigation—”

“Ellis—”

“He’s telling us to shove it. And he knows we’re working for Duto. His ultimate boss. He’s got nerve.”

“He’s got protection.”

“Then we’ll force it into the open. Whoever’s shielding him, Whitby, whoever, we’ll make him come out. He’s the pressure point. He’s the weak link.”

“I don’t like it,” Wells said. “It feels forced.” Though the move made a certain amount of sense. Murphy was acting like he was untouchable. They needed to find out why.

Shafer’s phone trilled. “Yes. They’re positive?”Pause. “No. I’ll tell him. Yes. I’m sorry, too.”

Wells knew even before Shafer hung up. “Jerry Williams?”

“Louisiana, Terrebonne Parish. A fisherman found his body today. In the swamp.”

Wells remembered Jeffrey Williams, curled on his mother’s lap, awaiting sleep, awaiting his father. What would Noemie tell him now?

“They’re sure.”

“His wallet was in the jeans. And the body had a Ranger tattoo. Looks like he was shot in the head, but they won’t know for sure until the autopsy. Bodies in the swamp, you know—”

“Ellis. You’re talking about someone who was a friend of mine.” Wells felt his gorge rise at Shafer. Then realized he should direct his anger at whoever was behind this.

“Sorry,” Shafer said mechanically. “You going to the funeral?”

“I don’t think Noemie would want to see me. And you’re right. It’s time to lean on Brant Murphy. Past time.”

WELLS HAD ALWAYS DRIVEN with a heavy right foot. His WRX, a nifty little Subaru that looked like a five-door hatchback but could outrun the average Porsche, only made matters worse. Not his finest character trait, though he’d never had an accident.

He was running at eighty on the Beltway, playing tractor-trailer slalom, when he saw the black Caprice sedan with Virginia plates sneaking up behind him. He figured the Caprice for an undercover statie. He eased off, wondering what the ticket would cost. The Commonwealth of Virginia had raised the price of speeding to extortionate levels.

But the Caprice didn’t try to catch him, instead ducking behind an Audi three cars back. Wells peeked again at the mirror, saw a gray Chevy Tahoe sliding in behind the Caprice. Of course, unmarked government vehicles choked the Beltway at all hours. These two might have nothing to do with him. But the way they’d paced him made Wells think they did.

Only one way to be sure. He was three miles from his exit now. Plenty of time to move. If they were on him, he would lose them, get off the highway before they recovered. He tightened his seat belt, feathered the gas, felt the WRX’s engine rumble. There. One lane right. Between two eighteen-wheelers. Then into the far right lane, a quick left-right-left around a FedEx van. and then he’d see.

He pushed down on the gas, slid the wheel to the right. The WRX reacted instantly. The Caprice matched his first move but then got stuck behind the FedEx van. Wells accelerated and cut left, barely getting by a Toyota Scion. The Scion’s angry honk faded behind him as he pulled left and left again to a patch of open asphalt in the passing lane.

And now, no lie, he was having fun, the Subaru weaving through its bigger cousins like a fox dodging a pack of hounds. This stretch of the Beltway had just been repaved — Virginians liked their roads smooth — and it was sticky and tight underneath his tires. For the first time in months, he heard the music of the highway, nothing serious today, no Springsteen: “He’s going the distance/he’s going for speed.” Cake.

He boomeranged past a big low-slung Mercedes, resisting the urge to wave. Sixty seconds later, he’d lost any hint of the Caprice or the Tahoe in his rearview mirrors. Easy. Almost too easy.

TWO MINUTES LATER, he swung onto Braddock Road. He was heading for Brant Murphy’s no-longer-mortgaged house in Kings Park West, an upscale neighborhood in the city of Fairfax, fifteen miles from Langley. Per Shafer’s plan, Wells would knock on neighbors’ doors, flash his identification, ask if anyone had noticed anything unusual about Murphy recently. Sudden changes in spending? Late-night trips? Let the neighbors draw their own conclusions. And let Murphy hear the gossip.

He was stopped at a light at the corner of Braddock and Guinea when he heard the helicopter coming in fast and low. He peeked through the windshield, saw it directly overhead. Black, no more than three hundred feet up. Intentionally intimidating, letting him know he was being watched. No wonder the Caprice had let him go so easily.

Then he heard the sirens.

The light changed as the Caprice and Tahoe reappeared. Wells eased the WRX over. Best to settle this now. Spare himself the foolishness of trying to outrun a helicopter.

The Tahoe pulled in front of him, the Caprice behind, boxing him. Two men stepped out of the Caprice. Suits. White shirts. Blue ties. Hands on hips. Federal agents. Or so Wells hoped. Otherwise, he’d made a very big mistake.

19

The Midnight House had five cells. Four were standard prison cells in the basement of the barracks. The fifth was a level down, a single subbasement room. Kenneth Karp had immediately realized its potential.

With a dozen Polish soldiers, Karp and Jack Fisher and Jerry Williams and his Rangers had poured thick concrete walls on all four sides. By the time they were done, the cell was something close to a vault: dark, silent, nearly airless.

Prisoners in the other cells faced all manner of minor indignities and irritations. Karp piped in music while they tried to sleep, sometimes loudly, sometimes so quietly it could barely be heard. He particularly favored Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All,” once putting it on a loop for five nights straight, until even the Poles begged him to stop. He and Fisher forced prisoners to stand on one leg for hours at a time, woke them at 2 a.m. for interrogations.

But in cell five, a prisoner was simply. left alone. In the void. Monitored by infrared cameras and microphones. Fed at random intervals through a slot in the two-inch-thick steel door, a tasteless gruel in a plastic bowl with a cup of lukewarm water to wash it down. The cell had no bed, only a metal chair bolted to the floor. A prisoner who tried to injure himself by banging his head against the walls lost even the tiny privilege of being allowed to move around the cell. Instead, his hands and legs were cuffed tightly to steel loops embedded in the floor and a hood pulled over his head. Darkness inside darkness. The true Midnight House.

A cell five prisoner could not shower or exercise. He was removed only for interrogation sessions and never told in advance when he’d be taken. The Rangers fired tear gas through the meal slot, stormed in, and dragged him out. But Karp believed that a prisoner should be left alone as long as possible once he’d been moved to cell five. Even interrogation, even Tasers and stress positions and waterboarding, came as a relief from the void.

In fact, cell five was so psychologically punishing that Rachel Callar had forbidden 673 from using it for more than four weeks straight. On this rule, she had refused to waver. A prisoner who wouldn’t talk after four weeks of pure solitary confinement could not be broken, only driven insane, she said.

AFTER TWO WEEKS interrogating bin Zari, Karp and Jack Fisher asked Terreri for permission to move him to cell five. Normally, they would have waited longer. The cell was the squad’s last resort. They’d used it only twice before. Once it had worked, in just over a week. Once it hadn’t, on a Yemeni who’d refused to speak even after four full weeks. They’d had to declare him intractable and ship him to Guantánamo. The Yemeni had been their only real failure, not counting Mokhatir, the Malaysian who’d had the stroke in the punishment box. And the stroke was plain bad luck.

But after running bin Zari through their standard treatments, Karp and Fisher had realized that he seemed to relish them, to view them as a form of combat. They couldn’t break him directly. They would have to come at him sideways, hope that he broke himself. The tactic hadn’t worked on the Yemeni, who had simply locked down. But bin Zari was smarter than the Yemeni, more social — and therefore, theoretically anyway, more susceptible to the isolation of cell five.

FOR A WHILE, bin Zari didn’t seem to mind it. He paced back and forth, regular steps, as if he was trying to measure minutes with his feet. He ran his fingers along the thick pads on the door. He sang. He fell to his knees and prayed. Once he seemed to be reciting an entire cricket match, play by play. He leaned against the door and told him that they would never break him.

They left him for six days. Then they took him out, and Karp promised him that he would remain in the cell until he answered their questions. No threats, no violence. Just the promise of a lifetime in the dark.

His second week wasn’t as pleasant. He walked less, talked less. He spent hours each day standing at the door, waiting for any hint of motion outside. He ran his hands along the smooth concrete walls, looking for cracks. He let his food sit for long stretches, though he always ate eventually. Karp was surprised he didn’t try a hunger strike. His body temperature rose and fell unpredictably, and his breathing became labored, both signs of stress.

After eight more days, they brought him out again. He’d lost weight. Two weeks of darkness had left his skin pallid, his eyes dull, his lips soft and loose. He blinked in the light of the interrogation room and tried to spit at Karp. But the saliva barely left his mouth.

Karp reached into the bag on the table, brought out an apple and a Swiss Army knife. Bin Zari jerked forward, straining against his chains. Karp sliced the apple slowly. He popped a slice into his mouth. The hunger in bin Zari’s eyes was frank and pitiful. His mouth opened, and a thin spool of drool dribbled out before he caught himself and licked his lips.

“Do you have any idea how long you’ve been in that room?”

Bin Zari was silent. He tried to keep his eyes off the apple, but he couldn’t.

“Fourteen days. Two weeks. And yet you look — well, see for yourself.”

Karp held up a mirror, gave bin Zari a look.

“It isn’t right,” bin Zari said. “What you do.”

It was the first time bin Zari had complained, the first time he’d shown weakness.

“You can make it stop,” Karp said, soothing now. “Just tell us.”

“Tell you what?”

Karp finished eating the apple, put the core in the bag. “Who gave you the uniforms and the passes. Who told you how to get through security. Just that. Start with that. And if that’s too much, give us one of your safe houses in Peshawar. Then you can stay up here in the light. Have an apple.”

Karp reached into his bag, extracted a second apple, smiling faintly, a magician pulling rabbits from a hat. See? There’s no end to them.

“But I tell you, Jawaruddin, before you decide, think about it. Because some questions we ask, we know the answers. We use those to double-check, make sure you’re telling the truth. And if we catch you lying, we’ll put you back down there and you’ll never get out. No matter how much you beg. The rest of your life. And you won’t die soon. We’ll make sure of it.”

Bin Zari leaned forward — and spat at Karp.

Back into the cell he went. For two days, the burst of hatred he’d summoned in the interrogation room seemed to strengthen him. He went back to pacing, back to praying. But inevitably, his energy faded. He lay on the floor, trying to see through the crack in the door. On the fifth day, he began to pound his head against the wall, a steady chunking that even Karp found awful, madness distilled to a single echoing thud. Terreri sent in the Rangers. They chained him down, put an IV in his arm with a glucose drip to feed him.

AT THIS POINT, Callar protested to Terreri.

“You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said.

“He’s lying in his own filth. Deprived of any stimuli. This is how you provoke a complete psychotic break. Irreversible.”

“You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said again. “We’re nineteen days in. I’m going to give Karp the last nine days.”

“What am I doing here?”

“Major, believe it or not, I listen to you. If not for you, I’d keep him in there forever.”

“That supposed to make me feel better, sir? Because it doesn’t.”

Callar walked out of the barracks and into the cold night air, across cracked concrete to the edge of the base. Stare Kiejkuty didn’t have much security. An eight-foot fence, a few spotlights, guard towers at the four corners, usually unmanned. It didn’t need more. Poland was its own security. There were no Chechens here, almost no Muslims at all. And after centuries of being batted back and forth between Russia and Germany, Poland had finally found a protector it could trust, a protector with no interest in swallowing it whole. No wonder the Poles loved the United States.

Outside the fence, life. Peasants sitting around their kitchens, eating boiled pierogi dipped in runny applesauce. The old ones gossiping about their children’s children. The young ones drinking buffalo grass vodka and texting one another — yes, even here — as they looked for their escape, to Warsaw or even farther west.

Did the peasants have any idea what was happening here? Would they care if they knew? No, Callar decided. Two generations before, they’d watched the Nazis feed Jews into ovens. They hadn’t protested. They hadn’t cared. More than a few had helped. The Poles were not a sentimental people. The tread of foreign armies had stamped the sentiment out of them long before World War II.

Nine days. They’d put bin Zari through hell for nineteen days already. What were nine more? Nine more might break him. It might.

“Nine days,” Callar said aloud.

She thought of how she’d gotten here: her decision to join the reserves, her tours in Iraq, Travis’s suicide. Along the way, each step had made sense, or seemed to. But taken together, they had the empty logic of a dream.

When they’d signed up for this squad, they’d all been promised two two-week leaves, recognition of the intensity of the work. Callar had taken one, halfway through. The trip had not gone well. Steve loved her, she knew. The blunt truth was that he loved her more than she loved him. He’d grown up in an army family, raised to obey. Unlike most kids, he had accepted the rules without question. His parents had died while he was in community college, his dad of a heart attack and his mother of breast cancer that had refused to answer to chemotherapy. After they were gone, Steve had retreated into himself while he waited for someone new to obey. Probably he should have been a soldier, but the military’s machismo didn’t suit him. So he went to nursing school and moved to California, where he found his way to the VA hospital where they’d met.

He was a handsome man, Steve, but he’d had only one previous girlfriend, and their relationship had ended badly. She said I was too in love with her, Steve said. That I never said no. I don’t understand how you can be too in love. Rachel hadn’t tried to explain. But she knew how his ex had felt.

Still. He was smart and funny in his sly way, a simple and good cook, a considerate lover — sometimes too considerate; sometimes she wanted to tell him to hurt her a little, but she never did because she knew he wouldn’t understand — and he supported her without question. He was the opposite of her father, who sucked all the oxygen out of every room he was in, who demanded unending attention as the price of his love. When Rachel went away, Steve wrote her every night, the quotidian details of life on the ward where he worked, misbehaving patients and hospital politics. She cherished the letters, cherished the knowledge that life went on back home. But she hardly wrote back. And he never minded, or if he did, he never complained.

Children would have changed him, she thought. Children would have given him a new focus. He would have been a wonderful dad. But she’d miscarried and then had an ectopic pregnancy and miscarried again, and after that, the docs said she couldn’t risk another pregnancy. They’d talked about adoption but hadn’t done anything, not yet, so it was just the two of them.

He’d argued with her, really argued, only once, when she’d told him she wanted to go to Poland. He’d warned her: You’re more fragile than you think, Rach. What if it’s too much? What then?

It won’t be too much, she said. And if it is, I can always leave. It’s only fifteen months — eighteen, max.

Please, he said. Listen to me on this.

But she’d never listened to him before, and she wasn’t about to start.

NOW SHE KNEW how right he’d been. And yet she couldn’t tell him. Not over e-mail, not over the phone, not during those unbearable two weeks at home. Not because of anything he would have said. He would never have held his rightness over her, never tried to punish her for her mistake. And not because she’d be breaking every secrecy oath she’d signed, either.

Because she was humiliated at her weakness. Terreri and Karp and the others in the squad saw the bigger picture. They saw that breaking these detainees might help them dismantle terrorist networks that were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, nearly all civilians, nearly all Muslims.

But she could see only the prisoners themselves, screaming as they were Tased or locked for hours in a box smaller than a coffin. Watching them suffer tore against her instincts and her medical training. But she’d signed up for it, and she couldn’t quit. She would finish this tour, whatever it cost her. Just like the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to leave wasn’t hers to make.

She needed to tell Steve all this, but when she tried to, she couldn’t. They’d passed her leave in silent agony. He’d bought Padres tickets for them her second night back, and she’d forced herself to go. After that, she spent most days at home. She made plans with her friends and canceled them. She hardly slept. One night, at 2 a.m., she got into her 4Runner and drove east into the desert to the Arizona border and turned around and drove back, listening to the mad conspiracy theories high on the dial the whole way.

When she got back, she smelled eggs in the pan, onions sizzling, toast browning. In the kitchen, two plates were set, two glasses filled with orange juice. She sat down and watched him cook.

“Breakfast? ”

“Sure.”

He filled the plates and sat across from her. They ate in silence. She hadn’t eaten in two days, and she tried to savor every mouthful, to be present with him and not at the Midnight House. But she couldn’t help herself.

“This is great,” she said.

“You like it?”

“I do.” She shoveled scrambled eggs into her mouth, and before she could help herself she was crying.

“Tell me,” he said. “Rach, please.”

“I can’t.”

He turned away from her, went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it down before he spoke, still facing away.

“Watching you like this. I can’t take it.”

“You should leave me, Steve.” The baldness of her words surprised her. “I’m no good.”

He turned to look at her. Panic was in his eyes. “Do you want that?”

She didn’t trust herself to speak. She shook her head.

“I’d die first,” he said.

He was desperate to help her, desperate to make her happy. Instead, her misery echoed in him. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t unburden herself to him. And she couldn’t explain. She couldn’t talk.

She almost laughed at the irony. What she needed was a few hours with Kenneth Karp and his stun gun.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Let me get through this, okay? I promise. I’ll get through it. I’ll come back to you.”

BUT INSTEAD SHE’D SPUN further and further away. Now she was left with nothing but the base around her and the fence in front of her. Then even the fence seemed to shimmer and dissolve. She needed a moment to realize why. She was crying, not a few tears but spigots. She stood and cried until she had no tears left. Then she walked back to the barracks to do her job. To make sure that Jawaruddin bin Zari stayed alive.

AFTER FOUR DAYS LOCKED on his back with nothing but his own mind for company, bin Zari broke.

“All right,” he moaned into the silence. “All right. I will tell. Please. I will tell.”

Even then they didn’t get him. They left him another twenty-four hours. Then the Rangers brought him up to the interrogation room, dressed only in a loose diaper, stinking of his own waste. They pulled off his hood and locked him to the chair and hosed him down.

He was crying when Karp walked into the room, and Karp knew he had won. Karp uncuffed bin Zari’s hands and offered him a bottle of water. He tried to uncap it, but his hands and feet trembled uncontrollably. Karp unscrewed it, tipped it gently to bin Zari’s mouth.

“It’s too much,” bin Zari said.

Karp put a hand to bin Zari’s head, found the skin hot and clammy. They’d have to get him treated. But first—

“I know,” Karp said, soothing now. “I know.”

“I will tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Of course.”

“Things you can’t imagine. About the ISI. About Pakistan.”

Karp was wary of these grand pronouncements. “Don’t lie, Jawaruddin. If you lie—”

“It’s true. Please.”

“All right.” Bin Zari seemed serious. Karp wondered what he could be hinting at. They’d find out soon enough.

“You promise.”

“We’ve never lied to you, have we, Jawaruddin? We’ve hurt you, but we’ve never lied.”

And, in fact, Karp tried not to lie to detainees. They had to believe that once they decided to cooperate fully, they would no longer be punished.

“That’s true.”

“If you are honest, you answer our questions”—Karp carefully avoided phrases like “work with us” or even “tell us,” for fear they would force bin Zari to confront the reality of his betrayal—“then I promise, not another minute in there.”

“A regular cell.”

“A regular cell. A shower. A toilet and lights and a bed and solid food. All the things a man should have. Even a radio and a television.”

“You promise.”

Besides the bottle of water, Karp had brought a briefcase into the interrogation room. He popped the latches, handed over a file. Three copies of a two-page contract, the first in Pashto, the second in Urdu, the third in English, pledging good treatment. No explanation of what bin Zari would have to do in return. Spaces at the bottom for signatures from bin Zari and Karp and Terreri, who had already signed.

The contracts had been Karp’s own innovation, and they’d proven brilliant. They were unenforceable and meaningless. But printed on heavy stock with fine legal frippery, they gave detainees the illusion of returning to a world of laws and rules. They announced a partnership, sour but real, between jailer and detainee.

Karp slid a pen across to bin Zari.

“I promise,” he said. “Take your time. Look it over and decide.”

But bin Zari had already put his shaking hand to the page.

THAT NIGHT, KARP KNOCKED on the door to the first-floor room that Callar used as an infirmary. Bin Zari was inside, a drip carrying intravenous antibiotics into his arm, bandages and ointment on pressure sores that dotted his back and legs. His breathing was slow and labored and his eyes dull.

“He gonna be okay?”

“Should be. Fever’s coming down,” Callar said.

“When can he talk?”

“You cannot be serious. His infection’s still raging.”

“Serious as a heart attack.”

Callar was through fighting. “Tomorrow, probably. He won’t be feeling great, but that’s better, right? What we want.”

“You’re finally getting it,” Karp said. He laid a friendly hand on her shoulder.

Suddenly she wanted to kiss him, this man who repulsed her. Put her arms around him and take him back to her room and make hate with him. Compound her degradation by betraying her husband. Sink as low as she could. She fought the impulse down. He was smiling, and she wondered if he’d somehow read her mind. But his attention seemed to be focused on bin Zari.

“Getting it,” she said. “Yes. I think I am.”

20

In his rearview mirror, Wells watched the men in suits closing on the Subaru. Their hands were belt-high. Holster-high. With the Tahoe in front of him, the Caprice behind, he’d given up his chance to run. He unlocked his doors, lowered his window, put his hands on the wheel.

The guy at his window was maybe thirty-three, medium height, with a blue suit, brown skin. He flipped open his wallet, showed Wells an FBI identification badge.

“Mr. Wells? I’m Agent Joseph Nieves. You need to come with us.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Then you’d best tell me why.”

“You’re a material witness in a federal investigation.”

Material witness was a meaningless term, an excuse to pick him up. If you felt like talking, you could have called, Wells didn’t say. Professional courtesy. But they wanted to prove they didn’t need to show him any courtesy at all.

“I’ll come. But I’m driving.”

“We’d prefer if you ride with us.” Nieves sounded embarrassed.

“You made your point. Don’t push it.” Though Wells almost hoped Nieves would.

Nieves stepped back, murmured into the microphone in his lapel, nodded. “Mr. Wells, will you give me your word—”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

THEY CONVOYED NORTH along the Beltway, the Caprice’s siren clearing the road as smoothly as a snowplow. At exit 46, they swung east onto Chain Bridge Road, which led to the Langley campus. But they weren’t going to the CIA. Just past the Dulles toll road, they turned left, heading for a complex that looked like a typical suburban office park, centered around a large X-shaped building.

In reality, the complex — called Liberty Crossing — was the newest center of power in the American intelligence community. Its low-key appearance was deceiving. The buildings were more concrete than glass, built to survive a truck bomb. A thick-walled guardhouse protected the main entrance, and a hairpin turn in the access road ensured that vehicles would be moving slowly as they approached it. Behind the guardhouse, waist-high steel boluses blocked the road. In block letters, a sign proclaimed: “Pre-cleared visitors only. Visitors without pre-clearance will not be admitted.” And an afterthought: “Welcome to NCTC/ODNI”—the National Counterterrorism Center and the office of the director of national intelligence.

The Caprice stopped beside the guardhouse. From the Subaru, Wells watched as Nieves handed over his badge and had a short, heated conversation with the guard inside. Another guard in a flak jacket emerged from the back of the house, leading a German shepherd. The dog trotted around the WRX, poking its nose under the bumpers. “Clear,” the handler said. And only then did the boluses behind the guardhouse retract, opening the road to the building.

Disrespect upon disrespect, Wells thought.

THEY PARKED in the visitors’ spots near the front entrance. Nieves walked to Wells’s door. “You holding?”

Wells flipped open his jacket to show his Glock.

“It would be easier if—”

Wells slipped the pistol under the seat. “Just don’t try to strip-search me.”

He wasn’t strip-searched, but he did have to pass through a body-imaging scanner at the entrance. “Standard procedure for all visitors,” Nieves said.

“As long as it’s standard procedure.”

The building had been finished barely a year earlier, purpose-built for Whitby’s new agency. Its lobby was expensive, crisp, and high-tech, white walls and marble floors so smooth they belonged on the starship Enterprise. Oversized photos of President Obama and Fred Whitby stared down from behind the guard station. Beside them, brass letters proclaimed “Office of National Intelligence: Coordination, Integrity, Transparency.” To Wells, the motto sounded more appropriate for a garage that specialized in windshield replacements.

Just past the guard station, Nieves waved a keycard at an unmarked steel door that opened into a long concrete hallway. “This way.”

Wells followed Nieves into a windowless square room with a camera in the corner.

“Get you a soda or anything?” Nieves said.

Wells ignored him until he left. After ten minutes, the door opened again and two agents hustled Shafer in. “Whitby’s certainly making a point,” Shafer said, after they left. “Oh, yes, indeed. How’d they pick you up?”

Wells told him. “You?”

“Outside my house,” Shafer said. “No helicopter, but they embarrassed me in front of the kids. Idiots.”

Wells closed his eyes and saw Cairo, the mosques and the minarets and the river that hardly seemed to move. “Have you heard anything about Alaa Zumari?”

As far as I know, he’s still a fugitive. Unfortunately I can’t call your buddy Hani and ask for an update.”

“A little intra-agency cooperation.”

The job was becoming stranger by the day, Wells thought. Arrested, or not quite arrested, by the director of national intelligence for a mission they were carrying out on behalf of the director of central intelligence.

“We should go to Congress,” Wells said. “Tell them they need to appoint a director of planetary intelligence to sort this out.”

“Why stop there? I was thinking galactic.”

“Universal.”

Wells opened his eyes, saw Shafer peeking out through the narrow window at the door. He sat down. A few minutes later he amused himself by flipping the finger at the camera in the corner. Then he stretched, knee bends and shoulder rolls. Finally, he turned to Wells, who hadn’t moved.

“Aren’t you bored, John?”

“What’s the point of being bored?”

“Maybe I was wrong about you. You’re more of a Buddhist than I thought.”

“Not a Buddhist. Just patient.”

“Is there a difference?”

AFTER TWO HOURS, Nieves reappeared. “Come with me.” They passed out of the concrete corridor and down a series of halls, each plusher than the next, into a long conference room. This one had windows. And wood-and-leather chairs. And Fred Whitby. Wells hadn’t met him before, but his photo was in the lobby, so Wells was fairly certain. Next to Whitby, Vinny Duto.

“Gentlemen,” Whitby said. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” He stood and smiled. Duto followed. Whitby was handsome but smaller than Wells had imagined. With his blue eyes and tiny hands, he looked like nothing so much as an elf in a tailored gray suit.

“Ellis Shafer. And John Wells,” he said. “I wish we could have met on better terms. Please, please sit.”

“The terms were yours,” Wells said.

“I’m sorry about the way you were pulled over. When it became clear you were headed for Brant Murphy’s house, my agents felt they had to intercede. It was for your protection as much as ours. One of my men worried you were behaving erratically.”

“Your men. FBI works for you now?”

“You can’t seriously be pretending to be worried that we’re threats,” Shafer said. “Even Vinny is too smart to pull that card. I realize you were shining shoes at the Pentagon when John saved Times Square, but you might look it up.”

“I know Agent Wells’s record intimately,” Whitby said. His voice sounded to Wells as though it had been filtered through a garbage bag fresh out of the box. Smooth and shiny and heavy and plastic. “Yours, too. And that is the reason you sit here as my guests—”

“Guests—” Shafer said. At the agency, Shafer had crafted a role as a cranky professor, a sharp-tongued genius. Duto had reached a rough accommodation with him, and with Wells. He let them operate unmolested. In turn, they didn’t argue when he took credit for their successes, using them to burnish the agency’s luster, and his own.

But Whitby didn’t care about the glories of Duto or the CIA. His brief was broader. As director of national intelligence, he ran the entire “intelligence community,” the monster that included sixteen agencies in all, with hundreds of thousands of employees and an annual budget of forty billion dollars. He divvied up the money, set priorities, oversaw turf wars. Whitby, not Duto, reported directly to the President. And if Whitby wanted to, he could make life very difficult for the CIA and everyone in it, including Wells and Shafer.

Yet Duto had known all this when he’d asked Wells and Shafer to investigate the 673 murders. He’d told them he would handle Whitby. But Duto had been wrong, Wells thought. For this meeting, he and Shafer would do well not to argue. At least until they saw Whitby’s cards.

Beside Wells, Shafer seemed to make the same calculation. He sat back in his chair, patted his stomach like a man with indigestion. Finally he murmured, “So, we’re your guests.”

“Anyone but you two would be looking at obstruction-of-justice charges right now,” Whitby said. “Or worse.”

“We’re obstructing the FBI investigation?” Shafer said. Quietly, not argumentatively. A man trying to get his facts straight. The performance didn’t come naturally, but Shafer was managing. George Smiley as played by Larry David.

“We’ve got a hundred agents on this—”

“Impressive,” Shafer said. “The results, if I may be so bold as to point out, have been a little thin so far.”

“If I may be so bold as to point out”? Shafer just needed a smoking jacket, Wells thought.

“You don’t know enough to judge our results, Mr. Shafer. We are making progress. We do not need two cowboys disrupting the investigation, disturbing and frightening witnesses. As well as damaging our relationship with a foreign intelligence service that is our ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.”

Whitby tilted his head a fraction, shifted his attention from Shafer to Wells.

“Agent Wells? Anything to say? Or you prefer Mr. Shafer to speak for you?”

The unpolluted blue of Whitby’s eyes reminded Wells of the tint of deep ice on a New Hampshire lake in January. They were a soldier’s eyes. Yet Whitby wasn’t a soldier, just a politician-turned-bureaucrat. He presumed to judge men who had taken risks he would never share. He mistook his bureaucratic squabbles for combat. Explaining this to him would be impossible. He would simply stare with those blue eyes, seeing nothing, believing he saw everything.

“Nothing to say,” Wells said. “Nothing at all.”

WHITBY OPENED THE LAPTOP in front of him, tapped the keyboard. On the flat-panel monitor behind him, a map of Pakistan appeared and a dozen red circles lit up.

Whitby clicked on a circle near Islamabad. A satellite image appeared, a warehouse on a small army base. The photograph was extremely high-resolution, sharp enough to reveal dents on the Jeeps parked beside the warehouse.

Whitby clicked again. The satellite photograph disappeared, replaced with a blurry image of six large bunkers. “From a Predator with the new radar package,” Whitby said.

“That’s through the wall?” Shafer said.

“Yes.”

Beside the image, acronyms and numbers marched down the side of the screen: “5 (PLU/UA) Y 100/300 GS 400 (UR) PTI Med/High RA High AA Medium OTR High.”

“Any guesses what we’re looking at? Humor me, Mr. Shafer.”

“A Pakistani nuclear-weapons depot?”

“No fooling you.” Whitby ran a pointer down the list of acronyms, reading as he went: “Five weapons. Plutonium. Unarmed. Yield of one hundred to three hundred kilotons each. Four hundred guards on the site. No heavy weapons. Possibility of Taliban infiltration medium to high. Road access high. Air access medium. Overall threat risk high.”

Whitby clicked back to the main map.

“We have similar information for every nuke in the Pakistani arsenal. They have eighty-two weapons now, by the way. We knew they’d been moved around, split up, but we had no idea how much. Seems Musharraf”—theformer Pakistani president—“decided that scattered sites would be the best way to save enough weapons to survive an Indian first strike. Now, of course, the Paks have a slightly different problem. As do we.”

Whitby pointed out the red circles, one outside Rawalpindi, the other near Lahore. “These two bases are our biggest problem. Both with senior commanders who are sympathetic to the Islamist movement.”

“Why doesn’t the army move them?”Shafer said. “Or replace the commanders?”

“You know better than that. Every general is his own little power center. And those warheads, they’re prestigious. Tricky to ask a general to give up control. Especially one who might have a line to Al Qaeda.”

Whitby closed the map. “Mr. Shafer, you’re welcome to examine these estimates for as long as you like. At your leisure. I know you’re a strategic thinker. And in your strategic”—Whitby’s repeated use of the word somehow made it, and Shafer, sound ridiculous—“analysis, is this information precious?”

“If it’s accurate, sure.”

“It comes from the very highest levels of the ISI. It’s accurate. They even took us inside six depots. And we’ve checked the others with Predators and satellites, and as far as we can tell, they told the truth.” Whitby paused. “I don’t need to explain what this does for us, do I? Why do you think we bulked up in Afghanistan? Not just to play with the Taliban. We have a QRF”—a quick reaction force—“at Bagram on permanent alert. One of these depots gets hot, we’re in the air in fifteen minutes. For the first time ever, we have the Paki arsenal under control.”

“A genuine coup,” Shafer said. “But please. I’m a bit slow. How does this connect to 673, the murders? Last I checked, none of the detainees at the Midnight House worked for the Pakistani army. Or the ISI.”

“I can’t tell you. But I promise, this is related to information that 673 developed.”

“You promise. Sweet of you.”

“It’s true,” Duto said.

Shafer turned his head to Duto. “How long have you known about this? ”

As an answer, Duto coughed into his hand.

And then Wells saw the missing piece. One of them, anyway.

This map was the reason that Frederick Whitby, former congressman, former mid-level Pentagon analyst, had become one of the most powerful men in Washington. The reason he was the director of national intelligence and Duto was at Langley reporting to him. And it had come out of the Midnight House. But the Midnight House had been rotten. If the FBI’s investigation into the murders of Task Force 673 went the wrong way, Whitby’s triumph would lose its shine.

Shafer got it, too, Wells saw. He lifted his head, a dog on the scent. “Is this why you’re obstructing the FBI’s investigation?”

“I’m not—”

“You blocked them from seeing the letter to the IG.”

“That letter is nothing but rumor. Totally unsubstantiated.”

“It’s unsubstantiated because you didn’t let the inspector general investigate it.”

“It has nothing to do with these murders. Whoever’s killing those men, a foreign terrorist group, a domestic criminal, the FBI has the tools it needs.”

“Does the FBI know you oversaw 673 at the Pentagon?” Shafer said.

“Senior bureau officials are aware of my previous position and don’t believe it’s pertinent to their investigation.” Whitby was tense now, falling into bureaucratic jargon, Wells thought.

“Maybe if they knew about the letter, they’d reconsider.”

“Mr. Shafer. You and Mr. Wells have not an iota of authority to investigate these crimes. Director Duto made a mistake in thinking otherwise.”

“I made a mistake,” Duto agreed. Almost cheerfully. Not even an eyelid twitch.

“We can’t risk letting this leak. If the Pakistani public finds out we’ve been monitoring their nuclear stockpile, there will be riots. The army will face enormous pressure to relocate the weapons. At best, we will then lose our knowledge of where they’re housed. At worst, terrorists will try to steal them as they’re being moved. And none of this has anything to do with the 673 murders. So, I’m asking you now, don’t get in the way. Let the FBI do its job.”

“But there’s something I don’t get,” Wells said. Playing the naïf, as they all seemed to expect of him. Whitby turned his frozen blue eyes on Wells.

“You were in charge of 673?”

“In a manner of speaking. I helped set it up. It ran autonomously.”

“But you saw the take.”

“Yes.”

“And you know what tactics they used?”

“It ran autonomously.”

“I didn’t ask if you okayed them. I asked if you knew of them.”

“We’re not here to talk about this.”

“Bear with me,” Wells said. “My question is, how can you be so sure of the information that 673 developed without knowing exactly what they did to the prisoners?”

“The information was incontrovertible. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Did it come from the missing detainees?”

“What missing detainees?”

“The two who aren’t in the system. The two who don’t exist.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. There are twelve prisoner numbers mentioned in the letter. Ten match detainees. The other two don’t go anywhere.”

“That letter is nothing but rumor. It’s quite possible whoever wrote it decided to put in fake PINs to cause this kind of trouble.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“I am through discussing the letter, Mr. Wells. It should have been destroyed.”

Wells wondered if he should push further, bring up Jim D’Angelo, the former NSA software engineer who’d gotten the no-bid contract. Then decided to wait. They still didn’t know exactly what D’Angelo might have done for Whitby, or why. They didn’t know where Duto stood. They needed evidence, not hunches.

“So, that’s it,” Shafer said. “We leave it alone.”

“You leave it alone.”

“And what if somebody picks up the phone, calls us with a tip?”

“You refer them to the FBI.”

“And if we happen to stumble on some bit of evidence—”

“You give it to the FBI.”

“Got it,” Shafer said. “Got it, John?”

“Got it, Ellis.”

“So, we’re done here?”

“Most certainly.”

Shafer pushed himself back from the table. Wells followed.

“Gentlemen,” Whitby said. “I’m not sure I’ve made myself clear. Don’t press me on this. Director Duto can’t protect you. Your reputations won’t protect you. You are to stay away from this investigation. That is a direct order. Understood?”

Wells raised his hand. “Question.”

Whitby stared at Wells’s upraised arm as if he wanted to chop it off. “Is this funny to you, Agent Wells?”

“I’m just used to a more direct threat. Drop your gun or I shoot you in the head. That kind of thing. I can be a bit slow. And you’re being, you know—”

“Vague—” Shafer said. “He’s being vague, John. And that’s unhelpful. I, too, want to know exactly what’s at risk here. Will we be losing our parking passes at Langley? Our per diems on road trips?”

Whitby smiled. And Wells saw that they weren’t close to cracking him. “I’ll bring you in as material witnesses, hold you until the FBI finds the killers. Worst case, you two get stuck in detention for years and even the agency can’t get you out.”

Whitby slid a thin, red-bordered file folder across the table to Wells. Wells opened it. Gruesome photographs, a crime scene in Moscow. Wells recognized the men. He’d killed them.

“Murder, plain and simple,” Whitby said. “Not a CIA operation. Just a rogue agent, out of control, killing FSB agents. The same man who just went to Cairo and pissed off our closest Arab ally. Make for some interesting reading in the Post, wouldn’t it? Or Vanity Fair. It’s more a Vanity Fair kind of story, the hero with the feet of clay. And you’re in jail, no way to explain yourself.”

“The same rogue agent who stopped a nuclear attack on Washington—”

“That didn’t happen, Mr. Shafer,” Whitby said. “Or did it? It’s so highly classified, it’s practically a myth. And it’s going to stay that way. Could provoke national hysteria otherwise.”

“Times Square wasn’t classified.”

“Times Square was a long time ago. What’s he done lately?”

Whitby slid another red-bordered folder to Shafer. “As for you — I’ve got twenty years of you giving classified information to the French, Israelis, Saudis. Even the Russians.”

“Trading. Not giving.”

“Was it authorized? In writing?”

“We always got as much back as we gave,” Shafer said. “Or more.”

“I’ll bet I can find a couple exceptions. Those might be tough to explain to a jury. Or the Post. Yes. Strikes me as more of a Post story. Nothing operatic about this one. Meat-and-potatoes espionage.”

Wells slid back the file.

“Director Whitby,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

“The same. Agent Nieves will show you out.”

THAT NIGHT, Shafer and Wells sat high in the upper deck at Nationals Park. D.C. had once been home to the famously lousy Washington Senators. Sportswriters had joked that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” before the Senators decamped to Minnesota in 1960 and became the Twins.

Now Washington had a new team, the Nationals, itself a refugee from Montreal, with a new name and a new six-hundred-million-dollar ballpark. But the Nationals were no better than the Senators had been. And Nationals Park was three-quarters empty even on sunny days, making it an excellent place to avoid eavesdroppers.

Wells stretched his long legs on the seat in front of him. He and Shafer were in the upper deck, with an entire section to themselves. “So?”

“He can make it messy for sure. He knows how to work the press. Knows your stuff is classified and tough to leak. It really would be a problem if people knew how close we cut it last year. Meanwhile, Whitby goes to town. Bold move. Instead of dancing around your reputation, he attacks it straight on.”

“Paints me as out of control and dangerous.”

“Thinking you’re above the law. Yep.”

“How could he be so wrong?”

Shafer laughed. They both knew Whitby’s accusations had more than a grain of truth.

“What about you?”Wells said.

“He’s got ammo. You see it in context, it makes sense, but if he takes a couple examples, Shafer gave this satellite imagery to the Saudis, this NSA intercept to the French — it would take some time to explain to a jury. More important, money. Probably all I have.”

“And Vinny’s locked up tight.”

“Looks that way,” Shafer said. “Though I have a theory on that.”

“You think he set us up.”

“I’ll tell you when it’s all done. I promise. So, what do you think, John? Do we quit? Walk away? Give the man what he wants?”

Wells didn’t bother to answer.

“I didn’t think so,” Shafer said.

Far below them, a Nationals batter — a slim black guy who reminded Wells of Darryl Strawberry circa 1986, tall and lean and quick — stroked a scorching line drive to right field. It spun into the corner, and by the time the Brewers outfielder corralled it, the batter was rounding second, eating up the basepaths with smooth, long strides. The right fielder fired a strike from the corner, but by the time the third baseman got the tag down, the runner had touched the bag for a triple. The crowd, such as it was, cheered.

“Nice,” Wells said.

“You used to be able to run like that. Must be hard to get old for an athlete like you. Feel the reflexes go.”

“I still have enough left to toss you over the railing.”

Shafer squeezed Wells’s biceps. “Maybe. How about putting that muscle to good use?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“We have to go to Jim D’Angelo. As soon as possible. Find out who asked him to replace those names. And why.”

“But won’t he run straight to Whitby?”

“Not if we play him right.”