The Midnight House (21 page)

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.

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.