The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  What's one to make of a politician, one who has experienced torture personally, to all appearances a decent and brave man, who can say in one breath that “People will say anything under torture,” and in the next say, “Torture doesn't work”? He's either dishonestly pandering to the crowd (Am I being redundant by saying ‘politician’ and ‘dishonestly pandering to the crowd’? I suppose I am.) or he's too dumb to realize that, if torture's that bad, and with a modicum of ability to spot-check for truth, the victim of torture will also tell the truth rather than risk more torture. One has to wonder about the fitness for high office of such a man. I mean, really? It's being neither cleverly dishonest nor honestly stupid.

  -Tom Kratman

  “I want it noted,” Kit said, “that I don’t want to be here.”

  “Duly noted,” I said, tightly. I didn’t want to be here either. I didn’t like Stonewall under the best of circumstances and the Maximum Security Wing was one of the most unpleasant environments imaginable. I wondered if Kit could sense the ghosts of those who had died – who I had had killed – here. I could have sworn that I heard something whispering right at the limits of my perception. My imagination always plays up when I’ve got something to do that I’m not looking forward to doing. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Kit snapped, more angry than I’d ever seen him before, even when someone from the Constitutional Convention proposed that homosexuality be made illegal. “I am a Doctor, sworn to help the sick and injured, not to watch as someone is…hurt.”

  “Be grateful that you don’t have to do it,” Mac said, dryly. “I do understand your reluctance to take part, Kit, but we don’t have much choice. We need the information locked inside our friend’s brain and he’s not going to give it to us if we wipe his bottom with silken sheets and provide him with a concubine to share his bed.”

  I nodded once. I’d had to go through a course on prisoner interrogation and, truthfully, we might achieve better results if we had had no time limit and could break him down gradually. Making friends with him, as some terrorist interrogators had done, could lead to all kinds of interesting developments, including a new double agent. It could – and had – also lead to the intelligence services being hoaxed by the enemy. Stockholm Syndrome worked both ways.

  But we didn’t have time to be gentle. By my most optimistic estimate, we had less than a fortnight before the Warriors of the Lord restarted their advance towards Ingalls…and the centre of our new government. None of that time would be wasted, but it was hardly long enough to make Ingalls utterly impregnable…and even if they couldn’t get into the town itself, they could seal us inside indefinitely. We would either have to launch a costly offensive against them, where they would have all the advantages, or allow them to starve us out. They might also seal us off and destroy the other Principle Towns instead. We needed intelligence and I was past caring about how we got it. We just had to be careful that we weren't fooled.

  “Here,” I said, as we reached the final cell. It was twice as large as the other cells, for a reason that Richard had proven surprisingly reluctant to discuss, but it was large enough for our purposes. Our prisoner sat on a chair, his hands and legs firmly secured so that he could barely move a muscle, preventing him from committing suicide. It might have been an extreme precaution, but some of the harder terrorists we’d taken prisoner had committed suicide, just to prevent us from learning what they knew. The media had promptly claimed that their deaths were due to mistreatment, as if preventing them from hurting and killing hundreds of innocent victims counted as mistreatment. “What do you make of him?”

  “He’s got an incredibly small dick,” Kit said, finally.

  “All terrorists do,” Mac said. We shared a look of sly amusement. The Iraq War would have gone the other way if the terrorists hadn’t gone out of their way to make sure that everyone knew just what a terrorist victory would have meant for Iraq. It would have made Saddam look mildly maladjusted. “All you have to do, Doctor, is be there if he needs sudden and urgent medical attention.”

  “Sure,” Kit said, angrily. “How can you two be so calm about it? Are you all just mindless killing machines?”

  I ignored the jibe. Under the circumstances, Kit had every right to be annoyed with us – me. Mac had other ideas. “I saw their camp from the inside, Doctor,” he said. “I saw what they do with their captives, including people we have sworn to protect. They won’t hesitate to kill you because of your sexuality, the same way they won’t hesitate to kill Rose or Deborah for being women who know how to fight, and we have to do what we can to protect you. That…fucker in there isn’t an innocent victim, or someone brainwashed into following the Prophet, but one of their leaders, one of the people who are trying to spread the nightmare everywhere they can reach. He is as guilty as they come and we do not have time to be gentle.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, Doctor.”

  “Excuse me then,” Kit said, “if I don’t watch. I’ll wait outside until you call me.”

  I didn’t blame him. The thought of interrogating a prisoner rigorously – torture, in other words, if you don’t believe in mincing words – isn’t one that everyone can stand. It’s not easy to construct a moral case for administering pain to a fellow human being, even with so much at stake. There are too many questions that need to be answered, starting with the simplest of all. Did we have the genuine criminal, or did we have someone we’d picked up by mistake, innocent of any crime? The only reason, or so I told myself, that I was accepting the need for torture was because I knew we had a real member of the enemy leadership. There was no risk of making an innocent man suffer.

  We stepped into the cell and the captive’s piggy eyes turned to glare at us, although there was an undertone of fear in his gaze. I was delighted to see it. A real fanatic would take longer to break down, but real fanatics tend not to reach the high levels of terrorist organisations. The Prophet might be as mad as a hatter, but I was quite happy to bet – hell, I was betting – that his senior leadership was only in it for the power. The same was true of pretty much every terrorist group that hadn’t wiped itself out long ago.

  “Good morning,” I said, conversationally. Richard had, on my orders, meddled with the lighting a little, just enough to confuse the prisoner as to how long he’d actually been a captive. Deprived of any objective simulation – and affected slightly by some drugs we’d injected into his system – he might well believe that he’d been there for weeks, instead of two days. “How are you today?”

  I released the gag and he took the opportunity to spit at me. “That was careless,” I said, and slapped him across the face. I had to pull the blow – I didn’t want to inflict permanent damage yet, or stun him – but it left a satisfying mark on the side of his face. He stared at me, shocked for a moment, and then reverted to type. “We’ve finally gotten around to you and you really don’t want to piss us off, right?”

  “Right,” Mac agreed, and stepped forward into the light. We had dressed him in an outfit that made him look more like a demented dwarf than a soldier, but also made him look terrifyingly evil, like someone out of an S&M movie. The prisoner’s eyes went wide as he stepped into the light. Mac’s hand squeezed his throat gentle, leaving him in no doubt that he could crush his windpipe just by squeezing, before letting go and forcing the prisoner to take deep breaths. “Don’t piss us off.”

  “You can’t do this to me,” the prisoner protested, finally. We’d gotten through to him already, or was it just an act? I knew some terrorist groups that gave their people special courses in misleading interrogators, but I doubted the Warriors of the Lord would have bothered with such lessons. Why should they have if they knew the land was going to fall into their hands? “You can’t treat me this way?”

  I leaned forward, cursing an oversight. I should have swallowed something that would have given me really bad breath. “And we can’t we treat
you this way?” I asked, as insanely politely as I could. “You’re my prisoner. I can do what I like to you.”

  He shrank back in his seat. “No one knows you are here, my friend,” I breathed. “No one knows or cares that you survived the battle. We can do whatever we like to you and no one will even know, or care. Your fellow Warriors think that you’re a dead man and someone else has already been appointed to fill your shoes. They don’t care in the slightest what happens to you, not now that you’ve been replaced.”

  I had hoped that that would cause him to break, but he held on to himself. “I won’t tell you anything,” he said, desperately trying to avoid thinking of something that might save him. I might have overdone it a little. If he clung so hard to life, he would try to avoid telling us anything, just to prolong his existence. “You can do what you like to me. I won’t talk.”

  “Yes, you will,” I said. “Mac?”

  Mac stepped back outside the door and returned, a moment later, pushing a trolley. It had a small light mounted at one end – I believe Kit used it for his night time rounds in the hospital – which was shining brightly, illuminating the small collection of metal devices on the table. They looked intimidating, more intimidating than most military weapons, but they weren’t military at all. Some of them had been borrowed from Nana, the town’s dentist, and were designed for repairing teeth. Others had more mundane applications.

  “You can torture me all you like,” he said, “but I won’t talk.”

  “The interesting thing about torture,” I lectured, as I picked up a surgical knife and held it so that the light sparkled off its sharp blade, “is that it is actually quite reliable, under the right circumstances. Specifically, if we have a method of obtaining feedback, we are capable of knowing just when the person under the knife is telling the truth. Lying to us, my friend, will only prolong your pain, for we have other prisoners and a lie detector.”

  I thought I was overdoing it a little, but his eyes went wide. The wire that ran around his head, making him look like a candidate for the electric chair, wasn’t actually anything more than extra humiliation, but if we could convince him that it was a lie detector… We didn’t have other prisoners with whom we could crosscheck, but if he believed we had, we took away his motivation for lying.

  “If you lie to us, the pain will merely grow worse,” I said, calmly. I reached for his hand and smoothed it out. A moment later, I brought down the knife and cut his pinkie finger off. He screamed in pain and shock. I wasn't in a much better state. I’d injured people before, although never so…precisely, but the finger had come off much quicker than I had expected, somehow. I passed the grizzly trophy to Mac, who put it in a shiny bowl, and held it up in front of our guest’s eyes. “As you can see, we have no compunction about hurting you.”

  His eyes showed an internal struggle…and pain. A dull stink rose up from where he had urinated involuntarily. My nose twitched, but I ignored the smell, satisfied that we were scaring hell out of him. If we kept pushing him, I was confident that he would break. We could keep making him suffer for hours.

  I said as much. “We can do this forever, if we have to,” I said. “Perhaps we could cut off one of your toes next, or perhaps we should start getting ambitious and cut off your nose, or pluck out one of your eyes, or maybe even your penis? What do you think of that?” He said nothing, whimpering desperately, trying to force us to soften and spare him the agony. I reminded myself about the captives they’d taken and pushed my guilt into a darkened corner of my mind. “Tell me, now. What is your name?”

  Mac passed me the dentist’s drill and I held it close to his mouth. “Daniel,” the prisoner screamed. “My name is Daniel!”

  I smiled, tightly. “Good, Daniel,” I said, withdrawing the drill. Carrot and stick, again, rewarding him for telling us what I’m sure felt like a piece of insignificant data. “Now…how did you join up with the Warriors of the Lord?”

  He flinched back, eyes wide and staring, until I brought the drill back towards his mouth. It was an astonishingly intimidating tactic, but then, most people dread going to the dentists and having him working away inside their mouths with his drills. I’m sure Daniel – as we must now call him – sensed that I didn’t have any proper dentist training, or that I wouldn’t hesitate to drill right through the tooth and into the nerve below. He started to gibber away and I listened carefully, grateful for the recording system. We’d be able to replay it later.

  Daniel – his real name had been something a great deal less religious – had been one of the early ones to fall into the hands of the Warriors of the Lord, just after the bombs fell. He talked briefly about a shrewish wife and two minor children, the former of whom had been broken by the Warrior treatment into a proper wife. His delight in seeing his enemy – I wondered, grimly, how he could see his wife as an enemy, but I suspected I knew the answer – broken had brought him to the attention of the Warrior leadership, who had promoted him and made him their loyal servant. He hadn’t been the commanding officer of the force that had hit Summerville, but he’d been a high-ranking officer…and one who was partly responsible for the atrocities in the town.

  “We have to keep the bitches in their place,” he said, desperately. The temptation to inflict even more horrendous damage on him was almost overwhelming. “Man is the head of woman and a woman who seeks to live on her own is an unnatural offence against God. She must be punished and purged…”

  I pushed onwards grimly. “How many Warriors are there in total?”

  “I won’t tell you that,” Daniel said. I leaned forward with my drill and inflicted a tiny nick on the side of his gums. Judging from his screams, you’d think I had kicked him in the groin or poured acid on his head. “Thousands upon thousands; oh God I don’t know any more, I don’t know…”

  Mac and I shared a glance. “Thousands upon thousands?” I muttered. “A hundred thousand at most?”

  “It can’t be much more, can it?” Mac asked. “They couldn’t have fed millions of refugees for long, no matter how many old MRE packs they stored. They have to have limits somewhere.”

  I returned to Daniel. There was a thin trickle of blood seeping out of his mouth, spilling down towards the floor below. He looked to be in terrible shape, as if we’d pushed him too far too quickly, but I was sure we could go much further before he had a heart attack. There was so much else we had to ask him.

  “Weapons,” I said, firmly. “What kind of weapons do the Warriors have?”

  I listened to his answer in growing disbelief, rolling my eyes at the civilian attitude to weapons. Daniel might have been a high-ranking officer, but he lacked anything reassembling a comprehensive knowledge of modern weapons. The rifles he mentioned could have been anything from AK-47s to M16s or hunting rifles. I hurt him a little more, pushing for answers, but I don’t think he had them to give. He mentioned tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, but again, I don’t know if he really knew what he meant. We certainly hadn’t seen more than technicals and truck bombs during the Battle of the FOB.

  “Next question,” I said. “How did you get information from Ingalls?”

  “We sent agents into the town,” Daniel said. He looked completely broken, utterly shattered. I hoped – prayed – that it wasn't an act. If he had recovered enough to give us some misinformation, we were going to be in trouble. “They made contact with a few of your people and…got information. That’s how they knew to take Summerville so quickly. They knew that it was going to be reinforced.”

  I winced. Ingalls was hardly a big city. It was hard to keep anything a secret for long and…hell, an enemy spy in the right place could be devastating. If it was someone who’d had a pre-war link with the Warriors…or might it be someone else, someone discontented? The problem was that there were too many people who were ‘discontented.’

  Daniel coughed out blood when I put the question to him. “Who is the spy?”

  “Schneider,” Daniel said. I felt my mouth fall open. In hin
dsight, perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t seen it at all. I would have thought that betrayal to the Warriors was unthinkable. “Marc Schneider.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.

  -Jonathan Edwards

  We left Kit to tend to the prisoner, watched by a pair of burly security guards from Richard’s men, and retired to a side room.

  “It makes sense,” Mac said, grimly, once we were alone. “He might have been lying about the other questions, or didn’t know what we wanted to know, but if it really is darling Schneider…”