Seven Grams of Lead (19 page)

He worked himself into a seated position without
his head hitting anything—so he wasn’t inside a trunk. The vehicle took a sharp left. Centrifugal force flung him to the right, into an unpadded metal wall. A few more turns and he’d gathered that he was alone in the back of a cargo van, separated from the cab by a metal wall. Possibly Mallery rode up front in the cab; he couldn’t get a sense of who was up there—no traces of cologne or perfume or perspiration, nothing at least that penetrated the exhaust fumes or the hood filled with his own sour breath.

The van took an extraordinary number of turns, traversing every manner of road. If the driver’s objective had been to utterly disorient Thornton, he had succeeded ten turns ago.

Eventually the van slid to a halt. Front doors opened and closed—or so it felt. Thornton suspected the side cargo door opened too, when icy air hit him. Hands clamped onto his shoulders, others onto his ankles, and he was dragged from the vehicle, then propped into a standing position on flat pavement. The view inside the hood stayed as black as ever: It was still nighttime—or an overcast day. A cold wind buffeted him, the air carrying waxy fumes of aircraft hydraulic fluid. Despite his headphones, he heard the wheels tear into a runway, along with the whine of jet engines, which grew closer.

His handlers plucked off his shoes, then unsnapped, unzipped, and yanked off his jeans, along with his boxers. Before he could guess what degradation
was on the agenda, they stepped him, one leg and then the other, into a pair of tight-fitting, foamy shorts. To take the place of trips to the lavatory on a long flight ahead, he figured. This was shaping into a textbook rendition, a benign term for kidnapping with the purpose of detention and interrogation.

Two handlers prodded him up shaky stairs, pressed his head down—presumably to avoid a whack from the fuselage on the way through the door—then dropped him into a seat in the warm cabin. The door thudded shut, shaking the whole plane. So not such a big plane. The scream of the engines cut through the white noise. The aircraft lurched forward, taxied, then sped up. The cabin throbbed as the jet jumped into the sky, thrusting him backward in his seat.

If his captors were following the general rendition procedure he’d read in the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual—KUBARK was the CIA’s cryptonym for itself—they sought, at this stage, to psychologically dislocate him, maximizing his feelings of isolation and helplessness in order to destroy his will to resist interrogation. Unfortunately, he thought, this bit of knowledge was of no more use than a condemned man’s grasp of the workings of the guillotine. Unlike Peretti and O’Clair, he was alive only because he remained of use to his captors. Before killing him, too, he suspected, they wanted to know what he’d learned of their operation and whom he’d told. Unfortunately, his answers were
Not much
and
Mallery.
Little to work
with in order to prolong his life. And whether Mallery’s life had been spared for the same reasons: He could only hope.

The Kubark manual recommended diminishing the subject’s will to resist by use of techniques such as prolonged constraint, extremes of heat and cold, and, the ace in the deck, sleep deprivation. Thornton knew he ought to sleep now, while he had the chance.

He tried. But his mind burned with questions, chiefly, as Mallery had asked: Who are these people? They might be operatives for a foreign intelligence service, he thought, aiming to spirit him beyond detection by American law enforcement. In that case, they would likely have had a go at him in the van, or in a room at the first motel or abandoned building the van came to. It was more likely that they were with an American service, or at least accustomed to working with American services, which routinely netted out on rendition because they wanted to employ harsher interrogation techniques than United States law permitted—the Pakistani ISI’s provision of “torture by proxy” was the glue in that service’s kinship with the CIA.

Thornton mulled which U.S. service might have ordered this rendition. The FBI and the NSA no longer seemed like contenders. Probably not Defense either, since Leonid Sokolov was their own asset. But there was still the CIA, Homeland’s ever-expanding and often erratic Office of Intelligence and
Analysis, the Commerce Department’s massive but little-known—to its credit—Bureau of Industry and Security, the State Department’s ubiquitous Bureau of Intelligence and Research … and at least ten others that could and would find use for a revolutionary eavesdropping device.

After hours of ruminating, Thornton was more puzzled than when he began. His stomach fell as the aircraft began its descent. He felt the vibration of the fuselage when the landing gear dropped. A minute later the wheels punched the runway.

When the plane stopped, he was pulled from his seat, then prodded from the cabin and down the steps. Sunlight warmed his hands. Daytime, he supposed. The air was hot, ninety easy, and humid. Through the pungent diesel fumes, a light breeze brought the scent of tropical verdure.

He was steered across rutted pavement, then onto a smooth surface with a bit more give, split at regular intervals. Wooden slats, he guessed. A pier? There was no crash of waves, no scent of ocean, no distant cry of seabirds—or there were, and his hood and a white-noise MP3 blocked them.

It felt as though he were boarding a boat, or something else that dipped as his handlers led him onto it. One of the handlers then maneuvered him out of the sun, down three steep steps, and into a stuffy space that stunk of brine. A cabin below deck? He was pushed into a seated position on what felt like a cushioned bench. Engines churned, the whole craft pulsated,
and a brisk launch threw him sideways. Salty air rushed into the enclosure. So a boat. For all he knew, the cabin contained ten other captives. But effectively he sat alone in a dark closet, for four or five hours, until someone hoisted him to his feet.

Nudged up the steps and back onto an open-air deck, he felt the craft slowing. To his surprise, off came the hood and earphones, revealing him to be on a spacious stern deck of a grimy commercial fishing boat.

He blinked against the sunlight. It still stung his eyes. He took in fog so thick that the bow appeared to be cutting a channel through it. His handler was a barrel-chested man of about forty with black hair shaved to the skin on the sides, gradually thickening to a flattop. The precise military cut contrasted with a nose that looked to have been broken at least twice and a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard.

A tall black man of about the same age stood at the wheel, focused ahead, his round face and stovepipe arms glistening with sea spray. He looked happy. Taking in his gold earring, Thornton was reminded of a seventeenth-century portrait of Captain South, the regal Martinican pirate, at the helm of his brigantine,
Good Fortune.
This man had a similar bearing despite his grimy overalls, a soiled T-shirt, and an even filthier baseball cap, embroidered with an anchor. Flattop’s attire was the same. They were going for the look of commercial fishermen, Thornton thought.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Kansas,” Flattop said in an indeterminate accent, the response a variation of the
no comment
Thornton had expected.

The latter-day Captain South stared ahead at what appeared to be a low-lying thunderhead. As the fishing boat drew closer, the dark cloud solidified into two neighboring mounds of black lava. They were islets, without a blade of vegetation between them, just a trio of big, rust-spotted Quonset huts. The two huts on the larger islet had windows; the one on the other islet only a door. A second commercial fishing boat—or prisoner transport—bobbed alongside a rotting pier that bridged the two islets. The surrounding water extended without obstruction before blending into a sky that was the same mucky gray; Thornton couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. He heard only the rhythmic thumps of the bow across the waves. This place was a maritime riff on hell, he thought—and probably was supposed to think. If not, why had they let him see it?

“What happened to the woman who was with me?” he asked, not expecting an honest answer. Sometimes, though, subjects unwittingly revealed useful information in their choice of misinformation.

“She went to the mall,” Flattop said.

No meaning that Thornton could parse. Flattop had a distinctive mode of pronunciation, though, particularly the
th
as
d
in
the.
It could only be New York. Or, a few thousand percentage points less likely,
New Orleans’ similar
Yat
—as in
Where y’at?
—a vestige of boatmen from the New York area who settled in Louisiana a century ago. Of course, the guy could also be a talented Pakistani ISI agent.

Thornton manufactured a grin. To inquire further about Mallery would betray his concern, which might be used against him. “Don’t suppose you can tell me how the Knicks did last night?” he asked.

Flattop looked out at the waves as if Thornton weren’t blocking his view.

Soon they docked in the harbor, which reeked of low tide even though the tide was in. Pointing a rugged black Heckler & Koch HK45 pistol, Flattop flanked Thornton, guiding him along a rickety wooden pier to the windowless Quonset hut. Captain South brought up the rear, with a gun of his own as well as a cudgel of some sort that he used to prod Thornton, who wondered why they bothered with weapons. Still bound at the wrists and the ankles, at best he would waddle away. And then what?

At the entrance to the Quonset hut, Flattop holstered his HK45, leaned over the incongruously futuristic keypad, and punched in eight or nine numbers. A lock disengaged with a whirr. Flattop pushed open the door and stepped through. The captain propelled Thornton inside, then swung the door to a ringing close behind them.

Thornton clenched his nose against the damp air, ripe with feces and rotting God-knew-what. Without
Captain South’s faint flashlight, he would have seen only blackness. As it was, he barely made out Flattop ahead of him.

When Thornton’s ankle restraints caused him to lag behind, the captain hit him in the small of the back and he lost a stripe of skin from his forearm to the coarse cinder-block wall.

The corridor took a sharp right, then another, and, improbably, another. The place was a maze. Probably by design, Thornton thought. Emanating from somewhere nearby, a man’s savage screams resounded throughout the metal structure. Thornton might have been rattled if not for his educated guess that the screaming was a recording they’d tripped, like the ghostly wail heard upon entering an amusement park haunted house.

After the tenth turn, Flattop stopped abruptly and told Thornton, “Turn around.” When he did, Thornton’s restraints were unlocked and whisked away by Flattop, who added, “Now, arms apart, hands on the wall.”

Using his flashlight beam, Captain South indicated a cinder-block wall streaked with muck. At least Thornton hoped it was muck. Palms pressed against it, he waited as they patted him down.

“Turn around a hundred and eighty degrees, slowly take off everything you’re wearing, and let it drop to the floor,” Flattop said.

Thornton complied, suppressing natural humiliation—or
trying to—by telling himself that it was these goons who ought to be embarrassed.

“Now, mouth wide open, say, ‘Ah.’ ” Flattop stuck out his slab of a tongue by way of demonstration.

He probed Thornton’s mouth and every other part of his body that might conceivably conceal contraband. Presumably passing the exam, Thornton received a canvas jumpsuit that looked gray in the low light but might have been red. It was a size too small and stunk of sweat.

“You look beautiful,” Flattop said. “Time for your interview.”

Rounding the corner,
Thornton had the sensation of plunging into a black void. A moment later, Captain South caught up to him, the guard’s flashlight revealing yet another filthy corridor. After about fifty feet, the captain’s beam showed another numeric keypad and Flattop again entering a code. Bolts released with a hydraulic hiss. Flattop pulled open a door, took Thornton by the collar, and jerked him into the fifteen-by-ten-foot “interview room,” in which an overhead fluorescent panel illuminated a traditional gritty concrete that was as devoid of color as it was of hope. Thornton suspected that the long mirror on the opposite wall was not a decorative element.

“Sit,” Flattop said, pointing him to the nearer of two chairs at the center of the room.

“Thanks.” Thornton lowered himself into the wobbly desk chair—wobbly by design, he suspected. The ideal was a swivel rocking chair, on wheels, with movable armrests. “Behavioral amplifier,” such a piece of equipment was known as in interrogation circles, because it magnified movements of the parts anchoring the subject, for example, his feet to the floor or his elbows to the arms of the chair. Since people dissipate anxiety through this type of movement, interrogators are given an indicator of nonverbal deceptive behavior. Thornton had learned of a few such behaviors when interviewing with a CIA polygraph examiner. People unconsciously put their hands in front of their mouths and eyes, literally covering lies, the woman had told him. They also involuntarily shifted into fight-or-flight mode, rerouting blood from regions that can temporarily do without it—especially the face—to the major muscle groups. The resulting sensation of cold causes subjects to rub their faces.

Unfortunately, what knowledge Thornton had of detecting deception would be of little use in deceiving an interrogator. Even veterans at questioning admitted to being as susceptible to being caught in a lie as their subjects. In fact they were often more susceptible since there were so many involuntary cues they needed to take into consideration. “It would be like a golfer trying to keep in mind eighty different improvements to his swing while hitting the ball,” the polygraph examiner had told him.

Captain South brought in a big Styrofoam container labeled
SOUPER MEAL
. He peeled off its lid to reveal noodles and vegetables in a broth. Steam rising from the top carried an aroma of chicken and spices, making Thornton’s mouth water. The captain set the container on the floor beside his chair along with a two-liter bottle of water, ice-cold if the condensation were any indication. Thornton was parched to the point that speaking required first unsticking his tongue from the sides of his mouth, and after at least thirty hours without food, it felt as if gastric acid were dissolving his stomach lining. He hesitated to touch the Souper Meal or the water, however, for fear that they’d been spiked with “truth juice,” a mixture of narcotics such as sodium amytal, thiopental, or seco-barbital and methadrine. As a result of their training, most covert intelligence officers could withstand enemy interrogation while under narcosis. But a few spilled unadulterated truth, no matter what. Some told the truth, but their speech was so garbled—a side effect of narcosis—that their responses were unintelligible. Others retained their diction but lost their wits. A truth serum with better than a 34 percent success rate had yet to be invented despite a decade-long effort by Russian SVR scientists at prisons packed with Chechens used as guinea pigs. If Thornton’s physiology placed him in the ungarbled-truth-spilling minority, however, he would become expendable.