Flight or Fright

by Stephen King

  John, having failed to catch the gist of Gallagher’s finale (there may not have been one), nodded.

  Gallagher did, too. Then: “He died only last year, you know.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “When your memos were leaked we even talked about it. I asked him for his opinion. He predicted that the terrorists were going to use our own courts against us. He said, ‘Shit, I personally violated Article III of the Geneva Conventions. Several times!’”

  Gentle crinkles of preoccupation formed across John’s brow. This was a mistake.

  “Here we go.” Gallagher was pointing to a belowground bar just off of Pikk, an absurdly pretty street John had wandered up and down earlier that day. Christmas lights were strung up in its basement windows; there was no sign. John did not drink, at least not in any way that conceptually honored what people meant by “drinking.” A glass of wine every few nights, always with a meal; an occasional imported beer on hot Sunday afternoons; a good single malt after an expensive dinner. When Gallagher mentioned a drink John had imagined the two of them sharing a tumbler of cognac in a wine bar. It was one of those social laws you broke only at great risk: never go anywhere with anyone you don’t know well.

  John followed Gallagher down concrete bomb-shelter stairs. Already uncomfortable, he became more so when Gallagher pushed open the door—a hail fellow, well met—and instantly repaired to the bar, where he had words with the gorgeous apparition toiling behind it. John decided to play a little game with himself to see how long he could last there. He found a table and waited for Gallagher to join him, but when he looked back, Gallagher was holding the bartender’s hand. He turned it over and traced with his index finger some elaborate fortune-teller augury on her palm. Smiling, the bartender pulled her hand free and worked the tap while Gallagher looked smugly around. She air-kissed him while handing over two pints. Gallagher raised the glasses to her. The moment his back was to her she stopped smiling.

  As for the bar’s other patrons: there did not appear to be any. John had chosen as his landing site the most centrally located of the room’s four tables. Sparsely arranged along one wall’s tragically upholstered booth were half a dozen cross-armed young women staring at the ceiling, their purses in their laps. At the other end of the room another woman danced on a stage no larger than the table at which John now sat. Thankfully, she was not stripping, and did not appear interested in stripping, but rather moved in a languidly bored way to music so timidly broadcast John could barely hear it. The walls and carpet were inferno red—the only recognizable motif. That this was exactly what John imagined hell looked like did not abate the impression. Gallagher planted himself in the chair across from John and pushed a beer toward him. “It doesn’t usually get hopping around here till one or two.”

  John motioned around. “What is this?”

  In mid-sip, Gallagher’s eyebrows lifted. When he lowered the glass his tongue agilely shaved off his froth mustache. “A place for discerning gentlemen. Don’t worry. It’s nothing you don’t want it to be.”

  With that the dancing woman came and sat next to John. She was violently pretty and wearing a black dress that could have fit inside a coin purse. Her dancing had left her sweaty and luminous, an ecosystem in miniature.

  John looked plaintively at his host. “Gallagher, please.”

  Gallagher laughed again. “One drink, Counsel. It’s a nice place to relax if you let yourself.” To the dancing woman he said, “Sweetheart, davei. Come sit next to me.” She did. The next woman who came over Gallagher tried to wave off; she sat next to John anyway.

  John shook her hand. Her legs were ruinously thin, her stretch pants tight around her thighs but barely holding shape against her calves. Her neck was a veiny stalk. She sniffled in an affected way and pulled two silver clips from her black hair. They were purely for show: not one displaced strand fell into her face. She scrutinized the clips as though she had panned them from a riverbed. She was waiting for John to speak. She replaced the clips and studied her foot as she tapped it against the red carpeting, which looked as though it had been the recipient of many gastric sorrows. Her toenails were the color of aluminum foil. John still said nothing to her. Gallagher, meanwhile, was getting along well with the dancing girl. Honestly. It appeared they were having a fairly serious conversation. The woman next to John lit a cigarette and took one of those long, crackling drags that actually made cigarettes seem appealing. Smoke leaked from the corners of her mouth. After another minute of this, she left, and John was alone with his beer.

  What they did not ask after his speech was whether he had suffered any reservations at the time he had written his memos. John did have occasional reservations. They all did. John worried first that interrogators might not feel restrained by the same moral qualms that he, John, would. He also worried about what was called “force drift,” where force applied unsuccessfully had no choice but to become force applied again, but more intently. After all, enhanced interrogation was excusable only if the person being interrogated was assumed to know something. This was why he never imagined it being applied to anyone but al-Qaeda members.

  John understood his arguments were controversial and sometimes even repellent, but they were legal rather than moral judgments. John did not craft policy or devise what form “enhanced interrogation” actually took. He simply measured legality against relevant statutes. His memos had been concerned with eighteen methods, and they came in three categories. The first category was limited to two techniques: yelling and deception. The second category comprised twelve: stress positions, isolation, forced standing for up to four hours, phobia exploitation, false documents, removal from standard interrogation sites, twenty-four-hour-long interrogations, food variation, removal of clothing, forced grooming, deprivation of light, and loud music. The third category, intended for use only against the hardest cases, broke down into four techniques: mild physical contact, scenarios that threatened the death of the detainee or his family, extreme element exposure, and simulated drowning. There was also a fourth category, which, thankfully, he had never been asked to rule on. The fourth category was also the loneliest. Its one technique: extraordinary rendition.

  John had told himself, while contemplating leaving Justice, that it would be better outside. Walks across an autumn quad, adoring students waiting outside his office, all the intramural atmosphere Washington could never provide except in venal approximation. Justice was a museum, and its cold marble hallways led to a kind of intellectual progeria: even the young there quickly became old. Addington was the saddest to see John go. Do you really, Addington asked, want to teach spoiled rich kids who give murdering proletarian mobs a good name?

  Within months after John’s departure, many of his judgments were withdrawn and then suspended. John later learned that Addington protested this by saying the President had been relying on John’s views. In that case, the answer came back, the President may have been breaking the law. Five months later, Abu Ghraib. Seven months later, John’s memos were declassified. Gonzales, at the press conference, claimed to want to show the media that due diligence and proper legal vetting had occurred at every step in the enhanced interrogation process. That was what he actually believed was at issue.

  John would never forget the rattlesnake energy coiled in those War Council meetings. They were all as confident as Maoists. Feith, Haynes, Addington, Gonzales, Flanigan—men one step away from the President. The lawyer’s lawyers. The nation had suffered a heart attack and they were holding the paddles of defibrillation, working together to improvise legal strategies for something no law as yet existed to contain. They met in Gonzales’s office in the White House, sometimes at Defense. Simple, uncatered, unrecorded meetings in which the most luxurious staples were a few Diet Cokes. John often looked at himself and Gonzales during these meetings. John was a first-generation American, Gonzales the son of immigrants so impoverished they did not even have a telephone. And yet here he was, drafting policy during
the most serious national-security crisis in half a century, serving as personal counsel to the world’s most powerful man. This was the America John had been willing to do anything legal to protect.

  Then you had Feith and Addington, androids who regarded other human beings as little more than collections of interesting mental malfunctions. The dimples within Feith’s rumpled Muppet face were venom repositories. He circulated memos without buckslips so no one could be sure to whom they were routed or cc’d them to people who never actually received them. He made speeches on the sanctity of Geneva only to heighten the incongruity of its sacred shroud being filthied by terrorists. His was such manifestly confusing lawyering that those who heard Feith talk about Geneva came away believing Article III would apply to everyone the United States captured. By the end of one of Feith’s monologues he had one of the Joint Chiefs mistakenly believing that all eighteen enhanced interrogation techniques were sanctioned by the Army’s Field Manual. Not one of them actually was. The idea to launch a new intelligence agency called Total Information Awareness, the logo of which was a crazy Masonic eye overlooking the world? Only Feith.

  As for Addington: the eyes of a Russian icon, the bearing of Lincoln, the disposition of a hand grenade. After the attacks, Addington began carrying a copy of the Constitution in his pocket so worn and flimsy it looked like it served as a hankie or coaster or both. Whenever anyone disagreed with him, he pulled it out and started reading from it. It was Addington’s special genius to frame every legal and moral argument in warlike terms, whereas any argument about actual warfare came draped in diaphanous euphemism. Maybe that was why, out of all of them, only Addington escaped. Only he had managed to keep his name off every relevant document.

  They had attempted to legislate within an atmosphere in which the ticking time bomb was the operational assumption rather than the outlying statistical Pluto it was. Now John could see that, but that was only one way of thinking about it. Another was this: intelligence was the ability to discern the applicability of incoming outside information. The better part of knowledge was knowing what you were allowed to forget.

  Three people had been subjected to waterboarding. Three people. And for that he had to answer questions about war crimes. John had heard that his successor allowed himself to be waterboarded before supplying a decision about whether it was over the line. The answer: it was. But for all that, for all the debate and decapitated careers, the CIA was still allowed to use simulated drowning (John actually preferred this more honest term), just as John had originally argued. His core arguments were still in place. Of course, no one in Justice wanted to sign off on CIA use of the technique, but the President found his man. He always did. But that was bitterness. John was not bitter. He would have liked to see Feith or Gonzales or Ashcroft, or any of them, alone in a European city, answering questions on policies they had endorsed and were now ashamed of.

  John looked into his pint glass, now an empty crystal well. Somehow he had drunk his beer. He could brood here, he knew, all night, and let the dark wave carry him.

  “I’m ready to leave,” he told Gallagher, who was still having his edifying conversation with the dancer.

  He looked at John. “I hope you’ve made time to see the Museum of Occupation tomorrow.”

  “I can’t, actually. I’m leaving in the morning.” John looked at his watch. It was already past midnight.

  Gallagher sat back. “A shame. Tallinn’s a nice place to spend a day in.”

  “Thank you for the drink,” John said, standing. “Feel free to stay. I can find my way back.”

  Gallagher remained seated but extended his hand. “I hope someday we might meet again. Have a good flight tomorrow.”

  At the door, John turned for one last glimpse of Gallagher. He was already on his cell, bent over in his chair, the dancer getting up to leave. Gallagher noticed John lingering in the doorway and shot him a not-very-sharp salute. Hard to believe that guy was a Marine. John wondered, though only for a moment, to whom Gallagher might be speaking.

  Janika’s interrogation film had been over for twenty minutes or two hours. It was impossible to keep track of time in the darkness. Light gave time’s passage handholds and markers. Time passed in the dark was like driving through cornfields—an endless similarity, full of the unseen.

  What the exercise was intended to provoke in him he did not know. He was no more or less sympathetic to those he had helped doom to torture than he was before it began. They misunderstood him. They did not comprehend what he had actually argued for. Those in command of this plane and, now, his life, had nothing to gain from him, other than invigorating their sadism. He, in return, had nothing he could give them, other than the gift of his torment. Torture, he had written, was a matter of intent. He now knew that torture was many more things than that. The exchange of dark knowledge, a revelation of hidden capacities, the annihilation of connection.

  Suddenly John was staring at the plane’s ceiling, its vaguely surgical nozzles gushing air. The lights were back on. He wrenched around in his adopted coach seat and was not quite prepared to see Janika’s broken body, still tangled in luggage. When he stood, gusts of sick-ness-spiced air pushed through the cloth chimneys of his clothing.

  After Janika’s tormentor had moved through Category I and the more visually operatic techniques of Categories II and III, several other men entered the room. What happened next was as dreadful as anything John had seen. He refused to watch most of it and opened his eyes only after the sounds of her struggle had ceased. While the men were verifying the extinguishment of Janika’s vital signs, the film stopped.

  John returned to his designated seat. Upon it sat his iPhone, white as a wafer. A dumb flood of thought branched off toward what few remaining lowlands it could. One of them was Gallagher, the only person who knew that John had changed his flight. Gallagher’s card was still in his breast pocket. He took it out and looked at it, his thumb playing over the raised embassy seal. He wondered how Gallagher knew he would not throw the card away. He wondered how it could be that Janika was wearing the same clothes in the interrogation video as she had been on this plane. He wondered how long he had actually been unconscious and whether this was the plane he had boarded. He wondered where on this plane those who were doing this to him were hiding. He wondered, too, how his iPhone was receiving any service, but there it was: two bars of reception. An answer came to one of his questions: Gallagher had not anticipated John keeping his card. John was four digits into Gallagher’s number when the recognition application tripped. It had been added to his phone.

  Gallagher answered after the third ring. “Tallinn is a nice place to spend a day. You should have listened to me.”

  What could John say? They had what they wanted.

  “Nothing to ask? I don’t blame you. You have bigger problems, Counsel. Right now you should probably turn around.”

  He did. A man in a black ski mask, and a YOU SUCK tee shirt, hit John in the face with an instrument of formidably metal bluntness. When his knees met the carpet he saw the item clearly: the same air compressor he had used to beat the cockpit door. John’s head turned mutant with pain. He did not remember the second blow but it must have come, because he woke, once again suddenly, in a plywood room, tied to a chair. One of his eyes no longer worked. Some of his teeth were gone and his tongue felt as swollen and bloody as a leech. He looked down at his shirt: a butcher’s apron. The plane’s engine was still in his ears. Turbulence shook the room. He could hear weeping somewhere close by. Sitting across from John was Gallagher, whose hands were folded atop yet another sign. He did not show it to John, but John could read it. Gallagher told John he could promise questions but not answers. He also told him this was new territory for all involved. Not even he was sure where this would go. “Are you ready?” Gallagher asked him. “I need to know if you’re ready.” John nodded, feeling somehow covetous of his mouthful of blood. The door behind him opened. Footsteps. Hands like toothless lupine muzzles took hold
of him. Category VI had begun.

  TWO MINUTES FORTY-FIVE SECONDS

  DAN SIMMONS

  Dan Simmons has written award-winning science fiction novels (Hyperion), award-winning fantasy/horror novels (Carrion Comfort), and stories which contain elements of both. Here is one of his very best stories, remarkable for its clarity and its brevity. Simmons suggests that two minutes and forty-five seconds can be the length of a pop song … a rollercoaster ride … or just enough time to contemplate one’s onrushing death.

  Roger Colvin closed his eyes and the steel bar clamped down across his lap and they began the steep climb. He could hear the rattle of the heavy chain and the creak of steel wheels on steel rails as they clanked up the first hill of the rollercoaster. Someone behind him laughed nervously. Terrified of heights, heart pounding painfully against his ribs, Colvin peeked out from between spread fingers.

  The metal rails and white wooden frame rose steeply ahead of him. Colvin was in the first car. He lowered both hands and tightly gripped the metal restraining bar, feeling the dried sweat of past palms there. Someone giggled in the car behind him. He turned his head only far enough to peer over the side of the rails.

  They were very high and still rising. The midway and parking lots grew smaller, individuals growing too tiny to be seen and the crowds becoming mere carpets of color, fading into a larger mosaic of geometries of streets and lights as the entire city became visible, then the entire county. They clanked higher. The sky darkened to a deeper blue. Colvin could see the curve of the earth in the haze-blued distance. He realized that they were far out over the edge of a lake now as he caught the glimmer of light on wavetops miles below through the wooden ties. Colvin closed his eyes as they briefly passed through the cold breath of a cloud, then snapped them open again as the pitch of chain rumble changed, as the steep gradient lessened, as they reached the top.