“So who killed them?” Wells said. “Jack Fisher?”
“No. Mohammed.”
“The boy?”
“He snuck into bin Zari’s cell through the overhead vent and killed bin Zari and then himself. They were alone for close to an hour. Plenty of time.”
“How? ”
“A blade from his cot leg. Must have made it at night when the Polish guards were sleeping.”
“You’re sure Fisher didn’t do it.”
“Why would I lie? Guy’s dead. And we could see what happened. Mohammed unscrewed the grate in his cell, got into the heating system, crawled across to bin Zari’s cell. Anyway, if you’d seen the bodies—” Murphy shook his head. “Bin Zari was torn up like wild dogs had gotten him. His body was in about eighty-five pieces. And Mohammed had bled out so badly. We practically needed waders to get to him. He was still holding the knife.”
“But it was convenient. Since you didn’t know what to do with them.”
“It was a nightmare. The most important prisoner since Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, more important, and this crazy kid offs him because we got sloppy. Lazy. We were there too long, all of us. We’ve been fighting this war too long.”
“Did you ever figure out why Mohammed did it?”
“No reason. Kid was nuts. Psychotic. Callar thought so all along.”
Psychosis, insanity in all its forms, was the thread, Wells thought. The madness had traveled from Mohammed Fariz to Rachel Callar to her husband like a kids’ game of telephone. If kids played telephone anymore.
Murphy reached into his pocket, withdrew a canister of Copenhagen. He extracted a wad of dip the size of a knuckle and stuffed it in his lower lip. “I’m not sorry we did what we did to Jawaruddin. We had to break him. But he shouldn’t have died that way, and Mohammed shouldn’t have either.”
Wells wasn’t interested in hearing Brant Murphy’s opinions on right and wrong. “You found the bodies. Then what?”
“Must be hard to be perfect, John.”
“Finish your story so I can tell you who I caught and get out of here and never have to see you again.”
Murphy spat a stream of dip into the driveway. “It was Terreri who realized what we had to do. Terreri and Fred Whitby.”
“Whitby knew that the tape you’d gotten from bin Zari—”
“Would make his career. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff. All along, he told us to do whatever we wanted to the detainees, long as the take was good and we didn’t leave marks. If they didn’t have scars or burns or missing fingers, nobody would care. That was the way Fred figured it. And he was right. But two dead bodies, especially in that condition, that would be hard to explain. Either we were negligent or just plain murderers.”
“You had to make them disappear.”
“We bought a couple of bank safes in Warsaw. We chopped up the bodies. Bin Zari was pretty well chopped up already. We put the pieces in the safes and borrowed a Polish military helicopter and flew out a hundred miles over the Baltic Sea on a cloudy night and dumped them. Boom. Boom. Problem solved.”
Wells didn’t trust himself to speak. Americans. Soldiers. Tossing human bodies away like garbage.
“Nobody on the squad protested,” Wells said.
“The only one who would have was Callar, and she wouldn’t speak to any of us by that point. But there was still one loose end to clear up.”
“The prisoner numbers.”
“I flew home. I’d met D’Angelo a couple times and I had a feeling about him, that he could be bought. At least rented. He was the kind of guy, always going somewhere fancy, getting somebody else to pick up the tab.”
“Takes one to know one.”
Murphy spat dip, another long stream.
“And he cleaned the database,” Wells said. “Jawaruddin bin Zari and Mohammed Fariz were never in U.S. custody. But he got too cute on the payoff.”
“We should never have agreed to the paper trail.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Wells said. “The video with bin Zari and Tafiq. Wouldn’t it be less valuable without bin Zari to authenticate it?”
“I get why you’d think that. But follow the chain. Don’t you think the ISI would do anything to keep that video secret?”
Now Wells saw. “We made a deal with Tafiq. Keep the video secret in return for access to the Paki nuke depots. Benazir Bhutto was murdered, and we know who’s behind it, and we haven’t told anyone.”
“I believe the term is
“Justice for Bhutto.”
“Good one, John.” Murphy’s grin revealed the flecks of dip between his teeth. “And Tafiq, he knows, the video comes out, the Pakis string him up. He tries for exile, who’s going to take him? Not the French. Not the Arabs. Not even the Russians. He’ll be stuck someplace like Somalia. He wants to make sure the tape stays in a vault somewhere. What’s he going to do? Tell us he was misquoted, he wants to see bin Zari to talk it over? He knows it’s real.”
“And he assumes bin Zari’s still alive. Somewhere in custody.”
“Correct. Everybody wins.”
Wells was silent. The pieces fit together now. The mystery solved. Yet ash filled his mouth. There would be no justice here, not for Benazir Bhutto, not for Jawaruddin bin Zari or Mohammed Fariz. Maybe not even for the members of 673 who had died at Steve Callar’s hand.
“You know all this for sure, or are you guessing?”
“Only the principals know for sure. But I saw the video, and I know about the nukes. The connection’s there. The greatest good for the greatest number.”
Murphy sounded cheerful now. He’d received a great gift, the chance to confess his sins without facing punishment. Without even chanting a dozen Hail Marys. The chance to rub Wells’s face in the reality of power politics at the highest level.
“Now I’ve told you everything. Time for your side of the bargain. And please don’t say it’s some government hit squad. I wouldn’t know whether to piss myself or slap you across the face.”
“One last question. You said the principals know. Who would that include? ”
“I would think all the obvious names. The President, the Vice President. The head of NSC and the SecDef. Whitby for sure. Duto, probably.”
“Duto? ”
“I’m guessing, but this kind of deal, don’t you think they ask the DCI for his opinion?”
Duto’s fingerprints were everywhere now, Wells thought. Only one thread left to unravel. Had Duto known about the dead prisoners all along? Had he set Wells and Shafer on the trail knowing even before they started what they would find?
“Did you tell Duto what happened to bin Zari and Mohammed?” Wells said.
“Of course not. The squad and Whitby were the only ones who knew.”
“Could he have found out some other way?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself.”
“I’ll do that.”
“So,” Murphy said. “A deal’s a deal.”
“It’s Steve Callar.”
“That’s impossible.”
