“You see, all torture seen by the nonparticipant is about creating a spot where death can appear but not appear completely. You want to get ’em as close as possible but not right over the edge. Too far, and you get the natural painkillers going. Not far enough, you get the spirit and will in the way, and then you’re in trouble.”
“Too far, not far enough?” Singleton said. “That’s insane.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter to me what you think. That one there gave me the location on Rake.” He gave a body a tap with his boot and watched it swing. “I pushed him as far as I could and then pushed him a little further, but not too far. You want them moribund. That’s the word. You want to keep them in a fresh moribund state. You push ’em too far, they just want to die right there. You’ve got to hold out some hope. You’ve got to mix it up. I’m a worker of metal, you see, so I understand just how far you can push it and how hot things have to be to bend.”
“Cut them down,” Singleton said. “Get a ladder in here and start cutting them down.”
“No need for the gun. I’ve got them rigged so I can just ease them down. I’ll do it as soon as you leave. And feel free to call in a report to headquarters, if it hasn’t burned to the ground. Most likely, it’s gone with the rest of Flint. Those folks know damn well what I’ve been doing up here.”
“No, now. Take them down,” Singleton said.
Wendy kept her eyes averted, cupping her hands and looked out the window into the darkness as Merle got all the bodies down — each one quietly, the ropes slipping through well-oiled grooves — and they lay crumpled, all in unnaturally easeful positions. Singleton now had his gun against the old man’s head, pressing it tight to his temple, as he told to him stand still while Wendy tied him up.
“I’m not going to tie him up,” she said, softly. “I want to get the fuck out of here and get on with the mission.”
The zip pills were wearing thin and everything had a stark, newfound clarity; the grappling hooks in the ceiling and the pulleys — and the old man, his face tight-scrunched, eyeing the gun fearlessly, staring right into it, only a few feet from Singleton, who held it out straight, his arm shaking slightly, his lips set firm, his legs apart, too, in a manner that seemed to indicate that he was resisting all temptation, and he was.
“I should shoot you right here. Save you a trial. A court-martial.”
The old man guffawed and then, in a swift swing of his head, spat to the side. “You two are the ones who are going to be up on charges. I know that for a fact. Nobody ordered you up here. If you were supposed to come to me, I would’ve been informed.”
“He’s right,” Wendy said. “This is a problem for headquarters, not us.”
“Listen to her, son. You walk out that front door and go ahead with your mission and leave me to be the man with the burden of having to push it to the limit to get what you needed in the first place. You walk out that door and don’t turn back around and I’ll go back to working with my hands. You work with your minds — whatever they call it, that intuitive nonsense — and I go forward in the old traditions. The wonders of the blocks and tackle, the usefulness of know-how.”
“Let’s go,” Wendy said.
“Listen to the lady,” the man named Merle said.
Singleton put the gun back in his waistband and spread his arms as if to say, OK, fuck it. It’s all yours.
“Nothing personal,” the man said. He had the door open and motioned them into the night air. They ran to the car through air sweet with pine and dew-wet grass. If Singleton wrote the report he’d say they left the house at gunpoint, the man unhinged by the dictates of his own mission. He could then discourse on the immorality of certain operations, the way things were actually done in the field in contrast to the vision that Kennedy had set forth.
* * *
A few miles down the road he stopped and Wendy stumbled out of the car, staying to the edge of the headlight beam, bowing down and vomiting into the gravel. When she got back in the car she said it wasn’t so much the bodies, or the stench, or the old man, or even the fact that they were in deep shit — officially AWOL, as the old man had indicated — that made her sick but something else, something she couldn’t pin down exactly, although it might’ve been the zip pills wearing thin. (Should we have another? Pop one more? It’s a great high.)
“No,” he said.
“No, what? No, we’re not AWOL.”
“No to more zip pills. No more drugs. We’re going to find a spot to park and hunker down for the night, get some rest, hit the road tomorrow fresh.”
Leaves were shimmering on both sides of the road, fresh and living leaves, frosted with moonlight.
He followed the road as it cut toward the shore.
“If I have to write a report, and I mean honestly do it, maybe under closely monitored treatment with further Tripizoid because who knows what the Corps can do to an AWOL agent, I want to be able to say we ran away from the safe house before we could look around, forgot the passphrase, something like that, and then we parked to rest, following procedure.” He stopped himself. What she didn’t know couldn’t be used against him in an interrogation.
“What? What were you going to say?” she said.
“Nothing. It’s beautiful here. This might be the place.”
They’d entered a small state park and were following a dirt road through a grove of quaking aspens.
“Whatever happens when we find Rake, the Corps is going to write up a report, either in response to our dead bodies or because we nailed the target, and if they interview me I’m going to claim that I had a vision right here, in this location, and that the vision told me where Rake was. I’m going to skip the safe house altogether. I’ll say you fucked me into unfolding Rake’s location, something like that.”
“Or you could tell them the truth,” she said. When he kissed her he tasted the forge on her lips, a faint tang of carbon. He thought of the windows on the other side of the room back at the safe house, the hanging bodies, and the dark portal in the window glass where he had cleared the dust.
Later that night, after Wendy was asleep, he opened the door quietly and got out and walked to the top of a dune and looked toward the car. It was hidden by trees shaking in a long sway of sequins as the leaves caught the moonlight.
Search and destroy was what they called it in my day, Klein had said. Now we call it a sweeping operation, or a reconnaissance in force.
Elastic with tar, a wave stretched itself from one end of the beach to the other, roping back as a cleaner wave overtook it, topped it, and spilled down into the sand. From far off came the tenuous whine of an engine downshifting. A gang of bikers riding along the road. The sound grew faint and slipped beneath the shush of waves. No shootout with bikers to end the night. Singleton felt relieved.
Would he use the old phrase in a report — or would he use “sweeping operation,” or “reconnaissance in force”? He’d say they had stopped at the beach for a rest and he had got out of the car alone — he’d make a point of saying that Wendy was sleeping soundly — and that he had stood at the top of a dune, whatever it was, and that he had watched the gunky waves coming across the water. He’d say he’d resisted the urge to walk to the water, to test it for coldness. But he’d admit that he’d had that urge.
He’d say that he began thinking about Huron, about the big spills that had presumably gunked it up when he was off in the war. It was enfolded, he’d explain, and it led me to thinking about the unfolded flashes I’d had (maybe he’d admit that he’d seen the photo on both folders, Klein’s and Ambrose’s). He’d say he was looking at the lake and had a vision — a big flash from the fuzzball — of the man with the phone to his lips, calling in coordinates, and that in the vision the numbers became clear to him, a longitude and a latitude, something like that.