The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (35 page)

She began trying to extricate herself from the relationship, but there was a problem: He threatened her and he threatened her husband. He said that he had no qualms about killing women—that when he was in Iraq, the locals had been prohibited from
doing so by their religious scruples, and that the dirty business had fallen to him and had become a specialty. He even told her exactly how he'd kill her, sticking the knife above her collarbone and flicking it toward her feet, so that, with just the barest nick, her jugular and carotid would bleed out.

And then, when threats failed, he said he was going to kill himself. He told her he was spending Thanksgiving 2005 alone, eating frozen pizza, and that he was going to eat the barrel of one of his handguns if he didn't get a call from the volunteer, whom he called his Baby Doll.

 

H
E MADE A LOT OF THREATS.
Some of them were just avowals of lethal capacity—“Hey, I'm a trigger puller,” he said when I first met him. “I'll put a round in your eye.” Others were the result of him playing around, as when I was watching TV in his living room in August and the red dot of a laser pointer started dancing around the walls. He was standing behind me, in the kitchen, pointer in hand, and when I said, “Um, Zeke?” he answered, “Oh, sorry. But don't worry—if I ever wanted to kill you, you'd never see the red dot.” Others were more specific. When he first told me about his handler, he said that he'd told his handler about me—with the assurance that if I revealed information he didn't want revealed, “I'll hunt you down and kill you.” Another time, on the subject of journalistic betrayal, he said, “Never betray someone who can kill you from a thousand yards away.”

And yet for a long time I was not scared of him, because on some level he was not a scary guy. He was a lonely guy. He was a pathetic guy. He was a recently divorced guy who, like every other recently divorced guy in America, had a George Foreman grill in his kitchen and a stack of DiGiorno pizzas in his freezer. He was too hangdog to be threatening, and when he finally did
scare me, it was not because he threatened me. It was because I thought he was going crazy.

 

H
E HAD A PHOTOGRAPH
of a sniper on his living-room wall. It was poster sized, and it was framed, and the man it portrayed was carrying a gauze-wrapped long rifle and wearing a hood that hid everything but his eyes and the bridge of his nose. He looked like a primordial executioner, rising out of the swamp, and as soon as I saw the photo, I thought it was Zeke. He had always said that I would never be able to trace him to Afghanistan or Iraq—that his participation there, though ostensibly part of a Blackwater contract, was a “black op,” with no paper trail. Now there was a poster in his living room whose copyright line—“Steve Raymer, National Geographic Image Collection, 2005”—made me think that I had found an image linking Zeke to Iraq, right there on his wall.

He was cagey when, during my September visit, I asked who it was. “A friend,” he'd said. “Misunderstood. You'd like him if you got to know him, but not too many people get to know him.” And so I went home and did a search for Steve Raymer. His name came up right away, and so did the photograph, which was available for sale, tagged with the following information: “French Soldier, 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion, Djibouti, Horn of Africa, 1988.” I called Steve Raymer, and he said yes, he was sure of the photo's provenance—that he remembered being out in the desert on a Foreign Legion training exercise and all these snipers rose up all around him, in terrifying silence. Raymer didn't say a word to the sniper, and the sniper didn't say a word to him—he just took his picture, and eventually
National Geographic
put it up for sale.

It was the first thing I asked Zeke about when I visited him in December, because—even though he'd made no claims for the
photo—now I thought I'd somehow caught him in a lie. “Tell me about the guy in the poster,” I said.

“You don't want to know that guy,” he answered. “He's a guy going through a very bad time.”

“Zeke, I know who it is.”

“You do?”

“It's a soldier with the French Foreign Legion in the Horn of Africa.”

He didn't miss a beat. Standing in front of the poster, he said, “Second Para, out of Corsica,” meaning the Legion's Second Paratroop Regiment, which is indeed out of Corsica. “That's where we mobilized out of.”

“You were in the French Foreign Legion?”

“Among other things,” he said.

“So that's you?”

“That's me.”

“I don't get it. I don't get why you're so coy about it.”

“I don't like talking about Africa. Those were the bad years.”

“Zeke, what are you afraid of?”

“I'm afraid of going to
jail
, man. Have you ever been arrested?”

“No.”

“Well, I have. I was arrested for attempted murder when I was a Ranger. McIntosh County, Georgia. You can look it up if you want to. It's a matter of public record.”

He was defending a friend, he said. The friend had gotten beaten up at a notorious brothel called the S&S Truck Stop. With a few other soldiers, Zeke had gone back and put an incendiary device on the roof, with the intention of “burning up everyone inside, including the whores.” The bomb didn't go off, he said, but he and the others were arrested anyway and spent nine days in jail before an FBI agent investigating the S&S for drug trafficking set them free. The incident ended his career as a Ranger, but he
said it also might have played a role in the call he received a few years later: for he had demonstrated a willingness not only to kill but to incinerate a room full of undesirables.

 

“D
O YOU HAVE THINGS
in your life that you're ashamed of?” Zeke asked. He had gone from the photo of the sniper to the couch and was stretched out on it, with his hands covering his face. I told him I did; of course I did. He said, “Well, you probably don't
do
them anymore. But I do. I keep doing them. I seek them out.” He was finally paying the price; he'd had a mild heart attack the month before, on account of the stress of living with his secrets. I told him that maybe he had received a sign that he should begin talking, starting with Africa. He said, “You might not like me very much after I do,” and asked if I thought he was a bad person. “I think you're trying to be a good person,” I said, “or else I wouldn't be here.” He got up and told me to follow him. He opened the door to his basement and turned on the light. He went halfway down the stairs and then stopped and looked at me over his shoulder. “Have you ever been around pure evil?” he asked. I paused. I'd been around pure evil before. I had just never followed pure evil down to the
basement,
and when I got there, I expected to be greeted by the grinning ricti of other journalists who'd pursued Zeke's story and wound up preserved in pickle jars. But no: It was just a basement, and Zeke couldn't find the photographs of the evil he had done in Africa. He did find, however, a big cardboard box full of the plays and screenplays he'd been writing since he got out of the Army, some of them faded with the passage of time.

 

T
HE WIND WAS MAKING NOISES
The noises were making Zeke jumpy. He was sitting up on the couch, doing what he was always doing—watching Fox News on the big-screen TV and
revealing his secrets. On this night, however, he was saying that everything had changed since he'd married Baby Doll. “I have something to
lose
now, man,” he said, by which he meant Baby Doll, by which he also meant his house, his job, his life. He had told me about everything. He had told me about Africa, about Afghanistan and Iraq. He'd also told me about the Philippines, about Indonesia, about Somalia, about Yemen, about Angola, about Nigeria, about Guatemala, about Haiti and El Salvador and Honduras. He had continued raising the stakes on his secrets until they all bled together. Indeed, he really had only one secret, because over the last twenty years he'd had only one job. He did not really work for Blackwater, and he did not really serve in the French Foreign Legion, and he wasn't a missionary for World Vision, and he wasn't a diplomatic observer for the State Department. Those jobs were just covers for his real job, which was something he called “direct sanction.” No matter where he was, he worked for his handler, and his handler paid him to kill people. He was, in his words, “a national-security asset,” “one of the best in the world at what I do”—a one-man death squad.

He had revealed his secrets in order to survive them, but now he thought he had made a mistake. He wondered if I had endangered him, and if it was the revelation, not the secrets, that would be impossible to survive. I told him that he had no choice now but to go all the way—that going public was the only way he could protect himself. “Do you mean
testify
?” he said, like a snake handler who had fallen from his trance and realized what he had been holding. “No way, man. I have nightmares about Charles Schumer asking me questions. You ever raise your right hand? I have, and it's a life-altering experience. My mother couldn't stand it….”

Suddenly he stood up. The wind had gusted, and there was a noise. He went to the refrigerator and came back with a handgun. He cocked it and went to the garage door, peeking outside while standing next to the jamb, his back pressed against the wall.
When he returned to the couch, he did not uncock his gun. Instead, he started transferring it from hand to hand and told me that I didn't know who I was dealing with: “If they want to get you, they get you. Or they don't get me. They get Baby Doll. They rape her, they sodomize her. It's called a break-in. Random violence. But it's not, and I know it's not. So no fucking way. I'm not going to get my Baby Doll raped and sodomized so Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton can make political hay!”

 

H
IS HANDLERS WERE REAL,
Zeke was talking to them on the phone. I was sitting across the table from him. It was the next day, and we were having breakfast at a restaurant in South Haven. At 9:30, he picked up the cell phone and dialed. He said, “Clark, William,” and then a number, 553. Then he said what sounded like a last name. And then he was talking to his handler, whom he called Larry. He was telling Larry that he was sitting with the writer from
Esquire
. He cringed at his handler's response. Then, as he explained later, he was transferred immediately to his handler's subordinate, who read him his secrecy oath and threatened him with the penitentiary. The subordinate's name was Kyle. Zeke complained about the way he was being treated by Kyle, then he began complaining about the way he was being treated by Larry. When he was finally transferred back to Larry, he said this: “Hey, Larry, thanks for the kick in the balls.” He said that if he ever saw Kyle in the street, he'd “take him out,” and then he promptly apologized for the threat. He hung up, and when he called back, a secretary answered and told him that Larry was at a meeting. “I just talked to him two minutes ago,” he said, and she put him through. “Larry, how much longer do I have to be in purgatory?” he said, and accused Kyle of selling him out years earlier. His tone softened after that; he said, “Hey, I'll do it, I'm a good soldier,” and hung up. He finished his coffee but not his eggs, and when we got back to the car, he said, “I fucked myself.
I stayed in too long, now they have their hooks in me. I have a new house, a new wife, a new job, and it's all fake. They can punch through it whenever they want to, and they just did. The thing is, you don't know what they can do—so they can do anything. If you ever hear that I've committed suicide, investigate the hell out of it.”

 

A
FEW DAYS LATER
the phone in my home office rang at eight o'clock in the morning. I didn't run to get it, though I knew it was Zeke. All that week I'd been on the phone with him, trying to get him to go public with his story, trying to convince him to allow me to use his name. He kept saying that he was going away. He was going back to Afghanistan. He was taking a job with a company that provided security for firms trying to do business in Kabul. He was leaving in January and didn't know when or if he was going to be back. He hadn't told Baby Doll, he said, then asked: “Do you think she's going to be mad?”

When the phone rang, I knew I'd lost him. And sure enough, when I checked the message, this is what it said: “Hi, Tom, this is Zeke. Hey man, I couldn't sleep at all last night, thinking about this story and stuff. And I gotta tell you, man, I have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan, I have no operational knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have no knowledge of any operational plans that have taken place in Iraq or Afghanistan, there's no record of me ever being in Afghanistan or Iraq, I'm a nonentity, I just don't exist in any of that kind of thing, I have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. Anything else is fine, but I have no knowledge of, there's no witnesses, there's nothing that ties me to Iraq or Afghanistan, never been to Iraq or Afghanistan, I just don't have anything to do with that, I can't have anything to do with that, and I'm sorry, I don't want to have anything to do with my name at all with Iraq or Afghanistan, I don't exist in that arena, never have, never will, and I just had a sleepless night last
night, so I wanted to call and tell you that I don't know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan and never have been and never will. I hope you're okay, your family's okay. I just had to tell you that. So. Thanks, Tom. Bye-bye.”

 

W
AS IT A DENIAL
or a confirmation? Was it the lie that told the truth or the truth that told the lie? I called Blackwater, and it was exactly as Zeke had foretold: A spokeswoman said there was no such thing as a “designated marksman” for Blackwater: “It's not a term we would use, because all our missions are defensive.” She confirmed that a William E. Clark had worked for Blackwater in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina, but that he was “never, ever, ever in Iraq or Afghanistan for us. He was never there on a Blackwater contract.” And then she said, “My understanding is also that he is prone to give false information and is not to be considered a trustworthy source.”