Alex Berenson - The Midnight House

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.

“Ma-a-saalama.”

“Ma-a-saalama.”

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—

A sap—

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

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

To: Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense

CC: Frederick Whitby, Director of National Intelligence

CC: Vincent Duto, Director of Central Intelligence

CC: Lucy Joyner, Inspector General, Central Intelligence Agency

Dear Mr. Gates:

This letter is in reference to the illegal activities of a unit operated by the army and the Central Intelligence Agency. Squad 673. This unit operated in Poland. Based at Stare Kiejkuty army base in eastern Poland. It had the job of interrogating “enemy combatant” detainees. Those known as high-value.

This squad 673 was led by COL Martin Terreri of the Fourth Special Operations Brigade. The second-in-command was Brant Murphy. A CIA officer. The unit had ten members. You should knowthat Brant Murphy and Colonel Terreri stole at least $1 million from the unit. They received kickbacks from Europa West Aircraftin return for hiring Europa West for Charter Flights. Flights #11, #19, and #27never took place.

Dr. Rachel Callar and other members of Squad 673 knew about the stealing by BRANT MURPHY and COLONEL TERRERI. However they did notprofit from it. They did not want to report the leaders of the squad. You should ask them!

Also, the unit did do acts of torture on its detainees. Including Waterboarding, Electric Shock, Stress Positions, Prolonged Sleep Deprivation, Mock Executions. And other bad acts.

I am not making this up. For proof, here are the prisoner identification numbers (PINs) of the detainees:

3185304876—3184690284—4007986133—4013337810—4042991331—4041179553—4192578423—5567208212—6501740917—6500415280—7298472436—7297786130

I know the Department of Defense is a law-abidingand ethicalinstitution. I appreciate your attention to these matters.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

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:

TOP SECRET/SCI/ PLASMA/76G

NOFORN/NOCON

DISTRIBUTION BY DCI ONLY

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.”