The Midnight House (29 page)

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.

W
ells 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.