But now she wished she felt as calm as she looked. This relentless antagonism, not just from Karp but from Terreri and Jack Fisher, was grinding her down. Last night she’d dreamed that she stood atop an endless tightrope, nothing below her, not a net or flat ground or even a canyon, nothing but a black void. Nothing to do but keep walking. And then she fell.
She hadn’t had that dream since medical school.
“Ken. Let’s just talk it out. Mohammed hasn’t given us anything.”
“Not yet.”
“And when you talk to him, he doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Sometimes.”
“And odds are he doesn’t have much for us. Given his age, given his probable role in the bombing—”
“We won’t know unless we ask.”
“This place is incredibly stressful for him. He knows he can be punished at any time. He has no control over his sleep, his eating—”
“It’s called prison.”
“Even if you’re mentally healthy, prison is difficult. And that’s if you know how long you’re in, where you are. I don’t know whether it’s genetic or whether he had some serious trauma as an adolescent, but he’s in no shape for this place.”
“Serious trauma as an adolescent.” Karp actually laughed. “Like every other kid in Pakistan. Doc-tor”—Karp made the word sound ridiculous—“this kid shot one of our guys. He’s a terrorist.”
“I’m not saying he’s not.”
“Good. Then let me do my job. You have an objection, talk to the colonel.”
And Karp walked out.
A flush rose in Callar’s cheeks. She tilted her head, looked at the chipped concrete ceiling, and counted seconds until her emotions vanished and she turned clear as a plate-glass window. Steve had been right. She shouldn’t have taken the job. But she couldn’t let it beat her, couldn’t let them beat her. She couldn’t fail. Not again.
KARP LOOKED INTO Mohammed’s cell. The kid lay on his cot, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving. Karp reached for the cell door and then hesitated. The truth was that the shrink was half right. Mohammed didn’t belong here. Not because he was crazy, whatever nonsense he was sputtering.
“Axis one, my ass,” Karp mumbled in Callar’s direction. Trying to assert her authority with this psychiatric mumbo jumbo. Of course Mohammed was stressed out and paranoid. He was supposed to be. He was here for an interrogation, not spa treatment.
No, Mohammed didn’t belong here because he didn’t know anything. The CIA had traced him to a madrassa in Bat Khela that produced suicide bombers as efficiently as a meatpacking plant turned steers into hamburger. Beyond that, his life was a cipher. Another lost boy in a country full of them.
But they couldn’t move Mohammed anywhere, especially not Guantánamo, not until they got bin Zari to talk. Since 2006, the President had said repeatedly that America was no longer holding detainees incommunicado. Technically, he wasn’t lying. Technically, Mohammed and bin Zari were even now on their way to Guantánamo. Their stay at the Midnight House was merely a stopover for “processing.”
But when Mohammed got to Guantánamo, he’d be given a lawyer. And once he told the lawyer that he’d been held at a secret prison along with Jawaruddin bin Zari, the lawyer would demand to know where bin Zari was and whether his rights were being respected. The United States was in no position to answer that question.
So, Mohammed couldn’t be split from bin Zari. And bin Zari wasn’t leaving the Midnight House, not as long as he wouldn’t talk. So far he hadn’t cracked, despite a half-dozen interrogation sessions and two nights in the punishment box. Karp and Fisher were already talking about their next step. Meantime, Mohammed would have to wait. Though Karp’s sympathy was limited. Mohammed had been willing to die as a suicide bomber. Three hots and a cot, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, was a decent bargain.
MOHAMMED FARIZ’S BAD LUCK had started more or less at birth. He’d entered the world in 1991, the youngest of six children, the product of a pinhole leak in a Chinese condom. His father, Adel, eked out a living ferrying laborers around Peshawar in a battered Toyota pickup.
Adel charged one rupee, about twelve cents, a ride. After gas and traffic tickets, some real, some imagined by underpaid cops, he cleared four dollars a day, enough to rent an apartment in the Haji Camp neighborhood, a warren of narrow streets around Peshawar’s grimiest bus station. The eight members of the Fariz family piled into four rooms in a six-story building that now and again dumped chunks of concrete on the heads of anyone unlucky enough to be walking by. Even in the summer, when Peshawar hit one hundred twenty degrees, Nawaz forbade her children from opening the apartment’s windows, which overlooked an alley that stank of sewage and stray dogs.
By the standards of Haji Camp, the Fariz family was middle-class. For a decade, Afghans had flooded into the North-West Frontier to flee the Taliban. Many wound up in Peshawar, destitute and desperate. They turned to heroin to salve their misery and prostitution to pay for their heroin. They were nearly all male. The sexual abuse of boys and young men was endemic in the North-West Frontier, in part because unmarried men and women could be killed simply for being seen together.
Prostitution and heroin use were illegal in Pakistan. But the Peshawar police had other concerns. They spent most of their time dodging suicide bombers, and the rest looking for bribes. They rarely came to Haji Camp. By 2003, the neighborhood’s disorder had attracted the attention of the self-appointed soldiers of the Jaish al-Sunni, the Army of the Sunni.
The Jaish were a ragged group of young men who called themselves an Islamic militia but were really a street gang, Bloods without the bandannas. Every few months, they descended on Haji Camp for flying raids, their hands heavy with chains and knives. Their leaders carried pistols but preferred not to use them. Guns were too easy. The Jaish wanted blood to flow. Sirens announced their raids, warning residents of Haji Camp to get into their homes. Anyone who remained outside was assumed to be an addict and fair game.
The day after he turned thirteen, Mohammed was caught in a raid. When the siren sounded, he was escaping Pakistan as best he could, playing World of Warcraft at a computer shop around the corner from his family’s apartment. To pay for the game, he dragged wheelbarrows of bricks at construction sites. Four hours of work brought him five rupees, enough to play for two hours on a slow computer, or an hour on a fast one. On the night of the raid, Mohammed had found a Shield of Coldarra, which promised him protection from even the toughest monsters. Then the siren sounded.
Around him, boys groaned to one another. “Tonight.” “Why tonight?” “Just got started and now this bastard.” “Ten rupees down the drain, man.”
One boy raised his hand and asked Aamer, the owner, if they could save their games and come back when the raid was over. “What the sign say?” Aamer said. There were seven signs, each painted a different color. They all had the same message, in English and Pashto:
“NO Refund EVER.”
“But it the Jaish, Aamer. The Jaish come, we should be having a refund.”
“What the sign say?”
The boys got up from their keyboards and hurried out. But not Mohammed. Mohammed had his new shield and five minutes left on his hour, and he planned to use both. Somewhere on this level, a Blessed Blade of the Windseeker was hidden. Mohammed meant to find it. The Jaish needed fifteen minutes to get this far into the neighborhood. Anyway, he was barely two blocks from his house.