The Midnight House (16 page)

“Kuwait.”

“Ahh, Kuwait. Of course. You have business here? Maybe you take day off, I take you to the pyramids. Very exciting, very historical . . .” He was off and running, and Wells couldn’t help but smile. One day he really would come back here as a tourist. He wondered who’d be with him. Or if he’d be alone.

 

 

THE CABBIE WAS STILL TALKING
as they headed up a low rise. Ahead, the road seemed to dead-end at a wide avenue, almost a highway, six lanes of cars heading north and south. Beyond the avenue, a jumble of buildings loomed, darker and lower than the rest of the city. The cabbie pointed at them. “Northern Cemetery.”

“I can’t wait.”

The cabbie drove through a short tunnel that ran under the avenue and opened into the cemetery. He stopped in front of four nut-brown men sitting in folding chairs, passing a
sheesha.

Wells paid the driver, unfolded himself from the cab. The men in the chairs looked curiously at him as it pulled away, trailing diesel smoke. Hani wasn’t among them, and Wells didn’t recognize any of them from the mosque. They were arranged in front of a store whose shelves, as far as Wells could tell, held only cardboard boxes of spark plugs.

The men’s
galabiyas
were gray with dust, their bodies limp, as if they had been sitting for so long that they were molded to the chairs. They could have been forty, or seventy. They struck Wells as the Egyptian equivalent of the old men who had—in the days before Wal-Mart and air-conditioning—sat in town squares in the South and watched the world go by.

“May I sit?” Wells asked the man on the far right. He seemed younger, or at least more awake, than the others.

“Sit, sit.”

Wells plopped down. Based on the regularity of the traffic passing them, the road through the cemetery seemed to be a major route to eastern Cairo. Wells couldn’t help feeling that running roads through a graveyard was somehow disrespectful. Yet did the dead prefer the loneliness of the immaculately maintained cemeteries in the United States? At least this way they were connected to the city where they had lived.

What nonsense,
Wells thought. In truth, if this place proved anything, it was the foolishness of ghost stories. Wells didn’t claim to know where the dead went. But he was sure they weren’t here. Their bones might be, but their spirits were long gone.

The man next to him moved a few degrees toward vertical.

“I am Essam.”

“Nadeem.”

“You visit the cemetery?”

“Yes.”

“Now? At this hour?”

“Why not?”

Essam didn’t seem to know what to say next. He slumped in his seat, reached for the
sheesha.
Its coals were out. He whistled sharply. A very small and very dirty boy, no more than ten years old, emerged from the spark-plug store, carrying tongs and a brass brazier trailing white smoke. He plucked two red-black coals from the brazier, arranged them on the
sheesha.

“You like to smoke?” the boy said to Wells. “Very good smoke. Apple, cherry, strawberry, melon—”

“No, thank you.”

“Very good smoke.” The boy tugged at Wells’s
galabiya
with a small hand black with coal dust. “You Kuwaiti?”

“Not you, too. Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Then Wells realized why the boy had asked. “Yes. Kuwaiti. You have something for me?”

The boy ran inside the store, reemerging with a piece of paper. “For you. One pound.”

“Who gave you this?”

“One pound.” One Egyptian pound was about twenty cents.

Wells gave him a pound, received the note in return.
“Keep walking,”
it said in Arabic. Nothing more. “Who gave you this?” But the boy had already gone back to spark-plug heaven.

“Who left this?” Wells said. “A fat man?” As an answer, Essam put the
sheesha
pipe to his mouth and took a long draw. He closed his eyes as the coals glowed red and the
sheesha
burbled happily. Wells stood, looked at the crumbling brick buildings around him, wondering if he was being watched, by the
muk
or the jihadis or both. But nothing moved.

Wells was gripped by a feeling he had never heard properly named, the sense that he could stay with these men for a thousand years, waiting for something to happen. Anything. And nothing would. Yet every moment would be as pregnant with anticipation as the one before, even as his feet took root in the earth, even as he turned into a living statue. The opposite of déjà vu. A state of permanent expectation.

“Good-bye,” Wells said.

Essam exhaled a cloud of white smoke. “Come back. Smoke
sheesha
with us
.
”

I know where to find you,
Wells didn’t say.

 

 

THE STREET CURVED LEFT
and then right. The dead were all around him—the living, too—huddled inside one-room mud-brick houses that reached the edge of the road. The neighborhood’s poverty was obvious here. The houses had uneven holes for windows. Mangy dogs slept fitfully in garbage-strewn lots, their ribs visible under thin brown fur. At the sight of Wells, they stirred but didn’t bother to stand.

Around the next turn, a narrow alley ran perpendicularly from the street. As Wells walked past it, a boy in dirty brown sweatpants hissed at him. “Are you the Kuwaiti?”

Kuwaiti.
The magic word. The password for tonight’s adventures.

“Yes.”

“Follow me.”

Wells turned down the alley, following the boy. This section of cemetery sloped north to south. They headed south, down a narrow staircase, concrete steps crumbling. The alley shrank as it continued, buildings pressing on both sides, leaving just enough room for two men to stand side by side. Wells wasn’t happy. An ambush here would be lethal. He peeked over his shoulder but couldn’t see anyone.

“How much farther, boy? ” he said. The kid ignored him, trotting ahead.

THEY PASSED AN OPEN SQUARE
filled with tombstones and one large mausoleum, the first evidence Wells had seen of an actual cemetery in the Northern Cemetery. Ahead, the alley swung left, a blind turn. The boy whistled and ran.
Here it comes,
Wells thought. As he made the turn, he felt rather than saw a man in a black mask stepping out of a hole in the wall behind him. He tried to turn, to protect himself, but something hard and metal crashed into the side of his head—

His last thought—and then his legs sagged underneath him and he was out.

T
he letter was a single white page, typewritten, undated, no letterhead.

Not surprisingly, the letter was unsigned. The envelope carried a Salt Lake City postmark and the same Courier twelve-point font. No return address.

Four thick lines of classification were stamped across the top of the letter:

And just in case the message hadn’t gotten through: PRINCIPALS ONLY.

Shafer read the letter through twice. He was examining it a third time when Lucy Joyner, the CIA inspector general, reached across the table. “Time’s up,” she said.

Joyner was a tall, round Texan whose curly hair was dyed a striking platinum blond. She investigated internal allegations of wrongdoing at the agency, a job that made her as popular at Langley as a police officer at a pro-hemp rally. She couldn’t fit in, so she’d taken the opposite route. Her hair was defiance in a Clairol bottle.
We’re here, we’re the IG’s office, get used to it.

“I’m a slow reader,” Shafer said.

She waggled her fingers at him, and he handed it over. They were in a conference room in Joyner’s office suite, on the sixth floor of the Old Headquarters Building. A framed map of Texas hung on one wall, beside a photo of Lyndon Baines Johnson wearing a cowboy hat and holding his dog, Little Beagle Jr.

“Can I see the original?” Shafer said.

Joyner had shown him a high-resolution copy of the letter, which was locked in her safe. “Nothing on it,” Joyner said. “No fingerprints or DNA. Whoever sent them was awful careful.” Joyner hadn’t lived in Texas in twenty-five years, but she sounded like she’d just gotten off a plane from Amarillo. Shafer wondered if she practiced at home.
Bar-be-cue. Fixin’s. Largemouth bass.

“What about the other letters?” Shafer said. “To Gates and Duto and Whitby?”

“Destroyed. I asked Duto about it; he told me his office gets all kinds of crazy mail. Can’t check everything. Yeah, well, my office gets nutjob letters, too, but we know when one’s real. And so do they.”

“Except when they’d rather not.”

“This conversation shouldn’t be happening,” Joyner said. “Lucky for me, you have that super-fancy clearance.”

“They keep forgetting to take it away.”

“So, I don’t need permission to show you this. And I remember how they treated you after nine-eleven, Ellis. Which is to say I think we’re on the same side. But most of what you want to know, I can’t tell you. You have to go to the source for that.”

“A couple of questions.”

“Just a couple.”

“Murphy told me you’d cleared him.”

“Did he, now.”

“I’m guessing that isn’t exactly accurate.”

“It is and it isn’t.”

“How far did you get?” Shafer asked.

“He came in for a prelim—”

“A prelim?”

“A preliminary interview. No lie detector, no lawyers. It’s optional, but most folks agree to ’em, because if we can get our questions answered then, nothing gets into your file, nothing for the boards”—the promotion boards—“to see. Anyways, he came in. I showed him the letter, asked him if he could tell me anything. He said he couldn’t. I asked him whether 673’s records would exonerate him. He said it didn’t matter, because they were DD-and-above clearance”—that only deputy directors and Duto himself could see them. “I asked him about the torture. He told me that he was administrative, didn’t run interrogations. Then I asked him about receipts and he laughed. Literally. Laughed out loud. Asshole. That was it. He left. I figured I’d better check it out. But before I got anywhere, Duto called.”

“When, exactly?”

“Maybe two days after I spoke to Brant. He told me to find something else to do, that he was invoking the NSE”—the national security exemption, which allowed the director to overrule the inspector general and stop internal investigations if they were likely to damage vital national interests.

“Duto didn’t tell you what was behind the NSE.”

“He did not.”