As I skated my cursor over the transcript of Lindsay’s speech, a link came up to “Neo-Teo/TTT/LDS.” Clicking it brought up an even deeper level of lunacy: a third video, also taken in the safe room but this time beginning with Lindsay praying with three other men in front of a DHI altar. In this one, Lindsay’s “infectious but paralogistic babbling” is about how the cosmogram of the Game was somehow also the True Cross of the Native American Prophet, the angel Moroni. “And I believe that this is the Stone of Abraham, the Pearl of Great Price that the Prophet Joseph intended us to find,” Lindsay says. “After all, the original Urim and Thummim were a pair of dice, or I suppose I should say dreidels. And when we master that great Game of God, surely we will be raised up, as the dross is cast down, raised up live through the Tree of Nephi to the garden of Adam the Christ, to a life everlasting of the body as well as of the soul, to live in Maya and become as gods.”
The three men answer, “Amen.”
Of course one’s natural first reaction to this was that Lindsay was a total crackpot. The obvious second reaction was to remind oneself that this hardly ever matters, and that Saint Paul, Joseph Smith, and Hitler were all even bigger crackpots, and did pretty well for themselves. And the third was to wonder what Lindsay was really talking about, in practical terms. He had to be up to a lot more down there than just building neon pyramids. There was no way he was going to get autonomous state status without being involved in some government thing, some military thing . . .
I searched for Guatemala, Belize, Chocula, Neo-Teo, Real Estate, Lobbying, and all possible combinations of those terms. Hundreds of files came up, but even just glancing them I could see that they were all relatively public-consumption stuff. The real dirt had to be somewhere else.
And what did he mean by “Live in Maya?” Well, put a pin in that for now.
I tried searching under moonstone, a word of Lindsay’s that I remembered hearing before somewhere—although now I couldn’t remember where. Moonstone didn’t work, but when I tried Moonstones (dimly recalling that it might be the name of an extinct breakfast cereal), a single folder came up. This one was encrypted under a whole different protocol, with a built-in autoimmune system that would destroy the file if it were accessed without a set of randomizer-card codes. However, after more work with the Sacrifice Game interface, I managed to break through and call up the folder. It had to be the most heavily protected data I’d ever seen or heard of, since there were thousands of decoy files around it and nothing to indicate it to anyone who didn’t know exactly the name they were looking for. Even then there were probably only ten or so outside drives that were like Marena’s old drive—which she’d cloned before turning in her old one to be destroyed—that belonged to officers of the corporation but weren’t inside Warren offices, and that could access it at all. The odds that anybody without my exact skills, motives, and life experience would ever get into it had to be vanishingly small.
At any rate, there were files on secret DARPA contracts going back to 1978, files relating to U.S. State Department black ops in Central America going back to the 1940s. Obviously, Lindsay had a tangle of ties to the military communities in both Belize and Guatemala, not to mention a rogue’s gallery of other countries. Whatever the overall goal of the project was, it was clearly ongoing. But at the moment I was only interested in one aspect of it. On an impulse, I searched this batch of files for Felix AND García-Torres.
The search flagged over two hundred files. My heartbeat shifted into neutral. I took a Ziploc bag out of my pocket, dug the two still-damp Kleenex wads out of it, and ate them. Gak. Another slug of soda. Ahh. Good to the last drop.
The first file showed that Felix and García-Torres were the same person, the same Corporal Jorge García-Torres, now a commander in the Guatemalan Army Air Corps, who was at the top of my (s)hit list, responsible for my parents’ murder in the G2 massacre at my village. It was obvious that he was on Warren’s payroll. Damn it. I knew it, I finger-fucking knew it! Hot spit. You’re a dead guy, I’m going to work this connection until you die screaming, you fuck!!!
As I reconstructed it, García-Torres and Lindsay knew each other from way back—at least since the 1970s, when the land that is now the Stake was one of John Hull’s training camps for the paramilitary squads who were helping run cocaine for Oliver North’s group “under the aegis of Bush the First.” Since then, García-Torres—now a commander—had acted as Lindsay’s main contact in the Guatemalan military.
Despite the detaching qualities of the tsam lic, my teeth were chattering with rage. I was already getting that blue taste and that ringing in my carapace. I checked in on Marena again. She and Max were in her car, which meant she’d get here in a little over a half an hour if she didn’t stop for anything, which she wouldn’t. Come on, Jeddidiah. It’s in there. Find it. Find it.
( 96 )
For now I left out No Way’s middle names, even though one of them, José, was how he got his nickname. Instead I just searched for QUINONES and XILOX. Eleven files came up. One was a Bosch .dv4 from the day after the downloading, when we were still at Ix Ruinas and I’d still been under some anesthesia. I clicked it open. At first I couldn’t tell what the image was, and then it sort of clarified into Grgur’s big scalpy head bobbing close to the camera in green greasy grainy enhanced night-vision and a little light from a red-filtered lamp. One of the ugly Alarcón brothers—I couldn’t tell whether it was Leonidas or Luis—asked him something about what I guess was Ana’s diversionary squad and he said something back, but I couldn’t make it out. It was weird how completely I’d missed that whole strain of activity at the time, the patrol coming through and confronting them and everything, it was like I’d had a minilobotomy. Grgur’s head moved aside and I could see No Way’s face and naked upper body about two meters from the camera, his skin glowing phosphor-gray in the visible darkness.
Uh-oh, I thought. Bad deal. Bad. Bad.
No Way—basically my best friend, and my only real friend who remembered the crazy life—was at an angle on a blanket and a pair of hands was putting a blood-pressure cuff around his upper left arm. There was a sort of thick monocle surgical-taped over one eye and his other eye was taped open. He was wearing a black headband like the one I’d had for the downloading. I was getting that unfun gravityless feeling like the part of your face where you live is still okay but the dorsal side of your body—starting from your back teeth—is all melting away, like that Peter Lorre knockoff at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. A torso passed in front of the camera and then another hand pulled a drooly bit of tape-wrapped rag out of No Way’s mouth. He’d been knocked out and transported. I’d always thought No Way was so alert nobody could ever sucker him. But I guess your own crew can usually get the drop on you. Or maybe even his own communicator or some other piece of equipment had had a remote-fired restraint stunner planted inside it. He started trying to say something but I couldn’t hear anything, just Grgur and the Alarcón boys talking about whether they’d found anything. They must have strip-searched him. When the torso moved away I could see that No Way’s arms were pinned under big nylon sandbags like Whitefoods. A window came up in the lower right of the screen that said the software and field unit they were using was from Royal Ordnance, which I think is a subsidiary of British Aerospace. The window looked pretty much like the Norton System Doctor interface, except instead of Disk Integrity and everything it had temperature, skin temperature, blood pressure, respiration, muscle tension, “Estimated Voice Stress Level,” galvanic skin resistance, electroencephalograph, and a bunch of other exotic readouts. Of course, I couldn’t see the controls or anything, but from the one window it seemed like a pretty sophisticated gadget. Electroshock is pretty much the only kind of interrogation device anyone uses these days, since it’s so convenient and effective and doesn’t leave major marks. But I’d been hearing lately that even with a lot of conductant some of the Amnesty International types were figuring out how to tell if someone had been tortured f
rom collagen calcification or some other histological change in the skin cells. So the deal now was to use pulses of AC voltages at very low amperage, like you were using an old hand-cranked magneto. Then ideally the current wouldn’t arc or cause burns. On this particular unit the bar graph went all the way down to fifty volts—which probably wouldn’t hurt much more than a good-sized pinch of carpet static—and up to sixty thousand volts, which could cause a heart attack if you weren’t healthy. I couldn’t see the electrical leads in the shot, but if they were following common practice one would be a large conductor, with a lot of conductant, clipped to the flap of skin between two toes, and the other would have been inserted in his anus or urethra. Leonidas Alarcón bent his head down, made sure No Way was breathing, and then wrapped his mouth and neck in a sort of big puffy yoke made of white rags. No Way’s head stuck up out of it like it had sunken halfway into an Elizabethan lace collar. Someone threaded what I guessed was a little microphone into the front of the muffler. No Way would be able to breathe and talk, barely, but if he started yelling it wouldn’t be loud. Evidently they weren’t far from the site. Where, presumably, the Guate patrol was stomping around.
“No Way?” Grgur’s voice said. “It’s Grgur. You know who I am, right?”
Someone flicked on the microphone. It picked up No Way’s voice pretty well:
“. . . quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,” he was mumbling, “verbo et opere: mea culpa—”
“Come on, don’t worry,” Grgur said, “we’re not going to hurt you, but we do need you to answer a few questions before we take you into detention.”
“. . . beatum Ioannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum, omnes Sanctos . . .”
“Hey. Pancho? You understand? You’re getting too uptight about this. Knock it off.” They let him finish, though. Maybe they were all too Catholic to zap him in the middle of a confiteor.
“. . . et vos, fratres, et te, pater, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum. Amen.”
I fucked up, I thought. I’d always said I wouldn’t trust anybody, and then I’d done it anyway, and once again I’d fucked up royal—
“Good,” Grgur’s voice said. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to just test this for a second.” The voltmeter bar slid up to seven thousand volts and back. No Way’s body arched a bit, and there was an exhalation of air, but he didn’t scream. If you’ve felt it, you know that the pain of electricity is like nothing else, it seems to come from within your own body and not from a foreign source. It’s like your cells decided to fry themselves. I couldn’t help seeing some of the readouts, pupillary size dilating from five millimeters to seven, muscle tension bouncing from sixty-five to ninety and back, galvanic skin resistance—that is, the conductivity of the electrolytes in the skin—going up twenty percent, the whole nine yards. Leonidas Alarcón looked back at the camera, which I guess was just the little teleconferencing lens in the screen frame of Grgur’s phone. He listened to the night sounds for a minute.
“Okay,” Leonidas said.
“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur’s voice asked. His voice had a new police-trained ring to it, with less of a Slavic accent than before. He sounded bored but I got the feeling that under that he was in a hurry.
“Hey, you’re getting a hard-on,” No Way rasped in Spanish. “Check it out, he likes his work.”
“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur repeated.
“Quiñones Xiloch,” No Way said. Maybe he’d decided to get this over with as fast as possible.
“Could you tell us your age, please?”
“Thirty-four.”
Grgur paused for a minute, probably watching the readouts. The electroencephalograph seemed to be set to flag peaks, troughs, and unusual concentrations of the sinusoidal alpha waves over different time intervals. Right now it was wavering between 10 and 13 Hz, which I guess polygraph devotees would call normal stress.
“Would you please tell us, what is your primary affiliation or loyalty?” Grgur asked.
“EGP,” No Way said. That is, the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.
“Would you list your military affiliations?”
“EGP only.”
“Would you tell us your position within that organization?”
“Clase de tropa,” No Way said. It was like a noncommissioned officer.
“Would you tell us your serial number?”
“There are no numbers.”
Grgur didn’t pursue it. Maybe he knew it was true. Anyway, the program recalibrated itself and marked the response as normal.
“Would you please tell us your commanding officer within that organization?”
“Carlos.” Carlos was the head of the whole movement, like Marcos had been in southern Mexico in the early nineties, and like Marcos he wore sunglasses and a bandana and nobody knew who he really was. Or whether he was even one person.
“Would you tell us the names of the other officers in your cell?”
“Rodríguez, Infante, Kauffman, Noxac, Rueda.”
“None of those check out,” Grgur said.
“Then I don’t know the real ones,” No Way said.
“Would you tell us the names of the other officers in your cell?”
“Rodríguez, Infante, Zaya—”
The voltmeter darted to ten thousand and hung there for 2.1 seconds. No Way’s backed arched and bounced and he let out a tiny whistling screech.
“That’s bullshit,” Grgur said. “Listen. Would you please tell us the name of your contact?”
“Did you come?” No Way asked.
“Who’s your current contact?”
“Nestor Xconilha.”
“Would you please tell us the name of your current controller?”
“Also Nestor Xconilha.”
“Who is your backup?” He meant the person who comes looking for you.
“I have no backup on this job.”
“When is your gone-missing date?”
“Today.”
“How long will it be before your organization starts looking for you?”
“They may be looking for me now.”
“We weren’t due to finish until tomorrow.”
“I was supposed to report today.”
“Who can we contact to back that up?”
“They won’t answer any contacts,” No Way said.
“What call signals can you give us to help you make the report?”
“No, they won’t.”
“If we let you make the contact, will you arrange for them to meet us here?”
“Sure.”
“I have a problem with your physical readings on that answer,” Grgur said.
“You’re right, you’re right, they won’t,” No Way said. “That’s against policy. They’re too careful for that.”
“So what would we do then?”
“Meet, uh, prearranged place,” No Way said.
“Can I ask where is that?”
“Poptún.”
“I don’t think that’s right,” Grgur said. “Listen. You know about the new polygraph feedback software, don’t you?” “No,” No Way said. He was hoping they’d take time to explain it to them.
“Yes, you do,” Grgur said, “we can tell. Even on a trivial question like that one.”
“Okay,” No Way said. I could tell he knew it was bullshit, though. And I think Grgur could tell that too. Not that the thing wasn’t sensitive, but all real interrogators know that no matter how many readings you get, they don’t always have much to do with the truth as such. If anything, they have to do with how much the subject expects and fears the next burst of pain. So if he thinks lying’s going to avert it, his readings might go down on a lie, not up. But I guess they were hoping to get enough out of all their data back at the ranch. At least on one or two key issues.
“Who should we contact if we have to release you to the Guates’ army patrol?” Grgur asked.
“Nobody.”
&
nbsp; “Who should we contact if you were detained, injured, or killed?”
“Nobody.”
“Listen, believe it or not, we’re not hostile to you,” Grgur said. “We are somewhat hostile to the current administration of this country and we had the impression you were too. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Would you please tell us what your cell knows about this operation?” Grgur asked. At least for now he wasn’t pursuing the names thing. Maybe they really weren’t after that.
“Do you mean this particular looting expedition?” No Way asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know anything about it myself.”
“What does your cell know?”
“They don’t know anything, I’ve been out of contact since August thirtieth.”
“Would you please tell us what Mr. DeLanda has told you about this operation?”
“Nothing. Wait, nothing besides your schedule and that you were digging and had to keep it quiet.”
“You’re sure that’s everything?”
“Yes, I even asked whether you were after jade masks or what and he said he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Can you tell us what you know about the settlement at Pusilha?” Grgur meant the Stake, but I guess he wasn’t supposed to call it that.
“I know there’s been a lot of real estate bought in the area. By the Morons. Four plantations, water rights . . . that’s it.”
“Are you sure?”
“They’re building landing strips and a control tower.”
“What else?”
“That’s it,” No Way said. He didn’t look so good. Since the beginning of the interview his blood pressure had gone from 135 over 80 to 155 over 95, and the pneumograph said his breathing was up to twenty-five breaths per minute.
The Sacrifice Game Page 55
