Sardar Ayoubi, or Detainee Four Sixty, as he was called here, shuffled carefully through the entrance to the interrogation building. No other gait was possible: his ankles were shackled with less than half a meter of chain connecting them, his wrists were locked to a chain around his waist, and a pair of guards held his upper arms, steadying and steering him. This last was necessary because he had a black bag over his head and was walking blind. It was all SOP for Sardar: though he'd been here a hundred times, he'd never seen the building from the outside – or inside, for that matter, until he reached his destination and the door was shut behind him.
Sardar counted steps. Six more, and he would be turned left, and the quality of the echoes would change as they entered the hallway leading to the interrogation rooms. Ten more would bring him to the first of the doors leading to a room. Sardar had been led to six different rooms here in the three years he had been detained: their doors lay at ten, twenty, and thirty steps on the left, and at fifteen, twenty-five, and thirty-five on the right. Except for the farthest, the rooms were exactly the same, blank-walled and windowless, furnished with a table and two chairs; the only difference was in how long it took to reach them. The farthest room, however, was equipped for 'enhanced interrogation techniques', and if he ever visited that room again, it would be too bloody soon. And that was why he counted his steps every time he was led down this hall.
The hands on his left arm tugged backward as the ones on the right urged him into a left-hand turn. Sardar turned, unresisting as always, and the guards' boots echoed down the long hall, scuffing the floor as they kept step with their prisoner. Ten steps, then twenty, twenty-five….
The grip on his arms tightened, and he realized he was dragging his feet.
Thirty steps, and now the hands on his biceps were almost lifting his heels off the floor.
Allah the Merciful, the Benificent…
It took a moment to realize that his captors had taken more than thirty-five steps. Sardar resumed his count as the men continued to half-drag him forward: forty, forty-five. Fifty. At fifty-five, they halted and turned him right. One of the guards let go of him. Sardar sensed the other guard's tension through the hands gripping his bicep. "Behave yourself," the man said in a low voice as the doorknob turned and the latch clicked.
Who am I meeting, the bloody President? He didn't say it out loud; even a simple affirmative would have been against the rules, and a smart comment would have cost him the inch-thick foam mattress covering the metal shelf that was his bed.
The door was opened. He felt a little puff of cool air on his hands and at the base of his throat, the only exposed skin on his body. The hand on his arm urged him through.
He felt carpet under his feet instead of concrete. The echoes in this room were different, muffled. He was led several steps inside, chivvied sideways, and told to sit, the big hand still gripping his arm and guiding him down. The chair was padded, not one of the usual heavy wooden ones with the shackle-scarred arms, and he sank into the cushion with his hands in his lap.
The bag was whisked from his head, and he beheld a houri.
...
Wilcox paused at the door to the 'guest' office at the end of the hall where, as instructed, he had brought Four Sixty instead of to an interview room. Questioning a detainee in a room with no cameras was a breach of protocol and security both, but he had been ordered to follow this agent's instructions to the letter. No doubt this was part of Nicole's 'different methods', he thought, and wondered what other surprises she might be preparing for the little raghead.
"Behave yourself," he found himself saying, even though Four Sixty was fully restrained, and had never offered any physical resistance even when he wasn't. Physically passive he might be, but Wilcox could see a deep and abiding anger in his eyes, and, though he was a favorite of the visiting interrogators, they never seemed happy when they were through with him. The sergeant thought it was just a matter of time before the right combination of stressors sent the kid off the rails.
Wilcox opened the door and gently pushed the detainee through. Keeping him firmly in control occupied all of the sergeant's attention until the kid was settled into the chair. Then he glanced at the figure standing behind the desk, and he almost forgot the subject in the chair beside him.
Nicole had changed out of her uniform into another, of sorts: a woman's power suit, light gray jacket and trousers, pastel blue button-front shirt with the top three fasteners undone. A pendant stone gleamed three inches below the hollow of her throat, suspended from a fine silver chain. The outfit looked like designer stuff, form-fitting, perfectly tailored and expensive as hell. It made Nicole look older, a successful young woman who knew her stuff but wasn't averse to using her looks to ease her way up the career ladder.
She nodded at the detainee, and Wilcox removed the head bag. The kid stared at Nicole as if he had never seen a woman before. The sergeant could sympathize: he'd seen plenty of women, but never one quite like this.
Four Sixty dropped his eyes and stared at the carpet. Nicole gestured toward him. "Take those things off him."
"If he's unshackled, two men have to stay in the room, Miss."
Nicole looked at Wilcox with a cool expression that made him feel as if he'd just farted. "Sergeant, where on earth do you think he'll run to?"
Uncomfortably, he said, "He might try… taking you hostage."
"If he does, shoot me first. I insist." She looked pointedly at the boy's leg and arm restraints.
Wilcox wearily inserted keys into the locks, popped them, and gathered them up. The boy rubbed his wrists as they always did, even though the shackles hadn't been tight enough to chafe. "Anything else?"
"Something to eat would be nice. I haven't had a bite since breakfast."
Wilcox blinked at the lie. He looked from her to the kid, who seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to meet his interrogator's eyes. She was going to eat in front of him? He was pretty sure that was an insult, especially with her being a woman. An attempt to put him in his place, maybe? "Sure. What do you want?"
"Anything you've got, as long as it's kosher."
He blinked again and looked at the detainee, whose head had snapped up briefly to stare at her before dropping back down. The sergeant said, "Kosher?"
She nodded, face serious. "I won't insist on rabbinical supervision. Just be sure it isn't anything unclean. Knock before you come in with it, please."
…
Sardar sat with his hands in his lap, staring at the floor between his feet and the big desk. A Jewish interrogator – maybe even from Mossad. Allah preserve me.
She said, "This is the part where I'm supposed to flip a page or two in your file and say something melodramatic." Her voice was like birdsong, or chimes, or the voice of Heaven. "Actually, I haven't read it. It's way too thick for a file on someone who hasn't told us anything, which tells me it's full of useless filler and unsupported opinions."
He heard the chair behind the desk creak; he swallowed as he imagined her hips shifting in the seat. "I'm not going to jerk you around, Sardar. I'm here because nobody else has gotten anything out of you. But nobody believes your story, either, and they assume, therefore, that what you're withholding must be very good stuff. And since you were raised in the West, you're perceived as having turned on your host culture, which makes you a sort of traitor as well as a terrorist. That earns you some special treatment in the press - and in here."
A pause, as if she was waiting for a response. He didn't dare speak. She went on, "I'm not sure that's the case. As I said, I'm not going to jerk you around. Convincing me won't get you out of here. But I may be able to persuade certain people that trying to break you is counterproductive."
Bitterness overwhelmed his fear. "So, you're offering to stop torturing me if I tell you what you want to know?" The same offer I've been given every day since my first visit to Room Thirty-five.
"I don't know if you have a single scrap of information I want. I'm only offering to listen honestly to what you have to say." He heard the chair creak as she leaned forward. "Talk to me. Tell me the story like it's the first time, and I'll listen like I'm the first to hear it. Then we'll see where things go from there."
Well, he thought, this is a new approach. And I thought they'd tried every one imaginable. Sardar had been sat down with all sorts of interrogators - teams and individuals, even a few women, though none like this. Some of them had been in masquerade. The fake mullah had been laughable, but some of the others had been much better, like the 'human rights worker' and the one who had claimed to be from the British Embassy. Their questions always tripped them up, though; they simply weren't interested enough in the ones that the people they were pretending to be would want answers for. After all that, presenting him with an honest and sympathetic intelligence operative should be the biggest stretch of his credulity ever.
And would have been, if this woman were not so…
One of the uniformed interrogators, a woman who'd been hostile and aggressive from the start, had grown angry with his 'attitude' – his stubborn refusal to confess to crimes he hadn't committed, and to divulge information he didn't have - and had ordered him shackled to the chair and then sent the guard from the room, leaving Sardar alone with her. Still looking at Sardar like she was a dog about to bite, she'd committed various personal indignities on him that might have had an Afghan hill tribesman howling for mercy rather than bear the shame. But Sardar, being a city boy and raised in the West, had merely endured it, praying silently to Allah and trying with mixed success to restrain, or at least ignore, his reactions to her handling of him. Eventually the woman had tired of her sport, restored his clothing and hers, and called for the guard to take him away.
But sometimes he still had dreams about that woman's hands on him, and the sensations they'd aroused, that brought him to his knees in prayer in the middle of the night. The scent of her breasts as she'd pressed them into his face was an especially stubborn memory.
And one glance at this young woman had brought all those memories to mind, substituting her face and body for the interrogator's. He couldn't look at her for two seconds without imagining what she looked like under her clothes, and the feel of her under his hands. He stared down at his soft slip-on shoes and tried to think of a prayer.
"Let me help you start," she said. "You're British, right?"
"Yes," he said to the floor. "You know that. I was born and raised in Southampton."
"And what were you doing in Afghanistan when you were picked up?" Music couldn't fill a room with more beauty than her voice.
He swallowed. He noticed that the carpet squares glued to the floor were each exactly the same pattern, but they'd been turned about when they were laid to create variety. "I was trying to get out of the country, not rushing to join the fight."
"Why were you there to begin with?"
"I've got family there."
"You said you were born in England. How close are you to your family in Afghanistan?"
Here it comes, he thought. "Never met them before. My parents sent me on holiday to the old country for my eighteenth. I was supposed to be gone for a month or two." And I haven't seen my family since. I turned eighteen in this place, and twenty-one as well, unnoticed by anyone in the world. He braced himself for the predictable questions to follow: who did he meet there, and what did they tell him? What was he supposed to do when he got back to England? What contact information was he given? What did he know of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity?
"Does that happen a lot in transplanted Afghan families? Parents sending their kids halfway around the world to visit relatives they never met?"
It wasn't the first time he'd been asked that question. But the girl's tone of voice was light and conversational, and, for the first time, Sardar thought maybe his questioner wasn't trying to catch him in a lie. "If they can afford it, yeah. It's not something every kid gets like a bar mitzvah. And it's just for the boys."
"Bar mitzvahs are boys-only too, Sardar," she said quietly.
"Oh. Sorry." He didn't understand why he said it. He kept his eyes on the floor.
"Don't be. I'm not Jewish."
He lifted his chin, but brought it back down before his eyes reached the edge of the desk; he had the strangest feeling that, if he looked on her face again, he'd never be able to pull his eyes away.
She went on, "I just wanted them to bring you something fit to eat. I hear they play games with your food sometimes. Jewish and Muslim dietary laws are similar, aren't they?"
He cleared his throat. "Well, at least they won't pour bacon grease on it. Thank you."
"You're welcome. Is it because I'm not properly covered? Is that why you won't look at me?" She waited a moment; when he didn't answer, she went on. "You were raised in England. Surely you saw plenty of girls who weren't dressed according to Sharia. Even Muslim ones."
He didn't understand why he spoke; he hadn't intended to. It just came out on its own. "I can't. I'm too weak."
"I don't understand."
It's been too long since I've looked on a woman. Especially one like you. I know it's not my bloody imagination. You look like a page-two girl." He thought he was done, but something prompted him to add, "I'm sorry. But, when I look in your eyes, I feel far from God."
"Hm. I've had men tell me that looking in my eyes makes them feel like they're in Heaven."
"Lustful thoughts are a tool of the Devil. A woman's beauty is a peril to a man's soul. It's not the woman's fault, but she leads man into unclean thoughts anyway."
"So that's why they cover? To protect men's virtue?"
"And their own."
"Because, if she doesn't, she's doing the Devil's work?"
"Western girls don't know any better, and they've been taught that covering up is demeaning."
"And even worse, that they should glory in the thoughts they instill in men. Our culture must seem perverse to a Muslim not raised in it." Her voice drew closer. "Do you see it that way?"
"I see why I drove my parents crazy with worry, back in Southampton. And why they sent me to the old country to meet family."
"And maybe a girl, one with a proper sense of decorum and virtue?"
"Yeh." He could see her pants legs now, the last foot or so of them anyway, and her shoes. The shoes were a working style: not like the boots the soldiers wore, but square-toed and sensible, shoes that could almost belong to a man. But they were too small, and he knew too well the feet inside them belonged to a woman. He imagined them bare –somehow he was certain that they would be perfectly formed and immaculately pedicured, a sensual treat for his hands - and squeezed his eyes shut until his vision blurred when he opened them. "I can't even look at you without…" He trailed off, feeling the heat rise in his neck and ears.
"Which isn't meant to be a compliment. I'm sorry, really, but there's not much I can do about the way I look. I doubt throwing a tarp over my head would make any difference to you now." Her hands came into sight, smooth graceful hands, pale as milk, with pink-painted nails, presenting a book on a snowy kerchief. A Q'uran. "I can't leave you alone in here, my authority won't stretch that far. But if you want to pray, I'll go behind the desk and turn my back. Is it enough?"
He took it in both hands, careful not to touch her. "The Law makes allowances for prisoners, or Faithful under other kinds of duress." After a moment he added, "Thank you."
"It's an English translation. I understand that means technically it's not a real Koran, because it's not written in Arabic. It's all I could get on short notice. But I wasn't sure you were allowed one of your own."
"We are now." And the guards leave them alone. Not like the first days, when they made us watch them step on them and drop them into the toilets. Sardar turned the cover. "Mine's just like this, actually. I don't read Arabic."
"Like you said, God makes allowances." He heard her move away. "Pray for strength, Sardar. Pray for the strength to look on me and talk to me, and I'm sure it'll come."
With trembling hands, Sardar opened the holy book, and turned to a favorite passage, one that he had returned to many times to take his mind off the tumult as a team of MPs rushed into a nearby cell to settle a quarrel between a guard and another prisoner.
Righteousness does not consist of turning your faces towards the East and the West. But righteous is he who believes in God, and the Last Day, and the angels, and the Scripture, and the prophets. Who gives money, though dear, to near relatives, and orphans, and the needy, and the homeless, and the beggars, and for the freeing of slaves; those who perform the prayers, and pay the obligatory charity, and fulfill their promise when they promise, and patiently persevere in the face of persecution, hardship, and in the time of conflict. These are the sincere; these are the pious.
He slid forward, and his knees dropped to the carpeted floor. And wherever you come from, turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque. This is the truth from your Lord, and God is not heedless of what you do. But he had no idea which direction…
"Right," the girl said quietly. "A little more than a quarter turn."
He shifted clumsily, eyes on the floor, and touched his forehead to the carpet. Just as We sent to you a messenger from among you, who recites Our revelations to you, and purifies you, and teaches you the Book and wisdom, and teaches you what you did not know.
So remember Me, and I will remember you. And thank Me, and do not be ungrateful.
O you who believe! Seek help through patience and prayers. God is with the steadfast.
The Book was closed between Sardar's hands; he silently recited from memory, honed by a hundred readings.
And, after some unguessable time, he realized that his fear had drained away, replaced by a sense of peace and reassurance.
He raised his eyes. The girl sat behind the desk, eyes downcast, not looking at him. She was still perilously beautiful, but that knowledge seemed remote and objective, no longer a dark magnet pulling him toward her.
The girl sensed his regard, and raised her eyes to meet his. He was somehow unsurprised to see that eyes were a rather exotic color, a sort of violet, quite lovely. A woman must be of exceptionally good heart, he thought, to be so good-looking yet so demure. Even though no true believer, she was clearly a child of The Book, and worthy of God's favor. How could such a creature have come to him at this time, in this place, if not as a gift from God?
Had he been sent a measure of deliverance – not from this place, that was too much to ask, but deliverance of the spirit? After years of unrelenting routine and discomfort, facing the cynical eyes of the interrogators and enduring the unrelenting hostility of the guards - hostility that freshened each time one of those bain chodas in the adjoining cells shouted one of their stupid slogans at him or tried to draw him into their little conspiracies, as if he was one of them – had he finally been set down before someone here who was capable of seeing another human being on the other side of the table? He focused on the girl again. She met his gaze: her eyes were patient, unjudging… and expectant.
He took a breath and let it out. "Where do we start?"
Her smile was like breaking dawn. "Something pleasant. Home. What's it like, growing up Afghani in Southampton?"
….
"It's time to talk about this." The girl reached into the folder and pulled out several page-sized digital photos. Sardar knew without looking at them what they were. It occurred to him that, for someone who hadn't read his file, she seemed to know her way around it. "I suppose you know how much this incident did to your credibility."
The pictures were screencaps with the logo of a jihadist website in a bottom corner. Several men stood outside in bright sunshine, firing automatic weapons at makeshift targets: an old truck, a window in a wall – a mannequin in desert camouflage uniform. One of the men was Sardar. Another picture showed him firing from cover behind a rubble wall, as if training to fight in an urban setting. In a third he sat at a food-laden table, eating and conversing in the company of several important-looking men. Finally, a picture of him bent over a map table, seeming to be making plans. Even though Sardar had been expecting this, his heart sank. "I was tricked and coerced into being in that video," he said wearily, knowing he wouldn't be believed.
"How did it happen?" She asked. There was no sarcasm or suspicion in her voice. Something must have shown on his face, because she went on, "I offered to listen to you, remember? Tell me how you ended up at this camp playing soldier."
Sardar gathered his thoughts and memories. "It was a week, maybe ten days after we had gone into the back country to see some cousins. The cities are all right, but as soon as you get to the end of the paved roads, you step back in time a thousand years. Absolutely nothing to do. Most people don't even know how to read. I was bored out of my mind.
"One of my cousins introduced me to a friend of his, a pleasant sort who offered to take me for an outing and meet some friends. I took him up on it. We drove in his car for half a day – he actually pulled over and refilled the gas tank from jerrycans in the trunk. I had no idea where I was, and I was starting to think I'd been kidnapped. Finally we arrived at this tent city built around some kind of old fort.
"His 'friends' turned out to be an Islamist militant group. They had ideas about bringing holy jihad to Syria and Iraq. Nutters all, but the way the white showed all around their eyes when they talked about restoring the ascendancy of the Faith told you they didn't believe in friendly disagreements. I ate with their leaders while they quizzed me about living in England. Any time I answered a question, they looked at one another as if they thought I was lying. I thought they might kill me for a spy or some such.
"Instead, they put a gun in my hand and took me out to play with it. First and only time I've ever touched one of the bloody things. I don't think I even hit any of the targets. I nodded and smiled and pretended to be having fun, while I tried not to shit myself. I didn't know they were recording it all. But really, it wouldn't have made any difference, I was that worried for my life. I just wanted to go home, and if pretending to be convinced that all that shite they were slinging made sense, that's what I was going to do."
"So they didn't provide you with a contact list, or money, or instructions?"
"No."
"And they didn't try to convince you to stay?"
"They did at first, but then they gave up on that too, I suppose. My cousin took me home at sunset, driving for hours down dirt roads as dark as the inside of a sack. On the way, he made me promise half a dozen times that I wouldn't tell anyone about the camp, or where it was." He scoffed. "As if I could ever have found it again. I didn't see three road signs the whole trip." He waited a moment. "Aren't you going to ask?"
Nicole smiled and shook her head. "By now it's gone. Whoever you met there, I'm sure they didn't tell you anything that would be useful." She tapped a fingernail on the report, looking down at it; Sardar was now sure that, all her dismissals aside, she had studied it, and was familiar with anything of significance that it contained. "You were turned in to Allied authorities four weeks later, part of a group of reported terrorists. What happened there?"
"What happened? Two weeks after that little outing, some bloody maniacs flew a pair of planes into the towers in New York. We didn't hear about it right off – I was still visiting relatives in the back country – and by the time we did, the borders were closed and the bombs were about to fall."
"You keep saying 'we'."
"My family didn't send me off alone. I had two mates with me, Yama and Asad." He scoffed. "I guess their parents were trying to keep them out of trouble too."
"Where are they now?"
"Yama is here, I think. I used to see him sometimes, back when they kept us kenneled outside like dogs. But not since we moved indoors."
"And Asad?"
"Don't know. We three got separated trying to reach the border. Things were mad there after Nine-Eleven. Rumors were flying about everything, and the wilder they were, the faster they traveled. There were people going round saying it was the end of the world, that the Americans were going to nuke us. Armed men were riding around in trucks firing their guns in the air and shouting slogans, trying to stir things up. Someone would accuse a neighbor of working for the Americans, and they'd drag him through the street and beat him. Most people were just keeping close to home, afraid to step out, but some tried to get out of the country.
"We were traveling with this bunch of refugees, a sort of column. Everyone was on foot; there wasn't any petrol to be had by regular folk by then, so they just abandoned their cars when they ran dry. This pickup truck full of armed men came chasing up the road after us. I don't know to this day what it was about, whether they were Taliban or Northern Alliance of just arseholes, but they plowed into the column, firing into the crowd and scattering everybody who didn't fall. That was the last I saw of Asad. For all I know, he's dead."
She nodded sympathetically. "What sort of truck?"
"Full size, white. Toyota, I think."
"Were they wearing anything that looked like a uniform? Armbands, even?"
"No. Well…" He reconsidered. "Most of them had a kerchief. Red and white check, reminded me of a tablecloth at a picnic. Some of them wore it on their heads, others on their necks."
"You said they fired into the crowd. What sort of weapons did they have?"
He shook his head. "I only touched a gun once my whole life. I can't tell one from another."
"You may only have held a gun once, but you've watched enough television to know what an M-16 and an AK-47 look like."
"I was running for my life, miss." He thought. "If I had to guess, I'd say some of the rifles were those Russian things with the wooden stocks and grips, but they had some other ones too. I know they didn't sound all the same when they were shooting at us."
She nodded and removed a folded map from her little bag and spread it out on the desk, nearly covering it. "Can you show me where it happened? I'll help you."
Wilcox, standing just outside in the corridor, started at the sound of laughter coming through the door – a little birdsong laugh that surely was Nicole's, and another voice, the detainee's. His eyes and Forstner's met. Reflex made him turn the knob and look inside.
They stood side by side, their backs to him, boardroom hottie and orange-jumpsuited bad boy with a chain still circling his waist. They were leaning over the front of the desk. The boy was murmuring something, touching a big map with his finger. They both stopped and turned to look at him as if he was intruding.
He said, unnecessarily, "Everything okay in here?"
"Just fine, Sergeant," she said. "Bring the food in when it arrives." And stay out till then, her eyes said.
When the door closed, she touched a spot on the map and went on, "So this is where you were picked up?"
"I think so," Sardar said. "Half a day after that shoot-up on the road. Another truck – might have been the same one, I suppose, just with different people in it. I was walking down the road alone, and it came up behind. Trying to avoid them would have been pointless, there was no place to hide, not a bush or a building in sight. They pulled up, and one of them said, 'get in.' I was sure they weren't offering me a lift, but the way they held their guns made me think I should do what they told me. An hour or so later, we went through the gates of what I took to be a refugee camp." His mouth twisted. "When I saw the American uniforms, I thought I was finally getting a bit of luck. I actually thanked the bellends who'd brought me in."
"Until the questioning began."
"I wasn't really questioned, not right away. I started out in a pen with a mob, a mix of slogan-shouters and refugees. I went up to the wire and told the guard I was a Brit. Ten minutes later, I was in another pen, a smaller one with just two other people - a Kraut and an Afghan who spoke English. I talked to them, and found out the German had been picked up on the road as well. The Afghani had been snatched right out of his house.
"The Afghani – he was a teacher – he'd been in custody for four days. He told us, 'You're only here because they know you speak English. Don't tell them you're foreign nationals.' I told him it was too late for that. He looked at the guard, who was watching us as if he thought we were about to rush him. 'That's too bad,' he said. 'The American President has been going on and on about how the Taliban are recruiting Muslim extremists from all over the world and training them as terrorists.'
"I thought about my little holiday in the countryside, and the day trip that had taken me to that camp. 'Do you think it's true?' I asked him.
"'I think it's bullshit,' he said. 'Just an excuse to show the Muslim world what happens when you side with somebody who pisses off the United States.' He gave the guard a glance, then he went on, 'But what do I know? I'm just a schoolteacher. I don't have a picture of Bin Laden hanging from my rearview mirror, like some West Bank cab driver.' That sounded a bit well-traveled for an Afghani schoolteacher. But I decided not to ask any more questions.
"After a bit, a pair of guards came to the gate and beckoned me over. If I had had any doubt things could get worse, that ended when they handcuffed me." He paused. "Do I have to go on about what happened after that?"
"Not if you don't want to," she said. "Unless you think your account differs from the official version."
He scoffed. "'Official version.'"
"You know what I mean. According to the official report, you were brought in by native auxiliaries tasked with rounding up stray Taliban or Al-Qaida fighters. They claimed you threw down a rifle and surrendered when they approached you." She lowered her lashes. "Nobody thought to ask them to produce the weapon, even though it was unlikely they would have left it behind. When you were brought before a screening officer, you said you were British and tried to claim immunity."
He sighed. "I gave him my name, said I was a British citizen, and told him I didn't belong there. I asked him to contact the British Embassy. I thought all I would have to do was prove I was a tourist, and they'd send me home." He took another deep breath and let it out. "The next day, I was riding in a helicopter with a bag on my head."
Knuckles rapped on the door, and Sergeant Wilcox entered, tray in hand.
…
"Well, how was it?" Nicole asked a few minutes later. "You seemed to enjoy it."
"The food was nothing special," he said. "But it seems forever since I've been served a meal that didn't come in a Styrofoam box. Thank you."
"It's very hard here, I know," she said quietly. "Do you have friends, at least?"
"I'm in solitary confinement," he reminded her. "A couple of the other inmates talk to me in Pashto, though they have to shout to be heard, and the guards usually quiet us pretty quick. But even if we were free to, they're not easy to talk to. I think they're both graduates of a camp like the one I visited."
"Nothing in common, then."
"Just a language, and our religion, and where we are now."
"Why do they even try, I wonder? Just because they can talk without their captors overhearing?" She added, "You'd think at least a few of the guards would understand Arabic, but that's the U.S. educational system for you."
He scoffed. "Oh, there are plenty of light-skinned people back home who don't speak anything but English. There are blokes who pride themselves on their ignorance wherever you go."
"I'm not going to do it. But I think you should know that, being an infidel Western girl and not properly brought up, I have a very strong urge to hug you and tell you things are going to get better."
"I don't dare hope. But thank you."
An hour after bringing in the tray, Wilson heard the door open. Nicole peeked through. "We're done." In a lower voice she said, "Be gentle."
He and Forstner came in, shackles in hand; the boy was already seated, waiting unsmiling for his leg irons. When they were secure, he presented his wrists so that they could be cuffed to the chain around his waist. When the sergeant produced the head bag, Nicole said, "Wait." She knelt in front of the seated man. "I can't make you any guarantees, Sardar. But I'll speak for you to whomever I can."
He nodded, silent in the presence of the uniformed men, a detainee once again. Wilcox slipped the bag over his head.
…
"This has to be the oldest Jeep in the US military's fleet," Nicole said from the back seat of the little CJ7 as it started up the steep rise leading away from the camp and towards her quarters.
"A lot of bases have museums," Wilcox answered from the shotgun seat, turning to look at her. "I bet there's more than a few MJ3s on display. But I suppose it could be the oldest daily driver. That said, it doesn't belong to Uncle Sam. It's mine."
"Really." She smiled. "Were you inspired by all that Fifties-era Detroit steel on the other side of the wire?"
"Never gave it a thought. I just like old Jeeps. Simple transpo, easy to keep running. It's really just a big rugged golf cart. But it's all you need around here." He scoffed. "I know somebody who bought a '68 Mustang and brought it here. To a place with a road network that mostly looks like a bunch of nature trails. Doubt he ever gets it up to thirty."
"Hey, it's a convertible," Forstner said. "I get a lot of action with that car."
"Really," Nicole said, turning her smile on the driver.
He blushed. "Well, not lately."
"I'm sure Corporal Wickes would be relieved to hear that." Wilcox said to Nicole, "Girlfriend. Recent acquisition."
Nicole's smile faded, but her tone stayed light. "Is she camp personnel, then?"
"Yeah," he said. "Guard force. She's due to transfer out in August."
"Not much time."
The grade steepened, and he downshifted with a momentary grinding of gears. "Guess we need to make the most of the time we have."
"That you do," she said. "Max, take the rest of the day off."
"Ma'am?"
"I said, go do something else. Hit the NCO Club. Visit your girlfriend, if she's off duty. Take a nap. Just tell us where to drop you off." She turned her gaze on Wilcox. "The sergeant and I aren't going to be doing anything else today that we'll need help with."
…
"How did you get him talking?" Wilcox asked half an hour later.
They had ventured over the ridge, after a brief stop at her quarters to change back into uniform, into the largely non-military section on the outskirts of the base which contained a number of retail establishments. They were presently sharing a table at a franchise coffee shop. Over the rim of his coffee cup, Wilcox watched his principal nibbling a sandwich while he waited to see if she would answer. He wasn't entirely sure she would, but he needed to still the crazy thoughts whirling through his head, thoughts of her bent over the desk in the interrogation area with her trousers down around her ankles, while the detainee...
"It was easy, really." She tucked her black hair behind her ear with her two middle fingers, making it shimmer with eye-catching highlights. "I just convinced him God wanted him to."
He blinked at that, but let it pass. "You buy his story?"
She looked across the table at him, and again he felt trapped like a fly on a glue strip by her eyes. "Men don't lie to me, Brian, unless I let them." She raised the paper cup to her lips and sipped. "He's just what he always claimed to be. A shiftless working-class kid from Southampton who didn't care about his ethnic heritage and ignored his parents' lectures on piety. They sent him to the home country as a last attempt to make a proper Muslim out of him, and it didn't take. After a couple weeks, he was bored stiff, chafing under the restrictions of Afghan society, and eager to get back home so he could resume life as a Brit. The jihadists approached him, as they did every foreign Muslim in-country, but they saw how lukewarm his faith was, so they settled for making a propaganda tool of him by video recording him at a local camp."
She opened another sugar packet into her coffee and stirred it in. "The war caught him still in the country. He and his friends fled for the border, looking for rescue by coalition forces. On the way, he was taken by Northern Alliance bullyboys and turned over to the Americans, solely to collect a bounty being offered for captured 'Taliban fighters'. He never should have come here."
"So, who are you going to talk to for him, then?"
"Nobody." She returned her attention to her sandwich. "However he got here, he's too valuable now to ever let go."
He frowned. "Eh?"
She swallowed a bite and said patiently, "He's praying five times a day now, Brian. Not just putting his nose to the carpet, actually talking with his God. He couldn't find his faith back in the old country, but he embraced it here. It's all he's got. The torture, isolation and persecution fed it and strengthened it. As a result, he's become the jihadists' poster boy. He's proof that you can't extinguish the flame of Islam with temptations and easy living, merely bank the fire until a fresh wind ignites it again." She smiled. "I'm quoting one of their sites. Extremist recruiters worldwide are pointing to him as proof that the West will never truly accept Islam, and that its policy of 'religious freedom' is a farce - even its own Muslim citizens will be casualties in its war against the Faith. He's confirmation that it's us against them. It would be insane to turn him out of here and let those people get their hands on him.
"And the hardcases in the camp here treat him like a mascot. He's the lost lamb returned to the fold. They all encourage him to stay strong, to keep resisting, to keep the Faith. He still rejects their agenda, but that only increases their trust. They tell him things, just hints, but more than they should to an outsider, trying to convince him he's part of something big and historic, that he's not suffering in vain. In just the time I spoke with him, he gave me enough intel to shut down two operations in Iraq and Pakistan, stuff he didn't even realize he knows. I'm not going to jeopardize a source like that with preferential treatment." She finished her cup. "Actually, the severity of his treatment should be stepped up for a little while after I leave, to reassure the others he didn't tell me anything. Move him into Five with the hardcases for a week or so."
"That's-" He caught himself.
"Cold? Yeah." She sipped her coffee. "This isn't bad. You hear so many bad things about Starbuck's. Guess you guys get the best." She set the cup down. "You're one of the good ones, Brian. It takes talent to be a good jailer." At his scoff she said, "I mean it. You have to be a special person to be able to deprive a fellow human being of his most basic rights without dehumanizing him. Most people can't do it. They either fraternize, which is dangerous and often results in the guard ending up behind bars too, or they treat their prisoners like animals, which is dangerous in other ways."
She picked her cup up again. As she touched her lips to the rim, she said, "Brian, have you ever seen a guard abuse a detainee? I'm not talking about 'enhanced interrogation.' I mean, beating him in his cell, humiliating him, doing a mindfuck on him." She looked up. "Don't bother to deny it. I see your answer in every line of your posture. You don't like it, but you feel helpless to do anything about it. The brass looks the other way, and you won't go outside of channels. But someone will, someday. Keep your distance, Brian, physically and emotionally."
She slid her cup aside and leaned close; he caught a hint of her perfume. "If this facility is ever closed down, it won't be because the guards torture detainees for information. But there's going to quite be a stir someday, when the press gets their hands on a smuggled video that shows the guards torturing detainees just for the hell of it. I said the rules here are whatever we want them to be, and that's true. Getting information out of these people is vital to our security and interests; it's the duty of everyone here to facilitate that, even at the expense of our guests' comfort and peace of mind. You can get away with some very questionable activities in pursuit of that objective – but only if you don't enjoy the work too much." She leaned back. "I'm done with work for the day. What do people do for recreation around here?"
He said slowly, "A lot of things. You can do anything at Gitmo that you can do at any other military base. Except go into town. So they try to bring hometown USA to the base. We have plenty of sports fields, a movie theater, restaurants." He gestured around him. "Even a few fast-food joints."
"What about beaches? You must have."
"Quite a few," he admitted. "A pool, even. But the nicest ones all face the Bay, not the ocean, and they're full of base personnel. I thought you wanted to keep a low profile."
"No secluded little places?"
"Well, the beaches on the camp side aren't good for swimming, just wading and sunbathing." He eyed the girl's creamy skin: she didn't look like the sunbathing type.
"I don't tan easily," she said, seeming to read his mind, "but I don't burn easily either. A little SPF thirty, and I'm good." She smiled. "That, and a suit."
He flashed on her as she had appeared at the door of the helo, in a summery outfit that put her figure nicely on display, and he couldn't stop his eyes from dropping momentarily, trying to see through the bulky fabric of the uniform. "Well, I doubt the X has anything you'd want to wear, but there's a little strip mall with a clothes shop not too far from here."
"That's the spirit." She was still smiling. "It just doesn't seem right to visit an island paradise like this without getting sand between your toes, don't you think?"
.,.
"I have to say, when somebody talks about beaches in the Caribbean, this isn't what comes to mind." Nicole stood ten yards out from shore, in water that rose from mid-calf to cover her knees with each foamy little wave. She turned to regard the rocky cliffs just thirty yards to either side. "Do they truck the sand in?"
Wilcox, standing on the beach and still in uniform, pulled his attention from the girl's bikini-clad backside. "I think if they trucked sand in, they'd deliver something better than this." The soil between the cliffs was coarse and gritty, interspersed with dark fist-sized rocks. "This is a runoff channel when it rains. I think the sand washes down from the hills." He added, "There's a better beach just a mile east of here. Still no sand, but there are deck chairs, bathrooms, picnic area. But it's probably not empty, and you said you wanted privacy."
"There are some beautiful beaches down the coast from Havana. Sand like sugar, palm trees, surf like a soft blanket. Your pick of lodgings, anything from driftwood shacks to luxury hotels built before the Revolution." She swirled her foot around in the waves. "My Uncle Jack used to tell me stories. He lived in Havana for a while, and traveled all over the island."
Wilcox did some mental figuring. If the guy had been banging around Cuba before the Revolution… "Is he still alive?"
"Oh, yeah. But he moves around a lot. We don't talk much anymore." She turned toward him. "He's not ninety years old. He was in Cuba after Castro took over. You might say spook stuff is the family business." Her eyes drifted to the cliff tops again. "Has anybody here been on the other side of the wire?"
"Every day," he told her.
"I'm serious."
"So am I. Cubans, not Americans," he amended. "The base had a good-sized Cuban workforce before the Revolution – gardeners, clerks, handymen, all kinds of non-essential stuff. When Castro took over, he let them keep coming to work, and we kept paying them. Most of them are retired now, but a couple geezers still go in and out the gate every day."
"Hm. Ever get asylum-seekers show up at the wire? There's a fifty-year-old law automatically granting asylum to Cubans who reach American soil, and this is US territory, at least from our side of the legal argument."
"You saw the woods on the other side of the chainlink. All around the base, a hundred yards beyond the perimeter, the trees give way to dead ground, a minefield surrounded by a fence that's twice the size of ours. It's patrolled by half the Cuban Army. There isn't anybody coming up to the wire."
"This would be a little more fun if I wasn't alone. You should have brought a suit."
"On duty, Nicole." He realized it was the first time he had used her name.
"Hm. So when are you off duty?"
"As long as you're here, I'm not."
She turned to him with a little smile. "Oh, really. So you're at my beck and call, twenty-four-seven?"
He swallowed. "Till you're at your door, and anytime you leave your little cottage."
She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind. "Well, the water's warm enough, anyway." She walked out of the waves, belly flexing, thighs glistening. "I left my towel in the car. Could you…"
"Sure." He pulled his eyes off her, turned away, and hurried to the little Jeep twenty yards up the beach. A moment later, he was back with the oversized beach towel she had purchased with the bikini. "Where do you want it?"
"Well, I'd like to get a little sun, but I don't really want to lay out with you standing over me like a bodyguard."
"It's not a big deal." He spread the towel in the sand and took a few steps away. "I come out here a lot, just to look at the water."
"Hm. Getting away, in your mind at least." She sat down on the towel and began applying sunscreen to her lower legs. "How long have you been here?"
"Three years," he said, watching her hands glide up and down from ankle to knee. "Since the beginning, pretty much."
"You must have volunteered to stay then. Do you like it here?"
"I'm used to it."
"Sounds like it isn't so much about being here, as you don't want to be someplace else." She dispensed a dollop of the creamy white lotion on her thigh and began rubbing it in; Wilcox swallowed. "How do you get along with the ex?"
He blinked and pulled his eyes away from her hands. Slowly he said, "I don't recall ever telling you I was married."
"Guys like you always have ex-wives." The next dollop fell on her belly; the sergeant swallowed as her fingertips slid briefly under her bikini bottom while working it in.
He managed to tear his eyes away from the show, and studied the clifftops. "Guys like me?"
"You know. Mid-thirties, good-looking, conservative, career-wedded. You always try to juggle family life along with a profession. No ring, so the experiment must not have worked out. Any kids?"
"No," he said. "We agreed to wait. Maybe we knew from the beginning that it wasn't going to work."
They talked, Wilcox trying to keep his eyes on the water and the lowering sun instead of the half-naked girl stretched out on the towel nearly at his feet. The conversation drifted from subject to subject, with the interrogator asking most of the questions, and the sergeant doing most of the talking.
On occasion, he would slip in a question of a personal nature, but those queries were usually answered with a vague or cryptic evasion. A few comments from Nicole about her 'Uncle Jack' hinted that he was a former Green Beret who had gotten involved with the CIA after Vietnam. But several attempts to prompt her to give up more information resulted in little more than shrugs. Finally he asked point-blank, "What about your family? Mom and dad still together?"
"Hard to say," she said. "I was orphaned when I was five years old. Car crash."
Stunned, he said, "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Like I said, I was five. I don't remember them. Uncle Jack is an old Army buddy of my dad's. He kind of looked after us, when he wasn't busy doing other things. Our foster mom is a dragon lady, but she made sure we got a first-rate education and never lacked for a thing."
He remembered Nicole's fascination with the kids at Camp Iguana – had it really been just that morning? Had their isolation struck a chord? How easy had her childhood really been? Then her words registered. "We?"
"Me and my brother, he's a year older." She lifted a knee and stretched out the other leg, toe pointing prettily. "We have a half-sister, but we didn't find out about her until a couple years ago. Different moms."
"Older or younger?"
"Younger by five years. And yes, my parents were together at the time. That's why we didn't know about her, I suppose."
"Hm. You get along?"
"Not really," she said. "Different backgrounds, different interests." She rolled over. "Get my back?"
His breathing roughened. "Sun's almost down."
"I know. Better hurry."
He knelt in the sand next to her and reached for the plastic squeeze bottle. He eyed the girl's skin: soft, creamy, unblemished, looking as if it had never been darkened by the sun. Vampire's skin. He shook his head at the strange thought and squirted a small portion of sunscreen into his palm. He leaned over, touched the heel of his hand to the middle of her back…
"Brian," she said softly.
He looked down. His palm was spread across the small of her back. A smear of lotion stretched the length of her spine from the middle of her shoulders to the top of her bikini bottom and over the dimples above her buttocks. He blushed to see that the trail ran under the string across her back.
"You need to spread it out," she went on.
His breathing roughened. Her bikini was the string kind, held together with knots at hips and the middle of her back and the back of her neck. None of them was double-tied. In two seconds, she could be naked and in his arms…
The hand not touching her was wet. He looked at it, and saw that he was still holding the lotion bottle, and had squeezed out half its contents to drip lazily off his fist.
He stood, flicking the oily fluid into the sand. "The sun's gone. We're done here."
"So it seems." She stood, gracefully folding and unfolding herself to rise to her feet. She looked out to sea. "Which way is Jamaica?"
"South." He hadn't meant to, but he found himself coming up behind her and gripping her shoulders, turning her slightly. "That way."
She shivered in his hands. Her skin was cool; he felt goosebumps rise on her upper arms. He bent for the towel, gave it a brief shake, and wrapped it around her. His arms circled her shoulders, drawing her against him.
He felt her soft exhale. "You want me."
It never occurred to him to deny it. "Do you ever meet a man who doesn't?"
"From time to time." She added, "But you're not going to do anything about it."
"No." He dropped his hands, but somehow he couldn't make himself step back. Thoroughly uncomfortable now - from his behavior, or perhaps something else - he stared at the horizon while he searched for words. "I have a feeling that casual sex with you… wouldn't stay casual."
She nodded, unsmiling, and stepped away, wrapping the towel a little tighter around herself. She turned and walked back to the Jeep.
The drive back was quiet. When they came to a stop at the curb in front of Nicole's quarters, she said, "Stay here," and swung her legs out of the doorless little vehicle.
He shook his head and put a foot out. "I can-"
"No," she said, putting up a hand in a halting gesture. She locked eyes. "If you walk me to the door, you'll still be here in the morning. Your reasons for not doing that are better than you know." She pulled her bag out of the back, stuffed the towel into it, and strode up the walk with it over her shoulder, bikini-clad hips rolling enticingly. "Get some rest," she called over her shoulder. "Pick me up at seven."
With that image burned into his vision, Wilcox drove back to the little row of two-room concrete bungalows that included his quarters. Leaving the Jeep out front, he unlocked the door and let himself in, shutting the door behind him.
He surveyed the living area: a space smaller than most hotel rooms, just roomy enough for a single bed, drawers, a closet, and a TV. Another door led to a bathroom so tiny that his knees touched the wall when he sat on the toilet, with a shower stall instead of a tub. The threadbare rug on the painted cement floor needed a good beating. There were no pictures or adornments on the walls, and just one small window above the foot of the bed, covered with cheap thin curtains. The room that had been his private place for nearly three years now looked to him like a prison cell.
Through the wall, softly, he could hear his neighbor playing music, some country western tune with a lot of twangy guitar. Through the opposite wall, he heard the rising hiss of a crowd cheering its team on TV.
He had never felt so alone in his whole life.
He got back in the Jeep, telling himself he just felt like a drive. He wandered the roads, paved and unpaved, that wound through the hills. He crossed the ridge and tooled down the base's streets, cruising like a teenager in his parents' car. He hit a drive-thru, pulled into a lit-up ball field, and ate while he watched a game. He headed back over to the camp side of the peninsula, and parked on a little public beach, the better-attended one that his protectee had shunned, and stared out over the dark water, watching the lights of some officer's pleasure boat cruise by ferrying a load of half-drunk passengers.
And then, as he had known he would, he found himself shutting off the engine at the curb in front of her cottage.
The little house's lights were all off. But a pale yellowish glow came through one of the windows, so faint that he didn't see it until his headlights had been off for a while and given his eyes time to adjust. Was it a night light, or maybe an open fridge door? But he didn't think it was either of those things. His imagination pictured her sitting at the kitchen table, staring into a candle, her eyes huge and dark in its feeble light.
He scoffed. What would she be doing, summoning spirits? Worshipping some dark god? It was just a four-watter plugged into a baseboard somewhere, to keep people from bumping into furniture in a strange house late at night. She was in bed and asleep, like he should be.
What did she wear to bed? Or did she wear anything at all?
The sergeant's hands clenched on the wheel. He started the little vehicle and, without turning on the headlights, drove off.
At the specified hour the next morning, Wilcox was back at VIP accommodations. Forstner could ride the bus in, the sergeant had decided, and join up with them at Camp Delta. Some instinct told him that he should meet Nicole this morning alone.
He knocked on Nicole's door, wondering how long it would take her to answer. Would she come to the door half-dressed, or wrapped in a towel straight from the shower? Would she invite him in to wait while she finished up? Or maybe his knock would wake her, and he really would find out what she wore to bed…
The door opened. Nicole, looking very crisp and professional in her uniform, passed him by with a terse "Good morning" and headed down the walk. He followed, puzzled and suddenly wary.
He got behind the wheel and started the engine. "Where to?"
"Back to Camp No," she said to the windshield. "One of the regular rooms this time. I'll wait there while you fetch the next one."
"You don't want any breakfast? No coffee?"
"No," she said shortly. There was no music in her voice today. Gone was the friendly, flirtatious girl who had seemed almost ready to invite him to spend the night.
Or… had the invitation been 'almost'? Had her warning at the curb last night been a test of sorts? One that he had failed? He tooled along in silence for another mile, then said, "Nicole, if I did something to upset you, I'm sorry."
She glanced his way, the corner of her mouth lifted in a tiny smile. "You sound like a guy fighting with his girlfriend, Brian." She shook her head and returned her gaze to the road ahead. "You didn't do anything. I'm just trying to keep my head in the game. So far has just been a warmup, really. The first one was easy as driving a nail." The corner of her mouth twitched again. "And the second one was kind of like teaching tricks to a puppy." Her face blanked again. "But the last three are going to take some concentration, and a lot of self-control. And they won't be any fun at all."