“Yes, Muscles, I know. Hasn’t been decided. What you just saw, that could cause a lot of problems with the Paks. Only a few people back in D.C. even know about it. Even fewer know how we got it. And they don’t want Jawaruddin to get to Gitmo and start bitching about how he’s been treated. ’Specially if along the way he mentions the video. And we can’t exactly send him back to Pakistan, either. So, it’s complicated.”
“We ought to leave them here, let the Poles have ’em.”
“Personally, I wouldn’t care if they spent eternity and a day downstairs. But no, they won’t be staying here. When we go, the Midnight House is done.”
“We oughta just kill ’em,” Fisher said. He looked around the room. “I’m serious. Much easier.”
Terreri puffed his cigar, blew a perfect ring. “You mean it, don’t you, Jack?”
“That man downstairs is a human roach.”
“You’re sick,” Callar said.
“All your complaining, you’ve been here every step,” Fisher said. “Little late to be holding your nose.”
“Wish I could agree with you, Jack,” Terreri said. “But that’s not how we do.”
“You sure? One hundred percent? If I went downstairs right now and did it myself, I’ll bet none of you would turn me in.”
“I would,” Callar said.
“Would you, now, sweetheart?” Fisher stepped toward her, blew a stream of smoke in her face.
“Enough, Jack,” Terreri said. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Good. And on that happy note, let’s go outside, take a couple pictures. Something to remember when we’re old and gray.”
DOWNSTAIRS, MOHAMMED PULLED HIMSELF atop the cot, wormed his head into the vent. The tube was cracked and rusted, the air inside hot and stale. He wanted to pull out his head. He wanted to lie on the floor and close his eyes and sleep. And wake up in the room in Haji Camp he shared with his brothers, wake up before the Jaish had touched him. He was so tired.
But the djinns didn’t care about his excuses. They had chosen him for the mission. As he wavered, their voices rose, a cacophony of curses and threats, filling him until he couldn’t breathe. Go on, the djinns said. Leave it behind.
Mohammed balanced himself on top of the cot. He pushed himself into the vent and found the cross-passage that ran horizontally through the ceiling of the cell block. To his right, the passage led to the front of the block and the guard station. To the left, it ran toward the rear wall and Jawaruddin’s cell.
Left, the djinns whispered. Left.
Mohammed put the knife into the passage to his left. He reached for the ridges of metal where the ventilation pipes had been welded together and pulled himself left, pushing the knife before him. For a moment he was stuck, and then he wriggled his shoulders sideways and freed himself and squirmed forward with the syncopated twists of a snake. He slid over the vertical vent that dropped into the cell beside his and wriggled along until he reached the fourth and final cell. In the cell below, he heard Jawaruddin. He looked down and saw Jawaruddin’s bulky body through the grate. “Monkey. Are you up there?”
Now, the djinns said. He’s the devil. The devil, the devil, the devil. And if you don’t do what we say, you’ll be the devil, too.
Mohammed dropped down and kicked through the grate and slid out.
IN THE CELL BELOW, bin Zari looked up almost in awe as Mohammed’s feet emerged from the vent. “Crazy monkey. Where did you think you were going? Trying to escape?”
Bin Zari reached out and tugged at Mohammed’s legs and pulled him down. Centimeter by centimeter, Mohammed’s belly and neck and head came out of the grate. His arms were over his head, the last part of him to emerge—
And so bin Zari had only an instant to react when Mohammed’s arms came free and Mohammed’s right arm swung down at his face with something that looked like a lightning bolt wrapped inside his brown fingers. Bin Zari grunted and twisted his head and let go of Mohammed—
But he was too late. The sharpened edge of the cot leg caught his left eye and tore through the lid and the cornea and into the meat of the eyeball. Bin Zari lifted his arms and tried to scream, but Mohammed shoved the leg deep into his brain, and before bin Zari knew what had happened the pain spread from his eye to everywhere and nowhere and he couldn’t hold himself and—
He collapsed beneath Mohammed, dead before he touched the ground.
BUT MOHAMMED AND THE DJINNS weren’t finished. Mohammed slashed at Jawaruddin’s face and belly until the big man’s guts covered the floor of the cell and his nose and ears lay stacked on what was left of his chest. Now eat, the djinns told him. Eat.
“No,” Mohammed said aloud.
Then we’ll never leave you alone.
But Mohammed had the answer for that. He wiped the cot leg as best he could against bin Zari’s blanket. When the blood was gone and he could see the edge of the blade he’d made, he tilted back his neck and tore at himself. The cutting wasn’t easy. The blade was dull now and he wouldn’t have imagined his poor, wretched body would fight its own destruction so desperately. But the djinns were quiet at last. So he cut and cut until his own warm blood covered his hands and his chest and washed him clean.
28
We took pictures for a while and sat outside and had a couple beers. Then we came back in and found the bodies. Callar did. She went downstairs, and we heard her screaming.”
Wells and Murphy had circled the neighborhood as Murphy explained how bin Zari was captured and tortured and finally broken. How he’d told them about the laptop. How the Deltas had found the computer in the Swat Valley. And what it had held.
Somehow they wound up sitting on the driveway where Wells had parked his WRX. The two agency guards watched from the van.
“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.”