Jonathan Kellerman - The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

“It’s a soldier with the French Foreign Legion in the Horn of Africa.”

He didn’t miss a beat. Standing in front of the poster, he said, “Second Para, out of Corsica,” meaning the Legion’s Second Paratroop Regiment, which is indeed out of Corsica. “That’s where we mobilized out of.”

“You were in the French Foreign Legion?”

“Among other things,” he said.

“So that’s you?”

“That’s me.”

“I don’t get it. I don’t get why you’re so coy about it.”

“I don’t like talking about Africa. Those were the bad years.”

“Zeke, what are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of going to jail , man. Have you ever been arrested?”

“No.”

“Well, I have. I was arrested for attempted murder when I was a Ranger. McIntosh County, Georgia. You can look it up if you want to. It’s a matter of public record.”

He was defending a friend, he said. The friend had gotten beaten up at a notorious brothel called the S &S Truck Stop. With a few other soldiers, Zeke had gone back and put an incendiary device on the roof, with the intention of “burning up everyone inside, including the whores.” The bomb didn’t go off, he said, but he and the others were arrested anyway and spent nine days in jail before an FBI agent investigating the S &S for drug trafficking set them free. The incident ended his career as a Ranger, but he said it also might have played a role in the call he received a few years later: for he had demonstrated a willingness not only to kill but to incinerate a room full of undesirables.

“DO YOU HAVE THINGS in your life that you’re ashamed of?” Zeke asked. He had gone from the photo of the sniper to the couch and was stretched out on it, with his hands covering his face. I told him I did; of course I did. He said, “Well, you probably don’t do them anymore. But I do. I keep doing them. I seek them out.” He was finally paying the price; he’d had a mild heart attack the month before, on account of the stress of living with his secrets. I told him that maybe he had received a sign that he should begin talking, starting with Africa. He said, “You might not like me very much after I do,” and asked if I thought he was a bad person. “I think you’re trying to be a good person,” I said, “or else I wouldn’t be here.” He got up and told me to follow him. He opened the door to his basement and turned on the light. He went halfway down the stairs and then stopped and looked at me over his shoulder. “Have you ever been around pure evil?” he asked. I paused. I’d been around pure evil before. I had just never followed pure evil down to the basement, and when I got there, I expected to be greeted by the grinning ricti of other journalists who’d pursued Zeke’s story and wound up preserved in pickle jars. But no: It was just a basement, and Zeke couldn’t find the photographs of the evil he had done in Africa. He did find, however, a big cardboard box full of the plays and screenplays he’d been writing since he got out of the Army, some of them faded with the passage of time.

THE WIND WAS MAKING NOISES The noises were making Zeke jumpy. He was sitting up on the couch, doing what he was always doing-watching Fox News on the big-screen TV and revealing his secrets. On this night, however, he was saying that everything had changed since he’d married Baby Doll. “I have something to lose now, man,” he said, by which he meant Baby Doll, by which he also meant his house, his job, his life. He had told me about everything. He had told me about Africa, about Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d also told me about the Philippines, about Indonesia, about Somalia, about Yemen, about Angola, about Nigeria, about Guatemala, about Haiti and El Salvador and Honduras. He had continued raising the stakes on his secrets until they all bled together. Indeed, he really had only one secret, because over the last twenty years he’d had only one job. He did not really work for Blackwater, and he did not really serve in the French Foreign Legion, and he wasn’t a missionary for World Vision, and he wasn’t a diplomatic observer for the State Department. Those jobs were just covers for his real job, which was something he called “direct sanction.” No matter where he was, he worked for his handler, and his handler paid him to kill people. He was, in his words, “a national-security asset,” “one of the best in the world at what I do”-a one-man death squad.

He had revealed his secrets in order to survive them, but now he thought he had made a mistake. He wondered if I had endangered him, and if it was the revelation, not the secrets, that would be impossible to survive. I told him that he had no choice now but to go all the way-that going public was the only way he could protect himself. “Do you mean testify ?” he said, like a snake handler who had fallen from his trance and realized what he had been holding. “No way, man. I have nightmares about Charles Schumer asking me questions. You ever raise your right hand? I have, and it’s a life-altering experience. My mother couldn’t stand it…”

Suddenly he stood up. The wind had gusted, and there was a noise. He went to the refrigerator and came back with a handgun. He cocked it and went to the garage door, peeking outside while standing next to the jamb, his back pressed against the wall. When he returned to the couch, he did not uncock his gun. Instead, he started transferring it from hand to hand and told me that I didn’t know who I was dealing with: “If they want to get you, they get you. Or they don’t get me. They get Baby Doll. They rape her, they sodomize her. It’s called a break-in. Random violence. But it’s not, and I know it’s not. So no fucking way. I’m not going to get my Baby Doll raped and sodomized so Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton can make political hay!”

HIS HANDLERS WERE REAL, Zeke was talking to them on the phone. I was sitting across the table from him. It was the next day, and we were having breakfast at a restaurant in South Haven. At 9:30, he picked up the cell phone and dialed. He said, “Clark, William,” and then a number, 553. Then he said what sounded like a last name. And then he was talking to his handler, whom he called Larry. He was telling Larry that he was sitting with the writer from Esquire . He cringed at his handler’s response. Then, as he explained later, he was transferred immediately to his handler’s subordinate, who read him his secrecy oath and threatened him with the penitentiary. The subordinate’s name was Kyle. Zeke complained about the way he was being treated by Kyle, then he began complaining about the way he was being treated by Larry. When he was finally transferred back to Larry, he said this: “Hey, Larry, thanks for the kick in the balls.” He said that if he ever saw Kyle in the street, he’d “take him out,” and then he promptly apologized for the threat. He hung up, and when he called back, a secretary answered and told him that Larry was at a meeting. “I just talked to him two minutes ago,” he said, and she put him through. “Larry, how much longer do I have to be in purgatory?” he said, and accused Kyle of selling him out years earlier. His tone softened after that; he said, “Hey, I’ll do it, I’m a good soldier,” and hung up. He finished his coffee but not his eggs, and when we got back to the car, he said, “I fucked myself. I stayed in too long, now they have their hooks in me. I have a new house, a new wife, a new job, and it’s all fake. They can punch through it whenever they want to, and they just did. The thing is, you don’t know what they can do-so they can do anything. If you ever hear that I’ve committed suicide, investigate the hell out of it.”

A FEW DAYS LATER the phone in my home office rang at eight o’clock in the morning. I didn’t run to get it, though I knew it was Zeke. All that week I’d been on the phone with him, trying to get him to go public with his story, trying to convince him to allow me to use his name. He kept saying that he was going away. He was going back to Afghanistan. He was taking a job with a company that provided security for firms trying to do business in Kabul. He was leaving in January and didn’t know when or if he was going to be back. He hadn’t told Baby Doll, he said, then asked: “Do you think she’s going to be mad?”