floor and a hood pulled over his head. Darkness inside darkness. The true Midnight House.
A cell five prisoner could not shower or exercise. He was removed only for interrogation sessions and never told in advance when he’d be taken. The Rangers fired tear gas through the meal slot, stormed in, and dragged him out. But Karp believed that a prisoner should be left alone as long as possible once he’d been moved to cell five. Even interrogation, even Tasers and stress positions and waterboarding, came as a relief from the void.
In fact, cell five was so psychologically punishing that Rachel Callar had forbidden 673 from using it for more than four weeks straight. On this rule, she had refused to waver. A prisoner who wouldn’t talk after four weeks of pure solitary confinement could not be broken, only driven insane, she said.
AFTER TWO WEEKS interrogating bin Zari, Karp and Jack Fisher asked Terreri for permission to move him to cell five. Normally, they would have waited longer. The cell was the squad’s last resort. They’d used it only twice before. Once it had worked, in just over a week. Once it hadn’t, on a Yemeni who’d refused to speak even after four full weeks. They’d had to declare him intractable and ship him to Guantanamo. The Yemeni had been their only real failure, not counting Mokhatir, the Malaysian who’d had the stroke in the punishment box. And the stroke was plain bad luck.
But after running bin Zari through their standard treatments, Karp and Fisher had realized that he seemed to relish them, to view them as a form of combat. They couldn’t break him directly. They would have to come at him sideways, hope that he broke himself. The tactic hadn’t worked on the Yemeni, who had simply locked down. But bin Zari was smarter than the Yemeni, more social — and therefore, theoretically anyway, more susceptible to the isolation of cell five.
FOR A WHILE, bin Zari didn’t seem to mind it. He paced back and forth, regular steps, as if he was trying to measure minutes with his feet. He ran his fingers along the thick pads on the door. He sang. He fell to his knees and prayed. Once he seemed to be reciting an entire cricket match, play by play. He leaned against the door and told him that they would never break him.
They left him for six days. Then they took him out, and Karp promised him that he would remain in the cell until he answered their questions. No threats, no violence. Just the promise of a lifetime in the dark.
His second week wasn’t as pleasant. He walked less, talked less. He spent hours each day standing at the door, waiting for any hint of motion outside. He ran his hands along the smooth concrete walls, looking for cracks. He let his food sit for long stretches, though he always ate eventually. Karp was surprised he didn’t try a hunger strike. His body temperature rose and fell unpredictably, and his breathing became labored, both signs of stress.
After eight more days, they brought him out again. He’d lost weight. Two weeks of darkness had left his skin pallid, his eyes dull, his lips soft and loose. He blinked in the light of the interrogation room and tried to spit at Karp. But the saliva barely left his mouth.
Karp reached into the bag on the table, brought out an apple and a Swiss Army knife. Bin Zari jerked forward, straining against his chains. Karp sliced the apple slowly. He popped a slice into his mouth. The hunger in bin Zari’s eyes was frank and pitiful. His mouth opened, and a thin spool of drool dribbled out before he caught himself and licked his lips.
“Do you have any idea how long you’ve been in that room?”
Bin Zari was silent. He tried to keep his eyes off the apple, but he couldn’t.
“Fourteen days. Two weeks. And yet you look — well, see for yourself.”
Karp held up a mirror, gave bin Zari a look.
“It isn’t right,” bin Zari said. “What you do.”
It was the first time bin Zari had complained, the first time he’d shown weakness.
“You can make it stop,” Karp said, soothing now. “Just tell us.”
“Tell you what?”
Karp finished eating the apple, put the core in the bag. “Who gave you the uniforms and the passes. Who told you how to get through security. Just that. Start with that. And if that’s too much, give us one of your safe houses in Peshawar. Then you can stay up here in the light. Have an apple.”
Karp reached into his bag, extracted a second apple, smiling faintly, a magician pulling rabbits from a hat.
“But I tell you, Jawaruddin, before you decide, think about it. Because some questions we ask, we know the answers. We use those to double-check, make sure you’re telling the truth. And if we catch you lying, we’ll put you back down there and you’ll never get out. No matter how much you beg. The rest of your life. And you won’t die soon. We’ll make sure of it.”
Bin Zari leaned forward — and spat at Karp.
Back into the cell he went. For two days, the burst of hatred he’d summoned in the interrogation room seemed to strengthen him. He went back to pacing, back to praying. But inevitably, his energy faded. He lay on the floor, trying to see through the crack in the door. On the fifth day, he began to pound his head against the wall, a steady chunking that even Karp found awful, madness distilled to a single echoing thud. Terreri sent in the Rangers. They chained him down, put an IV in his arm with a glucose drip to feed him.
AT THIS POINT, Callar protested to Terreri.
“You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said.
“He’s lying in his own filth. Deprived of any stimuli. This is how you provoke a complete psychotic break. Irreversible.”
“You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said again. “We’re nineteen days in. I’m going to give Karp the last nine days.”
“What am I doing here?”
“Major, believe it or not, I listen to you. If not for you, I’d keep him in there forever.”
“That supposed to make me feel better, sir? Because it doesn’t.”
Callar walked out of the barracks and into the cold night air, across cracked concrete to the edge of the base. Stare Kiejkuty didn’t have much security. An eight-foot fence, a few spotlights, guard towers at the four corners, usually unmanned. It didn’t need more. Poland was its own security. There were no Chechens here, almost no Muslims at all. And after centuries of being batted back and forth between Russia and Germany, Poland had finally found a protector it could trust, a protector with no interest in swallowing it whole. No wonder the Poles loved the United States.
Outside the fence, life. Peasants sitting around their kitchens, eating boiled pierogi dipped in runny applesauce. The old ones gossiping about their children’s children. The young ones drinking buffalo grass vodka and texting one another — yes, even here — as they looked for their escape, to Warsaw or even farther west.
Did the peasants have any idea what was happening here? Would they care if they knew? No, Callar decided. Two generations before, they’d watched the Nazis feed Jews into ovens. They hadn’t protested. They hadn’t cared. More than a few had helped. The Poles were not a sentimental people. The tread of foreign armies had stamped the sentiment out of them long before World War II.
Nine days. They’d put bin Zari through hell for nineteen days already. What were nine more? Nine more might break him. It might.
“Nine days,” Callar said aloud.
She thought of how she’d gotten here: her decision to join the reserves, her tours in Iraq, Travis’s suicide. Along the way, each step had made sense, or seemed to. But taken together, they had the empty logic of a dream.
When they’d signed up for this squad, they’d all been promised two two-week leaves, recognition of the intensity of the work. Callar had taken one, halfway through. The trip had not gone well. Steve loved her, she knew. The blunt truth was that he loved her more than she loved him. He’d grown up in an army family, raised to obey. Unlike most kids, he had accepted the rules without question. His parents had died while he was in community college, his dad of a heart attack and his mother of breast cancer that had refused to answer to chemotherapy. After they were gone, Steve had retreated into himself while he waited for someone new to obey. Probably he should have been a soldier, but the military’s machismo didn’t suit him. So he went to nursing school
