You are a caged animal, and now you’re about to find out just what they can do to a man when they yank him out from behind bars.
He had thought they were going to bring out the long knives this morning, but they’d run him through that endless lie detector test instead. He knew he’d failed. How could he have passed? He’d been so anxious that he never stopped sweating. The needle tracking his emotions must have turned the page into scribbles worthy of a toddler. The exam had run the gamut of his life, but this morning, at least, they were interested only in prying answers out of him — not fingernails.
The polygraph had come on the heels of hours of interrogation last night. They were clearly unhappy with his denials. He’d pleaded with them, and all he got for his efforts were stony faces, the same grim expressions that greeted his every answer on this morning’s test.
Torture had to be next. Wasn’t that the drill? He thought he’d read that somewhere. Probably in an op-ed piece in the Post or Times. They start soft, then hammer hard.
They would have to get tough. He sure would, if he were in their position. With the entire country grinding its teeth over the coming collapse of the grid — for good, this time — his warders could ill afford to take a leisurely pace to his undoing.
Son of a bitch.
As much as he hated his cell — barely long enough for a bunk, and so narrow that he could reach out and flatten both hands against the walls — he didn’t want to leave it. Not now. And no lunch? Even gruel would be a diversion.
The answer came to him on a wave of dread: They don’t want me vomiting on them.
Where the hell were his friends? His colleagues at the NRDC? Nobody had been trying to help him. That’s what his inquisitors had told him.
“You’re a real popular guy,” a guard said to Ruhi yesterday.
He figured that all the guards’ words were scripted down to the last syllable to make him feel weak, alone, isolated — dependent on his jailers. But here was the rub about Ruhi’s friends: He had seen no evidence that the asshole guard was wrong. Zero. Zilch.
Why weren’t lawyers banging on the courthouse doors demanding a writ of habeas corpus? Oh, that’s right, he scolded himself, because detainees don’t have constitutional rights anymore. No opportunity to face an accuser — the U.S. government, in this case — by standing up in court to demand to see the evidence against them, until, that is, they’d been sufficiently tortured to tell any lie that would make the agony stop. Then, and only then, did they get to go to court and hear how they had, in effect, indicted themselves.
Maybe the courts weren’t even operating anymore.
It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to indict myself in this place, he vowed. Though the implications made his legs feel weak, he shook his head and promised himself that he wouldn’t turn his life into a sham for the sake of unseen interrogators — the ones who reputedly watched the torture of detainees from a distance.
In seconds, he heard a metallic click from the door. A command came next:
“Hands out.”
A waist-high slot slid open. He stuck out his hands. After they were cuffed, a slot by his feet opened, and his ankles were manacled.
“Step away.”
He withdrew his hands and took tiny steps back, making sure not to trip.
Someone looked in, although he was sure they had cameras secreted in the cell.
Now a series of clicks signaled that the steel bars in the door were retracting all the way. It happened so quickly that it made him think of man-eating creatures rearing back on their hind legs to spring at him.
Two huge guards in dark blue uniforms walked in. One ran a chain from Ruhi’s handcuffs to his ankle manacles, and then drew it tight before locking it in place.
By design, he could move only slowly. By desire, he did not want to leave his cell any faster than necessary, for what could await him but the worst?
Even so, stepping outside did provide some relief. He was chained, but no longer sealed up like an anchovy in a factory ship.
Relief proved both scant and brief.
“Where are we going?” he asked as respectfully as he could.
“The prisoner will not speak unless he is spoken to,” said the guard to Ruhi’s right. He gripped his bicep hard, with a hand so big that it wrapped all the way around his arm.
The two men led him to an elevator. The buttons on the control panel were not labeled. The doors closed. The elevator dropped so quickly that Ruhi’s empty stomach lurched.
When the doors opened, he saw nothing but metal cages lining a corridor. The passageway was scarcely wide enough to accommodate him and the guard in blue, who continued to apply hard pressure to his arm.
The other guard walked ahead, spine straight, shoulders back.
Both of the men moved too quickly for Ruhi’s comfort. His ankle manacles chafed with every step as he tried desperately to keep up.
Then he heard a growl. Deep. Throaty.
In moments they were passing a kennel on his left.
It’s empty. So whatever it was must be—
“Fuck!” he yelled as a black German shepherd lunged from the shadows and crashed into the cyclone-fence barrier. It was all that stood between Ruhi and the most vicious display of animal fury that he had ever witnessed.
The beast was on its hind legs, snarling and tearing at the kennel — mere inches from him.
The guard forced Ruhi to stop and face the crazed creature, pushing him so close to the steel mesh that Ruhi could smell the dog’s gamy breath.
“Meet your cell mate,” the guard said.
They choreograph it to make you feel scared, he tried to reassure himself as they moved on.
Farther along, they entered a well-lit corridor with cinder-block walls. But he still heard that dog howling, and then noticed reddish-brown smears on the wall. Stains. Dried blood.
“Did I say that you could look at that?” the man holding his arm asked.
Ruhi shook his head.
The guard squeezed harder. “I asked you a question.”
Ruhi’s arm was going numb. “No, you didn’t say I could look.”
“But as long as you’re so curious, do you know what we call that shit?”
“No.”
“Terrorist graffiti. We use you guys like spray cans. Certain colors explode right out. The reds, and the—”
The guard in front interrupted his colleague by opening a door. Ruhi was led into a room containing a wooden armchair with a spotlight directly above it. Otherwise the room was dark. The chair legs were bolted to the floor.
With a shove, the guard released his arm and forced him onto the seat. Another spotlight beamed a second later — on a tub in the corner of the room. A hose, long wooden board, and sheet lay next to it.
As Ruhi’s ankles were released from the manacles, they were bound to the leg of the chair with a thick, Velcro-lined material.
Both guards secured his arms and wrists. That’s when Ruhi noticed indentations in the wood for his hands.
The guards cinched each finger as tight as a racing saddle. Ruhi could not flex so much as a knuckle. Only the tips were exposed.
“What are you guys doing?” he asked. “I swear, I’ve told you everything I know.”
Deputy Director Holmes watched Ruhi Mancur on his large wall monitor. He was intensely interested in seeing the detainee’s reactions to the most miserable threats — and nobody was better at issuing them than the guard nicknamed “Tire Iron.”
“We don’t really think of these as fingers.” Tire Iron’s voice arose from the screen as he strummed a series of Ruhi’s fingernails. “We think of them as memory aids. Sometimes it’s a miracle, the shit that comes to mind once we get a firm grip on the situation.”