Inside Out

“Lanier! Paula Lanier. She took the picture. While you were sleeping, on the way to Costa Rica.”

Ben stopped and turned. He tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t. “What?”

“She works for me, all right? Or she did, when I represented the vice president’s office. Now I’m more of an asset for her because of my co

“I don’t understand.”

“I knew the FBI was going to be involved in this thing, okay? I knew as soon as it broke, and I needed someone I could trust. So I pulled some strings and had Lanier assigned. She’s been reporting developments to me. Including the involvement of a mysterious operative who wouldn’t even acknowledge his affiliations.”

“Who sent those contractors to Costa Rica? Who sent the two Ground Branch guys?”

“That was a CIA op.”

“But you knew about it.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I make it a habit to know about everything.”

Ben thought. Someone had followed him from the airport that afternoon. The only person outside of Hort who knew he’d been selected as the courier was Paula. He could have kicked himself for his stupidity, for letting his guard down. She’d played him. And he’d fallen for it.

“What about the two guys who followed me from National today?”

“Ground Branch again.”

“Who the hell’s ru

“It’s not a question of who’s ru

“And your common interest on the tapes is the Caspers.”

“That’s everybody’s common interest. Every American’s, anyway.”

“What are they?”

“Why are you asking me? You work for Horton, right? He knows as much as I do. Christ, he was responsible for their orderly disposition.”

Ben was surprised but didn’t show it. “I’ll ask him when I’m ready to ask him. I’m asking you now.”

Ulrich looked at him. “What do you think is on those tapes?”

Ben shrugged. “Waterboarding. Torture.”

Ulrich laughed. “Waterboarding and torture aren’t even news anymore. Over half the country supports torture, didn’t you know? And over sixty percent of Evangelicals.”

“Video would be different.”

“Well, that’s probably true. Seeing what American soldiers and spies had to resort to in the war on terror would have been painful. It would have damaged our self-image as a country, weakened our will to do what needs to be done. But the Caspers were the real problem. Asking the country to accept what we had to do about them… that would have been too much. People wouldn’t be able to understand. And they shouldn’t be forced to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll give me the tapes?”

“For the truth.”

Ulrich nodded. “You know about the ghost detainees, don’t you?”

Ben thought about what he’d heard. “Rumors. Detainees the CIA was holding without acknowledging their capture or detention. Shuttling them through Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo and the rest so the Red Cross couldn’t verify their existence, or keeping them at the black sites. That’s what the Caspers were?”

Ulrich wiped blood from his mouth, then regarded his hand. “If you want to keep secret prisoners, you have to build secret prisons. After 9/11, we tasked the CIA with doing exactly that. And then we populated what they built.”

“With the Caspers.”

“Among others. Now, the way you hear about it in the media today, you’d think all the people we picked up in the war on terror were i

Ben thought of the Manila city jail. “Well, if you couldn’t prove they’d done anything-”

“Just because we couldn’t prove it in a court of law didn’t mean it wasn’t so. And look, okay, maybe some of them were i

Ben didn’t answer. Not so much earlier, he would have gotten it. But now, hearing it out loud, he wasn’t sure.

“So you captured these ghosts. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, the way they were interrogated might have offended the sensibilities of the armchair quarterbacks who’ve already forgotten 9/11.”

“You waterboarded them?”

Ulrich tugged on his beard. “At first.”

Ben had been waterboarded during his SERE-survival, evasion, resistance, escape-training. He’d consented to it, the people who’d done it had been his own instructors, he’d been provided with a safe word and a te

“What do you mean, ‘at first’?”

“Let’s just say that, by the end, they wished they were just being waterboarded.”

Ben looked at him, trying to imagine what you would have to do to a man to make him long to be waterboarded, instead. He couldn’t come up with anything. He said, “And the CIA videotaped it.”

“You got it. There’s no genius like a CIA genius. Fundamentally, they created a whole line of government snuff films.”

Ben imagined a bunch of guys watching God knows what through a viewfinder, recording it, watching it again later on a screen in a dark room. Rewinding it. Pausing. He thought of what Hort had said, about how torture is always about something else. He felt sick.

“And you’re worried that if the public ever sees the videos, they’re not just going to go after the people who filmed and starred in them, they’re going to go after the producers, too.”

Ulrich looked at him. “If I were you, I’d be a little more concerned about Muslim audiences on this than I would be with domestic ones.”

“Yeah, I get that. But you’re not me.”

Ulrich didn’t answer.

Something was tickling at Ben’s mind. There were a lot of things you knew when you were in the unit, or at least that you’d hear about. But the Caspers… not a word. How had they covered it up so completely?

“What did you do with them?” he said. “The Caspers. When you were done with them. Done filming.”

Ulrich didn’t answer.

Ben said, “Tell me you didn’t.”

“Look, these were genuinely dangerous men-”

“Oh, man-”

“-who couldn’t just be released. But they couldn’t be tried, either, or they would have gone public with tales of torture. And besides, they’d go free in the end anyway because people would say their confessions had been coerced.”

“What did you do with them?”

“They were disposed of.”

“You mean, the CIA just executed them? Prisoners?”

“Not the CIA. JSOC. Your commander. Horton.”

Ben blinked despite himself. “What? Why?”

“JSOC was being run out of the Office of the Vice President. The Caspers were just one of the operations your people were involved in. They were ghosts anyway-no records of their capture, movement, detention, or imprisonment. It was as though they hadn’t existed. We just had to make de jure what was de facto. And now it is. They don’t exist. They never did.”

“Except for the tapes.”

“Yes. That’s why we wanted those tapes back. You ought to get a medal for recovering them.”

For some reason, the thought of this guy proposing a medal, and for this, made Ben want to hit him again.

“What was Ecologia, then?”

“A company that devised an i