by Bob Mayer
It didn’t bother Sarah that much.
And the music. In the mock prisoner-of-war camp where she’d ended up, they’d played music most of the time, keeping everyone on edge, making it difficult to sleep. She had an idea what was awaited her in whichever cell they tossed her in.
A door swung ponderously open and she was wheeled in. Bright lights lined the ceiling, glaring down at her as she was placed near the center of the room. Another person came in, some nondescript woman with shears and an electric razor. She shaved Sarah completely. Her head and her entire body. The woman was not tender and Sarah’s skin was left raw and bleeding in several spots. Then the woman and the two men who’d pushed her gurney left.
And the door swung shut.
She was still bound to the gurney. She looked about, her head nestled in the sheared debris of her hair. The walls were covered with this bright red padding covered them, even the back of the heavy door.
No smashing one’s head against a wall to end it.
There were tiny black spots up in each corner: cameras.
She waited.
Someone else might have called out. She didn’t. In fact, the longer it went without anything happening, the better. The rule was to hold out for forty-eight hours. She knew that her handler, Westland, back in the States had been informed she’d left the plane and had already noticed she had not sent her infiltration confirmation report. And Westland would soon note that there was no initial entry report as required by SOP.
Those two events would initiate a protocol: whatever information Sarah had that could compromise other operations and personnel would be reviewed and action taken to minimize possible damage.
So every minute that ticked by, while it might serve to un-nerve someone else, was almost soothing to Sarah.
Eventually she had to urinate. So she did.
She noticed it was getting chillier in the room. Temperature modification. Something she expected. Nothing she could do about it. Goose bumps rose on her skin. She began to shiver, vibrating against the restraints.
She had no idea how much time had passed.
She eventually lost consciousness.
She woke to her body covered in sweat, the temperature in the room at least in the high nineties. She was badly dehydrated. She could smell her urine and the gurney below her was soaked.
She heard the door open but didn’t turn her head, the only act of defiance left. A woman came into view, hovering over her. A rather striking woman, with short blond hair, well colored, and high cheekbones. She had grey eyes; correction one grey eye. The other was bright red, artificial. No pupil. Just red. She might have been a model (other than the eye), but the lines on her face indicated she was in her thirties at least, past prime for most models and she’d never known the prick of the Botox needle. The heat didn’t seem to affect her in the slightest; she looked like she could walk through a sauna and not produce a drop of sweat. Cold, very cold.
Sarah doubted she was a model.
“What do you know of the color red?” the woman asked in perfect English with an American accent.
There was someone else in the room, on the other side. Sarah shifted her eyes. A man dressed in white. He had an IV stand and a cart. He found a vein in her arm, expertly inserted a needle, checked the drip and then left.
“You must be thirsty,” the woman said. “We want to keep you hydrated. In fact, you’re not really going to be harmed. Physically. Much. No marks at least. Nothing permanent. That’s crass and vulgar.” She pointed at her red eye. “This was crass and vulgar and totally unnecessary so I know of what I speak. But I adapted. Some think it an ostentatious display, my red eye. But it’s a machine. A very expensive one. I can’t see through it; a pity. So I have no depth perception. Ended my ability to do my previous line of work, although it is amazing how we can adapt to almost anything. But the eye is quite useful in my new occupation. It registers your temperature and some other things.” She shifted gears. “Back to the room. Do you like the red?”
Sarah stared straight up.
The woman waved her hand, indicating the surroundings. “Red is a warm color. It, and its neighbors orange and yellow, have the longest wavelengths. Thus it actually takes more energy to look at those colors than the soothing ones, like blue or green. Red stimulates the brain, raises your pulse and your respiration rate.” She gestured toward her red eye. “I can tell both of yours are up. People think a toreador wears a red cape to enrage the bull, but the bull is colorblind. It only responds to the movement of the cape. He wears it for the crowd. The color indicates danger, excitement, hostility and also success. Like the toreador, everything here is designed for you and those like you. Keep that in mind.
“Have you ever noticed how many fast-food restaurants are painted red? It also stimulates the salivary glands and makes us hungry. You’re hungry, aren’t you? And it hurts the eyes. Casinos use red in high-stakes areas because it tends to make people place larger bets and take greater risks. And it induces us to make faster decisions, which is why ‘buy now’ buttons tend to be red.”
Sarah knew the monologue was the first attempt at making a connection. The woman was letting her know that she was an expert. Also, she wasn’t threatening. Not directly. It was all implied. Sarah also knew she had to play her own side of this.
Sarah tried to speak, found it hard with such a dry mouth, but finally managed to get the words out. “So you’re my toreador?”
The woman laughed, no warmth in it. “That would make you a bull. Do you feel like a bull right now? Pinned down? Helpless? No. If I were your toreador, this would be a contest. I can assure you, this won’t be a contest. The sooner you accept that, the better.
“FSB? SVR?” Sarah asked, using the acronyms of different successors to the KGB.
“That would make you CIA. Which you might have been once upon a time, but no longer. As your unit has no name, mine doesn’t either. And this place,” she indicated the red walls. “Doesn’t exist. A black site, similar to the ones your country has. Not listed on any maps. Not acknowledged. Think of what happens in your black sites. And then accept we are no different.”
The woman looked at Sarah, raking her gaze along Sarah’s naked body. “I will soon know you better than anyone ever has. Think of that? I will be more intimate with you than any lover you’ve known.”
* * *
During training, Sarah had been taught by a Buddhist monk to meditate, an arcane skill for an assassin and one she hadn’t seen the need for at the time.
It was very useful now. The lights never went out and the moment her ‘toreador’ had left, music began blaring. A form of heavy metal with no discernible beat, a rock band on a very bad trip with no musical talent. Sarah kept her eyes closed and focused on the techniques she’d been taught. She’d just reached an almost peaceful place despite the alternating temperature, light and sound, when the door opened and the sound suddenly stopped.
The silence was surprisingly disconcerting.
“I did not properly introduce myself last time,” the red-eyed woman said. “My name is Verusha. We know your name. We know quite a lot about you, actually. And since you never sent your infiltration or initial entry reports, your handler knows you have been compromised. And all that valuable information in your head is no longer timely. So, bravo. According to the tenets of your SERE school, you have lasted the critical first forty-eight hours without giving up anything.
“But that’s not what we’re interested in. After all, we are not at war with your country. We’re not that keen on what you know. What we want to know is who you know. Who they are. It gives us a picture of our counter-parts in your country. Such knowledge is very useful, as you can well imagine.
“Shall we begin?”
Of course it had already begun from the moment she’d been tased.
The weeks that followed merged together. Light. Sometimes pitch-black. Sound. Sometimes, but rarely, absolute silence. Heat. Cold. Interrogations.
> Then, once, the door flew open and a quartet of men rushed in. They handcuffed her and hustled her out of the cell, and down the corridor, essentially carrying her. They made a left turn, then a right and an open door beckoned. They carried her out the open door into a courtyard, roughly twenty feet on a side. The walls, other than the steel door, were concrete. The men carried her to one side and shoved her against the wall, where she stood, naked and shivering.
She looked up. A grey, cloudy day.
Never had such a sky looked so beautiful to her.
Then she looked down. The four men had pistols leveled, pointing at her. Looking left and right she saw that the concrete to each side was pitted and cracked. Dull red smears marked it. The brick floor was stained dark.
It was a place of execution.
The steel door creaked open and a man wearing a suit stepped out. He had a piece of paper in his hand. He barely glanced at Sarah, then read in imperfect English: “Enemy of the state. You are condemned to die by firing squad. Today. Sentence to be carried out immediately.” He folded the piece of paper then slid it into a pocket on the inside of his suit. Then he nodded at the four men.
“Prepared!” he cried out. They’d been ready from the moment they raised their pistols.
“Aim.”
For the first time, for some odd reason, Sarah felt the full extent of her nakedness as the looked at the four pistols aimed at her. The black holes at the end of the muzzles appeared enormous.
“Fire!”
The hammers clicked down.
On empty chambers.
Sarah felt pride that she didn’t fall to her knees. The men holstered their guns, hustled forward, grabbed her, and dragged her back to her cell.
She was grateful to have been outside, if only for a moment, and seen the sky.
Eight times the door was opened and she was dragged out to that courtyard. Far above the sky always beckoned. Sometimes it was day, sometimes night. Once they did it in the midst of thunderstorm. Sometimes it was pistols. Sometimes automatic weapons. Sometimes it was four men, then a few more, a few less. Once, a single man, pressing a pistol up to the back of the her head after making her kneel and face the wall, staring into fresh blood smearing the concrete.
Never did the bullet come.
Always she was returned to the cell and strapped down again.
Finally, after what must have been months, she was unbuckled from the gurney and it was removed along with the IV. But she was kept naked in the cell. Food was thrown in onto the floor, slop about whose composition she had no clue. No water. She learned she had to drink when the hose man came in, follow him around, mouth open, desperately gulping water, even as it blasted against her skin and face.
There was no toilet. There was a three-inch wide drain in the center of the rubber mat floor and it all sloped gently down to that. Every so often, at a varying schedule, two men came in, with two guards overwatching with tasers, and hosed the room, and her, down.
Sometimes the lights and sound went out, descending her into pitch black and absolute silence. The mock executions decreased in frequency, but always loomed, with the greater threat of real execution as she knew she was less and less useful to them as they wrung her dry of everything she knew.
She tried doing exercises. But she was so famished and exhausted, her energy was spent quickly and she realized they were not supplying her with enough calories for her to work out. Just enough to survive. So she kept working out, trying to kill herself.
But they knew that one too. She was tased, gurnied, and IVed, just enough to survive. She went through this pattern several times before surrendering to the norm of just enough food to live.
It got to where Sarah looked forward to Verusha’s visits. She anticipated them, her only interaction with another human being. The only thing that kept her from becoming a base animal.
Sarah talked. Not much at first, but more and more, trying to draw out the visits as long as possible. She gave up all she knew. And when she had nothing left, she began to make things up because she knew that one day that sky above the courtyard would be the last thing she would ever see.
That was a mistake.
One day the door flew open and five men came in. Covered by the two men with tasers.
Four held her down. The fifth raped her. And then they all switched places.
This happened time and time again, with no visit from Verusha.
It occurred to Sarah, in some portion of her mind where she retained her sanity, that there was some ulterior motive to the rapes, not just punishment.
Everything here had a purpose.
One day the music suddenly stopped and instead of men, Verusha was framed in the doorway. Sarah rushed her, nothing to lose, and was tased by a man standing right behind her. She fell to the matting. Verusha walked in, followed by men with a gurney. Sarah was returned to the condition she’d arrived in.
She was at least thirty pounds lighter than the trim fighting shape she’d been in when she’d jumped out of the back of that Combat Talon; a skeleton with skin on it. It was her mind though, that was the most starved. Empty of almost all but the most base survival instincts.
In essence, she was nothing more than an animal in human form.
Sarah noticed a change. The temperature was normal. Not too hot, nor too cold for her nakedness. The only other times it was like this was the brief transition from freezing to sweltering and vice versa. But this was remaining the same as Verusha walked around her as if inspecting a slab of meat.
“If I wish to absorb fiction I will read my Kindle.” She smiled. “Yes, I own one. Love your technology. When you started making things up, I knew you’d told all.
She came to a pause next to Sarah’s shaved head. “Now you understand why we don’t use rude techniques such as water-boarding or cutting or breaking things. Other than the subject’s mind. When the torture is too rapid and intense, the subject tends to go to story-telling too quickly to stop it. At the beginning. Here, we get the stories, the lies, at the end, once everything had been wrung from the subject. So when you began to tell stories, we knew we had it all.”
Verusha ran a hand along Sarah’s cheek, almost like a lover. “The rapes were to remove your mind from the act of sex. Sex is a tool for people like us. That is all. There is no love. There is no affection. There is only power and leverage. Your body is yours only in how it is useful. It can be more effective than a sniper rifle or a dagger.”
“Kill me,” Sarah begged. “You’ve got everything.”
“Not everything,” Verusha said. “You are a valuable asset. You do know you were betrayed, correct?”
Sarah closed her eyes, but she nodded.
“Good. It’s an old technique to send in an agent with false information. As old as Sun Tzu probably. That’s why we didn’t care about what you knew. Some key elements of it were most definitely mis-information planted by your handlers to be given up to us under torture in order to mislead. For whatever reason. That’s why we focused on who you knew. Our dossiers on those people are now that much thicker.”
Verusha moved down to the strap across Sarah’s chest. She loosened it, then tossed it over. She continued, taking all of them off. As she did so, she spoke. “You can’t go back. When they sent you on this mission they decided you were expendable, for whatever reason. Even we have heard of your Cellar here. If you go back, they will Sanction you. Rather cynical, or perhaps ironic. You did what they wanted, but nonetheless you are a traitor.”
Verusha stepped back as Sarah sat up. “There’s clothing under the gurney.”
Sarah slid off the gurney and reached underneath. A blue jumpsuit. She carefully put one leg in, then the other, needing the gurney for support because she was so weak. She pulled it up, the cloth feeling foreign against her skin.
“You will be human again,” Verusha said. “But you will never be the same. I speak from experience.”
Sarah fingers fumbled with the last button, securi
ng it just below her neck. “What use could I possibly be to you?”
“You are a woman of considerable talents,” Verusha said. “You still retain those. Except your motivation and attitude are much changed. You won’t go back to your old job and—“
“I won’t work for you,” Sarah finished.
“Of course not. You would fear the same thing happening. It is the nature of our professions. So we are done with you. Killing you is wasteful since everything and everyone has some value.” She smiled, without any warmth or humor, which was quite a feat. “So we sold you.”
She turned and the door opened. A tall, thin man walked in. His head was almost a skull, the skin pinched so tightly to the bones. But his eyes bulged out slightly, giving him a strange appearance.
“My name is Karralkov,” he said in English with a Russian accent. “I run many businesses. Some in the United States. Some in other countries nearby. You will help me. In return, you will be well paid. And some time in the future, if you do your job well, you will be given your freedom with enough money to live the rest of your life in comfort. They use the stick here. I prefer the carrot.” He turned to Verusha. “Fatten her up. She looks terrible. My man will be here to take delivery in three weeks.”
Chapter Thirteen
“So it all comes full circle,” Chase said, when Sarah stopped talking. There had been a long silence, each person in the room processing what she’d related.
“Do you believe me?” Sarah asked, and it wasn’t clear if the question was directed to any specific person.
Chase, along with Riley, Gator, Kono and Dillon, all turned to look at Westland. “If I didn’t believe her,” she said, “I’d kill her right now.”
