West had never been very good at growing a beard, but he’d been without a razor long enough to leave him feeling like some pitiful creature from an Alexandre Dumas novel. They’d left him in his running shorts and T-shirt, which were now drenched in sweat and covered in filth. The poor excuse for a blanket had a hard stain that he suspected was blood along the top and bottom edges. It didn’t matter, it was much too hot to worry about a blanket. In the end, he rolled it into a ball with the dirtiest parts inside and used it for a makeshift pillow. The caged bulb high above the metal door provided the only feeble light. They’d taken his shoes, which bothered him at first, but he’d gotten used to it.
His fingernails were too long — a tiny thing, but enough to drive him deeper toward insanity. He would have bitten them down, but retained enough good sense to know the risk of infection was too great. He wondered idly if a person could keep track of the passage of time by gauging the growth of his fingernails. Probably, but he’d never paid enough attention.
Food, such as it was, came at odd intervals that he began to think of as days. Every other meal was rice and vegetable soup — singular, as in one small chunk of an unidentifiable vegetable floating in a ropy broth. Father West entertained himself trying to figure out what kind of vegetable it was. Somewhere between the soup meals came a small bowl of rice. This was usually served with a chunk of mystery meat that was even more unidentifiable than the vegetable. West was getting so thin that he’d been forced to roll the waist of his running shorts to make them stay up. Sweat ran perpetually, stinging his eyes and causing him to lose even more weight. There was a water can in the corner, containing a little extra protein in the form of swimming larvae. He drank it anyway, rationing himself at first, until he learned that a sullen guard came in every day sometime between soup and rice to fill it — and probably check to make sure he hadn’t killed himself.
He’d had no other human contact. No booking, no interrogation, no beatings, no nothing. It was as if the men who’d arrested him had simply dropped him off and forgotten he existed.
Prison was not exactly a new experience for Patrick West. He’d been locked up twice, years before taking his vows. It had been easier for him to lie then, about any number of things, especially his identity. Both the Cubans and the Russians had swallowed his story about being a Marxist student, which was the only thing that had kept him from being thrown against a wall and shot on either occasion.
He been good at it then, but he had fallen out of practice lately. His Indonesian captors knew full well that he was a priest. He’d been here for three years and was well known in both the Catholic and Muslim communities. But if his captors somehow learned of his time with the Central Intelligence Agency, well, there was no such thing as a former spy. The guards would begin to fear him, to wonder what covert mission he’d been carrying out in their country. They’d sweat him for a time, see what he knew — which was nothing, but they would never believe him. He’d eventually get thrown to the wolves of general population, where another prisoner would be allowed to murder him — or they would just leave him where he was and forget to fill the water can.
Maybe they knew about the CIA already…
He slammed his fist over and over into his own forehead, driving those thoughts from his mind. Futility would get him killed in this business.
The Clandestine Service had seemed glamorous at first — from the outside looking in — a world of fast cars, gunplay, and endless adrenaline. His instructors at The Farm, patriots all, had pulled no punches when training started. The actual work of an intelligence officer was at once boring and dangerous. They were often unarmed, or, at best, undergunned against superior numbers. It was lonely work, shrouded in lies, many of which you had to tell to people you loved. He’d met some incredible people, even run into some old friends. But in the end, he admitted to himself he was made for something different. His temperament was much better suited to saving souls than to saving democracy, which was not to say that he wasn’t an extremely gifted intelligence officer. He was an old man now, but even after all these years, it had come back to him naturally on the side of the mountain with Noonan. The social-engineering side of things was much the same as preaching religion — trying to make people see the “rightness” of your dogma over the misguidedness of their own.
He shuffled to the water bucket and stopped to take a drink, trying to avoid the larvae, when footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. It hadn’t been long enough for soup or rice. He strained his ears, soaking up what few details he could over the constant gurgle of sewage pipes and whimpering prisoners. The footsteps grew louder, then stopped in front of his cell door, followed by the jingle of keys. This was something different, and different played tricks with the mind.
West braced himself for what he assumed would come next. Questions. A river of questions. He wondered if they would start soft or resort directly to the physical stuff. He had to find some way to get a message out, to let someone know where he was. Even that was no guarantee that he wouldn’t disappear, but without it, the authorities had little incentive to keep him alive. As it stood now, the other Hashers knew he’d gone with some men in suits, but they’d been too far away to hear why. For all anyone else knew, he could have been kidnapped by a gang or Muslim extremists looking for a Christian. The church had surely filed some kind of report, but with nothing to go on, and the police themselves involved, that would accomplish little.
West hid a nervous shudder as the heavy metal door creaked open and one of the Indonesian policemen who’d arrested him beckoned forward with a flick of his wrist. He felt naked in his running shorts and filthy T-shirt.
“Turn around,” the policeman said, snapping on the handcuffs when West complied. The words were at once welcome and jarring. The other guards never spoke or even looked him in the eye. Direct communication after this long was sandpaper on his nerves. And still, he needed it so very badly. He looked over his shoulder at the officer and tried to keep from sobbing under the weight of the stress. He’d heard the others call this one Jojo shortly after the arrest.
“Can you please tell me where I am?”
Jojo ignored the question and gave him a none-too-gentle shove between the shoulder blades to get him moving.
“Walk.”
Curly fungus grew on the peeling stone of the narrow corridor, making it appear that the walls truly did have ears. What little light there was seemed pressed back into the feeble bulbs. The cells along the way had no windows, but he could hear shuffling inside most of them. He pictured filthy men, dressed in rags and hunched over with their ears pressed against the metal doors, clamoring for any form of human contact, even if it was only the sound of someone walking by.
West made two right turns before being ushered onto an elevator with polished wood paneling, surprisingly pristine, considering the state of the dungeon. The lemony furniture-polish odor of the elevator made the priest suddenly aware of his own stench. His stomach lurched as the car took them up two floors. He cowered at the bright lights of the hallway when the doors slid. The escort prodded him down a hallway of polished tile floors and blindingly white sidewalls, making another right turn before entering a ten-by-ten room with a large mirror along the wall opposite the door.
West’s heart raced when he saw his cell phone on the desk next to the second cop, a man the others had called Ajij on the day of West’s arrest. The phone’s screen displayed the passcode prompt, as if he’d been looking at it the moment before they walked in. A microphone, like the kind used in broadcast radio studios, occupied the center of the metal desk. Father West had no doubt there were cameras on the other side of the glass, recording everything that occurred.