He gave them everything, but they wanted more than everything and made that clear by hitting him on the sides and the back of the head with gun butts. They wanted his shoes and belt, and when he turned them over he was taken up a flight of stairs to a long wide corridor and told to sit there on a wooden bench. All but two of the men went away, the remaining pair leaning against the opposite wall, frowning at Lew with great intensity, as though their hostility were the only thing they clearly understood.
The half hour on the bench was a very good time; if it was supposed to be a psychological ploy to increase his nervousness, it had quite the opposite effect. Lew began to think again, to recover a bit from the beatings, and to observe the area around himself. He was in a long bare corridor lined with office doors, perhaps a third of them open. From within one office toward the far end came the halting sound of amateurish typing. At intervals along the walls were large notices: SILENCE. Here and there between the demands for silence were hung framed printed slogans and sayings; the one Lew could read said NO WISDOM IS GREATER THAN KINDNESS. THOSE WHO BUILD THEIR SUCCESS ON OTHERS MISFORTUNES ARE NEVER SUCCESSFUL. It was signed “Mjr Farouk Minawa.”
The least encouraging thing about the corridor was the thick blood-stains along the wall above the bench, just at the height of Lew’s head. Clearly, it was a habit here to beat the heads of seated prisoners against the concrete walls. An abrupt and messy death. Or possibly merely a fractured skull and irreparable brain damage. Lew sat braced to defend himself should either of those men across the way decide to play the game on him; even though he knew resistance was hopeless.
A strange thing about the two men guarding him: the nail on the little finger of each hand was over an inch long, curved and sharp and yellowish-gray, like the talon of a hawk.
After thirty minutes, two new men appeared from down the corridor and said to Lew, “Come with us.” Lew got to his feet, his former guards went away, and he walked between these new men down the corridor to the end and into a large office marked HEAD OF TECHNICAL OPERATIONS, where a thick-faced uniformed man sat at a large table piled with an assortment of junk.
This was Major Farouk Minawa, commander of the State Research Bureau and author of the homilies framed in the corridor. It was Minawa, a Nubian Muslim, who along with the Ugandan Chief of Protocol, Captain Nasur Ondoga, on July 5, 1976, at nine in the morning, went to Mulago Hospital, yanked Mrs. Dora Bloch (the only unrescued Israeli hostage) from her bed, dragged her screaming down three flights of stairs while staff and patients stood by in helpless shock, threw her into a car, drove her twenty miles from Kampala on the road toward Jinja, pulled her from the car, shot her by the roadside, and tried unsuccessfully to burn the body. (The white hair didn’t burn, and was the first clue to her identity.)
There were also three other Research Bureau men in the room, in their uniforms of bright shirts, platform shoes, bell-bottom trousers, dark sunglasses. One of these sprawled on a sofa to one side, drinking a bottle of soda. There were two other sofas, both empty, while the other two Research Bureau men prowled the room like big cats in a zoo. The two who had brought Lew in walked over to one of the empty sofas and sat side by side there, casually, crossing their legs, looking around, as though waiting for a bus. Everyone in the room but Minawa had the long nail extending from the little finger of each hand.
Minawa pointed at the carpeted floor in front of Lew. “Sit down.”
“On the floor?”
“Sit down!” Minawa fairly bounced in his chair with his sudden rage.
Sensing movement behind him from one of the roving men, Lew dropped quickly to the floor, bringing his knees up, folding his arms around them. Minawa glared across his messy desk, but when he next spoke, his voice was once more calm. “What did the CIA order you to do in Uganda?”
“The CIA?” In his bewilderment, Lew had one millisecond of joy, in which this would turn out to be somebody’s error and he would simply be released with apologies; but the fantasy didn’t last.
There were rifles, pistols, automatic guns stacked and stuffed under the sofas. One of the seated men took out a knife and studied the blade with great concentration.
“The CIA! The CIA!” Minawa pounded the tabletop. “You think we’re stupid here? You think we’re niggers?”
“I have nothing to do with the CIA,” Lew said.
“You are an American.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Your name is Lewis Brady.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Call me ‘sir’!”
“Yes, sir, my name is Lewis Brady.” To have refused the demand would have invited another beating. It wasn’t fear that kept Lew from wanting another beating, but the knowledge that he would need to be in the best possible physical and emotional shape for whatever came next; there would clearly be beatings enough without his requesting extra portions.
“In nineteen seventy-four,” Minawa said, referring to a sheet of paper on the table before him, “you were assigned by the CIA to the repressive government of Ethiopia.”
“No, sir,” Lew said. “Ethiopia hired me as an instructor. That had nothing to do with the CIA or any—”
“In nineteen seventy-five,” Minawa interrupted, “the CIA transferred you to the Angolan National Union. You won’t deny that was a CIA operation.”
“If it was,” Lew said, “I didn’t know it.”
The man lying on the sofa said, “You think you’ll kill us, but we can see you.”
“We have lists,” Minawa said. “When you crossed the border, we looked at the list.”
“What list would I be on?”
One of the roaming men, behind Lew at that moment, kicked him painfully in the ribs. “You will call the major ‘sir.’”
“I beg your pardon.” The kick made breathing difficult, but Lew tried not to show that. These creatures were more beasts than men, and would be attracted to weakness or fear. He said, “Sir, would you tell me what list my name was on?”
“Mercenaries,” Minawa said, “that our friends have identified as CIA.”
“What friends? Sir.”
“Our friends!” Minawa’s sudden displays of rage were metronomic, seeming to arise at specified intervals regardless of provocation.
“We have many friends,” the man on the sofa said. “And you have no friends at all.”
“The holy rebels of Chad learned the truth about you,” Minawa said, “and that was when you fled to Ethiopia.”
“Chad?” Briefly Lew had been involved in a rebellion in Chad, back in 1974, but why would—? And then it came clear. “Holy rebels” indeed; that was the rebellion financed by Libya. And wasn’t Colonel Gaddafi of Libya very tight with Idi Amin? “Libya,” Lew said.
They didn’t like it that he had seen through their mystery. The man on the sofa looked up at the ceiling as though no longer taking part in the conversation, and Minawa busily moved things around on his messy table, glowering and moving his lips.
Lew said, “Major, I can only assure you I have never been an employee of the CIA in my life.”
Still gazing at the ceiling, the man on the sofa said, as though reasonably explaining some simple concept to a dull child, “We will kill you before you can kill us. We have to protect ourselves; that is justice.”
“I am a tourist,” Lew said. “I have hotel reser—”
Minawa pounded his palm flat against the table top. “You are not a tourist! You are a mercenary soldier, a provocateur, an agent of the CIA!”
“No, sir, I’m—”
“If you lie,” Minawa said, pointing a blunt finger, “it will go very badly for you. We already know everything. You will write a paper. You will write what the CIA told you to do in Kampala. You will write the names of the people you were supposed to contact in Uganda.”