by Jeff Abbott
He leaned back. “We checked with her doctor. You and Lucy didn’t want to know what you’re having but I know. It’s a boy, Sam. Don’t you want to see your son?”
My son. I was going to have a son, if Lucy was still alive. Howell was laying brutal trumps on the table, one after another: this unknown money, my child. Maybe Lucy… No. I could not believe it of her.
Each word felt like a pebble in my mouth, spit out one by one. “I can’t tell you anything because I am not a traitor.”
Howell studied me in the long silence. “Then you’re a fool, because your wife is the traitor and she’s left you to take the blame.”
“No. No. She wouldn’t. She loves me.” The words sounded weak in my throat but I remembered that last morning with my Lucy, her shuddering atop me, my hands on the curve on her bottom, her breath warm against my throat. Talking to me about not taking chances running parkour, and telling me she loved me, and reminding me of dinner with the nice couples. Calling me monkey, to soften her criticism of my running. That was not a woman preparing to vanish from her own life.
He looked at me as though he were a teacher disappointed with his student’s performance. “She doesn’t love you. She left you holding the bag. Happy Thanksgiving.” Howell got up and left, the lights went out, and I sat in total blackness.
6
TIME, UNMEASURED, PASSED. My throat was molten, parched, like I’d reached in and raked the flesh with my own fingernails. A knot of hunger tangled my stomach and I felt like I had fever. I slid from the chair and lay on the cold floor. I ate bread and water when it was brought to me. I slept and I awoke, unsure if minutes or hours had passed, shivered against the stone. I dreamed I was running parkour, vaulting over walls, flying between buildings, every muscle afire with glory, my mind clear and clean and precise. Then the wall where I was to land was gone, and I plummeted toward a pavement covered with burning wreckage, helpless, out of control.
The lights snapped back on and Howell was sitting in his chair, as though he’d been there the entire time in the dark. But the suit was different. I looked to see if he had any water for me to drink. He didn’t.
“Help me, Sam.”
I looked at him. “How?”
“Help me understand this most interesting information I’ve come across,” he said.
“Did you find Lucy?” Confusion clogged my brain; my head felt thick with sleep. “The baby. Lucy is due soon. You have to find her.” My voice grated like rock against sand.
“The bomb,” Howell said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “I have the forensic analysis of the blast pattern, Sam.” He pulled out a photo of the London office, after the explosion. The desk arrangement had our names on it. S. Capra. Brandon. Gomez. McGill. The conference room, with the names of the three suits. In the computer room, a desk labeled L. Capra. Lucy’s desk. My dead friends. The photo painted a horror: the smears of gore, viscera blasted and cooked on the walls, the blackened, gaping holes in the floor, in the center.
The smallest circle, painted in red, marked my desk, in the center of the office.
“The bomb was planted right under your desk. It was disguised to look like a small external hard drive, plugged into your system.”
I stared at the map of destruction.
“Lucy handled all the hard drive installs in the office.”
“No.”
“How easy it must have been for her. Did she set up the bomb right under your boss’s nose, James’s nose, Victoria’s nose? Your nose?”
Each word felt like a knife sliding under my skin.
“The bomb is placed where Lucy can most easily hide it without anyone noticing. Did she feel some guilt, sentencing her husband, the father of her child, to death? So she warns you. You walk out right before the explosion.” In case I didn’t understand the implication.
“Shut up,” I said. I had not snapped or growled at anyone. I had focused and kept my calm while pleading my innocence. But this. Now. I couldn’t take it. “Shut up, shut up, shut the hell up.”
“Help me prove this woman a traitor. Think. Think of what you must have known. Try to remember.” This woman. Not calling her Lucy, not calling her my wife. Trying to establish an otherness for her, a separation between us. No.
“Lucy is innocent.” My voice wasn’t calm. The bomb being planted under my desk unnerved me.
“Then maybe you’re the one who’s the bad guy,” he said. “Maybe you’re framing her. Maybe you planted the bomb. Did you have someone take her away? Kill her and your own child?”
The rage, buried in me, surged like a killing fever. I wanted to strangle the lies out of his throat. I am starting to crack. I saw my hands start to shake. I felt heat rise in my eyes. But I couldn’t break. He wanted me to surrender control. I wouldn’t. “There has to be another explanation,” I said.
“That explanation is Lucy. The money. The bomb. It points to Lucy. She had the access to the account. She could have smuggled in the bomb.” His voice slid, low and soft. Howell had the barest Southern accent. “I am your only friend left, Sam. The rest of the Company and our British friends want to see you burn. I will help you but not unless you help me.” I saw how damned I was in their narrow gaze. The evidence of the financial account. The bomb, hidden in a way that Lucy or I could have done it. That was all they needed. I was screwed, even being innocent.
“You will never see the outside of this prison again if you don’t tell me what you know. Stop protecting Lucy, or stop protecting what you thought she was.”
He wanted me to call Lucy a traitor. To agree with him, to accept this impossible possibility. “No. She’s innocent. That man took her.”
“She got you out of there and then she left you behind. She betrayed her country and then she betrayed you.”
“No.”
Howell slapped me. Hard. I didn’t expect it because he looked like a professor, and professors don’t slap. “That’s reality, coming and waking you up, Sam. Tell me what you know.”
“Don’t be an idiot. If I wanted to bomb the building I wouldn’t have been there. I would have been long gone. You know I’m innocent, and you’re just going through the motions because it’s easier to lean on me than to go find the real bad guys. I have no deal to make because I have nothing to give.”
“Then you are a prize fool.” He left and then he came back five minutes later with a cold bottle of water. Beads crowned the plastic. And I wanted it so badly. He set it down in front of me but I didn’t reach for it.
“I want you,” he said, “to entertain the possibility that nothing you knew about Lucy Capra was true.”
Tears welled at the back of my eyes. I won’t let him see, I thought. But cameras were pointed at me, all the time. He would see me weep on tape. I kept my face still; kept the tears inside. For now. I would wait for the darkness, for the safety of the crook of my elbow. I would not let them see me hurt.
He watched me, like he’d trumped my hand. “I know you’re thirsty. You haven’t had water in three days. Did you know it had been that long? Drink up, Sam. I want your throat working. You have things to tell me.”
I took the water. I drank it. And as I finished, he pulled out the earphones, the eye covers. Two women wheeled in the cart with the meds.
Sodium thiopental, scopolamine, experimentals. Say hello to my blood. Maybe they gave me all of them—I felt more than one needle slide under my skin. Howell asked his soft questions again, and this time I heard other voices asking me the same, and I told them the bone-marrow truth: I do not know. I am not a traitor. I never did anything wrong. I babbled answers to every question about my life with Lucy. I told them about our lovemaking, our friends in London, our trips back home, any times she went to the Continent to explore on her own. I didn’t know what she did in those weeks I was undercover, playing a role in Prague, pretending to be a smuggler looking for illicit goods to ship. I told them whatever was in my brain. I became an oil spill of words.
But there was the bomb,
and there was the Caymans account, and that was enough. I must have known more, they decided. I must have had suspicions. Howell kept saying he wanted to believe me, like that belief topped his Christmas list. I said I knew nothing.
So they moved on past the chemicals.
The eye covers—which completely cut off my vision—made me feel like I’d been dropped into a hole that never ended. The earphones blasted music into my head: a hell’s jukebox of saccharine ballads, brain-crushing psychedelic rock I didn’t recognize, teeth-rattling rap. The rest of the time the sound was this high-pitched noise that made every nerve feel like it was sparking, like a broken cable. I lost all track of time, of place, of any sense that I remained tethered to the world.
The cure for that was pain. Howell wasn’t there when guards came in and they beat me for a solid ten minutes. Fists and feet. It was an expert ass-kicking. They didn’t mar my face but the rest of me purpled into a bruise. I curled into a ball. They gave me water, let me spit out a gob of blood. They looked at the gob as though gauging how much more I could take before passing a limit. Then they beat me again, kicking me harder. My spine and my legs felt on the verge of breaking. They were delightfully precise, careful not to break my ribs or my chin or my spine.
They asked the same questions. I gave the same answers.
I don’t know how long I resisted the sensory deprivation treatments. Minutes under the noise and the blackness can feel like endless hours.
Lucy. The Bundle that was a boy. That was the thread I seized, the scant hope that I would be believed. They had to be searching for her, desperately. They would find her, and when they did, they would find the answers. The explanation as to why Lucy and I were framed, why they took Lucy, why they destroyed the Holborn office. Find the line, just like on the parkour runs. There was a line to the truth. I just had to find it.
They left me alone with my pain for a few hours and then they returned and they dragged me into another room. They strapped me to a flat piece of wood. It moved. I felt my feet rise. My head descended toward the stone floor.
No, no, no. I fought against the straps. The sensory deprivation was allowed. It remained legal. This, no.
It wasn’t Howell standing above me, a cloth in one hand, a bucket in the other. The man wore a hood. I didn’t know his voice. I screamed for Howell.
“Mr. Howell isn’t here,” the hooded man said.
“Please don’t. Please.” I’d been through this before, in training. I knew what horror was coming and I struggled against the bonds, panic exploding in my chest like a mine. Because with the water on your face, you say what you have to. And if you know nothing, you truly know nothing, you will babble any torrent of words to get it to stop. You will tell any lie.
The truth of my life was about to die in this room.
“We’ve reached a moment of true unpleasantness, Sam.”
He waited for me to answer. All I could say, in a broken voice I didn’t recognize, was “Please don’t do this. Please. For your sake.”
I didn’t know where the last words came from. Like I cared about this stupid, heartless bastard who was nothing but a tool. I didn’t care. If I could have got off that board I’d have strangled him with my own hands.
“Tell us. Who did you and Lucy work for?”
“The Company. No one else.”
He shifted the words: “Who gave you the money that Lucy moved through the accounts?”
“I didn’t know about the money.”
“Why did you bomb the office? Who was threatened by the office’s work?”
I thought of all the networks we tried to study, the Money Czar who had no name, his face displayed on the presentation screen in the final moments before the office was destroyed. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t!”
“Where is your wife? Start with any of those questions and we don’t have to dance this dance.”
“I don’t know. Please.” I hated myself for that please.
“Why was the Holborn office a threat to your employers?”
“I have no employers! Jesus, please believe me. Please!”
My voice told him he was so close to breaking me. So close.
He draped the cloth over my face. “You’re not going to make it out of here to see your kid, Capra.”
“No!” I yelled. “No!”
He gushed the water over my face. I felt the water closing in on my lungs. I writhed against the straps, trying to move away from the awful, steady flow. The gush surged into what felt like a river.
I was drowning.
I started to babble. Nonsense. Random words. Lucy. The Bundle. God, no. The scarred man. Innocent. Innocent. I knocked myself nearly unconscious, slamming my head against the waterboard. He hadn’t secured me correctly. He slowly dragged the wet fabric off my face. I begged for air. Then he put the soaked shroud back over my nose and mouth.
And then he started again. I resumed screaming and babbling.
I was glad, when they kicked me to the cold embrace of the cell floor, that I could not hear or remember what I said. Some things are best lost to memory.
7
DECEMBER CAME. One of the guards mentioned to me that it was Christmas Day. He did not use the word merry. Then January marched by me. The baby’s due date, January 10, came and passed. Maybe my son was born now, drawing his sharp breaths, needing me. And I was stuck in a rocky hellhole.
That day, Howell came into my cell. “Your child was due today.”
I looked up from the black bread and the potato soup I was having for lunch.
“Cooperate and maybe we can find her. We have every hospital in Europe on alert for her. You could see your son, Sam. Don’t you want to see your boy?”
My face set into steel, no matter how torn my heart felt. “Yes. But I’ve told you everything. Let me go, Howell. Let me go. Let me help you find her.”
“What would you have named him?”
I didn’t want to talk to Howell about my lost son. I didn’t want to talk to Howell period. “Screw you,” I said. “What the hell would you care what we wanted to name our kid?”
“You’re really angry today, Sam.”
“I’m sick of you. Of all of you. Of your utter stupidity.”
Howell studied me, and then he stood. “Here’s the thing. I’ve fought for you. I believed you when you said you knew nothing. I think you are an innocent man. For what that’s worth.” He dropped a piece of paper on the stone floor. A photo of one of the ultrasounds, The Bundle in all his glory. Howell walked out.
I studied the picture. My child.
Am I a father? Has he been born? I have to get out of here. My kid needs me.
But I stayed sitting on the cold stone floor, thinking.
8
A WINTER SPENT WITH CHEEK against stone. I kept insisting on my innocence into February. Every day, every aspect of my life was questioned, dissected, dissolved. Every day, I was doubted.
Do you know what that is like? To not be believed? To not be believed by the people who are your peers, your friends, your sole support, when your family has gone missing? To have your colleagues sure that you are capable of treason and murder?
You cannot build a crueler jail.
March came. Howell was gone; there was no more waterboarding. Four different interrogators asked the same questions and listened to my litany of innocence. One morning two thick-necked ex-Marines came in and held me down and slid a needle into my skin and part of me hoped: this is it, the forever dark, the end. Now they’re done with me.
I woke up back in America.
The television mounted in the corner played Comedy Central. I jerked around to look at the walls. No window. Just white walls, the hospital bed, a chair, the television with a standup comic roaming the stage, screaming into a microphone, making fun of newlywed guys for being lame and uncool. Restraints bound my arms to the bed. The room smelled of disinfectant and lavender air freshener. I was washed and clean, for the first time in weeks. Cold against my b
utt I felt a bedpan, and poking into my flesh I felt a catheter; in my arm was an IV drip.
I stayed very still but all I heard was the soft, dreamy hum of hospital equipment and air-conditioning. I didn’t call out for the nurse. I was clean and in a bed and not in a dank, forgotten cell and no one was kicking me.
The comedian on the TV bitched about his wife. He poked fun at the insane demands of his kids. I wanted to strangle him for his blind ingratitude. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Then I just closed my eyes and I slept again, clean and comfortable, on sheets instead of stone.
When I woke, my mouth tasted sour with sleep. Still bound. Bedpan and catheter. A nurse entered the room and inspected me. She didn’t let her eyes meet my gaze.
“Hello,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
She still didn’t answer. She checked my vitals and made her notes and then she left. I tested the strength of the restraints. I wouldn’t be breaking loose… On the table now, pushed to the side, stood a green bottle of Boylan Bottleworks Ginger Ale, my all-time favorite soda. It’s made in New Jersey and you can’t get it everywhere. And a bottle of Heineken, although since I’d taken up parkour I didn’t drink very often. Both bottles glistened with beads of cold. Stacked next to it were books by my favorite authors. Pecan pralines, my favorite candy. A Hubig’s fried pie from New Orleans, a childhood treat from one of the few times when my folks lived in the States when I was a kid. A prickle of sweat formed on my back. This was some new torture.
Then a man stepped into my room. Broad-shouldered, dressed in a neat, bland gray suit, gray tie, blue shirt, his hair cut down to a burr, slices of gray in the goatee. Howell.
“Hello, Sam. How are you today? You’ve slept quite a bit, which is just what you need to get back on your feet.” His voice sounded kind, like he really cared how I was. Soft, quiet, and immediately I hated him again. The past months had taught me that I had no friends and no patience with those who pretended to be my friend.