[Alex Vane 03.0] The Mockingbird Drive

by AC Fuller

  Before I knew what was happening, I was on a wooden plank, tilted such that my head was below my feet. I was looking straight into a bright light until a black cloth was tied over my eyes and secured in some way I couldn't see. Ear-hair jammed my head between a lightly padded restraint. Dreadlocks strapped my feet, chest, and arms to the plank.

  Then I heard Holly's voice. "Alex, I know you're scared. But you have no reason to be. We're here to help you. Bonnie and I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't necessary. We just have a few questions for you. Is that alright?"

  Her voice was back to the generic tone. Her lovely accent gone.

  "I know you might be afraid," she continued, "but just say yes, or even grunt if you understand. I just need you to answer a few questions and then you'll be heading back to Greta, okay?"

  "Go to hell." Kind of a weak response, I admit, but at the time I really meant it. I hated her more than anyone in the world. Despite the blindfold, I could see her face in my mind. Creamy skin dotted with freckles. A smile that could start a war. But as I listened to her I imagined myself not just hurting her but inflicting pain. Running her over with a car, but just clipping her so she couldn't move, then backing over her limbs until they were mush.

  "Alex, please. This could take ten minutes if you were cooperative."

  "I won't be," I said.

  "Did you make any copies?" she asked.

  I said nothing.

  "Did you make any copies of the recording?"

  I thought of Greta.

  "Where is the drive itself?"

  It was stowed in my closet, but, again, I said nothing.

  Next I heard rapid footsteps, someone walking across the room. Then a slight splash of water on the floor. A few drops hit my hand.

  My heart twisted in my chest. I screamed, "Nooooooo," but it wasn't going to do any good. I was about to be waterboarded.

  "Go easy on him," Holly said. "He's soft. His heart could stop."

  "Wouldn't be the end of the world." It was Bonnie's voice.

  The last I'd hear for three minutes.

  There really aren't words for it. The water started slowly, flowing through the rag across my mouth and dripping and trickling down my throat. I've heard it's like drowning, but I don't really know what drowning is like. I felt the water pooling in my throat. I tried to spit it out, to gag or cough, but the angle on the board and my inability to move made that impossible.

  Fifteen seconds of water, then about a minute of nothing. Silence from Holly and Bonnie as I gagged and panicked. I knew what Holly meant. My heart could stop.

  Almost as bad as the physical part were the thoughts racing through my head. The closest thing I've ever experienced was when I'd stayed up all night drinking Red Bull and coffee, then taken one hit of some potent strain of legal weed that Bird had. At first, I'd had some paranoid thoughts, but the caffeine and stimulants kept speeding them up until they moved through my mind so fast that I crashed, literally. I blacked out and fell into a table.

  But with waterboarding, there's no blacking out. Every time I came close, Bonnie stopped.

  "Where did you get the recording?" Bonnie screamed, inches from my face.

  The next thing I knew, Holly was crouching next to me, whispering in my ear. Her accent was back. "Alex, you have the wrong idea about us. We're not even slightly mad at you. We don't care about you at all. We are paid professionals. Security experts. We're just doing our job here. Don't pretend like you don't know stuff like this goes on all the time. Please don't pretend that. It's utterly disrespectful to the men and women who have to carry out tasks like this to keep you safe."

  Of course I knew that things like this happened. I'd donated twenty bucks to the ACLU after Abu Ghraib. I knew about Guantanamo. But I'd always imagined stuff like this happening to other people. People elsewhere. Maybe not all of them were guilty, but it didn't happen to people who weren't putting themselves in bad positions.

  When you're being tortured, your mind starts doing gymnastics, trying to find a way out of what's happening. In the span of twenty minutes, I went from hating Holly's guts, to loving her and deeply regretting anything I'd done to offend her. At one point, my mind started playing scenes from movies with strong, authoritarian speeches, like Full Metal Jacket: "If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit!"

  I think this was my mind's way of putting what was happening in some kind of context. You see, people like me, whose problems in life have mostly been psychological, or philosophical, don't know what to do when the threat becomes existential.

  Holly was still speaking. "The thing is, Alex, there are two kinds of people in America. People who understand that things like this are necessary to keep things from devolving, and people who look to a bright, utopian future, and think things like this shouldn't be."

  I said, "I swear I don't know where Quinn is."

  "Have it your way," Holly said.

  Bonnie resumed the water, this time for longer. Twice, then three times, then five, and I lost track after that.

  I didn't get used to it, each time was worse than the last. Waterboarding isn't a simulation of death. It is your body actually approaching death.

  After the last time, Holly was back in my ear. "I'm sorry about that, Alex. Truly. It wasn't necessary."

  I loved her in that moment. I really did. It was the most transparent good cop, bad cop routine ever, but it didn't matter. I loved her and would have done anything to make her happy. The thing about being close to death is that it makes other things not matter. If they were trying to manipulate me, it was working.

  "Where did you get the recording?" Holly asked.

  Without thinking, before my mind could even process a thought, I said, "Innerva." It was like my body shot the word out before my mind could hold it back. Like as a kid, when I'd intend to lie to my mom, but she'd look at me so sweetly that I'd just admit the truth.

  "Good," Bonnie said.

  "And where is Quinn Rivers?"

  "I don't know," I stammered, but as I finished the last word a blow struck my solar plexus, causing me to gasp for air.

  Holly said, "That really wasn't necessary, Bonnie. Alex is one of the good guys. He's just misguided right now."

  When I got my wind back, I said, "She left me in Eugene. I haven't heard from her since. I swear."

  "Where's Innerva?"

  "I don't know." I tightened my abs as I said it, anticipating a blow. But it didn't come.

  Bonnie said, "You met with her at The Wynn."

  "I did. She gave me the drive. Said she was disappearing. If you know anything about her, you'll believe me. She would never have told me where she was going."

  "Is there any more to the recording?"

  "No."

  "You're lying."

  As much as I loved Holly, I still hated Bonnie. "Screw you."

  I could share all the grisly details, but I won't. I'd long since realized that they didn't care about the drive, about the fact that Quinn had leaked the story to the Chinese press. They only cared about the recording.

  We went back and forth for another hour, two hours, five hours. I don't know how long, but it felt like an eternity. Punching, waterboarding, then a break. Sometimes, everyone would disappear for a few minutes, maybe to give me a break, maybe to communicate with Amand or others. Then they'd come back and we'd do another round.

  But I guess that they never got the authorization to kill me, because, after I'd passed out for the tenth or eleventh time, everything stopped.

  Chapter 32

  Wednesday, June 21, 2017

  When I woke up, the room was black and silent. Terror.

  I could still feel the water in my throat and I gagged. But there was no water. Then I thought I was in the bo
x again. I tried to move my hand, but couldn't. I crinkled my nose and puffed out my cheeks, which seemed to be moving alright. I wriggled my toes.

  Within a minute, I could move my arms and legs. I wasn't in the box.

  I pushed myself up by the elbows and tried to sit up straight, but my stomach and back muscles wouldn't contract, so I collapsed in on myself and tumbled to the floor.

  I was in my apartment. The grain of the wood floor was familiar and I could see the light coming from the living room through the crack under the door. I scooted over to the door and opened it. Morning light streamed in from the living room, brighter than I expected. It was late-morning sun.

  I propped myself up on the arm of the couch until I felt confident enough to take a step, then stumbled toward the built-in phone on the wall. I dialed the front desk.

  A familiar female voice answered, but I didn't know her name. "Hello, Mr. Vane, how can I help you?"

  "What time did I get home?"

  "One of those nights, huh? I've been there. The overnight desk clerk told me you were brought up to your apartment by a couple of friends. Middle of the night. Dead drunk, he said."

  I hung up without saying anything. I knew that, when I asked Dexter, it would turn out that my two bros were Dreadlocks and Ear-hair.

  Once I knew who and where I was, and that I was safe, my first thought was of Greta. She'd been taken, and released. It was my fault. I saw myself standing on the sidewalk after the meeting with Gunstott, waiting for the CNN video to load, the needle in my arm, the box.

  And the torture.

  It didn't come back in the form of memory. I certainly could have remembered it, in the sense that, if I'd tried, I could recall the details. But instead, it came as a series of bodily sensations—creeping, crawling feelings of discomfort, asphyxiation, and, from time to time, uncontrollable panic.

  I dialed Greta, not knowing what I'd say if she picked up, but I didn't have to wait long to figure it out.

  "Alex, what happened? Where are you?"

  "I…I was taken. How are you? I know what happened. I mean, I heard what happened."

  "I'm okay. The police have no idea who took me, or why."

  "They didn't say anything or…do anything?"

  "Nothing. The cops think it may have been some horrible prank or something."

  I didn't know if I should tell her the whole truth right away. The phone felt like a hunk of lead in my hand, and it was taking everything I had just to stand there and talk. I would tell her, just not now. I listened to her breathing and, out of nowhere, my eyes started watering. I rarely cry, and when I do, it's usually the result of a long string of thoughts that make me sadder and sadder until a few tears squeeze their way out. But standing there in the kitchen, between the long silences, hot tears began rolling.

  I said, "I was going to meet you Sunday morning. I was the new client."

  "I know."

  "You…how?"

  "I figured it out a couple days ago. My assistant thought it was weird that a new client would book me for a full day without ever having worked with me. It wasn't hard for her to figure out what was going on."

  "I feel like an idiot. It was…I don't know. I was trying to…"

  There are awkward silences and comfortable silences. And, as I looked around my apartment, I knew that this was one of our old, comfortable silences. A silence in which she could see through me, but I didn't care because I knew she loved me anyway. It hung in the air for a long time, until the warm sun gleaming off the floors blurred my vision. My head screamed with a piercing pain, but I didn't care. I looked out at the Puget Sound long enough to see a ferry boat make its way into the ferry terminal, leaving a low wake behind it as it cut through the water.

  I was still crying, but I wasn't sad. I felt broken, ashamed, and grateful to be alive. "Can I ask you something?" I said to Greta.

  "You want to know if I was planning to show up, right?"

  She knew me. Despite everything, I needed to find out if I had any hope with her.

  "I wasn't going to at first. At first, I was pissed. But then I thought about how I got you added to the No Fly List. About how some of the things that went wrong with us were actually my fault. Did you really call Dexter Park?"

  "I did. Well, I had Mia call him. Yoga. Couples counseling. And pork buns from Mee Sum."

  The line was quiet for a while, then she said, "I was going to show up."

  What hit me then was that I didn't know if we'd live together again or stay married. But I knew that I was royally screwed up, and I would need her help to get myself right again, if that was even possible.

  She said, "Alex, what's been going on? My assistant said that Mia said you'd been out of town. And now the news about the shooting not being what they said before. Did something happen?"

  "Can we get together tonight? No pressure, no expectations. But can we?"

  She agreed, and I promised I'd explain everything, but first I needed to make sure this thing was over. I searched for my cellphone, which Dreadlocks and Ear-hair had been nice enough to leave on my kitchen counter, then fell onto the couch and turned on the news. CNN and MSNBC were on commercials, but FOX was talking about the shooting. What I wanted to find out was whether anyone was connecting the leaked documents on the Chinese website to the shooting.

  I listened to the report as I swiped to open my phone. Fox was doing one of the bits where, after a minute-long report from a stringer in Vegas, they spend an hour debating the information. A scruffy looking professor-type sat on the left, across from a youngish blonde woman in a chic black pantsuit on the right. A bored looking host "moderated" the discussion behind a glass table.

  Host: But the recording, if authentic, does seem to imply that the first story we heard was…

  Chic Woman: That's exactly the point. The first story we heard may or may not be correct, but we need to give the officers the time to—

  Professor-Type: Can I get…can I get in here? I'm sorry, but why are we giving the Las Vegas police the benefit of the doubt? No…no, let me finish. They botched this case from day one, when they announced, "case closed," and told us the chronology of the shooting. It's not our fault they got it wrong. Why should we trust them now?

  Host: So, what do you recommend?

  Professor-Type: This case needs to be federalized, taken over by the FBI.

  Chic Woman: Just what we need, more federal intervention in the business of the states.

  Host: What about that? If the original version has been called into question, we don't know if this is a deranged loner or radical Islamic terrorism. We don't know if…

  Professor type: Wait a second, how can you make that leap if—

  Chic Woman: We don't know, we don't know yet. If there's any chance this was radical Islamic terrorism, then yes. Bring in the FBI, DHS, the CIA. Bring in the Marines. But until there's some indication of that, can't we let the local police officers do their jobs? Until then, aren't we just speculating?

  Host: Well, we are coming up against a break, and until we receive additional information, speculation is all we have.

  Professor-type: It's what we do.

  Chic Woman: It's what we do.

  They all laughed, and I felt like reaching through the screen and shouting at them, "It's all you do!"

  I wanted to tell them that if they want to claim to be a news station, maybe they could put some resources into reporting the news, rather than hosting staged arguments about pseudo-facts. I considered checking the other networks, but I knew they wouldn't be much better. I'd always thought that the cable news setup was a little surreal, but today it was like watching the performance of two children fighting for mom's attention. It was such a petty distraction in a world full of serious topics, such a waste of resources, such a…it was a lot like my website, actually.

  I'd been browsing my news apps and social media feeds while listening. The shooting was trending again on Facebook and Twitter, but there was no new information and
the LVMPD hadn't responded to the release of the audio except to issue a one paragraph statement indicating that they could not yet verify the authenticity of the recording and they would look into the matter further, but, for now, they had no reason to believe that Baxter Callahan had not acted alone.

  From what I could tell, Captain Shona Payton had not made another appearance on behalf of the department, and she hadn't been quoted anywhere that I could find.

  Meanwhile, the Gunstott story had picked up a little steam in China, though it appeared to have gone unnoticed by the American media. A follow-up article on The Dissident Blog quoted three unnamed Chinese officials, all saying some version of the same thing: China had long suspected that America would try to spread its propaganda though the media, and, if these allegations turned out to be true, Gunstott's deal could not be allowed to go through.

  It wasn't much, but it might be enough to get people digging.

  In my mind, there were three questions to answer. The first was, why had they let me go? I couldn't be sure, but my guess was that they believed that I didn't know where Quinn was, and that there was no more to the recording, which, according to the news I'd read, had given no indication about who the shooters were, other than the fact that there may have been two. They had also probably spoken with Amand, who believed he had me under control.

  And that was my second question: was there a way to escape from this web? Could I go to the police, or anyone, and tell them what happened without bringing more trouble on myself?

  My third was simple: what could I do to stop Dewey Gunstott?

  I walked to the bedroom and changed into a pair of gray jeans and a black t-shirt, which felt looser than normal. I ran my hands over my stomach. Definitely a little flatter. I realized I'd been running on coffee and snacks for a week, and hadn't eaten in at least twenty-four hours. As stupid and vain as it was, it put a little spring in my step as I slid my phone in my back pocket and headed out the door.