and moved to California, where he found his way to the VA hospital where they’d met.
He was a handsome man, Steve, but he’d had only one previous girlfriend, and their relationship had ended badly.
Still. He was smart and funny in his sly way, a simple and good cook, a considerate lover — sometimes too considerate; sometimes she wanted to tell him to hurt her a little, but she never did because she knew he wouldn’t understand — and he supported her without question. He was the opposite of her father, who sucked all the oxygen out of every room he was in, who demanded unending attention as the price of his love. When Rachel went away, Steve wrote her every night, the quotidian details of life on the ward where he worked, misbehaving patients and hospital politics. She cherished the letters, cherished the knowledge that life went on back home. But she hardly wrote back. And he never minded, or if he did, he never complained.
Children would have changed him, she thought. Children would have given him a new focus. He would have been a wonderful dad. But she’d miscarried and then had an ectopic pregnancy and miscarried again, and after that, the docs said she couldn’t risk another pregnancy. They’d talked about adoption but hadn’t done anything, not yet, so it was just the two of them.
He’d argued with her, really argued, only once, when she’d told him she wanted to go to Poland. He’d warned her:
But she’d never listened to him before, and she wasn’t about to start.
NOW SHE KNEW how right he’d been. And yet she couldn’t tell him. Not over e-mail, not over the phone, not during those unbearable two weeks at home. Not because of anything he would have said. He would never have held his rightness over her, never tried to punish her for her mistake. And not because she’d be breaking every secrecy oath she’d signed, either.
Because she was humiliated at her weakness. Terreri and Karp and the others in the squad saw the bigger picture. They saw that breaking these detainees might help them dismantle terrorist networks that were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, nearly all civilians, nearly all Muslims.
But she could see only the prisoners themselves, screaming as they were Tased or locked for hours in a box smaller than a coffin. Watching them suffer tore against her instincts and her medical training. But she’d signed up for it, and she couldn’t quit. She would finish this tour, whatever it cost her. Just like the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to leave wasn’t hers to make.
She needed to tell Steve all this, but when she tried to, she couldn’t. They’d passed her leave in silent agony. He’d bought Padres tickets for them her second night back, and she’d forced herself to go. After that, she spent most days at home. She made plans with her friends and canceled them. She hardly slept. One night, at 2 a.m., she got into her 4Runner and drove east into the desert to the Arizona border and turned around and drove back, listening to the mad conspiracy theories high on the dial the whole way.
When she got back, she smelled eggs in the pan, onions sizzling, toast browning. In the kitchen, two plates were set, two glasses filled with orange juice. She sat down and watched him cook.
“Breakfast? ”
“Sure.”
He filled the plates and sat across from her. They ate in silence. She hadn’t eaten in two days, and she tried to savor every mouthful, to be present with him and not at the Midnight House. But she couldn’t help herself.
“This is great,” she said.
“You like it?”
“I do.” She shoveled scrambled eggs into her mouth, and before she could help herself she was crying.
“Tell me,” he said. “Rach, please.”
“I can’t.”
He turned away from her, went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it down before he spoke, still facing away.
“Watching you like this. I can’t take it.”
“You should leave me, Steve.” The baldness of her words surprised her. “I’m no good.”
He turned to look at her. Panic was in his eyes. “Do you want that?”
She didn’t trust herself to speak. She shook her head.
“I’d die first,” he said.
He was desperate to help her, desperate to make her happy. Instead, her misery echoed in him. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t unburden herself to him. And she couldn’t explain. She couldn’t talk.
She almost laughed at the irony. What she needed was a few hours with Kenneth Karp and his stun gun.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Let me get through this, okay? I promise. I’ll get through it. I’ll come back to you.”
BUT INSTEAD SHE’D SPUN further and further away. Now she was left with nothing but the base around her and the fence in front of her. Then even the fence seemed to shimmer and dissolve. She needed a moment to realize why. She was crying, not a few tears but spigots. She stood and cried until she had no tears left. Then she walked back to the barracks to do her job. To make sure that Jawaruddin bin Zari stayed alive.
AFTER FOUR DAYS LOCKED on his back with nothing but his own mind for company, bin Zari broke.
“All right,” he moaned into the silence. “All right. I will tell. Please. I will tell.”
Even then they didn’t get him. They left him another twenty-four hours. Then the Rangers brought him up to the interrogation room, dressed only in a loose diaper, stinking of his own waste. They pulled off his hood and locked him to the chair and hosed him down.
He was crying when Karp walked into the room, and Karp knew he had won. Karp uncuffed bin Zari’s hands and offered him a bottle of water. He tried to uncap it, but his hands and feet trembled uncontrollably. Karp unscrewed it, tipped it gently to bin Zari’s mouth.
“It’s too much,” bin Zari said.
Karp put a hand to bin Zari’s head, found the skin hot and clammy. They’d have to get him treated. But first—
“I know,” Karp said, soothing now. “I know.”
“I will tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Of course.”
“Things you can’t imagine. About the ISI. About Pakistan.”
Karp was wary of these grand pronouncements. “Don’t lie, Jawaruddin. If you lie—”
“It’s true. Please.”
“All right.” Bin Zari seemed serious. Karp wondered what he could be hinting at. They’d find out soon enough.
“You promise.”
“We’ve never lied to you, have we, Jawaruddin? We’ve hurt you, but we’ve never lied.”
And, in fact, Karp tried not to lie to detainees. They had to believe that once they decided to cooperate fully, they would no longer be punished.
“That’s true.”
“If you are honest, you answer our questions”—Karp carefully avoided phrases like “work with us” or even “tell us,” for fear they would force bin Zari to confront the reality of his betrayal—“then I promise, not another minute in there.”
