"If you find this briefcase do not touch it! Do not attempt to open it! Call 911 immediately and get out of the area!"
MATT knew none of this at the time. He only knew that Albert and Argyle stopped showing up for the twice-daily interrogations. They put in an appearance now and then, at no predictable intervals, and asked some new questions, few of which made much sense to Matt, but never stayed longer than an hour.
Time crawled by, with no way to measure it. It might have been two weeks or it might have been six weeks. Meals arrived, sometimes when he was hungry, sometimes when he was not. After an hour they were taken away, whether he had eaten them or not. He had all the water he needed, and much more light than he desired, as the overhead fixture was never turned off. There was nothing to read, no television to watch, absolutely nothing to do but lie on the bunk or exercise. He jogged around the room, did push-ups and sit-ups, and soon was in the best shape of his life.
He slept a lot at first, and then hardly at all, to the point where he was surprised to wake up lying in the bunk.
Before long he came to actually look forward to the visits from A&A, something he would have sworn would never happen. He realized it meant they were wearing him down, and knew there was not much he could do about it. In spite of himself, he found himself asking them questions. Stupid, desperate questions.
How is the weather today?
Where are you from?
Is Susan okay?
Do you have more than one pair of argyle socks, or do you wash those every night?
Matt had always been a loner, but he found to his surprise that he did not seem to actually be hermit material. He found himself hungering for the barest hint of contact, and even though he was aware that Albert was probably doling out these hints with complete calculation, with the goal in mind of making Matt emotionally dependent on him, he soaked up the tiny bits of data like a sponge.
It's warm and sunny. Perhaps you can get out and enjoy it soon. It's entirely up to you, Matt.
I'm from Oregon. Yes, I know you are, too.
Susan is fine. Would you like to write her another postcard, tell her you're okay? Argyle never answered about the socks. Argyle never answered anything. And of course that was calculated, too.
But about halfway through his ordeal (as he estimated later), he began to adjust. He spent more and more time simply sitting. Sometimes he cleared his mind, went into a state of meditation, inventing for himself the basics of yoga. Other times his mind was very busy indeed, thinking over what had become the central problem of his life: time travel, and how to accomplish it.
It was during these times of meditation that he decided on his future course.
If he ever got out alive.
THEN one day Argyle showed up without Albert. Another well-known fact about prisoners in solitary confinement is that any change in routine, while it may be welcome in some ways, is also upsetting. When you are utterly in the power of someone else, and you don't even know who that someone else is, there is a superstitious feeling that any change is probably going to be for the worse. Matt swallowed hard, and got up from his seat on the bed.
"Am I ever going to learn your name?" he asked, trying to put on a brave face. Argyle ignored the question, as he had ignored every question Matt had ever asked. He walked up to within a pace of Matt and put his hands on his hips.
"I want you to know something," Argyle said. "I know you've been lying, right from day one. I know how to get the truth out of you, I could have you talking in fifteen minutes, tops. I could have you telling me things you didn't even know you knew. I just wanted you to know that." And he hit Matt in the nose with a right hook before Matt was even aware the man was moving. On his way down Matt caught a left jab to the stomach that explosively brought up the powdered eggs and greasy bacon and coffee he had eaten a few hours earlier. After a moment of blackness Matt found himself on his knees staring at a mixture of vomit and blood on the floor between his hands. The vomiting had stopped, but the blood was still spurting.
So this is how it begins, Matt thought. From the first he had been expecting this. In fact, he'd expected it a lot sooner. He had dueled with them for a long time, doing his best to conceal the one nugget of information that might, might, be of some use to them, and did it while always telling the truth. Always, and it hadn't been easy. He hadn't fooled them—the punch in the nose was proof of that—but he hadn't given them anything useful, either. He wasn't going to give it all up now, not after two punches, not simply because he was petrified at the very concept of torture. He had to hold out longer than that, didn't he?
So what would a movie hero do? What would Indiana Jones do? Come out with a snappy line, that's what he'd do.
Matt stared at the brown wingtips inches from his face, and at the argyle socks he had come to hate so much. "I get it," he said. "You don't wash them at all." Well, it wasn't Hasta la vista, baby, but he wasn't an indestructible machine, either.
The door was still open when Howard came in and stopped dead in his tracks. His face flushed bright red and he turned on his heel and leaned out the door.
"I want that man charged with assault and battery!" he screamed, so angry his voice came out at the high-pitched squeak that had been the bane of his school years. "I'm a witness! I want him fired, and I want him in prison!"
Howard came back into the room, shaking with fury, and strode over to the sink, where he grabbed a towel and hurried back to kneel beside Matt. He started to mop at the blood on Matt's face, but Matt pulled away and Howard just handed the towel to him. Matt used it to scrub at the back of his head.
"He spit on me," Matt explained.
There seemed to be two Howards kneeling before him. He realized his eyes were starting to swell up. He squinted one eye closed, which probably gave him the dubious expression he was going for.
"Took you long enough to get here."
"Matt, I..."
"Never mind. So what is this? Stage three of the interrogation? Start out soft, go hard, then try sweet reason? Or is there more brutality to come?"
"There was never supposed to be any brutality in the first place. That man was taking out his own frustrations, and I promise you he's going to pay for it. Here, let's go sit down and we'll talk about it." He grabbed Matt under the arm and Matt submitted, letting himself be helped to his feet, where he staggered to the table and fell heavily into a chair. The flow of blood had dried to a trickle but his nose hurt like hell. He busied himself wiping his face, giving himself time to think about this new development.
Was this staged for his benefit? Rough him up, then bring in a familiar, if not exactly beloved face, and go at him again while he's presumably at his most vulnerable?
You could sure make a case for it, but Matt couldn't buy Howard Christian as that good an actor. He looked across the table and saw a man who might be a real bear at a conference table doing a business deal, but who simply didn't have it in him to simulate the shaking hands, the sick expression.
He decided to trust him, tentatively. Matt knew himself to be a poor judge of character, not having spent a lot of time studying the human species, but he felt he'd learned a lot during his weeks in here when there was nothing at all to do but study his interrogators. He'd certainly read Argyle correctly.
"Who is it?"
Howard grimaced.
"All right, I understand you haven't told any lies, so I won't either. Part of the deal that got me in here is that I can't tell you that. Think of them as the NNSA."