In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  I didn’t like these people. I decided right then that they would pay a price for all this.

  One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup of coffee—they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Starbucks, I saw—and they had an indistinct conversation that involved a fair bit of laughter.

  Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air, not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the slice of outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was dark out, and raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that’s part mist.

  The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that’s when I knew that I wasn’t a prisoner of some terrorists—I was a prisoner of the United States of America.

  They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for us one at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. As close as I could work it—counting seconds off in my head, one hippopotami, two hippopotami—the interviews lasted about seven minutes each. My head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal.

  I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Up close, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the corners of her mouth.

  “Thanks,” I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and then dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic politeness, but it had been drilled into me.

  She didn’t twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the truck and behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat in it. Two of them—Severe Haircut woman and Utility Belt man—looked at me from their ergonomic super-chairs.

  They had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and backpack spread out on it.

  “Hello, Marcus,” Severe Haircut woman said. “We have some questions for you.”

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked. This wasn’t an idle question. If you’re not under arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can’t do to you. For starters, they can’t hold you forever without arresting you, giving you a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was I ever going to talk to a lawyer.

  “What’s this for?” she said, holding up my phone. The screen was showing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data without giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message—an animated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture—because I liked to customize my gear.

  “Am I under arrest?” I repeated. They can’t make you answer any questions if you’re not under arrest, and when you ask if you’re under arrest, they have to answer you. It’s the rules.

  “You’re being detained by the Department of Homeland Security,” the woman snapped.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “You’re going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now.” She didn’t say, “or else,” but it was implied.

  “I would like to contact an attorney,” I said. “I would like to know what I’ve been charged with. I would like to see some form of identification from both of you.”

  The two agents exchanged looks.

  “I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,” Severe Haircut woman said. “I think you should do that right now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don’t look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now, what is this for?”

  “You think I’m a terrorist? I’m seventeen years old!”

  “Just the right age—Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You’ve posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public Internet.”

  “I would like to speak to an attorney,” I said.

  Severe Haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. “You’re under the mistaken impression that you’ve been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you, I’d be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?”

  “I’m not going to unlock my phone for you,” I said, indignant. My phone’s memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and mods I’d installed. “That’s private stuff.”

  “What have you got to hide?”

  “I’ve got the right to my privacy,” I said. “And I want to speak to an attorney.”

  “This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don’t have anything to hide.”

  “I want to speak to an attorney.” My parents would pay for it. All the FAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to see an attorney, no matter what they say or do. There’s no good that comes of talking to the cops without your lawyer present. These two said they weren’t cops, but if this wasn’t an arrest, what was it?

  In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them.

  CHAPTER 4

  They re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long time later, the truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauled back to my feet. I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they felt like blocks of ice, all except my knees, which were swollen and tender from all the hours of kneeling.

  Hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and I was picked up like a sack of potatoes. There were indistinct voices around me. Someone crying. Someone cursing.

  I was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to another railing. My knees wouldn’t support me anymore and I pitched forward, ending up twisted on the ground like a pretzel, straining against the chains holding my wrists.

  Then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn’t like driving in a truck. The floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy diesel engines and I realized I was on a ship! My stomach turned to ice. I was being taken off America’s shores to somewhere else, and who the hell knew where that was? I’d been scared before, but this thought terrified me, left me paralyzed and wordless with fear. I realized that I might never see my parents again and I actually tasted a little vomit burn up my throat. The bag over my head closed in on me and I could barely breathe, something that was compounded by the weird position I was twisted into.

  But mercifully we weren’t on the water for very long. It felt like an hour, but I know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then I felt us docking, felt footsteps on the decking around me and felt other prisoners being unshackled and carried or led away. When they came for me, I tried to stand again, but couldn’t, and they carried me again, impersonally, roughly.

  When they took the hood off again, I was in a cell.

  The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was one window high up, and rusted bars guarded it. It was still dark outside. There was a blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat, set into the wall. The guard who took off my hood grinned at me and closed the solid steel door behind him.

  I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into them and into my hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. I heard other people talking, crying, shouting. I did some shouting too: “Jolu! Darryl! Vanessa!” Other voices on the cell-block took up the cry, shouting out names, too, shouting out obscenities. The nearest voices sounded like drunks losing their minds on a street-corner. Maybe I sounded like that to
o.

  Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yell louder. Eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off, screaming our throats raw. Why not? What did we have to lose?

  The next time they came to question me, I was filthy and tired, thirsty and hungry. Severe Haircut lady was in the new questioning party, as were three big guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was black, the other two were white, though one might have been Hispanic. They all carried guns. It was like a Benetton’s ad crossed with a game of Counter-Strike.

  They’d taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles together. I paid attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard water outside and thought that maybe we were on Alcatraz—it was a prison, after all, even if it had been a tourist attraction for generations, the place where you went to see where Al Capone and his gangster contemporaries did their time. But I’d been to Alcatraz on a school trip. It was old and rusted, medieval. This place felt like it dated back to World War Two, not colonial times.

  There were bar codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each of the cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tell who or what might be behind them.

  The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonomic chairs—not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden chair—and a big wooden board-room table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in the cop shows, and I figured someone or other must be watching from behind it. Severe Haircut lady and her friends helped themselves to coffees from an urn on a side-table (I could have torn her throat out with my teeth and taken her coffee just then), and then set a styrofoam cup of water down next to me—without unlocking my wrists from behind my back, so I couldn’t reach it. Hardy har har.

  “Hello, Marcus,” Severe Haircut woman said. “How’s your ’tude doing today?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This isn’t as bad as it gets you know,” she said. “This is as good as it gets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even if that convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’re a marked man now. We’ll be watching you everywhere you go and everything you do. You’ve acted like you’ve got something to hide, and we don’t like that.”

  It’s pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase, “convince us that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever felt this bad or this scared before. Those words, “wrong place at the wrong time,” those six words, they were like a lifeline dangling before me as I thrashed to stay on the surface.

  “Hello, Marcus?” she snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Over here, Marcus.” There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself for letting her see my fear. “Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn’t the worst place we can put you, not by a damned sight.” She reached down below the table and came out with a briefcase, which she snapped open. From it, she withdrew my phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder, and my memory keys. She set them down on the table one after the other.

  “Here’s what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. If you do that, you’ll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You’ll get a shower and you’ll be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. Tomorrow, we’ll bring you back and ask you to decrypt the data on these memory sticks. Do that, and you’ll get to eat in the mess hall. The day after, we’re going to want your email passwords, and that will get you library privileges.”

  The word “no” was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but it wouldn’t come. “Why?” is what came out instead.

  “We want to be sure that you’re what you seem to be. This is about your security, Marcus. Say you’re innocent. You might be, though why an innocent man would act like he’s got so much to hide is beyond me. But say you are: you could have been on that bridge when it blew. Your parents could have been. Your friends. Don’t you want us to catch the people who attacked your home?”

  It’s funny, but when she was talking about my getting “privileges” it scared me into submission. I felt like I’d done something to end up where I was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something to change it.

  But as soon as she switched to this BS about “safety” and “security,” my spine came back. “Lady,” I said, “you’re talking about attacking my home, but as far as I can tell, you’re the only one who’s attacked me lately. I thought I lived in a country with a constitution. I thought I lived in a country where I had rights. You’re talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.”

  A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. “So melodramatic, Marcus. No one’s attacked you. You’ve been detained by your country’s government while we seek details on the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on our nation’s soil. You have it within your power to help us fight this war on our nation’s enemies. You want to preserve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop bad people from blowing up your city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to unlock that phone before I send you back to your cell. We have lots of other people to interview today.”

  She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains that kept me from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was going to do it. She’d told me what my path was to freedom—to the world, to my parents—and that had given me hope. Now she’d threatened to send me away, to take me off that path, and my hope had crashed and all I could think of was how to get back on it.

  So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it for her, and she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch.

  “The password,” I said, finally understanding what she wanted of me. She wanted me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, where her pals could hear it. She didn’t want me to just unlock the phone. She wanted me to submit to her. To put her in charge of me. To give up every secret, all my privacy. “The password,” I said again, and then I told her the password. God help me, I submitted to her will.

  She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equivalent of a touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the door closed, I saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in.

  I wish I could say that I’d anticipated this possibility in advance and created a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but I wasn’t nearly that paranoid/clever.

  You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had locked away on my phone and memory sticks and email. I’m just a kid, after all.

  The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between my phone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we’d done. You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we’d carried out and the electronic reconciliations we’d arrived at.

  You see, I don’t delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and you never know when you’re going to want to go back to that stuff. Especially the stupid stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes where you’re sitting on the subway and there’s no one to talk to and you suddenly remember some bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said? Well, it’s usually never as bad as you remember. Being able to go back and see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you’re not as horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and I have gotten over more fights that way than I can count.

  And even that’s not it. I know my phone is private. I know my memory sticks are private. That’s because of cryptography—message scrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and me get access to the same crypto that banks and the National Security Agency use. There’s only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: crypto that’s public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That’s how you know it works.

  There’s something really liberating about having some corner of your life that’s yours, that no
one gets to see except you. It’s a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There’s nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you’d have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you’d be buck naked?

  Even if you’ve got nothing wrong or weird with your body—and how many of us can say that?—you’d have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.

  It’s not about doing something shameful. It’s about doing something private. It’s about your life belonging to you.

  They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I’d broken a lot of rules all my life and I’d gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I’d snuck out of school.

  I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch of sky overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had no clue where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during my exercise period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strained my ears for any sound that might help me understand what this place was, but all I heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversations, a plane landing somewhere nearby.

  They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni pie from Goat Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The carton with its familiar graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder that only a day before, I’d been a free man in a free country and that now I was a prisoner. I worried constantly about Darryl and fretted about my other friends. Maybe they’d been more cooperative and had been released. Maybe they’d told my parents and they were frantically calling around.