Islands in the Net (46 page)

“We still send aid, don't we?”

“That only adds to the misery. It props up corruption.”

Laura rubbed her sweating forehead. “I don't understand.”

“It's simple. We must succeed where Vienna has failed. Vienna did nothing about the terrorist data havens, nothing about Africa. Vienna is weak and divided. There's a new global order coming, and it's not based in obsolete national governments. It's based in modern groups like your Rizome and my Free Army.”

“No one voted for you,” Laura said. “You have no authority. You're vigilantes!”

“You're a vigilante yourself,” the Inspector of Prisons said calmly. “A vigilante diplomat. Interfering with governments for the sake of your multinational. We have everything in common, you see.”

“No!”

“We couldn't
exist
if it weren't for people like you, Mrs. Webster. You financed us. You created us. We serve your needs.” He drew a breath and smiled. “We are your sword and shield.”

Laura sank back into the chair. “If we're on the same side, then why am I in your jail?”

He leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “I
did
tell you, Mrs. Webster—it's for reasons of atomic security! On the other hand, we see no reason why you shouldn't contact your coworkers and loved ones. Let them know you're alive and safe and well. It would mean a great deal to them, I'm sure. You could make a statement.”

Laura spoke numbly. She'd known something like this was coming. “What kind of statement?”

“A prepared statement, of course. We can't have you babbling our atom secrets over a live phone link to Atlanta. But you could make a videotape. Which we would release for you.”

Her stomach roiled. “I'd have to see the statement first. And read it. And think about it.”

“You do that. Think about it.” He touched his watchphone, spoke in French. “You'll let us know your decision.”

Another goon arrived. He took her to a different cell. They left the handcuffs off.

Laura's new cell was the same length as the first, but it had two bunks and was a stride and a half wider. She was no longer forced to wear handcuffs. She was given her own chamber pot and a larger jug of water. There was more scop, and the porridge was of better quality and sometimes had soybean bacon bits.

They gave her a deck of cards, and a paperback Bible that had been distributed by the Jehovah's Witness Mission of Bamako in 1992. She asked for a pencil to make notes on her statement. She was given a child's typer with a little flip-up display screen. It typed very nicely but had no printout and couldn't be used to scribble secret messages.

The screaming was louder under her new cell. Several different voices and, she thought, different languages too. The screaming would go on, raggedly, for about an hour. Then there would be a coffee break for the torturers. Then they would set back to work. She believed that there were several different torturers. Their habits differed. One of them liked to play moody French café ballads during his break.

One night she was woken by a muffled volley of machine-gun fire. It was followed by five sharp coup-de-grâce shots. They had killed people, but not the people being tortured—two of them were back next night.

It took them two weeks to bring her statement. It was worse than she had imagined. They wanted her to tell Rizome and the world that she had been kidnapped in Singapore by the Grenadians and was being held in the underground tunnel complex at Fedon's Camp. It was a ridiculous draft; she didn't think that the person who had written it fully understood English. Parts of it reminded her of the FACT communiqué issued after the assassination of Winston Stubbs.

She no longer doubted that FACT had killed Stubbs and shot up her house. It was obvious. The remote-control killing smelled of them. It couldn't have been Singapore, poor brilliant, struggling Singapore. Singapore's military, soldiers like Hotchkiss, would have killed Stubbs face-to-face and never bragged about it afterward.

They must have launched the drone from a surface ship somewhere. It couldn't have come from their nuclear submarine—unless they had more than one, a horrible thought. The sub couldn't have traveled fast enough to attack Galveston, Grenada, and Singapore during the time of her adventure. (She was already thinking of it as her adventure—something over, something in her past, something pre-captivity.) But America was an open country and a lot of the F.A.C.T. were Americans. They bragged openly that they could go anywhere, and she believed them.

She believed now they had someone—a plant, a spy, one of their Henderson/Hesseltines—in Rizome itself. It would be so easy for them, not like Singapore. All he would have to do was show up and work hard and smile.

She refused to read the prepared statement. The Inspector of Prisons looked at her with distaste. “You really think this defiance is accomplishing something, don't you?”

“This statement is disinformation. It's black propaganda, a provocation, meant to get people killed. I won't help you kill people.”

“Too bad. I'd hoped you could send your loved ones a New Year's greeting.”

“I've written my own statement,” Laura offered. “It doesn't say anything about you, or Mali, or the F.A.C.T., or your bombs. It just says I'm alive and it has a few words my husband will recognize so that he'll know it's really me.”

The Inspector laughed. “What kind of fools do you take us for, Mrs. Webster? You think we'd let you spout secret messages, something you'd cooked up in your cell after weeks of your … oh … feminine ingenuity?”

He tossed the statement into a bottom drawer of his desk. “Look, I didn't write the thing. I didn't make the decision. Personally, I don't think it's all that great a statement. Knowing Vienna, it's more likely to make them tiptoe their way into that termite castle under Fedon's Camp, instead of shelling it into oblivion, like they should have done way back in '19.” He shrugged. “But if you want to ruin your life, be declared legally dead, be forgotten, then go right ahead.”

“I'm your prisoner! Don't pretend it's my decision.”

“Don't be silly. If it meant anything serious, I could make you do it.”

Laura was silent.

“You think you're strong, don't you?” The Inspector shook his head. “You think that, if we tortured you, it would be some kind of romantic moral validation. Torture's not romantic, Mrs. Webster. It's a thing, a process: torture is torture, that's all. It doesn't make you any nobler. It only breaks you. Like the way an engine wears out if you drive it too fast, too hard, too long. You never really heal, you never really get over it. Any more than you get over growing old.”

“I don't want to be hurt. Don't pretend I do.”

“Are you going to read the stupid thing? It's not that important.
You're
not that important.”

“You killed a man in my house,” Laura said. “You killed people around me. You kill people in this prison every day. I know I'm no better than them. I don't believe you'll ever let me go, if you can help it. So why don't you
kill me too
?”

He shook his head and sighed. “
Of course
we'll let you go. We have no reason to keep you here, once your security threat is over. We won't stay covert forever. Someday, very soon, we'll simply rule. Someday Laura Webster will be an upstanding citizen in a grand new global society.”

A long moment passed. His lie had slid past her comprehension, like something at the other end of a telescope. At last she spoke, very quietly. “If it matters at all, then listen to me. I'm going to go insane, alone in that cell. I'd rather be dead than insane.”

“So now it's suicide?” He was avuncular, soothing, skeptical. “Of course you've been
thinking
of suicide. Everyone does. Very few ever really do it. Even men and women doing hard labor in death camps find reason to go on living. They never bite their own tongues out, or open their veins with their fingernails, or run headlong into the wall, or any of those childish jailbirds' fantasies.” His voice rose. “Mrs. Webster, you're in the
upper level
here. You're in
special custody
. Believe me, this city's slums are full of men and women, and even
children
, who'd cheerfully
kill
to have it as easy as you do.”

“Then why don't you let them kill me?”

His eyes clouded. “I really wish you wouldn't be like this.”

He sighed and spoke into his watchphone. After a while the goons came and took her away.

She went on hunger strike. They let her do it for three days. Then they sent her a cellmate.

Her new cellmate was a black woman who spoke no English. She was short and had a broad, cheerful face and two missing front teeth. Her name was something like Hofuette, or Jofuette. Jofuette would only smile and shrug at Laura's English: she had no gift for languages and couldn't remember a foreign word two days running. She was illiterate.

Laura had poor luck with Jofuette's language. It was called something like Bambara. It was full of aspirations and clicks and odd tonalities. She learned the words for
bed
and
eat
and
sleep
and
cards
. She taught Jofuette how to play Hearts. It took days but they had a lot of time.

Jofuette came from downstairs, the lower level, where the screaming came from. She hadn't been tortured; or, at least, no marks showed. Jofuette had seen people shot, however. They shot them out in the exercise yard, with machine guns. They would often shoot a single man with five or six machine guns; their ammunition was old, with a lot of duds that tended to choke up the guns. They had a worldful of ammunition, though. All the ammunition of fifty years of the Cold War had ended up here in African war zones. Along with the rest of the junk.

She didn't see the Inspector of Prisons again. He wasn't the guy who ran the place. Jofuette knew the warden. She could imitate the way he walked; it was quite funny.

Laura was pretty sure that Jofuette was some kind of trusty, maybe even a stool pigeon. It didn't bother her much. Jofuette didn't speak English and Laura had no secrets anyway. But Jofuette, unlike Laura, was allowed to go out into the exercise yard and mingle with the prisoners. She could get hold of little things: harsh, nasty cigarettes, a box of sugared vitamin pills, a needle and thread. She was good to have around, wonderful, better than anyone.

Laura learned about prison. The tricks of doing time. Memory was the enemy. Any connection with the outside world would be, she knew, too painful to survive. She just did her time. She invented antimemory devices, passivity devices. When it was time for a cry she would have a cry. She didn't think about what might happen to her, to David and the baby, to Galveston, to Rizome, to the world. She thought about professional activities, mostly. Writing public relations statements. Testifying to public bodies about Malian terrorism. Writing campaign documents for imaginary Rizome Committee candidates.

She spent several weeks writing a long imaginary sales brochure called
Loretta's Hands and Feet
. She memorized it and would spin it off sentence by sentence, silently, inside her head, slowly, one second per word, until she reached the end. Then she would add on a new sentence, and then start over.

The imaginary brochure was not about the baby herself, that would have been too painful. It was simply about the baby's hands and feet. She described the shape and texture of the hands and feet, their smell, their grasp, their potential usefulness if mass-produced. She designed boxes for the hands and feet, and old-fashioned marketing slogans, and ad jingles.

She organized a mental dress store. She had never been much of a fashion maven, at least not since junior high school days, and her discovery of boys. But this was a top-of-the-line fashion outlet, a trend-setting emporium catering to the wealthy Atlanta crowd. There were galaxies of hats, marching armies of hosiery and shoes, whirlwinds of billowing skirts, vast technicolor brothels of sexy lingerie.

She had decided on ten years. She was going to be in this jail for ten years. It was long enough to destroy hope, and hope was identical with anguish.

A month, and a month, and a month, and a month.

And another month, and another and another and another.

And then three, and then one more.

A year.

She had been in prison for a year. A year was not a particularly long time. She was thirty-three years old. She had spent far more time outside captivity than in, thirty-two times as much. People had done far more time in prison than this. Gandhi had spent years in prison.

They were treating her better now. Jofuette had made some kind of arrangement with one of the female goons. When the goon was on duty she let Laura run in the exercise yard, at night, when no other prisoners were present.

Once a week they brought an ancient video recorder into the cell. It had a black-and-white TV manufactured in Algeria. There were tapes, too. Most of them were old-fashioned American football games. The old full-contact version of football had been banned for years now. The game was spectacularly brutal: huge lumbering gladiators in helmets and armor. Every fourth play seemed to leave one of them sprawling and wounded. Sometimes Laura would simply close her eyes and listen to the wonderful flow of English. Jofuette liked the games.

Then there were movies.
The Sands of Iwo Jima. The Green Berets
. Fantastic, hallucinatory violence. Enemies would be shot and fall down neatly, like paper cutouts. Sometimes the good guys were shot, in the shoulder or arm usually. They would just grimace a bit, maybe bind it up.

One week a film arrived called
The Road to Morocco
. It was set in the African desert and had Bing Cosby and Bob Hope. Laura had vague memories of Bob Hope, she thought she must have seen him when she was very young and he was very old. He was young in the film, and quite funny, in a quaint premillennial way. It hurt terribly to watch him, like having a bandage ripped away, touching deep parts of her that she had managed to numb. She had to stop the tape several times to mop at tears. Finally she snatched the tape out and jammed it back in the box.