Alex Berenson - The Midnight House

But the djinns didn’t care about his excuses. They had chosen him for the mission. As he wavered, their voices rose, a cacophony of curses and threats, filling him until he couldn’t breathe. Go on, the djinns said. Leave it behind.

Mohammed balanced himself on top of the cot. He pushed himself into the vent and found the cross-passage that ran horizontally through the ceiling of the cell block. To his right, the passage led to the front of the block and the guard station. To the left, it ran toward the rear wall and Jawaruddin’s cell.

Left, the djinns whispered. Left .

Mohammed put the knife into the passage to his left. He reached for the ridges of metal where the ventilation pipes had been welded together and pulled himself left, pushing the knife before him. For a moment he was stuck, and then he wriggled his shoulders sideways and freed himself and squirmed forward with the syncopated twists of a snake. He slid over the vertical vent that dropped into the cell beside his and wriggled along until he reached the fourth and final cell. In the cell below, he heard Jawaruddin. He looked down and saw Jawaruddin’s bulky body through the grate. “Monkey. Are you up there?”

Now, the djinns said. He’s the devil. The devil, the devil, the devil. And if you don’t do what we say, you’ll be the devil, too.

Mohammed dropped down and kicked through the grate and slid out.

IN THE CELL BELOW, bin Zari looked up almost in awe as Mohammed’s feet emerged from the vent. “Crazy monkey. Where did you think you were going? Trying to escape?”

Bin Zari reached out and tugged at Mohammed’s legs and pulled him down. Centimeter by centimeter, Mohammed’s belly and neck and head came out of the grate. His arms were over his head, the last part of him to emerge—

And so bin Zari had only an instant to react when Mohammed’s arms came free and Mohammed’s right arm swung down at his face with something that looked like a lightning bolt wrapped inside his brown fingers. Bin Zari grunted and twisted his head and let go of Mohammed—

But he was too late. The sharpened edge of the cot leg caught his left eye and tore through the lid and the cornea and into the meat of the eyeball. Bin Zari lifted his arms and tried to scream, but Mohammed shoved the leg deep into his brain, and before bin Zari knew what had happened the pain spread from his eye to everywhere and nowhere and he couldn’t hold himself and—

He collapsed beneath Mohammed, dead before he touched the ground.

BUT MOHAMMED AND THE DJINNS weren’t finished. Mohammed slashed at Jawaruddin’s face and belly until the big man’s guts covered the floor of the cell and his nose and ears lay stacked on what was left of his chest. Now eat, the djinns told him. Eat.

“No,” Mohammed said aloud.

Then we’ll never leave you alone.

But Mohammed had the answer for that. He wiped the cot leg as best he could against bin Zari’s blanket. When the blood was gone and he could see the edge of the blade he’d made, he tilted back his neck and tore at himself. The cutting wasn’t easy. The blade was dull now and he wouldn’t have imagined his poor, wretched body would fight its own destruction so desperately. But the djinns were quiet at last. So he cut and cut until his own warm blood covered his hands and his chest and washed him clean.

We took pictures for a while and sat outside and had a couple beers. Then we came back in and found the bodies. Callar did. She went downstairs, and we heard her screaming.”

Wells and Murphy had circled the neighborhood as Murphy explained how bin Zari was captured and tortured and finally broken. How he’d told them about the laptop. How the Deltas had found the computer in the Swat Valley. And what it had held.

Somehow they wound up sitting on the driveway where Wells had parked his WRX. The two agency guards watched from the van.

“So who killed them?” Wells said. “Jack Fisher?”

“No. Mohammed.”

“The boy?”

“He snuck into bin Zari’s cell through the overhead vent and killed bin Zari and then himself. They were alone for close to an hour. Plenty of time.”

“How? ”

“A blade from his cot leg. Must have made it at night when the Polish guards were sleeping.”

“You’re sure Fisher didn’t do it.”

“Why would I lie? Guy’s dead. And we could see what happened. Mohammed unscrewed the grate in his cell, got into the heating system, crawled across to bin Zari’s cell. Anyway, if you’d seen the bodies—” Murphy shook his head. “Bin Zari was torn up like wild dogs had gotten him. His body was in about eighty-five pieces. And Mohammed had bled out so badly. We practically needed waders to get to him. He was still holding the knife.”

“But it was convenient. Since you didn’t know what to do with them.”

“It was a nightmare. The most important prisoner since Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, more important, and this crazy kid offs him because we got sloppy. Lazy. We were there too long, all of us. We’ve been fighting this war too long.”

“Did you ever figure out why Mohammed did it?”

“No reason. Kid was nuts. Psychotic. Callar thought so all along.”

Psychosis, insanity in all its forms, was the thread, Wells thought. The madness had traveled from Mohammed Fariz to Rachel Callar to her husband like a kids’ game of telephone. If kids played telephone anymore.

Murphy reached into his pocket, withdrew a canister of Copenhagen. He extracted a wad of dip the size of a knuckle and stuffed it in his lower lip. “I’m not sorry we did what we did to Jawaruddin. We had to break him. But he shouldn’t have died that way, and Mohammed shouldn’t have either.”

Wells wasn’t interested in hearing Brant Murphy’s opinions on right and wrong. “You found the bodies. Then what?”

“Must be hard to be perfect, John.”

“Finish your story so I can tell you who I caught and get out of here and never have to see you again.”

Murphy spat a stream of dip into the driveway. “It was Terreri who realized what we had to do. Terreri and Fred Whitby.”

“Whitby knew that the tape you’d gotten from bin Zari—”

“Would make his career. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff. All along, he told us to do whatever we wanted to the detainees, long as the take was good and we didn’t leave marks. If they didn’t have scars or burns or missing fingers, nobody would care. That was the way Fred figured it. And he was right. But two dead bodies, especially in that condition, that would be hard to explain. Either we were negligent or just plain murderers.”

“You had to make them disappear.”

“We bought a couple of bank safes in Warsaw. We chopped up the bodies. Bin Zari was pretty well chopped up already. We put the pieces in the safes and borrowed a Polish military helicopter and flew out a hundred miles over the Baltic Sea on a cloudy night and dumped them. Boom. Boom. Problem solved.”

Wells didn’t trust himself to speak. Americans. Soldiers. Tossing human bodies away like garbage.

“Nobody on the squad protested,” Wells said.

“The only one who would have was Callar, and she wouldn’t speak to any of us by that point. But there was still one loose end to clear up.”

“The prisoner numbers.”

“I flew home. I’d met D’Angelo a couple times and I had a feeling about him, that he could be bought. At least rented. He was the kind of guy, always going somewhere fancy, getting somebody else to pick up the tab.”

“Takes one to know one.”

Murphy spat dip, another long stream.

“And he cleaned the database,” Wells said. “Jawaruddin bin Zari and Mohammed Fariz were never in U.S. custody. But he got too cute on the payoff.”