Alex Berenson - The Midnight House

“Three months after that was Kenneth Karp. Shot in D.C., east of Logan Circle, four months ago. About one thirty in the morning. Outside an ATM. He was one of ours, so it was reported to us, of course, but nobody made the connection. The cops figured it for a robbery gone bad, and so did our security officers. The ATM tape doesn’t show anything.”

“He live in D.C.? ” Shafer said.

Duto shook his head. “Rosslyn. Next question, why was he pulling five hundred dollars from an ATM in the District in the middle of the night? There’s a strip club a block from the bank. Karp had a weekly poker game in Adams Morgan. Apparently he had a routine. Leave the game at one, make a pit stop, get home at three. Wife never knew.”

“He did the same thing every week? ”

“That’s what his buddies told the cops.”

“Somebody could have figured out the routine, waited for him.”

“In retrospect, yes. At the time, we had no reason to think so.”

“What’d he do for 673? ” Wells said.

“He was the senior translator,” Duto said. “Spoke Arabic, Pashto, Urdu.”

Duto handed over a photograph, a bald-headed black man whose uniform stretched tight across his massive shoulders. Jerry Williams. No second picture, since Williams was missing, not dead.

“Williams’s wife reported him missing in New Orleans two months ago. Last seen at a bar in the Gentilly district. North of the French Quarter. He retired last year, after the squad broke up. He knew Arabic from his Special Ops training, so he worked with Karp on the translations. He was having marital problems, and the cops down there didn’t look too hard for him. If he’s alive, he’s laying low. He hasn’t been seen since, hasn’t used his ATM card or credit cards, hasn’t called his family, hasn’t flown under his own name. The cops haven’t officially ruled out his wife, but she’s not a suspect.”

Wells looked at the smiling man in the photograph and wondered if he was dead. “Let me make sure I have it straight. Callar, the doctor, hangs herself in San Diego. The two Rangers die. Nothing happens for a while. Then Karp dies here. Then Williams disappears in New Orleans.”

“Correct,” Duto said.

“Five missing or dead from a ten-person squad, nobody put it together?”

“Why would we? A suicide, an IED in Afghanistan, a robbery, a missing person. Four army, one agency. Hard to see a pattern. Until this.”

Duto slid two more sets of photographs across the table.

“Jack Fisher and Mike Wyly. Both killed two days ago. Fisher in San Francisco in the morning. Wyly in Los Angeles near midnight. Both shot at close range. No witnesses, and even though they were in residential areas, none of the neighbors heard shots. The cops are assuming a silencer.”

Duto didn’t need to explain further. Silencers were illegal, and good ones were hard to come by. A silencer meant a professional, or at least a semiprofessional, killer.

“Same gun in both shootings? ” Shafer said.

“Yes. Same as the one that got Karp, by the way.”

“Who were they? ”

“Wyly was a sergeant, a Ranger. Good guy, by all accounts.” He looked like a good guy to Wells. Tall, blue-eyed, big square jaw. He belonged on a recruiting poster. At least in the before shot. The after wasn’t so nice. He lay sprawled across a bare wooden floor, eyes dull, his hands covered with his own blood. Four shots in his torso, two in the abdomen, two up high in the chest. The shooter had wanted to be sure.

“Where was this? ” Wells said.

“His house, the San Fernando Valley. He’d just gotten divorced. The cops talked to his ex, but she has an alibi. Given the pattern of the shootings, there’s no reason to believe she’s involved.”

Wells handed the photos of Wyly to Shafer. He looked at Fisher, who was bald and offered a smile that revealed prominent canines. Wells hadn’t remembered the name, but the face was familiar.

“Rat Tooth,” Wells said. “I kind of liked him, but that was a minority view.”

“Rat Tooth? You knew him? ”

“He was an instructor at the Farm when I was a trainee. Even back then he was bald. Specialized in what he liked to call ‘tactical physical arts.’ Eye gouging, finger breaking. Halfway through, he disappeared. There were rumors he’d, quote/unquote, engaged in inappropriate physical contact with a trainee.”

“Bingo,” Duto said. “After that, we put him on the road where he belonged. He was in Colombia in the late nineties, the Philippines for a couple of years after nine-eleven. The places you could run without a lot of eyes on you. He liked it messy.”

Messy. The second photograph of Fisher was messy. He was slumped against a driver’s seat, head torn open by a close-range pistol shot. His jaw was open, and Wells couldn’t help but notice his teeth, long and sharp and nearly vampiric.

“Fisher had a reputation, I can’t deny it,” Duto said. “But he had his uses.”

He was as much as telling Wells and Shafer that Fisher had been the squad’s designated torturer. Though the United States didn’t torture, Wells reminded himself. Torture was wrong. And illegal. So whatever Fisher had or hadn’t done for 673, he hadn’t tortured. QED.

“You put all this together yesterday? ”

“The San Francisco police got the call on Fisher in the morning, two days ago. Once they figured out who he was, they got in touch with the FBI, which reached out to us. We didn’t know if his murder was connected to Karp, but we figured we’d better check on the other members of 673. We called Wyly’s house yesterday morning. An LAPD detective answered the phone.”

“What about the other three guys, the rest of the squad?” Wells said.

“All safe. Murphy, the number two, still works for us. He’s at CTC now”—the Counterterrorist Center. “Terreri, the colonel, he’s in Afghanistan serving at Bagram. The last guy, Hank Poteat, is an army communications specialist. He’s at Camp Henry in South Korea now. None of them have noticed anything off.”

“Is Murphy under guard? ”

“Yes.”

“The FBI is leading the investigation? ” Shafer asked.

“Correct. They’ve classified the murders as a possible terrorist attack. They’re putting together a task force. We’re assisting, and so’s the army. But the Feebs have jurisdiction. No different than the Kansi shootings.” In 1993, Mir Amal Kansi, a Pakistani graduate student, killed two agency employees near the main entrance to Langley. The FBI had led the investigation, capturing Kansi in Pakistan in 1997. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in Virginia in 2002.

“And the local police departments are cooperating,” Shafer said.

“Of course.”

“So, John and me,” Shafer said. “Help us out here, Vinny. Where do we fit in? Since we’re not part of the task force, and the agency’s got no jurisdiction anyway.”

“I’ll get to that,” Duto said. “But first, let me ask, this sound like AQ”—Al Qaeda—“to you? Or any of the usual offshoots? ”

“It’s too subtle,” Wells said. “Too much work for the payoff. It’s not like shooting a Cabinet secretary.”

“Did anybody outside know we’d set this squad up?” Shafer asked.

“You might have noticed, there’s no shortage of articles about our interrogation techniques.”

“But 673, were they ever mentioned specifically? ”

“Last year, a jihadi Web site wrote about them. ‘The American squad 673 are rabid dogs who must be exterminated.’ Nothing specific about their tactics. Generic stuff. We have the pages cached if you want to see them. NSA tried to find the source, but it couldn’t.”

“We know how the squad ID number got out? ”