The execution.
Screams. Too many screams. They have kept me awake at night, woken me from dreams and nightmares.
I do not enjoy what I do, though I am not ashamed of it, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am proud of it. It is something that has to be done, and somebody has to do it. It is because I do not enjoy it that I am good at it. I have seen the work of those who do enjoy our mutual calling, and they do not produce the best results. They get carried away, they indulge themselves rather than stick to the task in hand, which is to produce the results which are desired and to recognise them when they are produced. Instead, they try too hard, and fail.
I torture people. I am a torturer. But I do no more than I am told to do and I would rather that the people I torture told the truth, or revealed the information that they carry and which we need to know, as quickly as possible, both to spare themselves and to spare me the unpleasantness of the task because, as I say, I take no pleasure in what I have to do. Nevertheless, I do all that I am asked to do, and will always work long hours and take on extra duties if required. This is conscientiousness, and a sort of mercy because at least when I do it only the minimum is done. I have had colleagues – the ones mentioned above who enjoy what we do – who have been impatient to cause the maximum amount of pain and damage. They are, in the end, inefficient.
The clever ones pretend not to be psychotic and only indulge themselves rarely, opting for routine efficiency for the majority of the time. They’re the dangerous ones.
My favoured techniques are electricity, repeated near-suffocation and, hard though this may be to believe, simply talking. The electricity is the crudest, in a sense. We use a variable step resistor attached to the mains and a variety of common-or-garden car jump leads. Sometimes some water or conducting gel. The crocodile clips on the end of the jump leads hurt quite a bit without any current flowing through them. The ears are good sites, and fingers and toes. The genitals, obviously. The nose or tongue with the other terminal inserted into the anus is a favourite with some of my colleagues, though I dislike the resultant messiness.
Repeated near-suffocation involves gaffer-taping the subject’s mouth and then using a second small piece of tape to close the nostrils, removing it just before or just after the onset of unconsciousness. This is a useful technique for low-level subjects and for those who must be returned to some other department or security agency, or even to normal life, without any signs of injury.
Talking involves telling the subject what will happen to them if they do not cooperate. It is best done in a perfectly dark room, talking quietly and matter-of-factly from somewhere behind the chair they are secured to. First I describe what will happen to them anyway, even if they tell us everything, because there is a certain minimum, a kind of call-out fee level of torment that we have to inflict once people have been referred to us. This is to maintain our reputation and the sense of dread that must be associated with us. Fear of being tortured can be a highly effective technique for maintaining law and order in a society and I believe that we would be in dereliction of our duty if we did not do our bit.
Then I describe what I might do to them: the voltages used, the symptoms of suffocation and so on. I have studied the relevant physiology in some depth and am able to elucidate with the use of copious medical terminology. Then I describe some of the other techniques used by some of my colleagues. I mention the man whose code name is Doctor Citrus. He restricts his torture instruments to a sheet of A4 paper and a fresh lemon, using numerous – usually several dozen to start with – paper cuts distributed all over the subject’s naked body which then have a drop or two of lemon juice squeezed into them. Or salt, sometimes. Like repeated near-suffocation, this does not sound so terrible to most people, but, statistically, it is one of the most effective torture techniques that we employ. Of course our friend Doctor Citrus does not use just one sheet of paper, as any single sheet will grow moist with sweat and small amounts of blood, over time. He always has a box of paper to hand.
There are colleagues who prefer to use the tried and trusted tools of torture: thumbscrews, pincers, pliers, hammers, certain acids and, of course, fire; flame or just heat, supplied by gas burners, blowtorches, soldering irons, steam or boiling water. These are sometimes the techniques of last resort when others have failed. The subject will usually be scarred for life should they survive, and the survival rate, even if full cooperation is achieved, is not high.
Another of our colleagues likes to use cocktail sticks: hundreds of wooden cocktail sticks inserted into the soft tissues of the body. He talks too, softening the subject up psychologically by sitting in front of them and using a small penknife to slit the cocktail sticks, producing little barbs and curls of wood which will increase the pain caused both when they are inserted and when – and if – they are removed. He sits there for an hour or more with a big pile of sticks, using the tiny knife on these hundreds of little wooden slivers and detailing to the subject precisely where they will be placed. He too has some medical training and describes to the subject the thinking behind his technique as being in some ways the opposite of acupuncture, where the needles are inserted with the aim of causing little or no pain on entry and alleviating pain thereafter.
This preparatory dialogue can in itself be sufficient to produce full cooperation from the subject, though, as I say, there is a minimum level of pain which has to be inflicted in any event, just to be sure that full cooperation really has been achieved and to ensure that we, as an agency, are taken seriously.
My own talking technique is in some ways my personal favourite. I like the economy of it. I have found it is especially useful on artistic people or those of an intellectual persuasion as they tend to have their own very active imaginations and thus this technique lets these imaginations do my work for me. Over the years, some of them have even mentioned said phenomenon themselves, though this recognition would appear to make the process no less effective.
I do not like to question females. The rather obvious reason would be that their screams remind me of those of my mother when my father raped her on that never-to-be-forgotten night following her return home after the birth of my sister. However, I would prefer to think that it is simply good old-fashioned manners. A gentleman simply does not wish to subject a female to anything unpleasant. This does not stop me torturing women; it is still something that has to be done, and I am a professional, and conscientious, but I enjoy the process even less than I do when working with a male subject and I am not ashamed to admit that I have on occasion begged – literally begged – a female subject to exhibit full co-operation as quickly as possible, and I am also not ashamed to reveal that I have felt tears come to my eyes when I have had to work especially hard with a female subject.
The use of tape across the mouth, regardless of what other technique is being employed, is good for cutting down the sound of screams, which must then all exit the subject via the nasal passages – more than somewhat reduced in volume, I am relieved to be able to report.
I do draw the line at children. Some of my colleagues will happily oblige when a child must be tortured to force a parent to talk, but I think this is both morally objectionable and suspect in principle. A child ought not to have to suffer for the follies or beliefs of his or her parents, and to the extent that the techniques we employ on the subjects are in themselves a kind of punishment for subversion, treachery and lawbreaking, they ought to be applied to the guilty party, not visited upon their family or dependants. Everyone talks eventually. Everyone. Using a child to shorten the process is, in my opinion, sloppy, lazy and simply bad technique.