Alex Berenson - The Midnight House

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.

“Salaam alekeim.”

“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.

Your 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?”