He dismissed this airily: of course you can invite her, another woman is nothing, you are both welcome. I thanked him sincerely, saying that God would remember his generosity and threw in the quote about the blessedness of charity to the wayfarer from the Qur’an. So that was all set. I’d snatch my mother, bring her back here veiled, and get on with the rest of the mission. I walked home with my new pal, and we sat on rugs in the main room of his house and were fed by silent black shapes, and we talked of the terrible times. My man had no real objection to the Taliban, at least they kept crime under control and he thought the government was too harsh when it tried to uproot them. Bombs! Artillery! Many innocents had died. But of course the Taliban were wicked as well; they demanded that all rents be paid into their hands and not to the rightful landlords, of which he was one, and they murdered anyone who objected. Yes, it was a terrible time, but with God’s help perhaps it would improve. Slowly, without seeming to, I turned the conversation to the captive infidels. I said I assumed the Arabs had them hidden away and no one knew where they were. Of course everyone knew; it was in the house of his wife’s cousin, which he was renting to the Arabs, who at least paid dollars to the landlord. And he told me more than I needed to know about the house, how much his wife’s cousin had paid for it, who had owned it before, and what improvements had been made since, and said his wife’s cousin was a fool like all his family, since the man could’ve gotten far more for such a fine house if he had only known how to bargain.
Then I excused myself and said I had to go fetch my aunt and would probably be back quite late. Abdur wished me a safe journey and said his wife and daughters would be happy to receive the begum at any hour. I went out into the street. Perfectly black, overcast, a narrow alley like a mine shaft. I squatted down and screwed the silencer into my Stechkin and switched it to single shot. Then I strolled off to the wife’s cousin’s house. Paidara was shut down for the night, no one around, no sounds but the occasional dog barking and the purr of a generator. It had been a piece of good luck to meet Abdur, but anyone in the village could’ve given me information almost as good. Everyone knew everyone’s business in a village like this, and it would never occur to any of them that an American soldier could pass as one of the tribe. I had a pretty good map of the village in my head from studying the satellite shots and I didn’t have much trouble finding the house, a short street away from the inn.
It was a two-story building of the usual adobe brick and crumbling plaster, with an outside stairway up to the top floor and a high wall around it topped with a few strands of barbed wire. The gateway was closed with a wooden gate capped with spikes and faced with sheet-metal panels, and the windows were closed with louvered shutters. Bars of light strayed from the louvers in one of the upstairs windows, and I could see a ruddier flickering light coming from behind the closed gate. I stayed in the shadows across the little street and listened for a while. Men were talking in Arabic, softly: at least two, not more than four. I waited. They teach us to wait in my part of the army, and it’s one of the hard things; you have to stop thinking you’re in a movie, where action follows action.
Someone raised his voice, and there came an answering voice from the roof of the house. There was a man up there; I could just make out his silhouette. So figure three guys standing around a fire barrel in front and one up on the roof. He had to go first.
I walked through the darkness to the back of the house. Very good. A shedlike extension behind it with a tin chimney and a sloping tiled roof that connected with the rear wall of the house. It was not hard to get up on the tiles, and then it was a climb of maybe fifteen feet up the wall. Brick houses in this part of the world are not hard to scale; the brickwork is rough and often crumbling and the people are poor and slow to make repairs. I’d been climbing up walls like this since I could walk. I scrambled up and over the low parapet and crouched there in its shadow.
I heard steps. The roof guard had finished his conversation and was making his rounds, or maybe he was just moving because of the chill. He walked right by me and I stood up behind him and silently shot him through the head and grabbed his AK before it could hit the ground.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder and went down the outside stairway from the roof to the second floor. The door was unlocked and I entered the house. I was in a hallway with four doors. The only light came from under the door at the end of the hall; someone had a lamp going in there. It was enough light to see where they were keeping the hostages. It’s hard to turn a private house into a jail. The interior doors of a house don’t ordinarily lock from the outside, but the Arabs had attached two simple barrel bolts to each door, top and bottom. I chose one of the doors, pulled the bolts, and went in.
Two charpoys, each with a sleeping form under blankets. I bent my face closer to one sleeping head and sniffed. Unwashed woman. I took a lock of the invisible hair between my fingers. It was fine and when I walked my fingers down the strand I found that it was longer than my mother’s hair. I went to the other sleeper and sniffed again and closed a deep unconscious switch, an animal relic. I knew my mother’s smell. Gently, I touched her face. Her eyes popped open and her mouth opened to say something but I placed my hand over it.
“Quiet,” I whispered. “It’s me, Theo.”
“Theo,” she said and stared at me. She looked like she thought she was dreaming. “How did you get here?”
“Parachute.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“It’s a long story, Mother, and we haven’t got time. We have to get out of here.”
“Get out… you mean all the hostages?”
“No, just you. I came for you.”
“Theo, I can’t, I can’t just leave all these people.”
“You won’t have to. There’s a rescue operation on the way, but I want you where I can keep an eye on you. Put your shoes on.”
The other woman stirred in her sleep and made a sound. After a moment’s hesitation I heard my mother feeling around for her footwear and she stood up and I led her out of the room, bolting the door behind me.
Then someone shouted from outside. And again, more urgently. The men in front must have missed hearing from the guard on the roof. Footsteps and shouts on the outside stairway. I switched my machine pistol to full automatic.
A door opened. The hallway flooded with light. The black shape of a man in the doorway at the end of the hall. Everything was moving in slomo now as it does in a firefight. I had to take out the man in the doorway and then I’d go to the head of the stairs and shoot the guys coming up. I raised my Stechkin. I put the sight on the silhouette and squeezed the trigger, and as I did so, my mother struck my elbow an upward blow and the burst slammed into the ceiling.
“Theo!” she yelled. “Don’t shoot him. It’s Wazir!”
20
T hey took Cynthia to the basement of the main NSA building, OPS-2A, where the police force that monitors Crypto City has its headquarters. She was placed in the canonical windowless room with a table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. There was no sound from outside, the only noise the whir from the overhead vent. At one corner of the ceiling hung a small closed-circuit TV camera.
She sat and avoided looking at the camera. The Dutch courage from the martinis was rapidly fading, and this vexed the martinis, so that they no longer wanted to dwell in this unprofitable belly. Along with her spicy lunch they were sending urgent messages that they wished to leave, perhaps to decorate the sterile top of that table, or the floor.
Cynthia took deep breaths; she attempted calming thoughts. A fine cool sweat bloomed on her forehead. The door to the room opened and the two security men who had lifted her walked in. One was a mild-looking Latino; the other was a taller man with a flat ugly face and small, deep-set, piggy blue eyes. The tall one, the obvious bad cop, walked around the table and stood just out of her peripheral vision, leaning against the wall. The Latino sat down on the chair opposite her. He extended his hand and she took it,
aware of how clammy her own was.
“Gene Arbenz,” he said. “That’s Bill Cavanagh over there. We’re here to explain your situation as it now stands.”
“Can I make a phone call?”
“Not at this time, Cynthia.”
“Well, when can I make one?”
“I don’t have any information on that,” said Arbenz.
“Then why don’t you find someone who has that information?”
She felt the wind of movement behind her and Cavanagh leaped forward and slammed his hand down on the table with a shocking noise that made her bladder give way for a second, dampening her underwear.
His mouth was inches from her ear; she could smell his aftershave as he said, “Why don’t you fucking shut up and listen!”
Arbenz cast an admonitory look at his colleague. “Bill? Let me handle this, okay?”
Cavanagh grunted and went back to the wall.
Arbenz smiled and said, “Look, Cynthia, in a little while this is going to be out of our hands. You know what we usually do in security; we put up posters and check bags, and we run like a small-town police force for the facilities here at Meade. We’re not set up to, like, interrogate terrorists.”
“I’m not a terrorist. I haven’t done anything wrong.” She heard the quaver in her voice.
“Yeah, well the bosses think you have, and I have to say it looks real bad for you. A terrorist mole in NSA? With Top Secret clearance? Holy shit, Cynthia, this is going to go all the way to the White House. So I’m advising you informally, speaking as part of the NSA family, if there’s anything you’re holding back, now’s the time to let it out.”
“I’m not holding anything back. I’m telling the truth.”
“Maybe, but the best way to put everyone’s mind at ease in that regard is to tell us about the money.”
“What money?”
Arbenz sighed, as if he were so tired of hearing the pathetic lies of the guilty. “The money, Cynthia. In the Swiss account. Who paid it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t have any Swiss account.”
“Yes, you do. Over fifty thousand dollars has been run through that account in the last week, sent in and drawn out in ten-thousand-dollar increments. We need to know the source and where it is now.”
“I don’t-”
“Who paid it, Cynthia?” snarled Cavanagh behind her. “Who paid you to sell out your country? Fucking little gook bitch, we let her into this country and this is how she acts.”
Arbenz frowned at this. “Cavanagh, cut it out!”
Cavanagh cursed and walked to a corner of the room and slouched against the wall, an actor in a well-rehearsed play. Cynthia had seen the play too, like everyone else with a television, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t working.
“I’m sorry about that,” said Arbenz gently. “There’s never any need for that kind of language. But the problem, Cynthia, the problem is, we got you. I mean, we have this.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a plastic evidence bag. In the bag was a thumb drive.
“You kept this in your mailbox. It’s got the codes for your Swiss account and the decrypt code for the encrypted e-mails on your laptop. We’ve read them and they lay out the whole plot. How you were paid to convince NSA that there was no theft of nuclear material.”
“There wasn’t. The whole thing was a scam. And I never saw that drive before.”
“Then what about Mr. Borden? Do you deny that you got him to hack into the CIA computers? Borden is being very cooperative, Cynthia. He told us everything.”
Cynthia felt a pang of fear. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “I was trying to prevent a mistake. The intercepts were clearly phony and I can prove it with voiceprint analysis. The whole thing is part of a rogue CIA plot and I’ve been framed and you’re falling for it.”
“That’s a little too fancy, honey, don’t you think?” said Cavanagh.
“It’s the truth,” she said.
“Liar,” said Cavanagh.
Arbenz let out a small sigh. “Okay, then, in that case let me tell you what’s going to happen. In a few minutes a female officer will come in here and take all your clothes and jewelry, your watch, everything, and she will subject you to a full body-cavity search. You will be given other clothes to wear. You’ll be taken to a holding cell in this building. After that, agents of another federal agency will remove you from this site and take you to another facility for further interrogation. Do you understand that?”
“Yes. What other agency?”
“I have no information on that,” said Arbenz, “but you read the papers, you know what happens to suspected terrorists nowadays. They disappear. Stuff is done to them. And they talk; sooner or later, they all talk. So there’s no point in holding out. Cynthia, I’m trying to help you here. Please, for your own sake: Who’s your contact? Where’s the money? Who got you into this mess?”
Cynthia remained silent. After waiting a few long minutes, the two men left. She sat in the chair, trying to forget about her stomach and her bladder. She wondered what it would take to break her; not much, she thought, if they broke Arab terrorists they shouldn’t have a bit of trouble with a stupid American girl who’d had things fairly easy her whole life and who really believed in nothing much except her own career.
A black woman came in, portly, blank-faced, carrying a large paper bag. She dumped a bright orange garment onto the table.
In a robotic voice she said, “Are you menstruating or pregnant at this time?”
“No.”
“Are you currently infected with the HIV virus?”
“No.”
“Take off all your clothes and jewelry and put them in this bag. Here is a marker. When you have removed your things and placed them in the bag, lick the tape, seal the bag, and sign your name on the tape. Then lean over and grasp the edge of the table.”
Cynthia had often wondered in a vague way about how the monster regimes of the twentieth century got so many people-millions of them-to drop the human dignity that went with clothing and stand naked before men who were going to torture and murder them, but now she understood very well that there is hard-wired into the human psyche the false idea that someone who has absolute power over your body will be, must be, ultimately benevolent. Children are this way; human life would be impossible without that innate compact, and the evil ones of the earth exploit it to their ends. So children submit meekly to murder at the hands of their loved ones, and naked women march in orderly rows, holding their naked children’s hands, to the edge of the execution pits.
So now she was naked, bent over, and the woman told her to spread her legs, wider, wider. Cynthia stared wildly over her shoulder and saw that the woman looked at her in a way she had never been looked at by another woman, as an object to be processed, and she did process her, shoving her glove into Cynthia’s body cavities, first the mouth, and then, greased up, the vagina and rectum. Cynthia had heard that when rape occurred some women survived the horror by disassociating from their bodies, by making themselves believe it was not happening to them. She thought now that she would never be able to do this; she was failing now even in response to this lesser violation. Her body was too plainly importunate; it wanted to pee, to weep, and to puke, and it was all she could manage to keep these things from happening simultaneously.
The woman directed her to don the orange garment, and she did and placed the cotton slippers on her feet. She sat down again and waited, with legs crossed around her bursting bladder. Time passed, six minutes or six hours, she could not tell, and this was yet another way of announcing that she was cut off from the clock-bound society from which she issued; her time was now worth nothing, ergo she was nothing, an object, like a desk or a bar of metal.
The door opened after however long, and a small compact man and a quite large woman came in, both wearing gray suits, both with quite ordinary faces; she would not have spared a glance at them on the
street. She asked to go to the toilet. They declined to answer but worked silently and swiftly to manacle her hands and feet, connecting the chains to a broad leather belt. They placed a cloth hood over her head and led her away.
A ride in some kind of truck ensued. The exhaust fumes and the motion of the vehicle overcame the last of Cynthia’s physical resistance, her body betrayed her then and she wet herself and vomited into the hood, and the stench of this kept her stomach heaving long after it had been drained of its contents. No one helped her. Now she cried.
They had to half-carry her out of the van; her feet tripped on a short flight of stairs and she lost a slipper. She heard the swish and hum of an elevator. A door opened. Someone removed her manacles and the hood. She stood unsteadily, blinking in a harsh light. She was in a small room lined with white tiles, like a bus station restroom. She tried not to breathe in her own stink. Vomit smeared her face and the chest of her prison suit and her crotch and thighs were soaked and starting to chill. Overhead a caged light fixture held two bare incandescent bulbs and next to it an eye bolt had been affixed to the ceiling, which was covered in what looked like gray foam panels. There was a steel drain in the concrete floor. Frigid air poured from low vents.
In front of her was a steel table and behind it, seated in a red plastic office chair, was a man: short brown hair with a widow’s peak, dark interested eyes, the bland face of a middle manager. He had a folder and a pad in front of him, a government ballpoint in his hand. Behind him was a closed door with no knob or handle.
“Don’t look at me,” he ordered in a calm voice, a dog trainer’s voice, a flat midwestern accent. “Look at the wall. There’s a black spot on the wall. Look at that.”
She looked at the spot and asked, “Can I get cleaned up?” Her voice sounded strange to her ears, as if she had become someone else in the last hour-if it was only an hour. She had no idea.
“Of course, after you’ve answered a few questions,” said the man. “Satisfactorily answered. The way this works, Cynthia, is you give us a little and we give you a little, yes? So. Let’s start. Name?”
The Good Son Page 42