The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  Chapel turned and stared at him. Staring was easy. His eyes wouldn’t close. I’m a person, he thought. I am a person. I am a person.

  “If you tell me your name, you can sleep. You can eat. We’ll even hose you down,” Kalin said, with a smile.

  “I—I have a name,” Chapel insisted.

  “I know. Just tell me what it is. Really, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  Chapel tried to remember. He tried to remember why he couldn’t give this man his name. He was sure there was a good reason. He just had it. He just had the reason, he just had to remember. Remember why—

  Kalin clicked his pen. Got ready to write something down.

  “In your own time,” he said.

  Chapel stared and stared and stared. He opened his mouth. He felt like something was going to come out. Words. Two words. A name.

  “Indira Gandhi,” he said.

  The look on Kalin’s face made him laugh. And laugh and laugh.

  “David Cameron,” he tried, which was even funnier. Then he thought of the funniest name of all.

  “My name is Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin, and I’ll be conducting your interview,” he said. And that was just hysterical.

  He was still laughing when Kalin got up and picked up his chair. The notebook was nowhere to be seen.

  “I apologize,” Kalin said.

  Chapel stopped laughing instantly.

  “I underestimated you,” Kalin told him. “It’s clear you’ve been trained to counter this kind of persuasion. Sleep deprivation isn’t going to work on you.”

  “It’s—not?”

  “We find it highly effective with most people. But there are limits to what can be done this way. Sleep deprivation can even be fatal if it’s taken too far. The first queen Elizabeth of England died of insomnia, did you know that?”

  “That’s my name,” Chapel tried. “Queen Elizabeth.”

  Kalin shook his head. “I could keep you awake longer, but then you would die. And that wouldn’t help me finish my report. So go ahead and sleep.” He shrugged and headed for the door. “The drugs will wear off in a few hours, and then I imagine you’ll sleep very well indeed. That’s good. I’ll want you clear-headed tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? What happens then?”

  “That’s when we take things to the next level.”

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 26, 08:01

  Chapel woke up on the tiled floor of his room, his eyes slowly opening. He stretched out his arm, his legs, luxuriating in how rested he felt. He was sore from lying all night on the hard tiles, but he didn’t care. He felt a million times better than he had the day before.

  He was considering his options—most of which involved rolling over and taking a nap—when there was a knock at the door. It opened before he could even realize he should say something, and an orderly came in, bearing a tray of food. Dry toast and some water. Chapel didn’t protest how plain it was. His stomach had shrunk from going without for so long, and he probably couldn’t have handled anything more complex. The orderly left again without a word, before Chapel could ask for more.

  A little while later a different orderly came in and took the tray away. Then Kalin came in, carrying two chairs. He set them down facing each other and gestured for Chapel to sit in one of them.

  “You look well,” Kalin told him, with a smile that showed some actual warmth. “I’m glad. You know I don’t want to cause you pain, don’t you? I hope you understand that. That I don’t take any pleasure in what we’ve done to you.”

  Chapel considered sneering, but he didn’t want to give Kalin the satisfaction.

  “You don’t want to give me your name, we’ve established that,” Kalin told him. He made a dismissive gesture, as if he were shooing away a pesky insect. “Okay. Konyechno, as we say in Russia.”

  Chapel forced himself not to flinch, hearing Nadia’s favorite word out of this man’s mouth.

  “You know the term? It means more than just ‘okay’ or ‘of course.’ There’s no exact translation into English. Perhaps you have heard of our famous Slavic fatalism. The way we simply accept that the world is not made for our pleasure, to our desires. We say ‘konyechno’ to mean this. Perhaps the best English equivalent would be, ‘What are you going to do?’”

  “So you’ve given up? You’re going to release me with an official apology?”

  Kalin smiled again. “American optimism. Perhaps that’s what won the Cold War. Okay. All right. Konyechno. I give up . . . at least, I will stop asking for your name. There are other questions that I’d like answers to. I’d like to know how you met the terrorist Asimova.” He took his pen and his notebook out. “I’d like to know what you were doing at Aralsk-30. I’d like to know what her plan was. She was in charge, yes? She was giving the orders? We’ve established that much, but I’d like confirmation.”

  “For your report.”

  “Yes. Exactly. For my report. Where should we start?”

  “Sorry,” Chapel said. “I don’t have the answers you want.”

  “You mean you won’t give them to me,” Kalin suggested.

  “Believe what you want,” Chapel said. He draped his arm over the back of his chair. It was immensely comforting to have furniture at his disposal again. “So where I’m from—”

  “Which is?” Kalin asked, his pen coming up.

  “—the police have this tactic they use during interrogations,” Chapel went on, “called Good Cop Bad Cop. Two police officers enter the interrogation room and the first one threatens the suspect with jail. He shouts and demands answers and slams the wall and gets right up in the suspect’s face. The suspect, naturally, refuses to answer anything. He’s afraid of the bad cop, you see.”

  “Understandably.”

  Chapel nodded. “Eventually, the bad cop gets so frustrated he says he has to leave the room. That he’s going to hurt the suspect if he has to look at him for one more second. The other cop, the good cop, closes the door behind him and tells the suspect how sorry he is, that the bad cop is a hothead and dangerous and he wishes he didn’t have to work with him. He tells the suspect that things aren’t actually so bad, that he understands why the suspect did what he did. He promises him all kinds of favors. He gets the suspect coffee or food. He makes friends with the suspect. Of course, it’s all an act. Both cops know it. But it’s surprisingly effective. Given the chance to talk to a friendly face, many suspects will just give themselves away.”

  “Interesting,” Kalin said. “But I don’t see the point. There’s only one of me.”

  “Exactly,” Chapel said. “That’s why this isn’t going to work. I’ll never think of you as a friend, Kalin. And I’ll never answer your questions.”

  The senior lieutenant nodded in understanding and tapped his pen on the edge of his notebook. “You have been trained to resist interrogation, haven’t you? Very impressive. Very good. But you’re wrong about one thing—I’m not trying to fool you here. I harbor no illusions that you’re going to start to like me. I am not trying to instill Stockholm syndrome in you, no, nothing like that.”

  “Okay,” Chapel said.

  “No, no. You see, I wasn’t trained by American policemen. I was trained by the KGB. You understand, of course, that the old men I learned from were experts at this sort of thing. Masters of getting at secrets. They had their own technique. One of them, one of the most simple, one of the most effective was based on the idea of operant conditioning. Do you know the term? No? Let me tell you how it works. I begin with something bad, something unpleasant. Say, I keep a man awake for days until he begins to break down psychologically. Then—out of nowhere—I stop. I let him sleep. I give him food. I let him feel good again, safe again. I let him remember what it was like to be warm and comfortable. I let him remember how much he has lost. Because—and this is the effective part—it makes what comes next so very, very much worse.”

  Chapel froze in his chair. He forced himself not to give anything away.

  Kalin
rose from his chair. “Come,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I want you to see the next step.”

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 26, 08:20

  Kalin led him out into a wide hallway that curved gently as it followed the round shape of the hospital. They passed by a number of doors, some of which were ajar, though Chapel could see nothing in the rooms beyond. He wondered for the first time if he were the only inmate here.

  One door opened, and a pair of big orderlies stepped out. They nodded respectfully to Kalin and then fell in behind him and Chapel. They said nothing, and they didn’t meet Chapel’s eye.

  “Torture,” Kalin told Chapel as they walked, “has a rather long history. As soon as there were kings and priests, I imagine, there was a need for torturers. As long as there were heretics and dissidents. Think of all the ways it used to be done—the rack, the iron maiden, the thumbscrews. An enormous amount of human ingenuity has gone into finding ways to make people talk. But in ancient times it was always looked on as a craft. Perhaps an art form. It took the KGB to bring torture into the modern era. To bring science to the problem of persuasion. To make a technology out of it.”

  They reached a junction in the corridor, and Kalin gestured for them to walk deeper into the building, away from the windows.

  “For seventy years they worked at it, testing out new techniques, new drugs, new methods of causing pain. They studied how their subjects responded to each tactic. They made charts and graphs of how long human beings could withstand, say, having hot irons placed against the soles of their feet, or how long they could go without food before they would begin raving. They tested all the famous truth serums—scopolamine, sodium pentathol, amobarbital—measuring each dosage so carefully, compiling lists of control questions and polygraph results. For decades they honed and refined their methods, always looking for the new way, the best way to reach the truth.”

  They came to a bank of elevators. Kalin summoned one with the press of a button and they all stepped inside, the orderlies flanking Chapel on either side. Maybe they thought he was going to attack Kalin. Try to kill him.

  He’d thought about it. But he knew that no matter how much satisfaction he might get from strangling his interrogator, it would make no difference. Moscow would just send another one straightaway.

  As the elevator descended, Kalin continued his lecture. “After seventy years of this, most of what they had learned was what didn’t work. How useless most torture really was. Cause enough pain and a man will tell you anything—but you can never know if what he tells you is true or simply what he thinks you want to hear. Testimony given under the influence of drugs is as likely to be fabricated—pure fantasy—as it is to reflect reality. But they did learn one basic principle about torture. One thing they could be sure of: every subject is different.”

  The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out. Chapel thought they might be in the basement of the hospital. The air was much cooler down there, and a little clammy. The walls were all tiled, and drains were set at periodic intervals in the floor, as if this level needed to be hosed down frequently. Even the lighting was different—harsher, more direct. Instead of the recessed bulbs on the higher floors, here the light came from hanging lamps, each of them inside its own steel cage.

  It was not a good place. Combined with the subject of Kalin’s speech, it was enough to make Chapel’s skin crawl.

  “Some men resist pain better than others. Some can go longer without food. The same dosage of a truth drug might open one man up and kill another.” Kalin shrugged. “All very frustrating. But some agent of the KGB, some man who will be forever nameless, took this problem and saw that it was actually an opportunity in disguise. If every subject responded to torture differently, then it was clear to him that the torture must be changed to suit the subject. That effective torture meant finding the one thing, the one breaking point, that would work for a given subject. If a man is afraid of spiders, for instance—if he has a phobia of them, then you will get more out of him by sticking his hand in a box full of the things than you would from weeks of a drug regimen. If a man loves his wife, you threaten her, not him. The trick, of course, is finding out just what the breaking point, the weak spot, is. Especially with a subject who won’t even tell you his name.”

  They came to a section of corridor lined with long rectangular windows. Beyond the glass was only darkness. Kalin went over to one and flipped a switch, turning on lights in the room beyond.

  Chapel wanted to run away. He didn’t want to know what was in that room, what Kalin thought was going to make him crack. He started to turn—it was involuntary—but the orderlies just grabbed him then. Held him in place.

  “Take a look,” Kalin said.

  Chapel forced himself to look through the window. His imagination, he knew, was running away from him; it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what his own mind could come up with. He looked and saw—

  Nothing much. On the other side of the glass was what looked like a standard operating room. There was a slablike operating table and a couple of cabinets. A tank of anesthetic gas. Lights that could be shone directly on the table. That was it.

  No box full of spiders. No Julia with a gun to her head.

  Just an operating room.

  “I’ve been watching you for some time now. When you first came to me, I had your prosthetic arm taken away. I thought that would leave you vulnerable, that you would have difficulty doing the most basic tasks. But I was wrong—you operate just fine with one arm. You have learned over time how to get by with only half the usual number of hands. That’s very commendable. I wonder if you could learn the same lesson all over again?”

  Chapel’s eyes went wide. “No,” he said. “No. You can’t. You wouldn’t.”

  “I can. I will. You are a nonperson. I can do anything to you I desire,” Kalin said. “You don’t even have a name. Tomorrow, if you do not answer all of my questions, I will bring you back here and we will cut off your right arm. And then you will have no arms at all. It will be interesting to see just how well you can adapt to that.”

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 26, 14:33

  They left him alone all day. An orderly came by with food a couple of times, but he didn’t respond to Chapel’s halting questions, even when he tried to ask them in Russian. It was clear that Kalin had given the order that Chapel be left to his own thoughts.

  Which was a kind of torture all in itself.

  “You hold out as long as you can,” Bigelow had told him. Every day he kept silent was another day for Hollingshead to distance himself and the DIA from Chapel’s activities. Another day for Angel to scrub his existence off the official records. Another day to make it look like the United States had never sent an agent to sabotage Perimeter.

  But Bigelow had also told him there would come a time when he wouldn’t be able to hold out any longer. When the pressure was just too much.

  He’d already given one arm for his country. Was he supposed to give the other one, too? Objectively he knew the answer to that question. If he was willing to give his life for America, why not an arm? He’d already proven once that he could survive that kind of loss. That he could learn to have a meaningful life as an amputee. He thought back to when he’d come home from Afghanistan, and he’d worked with a physical trainer named Top, learning how to live with one arm. Top had been a sergeant in Iraq who had lost an arm, a leg, and an eye to a roadside bomb. The man had given more than anyone could reasonably ask, but he’d never complained—and he’d never let it slow him down. With Top’s help, Chapel had learned to adjust.

  Of course, part of that adjustment was getting a magic prosthetic that worked almost as well as what he’d lost. The artificial arm had made a huge difference in his life, made so many things possible for him. But that arm was gone. Kalin wouldn’t give him another one, and he certainly wouldn’t give him two. He would spend the rest of his life in this hospital—maybe years—struggling to learn to use his feet to feed himself, to clean hims
elf.

  And even that wouldn’t be the end of it. Once Kalin had taken his right arm—what would be the next step? If somehow Chapel managed to stay silent even through another amputation, Kalin wouldn’t just give up. He would find some other way to get the information he wanted.

  There came a point where your country could ask no more of you, Chapel thought. There came a point where no matter how many oaths and promises you’d made, no matter how sincerely you had sworn to defend the honor of your country, you had to let go. You had to give in.

  Maybe he had reached that point.

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 27, 07:00

  He was asleep when they came for him. Two big orderlies in white tunics picked him up and carried him out of his cell. Kalin waited for him by the elevator that led down to the surgical theaters.

  Kalin had his notebook in one hand, and his pen in the other.

  He was tapping the pen against the edge of the notebook. Impatient.

  Somehow that was the thing that made Chapel snap. That made him try to fight.

  One orderly held his arm, the other had his neck. He didn’t know if they were really hospital employees or FSB agents—but he could tell by how thoroughly, how efficiently they held him, that they’d had some training in how to restrain a violent person.

  They’d never tried to hold on to an Army Ranger before, though.

  Chapel’s legs were free. He stopped walking and forced them to drag him until his legs were dangling behind him, his bare feet squeaking on the slick floor. He brought one leg up and hooked it around the knee of the orderly holding his arm. The man wasn’t ready for that and he stumbled. The other orderly tried to compensate, but Chapel threw his weight to the side and all three of them went down in a heap.

  The orderly who held his arm saw the floor coming toward his face and let go, using his hands to catch himself. That was all Chapel needed. He brought his arm back and delivered a nasty punch right to the kidney of the orderly holding his neck. The man’s breath exploded out of his mouth, and his grip slackened.