Binder - 02 (15 page)

“How on earth did you survive that?”

“He was shooting from an unfamiliar range—about twenty feet.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. I admire your talent, Mr. Herne. I served myself, you know, but with much less distinction. Ever since I left the Army, I’ve tried to surround myself with men like you. I don’t know that any are actually at your level, but a few are close. Alpha is lucky to have you.” Price saw me twitch when he said Alpha’s name.

“You know that I left the Army over four years ago, Mr. Price?”

“The Activity is not the kind of place you ever completely quit, is it?” A genuine smile lit his eyes.

“I certainly hope it is.” When you’re preparing to lie, speak the truth with conviction.

“I’m sorry to have to get down to business so abruptly but it’s a very busy day for us, as you know. Since you entered our festival under an assumed name, I’m sure you aren’t looking to join our cause, although if I’m wrong I’d love to discuss it with you. I wanted to give you the opportunity to let me know why you’re actually here.”

I didn’t hesitate to answer him. “I’m looking for Heather Hernandez.”

“Ah, Anton’s girlfriend. She was here for a brief period. I’m afraid that she didn’t fit in well. It was Anton’s fault. He didn’t prepare her. I assure you that I’ve had a very serious talk with him about it.”

“You’re saying she’s not here now?”

“She hasn’t been with us for several days.”

“Do you know where she is? Her parents are looking for her.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m surprised she hasn’t called her parents.” Price had just told his first lie. “What’s your interest in the girl?”

“She’s the daughter of a friend.”

“You know Colonel Hernandez?” His voice lost inflection when he said the name. “That surprises me. But then again, I do recall that he served with Alpha. They have a history, don’t they?”

I kept my mouth shut. Price stood and extended his hand again.

“If there’s nothing more, Mr. Herne, I must move on to other matters. Jay will make sure you get off the grounds safely.”

On cue, Ventura returned with four armed men in black turtlenecks.

* * *

We passed the ground floor and kept descending. The guard who’d pressed the button stepped back and I got a peek at the elevator’s control panel. The button for level B2 was lit. Trouble. The basement is where you stow things you’d rather forget.

Judging from the pit in my stomach, the elevator was moving at a decent clip, but it was still a few awkward moments before we arrived at the second basement level. We’d be well under the massive structure now, perhaps at bomb-shelter depth. Another bad sign. When the doors finally opened, Ventura stepped out and turned immediately to the right, heading down a hallway. I realized we were walking directly under the conference center auditorium. The hall was Spartan, with concrete floors and white sheetrock walls. Windowless doors lined each side of the hallway at odd intervals. None had nameplates, although there were room numbers above the doors.

Thirty yards down the hall we came to room with a biometric scanner next to the door. Ventura pressed his thumb down and after a few seconds the panel beneath turned green. He pushed the door inwards. I hesitated and one of the guards shoved me roughly across the threshold.

I noticed the thickness of the door first. It was solid steel, the kind you try to avoid at all costs when you’re breaching. The doorframe was nearly a foot deep. The inside of the room was lined with gypsum masonry board. My guess was that six or more inches of sound deadening material stood between this room and the hall outside. The room was drab, with dark gray walls and a cement floor painted to match. It would be an easy place to hose out. There was a drain in the floor.

The room had no cameras, phones or desks. A neat array of tools, most of which I recognized, hung from pegs above a steel workbench against the near wall. A car battery and jumper cables sat in front of a wooden chair bolted to the cement floor. Another wooden chair sat in front of a galvanized steel basin, the kind you use to water cattle. The basin had a semicircle cut into it, like you’d see in a beauty parlor sink where they wash hair. The back legs of the wooden chair were set into steel lined recesses in the floor, so that the chair could be fully tilted back without sliding forward or toppling over. A pitcher and three buckets of water sat next to the chair. Several washcloths lay over the arm. The only good news—if you could call it that—was that the chair didn’t have built-in arm restraints.

As I stared at it, the guards took care of that. The two bigger guys each grabbed an arm. The third guard slipped thick plastic flexicuffs over my wrists while the fourth guard stood back four feet with his sidearm drawn. They did a good job securing me. The flexicuffs were tight enough that my hands were already numb when they sat me down on the wooden chair, draping my arms over the seatback like a slipknot. Then they cuffed my ankles to the chair using the steel handcuffs that were already attached to iron eyelets on each chair leg. When they were done, two of the guards left.

They left the A-team behind. One of the guards looked like a professional wrestler, while the other was about my size and build. The big guy had his blond hair cut in a flattop like Howie Long. The second guard had a dimple on his chin and smelled like Old Spice.

I looked at Ventura.

“I take it you have more questions?”

“Just a few.”

19

Forget any quaint notions you have about torture. Nobody bears the pain gracefully. The process of breaking someone is straightforward. Interrogators inflict extreme, unrelenting pain. The pain is either physical, psychological or both. They interrupt this pain at odd intervals to ask questions. Then they repeat the process.

Within the pantheon of interrogation techniques, waterboarding holds a special place. It was first widely practiced in the fifteenth century during the Spanish Inquisition. The Jesuits believed that the sensation of drowning had spiritual significance. It was used by Dutch traders in the Thirty Years War, by the Japanese in World War II and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the seventies. And yes, we did it, too—in the Spanish-American War and again not too long ago. Waterboarding is inexpensive, quick and it’s not messy. Done properly, it leaves no permanent physical injuries or visible marks.

I’ve been burned with cigarettes, amped with electricity and cut, poked and prodded in places too awful to mention. I’ve been kept awake, standing on a chair until my legs would no longer hold me. Yet waterboarding is the only form of torture that has convinced me every single time that I’m about to die, regardless of what my brain says. Unlike the cigarettes and the shock treatment, I’d only ever been waterboarded in training—during SERE indoctrination at Camp Mackall. That was bad enough. This time, there wasn’t a doctor standing by, and the men who were waterboarding me had been trying to kill me for the better part of three days.

They didn’t bother questioning me first. That showed they knew what they were about, because it’s when most detainees create an establishing story. It’s a lot harder to keep your lies straight when you’re gasping for air, wondering why you haven’t drowned.

Let’s dispense with another fallacy—the one about staying silent under torture. You don’t. Nobody does. Everyone talks. The best way to subvert an interrogation isn’t to clam up. Instead, you do the opposite. You tell so many different versions of your story that the truth is impossible to sort out. You divine whatever it is that the interrogator wants to hear and you tell it to them as many different ways as you can. You invent, blur and remix the details. And the key—the real key—is to keep doing that until the bitter end, when you start to want them to kill you just so it can all be over, when you’re no longer glad you’re still alive after each time they’ve tried to drown you; when you consider just swallowing enough of the water leaking through the cloth to drown and be done with it.

Until the waterboarding started, Flattop and Old Spice reminded me of nothing more than Army MPs—thugs with badges. But they knew what they were doing. They positioned the basin so that when Flattop tilted the chair back, my neck hit the cradle at such an angle that no amount of struggling would knock me from my seat. Old Spice put the damp washcloth over my face, covering my eyes, nose and mouth, then slowly poured water on the cloth from two feet as you’re supposed to. He kept the bursts of simulated drowning to twenty seconds, then let me breathe. I tried to make it easy for them to impress their boss. After the first ten seconds, I struggled, screamed, blubbered and externalized every other awful thing I was experiencing to make sure that Ventura was getting the show he wanted. He didn’t strike me as a professional, and amateurs are dangerous when they hold your life in their hands.

The questions started after the third dousing. I kept screaming for a moment after the water stopped dripping and I was pulled upright.

“Why are you here? Who sent you undercover? What do you know?”

Everything was a variation of those three questions. I had answers. Lots of them. I was looking for the girl, hidden nukes, buried gold. The FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, even the Parks Service had sent me. I’d found nothing, the key, evidence, everything. At one point I may have yelled “It’s not safe. They’ll recognize you!” I saw the mounting disgust in Ventura’s eyes as we continued the dance. I didn’t know anything, but my cowardice was making his job harder—that’s what he thought.

My mind was getting foggier, and I kept spinning the truth around in circles so I wouldn’t recognize it. I started to worry about hypoxia, about dry drowning. On and on it went until Ventura finally got exasperated. “This is going nowhere,” he snapped and stalked out. The guards exchanged a glance, the kind enlisted men share when dealing with an officer who’s out of his depth. When Ventura was out of the room, they righted me and took a step back, letting me breathe and clear my mind.

They’d made one mistake. A couple actually, but just one unforgiveable error. They left my watch on. Distorting the detainee’s sense of time is a basic part of any interrogation. When they righted me, I twisted around and caught a glimpse of the digital readout on the Timex perched just above the black flexicuffs on my wrist. I saw that my torture had lasted for less than an hour. On the one hand, it made me want to scream. Waterboarding turns you into a blubbering mess in less time than it takes to fry an egg. An hour of it felt like an eternity. I would have guessed they’d been torturing me all afternoon. But then seeing the time also brought me back.

Ten minutes later, Ventura returned, slamming the door shut behind him.

“We’re not getting anything useful from him. He’s just going to keep spewing garbage. He probably doesn’t even know what the truth is now.” He eyed me with pity. “I can’t believe he’s supposed to be some kind of war hero.” Then he jerked his head toward the steel basin, now half-full of water.

“Kill him.”

20

The two men hesitated, eyeing each other before turning to me. Old Spice stood to my right. For the entire interrogation, he’d been the chief torturer, dripping water onto the washcloth covering my face. He’d been careful to keep the Glock 19 on his right hip angled away from me, safely out of arm’s reach. Not trusting that I’d stay restrained showed his professionalism, especially since he’d put the flexicuffs on me himself. That composure slipped for an instant when Ventura told the two men to kill me. When Old Spice turned to face me, he stood a foot closer to me than he should have.

I took that moment to punch him in the crotch. As he doubled over, I tackled him around the waist and used his mass to lever the chair from its moorings. As my momentum bowled him over, the legs came free and I cartwheeled over him with my legsstill handcuffed to the chair. I drew the Glock from Old Spice’s Serpa holster as we rolled and raised it just as Flattop was pulling his Sig Sauer. I shot the bigger guard three times in the chest, then ducked left to avoid the elbow Old Spice jabbed back toward me. I poked the Glock into the soft fold of skin under Old Spice’s chin and fired. A splatter of brains painted the underside of the washbasin. I turned the gun on Ventura as I struggled to extricate myself from the chair and the dead guard. He looked ready to wet his expensive suit.

“Uncuff my legs,” I said. When Ventura looked around confused, I clarified. “The keys are there on the workbench.”

He fumbled with the keys and the cuffs but finally got them off my feet, releasing me from the chair.

“How did you do that? Your hands were tied. I saw them do it!” He was in shock, I could see. He wouldn’t be any use to me until he was calmer.

“I think it’s my turn with the questions, now,” I said, struggling to my feet. “Why don’t you have a seat?” I added as I righted the wooden chair and kicked it over to him. He sat and I walked over to the workbench and chose a pair of shears no doubt intended to remove a pinkie or ring finger. I stopped and stared down Ventura for a second, enjoyed watching the blood drain from his face. Then I snipped the right flexicuff off of my wrist and dropped the shears back on the bench.

I’d gotten my hands free by digging a small object from the artificial latex skin the Activity specialist had attached to my waist. The fake love handles wouldn’t have been convincing in a bathing suit, but they felt real enough to survive a pat down. The armorer embedded a lockpick on one side and the device that looked like a girl’s barrette on the other. I dug the barrette free of its rubber moorings as soon as I was taped to the chair. When Old Spice was first fiddling with the rag on my face, I opened the barrette and slid the thicker section between the hard plastic and my left wrist.

When I finally had my first opportunity to scream without a rag over my mouth, I snapped the ends of the barrette together. A tiny strip in the middle of the device instantly heated to nearly 1000 degrees and the barrette slid through the hardened plastic of the flexi cuffs like a hot knife through butter. I pulled my hand free, then twisted the cut ends of the restraint apart to keep them from refusing as the plastic cooled. I got a nice burn on my wrist in the process. Then I slipped my hand back inside the cuffs and waited for my moment. It took an eternity to arrive. Having my hands free, knowing that I could fight back should have made the torture easier. It didn’t.