He sank to his knees, then onto his side, the men watching as he curled protectively into a fetal position and tried to gulp air.
The elevator shuddered as it stopped. The doors clanked open, and he was once again dragged to his feet. He could not straighten up.
Someone behind him reached down between his ankles and cut apart the Flex-Cuf binding his feet together. He was able to walk, though not well, still doubled over in pain. A man on each side of him supported most of his weight, effortlessly, it seemed. Ruhi noticed for the first time that they all wore dark pants and short-sleeved white shirts. Odd attire for thugs, he thought.
They hauled him into a room the size of a basketball court, with an assortment of cables hanging from pulleys cinched to the ceiling at the far end. That’s where he was headed.
As they drew closer, he saw that the end of each cable held a shackle. But rather than string him up, the men forced him onto one of several white vinyl chairs with shiny metal legs. A heavy-looking wooden cabinet, the approximate length and width of a man’s body, lay on the floor a few feet away. He wondered if it was a coffin — or simply another means of providing slow death. His eyes returned to the other chairs, each of which had bloodstains. He thought it likely that white had been chosen to better expose the streaks and splatters. It amped up his anxiety, which had been redlining since he’d been roused from Uncle Malik’s guest room.
Only two of the men remained with him. He heard retreating footsteps very clearly, and he couldn’t help but envy those who made them.
One of the men standing in front of him wore round glasses, reminding him of John Lennon, of all people. The other, who had facial scruff much like Ruhi’s, circled behind him. Then he bent Ruhi forward, yanked up his cuffed hands, and jammed his arms over the back of the seat. A sharp pain wracked Ruhi’s shoulders.
His heart pounded. As a long-distance runner, he was acutely aware of his pulse and savvy enough to know that it wasn’t only his anxiety that was redlining; he estimated his heart was beating in the 180s, astoundingly high for a man in his fit condition. The man in the Lennon glasses picked up a chair and held it by two legs, like a bat. He appeared to be weighing the pros and cons of whacking Ruhi’s head off.
Ruhi felt himself flinching, or maybe he’d developed a tic. He wasn’t sure, and felt strangely aloof, almost clinically detached. But he wasn’t kidding himself: Any sense of distance from his circumstances would surely end with the first strong hint of pain.
Lennon, as Ruhi now thought of him, was large, but it wasn’t his broad chest or thick neck that drew his attention. It was the man’s forearms. They were bigger than Ruhi’s biceps, and each thick vein rose in relief and appeared shrink-wrapped in skin.
Lennon flipped the chair, catching the opening in the back with his index finger. With what had to have been a well-practiced twirl, he brought it upright and set it down in front of Ruhi. He stepped over the back and perched on it, less than a foot from him, so close that his boulder-like knees pressed against Ruhi’s considerably narrower ones.
“Bring it in,” Lennon shouted.
Two men entered. One carried a plywood board about six and a half feet long and two feet wide. A two-by-four had been secured by its narrow side on one end of the plywood, creating a tilt when the man laid the board on the floor.
Ruhi had a sick feeling about this. Lennon stared at him as he watched the second man set down a large white plastic bucket of water and a roll of plastic wrap, the kind usually reserved for food preservation. But Ruhi knew he was about to be waterboarded, and the only thing the plastic wrap would preserve was the extraordinary pain he was about to endure.
“So tell me, Mr. Ruhi Mancur,” Lennon said, speaking in accented English, “whom do you work for?”
“Work for?” Ruhi managed.
“I will tell you, Mr. Ruhi Mancur, that when I engage in dialogue with one of our distinguished clients, when I practice the art of conversation with him or, on those rare occasions, her, I expect an answer, not a question. So that’s the one break you’re ever going to get from me.” He nodded, as if this were fully agreed upon. “We know the games you play. We know they held you in the States, ‘questioned’ you. Tortured you. Yes, we know that, too.” He patted Ruhi’s face. “And we know they said that they were sorry and let you go. They said you were innocent.”
“It’s true,” Ruhi volunteered. “I was innocent. I am.”
Lennon sat back, shaking his head at Ruhi. “Yes, innocent. But then you jumped on a plane to Riyadh, like you could not get to your homeland soon enough. And we welcomed you, didn’t we? We didn’t stop you at the airport. We didn’t humiliate you with a full-body search. We didn’t drag you into a van and crack your head on concrete. No, we didn’t do anything but show you respect. We said, ‘Welcome to Saudi Arabia.’ Those very words. We thought, ‘Mr. Ruhi Mancur is coming home. He knows who his real friends are.’”
As Lennon spoke, he cast an occasional glance at the board. And that made Ruhi look at it, despite his fear that even a glimpse would encourage Lennon to begin the infamous torture. The two other men stood by, as if awaiting Lennon’s next instruction.
“But we did watch you, Mr. Ruhi Mancur. Just to be sure. And what did we see? Ahmed Mancur going to his father’s house on your very first night to talk to you.” He leaned into Ruhi’s face. “We heard every word. We could scarcely believe our ears. A good son of Saudi Arabia, who has every reason to hate America, comes to his homeland to support the worst elements in the kingdom.” He shook his head in what might have passed for sorrow under different circumstances. “Every word.”
Lennon nodded at the larger of the two men. “Get the straps.” Then he turned back to Ruhi. “So I’m going to ask you again, and if you are smart, Mr. Ruhi Mancur, and we think you are very, very smart, you will not ask another question. You will give only answers. So, whom do you work for?”
Ruhi looked up as the large men returned with black leather straps at least two inches wide.
“I’m not working for anyone,” Ruhi said, sickened by the sound of his own lies, for all they would soon mean.
Emma was grabbed by a man who smelled like old sweat and stale deodorant and shoved onto a bench seat near the middle of the blue bus.
“What’s your name?” another man yelled.
“Emma.”
“Emma what?”
“Emma Elkins.”
He looked at a small notebook. “You’re new.” It sounded like an accusation.
She nodded.
“Spell it.”
She did. The man wrote it down.
A girl sat next to Emma by the window, staring straight ahead. Her lip quivered. She was older and looked just as scared, which frightened Emma even more.
The man who shoved her onto the seat waved a gun in her face and shouted, “Don’t move!” with such a heavy accent that she guessed right away that the command was probably among the few words of English that he actually knew. The man with the notebook now demanded Tanesa’s name. He appeared to check it off on a list. Then he headed to the back of the bus, putting away his pen and taking out a gun.
Emma looked around as much as she dared without shifting her head. All the kids were at least fifteen or sixteen, and some looked older than that. The girl across the aisle caught her eye and held it. Emma noticed that her hands were folded in prayer, then saw that the girl right next to her also had her hands clasped. Maybe that was a prayer on her lips, not fear. Or both.
She took several studied breaths, like her mom had always told her to do before Emma lost her temper. It kind of worked. She didn’t feel so shaky.