Maybe for that reason alone, his blank stare didn’t seem as determined.
The same three men entered the frame, the one in the white smock administering the shot. As they retreated behind the camera, I was already bracing for what was to come.
It came. The man was asked his name in English, followed by Arabic, and he refused to answer, once and then twice. As with al-Hazim, the “symptoms” started.
“Are you a member of Al Qaeda?” came the next question, and again he refused to answer. But that was when things took a turn.
As his heavy body shook and convulsed, the man’s face looked as if he were in a tug-of-war. He was trying to fight the pain, not give in to it, but as his teeth gnashed and the tendons in his neck stretched so tight I thought they would snap, he opened his mouth not to scream... but to talk.
“Yes,” read the translation beneath him.
The voice of the interrogator resumed. So calmly, so eerily. “So you admit that you are a member of Al Qaeda?”
“Yes,” the man repeated.
And no sooner had he done so than the shaking, the convulsing, the outright agony he was experiencing began to dissipate. Quickly, the interrogator followed up.
“Are you aware of any plans by Al Qaeda to kill American citizens?”
Seconds passed as the man remained silent — and motionless — in the chair. He was clearly deciding what to do, how to answer. His forehead was dripping sweat. He didn’t have much time, and he knew it.
“No,” he answered. “I don’t know anything.”
He tried to sell it, his eyes pleading desperately with everyone behind the camera to believe him. The room was silent for another few seconds... and then came the sound. The handcuffs, the ankle cuffs — they began to rattle against the chair. His faced seized up, his dark eyes practically popping out of his head. Everything was starting all over, only faster and more severe.
“Yes!” he screamed. In English, no less. “Yes! Yes! I know of plans...”
And for a second time, everything stopped. No more convulsing, no more pain. No more video, either. It ended abruptly.
Owen turned to me. “Go figure, huh? Of all things, it’s the plans they didn’t want recorded.”
“How the hell did you get these?” I asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.”
“Yeah, that’s what I used to think.”
I got what he was saying. His life was never going to be the same. Maybe that was why he was eyeing my glass as I threw back the last of my whiskey.
“You want one?” I asked.
“No thanks,” he said.
But it was the way he said it, like it wasn’t even a possibility. “How old are you, by the way?”
“Nineteen.”
“Are you in school?”
“No,” he said. “I work.”
“What do you do?”
“I design artificial neurological implants.”
I stared at him blankly.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But Subway wasn’t hiring.”
The kid definitely had a snarky streak. In a good way, though. Claire would’ve liked him.
He and I were all alone in the back of the Oak Tavern, everyone else out of earshot. Still, I couldn’t help lowering my voice for what I was about to ask. It was just one of those kinds of questions. “Do you work for the CIA, Owen?”
He nodded at his phone. “Not anymore, I’m guessing.”
“And those injections, what we just watched. Did you have something to do with that?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether you think the Wright Brothers had something to do with nine-eleven,” he said. He slid out of my side of the booth and back into his before explaining. “I was working on artificial neurotransmitters for the human brain. I’m not a sap, I knew there were possible military applications. But I also knew that they were the cure for dozens of neurological diseases. Sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad.”
“Until you saw the bad with your own eyes,” I said.
“I was their missing link. They had isolated all the neurological changes, everything the brain does when we lie, but they didn’t know how to manipulate it.” He drew a deep breath, exhaling with regret well beyond his years. “I thought I was curing Alzheimer’s.”
The irony was inescapable. “They lied to you.”
“No, not exactly,” he said. “Those people in the recordings — the men in suits, the doctor — I don’t even know who they are.”
“But they know who you are, don’t they? They know you wanted to go public, and now they want you dead and anyone else you might have told.”
I leaned back, sinking into the booth as those last words of mine hung in the air for a few seconds. I’d said them thinking entirely about Claire.
That was when it dawned on me, the morning I’d had. I was leaving someone out of the proverbial risk pool. Me.
As if on cue, Owen tilted his head and, of all things, smiled. “Welcome to the club, dude.”
Book Two
Stranger Than Fiction
Chapter 30
Bretton Samuel Morris, ten months into his first term as president of the United States, shook what remained of his bourbon and rocks, the springwater ice cubes rattling against the crystal of his favorite glass. Tink-tinkity-tink.
The glass, specially commissioned from Waterford and featuring an etched American flag on one side and a bald eagle on the other, had originally been a gift to Ronald Reagan from the president of Ireland, Patrick Hillery. In total, there were four glasses in the set, but after a visit to the White House by Boris Yeltsin a few years later, only three remained. The Russian leader notoriously couldn’t hold his liquor, and since he was missing the thumb and forefinger on his left hand, he apparently couldn’t hold the glass, either.
“What time is it?” asked the president, breaking the silence of the Oval Office. He was staring out the window by the east door, which led to the Rose Garden, his back turned to the only other people in the room, his two most trusted advisors.
Clay Dobson, the chief of staff, glanced at his watch. “It’s approaching midnight, sir.”
The president drew a deep breath and then exhaled. “Yeah, that figures...”
In less than twelve hours, the Senate confirmation hearing for Lawrence Bass to become the next director of Central Intelligence was scheduled to begin. With the extensive background check long since completed, confidence in the White House had been riding high. Since the days of George Tenet, no one dared use the phrase slam dunk anymore, but everyone was certainly thinking it.
Bass, the current director of intelligence programs with the NSC, did not keep highly classified information on his unsecured home computer; he did not belong to an all-white country club; he drank socially, and sparingly at that; he paid Social Security taxes for his Guatemalan housekeeper; he did not secretly like to dress up in women’s clothing; and he did not have a thing for little girls. Or, for that matter, little boys. Lawrence Bass, the early-to-bed-early-to-rise ex-marine and Silver Star Medal recipient, had been vetted back to his diapers. Checked and rechecked. Everything had come up clean. Spic-and-span. Spotless.
The president turned from the window, facing the room. “Tell me this much, at least,” he said. “Are you absolutely sure what you’ve got is true?”
“As sure as we can be,” said Dobson, glancing down at the file in his hands. He then watched as the president nodded slowly.
“So, basically what you’re saying is... we’re screwed.”
“That’s one way to look at it, sir,” said Ian Landry, sitting cross-legged on the far sofa. The White House press secretary then shifted to his bread and butter: the spin. “On the flip side, knowing there’s a problem now sure beats the hell out of knowing it after the hearing tomorrow. At least tonight we have some options.”