“Never much for book learning myself.”
“But you are very intelligent, this your file makes quite evident.” Levine smiled, a bit more genuinely than before. “So many arrests, so few convictions and incredibly light sentences. Of course, you know what that tells me?”
“I was innocent.”
“Of course. Absolutely.” Levine raised an eyebrow. “You’re a textbook sociopath. Your history tells me that you’re perfect for my needs. Clearly, in exchange for leniency, you’ve sold out others. Because your nephew has never been convicted, I shall do you the courtesy of believing that your actions were more to protect him than otherwise. And I would have you acting for me in that same capacity.”
Walter’s eyes narrowed. “Ain’t nobody to sell out here.”
The commissar waggled an index finger at him. “No, no, no. You know better than that. You see, Wilson, there is a great deal at stake here. When a regime falls, power pours out and people scramble to sop it up. Certainly that’s what all the various factions outside the Collective are doing from the Rangers remnant on down. And thus it is inside the Collective—in a battle far more deadly because it is being fought deep within the shadows. Do you have any idea why I asked for—demanded, really—this position?”
“If I had to guess . . .” The mercenary paused for a moment to suck noisily on his teeth. “This is a big cesspit of secrets.”
“That, and more. Like you, everyone in here has a secret. Other commissars and high councilors have their enemies and scandals which they need buried, but they do not have the stomach for doing the necessary things.” Levine spread his arms wide. “Thus, they come to me. They send me their problems. I accept them. I dispose of them—but not before wringing out of them every iota of useful information. As common wisdom has it, information is power.”
“And here them others is just giving it to you.”
“Precisely. I will, of course, in due time, use this power to my own benefit. This office, this place, while wonderful, are really beneath a man of my potential. I aspire to more.”
Walter brought his head up. “But if an enemy shows you ain’t master of your business now, you ain’t going nowhere.”
“Yes, I knew you were the man I needed.” Levine returned to his desk and summoned a holographic representation of the entire campus, both above- and belowground. Red sparks, both stationary and mobile, stippled the hologram. “There have been ample studies on the corrosive effects of power over prisoners on even the most mild-mannered of individuals. This camp is a seething morass of corruption. I know there is a thriving black market within, and several smuggling rings where people on the outside buy privileges for people inside. I also assume trade in sexual favors occurs. I have even heard whispers about soldiers and mercenaries south at the secure Karayton facility being made to fight each other for the amusement of the proctors and high-ranking officials who wish to remain anonymous.”
“You want me to work all that out?”
“I would greatly enjoy that, and be in your debt if you could.”
“But?”
“There is a more immediate problem.” Levine’s brow wrinkled. “What I have heard nothing about is any attempt at escape. Organized attempt, that is. Now, a man of your skills would be an obvious asset to any escape team. You see, all the corruption inside the camp really means nothing as long as it remains contained. But were there to be a break out, well, heads would roll and mine would be first among them.”
“I dunno.” Walter shrugged. “Mop Boy done seen a lot, but no one trying to get out.”
“That just means they’re being careful. What I want to do is motivate them to accelerate their plans and recruit you to join them.”
An icy snake slithered through Walter’s guts. “How are you going to do that?”
“I’ll reintroduce you to the general population after you’ve been punished for your malingering deception as ‘Mop Boy.’ You do understand that the physical pain you’ll endure is pain you’re saving your nephew from, yes?”
Have to play into his fantasy . . . “Ain’t the first time.”
“Very good. Now, to report to me, just find a proctor, tell them you’ve been summoned to clean something up. They’ll call it in and a convenient time for your debriefing will be arranged.” Levine’s third smile was the broadest yet, and set the icy snake to thrashing in Walter’s bowels. “And rest assured, Wilson, that as I rise, so shall my friends. Who knows? Serve me well and perhaps, just perhaps, someday all this will be yours.”
Golden Prosperity Reeducation Camp, Rivergaard
Maldives
2 December 3000
Sophia Litzau clung to her identity as Felicia Fisher as tightly as a drowning person would cling to debris from a sinking ship. Every time a proctor headed in her direction, she expected to be unmasked and hauled away into some black hole from which there was no return. Even if she discounted 99 percent of the rumors in the camp, such disappearances happened and most people assumed the missing had been disassociated most violently.
Part of her fear stemmed not from who she really was, but because she’d been swept up in the raid on the Rangers camp. She’d expected to be housed with other prisoners who had been actively working against the Collective. Instead she found herself relegated to the status she’d had previously. Even having the Fisher identity backing her up, she should have been interrogated about the Rangers. At first she considered that lack of interrogation a bureaucratic oversight, but after a week, she suspected something more than incompetence was at play.
“Felicia, help me over here, please.”
“Yes, Ash, what do you need?” Sophia pasted a smile on her face and tried to match Ash’s pleasant tone of voice. “How can I help?”
“Sheet folding.” The dark-haired woman hefted a pile of sheets onto a table. “There should be a dozen in this mix.”
“Sure.” Sophia started rummaging through the sheets, looking for a corner. Once she found one, she started untangling it from the rest, and set it aside as a smaller linen lump.
Ash, stood at her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Mop Boy has not reached out to you?”
Sophia shook her head. She had a vague sense of who Ash referred to, but had never seen the man clearly. “Past couple of days, I’ve not seen him at all.”
“This has me concerned.” Ash handed her the corner of a sheet, then pulled the rest of it out of the pile. She backed away from Sophia and, together, they shook the sheet out before beginning to fold it.
They worked in silence until the final fold brought them face to face. “I wish I knew why he wanted you to get in touch with me and get me this job.”
Ash shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “I should not share this with you, but it is best you know. He talked with me about going on vacation.”
Vacation? Prisoners, in their private moments, regularly made a game of sharing what they intended to do once they got released from the camp. Some had modest goals of simply wanting to hug their family members. Others hoped to locate their families. Yet others spun grand fantasies which involved eating sumptuous meals, traveling off-world, engaging in as many hedonistic pursuits as they could—generally with the off-world travel as prelude to whatever followed.
But the way Ash had emphasized the word suggested something else entirely. Sophia could see why anyone would want Ash to join them in escaping. Smart, strong, beautiful and hardy, she’d be an asset regardless of what happened. And her positive attitude would keep folks going even when things got dicey.
But why would a half-wit want me to join the team? Felicia Fisher had no skills in her background, and Sophia had remained as quiet as possible to minimize notice. The assumption that suggested itself was that Mop Boy knew who she truly was, and his disappearance suggested that the secret of her identity could be revealed at any secon
d.
“A vacation would be quite nice.” Sophia passed Ash the foot end of a sheet and backed away. “I don’t know how long it would take to earn one here. And the practical considerations.”
Ash laughed and plucked at the hem of her gray tunic. “True. These clothes. I’d not want to get caught dead in them on vacation.”
“Definitely not. Vacation calls for something more . . . festive.” Sophia glanced at a pile of civilian clothes confiscated from the newest crop of internees. So, do I interpret her comment as her suggesting that Mop Boy wanted her to procure other clothes for the escape? “And the real question is what we’d eat?”
“I can’t cook, so food isn’t my responsibility.”
“That makes two of us.” Sophia shrugged as they made the last fold. “I grew up around here and know some beautiful, out-of-the-way places to go. I think that would be my best contribution.”
“Oh, to travel to some undisturbed place, and drop out of things as if we’d fallen off the edge of the world, that would be wonderful.” Ash’s blue eyes flashed. “We should plan this sooner rather than later.”
“I agree.”
“Hey, you there.”
Sophia and Ash both turned to regard the proctor. “Yes, Madam?”
“Laughter is the vice of those who believe they do not have to work.”
Sophia immediately cast her gaze down. “Beg pardon, Madam Proctor. It was a lapse.”
“We will have no more of that.” The woman’s expression sharpened. “Working here is a privilege. If you abuse it, you will be sent for remedial training. Instead of cleaning clothes, you will be getting them dirty, very dirty.”
“No, Ma’am, we don’t wish that.” Ash’s smiled died in a heartbeat. “We live to serve the good of all.”
“Forget that at your peril.” The proctor waved them back to work. “If I have to speak to you again . . .”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Sophia set the folded sheet on top of the pile, and began to fold another one with Ash. Though they remained silent, their dead expressions said all that needed to be said. Vacation can’t come soon enough.
Chapter Nine
Golden Prosperity Reeducation Camp, Rivergaard
Maldives
2 December 3000
Deceiving smart people isn’t any more difficult than deceiving stupid ones. The process becomes even easier if the smart people know they’re smart. The very fact that they are intelligent leads them to believe they’re bright enough to see through any deception, and they’re terribly reluctant to believe that someone else might just be that much smarter than they are.
Fooling smart people only requires a slight shift in the technique used to deceive idiots. It requires patience. Smart people are used to being in control of a situation and pride themselves on being able to peer into the future to assess the consequences of any action. When rushed, they lose that sense of control, and that makes them very skittish. They invariably default to a rock-solid belief that they are being deceived, and thus adamantly refuse to make decisions in the unsupportable belief that doing nothing is somehow safer than doing something.
Smart people also forget that higher intellect overall doesn’t compensate for specific knowledge and experience. A cadre of geniuses can be just as baffled and delighted by a magician’s performance as would be children at a birthday party. Lack of background information and context make it impossible for the magician’s audience to evaluate what’s going on. The audience has no clue what they’re even looking at, so being able to figure it out is all but impossible, no matter how brilliant they are.
These factors worked to Walter’s advantage as Levine put his plan into effect. The commissar turned Walter over to his crack interrogation team—one drawn from a bunch of psychology graduate students who, prior to the revolution, hadn’t done anything crueler than administer shocks to rats. As nearly as Walter could tell, they downloaded some papers about interrogation techniques, scaled up some of their lab equipment, and proceeded to reinvent a wheel that had been around for at least six millennia.
The regimen hit all the right notes, but was structured based on an artificial timeline and, more importantly, was geared for a result other than discovering Walter’s true identity. Because the commissar needed him back among the main camp population, Walter figured he would have to endure little more than three days of interrogation. That worked fine for two reasons. First, his training in resisting interrogation had lasted three weeks. Three days was a walk in the park, and the limited timeline gave him hope that the ordeal would end quickly.
Second, all that training—all the training every soldier and agent was given—emphasized the necessity to hold out for seventy-two hours. The intelligence community expected agents to break. You were encouraged to hold out as long as you could, but within seventy-two hours of your presumed capture, your unit would be able to shut down any operation with which you were involved. If you broke after that, you couldn’t betray anything, since there would be nothing to betray.
His captors did all the things they were supposed to do. Loud music, electrodes attached to tender bits of the anatomy, forcing him to stand, allowing him no sleep, denying him food, letting him get dehydrated and drenching him with icy water. The only time he wasn’t shivering from cold or fatigue was when they hit the juice and sent electricity stabbing through him.
Their attempts at waterboarding him proved the most unpleasant torture of all. They cobbled together an apparatus that had a board onto which he was strapped, face up. They tilted the board such that they raised his feet above his head. His head and shoulders dipped down into a bathing tub. At first they tossed a towel over his head, then poured pitchers of icy water over his face, but later they just filled the tub and dunked his head into the water.
The panic from the water smothering him made his heart pound. Water closed in on him, jetting into his nostrils and down the back of his throat. He wanted to cough, but doing that would cost him precious air. And yet his lungs burned. He needed to breathe, but breathing would suck water into his lungs. He’d drown himself, and that battle between his body wanting to breathe—the very thing that signified life—and his mind knowing it would kill him, redoubled the panic. Zeptoseconds stretched into hours. He wanted to scream, but that was worse than coughing.
Then they’d pull his head up. Sometimes for a second—enough time for a cough and ragged half-breath. Then back down, water suffocating him, lungs still on fire. Sometimes they’d dump in ice. Once, just once, someone elbowed him in the stomach. He sucked in a lungful of water as a result, and passed out. They revived him, and started the cycle again.
The times they kept his head up, or rolled him onto his side so he could puke up what he’d swallowed, those were the times they’d start with the questions. And had they asked the right ones, I would have told them everything.
But they didn’t. They asked him the same things they were used to asking other prisoners. How long had he supported the Litzau regime? What were his crimes against the Collective? Who were his friends outside the camp? Who were the people he knew who were fighting against the Collective? Their questions came from an incredibly general foundation, and never really drilled down into specifics. When they did, those questions were based on the profile Ivan had created. Walter was able to make up answers, confident that either they’d match the file, or couldn’t ever be verified.
The key to satisfying his captors was gradual consistency. Walter fought them, proclaiming innocence at first, then admitting partial culpability in an action; then, reluctantly, he would confess with details that spoke against his own best interest. The graduate students recognized the progression as a breaking down of Walter’s will, and returned to various subjects until they were satisfied that he’d completely abased himself on that topic.
Once he’d gotten them used to eroding his will and a
nticipating how long it would take to break him, he was able to manufacture little mysteries for them to solve. They managed to pull out of him the story of a “treasure” he’d buried out in the Preserve. It consisted of a small collection of jewelry he’d “liberated” from a variety of the vacation homes in Swindon. He said that no one up there would ever notice the trinkets missing—because if they were truly valuable they’d not have been left behind. For his interrogators, this tale validated the contempt they had for the First Families, and that confirmation bias clearly made his story true. It also validated the contempt they had for him as morally inferior, and fed into their sense of superiority.
After three days a proctor brought him clothes, provided him a hot meal which included actual animal protein and then had him guided back to a dormitory in the camp’s general population area. Somewhere along the line he got a folded blanket shoved into his arms. Another proctor took him to the dorm room, where Walter wandered along as far as he could, spied what he hoped was an unclaimed bunk, and collapsed on it.
He wasn’t sure how long he slept, but it wasn’t long enough. A couple of prisoners roused him, complaining he was in their bunk. Walter didn’t feign disorientation, and when he tried to stand, his legs collapsed beneath him. He crashed to the floor and smacked his head on the cot’s wooden frame hard enough to cut his forehead. Blood trickled into his right eye. His obvious disability converted some anger into sympathy.
Someone recognized him as Mop Boy, and his sudden appearance in their midst kindled suspicion. Walter pressed fingertips to his scalp and spat to the side. “They don’t like mal-in-something . . .”
Apparent Catastrophe Page 7
