Killing Sanford (Gary Cannon Book 1)

by Mike Kershner

  Cool night air poured into the trunk compartment, Gary shrunk back from where he imagined the opening was, but there were hands on him, strong hands, pulling, lifting. Then again there were another set on his legs. He struggled briefly and there was a voice from his feet “Mantener la calma, mantener la calma y se le multa.”

  The voice was strong, not loud, it was not a voice Gary recognized, and even though he had no idea what the man had said to him there seemed to be comfort in the voice. Gary was carried into a building. He heard a door open and close, now he could see some light poking through the bag that was over his head, the pinholes of light only added to the frustration of having his head covered. Light was not the reassurance he expected.

  Gary was turned over, placed in a chair, his joints were screaming at him, aching. The ropes on his ankles were undone only to have them re-tied to the chair legs, wrists undone next and re-tied to the arms, another rope was pulled around his chest and he felt it tighten and tied behind the chair.

  The hood was pulled from his head, he squeezed his eyes shut blinded by the unshielded 100 watt bulb hanging above him. When he could open his eyes there were two huge men above him with dark hair, dark eyes. On his left the man was slightly smaller, still a mountain, but shorter than the one on the right.

  The man on the left had a cream colored shirt on a black stripe running on each breast. His grey slacks were straining at the girth of his massive legs. The man to the right wore a tan shirt unbuttoned to mid chest the thin cotton of the shirt was a testament to the tensile strength of the material at every seam. The olive drab pants fell over what looked to be Government Issue black boots.

  The man with the grey slacks stepped closer, "What is your name?" He asked.

  "Gary..."

  Before we could complete his words he was backhanded by a massive hand.

  Again, "What is your name?"

  "Gary Cannon."

  Another backhand, "I don’t want your real name, boy."

  "What?"

  Closed fist to the midsection this time, and Gary fell forward coughing, heaving, his eyes watered pain radiated out to his chin. The rope they had tied around his chest was holding him upright, without it he would have fallen forward, likely to the floor.

  Gary caught back up with his breath, raised his head and opened his eyes. The man spoke again, "What is your name? Tell me a lie, tell me something, something I don’t know from the file I have on you, make me believe it."

  Gary paused, looked into the man's eyes studied his face, the dark coarse hair of his eyebrows, two days of stubble on his chin, the Saint Christopher medallion around his neck, he took him in memorized his face his stance every detail he could manage. Gary took a breath and said, "Milo, my name is Milo Bronson."

  The man turned his head slightly, raising his brow, "Hello nice to meet you Milo. I think we should have a nice long talk, we should get acquainted."

  The man with the medallion turned his head to a door to the left and said, “Estamos listos para comenzar.”

  A door to the right opened, a slender pale man walked in, walked up to the giant on the right and spoke to him in his left ear, and he then took a seat at a table behind them both directly in front of Gary. He opened a notebook and scribbled with a stubby silver pen. The giant in the boots motioned to the man closest to Gary, and took a seat in front of the table. “You may start. English from here on out please gentlemen.”

  Gary's mind was racing, where was this going? Who were these men? Where the hell was Neil? Had these guys over powered Neil? Was there someone after him, had they killed him?

  His thoughts were interrupted when the shorter man turned a chair around, straddled it and crossed his arms in front of Gary and said, "Now Milo, tell me about yourself, tell me who are your parents? Where are you from? But, be careful, my friend back here," he nodded his head back to the slender man at the table, "He is very good at listening, and believe me when I say he will tell me if something doesn’t match up."

  Gary looked forward, looked at the slender man at the table, to the silent giant in the chair and back to the one who had been doing all the talking. His brain started to churn, weaving, creating, he imagined faces, places, people, things and dates.

  The fear they had placed in him jump started something in his mind he had never felt, it was like all his life he had been in a room in his head, but only half the lights had been on. Gary started to talk, "My name is Milo Eugene Bronson, my father’s name is Isadora Bronson, my mother’s name was Helen Bronson, I had one brother, his name was Todd he was fifteen months younger than me but two years ago he was killed in Athens Georgia. That's where we're from, he fell from a tree in a grove near our house. My mother died when I was eight, it was cancer, lymphatic cancer. It was a rainy day in April."

  The man looked shocked, he turned around and the slender man nodded him on, "Milo, tell me about your father, do you know how your mother and father met?"

  Gary never missed a beat he looked the man right in the eyes, "Oh, sure. My dad Isadora, everyone calls him Izzy, it was his grandfather's name, he was born in San Luis Obispo, in California, his father worked there he had a small construction company. My dad spent most of his childhood there.”

  Gary continued on giving detail after detail building a life that never existed before. This went on for over an hour, the seated man in front of him asking him details and Gary weaving a lie. All the while the slender man at the table was furiously taking notes, keeping the details in order, writing the life story of Milo Bronson and his family.

  ***

  Neil Degrassi stood in a room behind a two way mirror, opposite of where Gary Cannon was inventing another life. He watched as the young man smoothly and effortlessly created people and memories from thin air.

  To Neil’s right a man sat on a table focused on the events beyond the glass. The man spoke, “Say Neil, that boy’s got quite the imagination.”

  Neil turned his head slightly, not looking away from the scene before him, “That he does. He’s not under that much pressure at the moment, we’ll let him finish and see how he holds onto it.”

  “No one holds on to it for long Neil, you know that. Somewhere they all get tripped up on some detail, some date gets mixed up with their life, and they forget something.”

  “We’ve got to get this baseline, everything builds from here. What’s the youngest you’ve put through this?”

  “Hell, the youngest? I don’t know maybe nineteen. But once I interrogated a subject that claimed to be seventeen, never know for sure, she died when we got a little carried away with the electricity. How much longer do you think we should let him build this?”

  “I say we let this go just a while longer, he’s on a roll. I sort of want to see just how much he can come up with. I can’t say I’ve ever heard this much damned detail. There is no doubt this is James’s son.”

  ***

  Gary was churning out information at full speed, and the man stood up from his chair, and walked close to him, Gary stopped talking. The man leaned in close, “Milo, when was your father born?”

  Without hesitation, “July 14th, 1926.”

  The man turned back to the slender man, he nodded. “Alright, where did your parents meet? When was it? What’s your birthday?”

  “My parents met in Athens, Georgia, my mother was eighteen my father, seventeen. It was September of 1943. They met in school, history class they told me, Mr. Sheffield’s class. My birthday is March 6th, 1950.”

  Again the look to the slender man and again he nodded. The questions continued, their chronological order mixed, their topics flipped. Questions were repeated, asked differently, and each time Gary produced answers that were verified by the man’s notes. Often he added subtle detail to his answers which were noted as well. For three more hours this went on, quizzing Gary on his story. He was flawless.

  ***

  Neil yawned, dawn was approaching. Two days before he and Gary had crossed the border into Mexic
o, it had been late when they made it to the safe house, and later still when Pablo and Fernando had slipped in and taken Gary.

  After they sedated him they drove all day and part of the night to get here to El Comienzo, the exercise had started before midnight and now it was close to six A.M.

  He watched Gary answer question after question, and each time repeat answers without tripping. He looked over at Brent Abby, Brent was showing his fatigue, his eyelids were heavy and he had his head planted firmly on his hand which was propped on the table in front of him.

  Brent was the man in charge at El Comienzo. He had only been a field asset for one contract, but when it came to training he was top notch, a total detail man. Brent ran this place like a Swiss watch.

  He was never able to make that switch to the killing side of things, weather his nerves, his conscience or his stomach stopped him Neil did not know. But for all the things he could not accomplish in the field he knew how to teach those things to others. The men, and women that were trained under Brent’s watch were hands down the best that Sanford International had to offer.

  “Brent, what do you make of this?”

  “Goddamned-est thing I’ve ever seen.” Brent said in his Southern accent, “He hasn’t so much as farted wrong. He’s been up all night, no food nothing more than a few sips of water when his voice cracks up. Usually by now they miss something, transpose a number somewhere, but this kid isn’t missing shit.”

  “What do you say we put him in the box, set the cycle temp at fifty, and give him the strobe treatment for say 6 or 8 hours? Then we pull him out of there and run this again, see how he fairs.”

  “I think that’s where we’re at Neil. Everyone breaks at some point. After the box, we’ll have the guys mix in some questions about his real life and see if we can trip him.”

  “Okay, do it. But you watch him close.”

  ***

  Gary was feeling good, he had been on a roll, he was tired and he still had no idea how long they had been grilling him. None of this made any sense, why would they drag him in here tie him to a chair and have him make up a life that he had not lived?

  He was getting hungry, his appetite had been gone through most of the interrogation, he did not even know if that was the right word for this, it felt more like story time with Gary. He did know that he was glad the man had not hit him since the very beginning. It seemed to have a correlation with him not mixing up his story.

  Again in his head he wondered where Neil had wound up, Neil was the man his father picked to watch over him, to see that he grew up, that he turned out alright, and surely in the world his father had been in he knew what this man was made of. Had Neil deserted him? Where was all this leading?

  These guys seemed nice enough, other than the fact that he was tied to a chair in a room with no windows, a big mirror and one light bulb. Couple that with the fact that there were two very large Mexican men that were ready to wail away on him if he misspoke a recalled detail of a story he was making up as he went along.

  A phone with no dial against the wall rang, the slender man got up to answer it. The slender man stood at the phone he did not speak, he was nodding, listening, then nodding again, and finally he said “Yes sir, right away.”

  The slender man replaced the handset and walked to the taller man, talked into his ear then stepped back. The two men looked at each other, and then came at Gary, each grabbed an arm. They untied his wrists and one grabbed him by both biceps while the other untied his legs and the rope around his chest. They told him to stand, but his legs were asleep and he stumbled. The men grabbed him by both arms and they easily hoisted him off the ground and carried him away through another door behind him that Gary had not seen.

  They hauled him down a corridor, made a left at a tee and continued on to an elevator, inside one of the men pressed the button marked “LL6” and the car began its descent. When the doors opened Gary was looking down another long corridor, concrete walls on both sides, single lights suspended from the ceiling at ten to fifteen foot intervals. They carried him out into the hallway and walked the entire length of it, Gary’s estimation was it had to be close to three hundred feet.

  There were doors occasionally on each side, and then two side corridors one to the left about a third of the way and then another to the right at about half way. At the end of the hall was a single door. The larger man produced a key that opened a small door to the right of the walk in door. Inside the small compartment was a combination dial like on a bank vault. He spun the combination and pressed a red button above the dial and there was a mechanical noise from inside the door and it popped open.

  Gary was placed inside the room, about five feet by five feet. The ceiling was low and Gary could not stand up. He squatted down in the small room, and assessed his surroundings as the men were closing the door without saying a word.

  There were grated vents on walls to his left and right, and in the ceiling what looked like a square glass sheet. When the door closed Gary discovered that the glass sheet was protecting a light bulb, it lit up for about one minute then went out.

  Shortly after the light when out he felt the movement of air from the vents and the light came back on. The air from the vents was cold, which felt good at first. The stress of what he had been going through had him pretty warm and he was sweating. Then the light came back on, then back off. The light worked its way on and off, starting slowly, then it cycled to a fast strobe.

  The air continued to pour into the small room and the temperature steadily dropped. Gary pulled himself over to one of the corners to try and get away from the direct blast of the machine chilled air coming from the vents, he pulled his knees up against his chest and wrapped his arms around them. He put his head down and tried to breathe his warm breath into his shirt.

  The strobe continued fast then slow, then back to fast, even with his eyes closed the pulses of light hit him like a hammer. Soon everything was amplified the light was blinding, the air was frigid, Gary was shivering. It seemed like a lifetime he had been in this small white room. The sound of the air moving through the registers was like the tear of a jet engine.

  Then there was a voice “Gary.”

  Gary did not answer, he had been told to lie and make them believe it, and he knew that if they did not believe him they would hurt him again. But then he thought, “Wait, I did everything right and here I am in this hole.” Still, his mind resisted and he stayed silent.

  Again the voice from a speaker, “Gary.”

  He waited, right now he was Milo, and they were not going to trick him.

  This time the voice asked a question, “What year were you born?”

  He looked up, “1950.” He said through chattering teeth.

  “What is your name?”

  “Milo Bronson.”

  There was no reply from the voice. Gary put his head down again and fought through the bombardment of the light flashing, and the freezing air. As he sat and shivered he recounted his tale and the story, he thought of himself as Milo and tried to imagine a warm summer day in Athens, a city he had never been to.

  In his mind he was in a green park, the leaves on the trees were fluttering gently in the breeze, on his back looking up into the blue summer sky he could see clouds, the contrail of a jet headed west, and hear the traffic of a busy street nearby. Most of all he could feel the warmth of the sun on his face, the sweat on his arms and legs.

  Gary imagined getting up, hopping on his blue bicycle he had left lying in the grass and pedaling his way across the grass of that park and out to the sidewalk.

  His time in the room from that point passed without notice. Gary was not in the room, he was Milo in a park in Athens, Georgia. Suddenly, the voice was back, “Gary Cannon. Tell me about your father James.”

  Gary was suddenly back in the small cold room, strobe striking like knives in his eyes, “My father’s name is Izzy, and mine is Milo.”

  The strobe stopped and the room went black. The air
stopped from the registers and everything was silent. Gary sat alone in the dark, still shivering, cold in a tiny box deep in the earth, but surrounded by nothing. It was a long while before he heard the mechanical whir of the door and it swung open flooding the room with light.

  The silhouette of the large men was unmistakable and their grip yet again proved to be unforgettable. They wrapped him in a wool blanket after they had him out of the box and on his feet.

  So back up the route they had come the two men took him, and back to the room where everything had started. Gary was told to sit in the chair, this time he was not bound. They checked his pupils, his blood pressure, his pulse and his temperature. He was allowed to stop shivering, and the slender man came in and sat and it all started again.

  ***

  “What the hell Neil?” Brent said more than annoyed.

  “Just calm down Brent. It’s not like we’re trying to extract some information from him, we’re base lining him.”

  “Dammit Neil I know, I just don’t get it. He should have cracked, he’s just a kid. He should have cracked by now something’s not right.”

  “Oh, it’s right alright. Brent don't you realize we have someone in that room that has done something no one has done before? We took this kid, who’s sixteen by the way, in the middle of the night, transported him in the trunk of a car across a country he’s never been to before. We don't show him a familiar face, we ask him to fabricate a story, and stick to it. Don’t forget he’s doing this on the spot. We don't feed him, don't let him sleep, we’ve got those two behemoths hovering over him all the time, put him in the box and now look out there, he hasn’t lost one step.”

  “He’s going to break Neil, they all break at some point. They all break.”

  “Don’t kill him Brent. I have a feeling this one is going to do things. Things none of us ever could, and when he’s done here you are going to go back and rewrite the book on training because he’s going to break it.”