The hours passed slowly. Richard vaguely recalled lurching to a halt, and his body being thrown out of the truck and then dragged down a dark stairway into a subterranean prison cell. His left hand had been cuffed to a large, heavy iron ring that protruded from the side of a cold, dark cell wall. He could only assume that they were in the basement of the Inzar Ghar safe house, located, from what he could remember, on the Pakistan side of the Sefid Koh.
The pounding pain in his temples quickly became unbearable. Richard had experienced chronic and debilitating headaches ever since he’d suffered an upper back injury in basic training. The intensity of the headaches was multiplied tenfold by the back spasms that came along with them. This particular problem had led him from aspirin, to Tylenol, to ibuprofen, and ultimately, when his life started to fall apart, to narcotics. Vicodin was his current drug of choice, only because it was readily available over the Internet. Some part of his brain realized that the various opiates, real and synthetic, led to ever-greater dysfunction. Another part of his brain justified and enabled the addiction. After all, he was taking medicine, not street drugs. Medicine that had initially been prescribed by doctors. He suffered chronic pain and was entitled to relieve it. He wasn’t an addict, and he didn’t use needles. He had a condition, like diabetes, that required medication to alleviate the symptoms. He had a job that carried with it great responsibility. He was functional, and the USA had a crying need for his services. In fact, had he not been told by Baxter that he was the one, the only one, who had the qualifications to do this?
On a more immediate and rational level, Richard knew that he’d never be able to perform those services, or take care of Jennifer, if his hands were tied by debilitating pain and the inevitable withdrawal that would come from a lack of medication. He knew how bad it would get, and how useless it would make him. The back spasms alone would have him paralyzed and completely helpless. He was able to reach, with his free hand, into his inside jacket pocket, where he’d hidden the bottle of Vicodin. He fumbled with it, sweating and cursing, trying to undo the tamperproof lid with one hand and his teeth. In his agitation, he dropped the open bottle on the ground, where it rolled, spilling about five of the pills. He was able to bring the bottle back toward him with his foot, and then started doing the same with the small white pills. Anchored to the wall by the handcuffs and the iron ring, he scraped the little pile of pills to within half an inch of his reach, less maybe. He pulled harder against the cuffs and ring, getting closer and closer, and was finally able to reach one, which he picked up and brought hungrily to his mouth. He was able to do the same with a second, and a third, and…
“Richard, what the hell are those?” asked Jennifer, who was similarly manacled on the opposite wall. “What are those little pills?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing really. Just some stuff for my head. I have an upper back injury, and—”
“Richard, I’m with the CIA, OK? I know the signs. I know a little bit about your history. What are they? Oxycontin? Percodan?”
“I have chronic pain, Jen. Maybe you can’t understand that. But I need those pills. I won’t be functional without them. They’re Vicodin.”
“Oh Jesus Christ,” she snorted. “Now Langley is sending drug addicts along to do high stakes missions. Why on earth did they send you, anyway?”
“Look, I’m not all that burned out. I’ve had some problems. Most people know that. I had a couple of marriages turn on me. My eyes went and I couldn’t fly the Tomcats anymore. I had a nasty injury in basic training. Fractured a couple of vertebrae in my back. Set me back six months. Then I had to redo basic with an injury like that. I basically had to ignore the pain all the way through, just to qualify.”
“So?” said Jennifer.
“What do you mean, ’so’?” he retorted. “Try walking that road for a mile or two. And I’m telling you, Jen, without those pills the pain will make me totally useless. We’ll be worse off than we already are.”
Jennifer bit her lip. “Sorry, Richard. This is the last place we should be arguing. The whole world knows what happened to Zak Goldberg. These are probably the guys who did that. We don’t want to go there. We should be working together, to figure out how to get out of this.”
“So nice of you to mention Zak,” responded a straining Richard. “When my parents died, Zak’s family took me in. I grew up with him. I heard the President read the coroner’s report. I saw his body at the airport when Trufit brought me in. Dismembered him, skinned him, while he was still alive…” His voice trailed away, but he continued to reach for the pills on the ground.
Jennifer didn’t respond, but watched him quietly. How extraordinary, she thought. He was actually expending more effort to get his drugs than he was to get out of this cell. Richard was pulling as hard against the handcuffs as he could, striving with all his might to reach the last three Vicodin, which were lying just outside his reach. He put one foot against the wall and pushed against it as hard as he could, reaching with his only free arm. The handcuffs dug brutally into the wrist of his manacled hand, and Jennifer worried that he might actually wrench a ligament or pull a joint from its socket. But the last pills remained just out of reach, no matter what he did.
Richard continued to reach, determined to either get the pills or dislocate a wrist, elbow, or shoulder in trying. He didn’t care about the pain from the handcuffs. That was temporary. The pain in his back would be much, much worse.
All of a sudden he lurched forward, smashing his head against the hard stone flooring of the cell. More blinding pain, more stars, more wretched borderline consciousness. Why the hell had he ever joined the military, let alone the CIA? Then he realized where he was. On the floor. With the Vicodin. He turned around, scooped up the last three pills, and popped them into his mouth, dry swallowing them.
“Um, Richard? I know you’re busy just now, but there’s something you should notice here,” Jennifer said, as politely as she could manage.
“What’s that?”
“You’re free. Well, more or less. At least, you’re no longer manacled to the wall. I think that’s more important right now than the drugs.”
Richard, in his desperate struggle to get to the Vicodin, had missed the fact that the iron ring had come clean out of the wall. It had been anchored into the concrete by a metal prong, some ten inches in length, for God knew how many decades. The moisture, and likely overuse of the cell, had caused the prong to rot, and the pressure Richard had put on it had worked it loose. Richard looked around in amazement, flexing his hands. His increasingly drug-addled mind was struggling to come to terms with this change in position when he noticed that when he’d fallen forward, he’d landed right on a chunk of bone. In his unbalanced state, his focus rapidly changed from his freedom to the bone.
“What the hell is this, Jen?” he asked, holding the bone up to the light.
“It’s a piece of bone. I think it’s a tibia. Look, it’s shattered on one end, but intact at the other. See, there are a few pieces of ligaments still hanging from it,” said Jennifer.
“What a bunch of evil, vicious bastards these guys are,” said Richard in disgust. “Probably tortured some guy to death right here.”
Then it hit him. The moment of epiphany. The shocking horror of death. “Jen, it was Zak. This came out of Zak,” whispered Richard hoarsely.
“You don’t know that, Richard. It’s a stretch,” she said quietly, hoping he was wrong.
“Oh my God, it must have. Remember the President at that press conference? He said that one tibia had been torn from Zak’s body, and hadn’t been found. This is where they did it. Right here, in this cell. This is the torture chamber. Oh my God,” breathed Richard.