She was dressed in a black pants suit, her hair pulled tight in bun, sunglasses masking the fatigue in her eyes. She turned her head toward the breeze blowing in off the Gulf. A gust caught a few strands of hair and pulled them loose. She had taken a pill to sleep on the long flight, and then another. Now that she had arrived, she felt groggy. She gave her cheek a gentle slap to wake herself up. With the sting came a bit of color.
The turbaned boatman tried to be friendly. He was a poor fisherman from Dar Es Salaam who couldn’t support his family running a boat back home. He spoke about fish. Sophie Marx didn’t want to make small talk, and she didn’t have any dirhams to give him a tip. She told him in Arabic to keep his eyes on the water or she would report him to the hotel manager.
The boatman deposited her at the Villas, the meeting place that Gertz’s support staff had arranged on short notice. The polygraph operator was already there. Gertz had dispatched him from Prague, where he nominally worked for an electronics company. Dubai station had a resident polygraph technician, but he reported to Headquarters, and Gertz vetoed that.
Marx stepped gingerly off the prow at the landing. The polygraph operator opened the door for her. He was a big, powerfully built man, well over six feet, with tattoos decorating his biceps. Marx was glad to see him.
“Hey, my name’s Andy,” he said, extending a forearm as thick as a log.
“Where did you come in from?” she asked.
“Ashgabat,” he said. “It was the quickest flight from Prague. I had to sleep in the transit lounge in Turkmenistan. Too hot. Glad to leave.”
“It’s hot in Dubai,” she said.
“Not when you’re in the pool.” He smiled. This assignment was a vacation for him.
Marx looked around the villa. It was too fancy for the task ahead: It offered a fine view of the water and beyond it the Burj Al Arab, billowing like the sail of a dhow forty stories tall. Marx closed the curtains and turned up the heat in the room till it would raise a sweat. She made herself a pot of coffee and waited for the Pakistani.
“Break him,” she told herself. “Make him talk.”
Hamid Akbar knocked gently on the door as if he were afraid that he would wake the neighbors. Through the intercom, he spoke the phrases of the recognition code. He retreated a step when Andy, the technician, opened the door. The American was so big. Akbar peered inside and saw that the CIA officer awaiting him was a compact and well-tailored woman. He bowed slightly in her direction and said, “Madam.”
“Welcome, Mr. Akbar,” she responded. “Please sit down. This will be a long visit, I’m afraid. I have many questions for you. Would you like some coffee?”
The Pakistani was waiting politely for her to sit down before seating himself.
She motioned sharply for him to take his seat, while she remained standing, her arms folded. She knew that she must establish dominance from the beginning.
“I am sorry about Mr. Howard Egan,” said the Pakistani, placing his hand over his heart. “It is most unfortunate that he is missing. I do not know what went wrong.”
The Pakistani sat awkwardly, his knees together primly. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. There was perspiration above his lip.
“We are all sorry, Mr. Akbar. But we need to know how this happened. People in Washington have questions about your role. I must warn you of that, so that we understand each other.”
The Pakistani arched his neck. He looked offended.
“Why me, madam? I have done nothing wrong, I assure you. It is I who am in danger. Next they will get me.”
Marx had been about to deliver to him the coffee she had promised, but she thought better of it. She set the cup down.
“I don’t think you get it, Mr. Akbar. You are a suspect. That is why you are here. You were the last person to see Mr. Egan. We need answers from you. My friend here is going to strap you to a machine that will tell me if you are lying. The reason we are doing this is because we have power over you. You must understand that.”
He looked at her warily. She was a woman; he was a man. But she was giving him instructions, and the big American with the tattoos was there to back her up.
“I can leave,” he said. He was trying to be assertive, but the way he formed the words it sounded more like a question.
She heard the weakness in the voice. It was the same voice she had heard on the NSA audio file.
“No, Mr. Akbar, you are wrong there. You cannot leave. You have taken money from the United States, and now, to be honest with you, we have power over you. Do you realize that? You could try to leave. But my friend Andy and I would stop you. And then we would tell people in Pakistan about your contacts with us, for all these years, and they would take care of the rest. So don’t talk any more about leaving, please. Are we clear?”
There was silence, so she repeated the question.
“Are we clear, Mr. Akbar? Otherwise, I am going to instruct Andy to take you into custody.”
He nodded. The sweat beads were rolling down his forehead now. He wiped the dampness away with his sleeve.
“And don’t call me ‘madam.’ It’s a name for someone who runs a brothel. Tonight I am your control. You can call me that. Miss Control.”
The little lines around his mouth crinkled. He had been nervous when he walked in the door. Now he was frightened.
“What is my name? Say it, please.”
“Miss Control.”
“Thank you.” It sounded strange, even to her, but she nodded approval. One of her tradecraft instructors had admonished her years ago at the Farm that an interrogator was like a jeweler working on a precious stone. You had to tap it at the right points, to make the rough bits fall away so you could see what was really there.
“Let’s get started,” she said, motioning to the technician to begin attaching his wires to Akbar’s body. The Pakistani fidgeted. He didn’t like to be touched, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“First the technician is going to ask some baseline questions, to measure your normal reactions. You do have normal, right?”
“Yes.”
Andy went through a string of simple questions: name, place and date of birth, passport number. As the Pakistani answered, he became confident again, leaning forward in his chair. Marx listened for a while, struggling to think of a way to establish primacy. When there was a pause, she broke in.
“Are you a homosexual, Mr. Akbar?”
“My goodness, no. Of course not. How can you ask that?”
She looked at Andy’s monitor.
“You’re lying. Let me ask it again. Have you ever had sex with a man?”
“No. This is a most gross insult. I am leaving now.” He began pulling at the wires, and then stopped when the big American seized his hand.
Marx looked to Andy, who studied his computer terminal and shook his ahead.
“You’re still lying, Mr. Akbar. Three strikes and you’re out. That’s what we say in America. Now tell me the truth. Have you ever had sex with a man? When you were a boy, perhaps? Women have an intuition about this, I’m warning you.”
“I do not have to answer,” he said. His eyes were becoming moist at the edges. He was humiliated to the core.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “Not a problem with me. All I care about is that you tell the truth. If you don’t, I’ll find out. Is that clear? Okay. Continue, Andy.”
She sat back, confident now in her dominance. People from shame cultures were so vulnerable if you pushed the right buttons.
The technician asked more questions, alternating soft ones and hard ones. He stood behind the Pakistani, who couldn’t see him and heard only his questions, one after another. When the machine indicated deception, Andy would ask the question again until he got an answer that registered as truthful. After forty-five minutes he nodded to Marx that he was ready for her to begin.