gorilla on the National Geographic Channel had slept for ten. Score one for Reacher, except they had probably used a lighter dose on me. At least I hoped they had. That huge primate had crashed down like a tree.
I raised my head again and looked around. I was inside a cell, and the cell was inside a room. No window. Bright electric light. New construction inside old construction. A row of three simple cages made of bright new spot-welded steel, sitting in a line inside a big old room made of brick. The cells were each about eight feet square and eight feet tall. They were roofed with bars, the same as their sides. They were floored with steel tread plate. The tread plate was folded up at the edges, to make a shallow inch-deep tray. To contain spilled liquids, I guessed. All kinds of liquids can get spilled in cells. The tray was spot-welded inside a horizontal rail that ran around the bottom of all the vertical bars. There were no bolts through the floors. The cells were not fixed down. They were just sitting there, three freestanding structures parked in a big old room.
The big old room itself had a high, barrelled ceiling. The brick was all painted fresh white, but it looked soft and worn. There are guys who can look at the dimensions of bricks and the bricklaying patterns they make and tell you exactly where a building is and exactly when it was constructed. I am not one of them. But even so the place looked like the East Coast to me. Nineteenth century, built by hand. Immigrant labour, working fast and dirty. I was probably still in New York. And I was probably underground. The place felt like a basement. Not damp, not cool, but somehow stabilized in terms of temperature and humidity by virtue of being buried.
I was in the centre cage of the three. I had the cot I was strapped to, and a toilet. That was all. Nothing else. The toilet was enclosed by a three-sided U-shaped privacy screen about three feet high. The toilet tank had a dished top that made a sink. I could see a faucet. Just one. Cold water only. The other two cages looked the same. Cots, toilets, nothing else. Leading away from each of the cells were recent excavations in the outer room’s floor. Narrow trenches, three of them, exactly parallel, dug up and refilled and smoothed over with new concrete. Sewer lines to the toilets, I guessed, and water lines to the faucets.
The other two cages were empty. I was all alone.
In the far corner of the outer room where the walls met the ceiling there was a surveillance camera. A beady glass eye. A wide-angle lens, presumably, to see the whole room at once. To see into all three cells. I guessed there would be microphones, too. Many more than one, probably, some of them close by. Electronic eavesdropping is hard. Clarity is important. Room echo can ruin everything.
My left leg hurt a little. A puncture wound and a bruise, right where the dart had hit. The blood on my pants had dried. There wasn’t much of it. I tested the strength of the cuffs around my wrists and my ankles. Unbreakable. I bucked and jerked against them for half a minute. Not trying to get free. Just checking whether I would pass out again from the effort, and aiming to attract attention from whoever was watching through the surveillance camera and listening through the microphones.
I didn’t pass out again. My head ached a little as it cleared, and the exertion didn’t make my leg throb any less. But apart from those minor symptoms I felt pretty good. The attention I attracted was delayed well over a minute and took the form of a guy I had never seen before walking in with a hypodermic syringe. Some kind of a medical technician. He had a wet cotton ball in his other hand, ready to swab my elbow. He stopped outside my cage and looked in at me through the bars.
I asked him, ‘Is that a lethal dose?’
The guy said, ‘No.’
‘Are you authorized to give a lethal dose?’
‘No.’
‘Then you better back off. Because however many times you shoot me up, I’m always going to wake up later. And one of those times, I’m going to come and get you. Either I’ll make you eat that thing, or I’ll stick it up your ass and inject you from the inside.’
‘It’s a painkiller,’ the guy said. ‘An analgesic. For your leg.’
‘My leg is fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Just back off.’
So he did. He went out through a stout wooden door painted the same white as the walls. The door looked old. It was vaguely Gothic in shape. I had seen similar doors in old public buildings. City schools, and police stations.
I dropped my head back to the cot. I had no pillow. I stared up through the bars at the ceiling and prepared to settle in. But less than a minute later two of the men I knew came in through the wooden door. Two of the federal agents. The two sidekicks, not the leader. One of them had a Franchi 12 with him. It looked loaded and cocked and ready. The other guy had some kind of a tool in his hand and a bunch of thin chains looped over his arm. The guy with the shotgun stepped up close to my bars and poked the barrel through and jammed the muzzle into my throat and kept it there. The guy with the chains unlocked my gate. Not with a key, but by spinning a dial left and right. A combination lock. He opened the gate and came inside and stopped beside my cot. The tool in his hand was like a pair of pliers, but with blades instead of milled grips. Some kind of a cutter. He saw me looking at it and smiled. He leaned forward, above my waist. The shotgun muzzle pressed harder into my throat. A wise precaution. Even with my hands strapped down I could have folded forward from the waist and delivered a pretty good head butt. Not my best, maybe, but with plenty of snap from the neck I could have put the guy to sleep for longer than I had been out. Longer than the silverback, perhaps. I already had a headache. Another big impact wouldn’t have made it much worse.
But the Franchi muzzle stayed firmly in place and I was reduced to the status of a spectator. The guy with the chains untangled them and laid them in place, like a trial run. One would cuff my wrists to my waist, one would chain my ankles, and the third would connect the first two together. Standard-issue prison restraints. I would be able to shuffle along a foot at a time and lift my hands as far as my hips, but that was all. The guy got the chains all locked and fastened and tested, and then he used the tool to cut off the plastic cuffs. He backed out of the cage and left the gate open and his partner pulled the Franchi away.
I guessed I was supposed to slide off the cot and stand up. So I stayed where I was. You have to ration your opponents’ victories. You have to mete them out, slowly and meanly. You have to make your opponents subliminally grateful for every little bit of compliance. That way maybe you get away with giving up ten small losses a day, rather than ten big ones.
But the two feds had had the same training I had had. That was clear. They didn’t stand there getting all beaten and frustrated. They just walked away, and the guy who had fitted the chains called back from the door and said, ‘Coffee and muffins through here, any old time you want them.’ Which put the onus right back on me, exactly like it was designed to. Not stylish to wait an hour and then hobble through and wolf stuff down like I was desperate. That would be getting beaten in public, by my own hunger and thirst. Not stylish at all. So I waited just a token interval and then I slid off the cot and shuffled out of the cage.
The wooden door led to a room about the same size and shape as the one the cages were in. Same construction, same colour paint. No window. There was a large wooden table in the centre of the floor. Three chairs on the far side, full of the three feds. One chair on my side, empty. Waiting for me. On the table, all lined up neatly, was the stuff from my pockets. My roll of cash, flattened out and trapped under a sprinkling of coins. My old passport. My ATM card. My folding toothbrush. The Metrocard I had bought for use on the subway. Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card, which she had given to me in the white-tiled room under Grand Central Terminal. The phony business card that Lila Hoth’s local crew had given to me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 35th Street. The computer memory I had bought at Radio Shack, with its loud pink neoprene sleeve. Plus Leonid’s clamshell cell phone. Nine separate items, each one of them stark and lonely under the bright bulbs on the ceiling
.
To the left of the table was another door. Same Gothic shape, same wooden construction, same new paint. I guessed it led onward to another room, the third of three in an L-shaped chain. Or the first of three, depending on your point of view. Depending on whether you were a captive or a captor. To the right of the table was a low chest of drawers that looked like it belonged in a bedroom. On it were a pile of napkins and a tube of nested foam cups and a steel vacuum flask and a paper plate with two blueberry muffins. I shuffled over in my socks and poured a cup of coffee from the flask. The operation was easier than it might have been, because the chest was low. My chained hands didn’t hamper me much. I carried the cup low and two-handed to the table. Sat down in the vacant chair. Dipped my head and sipped from the cup. The action made me look like I was yielding, like it was designed to. Or bowing, or deferring. The coffee was pretty bad too, and only lukewarm.
The fed leader cupped his hand and held it behind my stack of money, as if he was considering picking it up. Then he shook his head, as if money was too prosaic a subject for him. Too mundane. He moved his hand onward and stopped it behind my passport.
He asked, ‘Why is it expired?’
I said, ‘Because no one can make time stand still.’
‘I meant, why haven’t you renewed it?’
‘No imminent need. Like you don’t carry a condom in your wallet.’
The guy paused a beat and asked, ‘When was the last time you left the country?’
I said, ‘I would have sat down and talked to you, you know. You didn’t need to shoot me with a dart like I was something escaped from the zoo.’
‘You had been warned many times. And you had been markedly uncooperative.’
‘You could have put my eye out.’
‘But I didn’t. No harm, no foul.’
‘I still haven’t seen ID. I don’t even know your name.’
The guy said nothing.
I said, ‘No ID, no names, no Miranda, no charges, no lawyer. Brave new world, right?’
‘You got it.’
‘Well, good luck with that,’ I said. I glanced at my passport, as if I had suddenly remembered something. I raised my hands as far as they would go and leaned forward. I shuffled my coffee cup well out of my way, which left it in the space between my passport and my ATM card. I picked up my passport and squinted down at it and leafed through the pages at the back. I shrugged, like my memory had been playing tricks on me. I went to put the passport back. But I was inexact with its placement. A little hampered by the chains. The stiff edge of the little booklet caught my coffee cup and tipped it over. Coffee spilled out and splashed on the table and flowed right over the far edge and into the fed leader’s lap. He did the thing that everyone does. He jumped back, half stood, and batted at the air as if he could divert the liquid one molecule at a time.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
His pants were soaked. So now the onus was on him. Two choices: either disrupt the rhythm of the interrogation by taking a break to change, or continue with wet pants. I saw the guy debating. He wasn’t quite as inscrutable as he thought he was.
He chose to continue with wet pants. He detoured to the chest of drawers and dabbed at himself with napkins. Then he brought some back and dried the table. He made a big effort not to react, which was a reaction in itself.
He asked again, ‘When was the last time you left the country?’
I said, ‘I don’t recall.’
‘Where were you born?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘Everyone knows where they were born.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘We’ll sit here all day, if necessary.’
‘I was born in West Berlin,’ I said.
‘And your mother is French?’
‘She was French.’
‘What is she now?’
‘Dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Are you sure you’re an American citizen?’
‘What kind of a question is that?’
‘A straightforward one.’
‘The State Department gave me a passport.’
‘Was your application truthful?’
‘Did I sign it?’
‘I imagine you did.’
‘Then I imagine it was truthful.’
‘How? Were you naturalized? You were born overseas to a foreign parent.’
‘I was born on a military base. That counts as U.S. sovereign territory. My parents were married. My father was an American citizen. He was a Marine.’
‘Can you prove all of that?’
‘Do I have to?’
‘It’s important. Whether or not you’re a citizen could affect what happens to you next.’
‘No, how much patience I have will affect what happens to me next.’
The guy on the left stood up. He was the one who had held the Franchi’s muzzle hard against my throat. He went directly left from behind the table and walked out, through the wooden door, into the third room. I glimpsed desks, computers, cabinets, and lockers. No other people. The door closed softly behind him and the room we were in went quiet.
The main guy asked, ‘Was your mother Algerian?’
I said, ‘I just got through telling you she was French.’
‘Some French people are Algerian.’
‘No, French people are French and Algerian people are Algerian. It’s not rocket science.’
‘OK, some French people were originally immigrants from Algeria. Or from Morocco, or Tunisia, or elsewhere in North Africa.’
‘My mother wasn’t.’
‘Was she a Muslim?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m making inquiries.’
I nodded. ‘Safer to inquire about my mother than yours, probably.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Susan Mark’s mother was a teenage crack whore. Maybe yours worked with her. Maybe they turned tricks together.’
‘Are you trying to make me mad?’
‘No, I’m succeeding. You’re all red in the face and you’ve got wet pants. And you’re getting absolutely nowhere. All in all I don’t think this particular session will be written up for the training manual.’
‘This isn’t a joke.’
‘But it’s heading that way.’
The guy paused and regrouped. He used his index finger to realign the nine items in front of him. He got them straight and then he pushed the computer memory an inch towards me. He said, ‘You concealed this from us when we searched you. Susan Mark gave it to you on the train.’
I said, ‘Did I? Did she?’
The guy nodded. ‘But it’s empty, and it’s too small anyway. Where is the other one?’
‘What other one?’
‘This one is obviously a decoy. Where is the real one?’
‘Susan Mark gave me nothing. I bought that thing at Radio Shack.’
‘Why?’
‘I liked the look of it.’
‘With the pink sleeve? Bullshit.’
I said nothing.
He said, ‘You like the colour pink?’
‘In the right place.’
‘What place would that be?’
‘A place you haven’t been in a long time.’
‘Where did you conceal it?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Was it in a body cavity?’
‘You better hope not. You just touched it.’
‘Do you enjoy that kind of thing? Are you a fairy?’
‘That kind of question might work down at Guantanamo, but it won’t work with me.’
The guy shrugged and used his fingertip and pulled the stick back into line, and then he moved the phony business card and Leonid’s cell phone both forward an inch, like he was moving pawns on a chessboard. He said, ‘You’ve been working for Lila Hoth. The card proves you were in communication with the crew she hired, and your phone proves she called you at le
ast six times. The Four Seasons’ number is in the memory.’
‘It’s not my phone.’
‘We found it in your pocket.’
‘Lila Hoth didn’t stay at the Four Seasons, according to them.’
‘Only because we told them to cooperate. We both know she was there. You met her there twice, and then she broke the third rendezvous.’
‘Who is she, exactly?’
‘That’s a question you should have asked before you agreed to work for her.’
‘I wasn’t working for her.’
‘Your phone proves that you were. It’s not rocket science.’
I didn’t answer.
He asked, ‘Where is Lila Hoth now?’