by Lis Wiehl
“Judging from the pictures I’ve seen, I’d say the structure on the left was the jail,” Bob says.
Erica scans the jail. It’s beat-up, has a few high horizontal windows. Like the rest of the settlement it looks long-deserted.
“Let’s go in. Riley, how about I drive and you shoot our approach?” Erica says.
She gets out, opens the driver’s door, and gets in as he moves over and hefts up his camera to start shooting through the windshield. Behind her, Bob leans out a window, his gun at the ready. Erica turns on the engine and taps the accelerator, driving no more than five miles an hour, practically rolling toward the spectral settlement. Then they’ve arrived. She turns off the engine and that deathly quiet settles over them. They get out of the car and walk over to the jail as Riley shoots more establishing footage.
The door to the jail is ajar; Erica pushes it open and they all step inside. It takes a moment for their eyes to adjust to the sudden dark, pierced only by the shafts of light from the doorway and the narrow horizontal windows set high in the far wall.
Then the smell hits them—it’s some rank combination of tobacco and sweat and urine and excrement and fear. They’re at one end of a corridor that runs down the center of the jail. Erica slowly walks down it. There are three cells on each side, enclosed by mortar walls, with a small window in each door for food to be passed through. She pushes open the door to one of the cells and steps inside. It’s tiny, no more than four feet by four feet, smaller than most kennel cages, with a dirt floor and no window, no room to lie down, no room to think or dream or plan. But more than enough room to go insane.
Erica feels a wave of claustrophobia and steps back into the corridor. She reaches the room at the back, the interrogation room. There are several straight-back chairs and an old table. There’s no sink, no toilet, no running water, no electricity. And the air is so hot and dense that Erica feels as if it has substance and shape—moving through it takes effort. Sweating in her heavy clothes and flak jacket, made slightly dizzy by the heavy air, she feels alive and alert. Something happened to Mike Ortiz in this jail, and she feels she is moving toward the truth of what it was.
“What a place,” she says quietly. “Riley, let’s go outside and get some footage.”
Erica stands about twenty feet in front of the jail as Riley shoots. “Behind me—here in the middle of the blistering Iraq desert—is the jail where Mike Ortiz was held captive for nine months and nine days. The jail is part of this unnamed and abandoned settlement. Let’s take a look inside.”
Riley trails Erica as she walks back into the jail, his camera’s light on, throwing the creepy interior into stark light and shadow. Bob stands beside Riley, checking the small monitor on the side of the camera, nodding encouragement to Erica.
“One of these six identical cells housed Ortiz,” Erica says. “This is where he slept, ate, and exercised. Food came once a day, if that, and was usually a slimy gruel. Ortiz lost forty pounds. There was no toilet, only a bucket that was emptied by his captors when they felt like it. Ortiz had no books, no writing implements or paper, no contact with the outside world.” She moves down to the office. “This is the room where he was interrogated by Al-Qaeda officers. At first they wanted him to divulge intelligence and to renounce the United States, but when he refused, they tortured him, almost for sport. He was whipped and threatened with beheading. Standing here, in air that is so hot and thick that breathing is difficult, it’s hard to imagine how Ortiz survived with his sanity intact. And yet he took this hell and turned it into strength and will.” She exhales and tells Riley, “That’s good for now.”
Riley turns off the camera and Bob says, “Looks strong, Erica.”
“I think we’ve got what we need here. Now let’s go try and find that guard.” As they leave, Erica takes one last look behind her at the dark dank prison.
Isolation. Sensory deprivation. Fear. Indoctrination. Love.
CHAPTER 56
WITH BOB RUGGIO NOW DRIVING, they continue north through the sandblasted landscape. After twenty minutes, Bob turns down a paved road. “The village should be a couple of miles up here.” The three of them go on high alert as they put more distance between themselves and any possible escape.
And then there it is. Bob stops the car when they’re still several hundred yards away, and they look for signs of trouble. The village is tiny; there couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred residents, but it’s tidy and benign looking. There’s a small food store, children playing, a man is plastering the outside of a house, and in the central square a woman is drawing water from a well using a hand pump that looks like something out of an old Western.
“You’ll often find these villages around a dependable well,” Bob says. “And they have power.” He nods to the overhead line running in from the main road.
“And we’re sure Ortiz’s former guard lives here?” Erica asks.
“I trust my source. I’ve got the guard’s name, Akram Kouri. So we should be able to find out, one way or the other.”
Several villagers notice their car and stop what they’re doing to stare. “Places like this don’t get a lot of visitors. Remember, they don’t want trouble any more than we do,” Bob says. “Let me go break the ice.”
He walks into the village square. A middle-aged man comes out of the food store; he has a paunch and carries himself with authority. He greets Bob and they shake hands and talk. After a few minutes Bob waves to the others to join him. By the time Erica and Riley—carrying his camera—reach Bob, a small crowd has gathered. They’re curious and wary, but there’s no hostility. Still, Erica knows that ISIS could be hiding anywhere—even in a tiny village like this one—and her heart is pounding in her chest.
“How do you do?” the man says. “I am Ahmet and this is my village and my shop. You are welcome. We do not have war here. Are you hungry?”
While Ahmet seems trustworthy and peaceable, Erica wants to find Kouri as quickly as possible. “We’re fine, thank you. What we would like is to speak to Akram Kouri.”
“Ah . . . Akram. He is . . . ah . . .” Ahmet makes a circular gesture with his index finger beside his ear.
“Was he a guard at the prison where Mike Ortiz was held?” Erica asks.
“Yes. He see bad things. It is sad. Come.”
Ahmet leads the three of them through the village—they pass small houses, gardens, and yards home to chickens and goats. They reach the house farthest from the square. There is a walled front yard with dusty chickens pecking at the dusty earth. An elderly woman is sitting in a plastic-webbed lawn chair that looks like it was picked up at Lowe’s a decade ago. Her face is crisscrossed with a crazy quilt of deep wrinkles and she’s shucking a bowl of peas. As they enter the yard she frowns at them. When she sees Erica she leans back in surprise; then she narrows her eyes, sneers, and looks away.
“She is Akram’s mother,” Ahmed explains.
Bob hands the old woman some bills, and she nods her head toward the front door. They walk inside—the house is just one room, small and dark and at least ten degrees cooler than outside. The place smells like sweat and rancid cooking oil overlain with cheap air freshener. There are two single beds at one end and a rudimentary kitchen at the other. There’s an old man sitting at a small table covered with oilcloth. No, wait, he’s not old. He’s middle-aged, but his face is so haunted, so ravaged and sunken, that he looks as old as his mother.
There’s a tiny tinny radio on the table. The BeeGees are singing “Stayin’ Alive” and the man is making jerking gestures in response to the beat. He is definitely off in his own private Idaho.
Ahmet greets him, and the man looks at them blankly. Then he recoils. Ahmet speaks to him calmly, soothingly, and the man relaxes a little.
“Can you tell him we want to find out about what happened in the prison?” Erica says.
Ahmet speaks to Kouri, loudly and slowly. A look of abject fear comes over his face and his body shrinks in on itself. Riley stays in
the background, quietly filming.
Ahmet continues to question him, and Kouri grows more and more agitated and begins to speak in a fevered rush. Then he leaps out of his chair, eyes wild, words spewing, and he mimics strangling someone, now a blindfold is going on, now he’s screaming in someone’s ear, now he’s tying them down in a chair, now he’s whipping them. He’s in a frenzy, a fit, talking, babbling, flailing.
And then, like a switch was flipped, he stops and goes completely still. But his eyes remain wide with fear and agitation.
“Ask him who did it,” Erica whispers.
“Who?” Ahmet asks.
The man remains silent, sits back down, and a bizarre calm settles over him.
“Please, try again. I need to know,” Erica says.
Ahmet squats down so he’s level with the man. He puts a hand on his thigh, lowers his voice, and asks again. There’s a pause and time stops and Erica feels suspended over a great chasm, the chasm of truth. Then Kouri mouths an almost inaudible answer. Ahmet brings his ear close to Kouri’s mouth and asks him to repeat it. He does.
“What did he say?” Erica implores.
Ahmet turns to her. “He said they were Chinese.”
In the pounding desert heat Erica feels her blood run cold. She needs to be sure. She asks, in a slow somber tone, “You are sure the men who came and tortured Ortiz were Chinese?”
Ahmet asks and Kouri nods.
“How often did they come?”
“He says they came all the time.”
Then the old man’s body starts to shake and he starts to cry and blabber.
“What’s he saying?” Erica asks.
“He’s afraid the men are coming for him. Today.”
CHAPTER 57
ON THE FLIGHT BACK TO New York that night, Erica is still reeling from what she learned in that tiny Iraqi village. It was the Chinese who were spending all that time just torturing Mike Ortiz. His book is full of lies. It wasn’t just torture. It was systematic brainwashing.
Isolation. Sensory deprivation. Fear. Indoctrination. Love.
Erica can imagine it all going down in that sweltering jail hidden from the world. Ortiz kept isolated, blindfolded, his ears plugged, caged in that tiny cell, his will wearing down. And then hauled out for the long sessions of torture, beaten, threats made to him and his family, and more torture until he’s thrown back into the cell, where he cowers in the corner, trembling with fear. Then, when he’s broken, desperate and terrified, the mind games begin, the propaganda, programming, paranoia. And finally, when Ortiz is reduced to a quivering subhuman mass, deranged with confusion and want and fear—the love. The love that is his if he obeys. Love. Always and forever. Of course he’ll obey. Any edict. Any order. Just keep loving me and not hurting me. Please. Please don’t hurt me.
All hail. But all hail who?
Erica is beginning to doubt her theory that the CIA was behind the plot. Surely they wouldn’t have enlisted the Chinese to help them. From what Hamade told her, the CIA had more than enough Iraqi operatives to pull it off themselves had they wanted to.
Erica’s mind goes back to Lily Lau and Celeste Ortiz. Lau is the daughter of a Chinese diplomat. Celeste was a banker specializing in China. Who recites incantations in Chinese with her husband before public appearances. China is the world’s greatest economic power and is spreading its global web of influence in cunning ways. Like all empires, it wants to keep expanding. How brilliant it would be if China could gain control of the White House through the means of a subservient, compliant, brainwashed Mike Ortiz.
All hail . . . Lily Lau?
No, it’s too crazy. Too grandiose. Too bizarre. Or is it? She remembers Nylan Hastings’s plan to gain control of global media and communication and turn himself into some kind of twenty-first-century messiah. And how close he came to pulling it off.
Erica turns to her laptop and Googles Lily Lau. She devours a profile that ran in San Francisco magazine several years ago. From a family that has been prominent in Chinese politics for generations, the article details her cosseted childhood as the daughter of Chen Lau, then Chinese counsel general to San Francisco. The article touches on the deep ties between the city and China, dating back two hundred years to when San Francisco was the entryway for tens of thousands of Chinese seeking work. Today the city is still home to a vast Chinese population. It goes on to discuss Lily’s years at Stanford and her friendship with Celeste Pierce, which morphed into an extraordinarily lucrative business alliance. There’s a picture of Lily as maid of honor at Celeste’s wedding to Mike Ortiz at a Napa vineyard, another by the pool at her stunning country house in northern Marin County, and another of Lily in the compound’s courtyard, which is dotted with three guesthouses. Lily explains that she needs them for her extended Chinese family.
Really? Three guesthouses? And the estate is so isolated.
The article ends with Lily praising Celeste and Mike Ortiz and talking about how honored she is to be a part of all their good works, which she hopes will only multiply in the years to come. All in all, Lily comes across as smart, driven, charming, and caring, with a touch of becoming modesty. In other words, it’s a total puff piece. Lily may as well have written the article herself. The woman is a master of image manipulation.
Next Erica Googles Chen Lau, Lily’s father. She reads about his distinguished lineage and career, that he is considered shrewd and ruthless, that he is an undefeated chess master known for his ability to plan a dozen moves ahead of his opponents. When Lily was at Stanford, he moved back to China. Finally the article states that today he heads the Ministry of State Security, the Chinese intelligence agency—its equivalent of the CIA.
Erica is glad she’s in a private first-class seat. Otherwise, her fellow passengers might wonder why her whole body suddenly quivered like a leaf in an icy gust.
CHAPTER 58
ERICA WALKS IN THE DOOR of her apartment, drops her suitcase, and heads straight for her office, where she keeps several prepaid phones. She calls Mark Benton, the former GNN IT wizard who helped her crack the Nylan Hastings case. For his efforts Mark was assaulted, beaten, and left for dead on a Greenwich Village sidewalk. He survived, but it’s been a long haul back to physical and emotional health. By his own admission he’s still suffering from PTSD, although he’s functioning and even finding pleasure in life.
Mark left New York and moved out to Portland, Oregon, in part to live in a more low-key city, in part because he’s a passionate windsurfer. He found a good job in IT at Nike, which has much less of a pressure cooker culture than GNN. Erica is happy for him. The man has proved himself above and beyond.
“Hi, Mark, it’s Erica Sparks.”
“Erica, how goes it?”
“There’s no short answer to that question at the moment. Listen, I need your help.”
“Uh-oh.”
“If you don’t want to get involved, I will understand completely.”
“To be honest, I am getting a little bored by sneakers.”
“I’m working on a story about Mike Ortiz, an in-depth profile. As you may know, his wife is a billionaire and she is very secretive about how she manages her money. It’s all done through a company called Pierce Holdings, which is headquartered in San Francisco. I’m not at all sure things are what they seem. Hypothetically, is there any chance you could get into their system?”
“Hypothetically that would be breaking the law.”
Erica lowers her voice and gives him a broad-strokes overview of her investigation. When she’s done there’s a pause, and then Mark says, “Let me look into it.”
“Mark, there aren’t words.”
“Erica, my adrenaline is pumping. In spite of everything, that’s a good thing.”
They hang up. Erica trusts Mark with her life. The question is: Does she trust herself with his?
CHAPTER 59
ERICA IS SITTING IN HER broadcast booth at Houston’s NRP Park, better known as the Astrodome. Down below, the center is fill
ed with thousands of delegates to the Republican convention, who are listening to yet another speech. There’s even less drama here than at the Democratic convention, because presidential nominee Lucy Winters has already announced her pick for vice president, Senator Clark Hobbs of Tennessee. Erica is fidgety and fighting to stay focused, basically running on automatic pilot. The only story that interests her is unfolding out in San Francisco.
The energy here is a pale shadow of what it was in Chicago. Lucy Winters just doesn’t inspire the same fervor as Mike Ortiz. In the course of putting together her piece on Winters, Erica has come to like and admire her. She may not be a show horse, but she’s a real workhorse, well versed in policy, with a raft of solid ideas. Erica believes her low-key, methodical manner would serve the country well in these overheated times. Especially since Winters shows no hesitation in standing up to the far right, almost bloodthirsty ideologues in her party. In the primaries, her moderation almost cost her the nomination. In the general election it should help her, although she’s still behind in the polls.
The speech ends and Erica goes live, introducing yet another speaker, some governor, does it really matter? What matters is that Mike Ortiz is months away from becoming the most powerful puppet on the planet.
GNN cuts away to a panel of gasbags who will rehash what just happened—and bore the pants off any viewer not addicted to predictable “in-depth analysis” that any sixth grader is capable of. One of the producers comes over and tells Erica she has fifteen minutes. Erica goes to the craft services table and tries to pretend she has an appetite. Her prepaid rings and she goes out into the hallway.
“Erica, it’s Mark.”