The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Clay looked briefly at the CDL and handed it back to me. His hand was clean and his thumbnail trimmed back short. He ran his free hand over me again, said he was sorry. “Take off the hat.”

  I did, showed him the empty crown, brushed my hand through my hair.

  “Okay. What do you know about me?”

  “That you were in Romania during the war. That you are in the care of Dr. Paige Hulet of Arcadia hospital. That you are not supposed to leave that hospital and they are looking for you. That you have suffered psychotic breaks in the past but have been responding well to treatment.”

  He eyed me skeptically. “All true but the last. The drugs at Arcadia pushed me further and further underwater. Deep, dark, black fucking water. Full of voices and faces. Terrible visions, day after day. Real? Not real? It got worse and worse. Every med they tried. Even Dr. Hulet couldn’t get them right. Then a force came into me. It told me to stop poisoning myself. Four weeks ago I started puking up the pills, back in my room. But there’s a half-hour curfew after meds break to keep us from doing that. So most of it soaks in. Then, starting last week, no more meds at all.” Clay spread his hands to show me they were empty.

  “How are you doing, Clay?”

  “How do I look?”

  “Good.”

  “Sometimes I feel almost clear. Like I’m right on the edge of absolute clarity. But then it goes away without any warning. And I’m under the black water again with the voices and faces I’ve always seen and heard.”

  “‘Always’?”

  “Since the war.”

  Clay turned and looked at himself in the mirror, then back at me. “You sit here at the desk. I’m going to sit on the bed against the pillows. I have a friend but she won’t be back until much later. Do not touch the computer unless I say you can. I want to tell you a few things before I show you what I have.”

  I sat, took a small notepad and pen from my coat pocket. “Interesting dolls.”

  “Romanian. Dolls are a folk art there.”

  “Did you bring them home?”

  “We hid flash drives in them,” he said. “Sewed them into the undersides. The videos I’m about to show you.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Me and Vazz. He’s dead. They killed him.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Don’t lead me ahead,” said Clay. “Let me go at my own speed.”

  “Take all the time you want.”

  He looked down at me, then lay on the bed, his back against pillows and a headboard that creaked.

  I asked him if I could record. “Nell wants authenticity,” I added.

  “I’ve got all the authentic she can handle.”

  “There. You’re on, Clay Hickman.” I tapped my recorder app and set the phone on the table by the swordfighters.

  “I was born too early and wasn’t healthy,” said Clay. “Bad heart. So, operations. I spent my whole life working hard to get strong like other people. Like my sisters, then teammates, and then strong like Dad. In baseball I was all-league, all-conference, all-CIF as a senior. Third base. Then in the Air Force I was near the top in everything. I enlisted in 2006. Had to get Dad and Mom’s permission because I was only seventeen. I didn’t want special Hickman favors because of my family. I did really well in basic, was thinking pilot. But I really shined at the SERE training. That’s survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. So they put me to work as an assistant trainer. Youngest one ever. I’m good at using the mind to overcome adversity. Because I’d spent my whole lifetime doing it. There are similarities between resisting pain and building a sound body.”

  “I’ve heard the SERE is intense.”

  “Somewhat. I did mostly the simulations. We’d make our students as frightened and miserable as we could. Within reason. You do have to understand that none of it is like real detainee interrogation or abuse. Did you serve?”

  “Marine Expeditionary Force, Fallujah one.”

  “That was 2004,” said Clay. “The Blackwater contractors.”

  It told him I did a month of door-to-doors looking for the guys who did it.

  “I was still two years from enlisting,” he said. “Couldn’t wait to join the Air Force. Nine-eleven changed the way I saw myself, and the world. I realized my country needed me.”

  “I thought that, too,” I said. “I was just out of college when they hit the Trade Center.”

  Clay seemed to consider this. He adjusted himself against the pillows, and the headboard squeaked. He worked the semiautomatic out of his waistband and set it on the mattress beside him. He looked into the bathroom for a moment, then trained his attention on the curtained front window. I noted that the curtain was open just enough to let him see outside from where he sat.

  It looked like two people had slept in the bed. I glanced at the open suitcase on the far side of it, up against the wall, saw the blow-dryer lying on top. A faint feminine smell hung in the small room. Like Clay, I could see the bathroom from where I sat. He had duct-taped a pink handheld mirror to the wall near the bathroom window. And wedged an empty toilet paper roll behind the mirror so he could see the window from the bed. An early-warning system. The window screen had been removed and set against the wall, behind the toilet.

  “How is Nell?” he asked.

  “Nell equals busy.”

  “But on TV she always seems so calm.”

  “She is, by the time she’s on camera. A lot of actors and performers are that way,” I said.

  “Do you think she’ll go for this?”

  I opened my hands: Hopefully.

  He looked to the window again, then brought his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. “Okay. One day at Fairchild—that’s the Air Force base where the SERE school is—a big shot came to visit. Dr. Briggs Spencer. He was kind of a legend there. They talked about him and his partner—Dr. Timothy Tritt. They had been instructors there for years. Really got into it. Then after 9/11 they went private and helped start up the interrogation program at Guantánamo. Then Abu Ghraib. Then the black sites the CIA was allegedly in charge of. They were making a shitload of money. The rumor was, Spencer and Tritt came through Fairchild every four months, looking for top recruits. Talented guys to put to work in the prisons.”

  “I remember reading about them.”

  “So, right in the middle of my ‘Psychological Defense Against Mechanical Pain’ class, the actual Dr. Briggs Spencer walks in and sits down in the back.” Clay stared at me, nodding and smiling.

  “Were you nervous?”

  Suddenly he looked to the bathroom, his gaze raised high—window- and mirror-level. Then back to me. “No. I went on with my demonstration. One of the SERE methods was to use basic autogenics to create a useful dialogue between your conscious mind and your body to reduce the effects of stress. This was pure Spencer-Tritt. We had their training manuals. There was also a component of self-hypnosis. So, under stress, they taught, you focus your mind on a specific belief or idea or person that you are willing to undergo the torture for. For me personally, it had almost always been for my mom and dad and sisters. But you could pick a girlfriend or a buddy, or even a pet, and focus on that. Under interrogation, then, you would imagine that thing and you would create a conversation. You could even speak the words out loud if you wanted, which would generally confuse an interrogator, which we considered useful resistance. But I had added something of my own to that technique. Something I knew worked. If you, during pain, could combine that image and aural construct with three-part breathing—two short inhales through the nose followed by a fast loud exhale through the mouth—you were creating emotional resistance and a physical response. This satisfies the powerful fight-or-flight instinct. It gives you something to do. It’s not unlike Lamaze for childbirth.”

  I was impressed by young Clay Hickman at SERE. “Nell is going to eat this up.”

&nb
sp; He smiled. “So did Dr. Spencer.”

  31

  He pretty much hired me on the spot,” said Clay. “I was still Air Force, but he got me reassigned to the Spencer-Tritt team. He got the brass to do whatever he wanted. They just shuffled some papers, sent me to Ali AFB for one week to learn my cover as a Spooky mechanic, then cut me loose to go to Romania. It’s called sheep dipping. On that flight from Iraq to Romania, I thought I was joining the most elite team of specialists in the world. The absolute cutting edge—saving lives by asking questions.”

  “That must have been something, for a rich kid heading for Stanford a year before.” I caught my misstep, hoped Clay did not.

  “I never told you about Stanford.”

  “It was in Dr. Paige Hulet’s background on you.”

  Clay looked at me for a long beat. I wondered how it must feel to have a receding tide of psychotropic drugs still eddying inside you. How it must feel to not quite trust the only mind you have.

  “When we landed outside Bucharest it was early morning. First light. We traveled into the city in unmarked Romanian government vehicles. The black site was in the city limits, an old estate, set back from a road not far from the river. Going through Bucharest I saw the sun’s rays on the buildings, and none of the trees had leaves. It was cold and bleak. And I felt this strange mixture of adventure and dread. I was excited and afraid.”

  “Describe the site.”

  “Seven acres, an old mansion and outbuildings. It had belonged to a nobleman, then became a hotel, then a communist torture chamber. Then it was abandoned. By the time the CIA got it for us, it was run-down. There were busy railroad tracks nearby, which covered some of the sounds. Thick walls, too. We drove through an electric gate and parked in the old livery. I watched the gate roll closed and learned my first lesson about working in a prison: You’re a prisoner, too, man.”

  “What month was it?”

  “March. It was always March at White Fire.”

  Clay picked up the pistol, casually moved the slide to check the chamber. The steel and springs, so well-machined, sounded loud and precise in the cramped room. He placed his index finger alongside the barrel as if to calm it, then set the weapon back on the bed beside him. He looked out the front window, then back to the bathroom.

  “Are you afraid right now?” I asked.

  “Prepared.”

  “For what?”

  “Mr. Wills—they are after me.”

  “Who?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Please don’t turn out to be a fool.”

  I looked at the swordfighting dolls on the desk not far from me, performing in the down-glow of the lamp. Then across the room to Clay. His shadowed face was unclear in the poor light, but his eyes were bright flecks. In that moment he looked no more than nineteen or twenty years old. Sequoia’s age. He seemed so partial, so incomplete. I wondered how three years of war and torture, followed by years of psychosis and commitment to Arcadia—an exclusive wellness community for treatment of mental and emotional disorders—where young Clay Hickman was prescribed powerful drugs not to help but to subdue him, could have left him so strangely . . . What was the word . . . Blameless? Untouched?

  For the next few minutes he described what Timothy Tritt had talked about: the pressure to prevent the next 9/11, to get bin Laden, the American lives being risked and lost on bloody foreign soil. He talked about the cold and filth of White Fire, the incessant music and light, the compliance blows, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, walling, chainings. All of the monstering. And how the words white fire came to mean an irresistible torture, a kind of holy grail for the interrogators, a technique that, supposedly, no detainee could defeat.

  “This is important background,” Clay said. “Things Nell will need to know if she is to tell the story of Aaban properly.”

  Clay painted Aaban much as Tritt had—a large, proud, physically intimidating terrorist with personal ties to bin Laden and his organization. As in Tritt’s telling, Aaban refused to break while they subjected him to the entire CIA–Spencer-Tritt “menu.”

  I tried my best to react as if hearing these things for the first time. I checked my phone to make sure it was recording, then looked again at the swordfighters. I noted that an opening on one fighter’s baggy pants had been sloppily sutured with a rubber band, where one of the video sticks had been hidden all these years.

  “Aaban is a truly fascinating character,” I said.

  Clay cleared his throat softly. “He might not even be in Dr. Spencer’s book. Dr. Spencer will tell a story that makes a hero out of himself. But I know the true Aaban story.”

  I was tempted to confirm Aaban’s absence from Hard Truth, based on the book’s index.

  “I want the world to see what . . . we did to Aaban,” Clay continued. “This story is about me, too. Dr. Spencer was my supervisor at White Fire. This is about us.”

  He turned his head and stared dreamily at the mirror. I sensed him drifting away.

  “Clay,” I said. “It’s important that we get to the video you mentioned. It will have to be clear and compelling for Nell and KPBS to even consider it.”

  “Don’t rush me. I have the video. We recorded almost everything we did, to document our methods and successes and failures. We wanted a scientific record that could be built on in future wars. But some of it I recorded without Dr. Spencer knowing. Some of it Vazz recorded. Early in 2009, we were ordered to turn over any recorded material to the agency. Just before White Fire was closed. Vazz and I thought our secret videos would be destroyed, so we made copies, added some of the other recorded stuff, brought them home inside the fighting dolls. Something told me, even way back then in Romania, when I was nineteen years old and trying to gather actionable intelligence and save American lives, that everything we did was going to be denied. I already felt like I was beginning to lose it, Mr. Wills. Felt my mind slipping away, right into the cracks of those cold walls. I wanted a record of who I was and what we did. I didn’t want to remember myself as a weak man living in a nightmare. There is roughly one hour of video I can show you.”

  “Roll it, Clay.”

  He hopped off the bed, pushed the gun back into the waistband of his jeans, went into the bathroom and realigned the mirror on the wall. “Can you see the alley from where you are?”

  “Who are you expecting?”

  “Dr. Spencer and his old agency employers. You can’t conceive of my importance to them.”

  “Do they know what you have?”

  “They suspect. That is their training and nature. I told Dr. Spencer I have ‘white fire’ for him. I didn’t tell him exactly what it was. I want him to see it for the first time on Nell’s show. With me. You don’t see a problem with getting Dr. Spencer on the show, do you?”

  I had to think fast on that one. “No problem at all. We just tell him it’s to promote Hard Truth.”

  “Mr. Wills, it is nonnegotiable that Dr. Spencer be on the show with me. He must be.”

  “I’ll make your wishes clear to Nell.”

  “He’ll be surprised when he sees what I’m about to show you,” said Clay. “But he will have the chance to explain himself.”

  Clay went to the front door, checked the flimsy chain lock, and opened the curtain maybe one more inch. Then he sat down and tapped some keys on the laptop.

  “Aaban came to White Fire in June of 2008. Now, the first thing you’ll see is three guys shackled together in orange jumpsuits, being marched from a Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service SUV toward the detainee entrance to White Fire. ISIS now dresses their kills in orange as a reminder of how we dressed them. The detainee entrance was within a side courtyard, just in case neighbors or delivery people got curious about who we were and what we were doing. Aaban is the middle guy. The strong-looking one. Scared me when I first got up close to him.”

  32

  See, ri
ght there,” said Clay. He touched his finger to the screen but he didn’t have to. Aaban was half a head taller than the two other prisoners, and he was just as tall and thick as the beefy young Americans escorting them from the vehicle. The prisoners were triple-shackled to each other—ankles, waists, wrists. Aaban glared at the video shooter as he walked past. He was hawk-faced, with a full beard and thick gray-black hair.

  “Aaban means ‘Angel of Iron’ in Dari,” said Clay. “When he walks by the camera he says, ‘I will eat your eyes,’ but you can’t hear his voice very well. We always filmed the new detainees arriving so we’d have a chronological record of their progress. Before and after. Some of them you wouldn’t even recognize after six months. Their whole posture changes. That’s from stress positions and compliance blows. We put Aaban alone in the smokehouse cellar. It was the closest thing we had to a dungeon. Next, you’ll see him getting walled the very next day, then chained to the ceiling so he has to stand up on the balls of his feet. That makes your arches cramp. Painful.”

  The smokehouse cellar was made of very dark stones that seemed to be fitted without mortar. They looked wet. The ceiling was low and there was only one small window—a horizontal, iron-grated slot just above ground level. One industrial, mesh-covered lamp hung down. A dungeon indeed. The cameraman recorded the thin mattress on the stone floor, a plastic bucket, then Clay, standing in the poor light, dressed in fatigues and a civilian windbreaker. With him was a dark, shaggy young man wearing a T-shirt and jeans. “Moe,” said Clay. “One of our ’terps. You’ll see other guys come and go.”

  “Who’s shooting the video?”

  “Don Tice. Who now works for Dr. Spencer at Arcadia.”

  “Interesting.”

  “He’s a dispensing nurse. Nice guy.”

  An odd-looking plastic structure stood near the middle of the room. Beside it stood Aaban, stripped down to what looked like a dirty nightshirt. Hands cuffed behind him, of course. A crude wooden collar had been clamped around his neck. The collar had rope handles at opposite sides, and the interrogator—Clay Hickman—pulled Aaban forward across the room by the collar with both hands, then stopped and pushed hard, backward, sending him into the plastic wall. Aaban hit with a loud crack. The wall shuddered and Aaban crumpled to the floor. A moment later he was up, crouched and turning in a slow circle to find and face his tormentors.