. . . he started to turn round . . .
. . . as the realization that he’d been set up began to take shape . . .
. . . then a fist slammed into the side of his neck, just below the jawline . . .
. . . and he heard the hooker gasp ‘Mon dieu!’ with utter sincerity just as his brain shut down the parts that managed cognition and consciousness.
20
His first thought, at the cusp of waking, was that he was not alone. There was the soft, rhythmic sound, a rustle like air through nostrils, in and out. It was so dark, he blinked a few times to make sure his eyes were open. He began to get a sense of his body – immobilized around the chest, arms and legs bound to something solid. His ass was on a flat surface, his back up snug against something, so he was fairly sure he was sitting in a chair. His mouth was taped shut.
The repetitive sound grew louder, and reminded Dewey of the hose-suckers they had him lying next to in the clinic after the Kandahar IED, and it made his heart sag. He tried to pull against his binds and found they had minimal give. It had to be some kind of tape. He didn’t like the feeling of being immobilized. He never had. It made him feel weak. Then he remembered the hooker and what had gone down in the car, and his mortification hurt more than the pulsing pain in his head. The throb was like a Morse code message: You fucked up . . . you fucked up . . . you fucked up . . .
When the toy piano joined in he realized it was taped audio. Fourteen tinny notes – over and over – some randomly out of sync and just barely out of key. Frè-re Ja-cques, frè-re . . . Jaaa-cques, dor-mez . . . vooous, dor-mez . . . vooous . . .
A third layer of audio began, a hardcore smoker’s cough – a dry, cutting hack. The aural tapestry started making him see things in the heavy pitch-black – tiny pricks of light . . . fuzzy, floating wraiths . . . shifting shades of black on black. It didn’t matter if he closed his eyes or kept them open. The circuitry of the brain ensured that when a sound registered it sought imagery, even when there was none to be found. It couldn’t stop itself.
Geiger had decided to wait until the tape played out. The last eight of the thirty minutes was only one layer – hesitant, labored huffs of breath, the aftermath of someone who is struggling for calm, and just when it seemed the sufferer would attain some peace, it broke into sobs again. On and on. When the tape ended, silence barged into the place like a mute beast – dense and heavy. Dewey had been relatively quiet through it all – clearing his throat half a dozen times and groaning once or twice – but the end of the ordeal brought a loud, guttural grunt of relief.
Geiger reached for the left lamp. Turning it on would take him back in time, and start it all again. Shining the light would deliver him to his darkest place. But there was no other way.
Geiger turned the lamp on – and a piercing beam illuminated half of Dewey’s face and made him turn away with a wince and mutter.
‘Your license says your name is Dwayne Brock.’
Dewey’s right eye squinted open, searching the black behind the light.
‘It works best for me if I call you by your name. Nod if your name is really Dwayne.’
Dewey sighed, his head bobbed, and his eye closed.
Geiger’s fingers stirred at his sides. He moved to the lamp on the right and switched it on. The lights were only two feet away from Dewey, and bleached his face into a death mask. The grey, two-inch duct tape that encircled his head at mouth-level had a thin, darkened line of moisture where his lips joined, and there was a large welt where jaw met neck that resembled an oblong port-wine stain.
‘My name is Geiger. I’m not aware of how much you know about me and the man who hired you. His name is Dalton. Dalton and I worked in Information Retrieval. Our clients hired us to get information from people, and we were both adept at it – though our approaches and methodologies were very different. Dalton was violent, aggressive. I was more psychologically oriented – and understated, perhaps. They called me the Inquisitor.’
Geiger leaned to one of the lamps, bending the neck – a two-inch adjustment.
‘I’m telling you this because it’s important you understand the nature of this particular event. Point one . . . I am working with very little time. In IR, we call that an asap. Point two . . . I know very little about you – only what you do for a living and, because of your tattoo, that you served in Afghanistan – so the lack of time and personal data will limit what techniques I would usually employ.’
Geiger paused, aware his body was about to perform a very rare action – and he yawned. The sleep deprivation was making itself known – with him in the room, a Morphean presence tugging at his sleeve, offering dreams, softening the edges of focus. He headed for the wall. He hadn’t planned on turning the overhead room light on this soon, but it might banish his visitor, for a while. He reached out in the dark, found the rough concrete, and ran his palms across it like a blind man until he found the switch and flicked it.
He turned, and they shared a stare. Dewey was stripped to his jockeys – taped to the chair around the chest, his legs taped to the chair’s legs from ankle to knee, and his arms taped to the chair’s from the wrists to the elbows. On the table was Geiger’s iPad, connected to the two speakers, the knife, Dewey’s clothes, neatly folded, and a pile of electronic innards that had been Dewey’s cell phone before Geiger dismantled it to make sure it couldn’t be traced.
Geiger started back toward his prisoner. ‘Point three . . . In this session, I’m not just the interrogator – I am also the client. I am the one who needs the information . . . and I have never been in this position before. Taking all three points into consideration, what I’m saying is – I may end up doing things I never would have considered in the past. Honestly, it concerns me, deeply – because this session may be much more about pain than fear. Nod if you understand me.’
An indecipherable grumble came out of Dewey through the tape – and Geiger leaned forward, the fingers of his right hand stiffening to make a paddle as it flashed up –and swacked Dewey’s left ear with a loud clap. The blow set off a deep gnarl while Dewey seized up from the face all the way down his body, like a chain reaction – muscles tightening, bungee cords popping up under the flesh. Then a rush of breath pouring out of his nostrils ended his noise and his body relaxed.
‘Nod if you understood me.’
Dewey’s head dipped up and down. Geiger counted the number of nods – two – and their speed – unhurried. Everything mattered.
‘Good,’ said Geiger, though he would have preferred at least three nods, at a faster rate. He stepped behind Dewey and undid the duct tape from around the mouth.
Dewey stretched his jaw open as wide as a cat’s yawn, and then blew out a breath.
‘Tell me your real name now.’
Dewey grinned. ‘Okay, you got me. It’s Darryl.’
Geiger grabbed a generous clump of Dewey’s blond curls at the side of his head and started to twist it, clockwise. Dewey’s jaw snapped shut, lips stretching back, teeth bared in an angry mutt’s snarl. Geiger’s fist continued its slow rotation – and Dewey’s mouth finally sprung open.
‘Okay! Dewey! Stop! Fuck! It’s Dewey!’
Geiger let go, and Dewey shook his head wildly, like a man whose hair was on fire. ‘Muhh–thurr–fuhhck!’
Geiger’s violence had been less strenuous than hammering a nail, but left a slight tremor in his hands. He folded the used tape carefully, again and again, trying to kill it.
‘Dewey . . . Do you know who Harry Boddicker is?’
Dewey’s reply was without hesitation, and matter-of-fact. ‘Yes. One of the guys Dalton has.’
‘Do you know who David Matheson is?’
‘Yeah. The other guy. The Veritas Arcana guy.’
Geiger didn’t care about these answers. They were like pre-test control questions for a polygraph where the tester already knows the true and false. He was getting a sense of Dewey’s cadence, timbre, vocal tendencies.
‘Dewey . . . Who do
you work for – Soames or Dalton?’
Dewey tilted his head like a cock o’ the walk. ‘Let me tell you something, dude. You’re fucking with the wrong guy. I had the SERE training before I shipped out, okay? I know how to deal with this shit. Survival, Evasion, Resistance and—’
Geiger’s hand came up and paddled Dewey’s right ear. It sounded like someone slamming a door shut – and Dewey’s roar started down in the pit of him, and grew in volume as it climbed some inner ladder and finally burst out like a shotgun blast.
‘Fffffffffffffffffuck, man!’
Geiger came around to face him. ‘Dewey . . . I can tell you with near certainty that your training will not play a major role in what happens tonight in this room.’
The wince slowly drained out of Dewey’s face and he let out a long exhale, his cheeks puffing up like a blow-fish. For the first time, he took a good look at Geiger . . .
The guy was certifiably strange – he never blinked, and the odd walk, and the fingers flicking at his sides – but the weirdest thing was his voice. Dewey . . . I can tell you with near certainty that your training will not play a major role in what happens tonight in this room. How do you say that deadpan straight-faced and without even a touch of I’m fucking with you, Jack attitude?
He watched Geiger go to the two space heaters and bring them back – placing one on each side of Dewey – and then turn them on. Their quartz hearts immediately started to glow. Dewey could feel it.
‘We’ll start with them on low,’ said Geiger.
Dewey’s head hurt like hell – and his lower back was knotting up – but most of all, he was mad. No one had bothered to mention that he was tailing a world-fucking-famous torturer.
Geiger took up a position before his captive, five feet away.
‘Dewey, there are things I need to know. First, I need—’
‘Fuck you, dude.’ Dewey had the expression of a bored bartender, and the tone to match.
‘First, I—’
‘Fuck you.’
Geiger stepped toward him, and bent down until they could smell each other’s sweat.
‘Dewey . . . It’s best if you—’
‘Fuck you, man,’ and this time Dewey grinned. He felt better now.
Geiger’s hands flashed up and applied swift, synchronized, sideways chops to both sides of Dewey’s neck – something out of a magician’s stage act without the ‘Voila!’ – and Dewey’s head instantly drooped to his chest and his shoulders sagged, a marionette who’s had its strings cut, gone from the waking world for a while.
Geiger went to the table, poured a cup of water, and drank it all down before he took another breath. Then he inhaled and poured a second cup. Something was catching up to him. Running him down from behind. He heard the smooth, solitary lope, knew the effortless breath. Soon it would pull even with him, stride for stride – and he would turn and look into his own face. The Inquisitor. He felt the faintest shiver wash over his shoulders. It was dread.
Geiger turned his head for the click but the bones would not accommodate the gesture. He tried the other direction, but instead of obeisance some defiant cervical faction fired a thin, hot squiggle up the back of his skull. The tail-end of the sensation tickled the back of his eyes – tiny minnows darting around the optic nerve – and then they swam away. A noise made him turn, and he watched another drop of water fall from the hot-water tank on the wall into the pail on the floor. Plop! He understood that the actual volume of the sound was lower than it seemed to him – that his brain was taking the aural information it was receiving and amplifying it – and he understood what that meant.
Geiger walked back to Dewey and started massaging the back of the man’s neck, giving it a firm slap every five seconds. Dewey did a short, reflexive headshake as he came to.
‘What the . . . fuck, man?’
Dewey felt buzzed, a little wired – almost as if he’d had a couple of hits of really good grass – but not high. He felt low – the sense of something heavy slowly spreading out in his mind, weighing him down. That dream-sleep sensation when you’re trying to run down the road but your quads feel like wood and it’s all stumble and trip. Fear.
‘How long was I out?’
‘Approximately one minute.’ Geiger slowly raised himself up on his tiptoes, stretching the calves, holding the position for a few seconds and then slowly coming back down, working the Achilles. And then up again . . .
‘Dewey . . . I feel I know you somewhat better now.’
‘Is that right? So we gonna go out for a drink later?’
Geiger settled down on his feet and began to stretch at the waist, side to side, to loosen the damaged hips.
‘Everything in IR has meaning. What you say – and how you say it, and when you say it. Your facial expressions, body language, your breathing patterns.’ He walked to the table, picked up the knife, and then started into his slow stroll. It would become a perfect circle, ten to twelve feet in diameter. ‘And the converse matters equally. What you don’t say, what you don’t do. Unfortunately, as I said at the start – I don’t have time to take what I’m learning and use it to shape an approach.’
The Inquisitor was beside him now, in step – a prodigal son, the necessary evil – ready to do whatever was required.
‘There’s a story about Dalton – that during Operation Desert Storm, the allies captured one of Saddam’s henchmen, a very tough individual, and interrogated him for days without success – so they brought Dalton over. The first time Dalton asked a question the Iraqi didn’t answer and Dalton sliced off his bottom lip with a rotary knife. Then he went to work with a nail-gun – and very shortly after that the man told Dalton what he wanted to know. Some say the story was hype – but Dewey, the point is – Dalton made a career out of proving there are ways to acquire information quickly.’
Geiger stopped before him. ‘I need certain information – and if you interrupt me before I finish I will put you out again, and the next time you wake up you will be missing a part of your body.’
It hit Dewey again, a sudden gust – ice-cold, wrapped in elastic warmth. Geiger’s voice. Like a perfectly programmed machine – no fluctuation, edgeless, without a soul – and to see it come out of a man’s mouth made it all the more harrowing.
‘You’re on the clock now, Dewey. We’ll go one by one. First . . . Who do you work for – Soames or Dalton?’
‘Soames.’
There were no signs of life in Geiger. Not a blink, not a breath. To Dewey, he looked like a life-sized cardboard cutout.
‘I work for Soames, man. I’m on your side, asshole.’
Dewey replayed his answer in his head. The delivery sounded pretty good to him. He watched Geiger come closer – and turn the knobs on the two heaters. The soft gold of the quartz heating elements grew richer, brightening into a sun-flare yellow with a hint of orange. He felt the heat reaching him in a smooth wave, and his body – especially the sides of his forearms and calves – was starting to get that prickly, pre-sunburn feeling.
‘What the fuck, dude? I told you the truth.’
‘That’s also a lie.’
‘And what the fuck makes you so sure?’
‘Did you notice before . . . with the music – “Frère Jacques” – that a few of the notes were just barely out of key?’ Geiger straightened up. ‘That’s what a lie sounds like to me.’
His forearm levered at the elbow and the side of his fist slammed into Dewey’s upper thorax, with the second intercostal nerve the target. It was one of the Inquisitor’s frequent maneuvers, and Dewey seized up – the neural explosion bringing his pulmonary activity to a sudden stop, lungs in abeyance, awaiting a sign to resume their duties – but Dewey was too distressed to give the cue. He would have doubled over but the tape round his chest held fast and would not allow it – yet his struggle was so forceful that the chair moved an inch on the floor.
The staggered, breathless caaack! caaack! caaack! spurting out of him was like gunfire from a small-c
aliber weapon, and the only thought his mind was able to start and finish – I can’t breathe – vanished when Geiger put the point of the knife beneath his nose and rested it in the dent of the philtrum. Dewey froze, and the sudden shift in his focus was a reboot for his lungs. He tried not to move while he resumed breathing, and tried even harder to find a clue behind the slate eyes about what acts Geiger was truly capable of performing. The exposed hair on his arms and legs felt like it was about to catch on fire.
‘Shall I ask you the first question again,’ Geiger said, ‘or move on and then come back to it?’
Dewey went cross-eyed trying to look down at the blade. ‘Take it easy, Geiger. Eeee-zeeee.’
Geiger’s grip on the knife tightened and a droplet of blood sprouted beneath Dewey’s nose.
‘If you work for Soames, then what is her plan – if she gets to Dalton.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean?’
‘If Soames and you and Victor get to Dalton, who comes out alive?’
Dewey had seen guys mentally overload and never understood what it felt like – until now: a house of cards – one layer of fear on top of another, until you finally cave in from the weight of it all. The weird audio . . . the darkness . . . the pain . . .
Geiger’s grip was white-knuckled. A thin, crimson worm wriggled to life beneath the blade.
‘Dewey . . . If Soames gets to Dalton, what happens to Harry and Matheson?’
. . . the heat . . . the immobility . . . the glimpse of something cold and final hanging out on the corner of his vision, biding its time. Dewey tasted blood. It painted red-tinted pictures in his head that he didn’t want to look at.
‘Listen to me carefully, Dewey. You haven’t lived very long, and you haven’t made many important choices. This is about truth. That’s what it always comes down to. If you tell me the truth, then you give yourself a thousand other choices after this. If you choose not to, then it may be the last choice you ever make.’ Geiger lowered the knife. ‘I don’t know if you can hear the clock, Dewey – but it’s ticking. Do Harry and Matheson live or die?’
The Confessor Page 19