Then another swing, this one for real, the flashlight whistling through the hot, dry air at Wells’s face—
And stopping just short of his left eye. Wells didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. He burrowed into the core of himself and waited.
A thin trickle of sweat dripped down Hani’s left temple. He stared at Wells and then sighed and sat on the side of the desk and lit a cigarette. “I’ll be glad to have you gone,” he said.
WELLS SLEPT FITFULLY until the morning, when Hani brought in a doctor — or a man in a dirty white coat who said he was a doctor — who poured rubbing alcohol on Wells’s scalp, setting his broken skin on fire, and then taped a gauze pad to the wound. Hani was the only
“You leave tonight.”
Wells didn’t argue.
At midnight they put a hood over his head and bundled him into a van. When they pulled it off, he stood on the tarmac of Cairo International, staring at the blinking lights of a Delta 767. Delta ran a flight to New York four times a week.
Hani took Wells’s fake passports and the digital camera and arranged them neatly on the tarmac. He pulled a red plastic canister from the back of the van, splashed gasoline over the pile. He lit a cigarette and dropped it on the pile. The flames danced sideways on the tarmac, and the acrid smell of the camera’s melting battery filled the hot night air.
“Burn, baby, burn,” Wells said in English. “Got any marshmallows?” Hani hadn’t given him food or water since his arrest, a full day ago now. He was unsteady, feverish, his temperature spiking and diving like a Blue Angels pilot showing off for a new girlfriend.
“Marshmallow? What is that?”
Wells poked at the dying fire with his foot. “That wasn’t strictly necessary,” he said. “Can I go now?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice in the matter,” Hani said. “Our American ally. But if you ever come back to Egypt. We have so many accidents in Cairo. I know how I would suffer if Mr. John Wells were hit by a truck.”
“If I ever come back to Egypt, you’ll be the last to know,” Wells said. His voice tore his throat like ground glass. No more talking, in any language. He turned away and stumbled across the tarmac. At the jetway, he made sure to give Hani a wave.
FROM NEW YORK, he flew to D.C., where an army doc met him and stitched him up properly. The doctor told him he needed to spend a day at Walter Reed, but Wells turned him down. He took a cab to the apartment that Shafer had arranged as a crash pad and slept for eighteen hours straight.
When he woke the next morning, his fever was gone. He still had a headache, a dull pounding behind the eyes, but he felt just about human for the first time since the Northern Cemetery. Two messages waited for him on his cell phone, which he’d left in Washington. The first: “John. It’s Anne. Hope you and my friend Tonka are all right. Wherever you are.” She laughed nervously. “Don’t shoot anybody I wouldn’t shoot, okay? And call me sometime.”
The second message was nothing but a few seconds of breathing, followed by a hang-up. Wells wanted to believe he could recognize the fluttering of Exley’s breath. But the line didn’t have a trace, so he had no way to know. He listened twice to Anne’s message and three times to the hang-up and then saved them both.
He showered and shaved and sped to Langley, his headache growing more intense as he approached the front gate. For once, he wanted to talk to Duto. But when he got to Shafer’s office, he found out he wouldn’t have the chance.
“Duto going to see us?” Wells said. “Talk about Alaa Zumari? Tell me what an idiot I am, how I should have gotten the Egyptians involved from the get-go?”
“Nope.”
“Have a full and frank exchange of views?”
“Nope.”
“Because I’ve got a few things to say to him.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“He had to have known the details of Alaa Zumari’s interrogation. Had to. That Zumari gave up Samir Gharib. Why didn’t he tell us? It’s like he’s deliberately inciting us.”
Shafer cocked his head sideways and grunted.
“Are you trying to speak, Ellis? Because that’s not English.”
“Thinking.” He tilted his head to the other side. No other response.
Wells lowered himself onto Shafer’s couch. “You talk too much or not enough,” he muttered. “I have no idea how she”—she being Exley—“survived all those years with you.”
“I could say the same.”
Shafer had only three photographs on his desk: him and his wife, his family together, and him with Exley, standing side by side in front of the polar-bear cage at the Washington zoo. Shafer held up his right hand with the fingers hidden, as if a bear had just chomped them. Exley’s mouth was open in a wide O, a mock-horrified expression. The picture had been taken at least five years before, Exley and Shafer visiting the zoo with their families. A purely platonic trip. And yet Shafer’s face betrayed a depth of emotion for Exley that ran past simple friendship.
Shafer seemed to read Wells’s mind. “You’ll never be free of her as long as you work here.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be.”
“Maybe you don’t.” Shafer turned the picture facedown on his desk.
“Meantime. Setting ghosts aside. I know you’re angry, John, but I think we ought to wait on Duto until we have a better idea of the game he’s playing. Because this whole thing just keeps getting stranger. While you were sunning yourself in Cairo, I was keeping busy.” Shafer explained his meeting with Murphy and then the anonymous letter that Joyner, the inspector general, had gotten.
“You think Murphy was stealing?”
“Yes. But that’s not the strangest part. The letter had twelve PINs. I copied them all.”
“PINs.”
“Every detainee gets a unique prisoner identification number, a ten-digit serial number. Most of the time, the PINs are matched to a name, date of birth, home country — the basics of identity. If detainees aren’t carrying ID when we arrest them, and we can’t figure out who they are, the PIN won’t be matched to any biographical information. In that case it’s called a John Doe PIN and the first three digits are always 001.”
“Did 673 have any of those?”
“No,” Shafer said. “They always knew at least the name of the person they were interrogating. But whether or not we have any biographical details, once a prisoner is assigned a PIN, it’s entered in what’s called the CPR. Stands for Consolidated Prisoner Registry. The worldwide detainee database. And the CPR includes everybody, without exception. If you’re in U.S. custody, whether you’re at Guantanamo or the black sites, you are required to be in it. Even the base in Poland. Which was called the Midnight House, according to Murphy.”
“Zumari said the same.”
“Must have been proud of their ingenuity if they were telling prisoners.” Shafer sat at his desk and tapped keys until a blue screen with a white title appeared:
“I got the passcodes two days ago,” Shafer said. “In between explaining to Cairo Station why you were there and why you hadn’t told them. You can imagine.”
“If only I cared.”
Shafer entered the codes. A new screen popped up, a black word on a white background.
