“I’ll leave you to think things over.”
Then I nodded to Deutsch, and without another word, we headed down towards the cabin, Roos’s curses fading with each step.
We left him to stew there for twenty minutes, which was pushing it. I certainly didn’t want him dead. But I knew he was a tough son of a bitch, and I wanted this over today. Before the sun set.
We didn’t say much as we waited. I asked Deutsch about the gunfight down the mountain. She said it was no big deal. And that was it.
She could see I’d never done anything like this before.
I wasn’t a fan of “enhanced interrogation” or any other euphemism people came up with for torture. I wasn’t raised that way. It ran against everything I believed in, everything I thought our nation stood for. But I wanted him to talk, and I needed to scare the bejeezus out of him. I can’t say I was enjoying it, but to be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t uneasy about it either. It had to be done, which, I know, is not a politically acceptable excuse. It’s the excuse everyone gives. But there was no way around it and all I needed to do to brush away the first semblance of a qualm, if it arose, was to picture any one of the people that I knew had died because of a few callous words that bastard and his cronies had whispered to their hired guns.
No qualms showed up.
We went back up there twice.
The first time, he was still playing tough even though he looked like shit. He was going through violent shivering and had lost a lot of his muscular coordination. He’d also peed himself. Exposure to this much cold reduces the blood flow to the skin’s surface. The body can only hold so much liquid and responds by ditching whatever it can. That’s usually the first to go.
At this stage, you’d expect him to lose the ability to make rational decisions. Mountaineers suffering from hypothermia sometimes just laid down in the snow to sleep, or failed to fasten the most basic of harnesses properly. I’m not sure whether spilling his guts to me constituted a rational or an irrational decision as far as he was concerned. I was hoping for rationaclass="underline" it might help him survive, even if he only thought that had a small chance of happening. When we’ve got our backs right up against the wall, our survival instincts take over. I hoped his would, before it was too late.
But he was still fighting it. So we left him again, for fifteen minutes this time.
When we got back, he was in really bad shape. His body had stopped shivering, having lost any energy to keep itself warm. His limbs were stiff, his heart rate and his breathing barely there. His skin was pale and icy cold to the touch. More importantly, his resolve had also frittered away. His mind was weakened, he was disorientated, and his speech was slurry. And he was in pain. Lots of pain. His body had also decided his internal organs were more important that his extremities, which were red and hurting. All of them. Frostbite was setting in, fast.
If we left him there, he’d start dying soon. A long, painful death. Eventually, he’d start having hallucinations, then he’d lose consciousness and drift off into oblivion.
I didn’t want that.
He didn’t either.
On my haunches close to him, I asked, “Are you ready to talk?”
To the extent that he could answer, he did.
He wanted to talk.
It wouldn’t just be for my own ears. This would be saved for posterity.
This time, we’d brought up a couple of blankets and a thermos of hot coffee from the cabin. We wrapped him up, let him drink, and waited until he had warmed up enough to become coherent. Then I pulled out the GoPro Kurt had bought in New York, turned it on, and aimed it at Roos. For added safety, Deutsch also took out her phone, switched its camera to video, and started filming too.
70
With the GoPro blinking red as it recorded his words, Roos talked.
A lot.
The Janitors weren’t born out of some evil master plan, he told us. They didn’t come about by design. They just grew out of necessity and took shape gradually, with each new assignment.
It was all about getting rid of liabilities. Eliminating threats. Silencing whistleblowers. Whether they were abroad-or at home.
“All this fuss about JSoc,” he said with a weak, wheezy chortle, his words still struggling to come out. He was referring to the Joint Special Operations Command, a present-day network of highly trained paramilitary assassins who operated outside the traditional chain of command in executing the kill lists they were handed. They’d been the subject of exposés and debates in the news lately. JSoc combined the secretive, unaccountable world of mercenaries with the intel and firepower of the military, and its officials reported directly to the president. Its budget was secret. JSoc was, for all intents and purposes, the president’s personal hit team.
“It makes me laugh,” Roos continued slowly after a dry, pained cough. “Those pussies in the press are outraged, they think it’s a new low for us. It’s not. We’ve been doing it for decades. Only difference is-everyone’s now for it. Hell, JSoc got bin Laden, didn’t they? They ran team six.” He paused, catching his breath. “Let me tell you, back then? Things were different. The Cold War, Eastern Europe and Central America, South-East Asia, back in the day-it wasn’t as sexy. They were too far for people to really care, and there was nothing to show people for them to realize how serious the threat was. No embassies were bombed, no towers came down. It wasn’t the ‘War on Terror.’ We had to stay in the shadows.”
“But the people you were killing weren’t terrorists who were responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians,” I said. “They were innocent civilians.”
He wagged an angry, trembling finger at me. “We never killed anyone who didn’t pose a direct threat to the nation. And that’s a fact. We just did the dirty work no one dared to talk about. People out there-they have no idea. But they owe us. Because it’s not just about terrorists and military threats. It’s also about the bigger picture, about our place in the world. About how other countries see us. About economic power. About making sure we stay on top. I mean, look. You know the damage Woodward and Bernstein did. That whole Watergate mess-that should have never been allowed to happen.”
“You call it damage,” I said. “I call it what makes us strong. What makes us the best.”
“Such a God damn Boy Scout,” Roos spat. “That’s what makes us the best? To have our own president humiliated like that? To get him impeached, watch him crawl away from the White House with his tail between his legs while the rest of the world is laughing at us? How does that make us the best, exactly?”
He shook his head with disdain. I wasn’t about to argue with him. I wasn’t here for a debate. I was here to listen.
“It shook us, I tell you. Shook us all. I was just starting out, but for everyone around me, it was a massive failure. And I can tell you this-had my team been in place, that story would have never come out. Woodward and Bernstein wouldn’t have been around long enough to get the story out. And if we were still around today, you would have never heard of that cocksucker Edward Snowden either. Or any of those other Wikileaks faggots. That would have never been allowed to happen under our watch.”
We were getting off track. I had to reel him back.
I asked, “How did it start?”
He paused, gathering more strength, catching his breath. “We were at the CIA. Me, Eddy… we had an op going on in London with a Dutch contact. We were arranging some cocaine shipments to him in exchange for some favors in East Germany. And this fucking reporter for the Telegraph,” he said, “he got wind of it, cornered the guy, and got the whole story. And he was going to put it out there. Well, we found out in time. We talked to him, asked him to back down, explained the bigger picture. Explained that lives and careers were at stake. He wouldn’t. We tried threatening him. That only made things worse.”