I inhaled sharply, and squinted my eyes. I saw white. No colour.
The walls, the floor, the ceiling, my clothes, all white. My long black hair and my skin were they only difference.
My hands were bound behind the chair, like I was in an jail cell. A door opened, and a man came inside.
He stood in front of me, and another man wheeled in a trolley. I couldn't see what was under the cloth that covered the top.
"My name is Arthur." He said. He too, was dressed in white, and the other man stood to attention behind him. "Mind if we sit?"
"Que diable se passe-t'il? Pourquoi m'avez-vous pris? Laisse moi partier!" I shouted, looking up at him with my best poker face.
I was now my POW (Prisoner of War) training kicked in. I was taught to say nothing, and if I had to, it needed to be innocent chatter.
This experience was different for everyone who went through it. Some, went mad, smashing their own heads against the bars, or talking to dead relatives. Hallucinations. Some, were tortured to death. In Iran, women would endure a different sort of torture.
"So the pity here is I don't speak French. But the lovely thing is all French speak some English, even if they don't like to."
Great, he believed I was French, so far. All I needed to do was keep my mouth shut and wait for the tactical team to figure out my location for extraction. I needed to trust this thought.
"So let's do that hmm? Oh, why all the whiteness? I'll give you a bit of context. Some Westerners call this white torture or sensory deprivation. I prefer to look at this as a blank slate." He paced around me slowly, hands behind his back.
"Give me truth, and we'll fill in some colour together. Now, talk to me about how you managed to enter the Palace Hotel, access Fahim Jarif, and kill him. Who are you working for? And how did you get to Jarif? Simple questions. Simple answers." Arthur, if that was his real name, stopped in front of me and sat in the chair slowly. "Ooh. Silent rage. That old chestnut. Well, since you are determined to act like every other captured Spy, perhaps it is best to treat you as one for now." He looked at me, emotionless.
His guard punched my face, and I began to drip blood over the white clothing draped over me. My lip felt numb, but the pain around it throbbed. We sat in silence, and I didn't budge.
Not a sound, not a movement.
I didn't even move my eyes. I just stared at him.
"While you were napping, I took the liberty of examining your body." Arthur stood up, and lifted the white hospital-like gown over my knee and touched the bullet holes lightly. "These wounds were deep and old from a long time ago, or maybe from when you were a young girl. What sort of accident could cause this? Or maybe not an accident." He paced circles around me again. "What sort of person would do that, hmm?" He sighed "Let me tell you what I believe. I believe you snuck into Jarif's well-guarded hotel room and strangled him. I believe you had help from Mossad, the United States?"
"Je n'ai aucune idea de ce que tu veux." I replied quietly.
He laughed. "Really? Still with the French. Okay." He took out a black bag from under the cloth on the trolley.
He slid it over my head, and I took in a deep breath. The torture was about to begin. Something hard touched my head, and I heard a click.
I gasped a little, I knew it was a gun. My heart began to pound.
There was no way he would kill me without a confession.
What was he going to do?
I needed to sound panicked- the innocent would have. So I let myself sob, and I breathed heavily as convincingly as I could muster without over doing it.
"I'm a patient man," He whispered. "But my patience is not infinite."
The gun shot right beside my ear, with a loud bang. I jumped and screamed out, but I couldn't hear myself over the ringing in my ears.
It seemed like a long time before the ringing subsided, and I could hear a faint voice.
If I was to make it out alive, I was going to come back and murder this son of a bitch with my bare hands.
My hatred for the Iranians grew stronger at this moment.
"Pretty soon, you are going to tell me who the hell you work for and how the hell you got to Jarif." He took of the bag from my head and I squinted at the brightness. He left me to recover, watching me and pacing around me like a vulture.
An hour passed, or maybe only a few minutes? This white out was messing up my senses, just like he'd said.
"We have some new developments." He had a few pieces of paper in his hand, and he put them in my view. Recon photos of my team sitting down for lunch. A photo of Hayes and I at the airport.
"I know you're strong. But would you rather die than have a chance to see your family again? Find love? Have children? Don't you care about your team? Your team." He showed waved the photos at my face. "They were caught trying to rescue you. And you were captured because of your own stupidity." He showed me another photo, one of a man wearing the same suit Hayes was wearing on the op, only his face was unrecognizable.
He was covered in blood, arms tied behind his back as he was slumped on a chair.
"And this fellow, was killed because of you."
I stared at the photo, feeling a deep sense of regret now. Yes it was possible the photo was fabricated, and yes, it was also possible that what he was saying was true. I stared at the photo, taking in every detail, and I didn't see any flaws.
It looked like Hayes.
"How many more will die? How selfish are you willing to be?" He threw the photos at my feet, and I closed my eyes in disgust.
Arthur sighed. "Everyone has a breaking point, love. There's no shame in recognising that this is yours. You have failed your team. One is already dead."
I bit lip hard to stop it from shaking, he would see I was about to crack. I needed to make it harder for him, and I needed to use what he threw at me.
"Save the rest by explaining your allegiances."
I opened my eyes, and Arthur was back in his chair, nodding at me.
"You're lying." I replied finally.
His face didn't change. "Ah, English! A break through!"
"You don't know, anything. And you don't have anything either. Because a sick bastard like you, wouldn't just bring me a picture if you killed someone I cared about. You bring me their severed head." I said nonchalantly.
"Oh, you think I'm a sick bastard. No. A sick bastard would stay and watch." He got up and walked out of the room, and the guard stood over the trolley. He unfolded a case of tools, and he chose a butcher's knife. He took out a small blow torch, and heated the blade.
I looked away as my heart pounded faster, almost punching through my chest.
The pain.
The humiliation.
The damage. The mind does interesting things under extreme stress.
The red hot metal sunk into my flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but it's worse seeing it happen. My scream, once disbelief, is now gruesomely familiar in my ears. I know it won't stop him, but I still scream.
They say you see flashes of your life gone by before you die? That's wrong. For me, I saw things that could have been. Flag and I growing old together. My men, living happy and harboured lives. Peace in the world.
Jaz! Don't let them win!
My muscles locked into place, froze me where I sat. Because it wasn't the Arthur's voice that rebuked me now. It was a furious voice, a familiar voice, a beautiful voice–soft like velvet even though it was irate.
It was his voice–I was exceptionally careful not to think his name–and I was surprised that the sound of it did not knock me to my knees, did not curl me onto the floor in a torture of loss. But there was no pain, none at all.
In the instant that I heard his voice, everything was very clear. Like my head had suddenly surfaced out of some dark pool. I was more aware of everything–sight, sound, the feel of the cold air that I hadn't noticed was caressing my face, the smells coming from the burning flesh.
I looked around myself in shock.
Life is tough, but so are you, the lovely voice ordered, still angry. Do nothing stupid.
I didn't have to look to know who it was; this was a voice I would know anywhere–know, and respond to, whether I was awake or asleep… or even dead, I'd bet. The
voice I'd walk through fire for–or, less dramatically, slosh every day through the cold and endless rain for.
Kowalski.
But I was alone. The guard stood a few feet from me, staring at me with frightened eyes. Against the wall, confused, wondering what I was doing, sitting there motionless in the chair.
I shook my head, trying to understand. I knew he wasn't there, and yet, he felt improbably close, close for the first time since… since the explosion. The anger in his voice was concern, the same anger that was once very familiar–something I hadn't heard in what felt like a lifetime.
Keep your cool. The voice was slipping away, as if the volume was being turned down on a radio.
I began to suspect that I was having some kind of hallucination. Triggered, no doubt, by the memory–the Deja vu, the strange familiarity of the stress in the situation.
I ran through the possibilities quickly in my head.
Option one: I was crazy. That was the layman's term for people who heard voices in their heads. Possible.
Option two: My subconscious mind was giving me what it thought I wanted. This was wish fulfillment–a momentary relief from pain by embracing the incorrect idea that he cared whether I lived or died.
I could see no option three, so I hoped it was the second option and this was just my subconscious running a muck, rather than something I would need to be hospitalized for.
My reaction was hardly sane, though–I was grateful. The sound of his voice was something that I'd feared I was losing, and so, more than anything else, I felt overwhelming gratitude that my unconscious mind had held onto that sound better than my conscious one had.
The wise thing would be to run away from this potentially destructive–and certainly mentally unstable–development. It would be stupid to encourage hallucinations.
Very few seconds had passed while I sorted this all out. My little audience watched, curious.
It probably looked like I was just dithering over whether or not I was going to give in to them. How could they guess that I was standing there enjoying an unexpected moment of insanity?
After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done.
The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves. When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.
Though I appeared to be, for the moment, freed of the zombie abstraction, I was just as distant.
My mind was preoccupied.
The safe, numb deadness did not come back, and I got more anxious with every minute that passed without its return.
Arthur returned, and peered down at me, sombre. "Again, who do you work for?"
Hesitantly, I began whispering mumbled English, which didn't even make sense to myself.
"What?" Arthur crept closer, to listen.
I continued my babbling, looking straight at him.
Arthur's face was mere inches from mine, his ear towards my face. "Yes?"
I lifted my head and smashed it into his, feeling my skull give soggily with the impact. I ground down against the recoil of the crunch.
Leaving the inside of my head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade, like most after-effects, it did.
Arthur patted his cheek gingerly, glaring at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor. "Very cute, American." His hand flung back, and whisked me across the face.
At first it was numb, then the entire side of my face burned and throbbed with the sting.
"I'm not a fucking American. My name is Aida Hereb."
Arthur looked disappointed, wiping his blood stained hand on a white cloth. "Oh." But then he grinned devilishly. "We took the tracker out of you."
"What tracker?" I snapped.
"Clever, you swallowing it. But, this entire building is fitted with transmission dampers." His voice was low and he spoke very deliberately, and confidently. "From the minute you were brought in-well, when we rolled you, your signal vanished." He chuckled as his eyes bore down me intensely as I eyed the door. "Help is not coming." He sneered. "It's just you and me, American." He threw the cloth onto the trolley and crouched beside me. "Now, why did you come to the Palace Hotel and meet with Jarif?"
"Because he's friends with my brother," I decided to continue with the identity I had taken. "I'm Aida Hereb, I'm not American."
"So, the tracker is CIA issued. Makes sense." He breathed heavily, believing he had made progress. "You being a CIA agent, and all."
I screamed in frustration. "I don't know you! I'm not CIA!"
"Who hired you to kill Jarif?" He yelled, as his hand met my face in a fit of rage. Arthur hit with bruising force.
By now my headache was beginning to make my vision blurred, I struggled to keep my head from bobbing down to my chest. And saw Arthur's burrowed features a thousand meters above me.
My vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to fight the urge to roll into a fetal ball
"Let's start again." He said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance.
I snapped up from the waist, striking for his groin with my foot. The blow was out, spending itself in the meat of this thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm and the power knuckles hit me. I saw a scribble of multi-coloured lights and then everything whited out.
Consciousness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head.
Anger ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up and focused on Arthur waiting on the other side of the room.
"Wakey wakey, or, gas and a blow torch?" Arthur was grasping a fuel canister and blow torch, pacing around me like a vulture to its prey. "Who hired you to kill Jarif?"
I drew a breath hard through my teeth and it made a satisfying growling noise. "He tried to kill me."
"Like he'd bother," Arthur retorted. "It's not easy to take out some one as powerful as Jarif." He tipped the fuel around my chair, and threw the can into one corner, watching my reactions closely. He still expected to give in. He flicked the lid on the lighter impatiently.
"Wait," I stammered. "Wait, wait. Okay, my name is. My name is…" I looked up at and snarled. "Fuck you."
Arthur sighed heavily with anger as I gasped in another breath and screamed. "Fuck you!"
Just then, the door burst open, and another man summoned Arthur.
Arthur looked deeply dismayed as he was called out of the room.
There is no conditioning that can prepare you for having a cigarette stubbed out in your eye, for being burned to death, being raped, drowned, suffocated.
To the mind, pain is pain, eventually, you will break.
If it doesn't stop, you will go insane.
The mind does interesting things under extreme stress.
Hallucination. Displacement. Retreat.
As Tier Ones we learn those things: not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.
Beat the player, not the game.
There are things you can't kill your way out of.