The three of them asked me some basic questions about who I was and explained that they’d been brought into the process due to the language barrier. They gave me the same spiel about how I was in a court and would be released soon if I was telling the truth. After the small talk they got right down to business and handed me a blank sheet of paper and a pen. I was instructed to write down everything about myself—my Social Security number, online passwords for email, bank accounts, and credit cards, for Facebook, my website, and Verizon, along with any other information that I thought might help them in their investigation.
“Look, I gotta tell you I’m not sure about all these passwords,” I said. “I keep them all written down next to my computer so I never really committed them to memory.”
“Do your best,” said Redbeard. “Have you ever been in the military?”
“No.”
“Because if you have,” Chubs piped up, “you’d better tell us, or else you’re in trouble.”
During the interrogation the man lying like Buddha observed everything but only spoke a few times, always in a very polite and hospitable way. After I had written down everything the masked men wanted and answered their questions, they changed the subject to politics.
“What do you think about the war in Iraq?” Glasses asked me.
“I think it was wrong and I was against it,” I responded, telling them exactly what I thought they wanted to hear.
“Because we don’t like Saddam Hussein, but—”
“But it’s not the job of the United States to force-feed a revolution down another people’s throat? I agree,” I said, cutting him off.
This response seemed to please them and ended the conversation before it had really begun. All in all, they were very professional. Maybe there really is an investigation, I told myself. Maybe I really was going to be released soon.
When I returned to my cell, Theo was shocked to see me.
“Wow, you were gone so long I thought they’d let you go,” he said.
Two days later, the masked men returned. After I’d been escorted into the office again, my face lit up upon seeing them.
“All right!” I said. “You guys here to take me home? Everything work out all right?”
“No,” said Redbeard. “None of the passwords worked.”
I wasn’t surprised but acted shocked. Resting in front of him on a coffee table was a white laptop. The emir and Glasses sat behind the desk, talking in Arabic. I sat down across from Redbeard, next to Chubs, and he turned the laptop toward me while picking up a chrome pistol-grip shotgun and ordered me to log in to my bank account. After a few failed attempts I managed to log in and show them my savings, which amounted to over sixteen grand, with another nine in my business account. Then we moved on to my credit cards. After I logged in to those, they looked over all my purchases and questioned me on them. They weren’t happy about the cigarettes, but I explained the logic of buying them duty-free and for some reason they accepted that. Then we moved on to my email, which for the life of me I could not seem to access.
“Shit!” I said. “It’s not working!”
“Don’t curse,” said Redbeard.
“Try again,” said Chubs.
I did, but got nothing. Chubs told me to reset the password and have it sent to an email address he typed in. I did as I was told and was prompted to answer my security questions. The first question was my mother’s middle name.
“My mother doesn’t have a middle name,” I told them, which was true.
“Then put in her maiden name,” said Redbeard.
“Her maiden name?” I asked, filling with dread.
This was a big problem, both because I knew it was the answer I’d used, and for another reason.
“Yes,” said Redbeard. “What is her maiden name?”
“I’ll just type it in,” I said, and did it quickly.
It worked—we were in.
“What’s the maiden name?” said Chubs. “I need to write it down.”
They were all looking at me, waiting for the answer.
“. . . Grossberg,” I said, as if waiting to hear the gunshot a second later, but all I got in return was a thank-you. Apparently they didn’t know it was a Jewish name. A few minutes later we were back to discussing politics, and then I was escorted back to my room.
I’d noticed the round silver-dollar-sized impression in the center of the bottom half of the door early on, but never asked about it. For some reason, I didn’t think Theo was stupid enough to dig a hole that big right there in the open. I was wrong.
“What’s that hole in the door?” I finally asked one day when the lights were on, pointing at it.
“I made it with a spoon,” he answered. “The wood is really soft.”
“Yeah, but what was the point? What, were you trying to dig your way outta here?”
“I don’t know. I was bored.”
Later he admitted that he was trying to make a peephole . . . in the middle of the door. I guess he figured, much like the Star of David he made, they wouldn’t recognize a hole when they saw one. I told him there was absolutely no point in taking that kind of risk, considering what the repercussions would be, and that there was no benefit from it—I mean, what the fuck would we do with a peephole? Theo disagreed with me. He thought he’d proved it was possible to burrow through the wood and turn the key on the other side before anyone would notice. I disagreed with him right back on that one.
Sometimes I looked at Theo and saw a forty-four-year-old boy. He hated to share—and sharing was crucial in our situation. He chewed with his mouth open, making a squishing sound every time he opened and closed his hole, like a dirty mop being wrung out. One time he walked up to a flat piece of concrete about the size of a candy bar that had fallen from the wall behind the door. Without hesitation he stomped on it, breaking it into dozens of pieces and making a mess—all so he could kick a chunk around the room like a soccer ball. I don’t like living in filth, and I told him to clean it up about a hundred times, but he shrugged it off like every other suggestion I ever gave him—as if he was doing such a great job of taking care of himself thus far. Sometimes I really did feel like George Milton.
It was around this time that I started talking seriously about an escape. I wasn’t planning to burrow through the center of the door, Theo-style: The door was made of solid wood, but it was paneled, and along the edges of these indentations the wood was only about a centimeter or two thick. My plan was to perforate the edges where the wood was very thin and then kick the panel out one night when the area was getting shelled or some other, better opportunity presented itself. I figured that if we got lucky and the building took a direct hit, we might be able to execute the plan without being heard. It was a one-in-a-million chance, but the building did get hit several times while we were there, so it wasn’t impossible. On our trips to the bathroom I had been accumulating anything and everything that I thought might be of use. One of the most valuable items was a three-inch brass flathead screw that I took from a light switch casing that had been ripped out. But the screw was obviously not enough; we needed something to turn it with, and one day I found that something, resting on the sink. It came in the form of a flat little iron bracket, about four inches long.
“Put it back!” said Theo as I stuck it in my sock.
“Shut up!”
“They put it there as a trap! If they find that they’re going to torture us!”
“Then let’s hope they don’t find it. Now shut up. They’re coming.”
A few seconds later Yassine unlocked the bathroom door and we were past the point of no return.
“Come,” he said.
Theo and I stood there for a moment, waiting to see if he’d notice the missing piece of iron, but he didn’t, and a minute later we were back in our cell. Theo was furious, flipping out about what was going to happen when whoever put it there found the bracket missing.
“Dude, would you calm down?” I said. “Now boost
me up so I can stash it in the window.”
“No, no, you shouldn’t have done that! You shouldn’t have done that!” he kept saying.
Within a few minutes we heard the guards taking the men in the cell next to ours on a bathroom run. This calmed Theo down a little, because now if someone realized it was missing we wouldn’t be the only suspects. It didn’t stop his bitching entirely, however, so it was obvious that I would need a better stash spot than the window if I were ever to have a moment’s rest again.
On the ceiling were three fixtures containing long fluorescent tube lights. The fixture closest to the window had popped out of the ceiling on one side, making it the perfect hiding place. I stood on Theo’s shoulders while he leaned against the wall, and then I turned myself around so I was facing the light, holding on to the ceiling to keep my balance. Once I was in reach of the light I stuck the bracket into the fixture and popped it back into place.
“There, you happy?” I said. “They could come in here with a fuckin’ K-9 and still not find that thing.”
Now that this was settled, it was time to talk about the plan—but of course we argued about that, too.
The bottom panel of the door was about the length and width of a milk crate. I made one test hole along the indentation in the top right-hand corner to assess the strength of the wood and how long it would take. In less than five minutes, the screw was through, and had barely been stripped.
“No, I don’t want to do it that way,” said Theo. “I say we perforate the wood next to the doorknob and then punch it out and turn the key.”
The key was always left in the lock, but that part of the door was solid wood several inches thick. I argued that we would need a drill to pull it off, and even if we had one, the guards would notice the holes as soon as they approached the door. Theo’s answer was that we wouldn’t go all the way through until we were ready to leave.
“But we don’t know when we’re gonna leave!” I said. “It’s not like the regime gives us notice before they bomb the place!”
“Well, then we’re not going,” he said bitchily. “It’s always either your plan or nothing.”
“All right, fine!” I yelled. “My mother’s sixty-fifth birthday is in twenty-four days and I am not gonna ruin it by being in here!”
As you can see, my thinking was not exactly rational at this point, but yes, somehow I let him talk me into his stupid plan. Besides, I was certain that Theo would come around to doing things my way once he saw that the screw was never going to make it through the thickest part of the door.
The doorknob was chrome, set in a rectangular plate about ten inches long and five inches wide. After examining it, I figured our best bet was to first dig into the wood directly along the side of the plate, in order to keep our efforts concealed for as long as possible. When I pressed the corner of the bracket into the wood and dragged it downward, it made a slight indentation. When I did it again the indentation was a little deeper. I kept at this for maybe twenty minutes as they walked past the door on the other side—which they did constantly—until I stopped making progress. Now it was time to break out the screw. They rarely closed the door after they entered the room, and the mark I’d made wasn’t noticeable at a glance, so the chances of them finding it were slim as long as no one decided to inspect the door closely.
“Theo,” I said. “Come here, I wanna show you somethin’.”
I showed him what I’d done, explaining that it was very important for us to stick to this one spot until it was ready in case they ever inspected the door. He agreed and went right back to bed.
Now that I had gotten as far as I could with the bracket alone, I started using it as a screwdriver: I stuck the screw in the groove that I’d made and turned it. It didn’t go in easy due to the thickness of the door, and I kept stripping the screw. Eventually my fingers were bleeding so I passed the bracket to Theo and let him take a spin at it while I rested. After a few minutes, I got up to see what he had done. It was a disaster: instead of staying along the edge as we’d discussed, he’d just started digging a new groove horizontally away from the plate.
“What are you, fuckin’ retarded?” I asked, ripping the bracket from his hand. “Are you trying to get us tortured? Stay along the plate! That’s the plan!”
And on I went, but my explanations were useless. It was clear that Theo could have no part in orchestrating his own escape plan—it would have been suicide to rely on him for anything. If I hadn’t stopped him when I did, his new groove would have been as noticeable as the one he’d dug into the middle of the door. So, with my fingers still raw, I returned to work.
Looking back, I really don’t know what I was thinking. It was completely absurd to believe that we would ever be able to pull it off. I mean, I couldn’t even get the screw one centimeter into the wood, it was so solid. The longer I worked at it, the more I stripped the screw, and every time I did, the bracket made a loud click of metal on metal that made us freeze. We knew that if anybody heard what we were doing we were in deep shit—but we were in deep shit anyway so why not just double down, was my frame of mind.
Click!
A moment of silence, and then:
“Stop messing with the door,” Mohammad said from the hallway.
“Shit!” I whispered, rushing over to sit on my bed. After a minute I got up again and paced, holding the bracket and screw, trying to think of the best place to hide them if this happened again, since there obviously wouldn’t be time to stash them in the light.
That was when I heard the key turn. I tossed the screw into the middle of the floor to hide it in plain sight and threw the bracket under my blankets.
I was sitting again by the time Mohammad forced open the door, accompanied by Yassine and another thug I had never seen before. The electricity was out, and all three carried flashlights. Mohammad immediately started examining our side of the door while the unknown thug shined his light over our piss bottles.
“Mohammad, I was just cleaning my nails out on the door,” I said.
Theo and I were ordered to stand in the back of the room, and this was when the thug lifted my blanket and found the bracket. I was sure he was going to dig it into the flesh of my face and drag it down, but all he did was walk up to me and hold it in front of my eyes.
“Jumu’ah!” said Mohammad, kneeling by the door.
He’d found the impression Theo had made with the spoon months before—the “peephole.” Mohammad motioned me over, and when I knelt beside him he furiously pointed to the gouge in the door.
“Mohammad, that was already there,” I said, honestly. “I swear to God.”
He looked down. At his feet was a small pile of broken concrete pieces, the mess Theo had made so he could kick a piece of rubble around the room like a soccer ball. Mohammad picked up a chunk of concrete, examined it, and then placed it in the impression in the door and turned it from side to side—obviously imagining that this is what he’d heard us doing. Just my luck: it fit perfectly.
Mohammad turned to look me in the eye. A seriousness had overtaken his usually animated face, and in that two or three seconds as he stared at me, I knew I was finally meeting his darker half.
“Mohammad . . .” I said slowly, looking at Theo to see if he was going to fess up to making the mark in the door. Theo just stood there, silently watching events unfold.
By the time I turned my head back to Mohammad our punishment had begun. I saw the first punch coming and blocked it so that his fist only grazed the side of my head. The second one I blocked completely. Now on his feet, Mohammad dealt me a swift kick to the abdomen and then brought the piece of concrete down on the back of my head with wrecking-ball force. Stunned by the blow, I heard him instruct Yassine to tend to me, and I was dealt another kick as he moved on to Theo.
Theo hadn’t moved—Mohammad grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and threw him against the back wall. He fell to the ground flat on his face with his hands out, shaking. As Mohammad shined the l
ight in Theo’s face, he took out his Glock. I ran over as he pointed it down at Theo’s head.
“Mohammad, please don’t do it!” I begged. “Please don’t shoot him! I’m sorry, it was my fault!”
“I am going to come back in ten minutes to beat you,” said Mohammad to Theo in Arabic, while holstering his weapon. “And then come back at night to beat you some more. Take their beds!”
A second later they were dragging our beds and blankets out into the hallway and we were once again alone. That’s when Theo translated what Mohammad had said. There was a moment of silence.
“Hey, I don’t mean to be a dick, but did he say he’s gonna beat me too?” I asked.
“No,” answered Theo. “This is bad. We need our beds or we’re going to get sick.”
I told him not to worry about the beds, that I would talk to Mohammad and get them back. I waited a few minutes and then started banging on the door.
“Mohammad, come on, man, talk to me,” I called out. “This is all just a misunderstanding!”
After a few minutes of this, Yassine appeared. He looked enraged.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“I wanna talk to Mohammad.”
“No!”
“Well then, how about a bathroom run?”
“No, no bathroom! No food! Never again!” he shouted, slamming the door.
About ten minutes later, he returned and dropped a tray of olives and yogurt for us, then left without saying a word. Theo had lost his appetite, so I ate alone. Not long after this we heard a large group of people assembling outside our door and looked at each other with dread. When the door opened, standing there were about eight men wearing masks, dressed in black from head to toe. One entered and, after telling Theo to cover his eyes, cuffed him with his hands behind his back. Then they led him away and locked me in by myself. Theo didn’t say a word. A minute or two later the chilling sound of his screams came floating through the hallway and crashing into my ears. I paced back and forth, praying to God to make it stop and for them not to take me next, but I was pretty sure my luck in this area had run out.
The Dawn Prayer_Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison Page 8