She was in a cell. In a prison. In a fascist state. In Africa.
She began to wonder if there were worse places in the world. Could anything be worse? Yes, she thought, she could be sick.
She began to feel feverish.
An hour is:
A minute and a minute and a minute and a minute and a minute.
And a minute, and a minute, and a minute and a minute and a minute.
Then another, and another minute, and another, and yet another, and another.
And a minute, then two more minutes. Then, two more minutes.
Then, two minutes. Then, two minutes. Then a minute.
Then a similar minute. Then two more. And two more again.
That’s thirty minutes so far.
So do them all over again.
Laura’s cell was slightly less than four paces long and slightly more than three paces across. It was about the size of the bathroom in the place-where-she’d-used-to-live, the place she didn’t allow herself to think about. Much of this space was taken up by her bunk. It had four legs of tubular steel, and a support frame of flattened iron struts. Atop the frame was a mattress of striped cotton ticking, stuffed with straw. The mattress smelled, faintly and not completely unpleasantly, of a stranger’s long sickness. One end was lightly spattered with faded bloodstains.
There was a window hole in the wall of the cell. It was a good-sized hole, almost six inches around, the size of a drainpipe. It was approximately four feet long, bored through the massive concretized sand, and it had a crisscrossed grill of thin metal at the far end. By standing directly before the hole Laura could see a simmering patch of yellowish desert sky. Faint gusts of heated air sometimes rippled down the tube.
The cell had no plumbing. But she learned the routine quickly, from hearing other prisoners. You banged the door and yelled, in Malian Creole French, if you knew it. After a certain period, depending on whim, one of the guards would show and take you to the latrine: a cell much like the others, but with a hole in the floor.
She heard the screaming for the first time on her sixth day. It seemed to be oozing up from the thick floor beneath her feet. She had never heard such inhuman screaming, not even during the riot in Singapore. There was a primal quality to it that could pass through solid barriers: concrete, metal, bone, the human skull. Compared to this howling the screams of mob panic were only a kind of gaiety.
She could not make out any words, but she could hear that there were pauses, and occasionally she thought she could hear a low electrical buzzing.
They would unlock her handcuffs for meals and for the latrine. They would then seal them up again, tightly, carefully, high on her wrists, so she couldn’t wriggle through the circle of her own arms and get her hands in front of her. As if it mattered, as if she might break free with a single bound and tear her steel door from its hinges with her fingernails.
After a week her shoulders were in a constant state of low-level pain, and she had worn raw patches on her chin and cheek from sleeping on her stomach. She did not complain, however. She had briefly spotted one of her fellow prisoners, an Asian man, Japanese she thought. He was handcuffed, his legs were fettered, and he wore a blindfold.
During the second week, they began handcuffing her hands from the front. This made an amazing difference. She felt with giddy irrationality that she had truly accomplished something, that some kind of minor but definite message had been sent her from the prison administration.
Surely, she thought, as she lay waiting for sleep, her mind gently and luxuriously disintegrating, some mark had been made, maybe only a check on a clipboard, but some kind of institutional formality had taken place. She existed.
In the morning she convinced herself that it could not possibly mean anything. She began doing pushups.
She kept track of days by scratching the grainy wall under her bunk with the edge of her handcuffs. On her twenty-first day she was taken out, given another shower and another body search, and taken to meet the Inspector of Prisons.
The Inspector of Prisons was a large smiling sunburned white American. He wore a long silk djellaba, blue suit pants, and elaborate leather sandals. He met her in an air-conditioned office downstairs, with metal chairs and a large steel desk topped with lacquered plywood. There were gold-framed portraits on the walls, men in uniform: GALTIERI, NORTH, MACARTHUR.
A goon sat Laura down in a metal folding chair in front of the desk. After sweltering days in her cell, the air conditioning felt arctic, and she shivered.
The goon unlatched her handcuffs. The skin below them was calloused, the left wrist had an oozing scab.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Webster,” said the Inspector.
“Hello,” Laura said. Her voice was rusty.
“Have some coffee. It’s very good. Kenyan.” The Inspector slid a cup and saucer across the desk. “They had good rains this year.”
Laura nodded dumbly. She picked up the coffee and sipped it. She had been eating prison fare for weeks: scop, with the occasional bowl of porridge. And drinking the harsh metallic water, two liters every day, salted, to prevent heatstroke. The hot coffee hit her mouth with an astonishing gush of richness, like Belgian chocolate. Her head swam.
“I’m the Inspector of Prisons,” said the Inspector of Prisons. “On my usual tour of duty here, you see.”
“What is this place?”
The Inspector smiled. “This is the Moussa Traore Penal Reform Institute, in Bamako.”
“What day is this?”
“It’s …” He checked his watchphone. “December 6, 2023. Wednesday.”
“Do my people know I’m still alive?”
“I see you’re getting right to the crux of matters,” said the Inspector languidly. “As a matter of fact, Mrs. Webster, no. They don’t know. You see, you represent a serious breach of security. It’s causing us a bit of a headache.”
“A bit of a headache.”
“Yes.… You see, thanks to the peculiar circumstances in which we saved your life, you’ve learned that we possess the Bomb.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
He frowned slightly. “The Bomb, the atomic bomb.”
“That’s it?” Laura said. “You’re keeping me here because of an atomic bomb?”
The frown deepened. “What’s the point of this? You’ve been on the Thermopylae. Our ship.”
“You mean the boat, the submarine?”
He stared at her. “Should I speak more clearly?”
“I’m a little confused,” Laura said giddily. “I just spent three weeks in solitary.” She put her cup onto the desk, carefully, hand shaking.
She paused, trying to sort her thoughts. “I don’t believe you,” she told him at last. “I saw a submarine, but I don’t know that it’s a genuine nuclear missile submarine. I have only your word for that, and the word of the crew onboard. The more I think about it the harder it is to believe. None of the old nuclear governments were stupid enough to lose an entire submarine. Especially with nuclear missiles onboard.”
“You certainly have a touching faith in governments,” said the Inspector. “If we have the launch platform, it scarcely matters where or how we got the warheads, does it? The point is that the Vienna Convention does believe in our deterrent, and our arrangement with them requires that we keep our deterrent secret. But you know the secret, you see.”
“I don’t believe that the Vienna Convention would make a deal with nuclear terrorists.”
“Possibly not,” said the Inspector, “but we are counter terrorists. Vienna knows very well that we are doing their own work for them. But imagine the unhappy reaction if the news spread that our Republic of Mali had become a nuclear superpower.”
“What reaction,” Laura said dully.
“Well,” he said, “the great unwashed, the global mob, would panic. Someone would do something rash and we would be forced to use our deterrent, unnecessarily.”
“You mean explode an atomic bomb somewhere.
”
“We’d have no choice. Though it’s not a course we would relish.”
“Okay, suppose I believe you,” Laura said. The coffee was hitting her now, nerving her up like fine champagne. “How can you sit there and tell me that you would explode an atomic bomb? Can’t you see that that’s all out of proportion to whatever you want to accomplish?”
The Inspector shook his head slowly. “Do you know how many people have died in Africa in the last twenty years? Something over eighty millions. It staggers the mind, doesn’t it: eighty millions. And the hell of it is that even that has barely got a handle on it: the situation is getting worse. Africa is sick, she needs major surgery. The side shows we’ve run in Singapore and Grenada are like public relations events compared to what’s necessary here. But without a deterrent, we won’t be left alone to accomplish what’s necessary.”
“You mean genocide.”
He shook his head ruefully, as if he’d heard it all before and expected better from her. “We want to save the African from himself. We can give these people the order they need to survive. What does Vienna offer? Nothing. Because Africa’s regimes are sovereign national governments, most of them Vienna signatories! Sometimes Vienna dabbles in subverting a particularly loathsome regime—but Vienna gives no permanent solution. The outside world has written Africa off.”
“We still send aid, don’t we?”
“That only adds to the misery. It props up corruption.”
Laura rubbed her sweating forehead. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple. We must succeed where Vienna has failed. Vienna did nothing about the terrorist data havens, nothing about Africa. Vienna is weak and divided. There’s a new global order coming, and it’s not based in obsolete national governments. It’s based in modern groups like your Rizome and my Free Army.”
“No one voted for you,” Laura said. “You have no authority. You’re vigilantes!”
“You’re a vigilante yourself,” the Inspector of Prisons said calmly. “A vigilante diplomat. Interfering with governments for the sake of your multinational. We have everything in common, you see.”
“No!”
“We couldn’t exist if it weren’t for people like you, Mrs. Webster. You financed us. You created us. We serve your needs.” He drew a breath and smiled. “We are your sword and shield.”
Laura sank back into the chair. “If we’re on the same side, then why am I in your jail?”
He leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “I did tell you, Mrs. Webster—it’s for reasons of atomic security! On the other hand, we see no reason why you shouldn’t contact your coworkers and loved ones. Let them know you’re alive and safe and well. It would mean a great deal to them, I’m sure. You could make a statement.”
Laura spoke numbly. She’d known something like this was coming. “What kind of statement?”
“A prepared statement, of course. We can’t have you babbling our atom secrets over a live phone link to Atlanta. But you could make a videotape. Which we would release for you.”
Her stomach roiled. “I’d have to see the statement first. And read it. And think about it.”
“You do that. Think about it.” He touched his watchphone, spoke in French. “You’ll let us know your decision.”
Another goon arrived. He took her to a different cell. They left the handcuffs off.
Laura’s new cell was the same length as the first, but it had two bunks and was a stride and a half wider. She was no longer forced to wear handcuffs. She was given her own chamber pot and a larger jug of water. There was more scop, and the porridge was of better quality and sometimes had soybean bacon bits.
They gave her a deck of cards, and a paperback Bible that had been distributed by the Jehovah’s Witness Mission of Bamako in 1992. She asked for a pencil to make notes on her statement. She was given a child’s typer with a little flip-up display screen. It typed very nicely but had no printout and couldn’t be used to scribble secret messages.
The screaming was louder under her new cell. Several different voices and, she thought, different languages too. The screaming would go on, raggedly, for about an hour. Then there would be a coffee break for the torturers. Then they would set back to work. She believed that there were several different torturers. Their habits differed. One of them liked to play moody French café ballads during his break.
One night she was woken by a muffled volley of machine-gun fire. It was followed by five sharp coup-de-grâce shots. They had killed people, but not the people being tortured—two of them were back next night.
It took them two weeks to bring her statement. It was worse than she had imagined. They wanted her to tell Rizome and the world that she had been kidnapped in Singapore by the Grenadians and was being held in the underground tunnel complex at Fedon’s Camp. It was a ridiculous draft; she didn’t think that the person who had written it fully understood English. Parts of it reminded her of the FACT communiqué issued after the assassination of Winston Stubbs.
She no longer doubted that FACT had killed Stubbs and shot up her house. It was obvious. The remote-control killing smelled of them. It couldn’t have been Singapore, poor brilliant, struggling Singapore. Singapore’s military, soldiers like Hotchkiss, would have killed Stubbs face-to-face and never bragged about it afterward.
They must have launched the drone from a surface ship somewhere. It couldn’t have come from their nuclear submarine—unless they had more than one, a horrible thought. The sub couldn’t have traveled fast enough to attack Galveston, Grenada, and Singapore during the time of her adventure. (She was already thinking of it as her adventure—something over, something in her past, something pre-captivity.) But America was an open country and a lot of the F.A.C.T. were Americans. They bragged openly that they could go anywhere, and she believed them.
She believed now they had someone—a plant, a spy, one of their Henderson/Hesseltines—in Rizome itself. It would be so easy for them, not like Singapore. All he would have to do was show up and work hard and smile.
She refused to read the prepared statement. The Inspector of Prisons looked at her with distaste. “You really think this defiance is accomplishing something, don’t you?”
“This statement is disinformation. It’s black propaganda, a provocation, meant to get people killed. I won’t help you kill people.”
“Too bad. I’d hoped you could send your loved ones a New Year’s greeting.”
“I’ve written my own statement,” Laura offered. “It doesn’t say anything about you, or Mali, or the F.A.C.T., or your bombs. It just says I’m alive and it has a few words my husband will recognize so that he’ll know it’s really me.”
The Inspector laughed. “What kind of fools do you take us for, Mrs. Webster? You think we’d let you spout secret messages, something you’d cooked up in your cell after weeks of your … oh … feminine ingenuity?”
He tossed the statement into a bottom drawer of his desk. “Look, I didn’t write the thing. I didn’t make the decision. Personally, I don’t think it’s all that great a statement. Knowing Vienna, it’s more likely to make them tiptoe their way into that termite castle under Fedon’s Camp, instead of shelling it into oblivion, like they should have done way back in ’19.” He shrugged. “But if you want to ruin your life, be declared legally dead, be forgotten, then go right ahead.”
“I’m your prisoner! Don’t pretend it’s my decision.”
“Don’t be silly. If it meant anything serious, I could make you do it.”
Laura was silent.
“You think you’re strong, don’t you?” The Inspector shook his head. “You think that, if we tortured you, it would be some kind of romantic moral validation. Torture’s not romantic, Mrs. Webster. It’s a thing, a process: torture is torture, that’s all. It doesn’t make you any nobler. It only breaks you. Like the way an engine wears out if you drive it too fast, too hard, too long. You never really heal, you never really get over it. Any more than you get ove
r growing old.”
“I don’t want to be hurt. Don’t pretend I do.”
“Are you going to read the stupid thing? It’s not that important. You’re not that important.”
“You killed a man in my house,” Laura said. “You killed people around me. You kill people in this prison every day. I know I’m no better than them. I don’t believe you’ll ever let me go, if you can help it. So why don’t you kill me too?”
He shook his head and sighed. “Of course we’ll let you go. We have no reason to keep you here, once your security threat is over. We won’t stay covert forever. Someday, very soon, we’ll simply rule. Someday Laura Webster will be an upstanding citizen in a grand new global society.”
A long moment passed. His lie had slid past her comprehension, like something at the other end of a telescope. At last she spoke, very quietly. “If it matters at all, then listen to me. I’m going to go insane, alone in that cell. I’d rather be dead than insane.”
“So now it’s suicide?” He was avuncular, soothing, skeptical. “Of course you’ve been thinking of suicide. Everyone does. Very few ever really do it. Even men and women doing hard labor in death camps find reason to go on living. They never bite their own tongues out, or open their veins with their fingernails, or run headlong into the wall, or any of those childish jailbirds’ fantasies.” His voice rose. “Mrs. Webster, you’re in the upper level here. You’re in special custody. Believe me, this city’s slums are full of men and women, and even children, who’d cheerfully kill to have it as easy as you do.”
“Then why don’t you let them kill me?”
His eyes clouded. “I really wish you wouldn’t be like this.”
He sighed and spoke into his watchphone. After a while the goons came and took her away.
She went on hunger strike. They let her do it for three days. Then they sent her a cellmate.
Her new cellmate was a black woman who spoke no English. She was short and had a broad, cheerful face and two missing front teeth. Her name was something like Hofuette, or Jofuette. Jofuette would only smile and shrug at Laura’s English: she had no gift for languages and couldn’t remember a foreign word two days running. She was illiterate.
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