The Midnight House (10 page)

“Not so much. Too politically correct, don’t you think? The Democrats wanted it, and then the Republicans stuck it in the back of beyond. And all this self-conscious inspiration. We should have kept to Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington.”

“Where’s Exley?” Wells said, apropos of nothing. And saying Exley’s name made him think of Anne. He imagined he could smell her on his hands, feel her skin on his. Thinking about her made his mouth go dry. Yet, equally, he wanted to confess what he’d done to Exley. To apologize to her. And to make her jealous. Remind her of what they’d had. “How is she? ”

“Ask her yourself. You know how to find her. I’m not involved. You’re going to get back together, one of you needs to break already. Otherwise you’ll just make each other miserable.”

Suddenly a class of elementary-school kids, third or fourth grade, swarmed the memorial. Their teacher was barely old enough to shave, a hipster in black glasses, a well-meaning Teach for America refugee halfway between the Ivy League and law school. He was trying, but he could barely keep the kids in line. They bounced off one another, shifting foot to foot. Two boys ran off, chased each other around one of the marble benches at the edge of the memorial, playing at a gunfight. “You dead. Pump this shotgun on your head.” The other boy ducked behind a bench, then raised an invisible rifle in both hands. “Shotgun ain’t nothing. You the one
is
dead.”

“Let’s go,” Wells said.

“Depressing.”

“I hate watching it.”

“I mean, the waste of ammo. These kids can’t hit the side of a barn. And somebody needs to reload.”

“Nice, Ellis.”

“Can’t let everything get to you. You got to be able to smile sometimes, the absurdity of it.”

They left the kids behind, walked around the basin toward the Jefferson Memorial. A faint breeze fluttered off the stagnant water, carrying the muddy, briny smell that Wells would always associate with Washington. The swamp. A city that existed only as a kind of hotel for power. New York or Philadelphia would have been more natural sites for the seat of government, but the South wouldn’t agree, back in the day. So here they were.

Wells supposed the United States had been lucky to have D.C. If the capital had stayed in the North, the South might have seceded a decade earlier, before the Union Army could bring it to heel. And if the South had broken away, at least three countries would have formed in the area now occupied by the United States—a North, a South, and a West. Then the United States wouldn’t have been the dominant world power in the twentieth century. Perhaps World War I or even World War II would have ended differently. On and on the counterfactual history ran.

Kierkegaard was wrong, Wells thought. Life couldn’t be understood backward or forward. In the end, humans depended on faith as armor. But Wells’s own faith had faded. He didn’t know where to look. He’d lived as a Muslim for a decade. But how could he rejoin the
umma,
the community of believers, after what Omar Khadri had done to him? Yet Wells was even more perplexed by Christianity, the religion he’d been raised in growing up. He found Islam’s precepts easier to accept than Christianity’s, the relationship with God more personal.

The wind picked up and riffled the basin’s brackish water, scudding low waves against its concrete walls. Despite himself, Wells found himself looking for a fish in the pool. A fat, ugly carp or even a toothy pike.
Lord, just show me a pike that got lost on its way up the Potomac, and I will never question your existence again.

No fish.

Wells shivered in the breeze. Duto had certainly ruined his mood.

“Cold? ” Shafer said.

“Wondering if I should become a Buddhist.”

“I don’t think it would suit you. You know what you need, John? A mission.”

“That what you think? ”

“I knows you fancies yourself a deep thinker,” Shafer said in a ridiculous southern accent. “But philosophy ain’t your thing, John-boy.”

“You were born an ass, you will forever be an ass, and you will die an ass.”

“At least I’m consistent. You ever see Gandhi eating meat? Barbecue? Pulled pork? A fat T-bone? Sirloin? Broiled in butter and served with a side of bacon? ”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you’re making me hungry, Ellis.”

“Follow your destiny,” Shafer said. “Put down the book, grasshopper. Pick up the gun. Can’t kill nobody with a book.”

Wells laughed. “When we get back to the office, I’m going to try. Then I’m gonna put you on a spit.”

“Meantime, get to it.”

“You really want to do this,” Wells said.

“If nothing else, don’t you want to catch whoever killed your friend?”

“You don’t know he’s dead.”

“He’s dead, John. Until proven otherwise. Let’s find out who killed him.”

“Simple,” Wells said. “And if the truth turns out to be complicated?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Or burn it. Whatever.”

“All right.”

“So, Duto wants us to play detective, we play detective,” Shafer said. “Spitball. Everything but the obvious, the jihadi connection. Save that for last.”

“You know anything more about 673? Anything Duto didn’t tell us? ” Wells said.

“Only this: we and the army paid the members of the squad their regular salaries. But the expenses were financed by the agency through what’s called a C-one drop. The squad got quarterly disbursements. No accounting of what happened to the money after that. No receipts, no oversight. It’s very rare. Seven-three got close to eight million through these drops.”

“Eight million for a ten-man squad. Not bad.”

“No, it wasn’t. Some went to the Poles who were running the base. Some for charter flights. Some for coms equipment, probably. Satellite gear, et cetera. But that’s another possible motive. Maybe whoever was in charge of the money skimmed a couple million. Now he’s worried the rest of the squad found out, so he’s eliminating them.”

“What I don’t see, why kill the rest of the squad now? You’re just calling attention to yourself. Doesn’t make sense.”

“I can’t disagree,” Shafer said. “Okay. Your turn.”

“What about the woman, Rachel? The doctor. One woman, nine guys. Maybe she was having an affair. Two affairs. A love triangle.”

“Then she gets home and one of the guys kills her? And makes it look like a suicide? Then starts in on the rest of the squad? Why now?”

“Same problem as the money,” Wells said. “The timing doesn’t work.”

“Okay, this is the worst yet,” Shafer said. “Say one of the members is actually a jihadi. Who worked for all these years for the agency. Or the army. Waiting to get put on this squad. And then, lo and behold—no. I can’t even say it. It’s so ridiculous.”

“Try this. Coincidence. The doctor killed herself. Jerry Williams walked out on his wife. Karp got shot in a robbery—”

“Tell it to the guys who just got popped in San Francisco and L.A.”

With that they stood and looked over the Tidal Basin. Two helicopters flew low overhead, most likely headed for the White House, as an overweight jogger huffed slowly along the path that circled the pool.

“Not the most productive ten minutes we’ve ever spent,” Shafer said.

“What if—” Wells said.

“Just say it.”

“What if, let’s say, someone inside the agency or the Pentagon is embarrassed by what 673 did? Somebody high up? ”

“So, they want these guys taken out? One by one? Okay, go with it. Six-seven-three was torturing detainees. They were dumb enough to keep evidence, videos or photos. And some senior official was stupid enough to put his authorization in writing. He’s got a problem.”

“Big problem. The kind that puts him in jail.”

“Sure,” Shafer said. “But that’s a lot of stupid. And even so, the risk of taking them out is huge.”

“People have been known to do dumb things when they panic.”

“True. But play it the other way. What if Duto’s telling the truth and 673 found something huge? Proof the Kremlin is financing terrorism against us. Evidence that the French were paying bin Laden before nine-eleven.”

“Now someone’s decided that the information is too important to risk a leak. And so it’s time for 673 to go.”

“In the immortal words of Avon Barksdale, ‘They got to be got.’ ”

“Who? ”

“Ever see
The Wire
?”

Wells shook his head.

“It’s great. You’d like it. You’re like McNulty, only less of a hound. So. Six-seven-three finds something big, gets the wrong people upset . . .” Shafer trailed off.

“Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“I never buy the big conspiracies. You know, half the time we can barely tie our shoes. And now we’re saying the SecDef or the President or the Pope is taking out these guys one by one? That they’re rubbing their hands together in the White House, whispering to each other, ‘First San Diego. Then New Orleans. They know too much. Kill them. All of them.’ Giggling.
Bwah-hah-hah.
”

“The Russians,” Wells said.

“The Russians do enjoy their conspiracies. They might be crazy enough to kill our guys this way. But if Duto and Fred Whitby think it’s the Russians, why wouldn’t they tell us?”

Wells couldn’t think of an answer.

The jogger had reached them. She wore red shorts over her doughy white legs and a pale blue T-shirt with the University of Maryland terrapin logo. She kept her head down and avoided eye contact with them. Looking at her, Wells had a vague sense of déjà vu. He didn’t know why. Then he did. She looked like a younger version of Keith Robinson’s wife. Keith Edward Robinson, the CIA desk officer who’d spied for China and then fled for parts unknown, leaving his alcoholic wife, Janice, behind. Wells had met Janice only once, in a house that stank of hopelessness.

“You like her? Didn’t think she was your type,” Shafer said.

“She makes me think of Janice Robinson.”

“Keith’s wife?” Shafer looked again. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Never found that guy.”

“No, we didn’t. Probably buried in some jungle. He didn’t strike me as having much candle left. Though some of these guys, they last longer than you think. Keep pouring out misery. On themselves and everyone else. You know she quit drinking, right? Janice. Just in time, too. She had about two ounces of liver left.”

“Good for her.”

“Maybe one day he’ll send her a postcard, give us a chance to pay him a visit. No statute of limitations on what he did.”

“He got to be got, right, Ellis?”

“Exactly right. So. Assuming we’re out of wild theories. Let’s go back to the beginning. Say it’s a jihadi op.”

“Tell me how they got the members of the squad.”

“Bad opsec”—operational security. “Somebody in Poland found a flight manifest, didn’t put it in a burn bag like he was supposed to. Or the guy they released, Zumari, he knew where they were operating, and after he got out, he went back and bribed somebody there. Or the Berlin prosecutor’s office hates the agency and leaked the names.”

“I still don’t see it,” Wells said. “But if you got the names, you could do it. And maybe this is how you would. One at a time. Quietly. Once you’ve killed three or four, you lift the veil, go public with it. Shove it in our faces. Revenge on the American torture squad.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else,” Shafer said.

“How do we find out if the names leaked?”

“We don’t,” Shafer said. “That’s the FBI’s job. I’m going to work on Duto, push him to open the records. Even if he can’t give us the interrogation records, we’ve got to get more on the detainees. Names, nationalities, what we’re holding them for. And I’m going to talk to Brant Murphy.”

“The guy who still works for us.”

“Yes. At CTC”—the agency’s Counterterrorist Center.

“What’s that leave for me?”

“You’re going to do what Duto said. Go to Cairo to find Alaa Zumari. An encore performance. John Wells, back to his roots, undercover as a jihadi. For one night only. Acoustic. It’ll be fun.”

“And how do I get to him if the
muk
”
—
short for mukhabarat, the Arabic word for secret police—“can’t? I got it. I’ll ask Khadri and the rest of my buddies for references. Only they’re all dead. I killed them, remember?”

Though in truth, Shafer was right. Wells wanted to go, to be undercover again, to speak Arabic, to hear the midday call to prayer roll through dusty streets.

“As it happens, I’ve got an idea on that.”

T
he security at the big Egyptian hotels seemed good. It wasn’t. At the Intercontinental, a blocky pink tower on the Nile, a low gate protected the front driveway, and a bomb-sniffing German shepherd nosed around every car. But a determined bomber could have plowed through the gate, Wells saw. The guards had AKs and pistols, but they didn’t wear bulletproof vests. Wells wondered if the men he hoped to meet on this trip had made similar calculations.

Since the mid-1990s, dozens of terrorist attacks had hit Egypt, killing hundreds of tourists. Still, Americans and Europeans came here every day to gawk at the pyramids and visit the splendid tombs near Luxor. Wells wondered if they understood the resentments in the giant city around them.

Wells reached the Intercontinental’s front doors and gave up his cell phone to pass through the hotel’s metal detector. Inside, the lobby was air-conditioned, with a pianist playing at a black baby grand, its elegance oddly disconnected from Cairo’s dirt and noise.

At the reception desk, Wells handed over his newly minted passport, which proclaimed him William Anthony Barber, forty-one, of Plano, Texas.

“Mr. Barber. You will be with us for a week.”

“You got it, sweetheart.”

The receptionist tapped on her computer, handed over his passport and keycard. “Room 2218. Please enjoy your stay in Cairo.”