“Well, Mr. Crawley,” I said, “I guess what we need to talk about is why a nice guy like you would want to have me killed.”
He pursed his lips and swallowed again, his breath whistling in and out of his nose. I could see that he was trying to decide how to handle this. Deny everything? Blame someone else? Confess and beg for mercy? Something in between?
Watching him trying frantically to make up his mind, weighing the pros and cons of the feeble set of options before him, I sensed he understood that I knew what he was thinking, that I had seen it all before and would know just how to handle him regardless of which route he decided to use. So he would probably know enough not to outright deny everything. No, he looked savvy to me, even shrewd. At some level, he was probably thinking, Don’t deny it, he wouldn’t be here if his information weren’t good. And if you don’t deny it, if you confess up to a point, he’ll be more inclined to believe what follows. It would be a variation of the galoshes game I had just played with the old lady with the walker. And he’d probably do a good job, too. A lot of these government guys are pretty adroit when it comes to lying.
Let’s see, I thought, making a mental bet with myself, probably it’ll be something like, “I was only following orders.”
“It’s not me,” he said, unintentionally winning me the bet. “It’s someone else.”
“Who’s that, then?”
“It’s… look, Jesus Christ, I can’t tell you these things!”
“But it’s not you.”
Hope flared in his eyes. “Yes, that’s right.”
I sighed. “Is there another Charles Crawley running around who looks and smells just like you?” I asked.
“What?”
“A twin. You don’t have a twin?”
“What? No, no I don’t.”
“I didn’t think so. But see, that’s strange. Because a guy who looks exactly like you, and also named Crawley, although he called himself Johnson, went to a special operator recently and offered him a hundred thousand dollars to take me out. Went to him personally.”
He glanced to his right, a neurolinguistic sign of imagination, not of recall. He was trying to make something up, to find a way out of the corner he had just painted himself into.
“Maybe, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there is someone using my name. Trying to set me up.”
I sighed again. “The operator in question was carrying a cell phone with an integrated digital camera,” I said. “He took about a half dozen pictures of you.”
His pupils dilated. He licked his lips.
“I’m afraid this isn’t going to end the way we were hoping,” I said.
“All right, all right, I’m sorry, I was just afraid. That part was me. But look, I didn’t want to do what I did, I just… I didn’t have a choice.”
“I’m listening.”
He took a deep breath. “You were hired to… to go after someone recently. The problem you have, it’s with that person.”
I shook my head in mild disgust. It’s been my experience that bureaucrats are to killing what the Victorians were to sex: they just can’t bring themselves to call it by name.
I waited, letting the pressure of silence bear down on him. But he stayed cool, resisting the urge to talk. Okay, plan B.
I picked up the stun gun and held it an inch from his eyes, then depressed the trigger. Sharp tendrils of blue electric current crackled between the electrodes, and the acrid smell of ozone cut through the air. He tried to jerk his head away, but there was nowhere for him to go.
I released the trigger. “Remember, Mr. Crawley, my assurance that I wouldn’t hurt you had a condition attached. Let’s not breach the condition, okay?”
The truth was, I didn’t want to hurt him. Fear is a better motivator than pain. Fear is all about anticipation, imagination. Pain is real and quantifiable. Once the pain starts, the person is no longer in fear of it-it’s right there, actually happening. The person might think, okay, this is bad, but I can take it. And he might even be right. So when you’re interrogating someone, once you have to start actually hurting him, you’ve already lost a lot of your leverage. I wanted to avoid all that if I could.
I set the stun gun down. “It’s important that we not hide behind euphemisms and vague references and undefined pronouns, okay?” I said, as though he was a child and I was just explaining the rules of the classroom to him. “It’s important that you tell me exactly who’s coming after me and why. If it turns out that you’re just a bit player in all this, you’ll survive the conversation.”
Now I’d opened a little door of hope for him. All he had to do to march right through it was to betray a few people around him.
Fear of pain, the hope of release. Four out of five interrogators surveyed recommended this combination for…
“Okay,” he said, nodding against the pillow, “okay. If I tell you everything I know about this, will you promise to let me go?”
Denial. A pathetic thing, really. But there are people who need it to get through the tough times. Crawley, it seemed, was one of them.
“Yes,” I said. “But remember, there’s a lot I know already. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. So I’ll know if you’re leaving something out.”
“I understand,” he said, nodding, seeing that door opening wider. “I won’t leave anything out.”
I said nothing. After a moment, he took another deep breath and said, “The man you were hired to… go after. He found out about you. That’s how this started.”
“Say his name.”
“His name?”
“What did I just tell you about being vague? Are you trying to see how far you can push me? Say his fucking name.”
There was a pause, during which he looked like he might be sick. He said, “Belghazi.”
“Good. How did Belghazi ‘find out’ about me?”
“Someone was sent to Macau to kill him. At least, he thinks someone was. A Frenchman, guy named Nuchi, an independent contractor with a lot of Middle Eastern connections. Turned up dead in Macau less than a week ago with a broken neck, at the same time that the man… that Belghazi happened to be out there. Belghazi wanted to know what had happened. Did we know who had sent the guy, that kind of thing.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That we didn’t know anything about it. Which turned out to be true. Except that, when I started looking into it, I found out that we had sent someone, just not Nuchi. We sent you.”
“But you didn’t send the other guy.”
“Who can say for sure? This shit is obviously being set up through outside channels, or you never would have been sent in the first place. But I don’t think that even the idiots behind sending you would have been so stupid as to send two operators on the same op without informing them first.”
He was getting more talkative, which was good. I wanted to keep him going, to continue to foster his new-found loquaciousness. This way, he would be used to the dynamic by the time we got to the heart of the matter, at which point the act of betraying secrets would seem to be not much more than what he had already said and done. Contrary to popular imagination, a good interrogation is much more like a seduction than it is like torture.
“Who do you think sent Nuchi, then?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nobody knows. Nuchi does contract work for various Arab governments and terrorist groups, so the most likely explanation is that he was working for one of his usual clients. Maybe someone who Belghazi cheated, maybe someone trying to muscle in on Belghazi’s sources or on his networks. It’s actually good that the guy is dead. If you did it, you ought to get a medal.”
“But instead of a medal, you warned Belghazi that I was coming after him.”
There was a pause, during which he grappled silently with the realization that I knew this, too. Where possible, you want to give the subject the impression that you already know everything he’s going to tell you. This makes him afraid to hold anything back, and helps him rationalize full disclosure: after all, he’s not divulging anything you don’t already know.