Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  Park rotated the picture so that it faced his captain.

  Earlier, while he’d waited on the track, he’d arranged his case into a detailed outline. An order of fact and supporting evidence, bullet-pointed and footnoted with everything that had happened over the previous forty-eight hours and during the vast hours of observation he’d logged working Dreamer. He’d been prepared. He tried to recall that tightly rendered diagram of logic, cause and effect. But it was gone now, blown from the page by exhaustion and worry. Only the principal assumption remained legible in the mental scraps.

  He placed his finger on the picture, pointing at Cager.

  “It’s him.”

  Bartolome took another poor photo print from his papers and showed Park a close-up of Cager.

  “I know who it is. Everyone knows who he is. That’s the point.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Park was remembering his father again. Remembering conversations where they seemed always to be speaking different languages. Or talking in code, each lacking the key that would unlock the secret of the other’s meaning. Conversations about why he was taking a Ph.D. in philosophy instead of carrying on in political science. About taking the degree at Stanford rather than Harvard. About joining the police force. About having a child. His father had shifted the phone, a crinkle of newspaper, and then read a few headlines from the front page of the Washington Post. Sighed. Having a child, Parker? Now? What possible sense does that make? And Park had stopped trying to explain.

  But now he needed to be understood.

  He covered the picture of Cager with his hand.

  “It’s him. He’s the one doing it.”

  Bartolome squinted at him.

  “Can you pass a piss test?”

  Sweat ran from Park’s hairline, beaded in his eyebrows, stung his eyes, and made him blink.

  “What?”

  Bartolome stood up.

  “Jesus, Haas. Of all the asshole rookie moves, hitting your stash. No one expects you to be a saint on a job like this, but you don’t get high when you’ve requested a sit-down.”

  Park rubbed the sweat from his eyes.

  “I didn’t. I.”

  Bartomome was looking at the AC vent.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Captain.”

  He walked to the vent.

  “Goddamned thing.”

  Park watched as Bartolome took a butterfly knife from his pocket, twirled it open. He remembered how his father would shift an awkward conversation by suddenly embarking on some small task. After his mother’s funeral, standing in a far corner of the room as close to the door as possible, he’d watched as his sister had asked their father what his plans were for the house. Watched his father rise in midconversation, go to the wall, and stick his finger into a divot that Park had put there nearly twenty years before while playing field hockey indoors. That, he’d said, should have been tended to by now. And he’d gone to the garden shed for a can of spackle and a putty knife.

  Bartolome slide the blade of his knife into the slot on the back of one of the screws that held the vent grille in place.

  Park remembered following his father from the room, breaking off into the kitchen, calling a car to come pick him up, and leaving a half hour later while Ambassador Haas was still in the library covering one of the few remaining signs that indicated his children had been raised in his home. The patch, his sister told him when they next spoke, had not been painted over. Their father had left it visible. Apparently, she mused, he forgot to finish the job.

  Park watched the older man unscrewing the grille.

  “He gave me Dreamer.”

  Bartolome kept his back turned.

  “Captain.”

  He didn’t look at Park.

  “The real thing, Captain.”

  He pocketed the two bottom screws, began turning the one in the grille’s top right corner.

  Park rapped two points of his argument into the tabletop with his knuckles.

  “Hologram. RFID.”

  Bartolome jabbed the knife point into the wall and left it sticking there as he used his fingertips to pry at the edges of the grille.

  “Shut up.”

  Park rose.

  “He used it to conduct a transaction.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  The grille swung loose, hanging from the remaining screw in the upper left corner, revealing a cluster of tiny microphones and cameras mounted around the rim of the duct.

  Park walked over. He looked at the listening and observation devices. He looked at his captain. He remembered his father’s final act of surrender in the face of a world that had grown wild beyond his ability to keep himself and his family safe. He pointed at the pictures still resting faceup on the table and raised his voice.

  “Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior. He gave me Dreamer in exchange for Shabu.”

  Bartolome stuck a hand inside the duct and began ripping out the mikes and cameras. He dropped them on the floor, a bristle of wires and antennae, and stomped the pile twice with his Kevlar-soled boot.

  He put on his sunglasses, yanked his knife from the wall, scooped the papers from the table, and pulled the door open.

  “Come on.”

  Park looked at the pile of broken surveillance equipment and started to open his mouth again.

  Bartolome came back into the room and grabbed his arm.

  “You have a family, Haas. Keep your mouth shut and come on. Those were just the ones we could see.”

  He pulled Park down a hall of two-way mirrored glass peering in on interrogation rooms. Park saw a woman sitting alone, picking at a cake of scab on her neck. A small soot-smeared boy being screamed at by two uniformed officers. A man being beaten with a bloodstained telephone book. He pulled to a stop at the last room. Someone with a black bag over his head hung by his wrists from a U-bolt driven into the ceiling. An officer sat in a chair, smoking, occasionally setting the hanging body to swinging with prods from a PR-24 baton.

  “Captain.”

  Bartolome shoved him down the hall.

  “Shut up.”

  Bartolome slapped a button next to the door at the end of the hall and looked up at a camera in the corner where the wall and ceiling met.

  “Coming out.”

  A squelch of feedback, then a crackled voice.

  “With what?”

  “With my fucking collar.”

  “Where’s his cuffs?”

  Bartolome kicked the door.

  “In your fucking ass if you don’t buzz me out.”

  The door buzzed, they walked out into a box, the door swung closed, another buzzer, and they opened the second door, onto a loading dock in the parking garage. A van beeped as it backed up to the dock. Park could see faces smashed against the heavy-gauge wire screens that covered the openings where the windows had been shattered.

  Cops waited on the dock with batons, zip-cuffs, and riot helmets. Bartolome pushed through them. One of the cops flipped up her visor, the reserve who had processed Park.

  “Where you going with him?”

  Bartolome started down the steps, keeping Park in front of him.

  “Out of your hair.”

  “Where? I got paperwork.”

  “What the hell do you care? I just opened a space in your cells.”

  The reserve waved at Park.

  “Must be nice having a fairy godmother, asshole.”

  The back door of the van opened and the cops on the dock started pulling the prisoners out, swinging the batons as they emerged, beating them to the ground and putting on the zips.

  Bartolome unlocked a silver Explorer, planted Park in the passenger seat, and slammed the door before circling the truck and putting himself behind the steering wheel.

  “You incredible asshole.”

  He started the engine and pulled out of his space, up a ramp, swerving to miss another incoming van, and bounced out the exit onto the street.

  Late afternoon, sun dropping
out of the zenith of the sky, an angry red. Columns of smoke rose, pillars supporting a low brown roof.

  Bartolome pulled around a burning pile of uncollected garbage onto Sawtelle and looked upward as a gunship hovering over the 405 opened fire on someone below.

  “Been a long day.”

  Bullets hit a gas tank on the overpass, and a fireball burned the air.

  Park touched where his father’s watch.

  “What did you mean, Captain, ‘you have a family’?”

  Bartolome gunned the Explorer into an alley running down the back side of Sawtelle.

  “I meant you have something to lose.”

  A FIRST TASER had taken me to my knees in convulsions; a second Taser blacked me out. I had brief moments of awareness, a certainty that I had lost control of both my bladder and my bowels, pain as the razor being wielded to cut my clothes away nicked my chest, a blur of bodies in my living room, a wrench of nausea as I realized they were moving my furniture about, several mental blanks that could have been seconds or hours, stab of needle in my arm, and a fierce rush of intense lucidity that flooded through my bloodstream, directly to my heart and up to my brain.

  Time had passed. The sky was again dimming. I was naked on my couch, hands behind my back, a taut line of wire running from my wrists to a noose around my neck, legs splayed, ankles tied to the legs of a low table, this position giving them easier access to my genitals while preventing me from instinctively closing my legs when they began to use the soldering iron.

  I had been tortured twice before.

  The first time, I’d been barely twenty years of age. I was discovered someplace I should not have been, out of uniform, committing warlike acts. Clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions, I could have been tried for war crimes. But I was tortured instead, encouraged to make a confession that included crimes I had nothing to do with, and to repudiate my country. After three days I did as I was asked. Three months later, after I had been included as part of a covert prisoner exchange, I returned with a squad of Degar guerrillas to the camp where I had been held, and took part in my first and only revenge killings.

  The second time I was tortured I was nearly forty. I had been accepting several freelance contracts from an agency of my government, and returned excellent results on all of them. Results so excellent, in fact, that it was strongly suspected that I must be in possession of intelligence that could only have been passed to me by members of the primary opposition. I was deemed both volatile and disposable by someone determined to clean the slate and to winnow from me the details of my supposed betrayal. As there had been no betrayal, there was nothing to winnow. After two weeks I began to lie. Simple lies at first, but growing ever more elaborate as each lie led to more questions, until they all unraveled. Thus, the torture continued. After another two weeks I ceased to lie. I ceased to talk. I ceased to scream or cry or beg for mercy. I silently repeated a mantra to myself that heartened me and bore me up: They will kill me soon. They will kill me soon. They will kill me soon.

  But they did not.

  Instead, apparently inspired by my silence, they stopped asking me questions. While continuing to torture me. Randomly, without discernible reason or purpose, I was subjected to a variety of abuses for an additional two weeks. I’ve come to suspect that once I became silent I had been judged a loss. Convinced that they had passed the point where I might still be capable of revealing anything of value, my captors were quite prepared to kill me. I believe some spirit of frugality took hold, and I was kept about the place as a training subject. In those final two weeks I was a kind of living cadaver upon which students of the trade could hone their skills.

  That I was let go at the end of those two weeks did not, I am quite sure, have anything to do with my ability to perform this service. Rather, someone somewhere lost his job. Footing in the intelligence trade is notoriously slippery. A pioneer one day, it takes only a single misjudgment and the trail is lost, the fall to the bottom long, the ground, when it comes, littered with other once-adventurous climbers. Whoever had commanded my capture, retention, and course of interrogation had made a mess where he lived. Not in regard to me, however. That I was released was merely a sign of how singularly this person had let down the side. I intuited a general cleaning of house, all the pet projects of this persona non grata undone and swept from the scene.

  They could have killed me still. But that would have implied a belief on someone’s part, a belief that whoever was being cut loose from the firm had been on to something when they had me detained. So much more humiliating and nullifying to set me on my way. No harm, no foul. Though there was a use I could still be put to.

  There was an interim, of course. Medical attention, which, as it was applied in my cell, I initially thought was a part of the torture. An effort to restore some of my health before beginning anew. But it wasn’t. A man wearing the same surgical mask worn by anyone who came into my presence asked me questions in a flat voice with no accent. A voice that was the product of excellent training. And for another two weeks my worst hurts were ministered to. Several times I was given injections that put me to sleep. Each time I believed I would not wake up. Each time I did.

  The last time I woke in my cell a slight-framed person stood at the foot of the bed. From a manila folder this person drew several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs with a glossy finish. The photos were all of the same person. A man with a conservative haircut and suit. Nondescript. Two of the photos showed him entering a residence, the house number clearly visible. One of the photos showed him driving a car, turning onto a street where both that same house and a street sign were clearly visible. Another photo showed him walking in a busy downtown area of a large city, a well-known tourist attraction in that city clearly visible. That was the last photo. The lights went out, a needle pricked my arm, I went to sleep, and when I woke up I was home, in my own bed.

  Not one to question a message so crisply enunciated, I called my travel agent that day, booked a flight to the city I had identified by the well-known tourist attraction, flew to that city, rented a car, drove to the street whose sign I had clearly seen, parked up a bit from the house I had also clearly seen, waited until the nondescript haircut and suit arrived and went inside, followed him in soon after, and killed everyone within.

  No, this was not revenge. I did not doubt that this was the person who had ordered me held and tortured, but, as I was a mature man at this point, revenge was not on my mind. I was simply behaving in a prudent and professional manner. I had been told, as clearly as if the words had been spoken in my ear, that I should not take my release for granted, that payment was due. So I paid up.

  And that was the last that was ever made of it. I have never worked since for my government; a mutual accord. Could, one day, there be an accounting? Could some drone of the services uncover a dusty file while in the process of digitalizing back data and, seeing an opportunity for advancement, approach his or her superiors with this nugget of ancient history, a loose end left perilously undone? Could a fellow practitioner arrive by stealth and tie off that dangling line? Yes, to all questions, yes. But the prospect did not keep me awake at night.

  I was sent a message by whoever released me: Kill this man for us, or else. The particular savagery and bloody-mindedness I expressed in the fulfillment of that unspoken contract composed the text of my own reply message: Leave me alone, or I’ll do this to you.

  We heard one another, loud and clear.

  In both cases of torture, the questions I had been asked bore little relation to any actions I had ever taken. Though I was most certainly guilty of any number of misdeeds for which I might have been held accountable, I was always quizzed on matters unrelated. And so it was again.

  There were four people in the room with me. Well, six, but two of them were dead. One of those remaining four had collected some of my possessions. Papers, two external hard drives, two laptops and a tablet computer, five thumb drives, my slender bamboo-sided desktop
tower, and anything else that might reasonably store information, including my DVR. Though I doubted they’d learn anything from the classic episodes of Twilight Zone and several cooking and gardening shows that I was addicted to.

  Done with that, he’d unrolled a nylon tool caddy and sorted through various cables, fitting them to my phones and downloading assorted numbers and call logs before tossing the phones themselves into a knapsack. He’d be disappointed. The business phones were each assigned to a specific individual whose number I had memorized; they contained only one number each: their own. Call logs I erased after each call in or out from a particular phone. My personal phones were similarly barren of numbers. An advantage of a nearly photographic memory. I erased logs at day’s end in general. The phone I’d had on me when they attacked would have the helicopter pilot’s number, Vinnie’s incoming call, and a few others. Nothing I was concerned with.

  A second survivor was at the glass wall that looked out over the basin. He took frequent peeks through a pair of binoculars and spoke in occasional whispers into his headset. The glass was thick, impact- but not bullet-resistant; still the faint whines of sirens and crackle of gunfire penetrated. He primarily spoke modern Hebrew, with an Israeli accent, though I did catch a frequent, emphatic “fuck.” The third, a man who could only be described as “battle-scarred and proud of it,” asked me questions that, while they didn’t confuse me, did confound me. The fourth had plugged in the soldering iron and placed it carefully on the Thor table while it heated.

  The only obvious mistake they had made was in not wearing masks of any sort. Not that revealing their features marked them for an eventual vicious demise when I freed myself and set about to hunt them down one by one, rather that it revealed their intention to kill me no matter the outcome of their questioning. Tipping their hand a bit. For whatever it might be worth. Knowing I was going to die was hardly any comfort, but it did define the field of play, spurring me to actions I might otherwise not have taken.

  The battle-scarred man referred to a number of laminated sheets of paper on a clipboard. I had seen something similar in the past. An interrogation script, it would have been prepared in advance, each question allowing for only a limited number of answers. Each of these allowable answers leading to the next question. All roads leading to one of two conclusions only: You are the fucker we’re after or You are not the fucker we’re after. It didn’t matter that I could tell them outright that the answer in my case was the second option. They would only accept one of these two conclusions if it were arrived at after the script had been followed.