Brotherhood and Others

by Mark Sullivan

  Her fear exploded and he said, “I’m cleaning you. That’s it.”

  She studied his eyes and then looked past him up at the ceiling, relaxing her thighs. Robin ran the wet rags over her legs twice, tossed them in the corner, and got off the mattress. “That should feel better.”

  She wouldn’t look at him, but she nodded.

  He turned away, thinking about Julio and Claudio. What would they say? Not only had he left her alone, she’d seen him, she’d studied him. Would she know him? Of course she would. He considered putting the hood back on, but decided that was dumb. She’d seen him. Up close. He was already screwed.

  Behind him, he heard her trying to talk against the gag. He thought about just leaving her in the room while he sat in the hall, but then he went over and removed her gag.

  “Thirsty,” she said. “And I need something to eat.”

  He went to the food box, dug around, and returned with the water bottle. He held it to her lips and poured it into her mouth. Then he fed her some cookies and gave her more water.

  “Thank you,” she said, when he got up.

  “Following orders,” Robin said as he walked over and slid down the wall facing her.

  She was studying him again. “Are you going to kill me now that I’ve seen you?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

  A silence. “Have you killed anybody before?”

  Robin shook his head.

  “Have those other two?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What’s that tattoo on your arm?”

  Robin saw a piece of it sticking out from beneath the sleeve of his shirt. He tugged the cuff over it and said, “Nothing. And you ask too many questions.”

  “Everyone says that,” she said, and sighed.

  He studied her. Even though her hair was all crazy and her face was covered with tear streaks, she was pretty. “Who’s everybody?”

  “My teachers. My coaches. My mom and dad.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Robin said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  The girl thought about that. “You’re not like them, the other two.”

  Robin’s face screwed up in anger. “I’m exactly like them.”

  “No,” she said. “My mother has always thought me a fine judge of character, and you are definitely not like them. You could let me go.”

  “Oh, right, and you go running to the police and then my friends come back, find you gone, and either way I end up dead.”

  Antonia Valera’s eyes roamed over him. “Is that why you do this? Because you think ‘your friends’ will kill you if you don’t?”

  “No,” he said emphatically.

  Before the girl could respond, Robin heard a key in the lock and the door down the stairs squeaked open.

  * * *

  Monarch stood in the darkness by the factory, listening to the low rolling and breakingtones of someone in agony. What were they doing to him?

  Then the moaning stopped and all he heard was dripping. He felt as hollow and wrong as he had when seeing Claudio pull the hood down over Antonia Valera’s head in the back of the Mercedes all those years ago.

  Monarch understood full well that DeGrave was a nuclear mercenary who’d just left Iran. But when the hell had the agency gotten into torture? And who the fuck were those pale guys?

  Monarch absolutely knew the smart thing to do was to return to the loading dock, complete his phase of the mission, and mention what he’d heard to his superior, a conniving guy named Slattery. But what would Slattery say? Probably nothing, even if he knew anything. The CIA wasn’t about sharing knowledge, it was about hoarding it. It was another reason why Monarch was beginning to dislike working at the agency.

  A soft sob echoed from the factory. Monarch turned on his headlight, aimed it at the factory wall, saw an old drainpipe bolted to the exterior. Turning the light off again, he climbed the drainpipe like a monkey, reached the second floor in thirty seconds, and stepped out onto a ledge. Back pinned to the wall, Monarch side shuffled down the ledge to the first set of windows. Locked.

  But one of the windows in the second set was loose. He felt about the sash, sensing that the wood was punkie. He used a utility knife he had in his pocket to pry at the wood, breaking away chunks until the lock came free of the sash. He raised the windowand slid his leg inside, his foot probing for a floor. It was so dark inside he couldn’t tell what was below him.

  Cupping the headlamp, he flicked it on and spotted an iron catwalk about three feet beneath him. Turning the beam off once more, he eased around and dropped onto the catwalk, absorbing the impact and sound with his knees.

  His hands groped to his sides and found the wall and the rail, which was wobbly. Monarch slipped forward, hearing DeGrave choking and pleading.

  “Please,” he was saying. “Please, no more.”

  Monarch could make out a crack of light showing beneath a door at the end of the catwalk about sixty feet away. The closer he got, he realized that there was also a thin sheet of light shining between the side of the door and the jamb. It was hitting the bank of windows where Monarch had seen the glowing outside.

  He covered the last sixty feet to the door in complete silence, pressed his eye to the crack, and peered in.

  * * *

  Wearing one of the hoods, and carrying a second one, Robin met Julio out on the landing above the stairs.

  “Why’re you wearing a hood?” Julio demanded instantly.

  “Because she can’t,” Robin said. “She’s claustrophobic.”

  “Who the fuck cares?”

  “What does it matter?” Robin asked. “Either way she can’t see me.”

  “But she can see what’s around her,” Julio snapped. “Stuff she could tell the police when we let her go.”

  “What? Four walls? A mattress? A box with some food?”

  Julio’s left eye squeezed almost shut, then he snatched the extra hood from Robin’s hand and tugged it over his head. He made to move past Robin, but the boy put a hand in his way.

  Julio stiffened as if he were going to jack Robin for touching him. Then Robin gestured at the tattoo on Julio’s right forearm, which was showing. The Brotherhood’s leader relaxed, nodded, and rolled down his sleeve.

  He stepped inside. Antonia Valera lay on her side, the gag in again, the ends of which were tucked beneath her head but not tied. Robin prayed Julio would not notice.

  “Take the gag off,” Julio said to him.

  Robin leaped across the room, knelt, and made a show of fumbling behind her headbefore coming up with the kerchief.

  “Your father says he won’t pay your ransom,” Julio said.

  Antonia Valera began to cry and look pleadingly at Robin. “I told you.”

  Julio glanced at Robin, hesitated, but then said, “He won’t pay the ransom unless he hears your voice.”

  That seemed to calm the girl somewhat. “Give me a phone.”

  “No,” Julio said, taking a couple of steps toward her and drawing a small shiny minicassette recorder that Robin recognized.

  He’d clipped it off a businessman a few months before and Julio had asked for it in tribute. Julio put it down on the mattress in front of her, thumbed the record button, and nodded at her.

  The girl paused a beat, glanced at Robin, and said in a tremulous voice: “Mom? Dad? It’s Antonia. Please pay the ransom. I heard what you said about that movie, Daddy, but please! I don’t want to be here anymore.” She collapsed, sobbing.

  Julio reached out, clicked off the cassette player, and said, “Nice job. Any luck, and you’ll be home by morning.”

  He stood, said to Robin, “We’ll be back when we have the money. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

  * * *

  Monarch was taught methods to deal with torture when he was with Special Forces. But looking through the crack in the factory door, he knew he’d never seen or heard of what was
going on inside.

  At first glance the room could have been a modern in-patient surgery room. There was a domed operatory light in the center of the ceiling. DeGrave lay on a table below it, strapped down at his ankles, chest, wrists and forehead. Metal stands supported keyboards, screens,IV bags, and lines that ran into the backs of the South African’s left and right hands. Electrodes were hooked to his head, chest, and arms and ran to machines monitored by Mr. and Mr. Pale.

  They were talking softly to DeGrave.

  “No!” The South African moaned louder. “No, I don’t know. This is all just a bad dream, a nightmare.”

  One Mr. Pale said, “You’re right, it is like a nightmare, Stephan. But to suggest that you don’t know is false, and you know it. Trying to say otherwise is useless. No matter how you fight it, our method will soon find its way, and unlock your amygdala. You have two of them, deep in your brain, left and right of your stem. The amygdala regulates memory, and emotion. It also regulates the magnitude of anxiety and fear surrounding a particular memory or emotion.”

  DeGrave insisted: “I don’t know what the Iranians are doing—”

  “Too bad, Stephan,” the second Mr. Pale said.

  Both men turned to keyboards and began typing.

  They’d no sooner finished when DeGrave’s eyes rolled up in his headand his face contorted as if against a broken tooth. Then his body began to writhe and arch against the restraint straps. It was like some Hollywood depiction of a demonic possession, only the South African appeared to be face-to-face with the devil in his mind, or at least the thing that frightened him most.

  “No!” DeGrave shrieked. “No! Get it away! No!”

  He was wracked by spasms and convulsions. The first Mr. Pale released the strap holding the South African’s head to the table. DeGrave’s head tried to come free of his neck. His eyes bulged wide as if the terror that had seized his mind were trying to push its way out his sockets.

  Mr. and Mr. Pale simultaneously hit their keyboards and DeGrave collapsed backward, panting, covered in sweat, as if he’d just awoken from the worst nightmare he’d ever had.

  “Now, Stephan,” the second Mr. Pale said softly, “tell us about the Iranians, and what they have paid you to do.”

  * * *

  Still wearing the hood, Robin heard Julio shut and lock the downstairs door behind him.

  Antonia said softly, “What if my father still says no?”

  “I can’t help that,” Robin said, removing the hood, which was making him feel suffocated. He pulled her up into a sitting position, then sat against the wall opposite her again, got a cookie from the box, and ate it.

  She said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Robin made a scornful noise. “You can’t possibly understand, can you?”

  “Understand what?” she said. “What could drive someone like you to do this? To help those men kidnap me, and ask my father for ransom?”

  Robin felt disgusted, and then angry. “Your world is so little, so protected, so perfect. You have no idea what real life is like. To live on the street. Nowhere to sleep. Digging through a garbage pile for your food.”

  Antonia Valera’s face fell and she looked away from him, as if she had not considered this justification.

  “Have you done that?” she asked softly. “Dug through garbage for food?”

  Robin did not answer. But the pressure of those memories built in his head, and he saw himself that way not too long ago, a creature more than a human, desperately clawing for his existence in the stinking garbage pit that was once his home. His eyes began to tear and he looked away, rubbing at them with his sleeve. When he glanced back, she seemed to be reappraising him.

  “Where are your parents?” she asked.

  “Dead,” he said. “Murdered in front of me.”

  “What? When?” she asked, genuine concern in her voice. “How?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replied coldly.

  “So you’re an … an orphan?”

  “Well, isn’t that kind of obvious when your parents are dead?” he snapped.

  The girl shrank from him. “I’m sorry. I was trying to—”

  “Don’t bother,” Robin said, angry again. “Living in your compound with your servants, with your tennis and ballet, and piano, and skiing trips. You couldn’t possibly understand what most people have to do to just survive for one day.”

  During this attack, Antonia Valera’s cheeks had rippled with emotion before she screamed back at him, “What the hell do you know about my life?”

  “It’s perfect!”

  “Then you know nothing!” she shouted, infuriated now. “You couldn’t possibly imagine spending your life in a cocoon, where there’s an exact way to do everything, and if you don’t, you’re ridiculed, torn down, made to feel stupid. You couldn’t possibly imagine having only two friends in the whole world you can see outside of school. You couldn’t possibly imagine having parents who are gone almost every night, all the time. And a mom who is beautiful, and everyone compares you to her. And a father who’s like a genius, and everyone compares you to him.”

  She breathed hard and her shoulders fell. She looked forlorn when she said, “You couldn’t imagine any of that.”

  Robin blinked and said sadly, “You’re right. I couldn’t.”

  * * *

  “Who did you meet with in Iran?” the first Mr. Pale asked as his partner fiddled with the IV line into the back of DeGrave’s right hand.

  Monarch watched the South African blink as if drugs were sapping his last bit of will before he said in a slight slur, “Ahmadinejad.”

  Monarch didn’t recognize the name straight off. But then again he wasn’t exactly up on Iranian nuclear officials.

  But the second Mr. Pale knew the name and looked surprised. “The presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?”

  DeGrave nodded. “Crazy man. He plans to begin enriching uranium with the equipment in Isfahan the moment he is sworn in. And he wants to finish the IR-40 heavy water reactor as soon as possible. He said he would pay me to tell him how, right after the election.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty million Swiss Francs.”

  “What did you say?”

  The South African laughed as if wandering cynically through a drug-induced nightmare. “What do you think?”

  Monarch stepped back, his mind churning through what he’d seen and heard. There was no doubt in his mind that whatever Mr. and Mr. Pale did to DeGrave was torture.

  Monarch was not in the habit of abetting torture, and that pissed him off. He’d been deliberately deceived about the nature of his mission by men and women much higher in the CIA food chain than he was, and that pissed him off even more. Yes, they’d told him there would be drugs involved, cutting-edge truth serums. But nothing about invading the man’s brain, chemically amplifying his nightmares.

  He turned and began to pad back down the catwalk toward the window he’d used to enter the factory, thinking: But is it torture if DeGrave never remembers it? If he wakes up and thinks it’s all a dream? There was also the fact that the information the South African had given up was potentially huge should Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win the election and become president of Iran.

  That counted, didn’t it?

  Monarch had no answers, but felt used and confused to a certain extent by the events of the evening and by his own reactions to those events. He climbed out the window and was side shuffling back along the ledge toward the drainpipe when he decided to turn down all future rendition offers. Nothing had changed. Kidnappings, for him, were never good, always filthy affairs.

  Several feet from the drainpipe, he paused, feeling better for having made the decision. He’d get through with this op, and then tell his handler he was done with that particular area of tradecraft once and for all—

  Monarch thought he caught movement in his peripheral vision, below and to his left, out there in the shadows where the matted grass turned to forest. He s
tayed perfectly still, kept adjusting the angle of his left eye click by click until—

  There it was again. Something large. Make that someone large, moving from the tree line in a crouch.

  Shit, Monarch thought. Shit.

  How many were there? How had they known they were here? Should he risk talking and alert Barnett, Tatupu, Fowler, and Mr. and Mr. Pale?

  Instead, he started clicking the mike on and off, using Morse code to spell out, “Intruder moving in from east.” Then he slid over onto the drainpipe, and climbed down it, half expecting a gunshot to find him there, and thinking that no matter what you called them, kidnappings were always a cluster-fuck like this.

  * * *

  Robin came to consciousness slowly, confused, but hearing pounding somewhere. He saw the light on in the room and jolted awake, looking around and seeing Antonia Valera waking on the mattress.

  His heart raced. Was it the police? Someone who’d heard them arguing?

  Robin got up, completely alert now and shaking. He went to look down the stairwell, and heard more pounding below. He turned, meaning to climb to the roof and make his escape, but then heard Julio shout drunkenly, “Robin, you dick head, open up. I lost my key.”

  Robin wanted to get down on his knees and give thanks, but instead took the stairs two by two, twisted the lock and flung open the door. Julio stood there, carrying a half empty bottle of cachaca rum, shining a flashlight on his sweaty shit-eating grin.

  “We hit it, my thieving genius!” Julio said, barging by him and starting up the stairs. “Ten thousand dollars!”

  “Ten thousand? Where’s Claudio?”

  “Who cares?”

  Julio stopped on the landing, and tugged an envelope from inside his shirt. He opened it and showed Robin the wad of American cash. “As soon as daddy heard her voice on the tape, he did exactly what we told him. It went down so slick.”

  Now Robin was excited. “A quarter of all that’s mine?”

  Julio took a drink of rum, gazed at him without commitment, and said, “We talk of money in the morning.” He took another sip of rum. “Where is she?”

  “In there, on the mattress,” Robin said.