"Furthermore," he continued, speaking the words without looking at the scroll. "I, Ywe Hao, daughter of Ywe Kai-chang and Ywe Sha . . ."
She felt her stomach fall away. Her parents . . . Kuan Yin! How had they found that out?
". . . confess also to the charge of belonging to an illegal organization and to plotting the downfall of his most high eminence—"
She stood, shouting back at him. "This is a lie! I have confessed nothing!" The guards dragged her down onto the stool again. Across from her Yen 1
T'ung stared at her as one might stare at an insect, with an expression of profound 3
disgust.
"What you have to say has no significance here. You are here only to listen to your confession and to sign it when I have finished."
She laughed. "You are a liar, Yen T'ung, in the pay of liars, and nothing in Heaven or Earth could induce me to sign your piece of paper."
There was a flash of anger in his eyes. He raised a hand irritably. At the signal one of his young men crossed the room and slapped her across the face, once, then again, stinging blows that brought tears to her eyes. With a bow to his master, the man retreated behind the sedan.
Yen T'ung sat back slightly, taking a deep breath. "Good. Now you will be quiet, woman. If you utter another word I will have you gagged."
White Mountain 415
She glared back at him, forcing her anger to be pure, to be the perfect expression of her defiance. But he had yet to finish.
"Besides," he said softly, "there is no real need for you to sign."
He turned the document, letting her see. There at the foot of it was her signature—or, at least, a perfect copy of it.
"So now you understand. You must confess and we must read your confession back to you, and then you must sign it. That is the law. And now all that is done, and you, Ywe Hao, no longer exist. Likewise your family. All data has been erased from the official record."
She stared back at him, gripped by a sudden numbness. Her mother. . . they had killed her mother. She could see it in his face.
In a kind of daze she watched them lift the chair and carry the official from the room.
"You bastard!" she cried out, her voice filled with pain. "She knew nothing . . . nothing at all."
The door slammed. Nothing. . .
"Come," one of the guards said softly, almost gently. "It's time."
OUTSIDE WAS hea T—F iFTYCH'iOFHEAT. Through a gate in the wire fencing, a flight of a dozen shallow steps led down into the bunkers. There the icy coolness was a shock after the thirty-eight degrees outside. Stepping inside was like momentarily losing vision. Chen stopped there, just inside the doorway, his heart pounding from exertion, waiting for his vision to normalize, then moved on slowly, conscious of the echo of his footsteps on the hard concrete floor. He looked about him at the bareness of the walls, the plain unpainted-metal doors, and frowned. Bracket lights on the long, low-ceilinged walls gleamed dimly, barely illuminating the intense shadow. His first impression was that the place was empty, but that, like the loss of vision, was only momentary. A floor below—through a dark, circular hole cut into the floor—were the cells. Down there were kept a thousand prisoners, fifty to a cell, each shackled to the floor at wrist and ankle, the shortness of the chains making them crouch on all fours like animals.
It was Chen's first time below. Drake stood beside him, silent, letting him judge things for himself. The cells were simple divisions of the open-plan floor—no walls, only lines of bars, each partitioned space reached by a door of bars set into the line. All was visible at a glance, all the misery and degradation of these thin and naked people. And that, perhaps, was the worst of it—the openness, the appalling openness. Two lines of cells, one to the left and one to the right. And between, not recognized until he came to them, were the hydrants. To hose down the cells and swill the excrement and blood, the piss and vomit, down the huge, grated drains that were central to the floor of each cell.
Chen looked on, mute, appalled, then turned to face Drake. But Drake had changed. Or, rather, Drake's face had changed; had grown harder, more brutish, as if in coming here he had cast off the social mask he wore above, to reveal his true face; an older, darker, more barbaric face.
Chen moved on, willing himself to walk, not to stop or turn back. He turned his head, looking from side to side as he went down the line of cells, seeing how the prisoners backed away—as far as their chains allowed. Not knowing him, yet fearing him. Knowing him for a guard, not one of their own.
At the end he turned and went to the nearest cell, standing at the bars and staring into the gloom, grimacing with the pain and horror he was feeling. He had thought at first there were only men, but there were women too, their limbs painfully emaciated, their stomachs swollen, signs of torture and beatings marking every one of them. Most were shaven-headed. Some slouched or simply lay there, clearly hurt, but from none came even the slightest whimper of sound. It was as if the very power to complain, to cry out in anguish against what was being done to them, had been taken from them.
He had never seen . , . never imagined . . .
Shuddering, he turned away, but they were everywhere he looked, their pale, uncomplaining eyes watching him. His eyes looked for Drake and found him there, at the far end.
"Is . . . ?" he began, then laughed strangely and grew quiet. But the question remained close to his tongue and he found he had to ask it, whether these thousand witnesses heard him or not. "Is this what we do?"
Drake came closer. "Yes," he said softly. "This is what we do. What we're contracted to do."
Chen shivered violently, looking about him, freshly appalled by the passive suffering of the prisoners; by the incomprehensible acceptance in every wasted face. "I don't understand," he said, after a moment. "Why? What are we trying to do here?"
His voice betrayed the true depth of his bewilderment. He was suddenly a child again, innocent, stripped bare before the sheer horror of it.
"I'm sorry," Drake said, coming closer. His face was less brutish now, almost,! compassionate; but his compassion did not extend beyond Chen; he spared noth-1 ing for the others. "There's no other way. You have to see it. Have to come down| here and see it for yourself, unprepared." He raised his shoulders. "This—what you're feeling now. We've all felt that. Deep down we still do. But you have to have that first shock. It's . . . necessary."
"Necessary?" Chen laughed, but the sound seemed inappropriate. It died in his throat. He felt sick, unclean.
"Yes. Necessary. And afterward—once it's sunk in—we can begin to explain it all to you. And then you'll see. You'll begin to understand."
But Chen didn't see. In fact, he couldn't see how he would ever understand. He looked at Drake afresh, as if he had never seen him before that moment, and began to edge around him, toward the steps and the clean, abrasive heat outside, and when Drake reached out to touch his arm, he backed away, as if the hand that reached for him were something alien and unclean.
"This is vile. It's ..."
But there wasn't a word for it. He turned and ran, back up the steps and out—out through icy coolness to the blistering heat.
it was late NIGHT. A single lamp burned in the long, wood-walled room. Chen sat in a low chair across from Debrenceni, silent, brooding, the drink in his hand untouched. He seemed not to be listening to the older man, but every word had his complete attention.
"They're dead. Officially, that is. In the records they've already been executed. But here we find a use for them. Test out a few theories. That sort of thing. We've been doing it for years, actually. At first it was all quite unofficial. Back in the days when Berdichev ran things there was a much greater need to be discreet about these things. But now . . ."