If his captors were following the general rendition procedure he’d read in the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual — KUBARK was the CIA’s cryptonym for itself — they sought, at this stage, to psychologically dislocate him, maximizing his feelings of isolation and helplessness in order to destroy his will to resist interrogation. Unfortunately, he thought, this bit of knowledge was of no more use than a condemned man’s grasp of the workings of the guillotine. Unlike Peretti and O’Clair, he was alive only because he remained of use to his captors. Before killing him, too, he suspected, they wanted to know what he’d learned of their operation and whom he’d told. Unfortunately, his answers were Not much and Mallery. Little to work with in order to prolong his life. And whether Mallery’s life had been spared for the same reasons: He could only hope.
The Kubark manual recommended diminishing the subject’s will to resist by use of techniques such as prolonged constraint, extremes of heat and cold, and, the ace in the deck, sleep deprivation. Thornton knew he ought to sleep now, while he had the chance.
He tried. But his mind burned with questions, chiefly, as Mallery had asked: Who are these people? They might be operatives for a foreign intelligence service, he thought, aiming to spirit him beyond detection by American law enforcement. In that case, they would likely have had a go at him in the van, or in a room at the first motel or abandoned building the van came to. It was more likely that they were with an American service, or at least accustomed to working with American services, which routinely netted out on rendition because they wanted to employ harsher interrogation techniques than United States law permitted — the Pakistani ISI’s provision of “torture by proxy” was the glue in that service’s kinship with the CIA.
Thornton mulled which U.S. service might have ordered this rendition. The FBI and the NSA no longer seemed like contenders. Probably not Defense either, since Leonid Sokolov was their own asset. But there was still the CIA, Homeland’s ever-expanding and often erratic Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Commerce Department’s massive but little-known — to its credit — Bureau of Industry and Security, the State Department’s ubiquitous Bureau of Intelligence and Research … and at least ten others that could and would find use for a revolutionary eavesdropping device.
After hours of ruminating, Thornton was more puzzled than when he began. His stomach fell as the aircraft began its descent. He felt the vibration of the fuselage when the landing gear dropped. A minute later the wheels punched the runway.
When the plane stopped, he was pulled from his seat, then prodded from the cabin and down the steps. Sunlight warmed his hands. Daytime, he supposed. The air was hot, ninety easy, and humid. Through the pungent diesel fumes, a light breeze brought the scent of tropical verdure.
He was steered across rutted pavement, then onto a smooth surface with a bit more give, split at regular intervals. Wooden slats, he guessed. A pier? There was no crash of waves, no scent of ocean, no distant cry of seabirds — or there were, and his hood and a white-noise MP3 blocked them.
It felt as though he were boarding a boat, or something else that dipped as his handlers led him onto it. One of the handlers then maneuvered him out of the sun, down three steep steps, and into a stuffy space that stunk of brine. A cabin below deck? He was pushed into a seated position on what felt like a cushioned bench. Engines churned, the whole craft pulsated, and a brisk launch threw him sideways. Salty air rushed into the enclosure. So a boat. For all he knew, the cabin contained ten other captives. But effectively he sat alone in a dark closet, for four or five hours, until someone hoisted him to his feet.
Nudged up the steps and back onto an open-air deck, he felt the craft slowing. To his surprise, off came the hood and earphones, revealing him to be on a spacious stern deck of a grimy commercial fishing boat.
He blinked against the sunlight. It still stung his eyes. He took in fog so thick that the bow appeared to be cutting a channel through it. His handler was a barrel-chested man of about forty with black hair shaved to the skin on the sides, gradually thickening to a flattop. The precise military cut contrasted with a nose that looked to have been broken at least twice and a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard.
A tall black man of about the same age stood at the wheel, focused ahead, his round face and stovepipe arms glistening with sea spray. He looked happy. Taking in his gold earring, Thornton was reminded of a seventeenth-century portrait of Captain South, the regal Martinican pirate, at the helm of his brigantine, Good Fortune. This man had a similar bearing despite his grimy overalls, a soiled T-shirt, and an even filthier baseball cap, embroidered with an anchor. Flattop’s attire was the same. They were going for the look of commercial fishermen, Thornton thought.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Kansas,” Flattop said in an indeterminate accent, the response a variation of the no comment Thornton had expected.
The latter-day Captain South stared ahead at what appeared to be a low-lying thunderhead. As the fishing boat drew closer, the dark cloud solidified into two neighboring mounds of black lava. They were islets, without a blade of vegetation between them, just a trio of big, rust-spotted Quonset huts. The two huts on the larger islet had windows; the one on the other islet only a door. A second commercial fishing boat — or prisoner transport — bobbed alongside a rotting pier that bridged the two islets. The surrounding water extended without obstruction before blending into a sky that was the same mucky gray; Thornton couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. He heard only the rhythmic thumps of the bow across the waves. This place was a maritime riff on hell, he thought — and probably was supposed to think. If not, why had they let him see it?
“What happened to the woman who was with me?” he asked, not expecting an honest answer. Sometimes, though, subjects unwittingly revealed useful information in their choice of misinformation.
“She went to the mall,” Flattop said.
No meaning that Thornton could parse. Flattop had a distinctive mode of pronunciation, though, particularly the th as d in the. It could only be New York. Or, a few thousand percentage points less likely, New Orleans’ similar Yat—as in Where y’at? — a vestige of boatmen from the New York area who settled in Louisiana a century ago. Of course, the guy could also be a talented Pakistani ISI agent.
Thornton manufactured a grin. To inquire further about Mallery would betray his concern, which might be used against him. “Don’t suppose you can tell me how the Knicks did last night?” he asked.
Flattop looked out at the waves as if Thornton weren’t blocking his view.
Soon they docked in the harbor, which reeked of low tide even though the tide was in. Pointing a rugged black Heckler & Koch HK45 pistol, Flattop flanked Thornton, guiding him along a rickety wooden pier to the windowless Quonset hut. Captain South brought up the rear, with a gun of his own as well as a cudgel of some sort that he used to prod Thornton, who wondered why they bothered with weapons. Still bound at the wrists and the ankles, at best he would waddle away. And then what?
At the entrance to the Quonset hut, Flattop holstered his HK45, leaned over the incongruously futuristic keypad, and punched in eight or nine numbers. A lock disengaged with a whirr. Flattop pushed open the door and stepped through. The captain propelled Thornton inside, then swung the door to a ringing close behind them.
Thornton clenched his nose against the damp air, ripe with feces and rotting God-knew-what. Without Captain South’s faint flashlight, he would have seen only blackness. As it was, he barely made out Flattop ahead of him.