Fall On Your Knees

by Mary C. Findley

  "Are you going to torture him? Like they tortured you? Is that right?"

  "Three other agents involved in the Laptop Project have died," Murali told her. "I should have been dead also. I need to do something before more are killed. You don't have to see what I do. I just need you to come with me so the agency’s resources aren't divided."

  "This is necessary to save lives?"

  "I pray God I can do that, just as you saved mine."

  "But I –" Karin bit off her words as the memory of his cold lips chilled her soul.

  "I’m sorry." He tried to take her in his arms. She stayed stiff for a moment but gradually softened into his embrace and sobbed. This was the last thing he had wanted to do … to make this woman cry. Still, he had more that needed to be said.

  "Sometimes it’s necessary to do things we wish we didn’t have to so we can protect others." He felt her head bob against his collarbone and she didn’t pull away. He laid his cheek against her hair and then pulled back, holding her shoulders and stroking them with small thumb-circles.

  "Also, I don’t use physical torture as such," Murali said when she still didn’t answer. "I use psychological techniques – unpleasant sounds, small enclosures, light and dark – And I talk to them. I try to persuade, not torment."

  Still she didn’t speak. "Karin, I … I need you to come, to be nearby. I need to be able to leave that behind and remember that I have a refuge where I can be the man you married. I need us both to be each other’s refuge, because we cannot avoid the world forever. We don’t have to go confront it. Soon it will come and confront us."

  Karin lifted her hands and clasped his. "Of course I'll come."

  ***

  Murali held Karin as close as he could when they stepped out the front doors of the hotel. He saw Gerald and Bruno waiting for them in the black SUV and caught her look of surprise.

  "Did Gerald and Bruno get a little vacation while we honeymooned?" Karin asked. "I didn’t see them the whole time we were here."

  "Gerald went stealth, but he and Bruno were watching over us the whole time. He has been the primary agent on the Laptop Project all these years. He considers it his personal responsibility to bring it to a good end.

  "Doesn’t he have a life outside the agency, though? A family, a home?"

  "He has Bruno. It's more than most of us had. I cannot believe God blessed me with you. You may meet a few other operatives. They are mostly good people, but their aloneness and their loneliness might frighten you. You cannot imagine what a light you shined my way through that laptop."

  Bruno immediately tried to climb into Karin's lap again, across the seat and over Murali, but he pulled up sharply and Karin saw that he wore a harness that tethered him to the seat. He whined just once and then settled down.

  "Thank you, Bruno," she said, patting his head. "I'm not conflicted anymore."

  ***

  Murali anxiously watched as Karin surveyed his "apartment" – two rooms with bare cinderblock walls and linoleum that was a sickly shade of green. There were no windows. It had a tiny bathroom with a green shower curtain, miniature gas appliances, and a card table with two folding chairs. It had a slightly-larger than twin size metal bed and no door or divider between the rooms.

  "There are no quarters for married agents," he said. "Not sure anyone’s ever done it before – brought a spouse here, or even had one. I made them change out the camp cot I had with a promise that they’ve given us the biggest bed they have.

  "Now you see the pharaoh’s real palace. I’m so sorry, Karin. I’m just hoping this won’t last long. They need me to be onsite so we can keep the prisoner off-balance with interrogations at irregular intervals."

  "It’s all right," Karin replied. Her smile lit up the dingy room. If she was trying to fool him, she was good at it. "I noticed that Gerald, or whoever packed for us, included a few non-essential things that will brighten this place up a bit. When you come home, you’ll see. Murali …" The light faded, she chewed her cheek, and her eyes dropped to the floor.

  Anxiety filled him. "What is it?"

  "I told you I thought Gail got your address from that Skype session. I believe that even more strongly than I did before. She wasn’t part of the project, was she? She never got emails from your agency before, did she?"

  Murali only had time to shake his head before she plunged on.

  "But she said she got an email in her spam folder about the project cancelation."

  The two lists! The one person that differed between them. Murali wanted to slap his forehead, but he refrained because he wanted to focus on this pulsing star of a woman and drink in her brilliance.

  "How would she even know the person I was going to see Christmas Eve had information she could steal and sell? How would she know anything about you? This is deeper and wider than just me and the Laptop Project.

  "And those men … You said they knew I was coming. In fact, when I was sneaking down the hall toward the bathroom, I heard one of them talking about your ‘librarian girlfriend.’

  "Gail has to be involved in this. And someone has to have seen something of our conversations on the laptop. This thing between us – no one has spoken a word about it out loud. I only learned your name from Gerald out in the parking lot the last night you and I communicated through the laptop.

  "Murali, someone has been spying on Gerald, on me, perhaps on you, or at least you and I on the laptop – maybe they’ve been doing it for years, but they just finally learned they could get their hands on this last work you did. I don’t know how. But Gail knew too much. Those insinuations she made – She or someone has been spying all this time. Waiting … watching for the right hint that the right information was going to come their way. This was it, apparently."

  "The actual information was always encrypted," Murali said. "And the reference requests were always segregated, spaced out – How could anyone infer that we were working on sensitive projects? And as to them tracking me – spying on me? I don’t want to sound egotistical, but I have never been successfully tracked."

  "Until Christmas eve," Karin said. "They went after you, they found you, and they already had a buyer and an arrangement to get the information to him. This has to have been in the works for a long time."

  Murali drew Karin into his arms. He kissed her with a long, slow, intense passion until that tremble in her lips melted away under his. He caressed her neck, softening the tension he felt there. Her head lolled into the hollow of his shoulder. His hands explored her shoulders down to the small of her back, and she crumpled in his arms with a long breath.

  "Oh my light … my joy … my Karin. I’ll be back as soon as I can."

  ***

  Murali first went to the observation room and looked through the one-way glass at the prisoner. Gerald stood in the room with him, just leaning against the wall, staring at nothing. One time Murali had expressed sympathy that Gerald so often filled that role – standing, waiting, looking intimidating. It was essentially all he had done on the Laptop Project.

  "I suppose you want to know how I occupy my time while I do that?" Gerald had surprised him by asking the question.

  "If it’s not classified, and you don’t have to kill me afterwards," Murali teased.

  "I memorized the Bible back when I first began to do security details," Gerald explained. "I mean, I did the memorizing on my off time, because it took such a lot of concentration. But after a few years I had it all down."

  "All of it? The entire Bible?"

  "Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who said everything we know is lumber in the attic? Eventually new knowledge starts to push out the old stuff, so choose carefully what you put in. I’d spent years trying to figure out how to forget some of the things we have to do and see on this job. That was the only thing that worked.

  "Fill the attic with cedar beams instead of rotten wormy stuff. And when I want to achieve a certain expression – reassuring, intimidating, come any closer and I will shoot you – I can call u
p a Scripture that will put the right expression on my face."

  Murali sincerely wondered what verses Gerald rehearsed in his mind at the moment. The malevolent expression on his face as he stood over the prisoner must be the frosting on the cake of the man’s conditioning to feel the depths of his captivity and hopelessness.

  The prisoner was, of course, sleep-deprived, fed a diet laced with stimulants and various things that would keep him anxious, agitated, and depressed without seriously hurting him. He was periodically stripped and hosed down, among other things that robbed him of comfort, dignity, and choice. Right now he had been allowed to put on an orange jumpsuit but had been given no underclothing or shoes. He was shackled neck, wrists, and ankles, on a low stool, forced to bow his head and feel his degraded status every moment. In short, he seemed ready for Murali.

  "We know almost everything already," Murali said to him as he pushed open the door of the interrogation room and nodded to Gerald as he departed. "The order to take the head librarian into custody has already been given. For your sake I hope they don’t find her too soon. You’ll have a chance to make things easier on yourself before someone offers a deal to her."

  The door closed. Gerald had a special flair for making an "inner sanctum" sort of dungeon sound and he saw the man flinch. Murali closed in, invading the man’s personal space. "I just need you to clear up a few details."

  The prisoner stared up at him, a difficult task in his position, with a momentary flash of panic that gave way to sullen obstinacy. He said nothing.

  Murali had, looking over the tapes of previous interrogations, been forced to consider the possibility that this man did not know anything. The leader of the pair could have been the dead one – the hood had kept Murali from getting any look at their faces, and though he remembered the distinctions in their voices, he had gotten no sense of a stupider or smarter thug. Both of them seemed to be equally in on whatever the plan was.

  "Just think … you could get those chains off. You could sleep in a bed. You might get some time off from the lights and the noise … all sorts of good things could happen."

  "Screw you," the man said.

  This was progress. He had not said anything up to this point. Murali pressed the "nice guy" routine.

  "How’s the ankle healing up? I wonder if your friends would have bothered to patch it up, eh? Perhaps, if you’re walking well enough, we should just let you go. Maybe there’s still time for you to find a little cheer of the season. Seems as if you don’t really know anything."

  Hope flickered across his face for a full second. It changed to panic an instant later. "You can’t let me go," the man exclaimed. "They’ll think I told you something and kill me!"

  Good to know you have something to tell. "Not necessarily. You know my people watch out for you, and maybe catch them first before they get to you."

  "They’ll protect me? Like they protected you?" the man sneered. "No one even knew we had you. If your girlfriend hadn’t surprised us we’d have gotten what we came for."

  "I think you’re confused." Murali knew he had to be extremely careful. "I was about to celebrate Christmas with some friends. Who did you think I was, and what did you think I knew?"

  "You’re here asking me questions. Stupid ones. But it means you’re pretty important. Worth somebody’s time and money."

  "Or else somebody was pulling your leg in big way. Seriously, you take orders from a Community College librarian? Who does that?"

  "People who want to make a million dollars. That’s who. And she told us we could have the hot reference librarian as a bonus."

  Murali restrained the urge to injure the man. "And you took her seriously? Where was she going to get that kind of money?"

  "Wasn’t coming from her. She said all we had to do was get you to cough up that information she wanted – you know – get it on the digital recorder she gave us – and after you talked, we had to make it to the meeting she set up so we could hand it over and get paid."

  "None of this makes any sense. Obviously the two of you were not important and you don’t have anything to tell me that makes sense, so I’m going to advise them to cut you loose. You might still be useful as bait."

  The man swore, his body and voice equally shaky. "I can tell you more. But what’s in it for me? You people can just make me disappear. Why should I tell you anything?"

  "I don’t make people disappear," Murali said. "I can keep you safe. But you need to tell me everything."

  "Okay. She said this information was out there on a computer someplace, but there were codes she had to have before she could get to it. She said there was some kind of training you people went through so you could remember all the things you had to report. There were triggers that would make you cough it up, if we got you beat down enough and got past your resistance. She figured, either we could get it out of you that way, or we could let you watch us play with the hot librarian and that would press the right buttons."

  Murali clenched his fists and fought for control. "So you were confident, one way or another, that you could record me saying these codes. What did you intend to do with that recording? Where were you to take it?"

  "We had to get it to a cabin up in the mountains by midnight."

  "Who were you going to meet there?"

  "Don’t know. The librarian just told us they would be there, listen to the recording, check to see that the codes worked, and pay us our money."

  "Where is the librarian now?"

  "Don’t know. Thought you said you had guys on their way to get her."

  "Where is the cabin she told you to go to?"

  "Yeah. Maybe she went there." The man gave a set of directions. Murali knew Gerald would be relaying them and wheels would roll immediately.

  "Thank you," he said to the man. "I’ll get you taken to better quarters."

  "Yeah, and I want some real food, too."

  "I’ll see to it." Murali left the room. Gerald met him in the hallway. Murali gave orders to the two guards who entered the room to take the prisoner away.

  "How did they know about the File Drawer Protocol?" Gerald demanded when they were alone.

  "Someone in our agency told them. Possibly one of the thirty operatives who were murdered the first time the Spamalot Worm went active."

  "Analysts disagreed that all those deaths were murder, or all related to Spamalot."

  Murali ground his teeth. "Please give me the benefit of the doubt and agree that deaths resulted from the incident. Also that we lost critical data."

  "I can do that."

  "Thank you. Gerald, I am missing something. I have got to know how this person connected the Laptop Project to me, and through me, to the agency. That may give me the knowledge I need to understand how other agents were targeted, and may still be in the crosshairs.

  "This person being the head librarian? Gail Norcross?"

  "Yes. How did she get on to me? Where did she find my fingerprints smeared on this project?"

  "I’m telling you there was no breach. The laptop was secure. The project data was secure."

  "Describe the library. I want details. Everything."

  "We can get the security pictures and video. We updated everything frequently over the years."

  "So, millions of pictures. Thousands of hours of video. Send for them. But I trust your perceptions more than cameras."

  Murali watched Gerald speak in to a phone, hang it up, and go into "memory" mode. He moved through the bare room around the metal table in body, while his mind recalled the community college library.

  "Front doors are double, glass, steel frame. Enter from the west, walk into a glassed-in entryway, pass through a second set of double doors." Gerald considered.

  "Fiction to the right, nonfiction to the left. Head librarian’s desk in the center. Doorways on her left and right into the reference area. Students are supposed to observe enter to the left and exit to the right. Seldom do. Reference librarian’s desk sits in the northeast corner.
Half soundproofing, half glass walls to her office."

  A tap on the door announced the arrival of viewers for digital photos and videos, and a box of data disks. Murali sat down and started scanning while Gerald continued speaking. He studied the photos and videos and listened to Gerald for the next two hours.

  "What is that? That flash up there in the corner of the lefthand entrance to the reference area?" Murali finally asked.

  Gerald joined him at the table. "Fish eye mirror designed to keep students from bumping into each other. One on each side of the reference area. No one pays any attention to them either."

  "I see the mirror but why the flash?"

  "Sunlight reflecting from the front door opening?"

  "Wrong angle. There’s the head librarian at her desk. What’s she holding?"

  "Compact mirror. She was always fussing with her hair or makeup. And that stupid desk lamp."

  "Desk lamp … that’s her hand mirror reflecting the light of the desk lamp on the fish-eye mirror."

  Murali called up a score of pictures and shuffled them like a game of solitaire. "Look here, and here, and here."

  "The angle of the fish eye mirror changes slightly." Gerald swiped to enlarge the images. "Date stamps are consecutive."

  "Exactly." Murali pointed out a shot of Gail, standing on a squatty step ladder, polishing the fish-eye mirror. "Look at this one. She did this … fiddled with that mirror …" He shuffled through more photos by date "… for over a year … ‘til she got it into place to be able to read the messages on the laptop screen. Adjusted it whenever things didn’t line up just so. The patience and persistence of that woman! Extraordinary!"

  "Peculiar screen names, random, unrelated research requests, banal conversations, and lonely hearts romances. What did the conversations get her?" Gerald asked.

  Murali glared at him but got no satisfaction, so he pushed on. "She may have started out by being curious. Once she could see the screen, she could notice patterns. Who asked for what information, and who was on with Karin the most. Eventually Madhumeha would come to the front. That’s how she outed me."