Alex Berenson - The Midnight House

“Anyway, starting in 2004, we had a bunch of these squads. They went through various permutations, different names and squad numbers.”

“Translation: we and the army kept wiping them out and reconstituting them to make it harder for Amnesty or Congress or anyone to follow the thread,” Shafer interrupted. “I wish I could answer your questions, Senator, but Task Force 85 doesn’t even exist.”

“Do you want to explain, or should I? ” Duto said.

“You go ahead.”

“Thank you, Ellis. In late ’05, when the Abu Ghraib blowback was really bad, we eliminated all the black squads. But then at the beginning of ’07 we put one more together. Six-seven-three. The final iteration. Ten guys. Seven army, three agency. It ran out of Poland, a barracks on a Polish base there.”

“Okay,” Wells said, picturing the setup: the concrete building at the edge of the base, the one everyone pretended didn’t exist. Planes landing late at night, guards shuffling prisoners in and out.

“The army picked the commander. A colonel with a lot of experience in interrogations. Martin Terreri. And because of all the pressure we were under from the Red Cross and everybody else, we saved 673 for the toughest guys. This was not for routine cases.”

“Because of the tactics they were allowed to use.”

“In general, the way it worked, detainees came to 673 one of two ways. Some were in the system already — say, in Iraq — and somebody decided that they needed more pressure. The others, they were sent direct after capture.”

“Ghosts,” Shafer said. A ghost prisoner was a detainee whose existence the United States refused to confirm to outsiders, like lawyers or wives or Red Cross monitors.

“But not entirely. They were all in the system,” Duto said. “Legally, they had to be.”

“Got it,” Wells said. “Who oversaw Terreri? ”

“Nobody, really,” Duto said. “Six-seven-three, they were kind of ghosts themselves. Theoretically, Terreri reported to the deputy commander of Centcom”—Central Command, which oversaw all army operations in the Middle East and central Asia. “At the time, that was Gene Sanchez.”

“Isn’t Sanchez a lieutenant general? A colonel reporting to a three-star?”

“That was intentional. Sanchez wasn’t keeping a close eye on 673. It wasn’t on his org chart. The point was to let these guys do what they needed to do. In reality, the intel got chimneyed straight to the Pentagon.”

Chimneying — sometimes called stovepiping — meant moving raw intelligence straight to senior leaders instead of sending it through the normal analysis at Langley and the Pentagon. In theory, chimneying saved important information from being lost inside the vortex of the CIA and gave decision makers the chance to judge it for themselves.

“So, short version of the story, this 673 was a black squad with a straight line to the Pentagon,” Wells said.

“Pretty much.”

“They report to you also? ” Shafer said. “Or anyone on our side? ”

“Not directly.”

“What does that mean, Vinny? ”

“We saw the take after the army.”

“Even though you had guys on the squad? ” Wells said.

“That’s right.”

Wells didn’t get it, and then he did. “You didn’t like this squad. But you wanted to be sure you were involved, just in case they wound up with something good. You put a couple guys in, nobody important, protected yourself from whatever it was they were doing, but made sure you had a hand in the game.”

Duto was silent and Wells saw he’d scored.

“Always so clever, Vinny. Always playing both sides.”

“Guess you never broke the rules the last few years, John. Always please and thank you. May I go on, or you have more ethics lessons? ”

Wells laid his hands on the smooth polished wood of the table. He stared at Duto, and Duto stared back. The triple-thick windows and carpeted floors of the seventh floor swallowed conversations. Only Tonka’s panting spoiled the room’s silence.

“Vinny,” Shafer said. “You might take a different tone. Since it’s possible none of us would be here without John.” A reference to the bomb that Wells had stopped a year earlier.

“We would have found it,” Duto said, without any conviction. “We were close.” He tugged his tie loose, opened his briefcase, pulled out a folder, a physical effort to put the conversation back on track. “Like I said, 673 reported to the army, but we got their take.” Duto opened the folder, slid across a sheet with ten names on it. “Anybody on there ring a bell? ”

One name jumped at Wells. Jeremiah M. Williams, a soldier he’d met at Ranger training fifteen years before. “Jerry Williams,” Wells said. “I knew him a long time ago. Nice guy. Quiet. My ex-wife said something funny about him once. I can’t remember when it happened. But I remember her telling me he was built like a Greek god. You know, we’d just gotten married, so it was sort of a funny thing for her to say, but she was right. He was. Like a black Greek god. I’ll never forget it.”

“Your wife met him; you were friends with him.”

“Friendly.” Williams was tough to get close to. Or maybe Wells hadn’t tried.

“But you didn’t stay in touch.”

“When I started here, I didn’t stay in touch with anyone from the army.”

Wells wasn’t sure why he was going into so much detail about his non-relationship with Jeremiah Marquis Williams. Maybe to explain to himself how he’d gotten to this point in his life with so few people he could trust.

“He was a good man, Jerry. The type of guy who made training easier. Always pulled more than his weight.” Even as Wells said the words, he realized they sounded like a eulogy.

“He’s the only name you recognize? ”

“At first glance. Where is Jerry these days? ”

“Missing.”

“Jerry’s missing? All those guys are missing? ”

“Jerry’s missing. Presumed dead. The other six names with the asterisks, they’re dead for sure.”

Now Wells wished he hadn’t jerked Duto’s chain by bringing the dog. Headquarters brought out the worst in him. Acid rose in his throat. Another good soldier dead.

“How? ”

“In order. Rachel Callar killed herself in San Diego ten months ago. Overdose.”

Duto handed over two photographs. The first showed Callar in her army dress uniform. She was pretty and trim, her brown hair cut in bangs that covered her forehead. A practical-looking woman, freckles and a wide chin.

“Six-seven-three had a woman? ”

“She was the squad doctor. A psychiatrist.”

The second photo had been taken by the San Diego police at the scene of Callar’s suicide, a plastic bag pulled tight over her head. Wells passed the photos to Shafer without comment.

“Husband found her,” Duto said. “No note, but no reason at the time to believe it was anything but suicide. She was in the army reserve. Had done a couple of tours in Iraq, counseling soldiers there. Three months later, two Rangers, the most junior guys on the squad, were killed by an IED in Afghanistan.”

Duto slid across three photographs. The first two were similar, shots of broad-shouldered men in camouflage uniforms, both smiling almost shyly. The third focused on a blown-out Humvee, its armored windows shattered, smoke pouring from its passenger compartment.

“This one, we don’t know if it was related to the others — it was on a stretch of road where another convoy got hit the next week. Still, they were part of the squad, so it’s possible.”

“First the doctor in San Diego, then the two Rangers in Afghanistan,” Shafer said.

“Correct. Then we’re back stateside.”

Duto handed Wells two more photographs, the same macabre before and after. The first was a standard CIA identification shot. A paunchy man in a sport coat, striped tie, thick black hair. The second photo, a D.C. police shot. The same man, faceup on a cracked slab of sidewalk, dress shirt stained black with blood. His wallet sat open and empty on the curb, a few inches from his shoes.