Curtis and Vojnomirovic watched the subject writhing in the chair. He’d again started babbling a set of numbers and letters. Curtis checked the pad on his desk: ‘1511472723’. Yep, no change. What did they mean? Voj had no idea either. Were they code for something? Lat and long coords? Maybe it was his AMEX account number and the sucker was feeling guilty about not having paid his account? Of course, the sequence could also be utterly meaningless. He talked plenty about some historical rag head, Khalid bin Wallflower or something. The drugs got inside the mind and, over time, completely cleaned it out. Perhaps this stuff — the numbers and the Khalid bin dude — was just the mind’s equivalent of a dust ball behind the refrigerator. Whatever, extracting information was their job, not making sense of it.
Kadar Al-Jahani’s brainwave patterns shifted and the needle’s frantic activity on the printout told them that he was in the depths of some unspeakable nightmare, and that it was time once more to give him relief. With it came the opportunity for the subject to divest himself of the final secrets eating away at his brain. This subject had been tough but he had cracked, as everyone eventually did. The information he’d given up like rotten pearls, Curtis and Vojnomirovic knew, was exciting their superiors to the point where they actually paid them the occasional visit. Torture, for that’s what they were doing, was never a pleasant thing to witness. One needed a certain amount of callus built up, and Vojnomirovic and Curtis had built up plenty.
‘In you go, Voj. This is it, partner. We need the key, the final questions answered.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Vojnomirovic, somewhat annoyed. He knew exactly what had to be done and didn’t need the apprentice to remind him.
Curtis commanded the release of the pentothal with a tap on his keyboard, as Vojnomirovic squeaked off down the linoleum.
Kadar Al-Jahani’s skin crawled as he watched the boy lying on his bed, the rats tunnelling back and forth under the sheets. He felt himself floating higher above the scene and, as he did so, the anguish and pain seemed to drain away. Several men floated from the walls, C-4 and detonators strapped around their stomachs. Kadar was frightened but pleased. The explosive booster materials would atomise the hell playing out below him and he would finally be released to death and a place for all eternity beside Allah in the garden of paradise. Suddenly, the men exploded with nothing more than loud popping sounds and became round balls of tightly compressed flowers, like dandelions, their heads poking stupidly out the top from collars of petals. Kadar Al-Jahani was overcome with frustration. And then he was back in the chair in the white cell. The walls moved in and out as they breathed slowly, peacefully, yet the tears welled in Kadar’s eyes and began to flow freely down his cheeks. He roared with the pain of the memories, distorted and angry, carried on the backs of insects and rodents. And then he saw the man in the white coat and he knew love the way an acolyte might love God. This man was his saviour, his protector. It was he who kept the dreams at bay, and now Kadar Al-Jahani would do and say anything to please him.
‘Kill me,’ he begged. ‘Please kill me. I can’t bear this. Please pity me. I give you my life.’ He howled and his chest heaved with the sobs.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay,’ said Vojnomirovic. ‘I can make the evil stop, but you must help me.’
‘Anything,’ said Kadar. ‘Anything…please.’
‘Tell me where Duat is. Where is your comrade? Where is your base? What is the target?’ That was it, thought Vojnomirovic, the remaining tantalising details the subject held on to locked deep within. And they desperately needed that information.
The lieutenant colonel looked down at the man and noticed that something was wrong. He was sucking in oxygen, but he seemed in some distress.
‘Voj, get back in here quick,’ said Curtis through the small white speakers embedded in the corners of the ceiling.
‘Take a look at the man’s vitals,’ said Curtis when Vojnomirovic came running through the door, his own heart rate shooting way up when he saw the subject’s BP.
‘Jesus,’ said Vojnomirovic. The man’s systolic and diastolic readings were almost identical. One seventy over one sixty. ‘He’s about to crash, for Christ’s sake.’
An alarm bell sounded. ‘Christ,’ said Curtis, ‘there he goes.’
The stress on Kadar’s heart blasted him into a flashback. Suddenly, sand filled his nose and mouth and flooded into his lungs. He could feel his chest moving in and out, heaving, but the sand blocked his airways. He watched himself as a spectator and noted a small explosion in his chest that blew a red hole in his skin, where his heart would be. As his vision started to fade, white worms eating the colour from the picture, a rat poked his snout from the hole in his chest and tested the air, wriggling its long whiskers.
Curtis hit the external alarm and then he and Vojnomirovic left the control room and raced into Kadar Al-Jahani’s cell. Three male army nurses joined them with a crash cart. Vojnomirovic thrust a large pre-prepared hypodermic down, punching the needle through the subject’s rib cage and into his heart. He pressed down on the plunger, releasing the adrenalin. Nothing. Curtis applied the paddles and the subject jerked with the electric charge that hammered into his system. Nothing. Progressively higher shocks were fed to the heart in an attempt to kickstart it again, but it was useless.
‘Shit,’ said Curtis when he finally stood back and looked at the naked man strapped to the chair, slimy with blood and mucus. ‘What the fuck went wrong here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Vojnomirovic, already feeling the heat that would descend on them, ‘but we’d better fucking well find out.’
Port Botany, Sydney, Australia
The two Australian Customs officers walked slowly through the corridors between containers stacked as high as five-storey buildings. Daisy went ahead, the slack on her leash played out. The cool breeze quickened as it funnelled down these aisles and, despite the fact that it was late summer, both of the customs investigators were pleased to be wearing caps and windcheaters over their dark blue overalls. Daisy, a labrador — kelpie crossbreed, snuffled from side to side, shoving her snout into various cracks, hunting for the stray molecules of an array of different substances.
There were over a hundred containers on the wharf. On this day, they would try to inspect three, but probably only get through two. One of the agents carried the manifest for the first container to be inspected: 2209LK. The officers were going to make it hard for the wharfies today because this one was buried right in the middle of a stack. That meant getting to it would require other containers to be shifted and restacked. The labourers weren’t keen to cooperate because of the extra work involved. But the customs officers couldn’t care less. ‘The buggers get paid to move the things around, so what’s the fucking problem?’ said Craig in an aside to his older partner when the shift foreman bitched and moaned as he walked off.
The officers and their dog reached the end of the aisle and walked into bright sunshine, a cool breeze blowing the scent of salt and diesel fuel off the waters of the bay. The wharfies were shifting the containers one at a time with an enormous crane that hoisted the steel boxes up under its belly like a giant four-legged squid. It would take another half an hour at least, the agents realised, for the particular container they wanted to inspect to be freed from the stack.
The customs men sat down in the sun, out of the breeze, and soaked up the warmth. Daisy, too, took the opportunity to rest, half lying, half sitting up, her long red tongue waggling as she panted. ‘What are we looking at again?’ asked Robert, older by ten years and a considerable number of beers, all of which seemed to hang precariously over his belt.