“A regular cell.”
“A regular cell. A shower. A toilet and lights and a bed and solid food. All the things a man should have. Even a radio and a television.”
“You promise.”
Besides the bottle of water, Karp had brought a briefcase into the interrogation room. He popped the latches, handed over a file. Three copies of a two-page contract, the first in Pashto, the second in Urdu, the third in English, pledging good treatment. No explanation of what bin Zari would have to do in return. Spaces at the bottom for signatures from bin Zari and Karp and Terreri, who had already signed.
The contracts had been Karp’s own innovation, and they’d proven brilliant. They were unenforceable and meaningless. But printed on heavy stock with fine legal frippery, they gave detainees the illusion of returning to a world of laws and rules. They announced a partnership, sour but real, between jailer and detainee.
Karp slid a pen across to bin Zari.
“I promise,” he said. “Take your time. Look it over and decide.”
But bin Zari had already put his shaking hand to the page.
THAT NIGHT, KARP KNOCKED on the door to the first-floor room that Callar used as an infirmary. Bin Zari was inside, a drip carrying intravenous antibiotics into his arm, bandages and ointment on pressure sores that dotted his back and legs. His breathing was slow and labored and his eyes dull.
“He gonna be okay?”
“Should be. Fever’s coming down,” Callar said.
“When can he talk?”
“You cannot be serious. His infection’s still raging.”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
Callar was through fighting. “Tomorrow, probably. He won’t be feeling great, but that’s better, right? What we want.”
“You’re finally getting it,” Karp said. He laid a friendly hand on her shoulder.
Suddenly she wanted to kiss him, this man who repulsed her. Put her arms around him and take him back to her room and make hate with him. Compound her degradation by betraying her husband. Sink as low as she could. She fought the impulse down. He was smiling, and she wondered if he’d somehow read her mind. But his attention seemed to be focused on bin Zari.
“Getting it,” she said. “Yes. I think I am.”
20
In his rearview mirror, Wells watched the men in suits closing on the Subaru. Their hands were belt-high. Holster-high. With the Tahoe in front of him, the Caprice behind, he’d given up his chance to run. He unlocked his doors, lowered his window, put his hands on the wheel.
The guy at his window was maybe thirty-three, medium height, with a blue suit, brown skin. He flipped open his wallet, showed Wells an FBI identification badge.
“Mr. Wells? I’m Agent Joseph Nieves. You need to come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then you’d best tell me why.”
“You’re a material witness in a federal investigation.”
“I’ll come. But I’m driving.”
“We’d prefer if you ride with us.” Nieves sounded embarrassed.
“You made your point. Don’t push it.” Though Wells almost hoped Nieves would.
Nieves stepped back, murmured into the microphone in his lapel, nodded. “Mr. Wells, will you give me your word—”
“Yes. Let’s go.”
THEY CONVOYED NORTH along the Beltway, the Caprice’s siren clearing the road as smoothly as a snowplow. At exit 46, they swung east onto Chain Bridge Road, which led to the Langley campus. But they weren’t going to the CIA. Just past the Dulles toll road, they turned left, heading for a complex that looked like a typical suburban office park, centered around a large X-shaped building.
In reality, the complex — called Liberty Crossing — was the newest center of power in the American intelligence community. Its low-key appearance was deceiving. The buildings were more concrete than glass, built to survive a truck bomb. A thick-walled guardhouse protected the main entrance, and a hairpin turn in the access road ensured that vehicles would be moving slowly as they approached it. Behind the guardhouse, waist-high steel boluses blocked the road. In block letters, a sign proclaimed: “Pre-cleared visitors only. Visitors without pre- clearance will not be admitted.” And an afterthought: “Welcome to NCTC/ODNI”—the National Counterterrorism Center and the office of the director of national intelligence.
The Caprice stopped beside the guardhouse. From the Subaru, Wells watched as Nieves handed over his badge and had a short, heated conversation with the guard inside. Another guard in a flak jacket emerged from the back of the house, leading a German shepherd. The dog trotted around the WRX, poking its nose under the bumpers. “Clear,” the handler said. And only then did the boluses behind the guardhouse retract, opening the road to the building.
THEY PARKED in the visitors’ spots near the front entrance. Nieves walked to Wells’s door. “You holding?”
Wells flipped open his jacket to show his Glock.
“It would be easier if—”
Wells slipped the pistol under the seat. “Just don’t try to strip-search me.”
He wasn’t strip-searched, but he did have to pass through a body-imaging scanner at the entrance. “Standard procedure for all visitors,” Nieves said.
“As long as it’s standard procedure.”
The building had been finished barely a year earlier, purpose-built for Whitby’s new agency. Its lobby was expensive, crisp, and high-tech, white walls and marble floors so smooth they belonged on the starship
Just past the guard station, Nieves waved a keycard at an unmarked steel door that opened into a long concrete hallway. “This way.”
Wells followed Nieves into a windowless square room with a camera in the corner.
“Get you a soda or anything?” Nieves said.
Wells ignored him until he left. After ten minutes, the door opened again and two agents hustled Shafer in. “Whitby’s certainly making a point,” Shafer said, after they left. “Oh, yes, indeed. How’d they pick you up?”
Wells told him. “You?”
“Outside my house,” Shafer said. “No helicopter, but they embarrassed me in front of the kids. Idiots.”
Wells closed his eyes and saw Cairo, the mosques and the minarets and the river that hardly seemed to move. “Have you heard anything about Alaa Zumari?”
As far as I know, he’s still a fugitive. Unfortunately I can’t call your buddy Hani and ask for an update.”
