by Sam Powers
“I just reminded them that their father loves them, and then we looked at the pictures I took last summer in the Napa Valley.”
Callum finished his glass of water and placed his cutlery in the center of his empty plate. “I thought Joe was pretty much frozen out these days. What happened?”
“Agency politics,” Carolyn said. She’d had a couple of drinks and knew she shouldn’t talk about the agency’s business, but had lost some of her inhibition. “You know the cause of all of this was a mission a few years ago now. The guy he was helping on that case was killed a few days ago by a burglar. It all seems so pointless.” Then she remembered with whom she was talking. “Sorry, Callum. You know I don’t mean…”
“I know, I know,” he said. “We miss him too; I have no one to shoot pool with, and when I stay home all day, Ellen and the boy have to put up with me.”
“I want him home and I want the agency to accept his resignation,” Carolyn said. “I’m just so tired of worrying all the time. Even a desk job…”
“Joe would shoot himself before he’d do that,” Callum said. “Me too. You work in the field for long enough, the idea of pushing paper…” He shook his head. “At least he’s doing what he loves, Carolyn. You can be sure he knows how to take care of himself, and how to keep himself safe.”
APRIL 2, 2016, LUANDA, ANGOLA
Brennan was dreaming, a jumble of images that couldn’t be reconciled, time spent in Afghanistan, trapped under fire in a trench; then just as suddenly in his backyard at home and with the kids, Carolyn arguing and laughing at him, the kids pinning him down, only to turn a moment later into an insurgent, leaning over him, blocking out the sun.
The cold water slammed into him, stinging like a nettle, the shock immediately waking him up.
He’d been chained to a wall for the first two days; they’d brought him in on a bus with blacked-out windows, but he’d caught glimpses of the prison through the front windshield, an old colonial-style concrete and plaster building on the Luanda Harbor, adjacent to an ancient Portuguese governor’s mansion, still in fine condition despite two hundred years of conflict.
They’d taken his clothes, leaving only his trousers, then thrown him into a cell with a half-dozen local men; he’d managed to get some heavy shots in before they’d overwhelmed him in the tiny cell, the lack of space to operate taking away the advantage of his training; they proceeded to beat the foreigner for most of his first night, raining kicks and punches down on him, leaving Brennan curled up in a fetal position in the corner of the room, one hand above his head for protection, the other over his groin. They’d tired of it shortly before the clock, a block down the street from the prison, chimed for midnight; he’d spent the rest of the night watching the rest of the room, the low light of the moon just barely filtering through the high, barred window.
On day two, the fatigue-wearing guards came for him, picking him up under the armpits and dragging him down the corridor, first to a small medical office where a nurse patched him up and strapped his ribs; then, to a small cell in the next wing of the building, one on the first floor, the harbor seawall just below his window. The cell was filthy; the floor was smeared with dirt, his only companions a small wooden cot, devoid of mattress, blankets or pillows, and a pot in the corner for a toilet. It hadn’t been emptied or cleaned in a long time, lying on one side, a small puddle of semi-damp fecal matter gathering around it.
In the afternoon, the tide had risen, and water from the harbor began to slop through the window, splashing the dirt loudly at first. Within an hour, as sunset approached, it was nearly a half foot deep, the small drain in one corner unable to keep up, the water pouring in like a faucet left open. If it kept rising, Brennan knew, he’d be in even more trouble; as it was, the water was dirty, polluted, all manner of debris floating in it. He’d huddled on the cot until it subsided, hours later, the building’s overwhelmed sump pump finally drawing most of it out.
Day three had been hot; they finally brought him food, a hunk of the local bread and some plantain bananas, along with a bowl of water. But the conditions in the cell were vile; the heat began to evaporate the remaining harbor water, filling the room with a muggy humidity that topped the already damp local conditions and added in the smell factor. Brennan spent hours breathing through his mouth, trying to ignore the rank odor of dead fish and decay.
They’d come for him at ten o’clock that night; for the walk out of the block and across the courtyard, he’d been grateful. They’d led him into a near-identical four-story colonial building, then down a flight of marble stairs to its basement, where the torturer worked. Brennan wouldn’t have labelled it interrogation; the methods were too crude, too designed to induce physical pain over psychological, making the subject likely to say anything he thought the torturer wanted to hear, just to stop the pain.
The subject? After the first hour, he was already thinking about himself in the third person, as if his mind was dealing with the agony as an abstraction, something happening to a different version of him. The man working on him was short, dressed in a simple button-down Oxford-style dress shirt and pants, with no pretense to military rank or social status. But despite his inoffensive appearance, he seemed to take genuine pride and enjoyment from his work, smiling gently at Brennan as if he were a small child, even as the man pulled out his fingernails one at a time.
He hadn’t even started asking questions until he was through the first hand, Brennan refusing to scream, gritting his teeth and jerking spasmodically from each painful yank, each arm strapped to the chair, his ankles similarly bound.
“That must hurt,” the man said quietly, his English perfect. He tilted his head slightly and studied Brennan’s bleeding fingertips with clinical detachment. “What’s your name?”
Brennan said nothing. The man smiled gently once more. “Well… that is fine.” He reached behind him to the table that contained his tools and picked up a small, clear bottle, then unscrewed its cap. He turned back to Brennan and looked him in the eye as he poured a small amount of the liquid over his captive’s raw, fingers. The isopropyl alcohol was excruciating and Brennan shuddered, feeling his stomach and bowels clench.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“Skip.”
“Skip? Skip what?”
“Skip the fucking questions and send me back to my cell.”
The interrogator glanced down at his own shoes again, still smiling. “That’s not very polite, Mr. Smith. Your papers seem genuine but your visa stamp was a forgery, which leads us to believe you have someone in the American government facilitating your mission here, but that you came urgently. What were you doing in Cabinda?”
“Sightseeing.”
The smaller man nodded then paced the room for a moment with his hands behind his back. “We have an impasse of sorts, you see, Mr. Smith: my government is presently on very good terms with your government. Much American money is finding its way into this country for investment. And so I have been informed I’m not allowed to work on you to the degree that I would prefer. A few fingernails, that will be forgiven. But if I were to, say, pluck out one of your eyes or cut off an ear, there might be diplomatic ramifications.”
He walked back to the table and picked up what looked like an old Yellow Pages phone directory. “The pages of the phone directory, however, offer me an alternative. You see, they are so thin and packed so tightly together that, when held against a human body, they make an effective protection from damage. And yet, force transferred into one side of the book via a punch still follows Newton’s third law. There is an equal and opposite reaction, and the person on the other side of the book is likely to find it quite excruciating, particularly once their ribs have broken. But the skin on the outside is left unmarked. Clever, no? I believe it was invented by police in your country.”
The man held the book against Brennan’s ribs with his left hand then hammered a punch into it. Brennan felt it, his rib
s bruising slightly. He felt it more the second time; by the third, the interrogator was stepping hard into each punch, and Brennan felt his rib crack, the sting like a gunshot. The interrogator had a wild look on his face, as if delirious from a drug. He hammered Brennan with punch after punch. “Of course,” he said, breathing hard, “if you were to die from internal injuries, who could have foreseen such a thing, with you obviously having already been injured at the time of your arrest?”
He switched the book to the right-side ribs and continued hammering Brennan with bodyshot after bodyshot, another rib cracking, Brennan attempting to suppress a groan without much success.
“Is that enough, Mr. Smith?”
“You know…”
“Yes?” the man’s voice was full of anticipation.”
“If you stood on that phone book, people would think you were taller.”
Brennan caught a flicker of genuine annoyance on the man’s face before his expression once again reverted to something more serene.
“How are you enjoying our accommodations, Mr. Smith? Is your cell warm and cozy? I understand you have a sea view.”
“It’ll do,” Brennan said.
“You may yet be there for a very long time. There has been some discussion of ‘losing’ your paperwork. We have had no word yet from your people, so I must assume that you are here “off the record”, as the say. Do you know how many people after five years are still in here? Don’t bother to answer; I can assure you, no one lasts five years. How are your ribs feeling?”
“Like it’s the first day of the rest of my life.”
“Good, good. Then you’d enjoy a few more?” He raised the phone book and began hammering Brennan’s side with more punches. Another rib cracked, and the agent groaned loudly.
“Now, I suspect that was not a groan of pleasure, Mr. Smith,” the smaller man said.
Brennan was panting from the combination of stress, adrenaline and heat, the pain radiating through his side, throbbing like the world’s biggest bad tooth.
“Let’s begin again,” the man said. “What is your name?”
Brennan was too tired to bother trying. “Fuck off,” he said.
The interrogator shook his head in disappointment. “Round three, I suppose,” he said. “We’ll just have to have a convincing story. Let’s see: perhaps you were attacked by another inmate when you took his food. Yes, that’s a good rationale for losing an eye.” He turned back to the table and when he faced Brennan again was holding a scalpel in his right hand. “You said something about sightseeing, Mr. Smith. Perhaps…” he leaned in close, the blade less than an inch from Brennan’s eyeball, “… we can cure you of your inquisitive nature.”
He used his other hand to push Brennan’s head back, two fingers pulling back one of the agent’s eyelids. He leaned in, his breath hot and rank, “Don’t worry: soon you’ll have a whole new lack of perspective on things.” The blade crept forward until it was almost touching Brennan’s eye.
The door to the room swung open; the interrogator took a step back. The man who entered the room was in full military dress, a colonel’s bars on his shoulder. “Leave us,” he said to the interrogator.
The diminutive psychopath looked disappointed and glanced once angrily at Brennan before listening to his superior and leaving the room. A male nurse was standing behind the colonel in the doorway, anxiously awaiting instruction.
“Clean him up,” the colonel said.
The nurse set about binding Brennan’s finger tips in gauze, alcohol-soaked cotton and bandages.
“My apologies, Mr. Smith,” the colonel said. “It appears word of your captivity has somehow leaked to your fellow countrymen. Or that may be the case; I’m not certain what I’m allowed to say in this regard. However, I must apologize for my comrade’s… overzealous methods of questioning.”
“He broke my ribs.”
“Unfortunate, as I’ve said. However, you are a foreign national operating illegally in our country. I must ask you to tell me who you work for and perhaps, once we have established your purpose, we can discuss the interest from your embassy in finding out whom the American is that we’re holding.”
“The last guy was more convincing,” Brennan said. “He had that creepy movie villain vibe…”
“This is not a joking matter, Mr. Smith. If we so choose, you could be shot for espionage…”
“But you’re worried that would scare of some of those Yankee dollars, right? So why should I tell you a thing?”
The colonel’s face took on a stony contempt. “Perhaps another dozen hours hanging from the wall of a cell might change your mind,” the military man said, walking back towards the door. “Guards, bring our guest with us. We’re going back to the detention wing.”
April 8, 2016, LUANDA, ANGOLA
Brennan had begun to lose track of the time of day. The Angolans seemed to come and go, no one person always in charge of keeping an eye on him. They’d leave him chained up for five, six hours at a time, then let him down for one, then put him back up on the wall. Every so often, they’d wake him up with a bucket of cold water.
They didn’t seem in any great hurry to make him talk; given that the rats in his cell were the size of Chihuahuas, perhaps they figured eventually his own anxiety would eat at him, and he’d say something just to be free.
Instead, he used the vermin to occupy his mind, trying to identify which rat was specifically which, and then naming them. He’d learned it as a way to pass the time from a Soviet dissident trapped in a Polish church basement for sanctuary, around the reunification in Europe. Of course, the poor Russian had been there for months and his affinity to rodents had extended to predicting which would follow him into battle, so it was possible he’d gone just a little crazy.
But it was working for Brennan – that, and the belief that once he managed to get out of there, he might be able to track Dr. Han down and thank her in person for leaving him behind in Cabinda.
The latch to his cell clicked open and the door swung wide. The same short, mustachioed colonel in dress uniform who had visited him for two weeks entered, flanked by a soldier with a machine gun. “Good Morning, Mr. Smith!” he said cheerfully in English. “And how are you feeling today?”
“I’m chained to a wall. How do you think I’m feeling?”
“More requests for your embassy for information. They’re getting quite testy,” the colonel said. He strode over and stood next to Brennan. “There is an easy solution to your dilemma, Mr. Smith,” he said more quietly. “Simply tell us why you were at the rebel camp in Cabinda and we will let you go home.”
“You were probably a colonel pretty young, eh?” Brennan said.
“Why yes,” the colonel said, smiling brightly. “How did you know?”
“Guy your size and weight is likely to have what we call ‘short man syndrome’, a need to overachieve.”
The colonel wasn’t easily shaken. He smiled, tongue between his teeth and eyes averted as he held his patience. “If we hang you from the wall for much longer, Mr. Smith, your arms are going to start stretching… instead of just your nose.”
“I told you, I’m just a geologist. I was tipped that there might be unclaimed Uranium property around Massabi Lagoon.”
“Your visa to enter the country has shown to be a forgery, Mr. Smith. You have no company affiliation and your torso is covered in such an impressive array of scars and old wounds that I have trouble believing you are merely interested in radioactive rocks.”
“Believe what you want.”
“Explain the camp to me. Explain a dozen dead Cabindans, and an as-yet unidentified European. You’re a spy, Mr. Smith.”
“We’ve been over this… too many times.” The strain of standing constantly and having his arms suspended was only half the reason for his fatigue; his ribs had yet to heal and he winced every time he moved. “They were alive when I got there. They locked me in the shipping container. A bunch of other soldiers showed up and killed them.
”
“And left you alive.”
“And left me alive.”
“How fortunate for you.”
Brennan tilted his head and looked around the squalid cell. “Evidently.” The truth was, he didn’t know why Han had been involved or why she’d left him as a witness.
“So what are we to do with you? We could simply execute you as a clear and present danger to the national security of Angola, but we both know that would be both ironic, given our existing social conditions, and quite untrue.”
“Yep.”
“Or we could leave you here. But in short order, that would have diplomatic ramifications also.”
“I’m guessing.”
The colonel’s sneer was sardonic. He leaned in closely. “Were it up to me, Mr. Smith, we would work on you until you either talked, or died. Fortunately for you, my country’s greatly improved relationship with America is essential to business, and I do not wish to receive, how do you say, the ‘heat’ from people above me.”
Brennan looked him over from toes to head. “What are you, five-three? I’d say almost everyone’s above you.”
The colonel turned away for a brief moment then wheeled around quickly, slamming a balled up fist into Brennan’s stomach. Brennan grunted; he’d reflexively stiffened his stomach muscles before the blow and a fist-shaped bruise was spreading across them.
“I may not get the pleasure of having my man working the information out of you, Mr. Smith. But you are here for at least another day. It can be as unpleasant as you wish to make it.”
He turned on his heel and headed for the door, followed by the soldier. Then he faced Brennan again. “An embassy official will be here to see you tomorrow,” he said. “My advice would be to do whatever this person says in order to leave Angola. The next time you and I meet, I will not be so cordial.”
The diminutive officer turned to leave. “Hey!” Brennan said. “Aren’t you at least going to let me down?”
