Alex Berenson: The Midnight House

He shoved the guy out the back door and wrestled him down to the pebbled lot behind the house. The guy landed face-first, and all the air went out of him. Fezcko grabbed his bushy black hair and ground his face into the rocky soil. Then he chopped the guy three times in the neck for what he’d done to Maggs. Also to make sure he wouldn’t be any trouble. Though the guy didn’t look like much of a threat. He was shaking, and a trail of spittle covered his thin black beard. And he was young, maybe seventeen. But he had been popping off at them with that snubnose.

Fezcko patted the guy down and flex-cuffed his ankles so he couldn’t run and turned back to grab Maggs. But Maggs had already crawled out and was leaning against the side of the house on his good leg. The smoke inside was thinning, and the action had eased. No one was shooting, and the ISI men were yelling at one another in Punjabi as they cleared rooms on the second floor.

Fezcko pulled off his mask. “How’s your leg? ”

Maggs shrugged.

“No marine crap,” Fezcko said. “If you’re bleeding out, I’d like to know.”

“I’ll live. Lucky my running-back days are over,” Maggs said. “And lucky he only had a.22. Shoulda let me shoot him.”

“Next time.”

In the corner of the lot, the second captive lay on his stomach. The guy’s nose and mouth were foaming, and Fezcko wondered if he’d gone overboard on the CS. He pulled off Maggs’s belt and dragged the prisoner to his feet. The guy’s face was slack, his eyes wild and red. Fezcko mopped him up with a corner of his shirt. And realized he was looking at Jawaruddin bin Zari.

HE FROG-MARCHED bin Zari to Maggs.

“Got my belt.”

“That’s not all.”

Maggs took another look at the slumped-over mess in the jean jacket. “Is that—”

“I believe it is.”

Maggs raised a hand and they high-fived. Juvenile, maybe, but Fezcko didn’t care. They’d just caught one of the most wanted men in Pakistan.

A breeze picked up, dragging tendrils of the CS in their direction. Fezcko caught a whiff and began to cough. After a few seconds the breeze faded, but he kept coughing, until the cough turned into a laugh. He sat down beside Maggs.

“What? ” Maggs said finally.

“Been one hell of a going-away party, hasn’t it? ”

Ten minutes later, the smoke had cleared enough to allow Fezcko to enter the house without his mask. Six jihadis had been in the house when the raid started. Four were dead. Khan’s squad had shot two on the ground floor, the others on the stairs. In turn, Khan had taken four casualties, one dead, three seriously wounded.

“Not how we planned it,” Fezcko said to Khan.

“I should like to know who tipped them. Maybe our new friend can tell us.”

“How will you explain what’s happened to your squad? ”

“Leave that to me. Just promise, if you get anything from these monkeys, you’ll pass it on.”

“Done.”

THEY PUT HOODS ON the prisoners and threw them into the back of Khan’s van and rolled into the dark. By sunrise they would be halfway to Faisalabad. Before noon the plane would be at the airport, and by sunset bin Zari and the second prisoner would be somewhere over the Black Sea. After that. they would be in God’s hands.

God’s, and the agency’s.

Achauffeur.

That’s what Jack Fisher was, when you came right down to it. A chauffeur.

He didn’t mind, not too much.

When the new administration came in, he read the politics like everybody else. The rules were changing. The lawyers were putting their noses everywhere. Anybody too close to the black stuff might have a tough time. And he’d been close. Very, very close. And things had gotten messy at the end, for sure. But nobody could say they hadn’t gotten the goods in the Midnight House.

So be it. Let the big brains weigh what they’d done, the pros and cons, the morality of it. Fisher didn’t have an opinion. He wasn’t a big brain. He slept fine. No bad dreams. Even if Rachel Callar had tried to give him some of hers. And look what had happened to her. Fisher didn’t have much sympathy. As far as he was concerned, she was a coward who’d gotten what she deserved. But, Callar aside, after the freedom they’d had, he wasn’t planning to ask some twenty-eight-year-old lawyer “Mother may I? ” when he wanted to make a detainee stand up straight. Nope. Not interested.

So Fisher quit, took the deal they were offering, the extra severance and the enhanced pension. A lot of the guys in 673 had reached the same conclusion. Which was probably how Langley and the Pentagon wanted it.

Even with the pension and the severance, staying retired wasn’t an option for Fisher. Not with two ex-wives sucking him dry. He thought about working security for a company like General Electric or Boeing. Would have taken him about two days to get a job. The multinationals couldn’t get enough former CIA operatives.

But after twenty years of working for the government, Fisher didn’t want to swap one bureaucracy for another. He wanted to work for himself for a change. And live in California, like he always said he would. He’d grown up in backwoods Maine, a crummy little town called Caribou, halfway between Canada and nowhere. Some of his friends liked the winters, hockey and skiing cross-country, but Fisher wasn’t one of them. For as long as he could remember, he’d thought of California as the promised land. He printed up some fancy business cards: Jack B. Fisher, Fisher Security Consulting. Moved to Berkeley with wife number three. And rented an office in the Mission, a formerly down-and-out neighborhood in south San Francisco that was now as fat and happy as the rest of the city.

Fisher figured he’d start with freelance work for guys he knew at Kroll and Brinker. Jobs that were too small for them, too messy, that pushed the limits of the legal. He wouldn’t mind those jobs. In fact, he’d like them. He took out ads on late-night local cable and posted on Craigslist and waited for the calls to come in. But with the economy lousy, business was slower than he’d expected. After a couple months, he wondered if he might wind up at GE after all.

Then this gig dropped into his lap. He was sitting in his office, trying to think of ways to get his name out, when his cell phone buzzed. He didn’t recognize the caller ID. He answered anyway. He always answered. Couldn’t afford to piss off any potential customers. He’d probably work for his exes, if they’d hire him. Ex number one, anyway. Number two was a real piece of work.

“Jack? It’s Vince. Heatley.”

Fisher had gotten into a small-time poker game, mostly dollar-ante stud, with a bunch of retired FBI agents. Vince Heatley was a regular, former special-agent-in-charge of the San Jose office, now running security for George Lucas. Heatley was a solid guy, tightassed for Fisher’s taste but no worse than the average Fed. He usually lost a little but didn’t seem to mind. Which probably meant he had money.

“Free for a drink? ” Heatley said.

“If you’re buying,” Fisher said. And wished he hadn’t. He sounded desperate.

“Meet me at the Four Seasons.”

OVER A COUPLE OF BEERS, Heatley outlined the deal.

“Ever heard of Rajiv Jyoti? ”

Fisher shook his head.

“He’s a VC,” Vince said.

“He’s Vietnamese? Sounds Indian.”

“You really are new in town. No, a venture capitalist. You know, they invest in tech companies, start-ups. Rajiv was early in Google. He’s worth maybe a billion now, a billion-two. Depends on the day.”