“Do you see now, Arnesto? Do you see why we can’t let you run rampant?” Whiteside stood up and reached over and shut the laptop before picking it up and moving toward the door. “I want to help you, Arnesto. Let me help you save lives out there. I can get you anything you need, but I can’t help you at all until you start talking to me.”
Arnesto said nothing.
“Sleep on it,” Whiteside said. “We’ll meet again first thing tomorrow.”
They met the next day and the next and at indiscriminate times after that. Arnesto soon lost track of what day it was as the agents and guards were careful to hide that information from him. Even his meals were served at random times.
Through it all, Arnesto never said a word.
After what felt like a couple weeks, Arnesto noticed he had gone several days in a row without hearing from Whiteside. Were they done? Had his adversary asked his last question? It seemed unlikely, but then where was he? Time passed, and Arnesto grew more concerned that he had been abandoned.
It was with an ironic sense of relief that he was finally called back into the interrogation room.
“Hello, Arnesto, how have you been? Hanging in there okay?” Whiteside asked as Arnesto sat down. “Sorry to skip out on you like that, but your friend Pete gave us some new leads to check out. He cooperated quite a bit.” He motioned toward some boxes that Arnesto hadn’t noticed when he walked in. “Pete filled in a number of gaps in our intelligence and told us all sorts of things we didn’t have a clue about: the Oklahoma bridge collapse, for instance.” He paused to let that sink in. “You should know that we let him go in exchange for his cooperation. I hope you won’t hold a grudge against him. What he did was for the good of the country.”
Whiteside swiveled around in his chair, but then said, “Oh,” and turned back to face Arnesto, clasping his hands and resting them on the desk. “We paid a visit to your family.”
Arnesto did his best to remain stoic, but he had no idea if he was successful. He felt Whiteside probably noticed his increased heart rate. More than anything, he hated the way Whiteside paused after every couple of sentences. Was he merely gauging Arnesto’s reaction, or was he rubbing it in?
“I’m telling you this as a courtesy. All we did was inform them that we were likely going to be working together and asked them a few simple ‘background’ questions about you. Your parents, your brother, your ex-wife, they were all surprised and proud to find out you would be assisting us with important, top-secret work. See? I didn’t even have to lie to them. They didn’t even seem disappointed to find out they shouldn’t expect to hear from you for a while.”
Whiteside stood up and walked over to the boxes, pulling out several large folders before returning to his seat.
“Now, back to business, shall we?”
Schooled
Location: Unknown
Date: Unknown
Time: Unknown
“Report,” Whiteside said, not looking up from his monitor. He was drafting a reply to an email from his higher-ups who were demanding why weeks had passed without Whiteside being able to show progress. Just as Arnesto hadn’t shared one word with Whiteside, Whiteside was having trouble coming up with the words to answer his superiors.
A male agent named Crowl spoke first. “Pretty much the usual. He sleeps, exercises, eats, and stares or meditates or whatever.”
“Pretty much?” Whiteside asked. “I told you, if there’s any deviation at all, no matter how trivial, I need to know about it.”
“He’s… uh…”
“He’s playing with himself, sir. Masturbating,” said the female agent named Stanfield.
Whiteside took his hands off the keyboard and looked at the other agents. He thought for a moment, then said, “Explain.”
“He sits there playing with it,” Stanfield said.
“And stares at the camera the whole time,” Crowl added.
“How long?” Whiteside asked.
The other agents looked at each other. “A couple hours?” Crowl asked.
“Does he finish? Does he even have an erection?” Whiteside asked.
“Sir?”
Whiteside smiled and turned back to his computer. “He’s not playing with himself, he’s playing with you. Get him a magazine.” When his agents hesitated, he continued. “Get him a girlie mag. It’s okay. It’s the incentive approach, which is in the manual you two are going to reread the moment your shift ends. Dismissed.”
Arnesto did appreciate the magazine, more for the articles than the pictorials. While internet porn hadn’t completely ruined airbrushed, softcore pictures for him, it was the words that gave him the most distraction from his predicament. He devoured the magazine, fearing that at any moment it would be taken away from him. When it wasn’t, he reread it at a more relaxed pace.
He made up little games for himself, like trying to subconsciously count how many of a given letter was used while reading an article. Then he would go back and carefully count. He was always wrong, but never far off.
He stopped touching himself, not because he had succeeded in obtaining a magazine, but because he had failed at irritating Whiteside. Whiteside personally gave Arnesto a second magazine a few weeks after he had received the first.
“Thought I’d give you something a little more substantial,” Whiteside said, sliding the magazine across the interrogation table. “Go ahead, look at it.”
Arnesto never looked at anything Whiteside presented to him until he was ordered to do so. Aside from never speaking, Arnesto wanted to obey orders as best he could, but always did so without the slightest change in expression. He steeled himself and looked down.
It was a news magazine. The cover focused on some celebrity about whom Arnesto couldn’t care less. Arnesto lifted his head.
“Look a little closer. Please,” Whiteside said.
Arnesto looked back down at the magazine. In the corners under the large headline describing the celebrity’s shenanigans were various cover lines in much smaller text. One of them mentioned a school shooting.
“There it is, under whatsherface’s pregnancy, another school shooting, this one in Santa Monica,” Whiteside said. “Feels like we’ve been having more of them lately. It bothers me, Arnesto, and I know it bothers you. Every time I see a headline like that, I think, ‘Could he have prevented this? Could Arnesto have saved those lives?’ Go ahead, turn to page sixty-eight, see if they got the details right.”
Arnesto opened the magazine and flipped the pages until he reached the half-page article on the shooting. It was news to him. He recalled nothing of the event.
“I know, you can’t stop them all. At least, I don’t think you can. I’m not actually sure. But what I am sure of, is that, sooner or later, there’s going to be an event where people die that you could have prevented. How long — how long is it going to be until that happens?”
Arnesto never made eye contact with Whiteside unless ordered to do so. He believed in giving away as little information as possible. Unnecessary eye contact might not only give something away visually, it could also reveal information by virtue of a simple change in behavior. However, just this once, he couldn’t resist.