request for gear. He bought flat-screen TVs, computers, even a couple of Range Rovers for prisoner transport, quote/unquote. Still, the money was piling up. At this rate, they’d have two million bucks in their accounts when the tour was done.
Murphy had told Terreri that a month back, late on a Thursday night, in his office, as they knocked back pints of Zywiec, the local beer. It wasn’t half bad once Terreri got past the faint formaldehyde smell.
“Two million?” Terreri said. “You serious?”
“Yeah.” Murphy sucked down his beer. “There’s something else, too.”
Terreri took a sip, waited.
“Nobody’ll care if we send it home,” Murphy said. “Fact is, they won’t even notice it’s gone.”
Murphy hadn’t said any more that night, but Terreri could guess where he was going. Soon enough they’d have another conversation. The only question was how much they would lift and how’d they’d split it. Terreri wouldn’t feel guilty. The agency was practically begging them to skim.
SO TERRERI HAD A million reasons, give or take, to slog through the last couple of months of this job. But now he had to deal with Jawaruddin bin Zari. Their newest problem. The worst mooch they’d had yet. Since he’d arrived a week before, they’d treated him decently. Terreri’s orders. He always gave the detainees a chance to talk. But bin Zari had made clear he wasn’t interested. He seemed to want to provoke them into getting tough.
So be it. Terreri buzzed Jerry Williams in the basement. “Major. Please take prisoner eleven”—bin Zari—“to room A.”
“Yessir. Full shacks?”
“Hands and hood only, unless you believe he’s a risk.”
Ten minutes later, Williams and Mike Wyly led bin Zari into a cinder-block room, white, twelve feet square, lit by a hundred-watt bulb. A steel conference table and two steel chairs, all bolted to the floor, were the room’s only furnishings.
Bin Zari didn’t complain as Williams pushed him into a chair and snapped shackles around his legs. Only then did Williams uncuff him and tug off his hood. Bin Zari blinked, opened and closed his hands. A week of confinement hadn’t shaken his self-assurance. He appeared calm, almost bored. He had heavy, round features and relatively light skin for a Pakistani, more beige than brown. His slack skin and big lips promised decadence. He could have been a nightclub promoter in London, a hash dealer in Beirut.
“Jawaruddin bin Zari,” Terreri said in Arabic. “We captured you in June in Islamabad. Put you on a plane. Now you’re in what we call a secret undisclosed location. I know you understand me. I know you speak Arabic.”
Terreri let a minute go by. But bin Zari remained silent.
“We’ve treated you with dignity.”
“Is that what you call breaking my friend’s ribs? Injecting us with drugs?”
“What happened to you before you arrived, that wasn’t my doing.”
“Have you given him medical treatment?”
“Not your business,” Terreri said. “But yes, we have. Tell me, have we not treated you fairly? Would you have done the same for us? In return, I ask only that you answer our questions. Which you have not done.”
Silence.
“You may be asking yourself, ‘Why is this American wasting his breath? Is he so stupid as to think I’m going to speak?’ ”
Terreri dropped the safety on his pistol, snapped back the slide to chamber a round. Bin Zari’s eyes widened, but his breathing stayed steady. Terreri raised the gun, pointed it at bin Zari’s face.
“My friend. This speech is for me. Not for you. So that when we hurt you, when we break you, I won’t feel guilty. I won’t say to myself, ‘Maybe we didn’t give him a fair chance. Maybe he would have talked on his own.’ ”
“Do it, then,” bin Zari said.
Terreri flicked the safety on, put the gun back in his holster.
“You think I’d kill you, Jawaruddin? No. We want what’s in there.” Terreri tapped his temple. “That fat head of yours. Your organization, your e-mail addresses, your contacts in the ISI, your safe houses, all of it. And you’re going to give it to us.”
Bin Zari shook his head. And smiled, his wide lips spreading into a rubbery grin. Terreri felt a bloom of rage surge into his chest, his heart taking three beats where one would do. This fool. His bravado, real or fake, would lead only to more agony.
He was so tired of this.
“Your choice.” Terreri nodded to Williams.
“Full shacks?” Williams had seen this speech before.
“Nice and tight.”
Williams pulled the hood over bin Zari’s head.
THREE MINUTES LATER, Terreri sat alone, staring at the empty chair across the table. He laughed, a low chuckle. His rage had faded. That poor deluded asshole.
Then the door opened. Terreri found himself looking at the shrink. Rachel Callar. Another irritation. From the start, Terreri had wondered if she was tough enough for the job. But Whitby had insisted that they had to have a real doctor, preferably a psychiatrist. And Callar had volunteered. Before she’d signed up, Terreri had interviewed her, asked her if she understood what she was getting into.
She told him about a private she’d met in Iraq, a guy from the First Cav, two kids and another on the way. Guy’s name was Travis. An IED hit his Humvee. He walked away with a bad concussion and a broken hand. But the other guys in the Humvee both got wasted. The gunner’s leg landed in Travis’s lap. Travis blamed himself for getting hit. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he heard his gunner cursing him out. His hand healed, and he wanted to get back to his squad. Callar told him, “We’re gonna send you stateside, get you the help you need.” Three a.m. on the day he was set to go home, he put his.45 in his mouth and blew his head off. Left a two-word note:
“I let him down,” Callar said. She told Terreri she was tired of playing defense, trying to fix guys. This way she could be part of the fight, get the intel that they needed to save lives.
The story bugged Terreri. He wasn’t seeing the connection. She wanted in on interrogations because this guy offed himself? But they had to have a doctor, and she said she’d move to Poland. So he signed her up.
She’d been fine the first four months. But then something had happened. Okay. Terreri knew what had happened. They’d had a problem with this nasty little Malaysian named Mokhatir. He’d come to them from a raid in the southern Philippines. A Delta/Philippine army team had caught him in an apartment with three soda bottle- sized bombs that looked just about right for taking down an airplane. The other two guys in the apartment had been killed, so Mokhatir was all they had. He wouldn’t talk, and after a month the Deltas sent him to the Midnight House.
He insisted he hadn’t made more than three bombs. Karp and Fisher hadn’t believed him. They’d pushed him harder than any prisoner they’d had before. Over Callar’s objection, they’d locked him in the punishment box for fourteen hours straight. When they opened the cell, Mokhatir couldn’t move his legs or left arm. At first they thought he was faking, malingering, but after a few minutes they realized he wasn’t.
When they called for Callar, she said he’d had a stroke, probably the result of infective endocarditis. Bacteria had built up in a heart valve and caused Mokhatir’s blood to clot inside his heart. Then the clot had traveled to his brain, blocking blood vessels there and causing a stroke. Callar said he needed to get to a hospital for real care, but Terreri refused, told her to do what she could on the base. Without an MRI or CAT scanner or clot-busting drugs, she was reduced to the basics. She gave him aspirin and antibiotics, kept him hydrated, elevated his legs. She knocked down the infection, and eventually the clot seemed to break. A few days later, Mokhatir regained the use of his arm. But he never walked again. After a month, they put him on a plane, sent him to the Philippines, said he’d had a stroke, cause unknown.
The day after they flew him out, Callar knocked on Terreri’s door, said they needed to report what had
