“Get out of here,” she said, continuing to walk away.
“But I’ve got to talk to you.”
“The hell you do. We have nothing to talk about.”
“It’s a matter of national security.”
Soraya, shaking her head in disbelief, laughed bitterly and kept on walking.
“Listen, you’re my only hope. You’re the only one open enough to listen to me.”
Rolling her eyes, she turned to face him. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Rob. Go back and lick your new master’s boots.”
“LaValle sold me out, Soraya, you know that.” His eyes were pleading. “Listen, I made a terrible mistake. I thought what I was doing would save CI.”
Soraya was so incredulous she almost laughed in his face. “What? You don’t expect me to believe that.”
“I’m a product of the Old Man. I had no faith in Hart. I-”
“Don’t use the Old Man routine with me. If you really were his product you’d never have sold us out. You’d have hung in there, become part of the solution, rather than making the problem worse.”
“You didn’t hear Secretary Halliday, the guy’s like a goddamn force of nature. I got sucked into his orbit. I made a mistake, okay? I admit it.”
“There’s no excuse for your loss of faith.”
Batt held up his hands, palms-outward. “You’re absolutely right, but, for God’s sake, look at me now. I’m being thoroughly punished, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know, Rob, you tell me.”
“I have no job, no prospect of getting one, either. My friends won’t answer my calls, and when I run into them on the street or a restaurant, they act like you did, they turn away. My wife’s moved out and taken the kids with her.” He ran his hand through his wet hair. “Hell, I’ve been living out of my car since it happened. I’m a mess, Soraya. What could be a worse punishment?”
Was it a flaw in her character that her heart went out to him? Soraya wondered. But she showed no trace of sympathy, simply stood, silent, waiting for him to continue.
“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Listen-”
“I don’t want to listen.”
As she began to turn away again, he shoved a digital camera into her hand. “At least take a look at these photos.”
Soraya was about to hand it back, then she figured she had nothing to lose. Batt’s camera was on, and she pressed the REVIEW button. What she saw was a series of surveillance photos of General Kendall.
“What the hell?” she said.
“That’s what I’ve been doing since I got canned,” Batt said. “I’ve been trying to find a way to bring down LaValle. I figured right away that he might be too tough a nut to crack quickly, but Kendall, well, he’s another story.”
She looked up into his face, which shone with an inner fervor she’d never seen before. “How d’you figure that?”
“Kendall’s restless and bitter, chafing under LaValle’s yoke. He wants a bigger piece of the action than either Halliday or LaValle is willing to give him. That desire makes him stupid and vulnerable.”
Despite herself, she was intrigued. “What have you found out?”
“More than I could’ve hoped for.” Batt nodded at her. “Keep going.”
As Soraya continued to scroll through the photos her heart started to hammer in her chest. She peered closer. “Is that… Good God, it’s Rodney Feir!”
Batt nodded. “He and Kendall met up at Feir’s health club, then they went to dinner, and now they’re here.”
She looked up at him. “The two of them are here at The Glass Slipper?”
“Those are their cars.” Batt pointed. “There’s a back room. I don’t know what goes on in there, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. General Kendall is a God-fearing family man, goes to church with his family and LaValle’s every Sunday like clockwork. He’s very active in the church, very visible there.”
Soraya saw the light at the end of her own personal tunnel. Here was a way to get both her and Tyrone off the hook. “Two birds with one photo shoot,” she said.
“Yeah, only trouble is how to get back there to snap ’em. It’s invitation only, I checked.”
A slow smile spread across Soraya’s face. “Leave that to me.”
For what seemed a long time after Kendall had kicked him until he vomited, nothing happened. But then, Tyrone had already taken note that time seemed to have slowed down to an agonizing crawl. A minute was made up of a thousand seconds, an hour consisted of ten thousand minutes, and a day-well, there were simply too many hours in a day to count.
During one of the periods when his hood was taken off, he walked back and forth the narrow width of the room, not wanting to go near the far end with its ominous waterboarding tub.
Somewhere inside him he knew he’d lost track of time, that this slippage was part of the process to wear him down, open him up, and turn him inside out. Moment by moment he felt himself sliding down a slope so slick, so steep that whatever he did to try to hold on to it failed. He was falling into darkness, into a void filled only with himself.
This, too, was calculated. He could imagine one of Kendall’s underlings coming up with a mathematical formula for how far a subject should break down each hour of each day he was subject to incarceration.
Ever since he had suggested to Soraya that he might be useful to her he’d been reading up on how to handle himself in the worst situations. There was a trick he’d come across that was useful to him now-he needed to find a place in his mind where he could withdraw when the going got really rough, a place that was inviolable, where he knew he’d be safe no matter what was done to him.
He had that place now, he’d been there several times when the pain of kneeling with his arms locked high behind him became too much even for him. But there was one thing that frightened him: that damn trough on the other side of the room. If they decided to waterboard him he was done. For as far back as he could remember he’d been terrified of drowning. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t even float. Every time he’d tried to do either he’d choked, had to be hauled from the water like a three-year-old. He’d soon given up, figuring it didn’t matter. When was he going to go sailing or even lie on a beach? Never.
But now the water had come to him. That damn trough was waiting, grinning like a whale about to swallow him whole. He was no Jonah, he knew that. That fucking thing wasn’t going to spit him out alive.
He looked down, saw that the hand he held out in front of him was trembling. Turning away, he pressed it against the wall, as if the cinder block could absorb his unreasoning terror.
He started as the sound of the door being unlocked ricocheted around the small space. In came one of the NSA zombies, with dead eyes and dead breath. He put down the tray of food and left without even glancing at Tyrone, all part of the second phase of the plan to break him down: make him think he didn’t exist.
He went over to the tray. As usual, his food consisted of cold oatmeal. It didn’t matter; he was hungry. Taking up the plastic spoon, he took a bite of the cereal. It was gummy, had no taste whatsoever. He almost gagged on the second bite because he was chewing on something other than oatmeal. Aware that his every move was monitored, he bent over, spit out the mouthful. Then he used the fork to paw open a folded piece of paper. There was something written on it. He bent over further to make out the letters.
DON’T GIVE UP, it read.
At first, Tyrone couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he read it again. After reading it a third time, he scooped the message up with another bite of oatmeal, chewed it all slowly and methodically, and swallowed.
Then he went over to the stainless-steel toilet, sat down on the edge, and wondered who had written that note and how he could communicate with him. It wasn’t until some time later that he realized this one brief message from outside his tiny cell had managed to restore the balance he’d lost. Inside his head, time resolved itself into normal seconds and minutes, and the blood began once again to circulate through his veins.