Fahran wasn’t going to lead anyone to bin Laden. He was a follower. He barely knew where to take a piss when he was out on patrol with the other hard-liners.
They hated him. He was weak and he was slow and he was not very bright, so they called him bacha. When they were captured by our troops, they blamed him, and then one of them had made the joke about Osama coming to rescue his little boyfriend.
That started the whole thing. The others in his group saw a chance to save their own skins, so they lied about the kid.
He wasn’t resisting interrogation. He was telling the truth. He didn’t know anything. If he’d been smarter, he would have lied.
The kid was not innocent, as I said. Fahran would have happily unloaded a full clip from his rifle into me if he got the chance.
He wasn’t innocent. He was ignorant.
I jumped out then, took a glance in Hatcher’s head. He was still convinced. As far as he was concerned, they’d found Osama’s boyfriend. Getting him to let go of that idea would have been like getting a pit bull to unlock its jaws from a rib eye.
They would keep at him. They’d torture him to doomsday. He’d lie to buy time or a break in the pain, and then they’d figure out he was lying, and they’d start it again. He was going to spend the rest of his short, unhappy life locked in a cycle of pain and abuse and humiliation.
But the kid simply didn’t know what we wanted to know. Like it or not, I was the only friend the little bastard had.
So before I could talk myself out of it, I told the truth. “He’s got nothing.”
“What?” I think Cantrell and Hatcher said it at the same time.
“He doesn’t know anything,” I told them. “He’s never even seen bin Laden, outside of a photograph.”
It didn’t go over well.
“Bullshit,” Hatcher said. He got in my face. He had to lean over. He was a good eight inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than me. I knew I’d see his punch coming. I wasn’t sure that would be enough.
Instead of hitting me, he went back to the prisoner and grabbed him and shook him. “Tell me what you know!” he shouted, first in Pashto, then in English. “Tell me about bin Laden!”
“Bin Laden will make all of you pay!” Fahran wailed in Pashto.
Hatcher shoved him down on the board. The board tipped toward the basin, which was still full of water from the earlier sessions.
Hatcher kept screaming for Fahran to talk. He was dangerously close to the edge of something. I saw it in his head. There was no future there, just a big black wall like an approaching thunderstorm.
In desperation, I sent a message to the kid, direct into his brain.
Fahran looked at me, his eyes full of terror. He didn’t know how he could hear me inside his brain. He was one generation removed from shepherds. He’d been conscripted by the Taliban and given an automatic weapon. He’d never even made a phone call in his life. This was all black magic to him. He couldn’t lie properly when his life depended on it. He could only fall back on one word, practically the only word in English that he knew.
“No,” he said.
Absolutely the wrong word, as it turned out.
Hatcher heard defiance. And he snapped. He began pounding on the kid again. Big, swinging, meat-hook punches to the head. He grunted with the effort each time he pulled his arm back.
I was still off-balance, and now I was getting a fraction of each blow, sending my head spinning. I was still too deep in the kid’s brain. I put my hand on Hatcher’s shoulder, told him to stop.
He shoved me hard into the wall. My skull bounced off the cinderblock. Black dots swarmed around the edges of my vision. The room became a tunnel. Cantrell shouted something. Hatcher ignored him as he lifted the kid bodily from the board and plunged his head into the basin.
I felt the water around the kid’s chin, the sudden rush of it up his nose and down his throat, no plastic in the way this time, the jangling alarms going off in his nervous system as he desperately struggled to get back up. Hatcher held him down.
I heard Hatcher scream both in my ears and through the kid’s, a garbled stereo: “Give us a location! Where is he! Where is he!”
Cantrell was still shouting at Hatcher. The others were trying to pull him off the kid.
Like I said before, I’d always felt the pain of the interrogation sessions. But in that instant, with the kid underwater, dying for a breath, the reality behind them finally broke through. Up until that moment, I felt it only as another burden inflicted on me, another injury heaped on top of my own. At that moment, I finally understood that there was an independent human being out there, going through everything I felt, and that I was getting only an echo of their trauma. He was experiencing far worse.
I got it. True empathy. Being in the place of another person. Just as Hatcher put the kid under for the third time.
I’ve never had good timing.
The kid choked and gasped. I felt the water enter his lungs.
He was drowning. I was drowning with him.
I pulled back as hard as I could, told myself there was no water, my lungs were clear, I was out in the air. It was no good. I couldn’t get a breath.
Something kicked me in the head. And mercifully, everything went black.
I WOKE A few minutes later, in the corridor outside the cell. Cantrell was there, looming over me. I realized I was on the floor.
For a moment, I thrashed around like I was trying to swim.
“Easy,” Cantrell said.
My mind cast out immediately, instinctively. As always, as I’d been trained, to find the nearest people and assess the situation, to present an intuitive and immediate picture of my surroundings.
Silence. Fear. And a hole where the kid’s mind used to be.
Cantrell had put me into the recovery position. I sat up and regretted it instantly. There was a lump, getting bigger, at one temple.
“Knocked you out,” Cantrell said. “Your face was turning blue. You weren’t breathing. Seemed like you were having trouble disconnecting the wires.”
“Thanks,” I managed.
Hatcher was gone. Well out of my range. Probably on his way to a plane off the base, if not already in the air.
The camp doctor was there too. Cantrell stepped back, and he went to work. Checked me with everything in his kit.
“You had an event,” he said.
“What do you mean by ‘event’?”
Seemed like a reasonable question at the time. He looked away from my one eye that could focus. The other one I kept shut because it felt like the light was too bright on that side. When I finally got in front of a mirror, I discovered my pupils were different sizes. One looked as big as a Frisbee.
The doctor hemmed for a moment. “I think you’ve had some bleeding in your brain. I don’t have access to an MRI, so I can’t really say for sure. You’re presenting like someone who was badly concussed.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
He shrugged, misery coming off him in waves. “You need to get to a hospital. A properly equipped hospital. You need proper care. You could have an aneurysm waiting to burst. Or there could be ongoing damage. You might stroke out any minute, for all I know.”
“And he might be fine. I’ve seen him look worse with a hangover,” Cantrell said. “No offense, doc, but you know you’re kind of a Chicken Little around here. You’re always saying we’re going to kill someone sooner or later.”
The way Cantrell said it, it almost seemed polite. The doctor bit back something that sounded like a scream.
He didn’t say it out loud, of course. Instead, he went into the cell. A moment later, I saw the doctor escort a body bag, along with the two MPs hauling it. None of them glanced in our direction.
I looked at Cantrell. He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “We lost him. Bad day.”
Sometimes being a telepath means knowing
exactly what someone else means. It’s the complete erasure of ambiguity. There were a lot of different concerns competing for attention in Cantrell right then. He was worried about how Townsend would handle the incident. He wanted to make sure this didn’t become another scandal somewhere down the line. He had a brief vision of himself hauled before a congressional committee live on CNN. But mostly he felt a burned-out regret.
Not for the loss of the kid’s life. For the missed opportunity. This could have been thousands of man-hours, all billable under the contract.
“What was that?”
He looked at me. He knew he hadn’t said anything.
“You know you’re not cleared for everything that goes on between my ears,” he said.
It was too late. I knew what Cantrell knew. What he’d known before we ever set foot on the base.
“You never thought he knew where bin Laden was.”
Cantrell shrugged. “I had my doubts.”
I took a good long look inside Cantrell’s head. I could see it clearly. The word from above was that bin Laden was safe in Pakistan, protected by the ISI. The question wasn’t finding him. It was finding the nerve to kill him, and possibly start a war with an unstable country that was supposedly our ally.
I didn’t quite know what to do with the information. From where I sat, I could see into the interrogation cell. There was discarded sterile wrapping all over the floor. A defibrillator sat on its crash cart, paddles hanging off the sides. The basin with the water was still half full.
Or half empty, I suppose. Depending on how you looked at it.
“He didn’t know a thing,” I said, mainly just so someone would say it out loud.
Cantrell made a face like his lunch was repeating on him. I felt the stone wall go up, along with weariness and contempt. He began thinking of a scene from Debbie Does Dallas to block me out. “Well,” he said, “we’ll never know now, I guess.”
“I’ll know,” I said.
He considered several replies and discarded them all. “You need some leave,” he said. “Get your head on straight. See a real doctor. Spend a little time in bed with that pretty girl of yours.”
He signaled to another one of the soldiers nearby, who helped me to my feet. I couldn’t walk on my own.
Eight hours later, I was checked out by a confused doctor at the army medical center in Darmstadt, Germany. He said the MRI showed head trauma: tiny blossoms of blood flowering in my skull. They were healing rapidly, on their own, without clotting, so he thought surgery presented more risks than benefits. “Nothing too bad, really,” he said. He mostly got patients who were missing actual sections of their skulls, so I could see his point. He gave me a full bottle of OxyContin for the headache, and then signed me out.
Sixteen hours after that, I was back in Washington, D.C., and back in the world. As if nothing had changed at all.
[16]
First things first. We need money, and we need clothing, and we need transport.
Getting the money is the easy part. Preston thought he’d cut me off from the civilized world by taking away my cash and credit cards, and in a way he did. What he didn’t understand—what his handlers apparently didn’t know about me either—was how little that actually matters to someone with my talents and training.
I try to follow the rules and color inside the lines most of the time. But I was taught how to steal and cheat and lie by the very best criminals our government has to offer. All Preston has done is liberate me to use those skills again.
I don’t feel the need to inflict myself on any innocent bystanders today, so Kelsey and I drive deep into what they call Pennsyltucky, the rural areas that make up most of the state outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. At first glance, it’s idyllic. Old barns, small towns, green pastures. It’s also home to a booming meth trade, liquored-up violence, and cash-only gun sales.
We drive around until we find just the right kind of bar: one with too many cars out front in the morning, paint peeling from rotten wood, and windows dark with grime, like cataracts in the eyes of an old man. We park next to the run-down beaters in the lot, and I can practically smell the bad vibes coming from the building. Exactly what we need.
When we walk inside, I can tell the place was gorgeous once. Hundreds of square feet of deeply polished pine flooring, a wide bar cut from a single log, antique copper-plate ceiling. All of it now pitted and stained and yellowed with neglect. I am not one for feng shui or any of that mystic crap, but a place takes on the characteristics of the people who inhabit it, and the defeat in here is so thick I can almost see it hanging in the air with the cigarette smoke.
Despite our dirty clothes and lack of a shower, we’re still the best-dressed and cleanest people here. We get hard looks from the crew holding down the seats before noon. There’s an immediate wave of hostility. They’ve seen people like us before. Tourists. We might as well be from another country. They think we’re here to score drugs and gawk at the locals. A little tale of adventure to bring back to our equally rich and useless friends in Philly.
The bartender looks like your grandmother, if your grandma ran with biker gangs and kept little envelopes of crystal in her purse instead of hard candies. She ignores us for as long as she can, but eventually brings her attitude over to our end of the bar. I smell food cooking, and I’m hungry enough to order the chicken-fried steak without thinking too much about the kitchen. Kelsey orders a Pabst Blue Ribbon. The bartender practically spits with contempt. That would have been on tap here twenty years ago. Now it’s a hipster brand that sells for four bucks a glass. Kelsey changes her order to a Bud.
There are some ugly words muttered from the tables in the back. I take a look around and scan the watchers in the booths and chairs. No real danger. Life beat the crap out of these people long before they came in here. They’re not likely to stand up or make trouble. Most of them are already buzzed, their minds soft and bloated as their bodies, sloshing around in puddles of warm draft beer.
But one gleams, shiny and cheap, like a brand-new penny. It’s almost like he’s a tick, sucking life from the skins of everyone else in here. He locks on to us, eyes hard, a tight grin pulling his face in half. The local dealer. This is his office, and he thinks he sees new customers.
No. He thinks he sees new victims.
I pluck out his name:
I’m about halfway through the greasy steak when he slides up to us, that grin even tighter.
“Hey there, folks. How’s it going?”
He stands provocatively close to Kelsey. Challenging me already.
We chitchat for about a minute before we get to business. “So,” he says quietly. “You looking?”
Kelsey giggles. God bless her, she’s a natural at this. “Looking for what?”
“You’re too pretty to play hard to get,” he says, moving even closer. “You know what you want.” Tyler is not exactly subtle. He figures we’ll let him do whatever he wants as long as we get the meth.
The bartender stands at the other end of the bar, her back turned as if she’s trying to ignore us. But she’s in on it. She gets a cut of every sale Tyler makes in the bar. And she plans to back whatever play Tyler makes with the sawed-off shotgun she keeps under the register.
We negotiate for an eight-ball, with him steadily raising the price. Thoughts of money give me a way into his finances. He’s got about $500 in his wallet, and about three grand in a brick of small bills in his car. That should do.
We walk out through the back door. Nobody looks at us. Even if I couldn’t see the plans in Tyler’s head like they were on a movie screen, I would know what’s coming next.
Tyler uses the bar’s rear exit, which opens onto another gravel-and-dirt parking lot. Kelsey almost goes through the door after him, but I hold her back a little. I go out instead.
I�
��ll give Tyler this: he doesn’t waste any time. As soon as I step over the threshold, he rears back and throws a roundhouse punch at my head.
It’s always worked before when he’s ripped someone off. And it’s not a bad tactic, as long as the intended victim doesn’t see it coming.
But I do. And I am suddenly so grateful to Tyler for being stupid and vicious enough to do this.
I slip the punch, step inside the swing, and knock my shoulder hard into Tyler’s chest, driving him back. He nearly loses his footing, but manages to throw a left instead. He’s off-balance, wrong-footed. He doesn’t know how much trouble he’s in.
I block the left and put the heel of my hand right in his face. His head snaps back, his feet start pedaling like he’s on a bicycle, and I help him the rest of the way to the ground with a leg sweep.
He goes down into the gravel. Instead of finishing him, I wait.
I realize now I could have raised the cash a half dozen easier ways. Swiped an ATM card from someone’s pocket and the pin number from his head, for instance. Found a poker game and bankrupted the other players. Sold the Escalade to a chop shop. Pawned my watch.
But I’m in a foul mood, and it feels pretty good to fight back instead of running.
I can hear Kelsey’s small voice of alarm when I allow Tyler to get up.
He struggles to his feet, blood pouring from his nose and a gash on his forehead. He lifts his arms and snarls and gets ready for his last stand.
Unfortunately, at this range, I also get a solid connection with him, and his memories begin crashing into my head.
I see the death of his father when he was eleven, creating an absence that still hurts every time he thinks of it, like probing a broken tooth with his tongue. This was followed shortly by the disintegration of his mother, who retreated into herself and left nothing behind for her kids. He still brings her a carton of Marlboros every time he visits, about the only thing in her life that seems to give her any joy. He was a welfare case, a skinny little runt in church-bin clothes, a frequent victim of bullies. And then, by the miracle of puberty, he shot up six inches and gained fifty pounds and turned into a bully himself. He was just smart enough to realize the best business in town was helping other people deaden their pain. He started out buying beer for the other kids in his high school, then branched out to bad weed, then pills, then meth. He’s also smart enough to realize he’s never met a successful small-town dealer over thirty, and he knows he’ll be looking at the end of a gun or prison pretty soon.
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