Time had passed. The sky was again dimming. I was naked on my couch, hands behind my back, a taut line of wire running from my wrists to a noose around my neck, legs splayed, ankles tied to the legs of a low table, this position giving them easier access to my genitals while preventing me from instinctively closing my legs when they began to use the soldering iron.
I had been tortured twice before.
The first time, I’d been barely twenty years of age. I was discovered someplace I should not have been, out of uniform, committing warlike acts. Clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions, I could have been tried for war crimes. But I was tortured instead, encouraged to make a confession that included crimes I had nothing to do with, and to repudiate my country. After three days I did as I was asked. Three months later, after I had been included as part of a covert prisoner exchange, I returned with a squad of Degar guerrillas to the camp where I had been held, and took part in my first and only revenge killings.
The second time I was tortured I was nearly forty. I had been accepting several freelance contracts from an agency of my government, and returned excellent results on all of them. Results so excellent, in fact, that it was strongly suspected that I must be in possession of intelligence that could only have been passed to me by members of the primary opposition. I was deemed both volatile and disposable by someone determined to clean the slate and to winnow from me the details of my supposed betrayal. As there had been no betrayal, there was nothing to winnow. After two weeks I began to lie. Simple lies at first, but growing ever more elaborate as each lie led to more questions, until they all unraveled. Thus, the torture continued. After another two weeks I ceased to lie. I ceased to talk. I ceased to scream or cry or beg for mercy. I silently repeated a mantra to myself that heartened me and bore me up: They will kill me soon. They will kill me soon. They will kill me soon.
But they did not.
Instead, apparently inspired by my silence, they stopped asking me questions. While continuing to torture me. Randomly, without discernible reason or purpose, I was subjected to a variety of abuses for an additional two weeks. I’ve come to suspect that once I became silent I had been judged a loss. Convinced that they had passed the point where I might still be capable of revealing anything of value, my captors were quite prepared to kill me. I believe some spirit of frugality took hold, and I was kept about the place as a training subject. In those final two weeks I was a kind of living cadaver upon which students of the trade could hone their skills.
That I was let go at the end of those two weeks did not, I am quite sure, have anything to do with my ability to perform this service. Rather, someone somewhere lost his job. Footing in the intelligence trade is notoriously slippery. A pioneer one day, it takes only a single misjudgment and the trail is lost, the fall to the bottom long, the ground, when it comes, littered with other once-adventurous climbers. Whoever had commanded my capture, retention, and course of interrogation had made a mess where he lived. Not in regard to me, however. That I was released was merely a sign of how singularly this person had let down the side. I intuited a general cleaning of house, all the pet projects of this persona non grata undone and swept from the scene.
They could have killed me still. But that would have implied a belief on someone’s part, a belief that whoever was being cut loose from the firm had been on to something when they had me detained. So much more humiliating and nullifying to set me on my way. No harm, no foul. Though there was a use I could still be put to.
There was an interim, of course. Medical attention, which, as it was applied in my cell, I initially thought was a part of the torture. An effort to restore some of my health before beginning anew. But it wasn’t. A man wearing the same surgical mask worn by anyone who came into my presence asked me questions in a flat voice with no accent. A voice that was the product of excellent training. And for another two weeks my worst hurts were ministered to. Several times I was given injections that put me to sleep. Each time I believed I would not wake up. Each time I did.
The last time I woke in my cell a slight-framed person stood at the foot of the bed. From a manila folder this person drew several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs with a glossy finish. The photos were all of the same person. A man with a conservative haircut and suit. Nondescript. Two of the photos showed him entering a residence, the house number clearly visible. One of the photos showed him driving a car, turning onto a street where both that same house and a street sign were clearly visible. Another photo showed him walking in a busy downtown area of a large city, a well-known tourist attraction in that city clearly visible. That was the last photo. The lights went out, a needle pricked my arm, I went to sleep, and when I woke up I was home, in my own bed.
Not one to question a message so crisply enunciated, I called my travel agent that day, booked a flight to the city I had identified by the well-known tourist attraction, flew to that city, rented a car, drove to the street whose sign I had clearly seen, parked up a bit from the house I had also clearly seen, waited until the nondescript haircut and suit arrived and went inside, followed him in soon after, and killed everyone within.
No, this was not revenge. I did not doubt that this was the person who had ordered me held and tortured, but, as I was a mature man at this point, revenge was not on my mind. I was simply behaving in a prudent and professional manner. I had been told, as clearly as if the words had been spoken in my ear, that I should not take my release for granted, that payment was due. So I paid up.
And that was the last that was ever made of it. I have never worked since for my government; a mutual accord. Could, one day, there be an accounting? Could some drone of the services uncover a dusty file while in the process of digitalizing back data and, seeing an opportunity for advancement, approach his or her superiors with this nugget of ancient history, a loose end left perilously undone? Could a fellow practitioner arrive by stealth and tie off that dangling line? Yes, to all questions, yes. But the prospect did not keep me awake at night.
I was sent a message by whoever released me: Kill this man for us, or else. The particular savagery and bloody-mindedness I expressed in the fulfillment of that unspoken contract composed the text of my own reply message: Leave me alone, or I’ll do this to you.
We heard one another, loud and clear.
In both cases of torture, the questions I had been asked bore little relation to any actions I had ever taken. Though I was most certainly guilty of any number of misdeeds for which I might have been held accountable, I was always quizzed on matters unrelated. And so it was again.
There were four people in the room with me. Well, six, but two of them were dead. One of those remaining four had collected some of my possessions. Papers, two external hard drives, two laptops and a tablet computer, five thumb drives, my slender bamboo-sided desktop tower, and anything else that might reasonably store information, including my DVR. Though I doubted they’d learn anything from the classic episodes of Twilight Zone and several cooking and gardening shows that I was addicted to.
Done with that, he’d unrolled a nylon tool caddy and sorted through various cables, fitting them to my phones and downloading assorted numbers and call logs before tossing the phones themselves into a knapsack. He’d be disappointed. The business phones were each assigned to a specific individual whose number I had memorized; they contained only one number each: their own. Call logs I erased after each call in or out from a particular phone. My personal phones were similarly barren of numbers. An advantage of a nearly photographic memory. I erased logs at day’s end in general. The phone I’d had on me when they attacked would have the helicopter pilot’s number, Vinnie’s incoming call, and a few others. Nothing I was concerned with.