Barry Eisler - Inside out

Because he recognized you as JSOC. Because he assumed you were here to kill him. And then he realized you weren't-because he's still alive, because someone who was here to kill him wouldn't have announced himself to a guard and let himself be recorded by all the security cameras in the lobby and at the front desk. Now he doesn't know what's going on. He's trying to find out.

"I've been tasked by the U.S. government with recovering some stolen property," Ben said. "And I have."

Ulrich's eyes widened. "You recovered-"

He caught himself before he could say more. But he'd already said enough.

"Yes," Ben said. "Larison's dead. I recovered the tapes. Now I want to know who I return them to."

Ulrich didn't say anything, but Ben could see the eagerness, and the calculation, in his eyes.

"You want them?" Ben asked.

"Why would you think I do?"

Ben was impressed by the man's discipline. But he'd already slipped, and Ben wasn't going to allow him to recover.

"My mistake," Ben said. He turned and started to walk to the door. "I'll give them to the Justice Department."

"Wait."

Ben turned and looked at him.

"I'm not saying I'm interested. But… what are you asking for?"

Ben waited a moment to let him sweat. "You can start by telling me how you recognized me."

Ulrich licked blood from his lips. "I've seen your picture."

"How?"

"Your file."

"Bullshit. There's no photo associated with my file."

Ulrich licked his lips again. "All right, look. I can see there was a mix-up here-"

"Just tell me the truth. Or I'll know I can't trust you with the tapes."

"Okay, okay. The CIA's been trying to get those tapes back. They-"

"The CIA might have a photo of me. Or maybe they could get one. But that doesn't tell me what you matched it to."

Ulrich didn't answer. Ben didn't give him time to think of another lie. He turned and walked toward the door.

"Lanier! Paula Lanier. She took the picture. While you were sleeping, on the way to Costa Rica."

Ben stopped and turned. He tried to make sense of it, but couldn't. "What?"

"She works for me, all right? Or she did, when I represented the vice president's office. Now I'm more of an asset for her because of my connections. Or, she's my asset. Sometimes it gets hard to tell."

"I don't understand."

"I knew the FBI was going to be involved in this thing, okay? I knew as soon as it broke, and I needed someone I could trust. So I pulled some strings and had Lanier assigned. She's been reporting developments to me. Including the involvement of a mysterious operative who wouldn't even acknowledge his affiliations."

"Who sent those contractors to Costa Rica? Who sent the two Ground Branch guys?"

"That was a CIA op."

"But you knew about it."

"In case you haven't noticed, I make it a habit to know about everything."

Ben thought. Someone had followed him from the airport that afternoon. The only person outside of Hort who knew he'd been selected as the courier was Paula. He could have kicked himself for his stupidity, for letting his guard down. She'd played him. And he'd fallen for it.

"What about the two guys who followed me from National today?"

"Ground Branch again."

"Who the hell's running the CIA? You?"

"It's not a question of who's running it. People have common interests. We work together."

"And your common interest on the tapes is the Caspers."

"That's everybody's common interest. Every American's, anyway."

"What are they?"

"Why are you asking me? You work for Horton, right? He knows as much as I do. Christ, he was responsible for their orderly disposition."

Ben was surprised but didn't show it. "I'll ask him when I'm ready to ask him. I'm asking you now."

Ulrich looked at him. "What do you think is on those tapes?"

Ben shrugged. "Waterboarding. Torture."

Ulrich laughed. "Waterboarding and torture aren't even news anymore. Over half the country supports torture, didn't you know? And over sixty percent of Evangelicals."

"Video would be different."

"Well, that's probably true. Seeing what American soldiers and spies had to resort to in the war on terror would have been painful. It would have damaged our self-image as a country, weakened our will to do what needs to be done. But the Caspers were the real problem. Asking the country to accept what we had to do about them… that would have been too much. People wouldn't be able to understand. And they shouldn't be forced to."

"What are you talking about?"

"You'll give me the tapes?"

"For the truth."

Ulrich nodded. "You know about the ghost detainees, don't you?"

Ben thought about what he'd heard. "Rumors. Detainees the CIA was holding without acknowledging their capture or detention. Shuttling them through Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo and the rest so the Red Cross couldn't verify their existence, or keeping them at the black sites. That's what the Caspers were?"

Ulrich wiped blood from his mouth, then regarded his hand. "If you want to keep secret prisoners, you have to build secret prisons. After 9/11, we tasked the CIA with doing exactly that. And then we populated what they built."

"With the Caspers."

"Among others. Now, the way you hear about it in the media today, you'd think all the people we picked up in the war on terror were innocent. Because once the Supreme Court decided terror detainees had the right to petition for habeas corpus, we had to start letting a lot of them go."

Ben thought of the Manila city jail. "Well, if you couldn't prove they'd done anything-"

"Just because we couldn't prove it in a court of law didn't mean it wasn't so. And look, okay, maybe some of them were innocent. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. But now they have a grudge. Meaning, even if they weren't dangerous before, they are now. You want to be the one who lets one of these guys go and then have him slaughter more Americans? You're JSOC, not the ACLU, I thought you'd get this. It's why I'm telling you."

Ben didn't answer. Not so much earlier, he would have gotten it. But now, hearing it out loud, he wasn't sure.

"So you captured these ghosts. What's the problem?"

"The problem is, the way they were interrogated might have offended the sensibilities of the armchair quarterbacks who've already forgotten 9/11."

"You waterboarded them?"

Ulrich tugged on his beard. "At first."

Ben had been waterboarded during his SERE-survival, evasion, resistance, escape-training. He'd consented to it, the people who'd done it had been his own instructors, he'd been provided with a safe word and a tennis ball he could just drop at any time to stop the whole thing, and it had only been once-and still it was one of the most unpleasant things that had ever been done to him, instantly stripping away his will and replacing it with paralyzing, childlike terror. He'd held out for fourteen seconds, which made him practically the class champion. And the Caspers had gotten the real thing, and who knows how many times.

"What do you mean, 'at first'?"

"Let's just say that, by the end, they wished they were just being waterboarded."

Ben looked at him, trying to imagine what you would have to do to a man to make him long to be waterboarded, instead. He couldn't come up with anything. He said, "And the CIA videotaped it."

"You got it. There's no genius like a CIA genius. Fundamentally, they created a whole line of government snuff films."

Ben imagined a bunch of guys watching God knows what through a viewfinder, recording it, watching it again later on a screen in a dark room. Rewinding it. Pausing. He thought of what Hort had said, about how torture is always about something else. He felt sick.

"And you're worried that if the public ever sees the videos, they're not just going to go after the people who filmed and starred in them, they're going to go after the producers, too."