“No Way?” Grgur’s voice said. “It’s Grgur. You know who I am, right?”
Someone flicked on the microphone. It picked up No Way’s voice pretty welclass="underline"
“… quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,” he was mumbling, “ verbo et opere: mea culpa- ”
“Come on, don’t worry,” Grgur said, “we’re not going to hurt you, but we do need you to answer a few questions before we take you into detention.”
“… beatum Ioannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum, omnes Sanctos…”
“Hey. Pancho? You understand? You’re getting too uptight about this. Knock it off.” They let him finish, though. Maybe they were all too Catholic to zap him in the middle of a confiteor.
“… et vos, fratres, et te, pater, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum. Amen.”
I fucked up, I thought. I’d always said I wouldn’t trust anybody, and then I’d done it anyway, and once again I’d fucked up royal “Good,” Grgur’s voice said. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to just test this for a second.” The voltmeter bar slid up to seven thousand volts and back. No Way’s body arched a bit, and there was an exhalation of air, but he didn’t scream. If you’ve felt it, you know that the pain of electricity is like nothing else, it seems to come from within your own body and not from a foreign source. It’s like your cells decided to fry themselves. I couldn’t help seeing some of the readouts, pupillary size dilating from five millimeters to seven, muscle tension bouncing from sixty-five to ninety and back, galvanic skin resistance-that is, the conductivity of the electrolytes in the skin-going up twenty percent, the whole nine yards. Leonidas Alarcon looked back at the camera, which I guess was just the little teleconferencing lens in the screen frame of Grgur’s phone. He listened to the night sounds for a minute.
“Okay,” Leonidas said.
“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur’s voice asked. His voice had a new police-trained ring to it, with less of a Slavic accent than before. He sounded bored but I got the feeling that under that he was in a hurry.
“Hey, you’re getting a hard-on,” No Way rasped in Spanish. “Check it out, he likes his work.”
“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur repeated.
“Quinones Xiloch,” No Way said. Maybe he’d decided to get this over with as fast as possible.
“Could you tell us your age, please?”
“Thirty-four.”
Grgur paused for a minute, probably watching the readouts. The electroencephalograph seemed to be set to flag peaks, troughs, and unusual concentrations of the sinusoidal alpha waves over different time intervals. Right now it was wavering between 10 and 13 Hz, which I guess polygraph devotees would call normal stress.
“Would you please tell us, what is your primary affiliation or loyalty?” Grgur asked.
“EGP,” No Way said. That is, the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.
“Would you list your military affiliations?”
“EGP only.”
“Would you tell us your position within that organization?”
“Clase de tropa,” No Way said. It was like a noncommissioned officer.
“Would you tell us your serial number?”
“There are no numbers.”
Grgur didn’t pursue it. Maybe he knew it was true. Anyway, the program recalibrated itself and marked the response as normal.
“Would you please tell us your commanding officer within that organization?”
“Carlos.” Carlos was the head of the whole movement, like Marcos had been in southern Mexico in the early nineties, and like Marcos he wore sunglasses and a bandana and nobody knew who he really was. Or whether he was even one person.
“Would you tell us the names of the other officers in your cell?”
“Rodriguez, Infante, Kauffman, Noxac, Rueda.”
“None of those check out,” Grgur said.
“Then I don’t know the real ones,” No Way said.
“Would you tell us the names of the other officers in your cell?”
“Rodriguez, Infante, Zaya-”
The voltmeter darted to ten thousand and hung there for 2.1 seconds. No Way’s backed arched and bounced and he let out a tiny whistling screech.
“That’s bullshit,” Grgur said. “Listen. Would you please tell us the name of your contact?”
“Did you come?” No Way asked.
“Who’s your current contact?”
“Nestor Xconilha.”
“Would you please tell us the name of your current controller?”
“Also Nestor Xconilha.”
“Who is your backup?” He meant the person who comes looking for you.
“I have no backup on this job.”
“When is your gone-missing date?”
“Today.”
“How long will it be before your organization starts looking for you?”
“They may be looking for me now.”
“We weren’t due to finish until tomorrow.”
“I was supposed to report today.”
“Who can we contact to back that up?”
“They won’t answer any contacts,” No Way said.
“What call signals can you give us to help you make the report?”
“No, they won’t.”
“If we let you make the contact, will you arrange for them to meet us here?”
“Sure.”
“I have a problem with your physical readings on that answer,” Grgur said.