Jonathan Kellerman: The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

THE VOLUNTEER FROM the shelter in Louisiana received a call one day from Linda Clark. Linda told the volunteer that she’d been speaking to the Lord, and the Lord had instructed her to forgive the volunteer for breaking up her marriage to Bill. By this time, the volunteer was living in fear of the man she knew as Zeke, and so she asked Linda the one thing she really wanted to know: Is he dangerous?

Oh, I don’t think so, Linda said.

But what about the video footage he sent? the volunteer asked. What about the footage of him executing people?

And that’s when the volunteer found out about Team Dragon. That’s when she found out about everything , including the fact that he had never been to Afghanistan or Iraq. She was hoping that she could keep the affair from her husband, but she wound up confessing it all, and once she did, he forgave her, as the victim of a skilled predator.

“So I dodged a bullet,” she told me. “And so did you.”

It was embarrassing to think of it that way, of course-embarrassing to think that Zeke had singled me out the way he’d singled out so many others, embarrassing to think that I was one of his victims.

“Hey, look at it this way,” the volunteer said. “At least you didn’t have sex with him.”

THE OLD SOLDIER was surprised to hear Zeke’s name when I called him on the phone. “William Clark from California?” he asked, and when I told him what I was calling about, he responded immediately. “Well, if he’s the security manager at a nuclear plant, he bullshitted his way into it. He was like that as a teenager. He was one of the most grandiose, storytelling individuals I’ve ever met.”

Indeed, in May 1975, the soldier had been arrested for the sake of one of Clark’s stories. At the time, the most famous mercenary in the world was a man named Michael Hoare, who had raised private armies in the Congo and the Seychelles. Clark said he had been a Ranger, but now, like the soldier, he was in the 34th Infantry. He and a friend told the soldier that they knew somebody who worked for Michael Hoare, and that Hoare was looking for new recruits. First, though, they had to prove that they were brave and that they were ruthless. And so one night, Clark convinced the soldier to throw a bomb at the window of the S &S Truck Stop. It bounced off the bulletproof glass and exploded in the parking lot. They were arrested, along with three others, and spent the night in jail, before their CO got them out the next morning. There was no friend they were defending; there was no FBI agent. There were only a bunch of ignorant kids beguiled by a shot at glory, and in the story the old soldier tells, “I disassociated myself from William Clark as soon as I got back to the base.”

So he was living it, even then-the fantasy that has consumed his life, as well as the lives of everybody who has trusted him. Court records from McIntosh County indicate that there were no charges of attempted murder, as Zeke had said; the charge was “criminal attempt,” and it was dropped when it came to the docket. His military records indicate that although he might have gone to Ranger School, he did not graduate, and although he was assigned to a Ranger battalion, he finished out his career in the 34th Infantry, with an undistinguished rank and without a Ranger tab. There was no career as a Green Beret, as he had told his son; nor had he ever served in Vietnam. The gooks had not broken him, but he had come damned close to breaking Rick, who, when I told him the military records confirmed that he’d been lied to since he was four years old, said simply, “I want to put my head through a wall.”

WHEN ZEKE HAD the cell-phone conversation with his handlers in the restaurant, I knew that his story had only two possible outcomes, and that both were monstrous. If Larry and Kyle were real, then Zeke was an assassin in the employ of a secret governmental agency that had seen fit to give him a job at a nuclear plant just as he was starting to go crazy with guilt and shame. If they weren’t real, then Zeke was not just a liar; he was a liar who was willing to engage in complicated three-way public conversations with people who didn’t exist. He was a liar with an alias and fake passports, a liar who maintained extensive stocks of boarding passes and hotel-room keys, a liar who packed a duffel bag and kept it in his house in order to further the fiction that his next mission was one phone call away. He was a liar who conflated his lies with threats so that skepticism would be conflated with fear. He was a deranged liar, and he was the security manager of a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan.

I have a pretty good idea of what the answer is. After all, Zeke told the volunteer the exact same things about the handler that he told me, with the exact same proviso: that this was the first time he had talked about him to another living soul. And Linda Clark said that when Zeke got phone calls from his girlfriends, he often told Linda that his handler was on the line, and that he had to take the call in private.

There is no handler. There was no Larry or Kyle. And yet sometimes I find myself wishing that there were, because the alternative is harder to accept. In the four months I spent with Zeke, he told me exactly two significant facts, two plain truths uncomplicated by falsehood and fantasy: first, that he was security manager of Palisades Nuclear. And second, that last October he had gone to Washington, D.C., in the company of two federal agents and presented his vision of nuclear security to the head of the nuclear-hazards branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

HE WAS WONDERING if he should tell her. He was wondering if she would love him if he did. I urged him to. It was last December, and he had been married less than two weeks. I was saying goodbye to him for what turned out to be the final time, and I urged him to tell his new wife who he really was, so that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes he’d made with Linda. And then the phone rang. It was Baby Doll. He handed the phone to me, and I asked her why she’d married him. She told me that he was tall, that he was not fazed by her multiple sclerosis, and that he was, in her mind, “a gentle protector. He’s afraid that if I found out what he did, I wouldn’t love him. But that’s not the part of him that I care about. The part that I care about is the courageous part, the part that came to Michigan to start a new life without knowing a soul. The rest-he did what he had to do, what he was asked to do for his country. Others did it, too, and are still doing it. I know he has bad dreams about it. But I want to hold him through his bad dreams. He told me when we first met that we’re both wounded souls, and he’s right. But that’s why I love him.”

IT IS EASY TO THINK OF LYING as a victimless crime, akin to storytelling, akin to performance-after all, wasn’t Zeke performing when he was speaking to his handlers? All those unpublished novels, all those unproduced plays and screenplays; and now, at fifty-three, the chimney sweep finds his true métier, telling tales to a complicit reporter. And yet his victims number more than those whose feelings he’s hurt, whose lives he’s wrecked. When I called Blackwater about William E. Clark, I asked if Blackwater prohibited its contractors from having sex with the people they were supposed to be protecting. “What?” the spokeswoman answered, in disbelief. “Yes. Of course. It’s the first thing they’re prohibited from doing. It’s the worst thing they can do. Does that answer your question?” When I called DynCorp to see if William E. Clark was part of DynCorp’s Kosovo Mission-he was, but he wasn’t shot; no diplomatic observers were-the spokesman was chiefly concerned with Zeke’s claim that he was really in Kosovo for American intelligence. “He’s saying DynCorp was his cover ?” he said. “You have to understand-that’s the kind of claim that can put all our guys in jeopardy.” And when I called an FBI agent who until recently had been one of the chief liaisons between the bureau and the CIA, he listened to what I told him about Zeke, then said: “ Fuck this guy. Expose him. He’s an asshole.