by Marc Cameron
Arnie asked, “You have a draft?”
Chadwick nodded. She didn’t, of course, not yet. But that wouldn’t take long for her staff to do. There was a Navajo girl from Window Rock who’d been champing at the bit to get something exactly like this into committee.
“Okay,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair. “I have to be honest, though. I’m mildly stunned that you came here in person—and I’m not an easy man to stun anymore.”
“I understand completely,” Chadwick said. She tried, but couldn’t quite bring herself to say “Mr. President.” “This is odd as hell for me, too. You stand for virtually everything I am against. But for all that, this program seems like something you could support. If your side of the House finds out you’re behind it, they’ll come aboard as well. The thing is . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Ryan waited a beat, prodding when she didn’t continue. “What?”
“It would be cool if we could work together on the language, so the thing has both our stamps on it.”
Van Damm’s brow furrowed, the way it did when he didn’t like the smell of something. “You know that ‘working together’ means some of your people hammering out details with some of our people? The President doesn’t have time for daily sit-downs over a bill that should be hashed out by the legislative branch.”
“Fully aware,” Chadwick said, swallowing what pride she had left. She addressed Ryan instead of his lackey—who was too smart for his own good. “I would just ask for one or two of those sit-downs, mano a mano, so to speak.”
He gave a noncommittal nod. “I’m happy to take a look at your proposal.”
“To be honest,” Chadwick said. “I’m tired of fighting you, Mr. President.” There, that wasn’t so hard. “We disagree on a shitload of key matters. But in order to get anything done, we need to find something on which we can work together. It’s time you and I bury the hatchet.”
Van Damm shot a glance at the President, and then let his gaze settle on Chadwick. “Not in his back, I hope.”
“I get it, Arnie,” Chadwick said. “But you know me. I’ve been a front-stabber from the beginning—”
There was a knock at the door and Betty Martin stepped in, beckoning the chief of staff. “That call you were waiting on.”
Van Damm thanked her and then turned to Ryan. “Don’t you dare agree to anything while I’m gone.”
Ryan waved him off. “I’ll be fine, Arnie.”
The door shut, leaving Chadwick more alone than she’d ever felt in her life. She was definitely in the lion’s den now. She held her breath.
It was time to see what the all-powerful Jack Ryan was made of.
14
When he didn’t sleep, Father West paced—and he rarely slept. For the first few days—or at least, spans of time he believed to be days—he had prayed. His prayers were fervent. The heartfelt pleas of a man alone. He tried saying the rosary, counting the Hail Marys on his fingers, but he lost his place numerous times. As he prayed, he shuffled back and forth in the dim six-by-eight concrete cell. He moved methodically, like the internal workings of an old clock that was losing time and faith with every step. That was the interesting thing about God. He seemed to wait until one hit rock bottom before stepping in. Or, West thought, maybe he was just going crazy. Either way, his head hurt a little less at the moment, and that was something.
He’d been blindfolded with a paper bag when they drove him off the mountain—an odd item for a blindfold, so he suspected his arrest hadn’t been part of their plan for the day. It was impossible to know where they’d brought him, but it wasn’t far out of Bandung, if not one of the prisons in the city itself.
Wherever it was, he was underground, a bad place to be in an area famous for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The concrete cell was bare but for a thin mattress, sodden with humidity and sweat, and two buckets, one for water, the other a toilet. He could have cursed his fate, but experience caused him to think instead, Yay, they let me have a bucket.
He chuckled at the thought, of the stupidity of clinging to any shred of the positive at a time like this. The scrape of his shuffling feet covering his own whispered laughter. He sounded crazy, even to himself—which, he thought, meant he’d not gone crazy yet. The insane were not quite so self-aware. That made him laugh again. Three steps done, he turned on his heels and began the three-step journey back to the cell door.
He swayed a little in the turn. The inability to track time made him dizzy, unmoored. That was the point, wasn’t it? They wanted to tenderize his mind so he would talk, but they’d yet to ask him any questions. He had no idea how long he’d been here, but he was absolutely certain that if they kept him alone much longer, it wouldn’t matter what they asked him.
West had never been very good at growing a beard, but he’d been without a razor long enough to leave him feeling like some pitiful creature from an Alexandre Dumas novel. They’d left him in his running shorts and T-shirt, which were now drenched in sweat and covered in filth. The poor excuse for a blanket had a hard stain that he suspected was blood along the top and bottom edges. It didn’t matter, it was much too hot to worry about a blanket. In the end, he rolled it into a ball with the dirtiest parts inside and used it for a makeshift pillow. The caged bulb high above the metal door provided the only feeble light. They’d taken his shoes, which bothered him at first, but he’d gotten used to it.
His fingernails were too long—a tiny thing, but enough to drive him deeper toward insanity. He would have bitten them down, but retained enough good sense to know the risk of infection was too great. He wondered idly if a person could keep track of the passage of time by gauging the growth of his fingernails. Probably, but he’d never paid enough attention.
Food, such as it was, came at odd intervals that he began to think of as days. Every other meal was rice and vegetable soup—singular, as in one small chunk of an unidentifiable vegetable floating in a ropy broth. Father West entertained himself trying to figure out what kind of vegetable it was. Somewhere between the soup meals came a small bowl of rice. This was usually served with a chunk of mystery meat that was even more unidentifiable than the vegetable. West was getting so thin that he’d been forced to roll the waist of his running shorts to make them stay up. Sweat ran perpetually, stinging his eyes and causing him to lose even more weight. There was a water can in the corner, containing a little extra protein in the form of swimming larvae. He drank it anyway, rationing himself at first, until he learned that a sullen guard came in every day sometime between soup and rice to fill it—and probably check to make sure he hadn’t killed himself.
He’d had no other human contact. No booking, no interrogation, no beatings, no nothing. It was as if the men who’d arrested him had simply dropped him off and forgotten he existed.
Prison was not exactly a new experience for Patrick West. He’d been locked up twice, years before taking his vows. It had been easier for him to lie then, about any number of things, especially his identity. Both the Cubans and the Russians had swallowed his story about being a Marxist student, which was the only thing that had kept him from being thrown against a wall and shot on either occasion.
He been good at it then, but he had fallen out of practice lately. His Indonesian captors knew full well that he was a priest. He’d been here for three years and was well known in both the Catholic and Muslim communities. But if his captors somehow learned of his time with the Central Intelligence Agency, well, there was no such thing as a former spy. The guards would begin to fear him, to wonder what covert mission he’d been carrying out in their country. They’d sweat him for a time, see what he knew—which was nothing, but they would never believe him. He’d eventually get thrown to the wolves of general population, where another prisoner would be allowed to murder him—or they would just leave him where he was and forget to fill the water can.
Maybe they knew about the CIA already .
. .
He slammed his fist over and over into his own forehead, driving those thoughts from his mind. Futility would get him killed in this business.
The Clandestine Service had seemed glamorous at first—from the outside looking in—a world of fast cars, gunplay, and endless adrenaline. His instructors at The Farm, patriots all, had pulled no punches when training started. The actual work of an intelligence officer was at once boring and dangerous. They were often unarmed, or, at best, undergunned against superior numbers. It was lonely work, shrouded in lies, many of which you had to tell to people you loved. He’d met some incredible people, even run into some old friends. But in the end, he admitted to himself he was made for something different. His temperament was much better suited to saving souls than to saving democracy, which was not to say that he wasn’t an extremely gifted intelligence officer. He was an old man now, but even after all these years, it had come back to him naturally on the side of the mountain with Noonan. The social-engineering side of things was much the same as preaching religion—trying to make people see the “rightness” of your dogma over the misguidedness of their own.
He shuffled to the water bucket and stopped to take a drink, trying to avoid the larvae, when footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. It hadn’t been long enough for soup or rice. He strained his ears, soaking up what few details he could over the constant gurgle of sewage pipes and whimpering prisoners. The footsteps grew louder, then stopped in front of his cell door, followed by the jingle of keys. This was something different, and different played tricks with the mind.
West braced himself for what he assumed would come next. Questions. A river of questions. He wondered if they would start soft or resort directly to the physical stuff. He had to find some way to get a message out, to let someone know where he was. Even that was no guarantee that he wouldn’t disappear, but without it, the authorities had little incentive to keep him alive. As it stood now, the other Hashers knew he’d gone with some men in suits, but they’d been too far away to hear why. For all anyone else knew, he could have been kidnapped by a gang or Muslim extremists looking for a Christian. The church had surely filed some kind of report, but with nothing to go on, and the police themselves involved, that would accomplish little.
West hid a nervous shudder as the heavy metal door creaked open and one of the Indonesian policemen who’d arrested him beckoned forward with a flick of his wrist. He felt naked in his running shorts and filthy T-shirt.
“Turn around,” the policeman said, snapping on the handcuffs when West complied. The words were at once welcome and jarring. The other guards never spoke or even looked him in the eye. Direct communication after this long was sandpaper on his nerves. And still, he needed it so very badly. He looked over his shoulder at the officer and tried to keep from sobbing under the weight of the stress. He’d heard the others call this one Jojo shortly after the arrest.
“Can you please tell me where I am?”
Jojo ignored the question and gave him a none-too-gentle shove between the shoulder blades to get him moving.
“Walk.”
Curly fungus grew on the peeling stone of the narrow corridor, making it appear that the walls truly did have ears. What little light there was seemed pressed back into the feeble bulbs. The cells along the way had no windows, but he could hear shuffling inside most of them. He pictured filthy men, dressed in rags and hunched over with their ears pressed against the metal doors, clamoring for any form of human contact, even if it was only the sound of someone walking by.
West made two right turns before being ushered onto an elevator with polished wood paneling, surprisingly pristine, considering the state of the dungeon. The lemony furniture-polish odor of the elevator made the priest suddenly aware of his own stench. His stomach lurched as the car took them up two floors. He cowered at the bright lights of the hallway when the doors slid. The escort prodded him down a hallway of polished tile floors and blindingly white sidewalls, making another right turn before entering a ten-by-ten room with a large mirror along the wall opposite the door.
West’s heart raced when he saw his cell phone on the desk next to the second cop, a man the others had called Ajij on the day of West’s arrest. The phone’s screen displayed the passcode prompt, as if he’d been looking at it the moment before they walked in. A microphone, like the kind used in broadcast radio studios, occupied the center of the metal desk. Father West had no doubt there were cameras on the other side of the glass, recording everything that occurred.
“Easy way,” Ajij, the one with the phone, said. “Or hard way.”
“I don’t follow,” West said.
Jojo helped explain by sinking a fist into the priest’s right kidney. The sudden blow sickened him and sent him staggering forward. With his hands behind his back, he fell against the edge of the desk and slid down to his knees with a low groan.
Ajij shrugged. “Hard way it is.”
Spittle hung from West’s cracked lips. He swallowed, trying to catch his breath. “You haven’t . . . asked me any questions.”
The smarmy cop held up the phone, letting it swing between his pinched thumb and forefinger. “You must eventually tell us the code.”
West fought the urge to smile. Was it really going to be this easy?
“My friend.” Ajij nodded to the guy with the big fists. “He is happy to keep showing you the hard way. But everyone breaks, one way or another. You are no diff—”
“Seven angels,” West said. “Seven spirits, seven trumpets, seven seals . . .”
Jojo hit him again, just as hard, but higher this time, mercifully deflecting off his ribs instead of a kidney. “Speak straight!”
West groaned, biting back the urge to curse. He hadn’t been hit like this in a very long time. He spoke through clenched teeth on ragged breaths. “The code . . . The code is seven, seven, seven, seven. I have nothing to hide. If you have questions, please just ask me.”
Ajij entered the code with his thumb. He cocked his head, birdlike, to the side when the screen appeared, taking in the image. His eyes suddenly widened in horror. West couldn’t see it, but he knew that at that moment, the background on the last text he’d cued up turned from white to blue, showing it had sent. The cop fumbled with the device, trying to read the message. But West also knew it was already fading away, disappearing completely two seconds after it went out.
The door opened and a balding senior officer stepped inside, a man who was definitely in charge. Ajij and Jojo slumped when he entered, embarrassed kids caught in some act of mischief. Ajij slid halfway down behind the desk, lowering the phone.
“What are you doing?” the supervisor bellowed in Indonesian. He looked as terrified as he was angry, as if he himself was in grave danger from his subordinates’ stupidity. “Why are you interrogating him without me? Why is that device not inside a protective bag?” He shouldered his way past West, peering down at the phone.
Spittle flew from his lips as he held the phone up and leaned in close to a shrinking Ajij’s face. “What was it? What did you see?”
“A message, sir,” Ajij said. “But it has disappeared.”
The supervisor put a hand on top of his head, staring up at the ceiling. “What have you done?” He shoved the phone at Father West. “Make it come back!”
The priest stood a little straighter now. “That is impossible.”
The senior officer must have known this was the case, because he didn’t press the issue.
“Who did you contact? What did this message say?”
“It was so long ago,” West said, playing dumb. “Something I typed before you arrested—”
The senior officer slapped him hard across the face, then rubbed the back of his hand. Not quite as accomplished at hitting as his ham-fisted underling, he studied West for several long seconds before drawing a small black pistol and leveling it at the bridge of the prie
st’s nose. “I will ask you this one time and one time only. To whom did you send this message?”
“My friend,” West said honestly.
The officer turned to Ajij. “What number did you see?”
“Not much,” the cop stammered. “Two-zero-two something.”
“You had best remember!” the officer snapped over his shoulder. He brandished the phone at West, pistol still aimed at his face. “A 202 area code?”
Jojo looked up from his own phone. “The United States. Washington, D.C.”
The supervisor snapped at West, apoplectic. “Who do you know there?”
The priest gave a smug grin. Finally, someone had asked him the right question. “My good friend,” he said. “The President of the United States.”
15
That was the weirdest thing,” Michelle Chadwick said when she sat down at a table with David Huang at the Shake Shack inside the Fashion Centre mall across the Potomac from D.C. It was a little too close to the Pentagon for Chadwick’s tastes, but David had suggested it, and she’d gone numbly along like a good little piece of asset.
Huang was drinking a large chocolate milkshake and munching on his habitual french fries. There were security cameras outside in the mall, but he assured her that the cameras in the restaurant covered only the register. She would be seen going in, but there would be no record of who she’d sat down with. It was small consolation, considering all the salacious video the Chinese already had.
“You left your mobile phone outside of the Oval Office,” Huang said, eating another fry. “That was a serious mistake.”
“It’s protocol,” Chadwick said. The smell of burgers and grease made her stomach do flips. “Everyone is supposed to leave cells outside in the secretaries’ suite . . . you know, in case some Chinese spies turn a poor senator into . . . I don’t know . . . a mole or some shit.”