by Andrew Mayne
“No judge will agree to that,” I reply.
“We have one on the next floor. I’m pretty sure he won’t have a problem.”
This is some black-ops bullshit. When the Russian submarine, the Kursk, sank, I remember watching a video of the families of the sailors demanding answers from the Russian government and how one upset mother was tranquilized and dragged away by security people in white lab coats right on the spot. Don’t want to cooperate? This is how we handle you. In China, they don’t even bother with the lab coats.
So, a doctor signed a slip of paper declaring me crazy so they can hold me. Next they’ll be injecting me with something to make me so loopy I won’t even remember what happened.
Why?
“Cooperation is advisable,” says Chris. He places the sheet of paper back on the table and leaves me alone in the room.
It’s cold enough to be uncomfortable, and I have no sense of time. My hands are secured behind me to the metal chair, so I can’t get up.
I don’t have a lockpick and wouldn’t know how to get out of cuffs like these, anyway. Not to mention the fact that I’m in a locked room inside some government detention center.
Time passes. It could be an hour; it could be two. The bandage they gave me on the way has already soaked through, but the bleeding has stopped. I’ve gone from refusing to talk to wishing someone would come in here so I could tell them everything—which is nothing. I have to see Jackie. I also have to pee. I’m about five minutes from doing that right here.
The sound of the lock being turned fills the room. I watch the door as my next visitor arrives. I’d already given up hope of someone coming in and saying this was a mistake. I know it’s not. It’s part of their game.
The person who enters isn’t Chris or Dr. Pierson—it’s worse. It’s the woman from the secret boatyard. The woman who shot at me—and I shot back at.
She drops a duffel bag on the ground, selects a chair across from me, and sits for a moment, watching me with a faint grin. There’s something hard about her, like she’s gone through horrible things and thinks that’s normal—that everyone deserves her hard experience. She’s pretty but almost angry about it.
“I had a feeling we’d be seeing each other again,” she says at last.
I give her the same cold stare I gave the others.
She picks up the paper and scans it. “Scary? No? The really frightening part is what happens at the end of the three-day evaluation. The doctors could decide you need long-term treatment. If you were still uncooperative, they might determine there’s something medically wrong with you. A diagnosis would be made. Treatment applied. Some cures can kill you if you don’t actually have the disease they’re meant for.”
“This isn’t legal,” I say, breaking my silence.
“It isn’t? Which part? You studied the law. At what point did we break it? Maybe we use physicians and psychologists who are prone to saying what we want them to, but that’s not exactly a crime—not a provable one.”
“I’m allowed to have my own psychiatrist examine me,” I say, grasping for hope but knowing it’s futile.
“If this were a criminal detention. But it’s not. According to this, you’re not mentally fit to make demands, much less have them answered.”
I’m in a no-win situation. She’s got me in a legal box intended for terrorists and other enemies of the state. There’ll be no trial, because I’m not being charged with a crime.
I’m most worried about Jackie now. I can’t have her put through this—either never seeing me again or thinking I’m insane.
“You win,” I reply. “I’ll cooperate.”
She laughs. “You’ll cooperate? What do you think we think you know? If I suspected for a moment that you had any clue how to get what we’re after, you’d have already told us by now. I don’t want anything from you.”
“What’s with all this bullshit? Why take me to a DIA black site to scare me?”
“It looks like someone learned a new word.”
I don’t dare utter “K-Group.” Saying “DIA” may have been tipping my hand too much already.
“You are correct,” she says. “We’re concerned that Mr. Bonaventure has been funneling resources to terrorists, and we’re very anxious to recover any evidence relating to that. Do you have any information that might be of interest?”
It takes me a long, awkward moment to say, “No.”
She didn’t ask what she wanted to know. All I could think of was Winston Miller’s transceiver, anyway, but it seems rather unimportant now.
“Well, there could be a reward for any evidence of significance relating to the matter. Anything?”
“No,” I reply, still wondering what she wants from me. Maybe this is simply another kind of torture.
She stands. “I’ll give you some time to think that over.” She knocks on the door, and it’s opened from the outside. “Please escort our guest to level S.”
After she leaves, two guards enter the room, uncuff me from the chair, and lead me down the hallway. We go down a different corridor than we entered from, and they shepherd me down a stairwell.
We travel down four flights. I no longer have the handcuffs on and think about making a run for the door at the next landing. Would it be an office? Or more of the black site?
Like it matters . . . They no doubt know how to handle a situation like this; it’s not even worth attempting.
We reach the lowest level, a subbasement, I assume, and the guards use a key card to enter a dark corridor. This area has only one light, and the walls are painted black. The floor is dirty with broken tiles that hurt my feet when I step on them.
My mind races through the possibilities, each more terrifying than the last. The woman had a sense of cruelty about her. I probably killed one of her men. No way she’d take that lightly.
The pressure is too much. “I have a daughter. She needs to know I’m okay.”
The guards ignore me and keep pushing me along the corridor.
My breath starts to go short at the thought of never seeing Jackie again.
Stay strong. Don’t let them see you cry.
We reach the end of the hallway. There’s a large metal door in front of me. The fear of what’s on the other side has me panting.
Rumors about black-site prisons flood through me: waterboarding, solitary cells, electroshock . . . even rape rooms.
If someone places a hand where they shouldn’t, I’m going to fight. Lock me up. Make threats. But try to take my dignity, and I will make you pay.
One of the guards places a hand on my shoulder, and I wince.
“Relax,” he growls.
The other pushes the door open.
They shove me through.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
REEF
I go blind from the light. The corridor was so dark, and it’s so very, very bright . . .
Outside?
I’m in an alley. I see cars passing at one end.
I’m outside.
The door slams behind me. I turn around, and my escorts are gone.
Someone with a dark sense of humor has placed a sticker on the door asking visitors to please leave a review on Yelp.
This has all been a mindfuck.
They released me.
The woman . . . I’ll call her DIA Jane . . . must’ve let me go because I’m useless to her. After all, if I’d been working with Winston or Bonaventure, I wouldn’t have nearly killed myself trying to sneak into the submarine tunnel.
She’s pegged me for a clumsy idiot who stumbled into something bigger than herself.
She’s exactly right.
And now I know how high the stakes really are. She could have disappeared me with a snap of her fingers, but she didn’t. I wasn’t worth the paperwork. It was easier to dump me in an alley barefoot, wearing little more than a raincoat.
I hurry out to the sidewalk in case Jane changes her mind. She’s a crazy bitch—who knows what goes through that he
ad?
I look around to get a sense of where I am. The building I was in looks to be an eight-story, black-glass structure. There’re no markings on the exterior. Only a faceless building in a city filled with similarly faceless buildings.
I spot a lobby entrance but decide to go in the opposite direction. I can figure out the cover they use for their offices some other day. Right now, I need to get off the streets and get some clothes.
The raincoat could be covering a short work dress; the bare feet are harder to hide. I keep moving and get a few stares but don’t attract that much attention.
I find an open restaurant and go up to the hostess stand. A teenage girl is there. She’s got a warm smile but looks confused when she sees my bare feet.
“Are you okay?” she asks with concern.
“Yeah. Mostly. Can I use your phone?”
She takes a mobile phone from her pocket and hands it to me. “Are you sure you’re okay? Need me to call the police?”
“It’s okay. It’s not that big of an emergency. I just got stranded. That’s all.”
I stare at the device, trying to think who I should call. I draw a bigger blank when I realize I can’t even remember any of my contacts’ phone numbers.
I take a wild guess and use her phone to send a message to what I assume is Cynthia Trenton’s newspaper email account.
Forty-five minutes later, she pulls up in front of Reilly’s Restaurant. Before stepping out, I give my new friend Ophelia a big hug and thank her for the assist.
“You okay?” asks Cynthia when I get in her car.
“Give me a moment to process things.”
Cynthia glances down at my swimsuit, visible through my open raincoat. “Did anyone ever teach you how to dress?”
I have to laugh, because a swimsuit was the family uniform for half my life. “You really haven’t seen me at my best yet.”
“I hope not. I called Georgie. I told him you were okay. He was scared out of his mind.”
“George, scared? How can you tell? Is it a more concerned grunt?”
“Ha. Don’t underestimate. He’s more sensitive than he looks.” She pauses. “And probably the most decent man you’ll ever meet.”
We drive on I-95 southbound for a while. I wrestle with whether to ask her the question that’s been at the back of my mind since I saw her wall of newspaper clippings.
She seems blunt and to the point, qualities I pride in myself. “Can I ask you a question about George?”
“Maybe. What do you want to know?”
“Back at your house, the articles on the wall.”
“He framed those. Not my idea,” she replies.
“Yeah. But why the one about his arrest? That just seems weird.”
Cynthia smiles. “We don’t get too many guests. That article’s from when we met. I covered the story.”
“Okay. But it doesn’t paint him in a flattering light. I get that he was young and maybe didn’t do it. But still.”
“George knew what he was doing,” she replies. “You don’t, apparently.”
“Wait, what? If he knew what he was doing, why was he arrested for taking bribes?”
“When George joined that police department, he quickly found out that everyone, and I mean everyone in that unit, was on the take. Not all of them wanted to, but they went along with it. He was given a pretty easy choice early on: quit or stay on and keep your mouth shut.”
“So he took payoffs?”
“First he drove all the way to the FBI office in Tallahassee because he didn’t know who he could trust. The last thing he needed was another South Florida police officer seeing him talking to the FBI down here and mentioning it to his bosses.
“The FBI put him undercover. Their plan was to use him as a secret informant, then force the others to turn on each other so George never had to testify and expose himself as the one who reported them.
“But he knew it wouldn’t be enough. He told them they had to arrest him too. It was the only way it wouldn’t look suspicious. If they didn’t, he’d have a target on his back for the rest of his life.” She pauses. “It hurt him to see some of those guys go to jail. They were friends. He went to their kids’ birthday parties.”
“So, George sacrificed his reputation . . . his career, for that?”
“Basically. The charges against him and a couple others were dropped because of insufficient evidence. He was able to get hired again after sitting out for a couple years. A private recommendation was made that he be hired, and he went back to doing what he loved best. What he was made for. Of course, not everyone trusted him. Good cops thought he was crooked. Bad cops thought there was something suspicious about him.”
“And he never went public?”
“Nope.” Cynthia smiles. “He’s too goddamn stubborn. But I had him make me a promise. My last article, before I retire, is about a cop who spent his entire life letting people think he was a crook because he wanted to do the right thing.”
Jesus wept. What was it like to walk into the police station every day and know that some of your closest colleagues were calling you a crook behind your back? What’s it like to have every action scrutinized because there’s this huge asterisk by your name?
What’s it like to volunteer for that?
Who does that?
“You okay?” asks Cynthia.
“Yeah,” I reply, wiping my nose. “It’s been an emotional day.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
BARGE
“Why is she looking at me like that?” George asks as we sit in Cynthia’s living room and he redresses my leg wound.
She nods to the article wall. “I told Sloan about how we met.”
“Oh, that story,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I was young, idealistic, and too stupid to let them do it their way. That’s the real story. The FBI was already onto what was going on. Cynthia loves to make it out like I’m some kind of tragic hero.” He gets animated. “Want to know who the real villain is?” He points to her. “That woman right there! I’m twenty-two, in jail, afraid I’m going to get shivved when someone forgets to keep their mouth shut, and in walks this wet-behind-the-ears reporter telling me she wants the real story . . . or else.
“There was no or else. But I didn’t know that. So I swear her to secrecy, being the dumb ass that I am, and tell her.”
“And I didn’t tell,” says Cynthia.
“You’ve told everyone that sat on that couch!”
“But I didn’t write about it,” she fires back.
“Oh brother. So, she keeps coming back to the jail, asking me for details. Well, how long do you think a white cop can have a pretty black woman visit him in lockup before certain people start asking questions?”
“So, I dressed a little more . . . sexy.”
“Like a stripper. And I told everyone she was my girlfriend.”
“It worked.”
“Hell, yes. Everyone assumed I was just another idiot cop who got himself an expensive stripper girlfriend—the whole reason I went on the take. Nobody questioned it after that.”
“You did an excellent job of convincing everyone you were a dumb ass. Lord knows I still believe that after all these years.”
“So, this is still a cover for the two of you?” I ask, half joking.
They look at each other and contemplate this. Cynthia asks George, “When did it start becoming real?”
“I knew it was real the moment I first saw you. But when you picked me up from jail with a bottle of champagne and said it was just for show, I suspected it was maybe more than that. If not, thanks for protecting my cover all these years.”
“It’s a journalist’s job.”
George glances over at me. “So, where did she pick you up from? I tried to bail you out of Palm Beach, but they said they never processed you. I called FBI, DEA, and everyone else I could think of. Nobody had an answer. The duty officer at Palm Beach hung up on me when I asked where you’d been taken. I was on my way to his
house when Cindy told me you emailed her.”
“To his house?” asks Cynthia. “What were you going to do? Beat it out of him?”
Solar responds gruffly, “I don’t like to be hung up on.” He turns to me. “So, what the hell happened?”
I fill him in on everything that happened after I jumped into the water. It seems like I left our rental boat a week ago. In reality, it’s only been five hours. He stops me to ask a few questions but generally lets me tell it the way it comes to me.
At the end of it, he just sits there. I use my phone, which I’d left in the boat, to catch up on text messages with Jackie. She got a little panicked when I didn’t respond after all this time. Although it caused her stress, it warms me a little to know I could be missed that much.
“So, the Kraken is real,” says George. “And those DIA rejects . . . are neck-deep. I still can’t believe they took you to an actual DIA site, though.”
“Was it?” asks Cynthia. “How can you tell an official secret black-ops site from an unofficial one?”
“I guess it comes down to who pays the bills,” he replies. “But if you’re doing everything through contractors and subcontractors, who the hell knows? Jesus.”
I notice a voice mail message from Chief Kate on my phone. I’m pretty sure I’m still on leave, so I’m not sure what it’s about.
I play it, and a minute later, Cynthia and George are staring at me.
“You okay?” asks Cynthia.
“They fired me,” I say flatly.
I’m still trying to make sense of what Chief Kate said. She’d always looked out for me.
“Just like that?” says Solar.
“She . . . my chief . . . says the city manager said they had to let me go because of budget issues.” I stare at them, trying to find some sense of reason. “A week ago, everything was fine.”
I think about my student loans and the share of Jackie’s expenses I make it a point to pay for. Heck, she’s on my health plan—which is now going away.
“How can she do this? Right now, of all times?” I ask aloud.
“Of course right now,” says Solar. “This is how they play the game.”