The Midnight House (41 page)

THE LIGHTS FLIPPED ON,
and someone pounded on Wells. Shafer.

“Don’t kill him, don’t, don’t.”

Wells rose to his knees and straddled Callar’s chest and relaxed his grip. Callar’s mouth opened, and the blood burbled out of his torn-up face. Wells and Shafer watched him breathe. Then Shafer grabbed the pistol from his limp right hand. Wells picked him up and put him on the bed. Shafer pulled two sets of cuffs from his jacket and locked Callar’s wrists together and then his ankles. The adrenaline evaporated from Wells, and he sagged against the wall.

“We need to go.”

“No,” Shafer said. “Rooms 111 and 113 are empty, and there’s no sirens.”

“That’s Steve Callar.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen his picture. He doesn’t look much like it now.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You should go in the bathroom, get yourself cleaned up.”

 

 

WELLS FLICKED ON
the fluorescent lights and saw a berserker in the bathroom mirror. A thick, red trail of blood, maybe his own, maybe Callar’s, streaked down under his eye. Spit and phlegm covered his cheeks. Wells turned the tap and dabbed at his face until the wash-cloth was red. Traces of blood lingered, but he looked mostly human. He pulled down his jeans and boxers and winced as he touched his swollen testicles.

Shafer opened the bathroom door, holding a bottle of peroxide and a box of Band-Aids from the first-aid kit in the car. His jaw slipped open as he saw Wells poking at himself.

“Now’s really not the time, John.”

“Funny, Ellis.”

“Next time wear a cup.” Shafer tossed Wells the bottle and the Band-Aids, grabbed a towel, and left. Wells patched up his face as best he could and pulled his pants back up and walked shakily into the bedroom.

“He’s gonna need stitches,” Wells said.

“Stitches? You just gave him a new mouth. He’s gonna need a face transplant, like that French lady.” Shafer pressed at the bloody gash on Callar’s face with the towel.

“It’s not that bad.”

“Remind me never to get in a fight with you.”

“You need reminding of that?” Wells put a hand on Callar’s shoulder. “I still can’t see how he got to his wife.”

Callar groaned and stirred. Wells stepped away, drew his Glock, tried to keep his hand steady. Callar’s eyes blinked open. He poked his tongue though the hole in his face.

“You found me.”

“Saw you cruising the neighborhood,” Wells said.

“But you didn’t know it was me. Until you got here.”

“That’s right.”

“Anybody else know? FBI? Or is it just us chickens?”

“It’s over now, so why don’t you tell us what happened?” Shafer said. “Why you killed your wife and everyone else. And how you got from Phoenix to San Diego and back without anyone noticing.”

Callar laughed, a huffing laugh that turned into a vicious cough. Blood and spit exploded from his mouth, and a gob of phlegm landed on the television on the dresser.

“I’ve been telling you all along, and you still don’t get it,” he said. “My wife killed herself.”

Then, finally, Wells understood.

T
he video had been shot with what looked like a pinhole, through-the-wall camera. The image quality wasn’t great. But it was good enough.

On-screen, Jawaruddin bin Zari stood beside another man, tall, in his early fifties, in a neatly tailored suit. A trimmed black beard framed his face. Maggs knew him immediately. They’d met once before, at the embassy. Abdul-Aziz Tafiq, head of the ISI. Arguably the most powerful man in Pakistan.

Maggs wondered if the video had been spliced or faked. The NSA’s techs would have to check. But to his eyes it seemed authentic. Given the risks of the meeting—for both men—whatever had brought them together must have been crucial, an issue that could only be resolved face-to-face.

The terrorist and the security chief were in what looked like an empty office. No window or desk or phone, just a table and a couple of chairs. An on-screen clock recorded the date and time: 14 Dec. 2007, 6:23 p.m.

“Alekeim salaam
,” Tafiq said. “My friend, you asked to see me. Here I am.”

“I wanted to be sure this message came from you.”

“It does.” Tafiq paused. “So? Can you?”

“How many bombs have I set over the years?”

“You missed the general.”

“That was more complicated. And Pervez is fortunate.”

“This won’t be easy. Her car will be armored. Police in front and behind.”

“Leave it to me. She’ll hardly be moving. Those streets. And she can’t help herself. Waves to the crowds like the woman she is. As long as I have the route.”

“You’ll have it.”

“And the details of her security. Whatever you can give me.”

“Done. She cannot survive.”

 

 

“OH , MAN,”MAGGS SAID
to Armstrong, who’d been translating the conversation from Pashto. “You’re sure about this?”

“I’m sure.”

Only one
she
counted in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto. And she hadn’t survived. No. She’d been assassinated on December 27, 2007, in Rawalpindi, after a rally for her political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party. Another chance for peace in Pakistan destroyed by violence. The killer, or killers, were never caught.

A murder condoned—not just condoned but set in motion—by the chief of the ISI.

 

 

ON-SCREEN,
bin Zari put a friendly hand on Tafiq’s arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She won’t.”

“And your men?”

“Whoever you like. With connections or no.”

Meaning, Maggs presumed, that bin Zari was asking Tafiq to decide whether the assassins would be known members of Islamic terrorist groups or sleepers unknown to any intelligence agency.

“No connections,” Tafiq said. “But make sure they’re expendable. In case there’s pressure from the Americans and we must find them.”

“Done,” bin Zari said. “As for the money—”

“You should do it for free. You hate her more than we do.”

“As for the money.”

“Half tomorrow. The rest when it’s over.”

“Done.”

The two Pakistanis leaned in, hugged. And the screen went black.

Y
our wife killed herself,” Wells said. “So you killed everyone else.” “Someone finally gets it.”

Wells looked around, seeing the room for the first time, eleven feet square, the ceiling barely seven feet high and mottled with brownish stains. A light fixture poked like a pimple from the beige stucco wall behind the bed. Callar must have sat in rooms like this for weeks on end, in San Francisco and New Orleans and Los Angeles, plotting his mad revenge.

Wells ran a hand over his face and came away with a thin trail of perspiration and blood. Callar watched him with flickering eyes.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

“I’ve seen less depressing torture chambers. Really.”

“It does have HBO.”

“You stay here when you killed Ken Karp?”

Callar shook his head. “Down the street. Believe it or not, this is a step up. No bedbugs. Who’s your buddy, John? Didn’t do you much good in the fight.”

“I’m Ellis Shafer. Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“Fair enough,” Shafer said. “Stop me when I make a mistake. You didn’t know exactly what happened over there. But it was bad. Hard on your wife. And she wouldn’t quit. You asked her to come home, but she wouldn’t.”

“She wouldn’t even take her second leave.”

“Finally, the tour ended. Rachel came back to California. Got even more depressed. Wasn’t working. You couldn’t help her. She wouldn’t talk to you about it. She was the doctor, you were the nurse.”

“I couldn’t even get her out of bed. She lay there all day. Every day. A couple weeks before she died, I called her folks, asked them to come down from L.A. Didn’t tell them exactly what was wrong, but they knew it had to be something serious or I wouldn’t have called. She’d only seen them once since she had her breakdown in med school. A few minutes before they got to the house, I told her they were coming. She didn’t say a word, just got dressed, put on makeup,” Callar said. “They got to the house and she put on this act, went out to lunch, told them she was fine. She came home and told me if I ever did anything like that again, she’d leave me on the spot. She said her life was her life, she didn’t want anyone to know what was happening, and especially not her parents.”

“Not a healthy attitude. Especially for a mental-health professional.”

“I could have tried to have her committed involuntarily. In California we call it a fifty-one fifty. But she would have run rings around the cops. Probably would have wound up having me committed instead.”

“But you still loved her.”

“More than anything. You know, I wanted her from the first moment I saw her in the emergency room. It really was like that. And it never went away. The way she held herself, the way she could look at a patient, a sick one, a real crazy, size him up, put him at ease right away, just putting a hand on his shoulder.”

“A real crazy,” Wells said.

“Outside the hospital, she was funny. Smarter than I was. I guess we were never really partners, and maybe I should have minded, but I didn’t. My whole life, people been telling me what to do, and it never bothered me.”

“Rachel say what happened over in Poland?”

“Around the edges. She told me she thought that Murphy and the colonel were skimming. And something bad happened at the end. But I didn’t know what. She never said.”

“Then she sent you to Phoenix. Did you know what she planned to do?”

“I wasn’t sure.” Callar ducked his head to his shoulder, wiping at the blood trickling down his face. “No, that’s not true. I knew. But I hoped I was wrong. Anyway, like I told you, she never listened to me.”

“And when you got home, she was dead.”

“That’s right.”

“She leave a note?”

“She said she was sorry. That I’d be better off without her. That she failed.”

“She say how?”

“No. ‘I failed.’ That was it. And these twelve numbers. All ten digits long.”

“Did you know what they were?”

“I thought they were those ‘prisoner identification numbers.’ She’d mentioned them.”

“So, you hid the note from the cops,” Shafer said. “And a couple weeks later, you sent the letter accusing Murphy and Terreri of skimming. And for good measure, you accused the squad of torture.”

“Pretty much. I wanted a real investigation. There were enough details in the letter. I figured someone would have to look into it.”

“But you were wrong.”

“I figured somebody would call the house. Ask to talk to her. They didn’t know she was dead at that point. And when they found out, I figured it might make them wonder even more about the letter. But after a couple of months, I realized nobody cared.”

“You decided on your own action.”

Callar grinned. Blood dripped off his chin and onto the dark blue blanket beneath him. Wells wondered if the owners of the Budget Motor Inn had chosen the color because it hid bloodstains.

“Do you remember where you got the idea?”Shafer said.

“Indeed I do. She had one picture of the squad. Taken close to the end. Except for her, they all looked happy, believe it or not. Smiling, arms around each other. Wearing these cowboy hats. She was off to one side. She was smiling, too, but I knew she was faking it. The way she was holding herself, with her arms folded. I looked at that picture. Looked at it and looked at it. And kept imagining Rachel not being in it. And then I found out that those two Rangers had died in Afghanistan. And I imagined them not being in it, either.” Callar looked at Wells. “Remember that movie
Back to the Future
, when we were kids?”

“Sure.”

“So in that movie, Michael J. Fox, he’s got this picture of his family. And when he goes back to 1950-whatever and messes up the way his mom and dad are supposed to meet, the people in the picture, they start to vanish. Because he’s screwed up his own birth, see? And one day I saw the same thing happening to Rachel and the Rangers in the 673 picture. I mean, I didn’t imagine it. I
saw
it. I knew what I had to do. I just saw that picture entirely blank. It only seemed right.”

“You have the photo with you?”

“In my backpack.”

Wells rummaged through, found it. The members of 673 stood in front of an anonymous concrete barracks. Everyone but Callar wore cowboy hats. In the center, Murphy and Terreri held up a painted wooden sign that read, “Task Force 673, Stare Kiejkuty:The Midnight House.” Callar was in the group but not of it. Her smile was pained, her face tilted slightly away from the camera, as if she was looking at something the others had missed. A ghost on the edge of the frame.

“Why not just go after Terreri? Or Terreri and Murphy?”

“I blamed all of them. I didn’t know exactly who did what, but I knew everybody was dirty. It wasn’t my job to make distinctions.”

“It was your job to kill them,” Shafer said. “With an assist from whoever killed those Rangers.”

“That’s right.” Now that he wasn’t talking about Rachel, Callar’s voice was flat, remorseless.

“What about that posting on the jihadi Web site after Wyly and Fisher were killed? The one that said it was revenge for the way we treat detainees?”

“I knew at some point you guys would put the murders together. I was hoping to jump in front, misdirect you.”

“You figured out how to post it in Arabic?”

“I had time, the last few months. It wasn’t that tough. Lot of cutting and pasting.”

“The banality of evil,” Shafer said. “We could discuss the morality of collective punishment with you, but there wouldn’t be much point.”