"That wouldn't surprise me at all, Mongo," Veil said, and laughed. Suddenly, he seemed much more relaxed, as if some burden had been lifted from his shoulders. He grinned at me. "In fact, I completely agree with your thinking."
"How did you know enough to send me to him, Veil? How did you know about Torture Island, and, if you thought it was so important, why didn't you tell me about it in the beginning?"
"I wasn't sure that it was important, and I still don't know that it is. I knew about Torture Island because I once had a Nicaraguan lady friend who told me about it. Even if I had wanted to tell you about it, Mongo, I couldn't have."
"Why not?"
"In a way, I believe she'd broken a pledge to John Sinclair, or at least gone against his wishes, by telling me the story, and I'd specifically promised her I wouldn't tell anyone else. I knew Patreaux had been a part of it, because my lady friend told me he'd arranged with Sinclair for Amnesty International to take care of the surviving prisoners on the island. Since Patreaux, for whatever reasons, saw fit to share some of that information with you, however he may have put it, I see no reason now why I shouldn't talk about it."
"Who is this woman, Veil?" Harper asked quietly. "And what did she have to do with this Torture Island?"
"Her real name is Maria Gonzalez, but we'll call her Feather, because that's what Richard Krowl, the doctor who was the torture specialist on the island, called her. She was involved in the incident that got Krowl drummed out of the academic community, and she ended as one of Krowl's resident torturers-the most effective and most feared."
Harper made a sound of disgust and anger in her throat. I put my hand in hers, squeezed.
"She was a torture victim herself," Veil continued in an even tone, looking directly at Harper. "Feather's a physician, and she served the Sandinista guerrillas in their rebellion against Somoza. She was captured in the field by some of Somoza's soldiers and horribly tortured in ways I won't spoil your meal by describing. The torturers left her for dead in the jungle, but she was found by the guerrillas, and she somehow survived. However, the experience had left her catatonic. She was eventually sent to a Canadian clinic for torture victims that Richard Krowl was associated with.
"No matter how well cared for they may be, victims of severe torture are almost never the same; very rarely do they recover all their faculties. Their physical wounds may heal, but not the psychological ones; they are emotionally shattered. They can't cope with the flashbacks and nightmares that become their constant companions whether awake or asleep. Richard Krowl had his own notions about how to treat torture victims: he believed that revenge was the best medicine.
"Back in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had come to power, and most of Somoza's torturers were dead or in prison. One of their prisoners was the leader of the group that had tortured the woman. Krowl arranged for the man to be sent to the United States, supposedly to be a participant in a research project Krowl was setting up in a secure facility to study the minds of torturers. He had already brought Feather there. The fact of the matter was that Krowl couldn't have cared less about the man's thinking or motives. He was only interested in how having this man under her complete control would affect Maria Gonzalez, who hadn't spoken a word in nearly five years. He offered the man to her as a gift, told her she could do whatever she liked with him. She responded. The arrangement cured her of her catatonia, if not her muteness. She opted to torture her torturer to death, as he had tried to do to her. Her choice of torture instruments was a single feather. She worked on the man for a few hours every day, and it took him six weeks to die."
Veil paused as I rose and leaned across the table to wipe tears from Harper's cheeks. He reached out and touched her hand, raised his eyebrows slightly in a silent inquiry as to whether she wanted him to continue.
"Go on," Harper said in a steady voice. "I'm all right. I'm not crying for the man she killed, and you're not really upsetting me. I was just thinking of the horrible physical and mental pain this woman must have suffered to cause it to change her from a healer to a monster like the one she was killing."
"Precisely," Veil said quietly. "But Krowl was only interested in getting her to function at some level, not in healing her emotionally. This latest experience had not only turned her into a torturer but bonded her to Krowl, whom she now viewed as her savior. When his activities were discovered, he was thrown out of the academic and medical communities, and when he proceeded to set up shop on Torture Island, he took Feather with him. Because of the terrible combination of both pleasure and pain she'd learned how to excite using nothing more than a feather, she became Krowl's most effective interrogator, his chief torturer.
"She was there when Sinclair was brought to the island, strapped into a stretcher on a rack in a helicopter. It was Feather who took the first pass at breaking him down, and on the first night she left him unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in his body. What neither Krowl, Feather, nor any of the student-torturers on that island understood was that everything was going according to Sinclair's plan, and he had come carefully prepared. He'd hidden various tiny lock-picking devices inside his body before his capture, and within a few minutes after regaining consciousness and finding himself alone, he was out of his cell, on the loose, and free to kill-which is precisely what he proceeded to do. He began making a circuit of the island, breaking the necks of the various guards posted around the place. He came upon Feather-who never slept more than a half hour or so at a time-alone, standing at the edge of a precipice and staring out to sea. He probably wouldn't have had any compunction about killing a woman if she were just a torturer, but Krowl had told Sinclair her story before setting her loose on him, and he chose not to kill someone who had been a torture victim herself. Instead, he just knocked her out, reasoning that he'd have taken care of his business and would be in control of the island by the time she regained consciousness.
"On his way to the building where Krowl and his staff slept, Sinclair stopped in Krowl's offices to pick up two things he had come for in addition to the revenge he was exacting: a fortune in black pearls Krowl had amassed by forcing prisoners to dive for him in the shark-infested waters, and Krowl's records."
"I can understand his wanting the pearls," Garth interjected, "but why bother with the records?"
"He was finishing Harry Gray's work for him," I heard myself saying, instinctively sensing the truth of it, but not knowing exactly why. "He planned to shut down Torture Island simply by killing Krowl and the other torturers there, but he also wanted to make sure the names of the governments and organizations that had financed and used it were made public. It was his way of trying to keep another such place from starting up."
"That's correct," Veil said. "However, when he scanned the records and other papers in Krowl's office, he came across information that caused him to change his original plan. A memo he found indicated that in three days a well-known Russian dissident and his wife were being flown there for a little gentle persuasion and brainwashing to get the man to recant certain statements he had spoken and written before he and his wife were sentenced to internal exile. If Sinclair went ahead and put Torture Island out of operation that night, there would be nobody to take delivery, as it were, of the couple, and they would be returned to internal exile-perhaps even death-in the Soviet Union. If, on the other hand, Sinclair were to postpone his plans, if he could manage to somehow survive three more days in captivity until the Russians were delivered, he would also be able to rescue them. Obviously, there was going to be additional pressure above and beyond more torture he would have to endure. There were the dead guards he was leaving behind as evidence that something was seriously amiss; many of the torturers on the island knew him by reputation, and that reputation was such that he'd be suspected even if he were still locked in his cell. There would be demands to kill him outright, and, at the least, additional security precautions would be taken.