I heard those faint cries from the Romanian smokehouse. They came not from the Angel of Iron, but from his son, Roshaan, as he watched. From the boy—innocent, unprotected, and damned. My friends couldn’t control themselves. They screamed: What kind of God are you? How did You allow that to happen? Why?
“Another week went by,” Tritt continued. “When I’d ask him how it was going out there, Briggs would shrug and stare at me. He started losing weight. He developed a bad case of acne on his nose. He began eating his meals alone. He made me post the twice-daily TPUs—the team progress updates—which used to be his job. He became almost silent. He cut his own hair, with an electric clipper, very, very short, but he’d miss places. It looked like he was shaving his face every few hours, because it was always razor-burned and nicked. The only people out there in the smokehouse with him were Clay Hickman and John Vazquez and a couple of others. None of them were talking details. They kept to themselves. Another week went by, and another.
“Then, five weeks after the arrival of Roshaan, our routine started returning to normal. Briggs began attending the TPUs, then presiding again. He and Clay and the others rejoined us at meals. He let his hair grow, quit shaving. Once in a while, he’d talk baseball, or even make a joke, like the old Spence. What happened in the smokehouse? I don’t know. I never saw Roshaan again.”
“With all respect, Dr. Tritt, I find it hard to believe. That you don’t know what happened to the boy.”
Again the hard gray eyes, roving over me. “Spencer would say nothing about him. None of them would. Absolute lockdown, total silence. When I saw Aaban again, he acted as he always did—ferocious and proud. Angel of Iron was right. We moved him and the others out of White Fire just before Obama closed it. He’s at Gitmo, as we speak. I still don’t know what Spencer did with Roshaan. He refused to tell. It was as if the boy was never there.”
I watched the three dogs in the creek, heads hung to the water, backs lit by the sun. The dark Sierra Nevada and the pale White Mountains were still facing off across Owens Valley, while between them a vulture circled precisely in the blue.
“Bullshit,” I said. “You know what happened to Roshaan.”
Tritt said nothing, and I understood that he had come to the end of his speakable truth on this subject.
He shook his head slowly, as if answering no to a question only he could hear. “Spence knew he was being carried off. By the time the government closed the black sites and put us out of work, Briggs Spencer was a changed man. Maybe not even so much because of what he did, but because of what he believed about what he did.”
“Which was what?”
“That we were American doctors who had saved American lives and protected the safety of Americans at home using enhanced interrogation techniques.”
“What do you believe?”
Tritt helped himself to another beer but didn’t offer me one. He opened it and poured half of it down. “That some men lose their souls but keep their minds. While others keep their souls but lose their minds. We were basically just citizens who tortured people to little effect but made a lot of money. We rigged the results, and the CIA pretty much sang along. I can certainly make excuses. We had to deal with the languages and the dialects and the interpreters and detainees. They were endlessly evasive and inventive. What do you expect them to say under excruciating pain? Most of them screamed out something when they couldn’t take anymore. Something they thought we’d like to hear. Most of them didn’t know what we wanted them to know.”
There was a long silence then while Tritt stared out at the Sierras and dangled his half-empty bottle by its neck. His tone of voice was softer now, more intimate. “I was very concerned about the costs to my people. Most of our CIA officers were poorly trained and inexperienced. But they meant well. They were innocents, in their own self-serving ways. And some of the enlisted men we drafted into Spencer-Tritt, guys like Clay, they were just so damned young. I wondered right off what White Fire would do to them. I have a pretty good idea by now. See, Mr. Ford—most people can’t endure a place like White Fire for long. It’s the equivalent of a psychotic break, but you don’t come out of it. We lived in a world of constant pain and light and sound. A world of anguish and hopelessness. Our nightmares were not just in our heads while we slept, they surrounded us every waking minute of every day. They were real. The torturer is tortured. You do not drown a man strapped to a board without drowning yourself.
“Today, Briggs will claim that none of what we did bothers him. That everything we did was necessary. That we saved American lives with torture. He can’t name one American saved by torture, and not because the name is classified. You will search Hard Truth in vain for one such name. I spent time at every site. I know. Spencer will bring up bin Laden’s courier. But they’d been watching that courier for months. They had him cold. Ghul? The al-Qaeda agent? He’d identified that courier weeks before we got our chance at him. No EITs needed—Ghul just sang. Our little parakeet. We tortured him anyway, just in case there was more. There wasn’t. But everyone thought, at the time, that it was the right thing to do.”
Tritt opened the cooler, pushed his empty bottle into the ice, and came up with another. “You have to understand our circumstances. The pressure on us was enormous. We kept wondering when the next terrorist attack would come. Not only that, but innocent Americans were dying every day in the wars. I remember May 31, 2007. I was in Alexandria, Virginia, dining rather splendidly with some of my government bosses, having just gotten a five-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand-dollar paycheck for one month of work. And a story came on the bar TV—one hundred and twenty-six U.S. servicemen had been killed that month, the deadliest month in Iraq thus far. Eleven more in Afghanistan. Even half drunk I couldn’t escape those young deaths. Then I was back at White Fire. American death hung over us like a curse. How many more? What’s bin Laden going to do next? We needed to torture harder, torture longer, extract more intel—pull it out of them like teeth.”
Tritt paused and turned his hard, small eyes to me again. I would hate looking into those things, hour by hour, while he prolonged my agony. “So, you see, this difference between Briggs and me—in the way we see what happened in the war—is everything. It is why he can fly through the skies and make millions more dollars with the money we made selling torture. And why I sit in this meadow, drinking with the dogs. We are different alloys forged in the same fire.”
He swept his hand around the inside of the cooler but came up empty. Something in his mechanics told me he knew the beers were gone. He wiped his hands together, then drew them down his sun-wrinkled face.
“Clay told me something once,” he said. “It stayed in my mind because I could never figure it out. I had gone to see him in Arcadia, and near the end of our visit he told me he had ‘gotten half of Spencer’s white fire.’”
I waited for the explanation and got none. “What did he mean?”
“I said, ‘Clay, by “gotten” do you mean you understand half of Spencer’s white fire, and what exactly had happened to Roshaan? Or do you mean that you somehow have half of it?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered—he had half of Deimos’s white fire in his possession—and Vazz had the other half.”
“Clay had half of white fire, and John Vazquez had the other half? Help me out here, Doctor.”
“I figured video,” said Tritt. “Spence did, too. We shot quite a bit of it. The agency confiscated all they could find. Very dangerous material, to say the least. We had to close White Fire in a hurry. We figured someone could smuggle out evidence of what we did. We were just never sure who or what.”
I let my memories of the last twenty-four hours blow around in my brain like leaves. Something in there that I needed. It took a while, but I saw it and grabbed it: what Sequoia had texted me the night before, when I’d asked her why Clay had driven all the way to Mendocino County to see John Vazquez.
7:50 PM
; Why did Clay go there?
7:51 PM
For part 2 he says
For part two, I wondered.
Vazz’s half of white fire?
—
From the shade of a cottonwood outside Bishop Airport I called Laura Vazquez and left a message.
The beer had left me dull but jittery. I kept seeing Tritt’s dark, sun-brined skin, his gunmetal-gray eyes. I imagined hooded men in chains, writhing in pain—certainly the inspiration for Clay Hickman’s obsessive paintings. I heard the sound of a human body flung against a wall, the gurgled thrashings of suffocation. I pictured young Roshaan and wondered why Tritt—who had offered me so much of his own tortured soul—still couldn’t bring himself to tell me the boy’s fate.
The ringtone of my phone startled me.
24
It was Laura Vazquez and I apologized for bothering her at such a difficult time. In a faint, stoic voice she thanked me for what I had done the day before and asked me what I needed.
I told her what Clay had once said to his old boss, Timothy Tritt, and asked Laura if she had any idea what her husband’s “other half” of white fire might have been. I told her that I thought Clay might have come there yesterday in order to discuss that “other half” with her husband. I was crashing around for something, anything that would lead me toward Clay, and she must have sensed it.
She was quiet for a beat. “Mr. Ford—Clay left here just an hour ago. He was with a young woman named Sequoia. He asked me to see John’s war trunk and I let him see it.”
“What was in it?”
I pictured the contents as she listed them for me: his Air Force uniforms, rank insignias, training certificates, discharge papers. Commemorative plaques and medals. Some hats and T-shirts. There were photo sticks and some photographs he’d printed.
“He never really got into that stuff,” she said. “He seemed happy enough to forget it. The war. The trunk was down in the wine cellar, pushed into a far corner with fishing and viticulture magazines piled on top.”
I’d seen it and not known what I was seeing. “Did Clay take anything from the trunk?”
“Dolls. From Romania, I believe. Two of them—colorful, folksy dolls. Mounted on the same wooden base, fighting with swords.”
The jittery fog of White Fire vanished as a wave of adrenaline passed through me. “He left an hour ago?”
“Yes, no more than an hour ago.”
“Did he say where they were going?”
“If he did I don’t remember. I’m sorry, Mr. Ford. Today is the second-worst day of my life.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Vazquez. Please give my best to Michael.”
“I will do that.”
My next call, to Sequoia, went straight to voicemail, so I sent a text.
4:46 PM
Where are you?
4:47 PM
Drawing closer to Deimos. Sequoia drives and I plan.
4:48 PM
Hi Clay. How are the dolls getting along?
4:48 PM
You talked to my parents and Laura.
4:49 PM
Are the dolls valuable?
4:49 PM
Beyond value.
4:50 PM
Explain, please.
4:51 PM
Truth contained to be revealed.
4:52 PM
By Spencer? Because the world must hear it from the god of terror?
4:52 PM
4:53 PM
Where did Roshaan go?
4:56 PM
4:57 PM
We need to talk about Aaban and Roshaan.
4:58 PM
I will tell you when and where.
4:58 PM
Remember you are Asclepius, the healer.
4:59 PM
I am he.
4:59 PM
Part of your mission is to protect S.
5:01 PM
With my life. I love her.
Then, the unforgettable sound. I turned to watch a late-model Cessna 182 taking off, the Lycoming turbocharger roaring to life.
—
I got home after dark. A fire raged in the pit, orange flames roiling upward, my five loyal Irregulars roasting s’mores on wire hangers, five inquisitive, up-lit faces watching me come up the walkway with my duffel. Led by tenor Burt Short, they broke into the chorus of Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” their standard landlord welcome.
“We saved you one marshmallow and some chocolate dust,” said Grandpa Dick. “But you’ll have to make your own hanger.”
“Pour him a drink,” said Grandma Liz.
“You look like you’ve engaged the enemy,” observed Lindsey Rakes.
Wesley Gunn handed me a wire hanger and I saw his two black eyes. I took his chin in one hand and turned his face to catch the firelight.
“Things went a little south, south of the border,” said Burt.
“Drink, Rollie?” asked Grandpa, holding up an empty tumbler.
I declined, Dick eyeing me with concern. I set my duffel on one of the concrete picnic tables and looked out at the pond. Justine sat in the rowboat in her big straw hat. Looking my way, then gone. Adios, my living ghost. The pond lay flat and black and empty, and beyond it spread the hills and the distant scattered lights of Fallbrook. The night sky was gray and starless.
I lay back on a chaise longue and watched the smoke rise above the flame-lit silhouettes of my confederates. Burt took the adjacent chaise and filled me in on the Mexico run. As planned, he had driven Wesley and Lindsey down to Tijuana to a clinic once used “to great success” by an old friend of his. But, thirsty, they had stopped off at his favorite bar for “a” margarita, which had become “five,” leaving them too jovial for the clinic but just fine for shopping, and, later, dinner at La Gaviota, Burt’s favorite Tijuana club.
Later in the club cantina, after several more drinks—and the steady traffic of “distinguished professional women”—Wesley confessed that he was still a virgin. So Burt introduced him to one of the women. She was taken by strapping Wesley’s boyish smile. Burt brokered a deal with the woman’s “manager,” which put Wesley and the woman together in an upstairs room for one hour. Burt had bargained the manager down from two hundred fifty to one hundred dollars, and sent eighteen-year-old Wesley on his mission with the money, as a “gift.” At the end of the hour, the woman demanded two hundred fifty, then “feigned outrage” when Wesley offered all he had, which was Burt’s one hundred, and thirty-six dollars of his own. Her manager appeared with two policemen, took the money from Wesley but knocked him to the floor, twice, before the cops dragged him downstairs and out. “So, it resolved as we’d hoped,” said Burt. “Wesley gained black eyes but shed his innocence.”
Behind the haze of woodsmoke, Wesley lifted a bottle of beer our way, offered a pained smile. “And how was your weekend, Mr. Ford?”
“Uneventful.”
Wesley gave me a skeptical once-over. “Sometimes that’s best.”
I closed my eyes for a minute, listened to the conversations going on around me, then got up and collected my duffel from the table. Dick held up the empty tumbler again, an inquisitive look on his face. It drives him bats when I refuse alcohol. “Excuse me,” I announced. “I have a date to get ready for.”
“About time you had a date,” said Dick.
“Excellent, Rollie,” said Liz.
“She’s not good enough for you,” said Lindsey.
“Hope it goes better than mine,” said Wesley.
25
Paige Hulet had accepted my dinner invitation and wanted to meet on “neutral ground.” She’d arranged for a table at Tiburon on Fifth Avenue in downtown San Diego. I arrived on time and was seated. I wore a trim navy wool suit, a pressed white shirt, and a weirdly patterned necktie given to me by Justine. Tiburon was a handsome
place, smoked glass and darkly burnished woods, with a wine list that weighed pounds.
She strode across the room in a black calf-length dress pleated from the waist down, a black-and-red woven shawl, strapped black heels, and a shiny red clutch. Hair up, a trace of lipstick, and a smile.
I stood. “Dr. Hulet.”
“Mr. Ford.”
She set her bag on an adjacent seat, then the shawl. Her shoulders and arms were graceful. I felt that hyperfocused energy of being with a beautiful woman who is there because of you. I sat across from her. “This is not like seeing you at your work,” I said.
“Nor you at yours. Where did you get that wonderful tie?”
“Chinatown, L.A.”
I saw a twinkle in her eye. “Do you like the restaurant?”
“Perfect, so far.”
We ordered cocktails, made small talk, watched the sidewalk pedestrians through the darkened windows. The martini hit me like a punch. I felt the last two days trying to drag me under—the bloody murder of John Vazquez, the ragged wound his death would leave in the lives of his wife and son, Briggs Spencer’s and Timothy Tritt’s gothic horrors committed in the name of security.
Paige reached across the table and set a cool hand on mine. “I felt very bad for you Saturday night. I could feel your sadness for John Vazquez and his family, and your anger. And everything we’re both feeling for Clay. And Sequoia. All from five hundred miles away. We don’t have to talk about it.”
I touched my glass to hers. Instead of murder, war, and moral injury, we talked about current events, books, sports. Careful with the politics. Then childhoods, friends, even futures. The future as What if? The future as Wouldn’t it be great to? Future happy. Future lite. I realized she was not Justine and did not resent her for it. I gave in to the energy that she brought me, let my thoughts wander and my words play. We had another cocktail, ordered dinner, and made it last. Even the silences had comfortable shapes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made so little effort and felt okay. We talked late, finished the wine, had a dessert liquor, and paid up.
The Room of White Fire Page 15
