Most of all, Terreri was sick of the work. Which surprised him. He’d been in the interrogation business since 2002. He’d run a squad in Iraq in 2004, when the army and the agency were just learning how to break guys. When Fred Whitby came to him, told him about 673, told him the army and the agency wanted him to run it, he’d jumped at the chance. He believed in the mission. They were doing what couldn’t be done at Guantánamo. Not with the lawyers and the reporters bitching and even the Supreme Court getting involved. The liberals could complain all they liked, but sometimes you had to let the bad guys know they weren’t in charge anymore and the ride was going to hurt.
What he hadn’t expected, though maybe he should have, was that he’d finally lost his taste for wrangling these jihadis. In the last six months, he’d burned out, plain and simple. He was sick of playing Whac-A-Mole with them. Of their lies. Of their historical grievances. Of hearing about the perfection of the Quran and the greatness of the Prophet. They all were reading from the same script, and none of them had any idea how boring it was. They were by and large a bunch of jerk-offs who ought to be herding sheep. But they considered themselves soldiers because they’d gotten a couple of weeks of training with AKs and grenades. The real geniuses, the big winners, they could mix oil and fertilizer to make a truck bomb, something any tenth-grader with a chemistry book could do. They thought that made them terrorist masterminds.
Terreri, he’d never been a cop, but he figured he knew how those LAPD officers in South Central felt. He was wasting his life with a bunch of losers who didn’t understand anything except a closed fist. When this tour was over, he was done with interrogations.
Being here did have a few compensations. Like at no place else he’d ever been, Terreri had free rein. Nominally, he was on special assignment for General Sanchez, but Sanchez had made clear from day one that as far as he was concerned, 673 was nothing more than a line on an org chart. The intel went up to the Pentagon and only then was funneled to Centcom. Basically, nobody in Washington or at Centcom headquarters in Tampa wanted to know anything about their tactics. They wanted only intel.
Terreri agreed. In 2003, 2004, lawyers for the CIA and army spent a lot of time talking about what was legal and what wasn’t. Lots of conference calls, lots of memos. Lots of ass-covering. Now some of those memos had wound up on the front page of The New York Times. The less in writing, the better. Instead of a list of do’s and don’ts, Terreri had a simple two-page document — a secret memorandum signed by the President.
I hereby authorize Task Force 673 to interrogate unlawful enemy combatants, as defined by the Department of Defense, using such methods as its commander deems necessary. I find that the operations of Task Force 673 are necessary to the national security of the United States. Pursuant to that finding, as commander-in-chief of the United States, I find that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to the members of 673 for any actions they shall take against unlawful enemy combatants.
Task Force 673 shall operate only outside the states and territories of the United States. Outside those states and territories, only the Uniform Code of Military Justice and not the laws of the United States shall govern the actions of Task Force 673.
In other words, 673 was in legal limbo, exempt from both military and civilian law in its treatment of detainees. Of course, they weren’t completely off the radar. Their detainees were listed in the prisoner registry, and eventually most of them wound up in Guantánamo. So Terreri’s men had to be sure that they didn’t do too much visible damage. Still, they had plenty of room, and Karp and Fisher, especially, had found ways to take advantage of it.
Then there was the money. The army’s accountants were strict. But the CIA was funding this operation, and the CIA had different rules. In fact, as far as Terreri could see, when it came to spending money on black projects, the CIA had no rules at all. Brant Murphy, who handled logistics for the squad, never turned down a 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.’ ”