What we didn’t know then and found out the hard way later was that there is a splinter cell buried like a tick within the skin of the CIA, and it wanted bin Laden alive. They knew that bin Laden had at least five surgically altered and very well trained stand-ins. Much like the ones used by Stalin and Hitler. And, if the rumors were true, by William Taft. The stand-ins were either true believers who were happy to surrender to the knife in order to further Osama’s cause. Or they were on the payroll. Some of bin Laden’s family knew about the switch. Some of those were believers. Others were agents of the Seven Kings. It’s a complicated mess of duplicity and intrigue. The guy living in the cave in Afghanistan was only one of the fakes. So was the guy on dialysis. Funny thing is, the real Osama had been healthy and fit and hadn’t been inside either Iraq or Afghanistan since May of 2001. He hadn’t been in Pakistan since 2008.
The CIA splinter cell knew this. They knew it because eighteen months ago they located and apprehended the real Osama bin Laden. It was done very quietly, with their captive taken from a sprawling banana plantation in Guatemala and brought to this island for interrogation. Osama had been living under the false identity of a retired textbook publisher from Tel Aviv. Funny, huh? He had a Guatemalan wife, and he had four children who believed themselves to be half-Israeli. The CIA team raided his plantation in the middle of the night and whisked him away. To cover their tracks, they even sent a series of ransom demands as if they were local thugs. No one suspected a thing.
If I didn’t hate those pricks so much, I’d applaud them for their investigative brilliance.
Since then, the CIA has scored a surprising number of big-ticket arrests of actual al-Qaeda terrorists, thanks to information coerced from bin Laden by the splinter cell. This resulted in a new veneer for an agency that has taken a lot of drubbing over the last—oh, I don’t know … forever. Congress was so happy with them that when it came time to review the annual budget, they pretty much handed the Agency a blank check.
When Mr. Church and our crew found out about this through some creatively targeted computer hacking, we decided that Osama should come live with us. We weren’t here to “rescue” him per se. Hardly. Nor were we unduly concerned about the violations to his civil and human rights. Normally, that kind of thing torques my shorts. Less so in this case.
All we wanted was to turn him into an information source for us. There have been rumors in the intelligence pipeline for a couple of years now that something big was coming. Something massive. Something tied to the Seven Kings. The CIA splinter cell caught wind of it, too, but they dismissed it. The Kings were not on their to-do list. The Kings case belonged to the DMS.
So close.
So damn close.
What was the big project they had in development? Was there, in fact, a project at all? Bin Laden would have those answers. The King of Lies would know the truth.
If he was alive to tell us.
Now he was cooling meat.
Balls.
Interlude Two
The Imperial Condominiums
Unit 6A, Edgewater Drive
Corpus Christi, Texas
Four Years Ago
The girl’s name was Boy.
It was the only thing anyone ever called her. If she had a real name, it was buried in the dirt of the past. She wouldn’t answer to anything else.
Boy.
She was closing in on her twenty-fifth birthday. The last ten years of her life were the only years she cared to remember. The decade before that belonged to a different person. The decade before that belonged to a different story. A horror story.
No one sane mentioned her early years. No one smart asked her about them.
Doctor Pharos was the only one who could have that conversation with her, but he never did. He’d been the one to take her away from it, so he didn’t need to comment on it.
Because he’d taken her away from that life, and because of the things he had done while taking her away, they were connected. Bonded.
Family.
Doctor Pharos and Boy.
Not the Boy. Just Boy.
They shared no other obvious connections. Not gender, not race, not cultural background. Certainly not any religious ties, except that neither of them prayed to a god or believed one existed.
The reality of their connection was something about which they never really conversed. Not a philosophical dissection of it. Not a deconstruction of motive or sources of gratifications. It existed, and they knew it. It worked, and they worked with it. It grew, and they cultivated it.
Their connection was terror.
It was something Doctor Pharos required of her.
It was something she existed to provide for him.
And it was the source of her joy.
Doctor Pharos loaded her like a bullet in the weapon of his intention and fired her over and over again at the targets of his need. He did this in the past in the service of the people they had both served. That time had passed, and now he did it to serve his own needs.
Today he had fired her in the direction of a scientist and college professor who probably thought his life was good, his job satisfying, and his future assured.
In this he was mistaken because he did not know that he was the target of the bullet fired by Doctor Pharos.
Boy waited in the dark.
She liked the dark.
It was like a glove that fit all of her curves and extrusions. It kept her safe and reminded her of her power.
She sat cross-legged on the dining room table in a nest of steel. Each of the eight steak knives and eleven assorted cooking knives had been driven into the tabletop. She had taken great pains to make sure they stood perfectly straight, a precise half circle. She didn’t use forks. Forks were stupid. Who would use a fork?
Knives, though.
She got wet thinking about knives.
Her flesh trembled as she sat in her nest.
Waiting.
Waiting.
The man was late tonight. That was okay, though. It was a variable in a predictable pattern. He was sometimes late. A drive through for take-out. Dry cleaning. Sometimes a trip to the bookstore for magazines. She thought it strange that he only read magazines. There wasn’t a single book in the house.
People were strange.
She waited.
The music coming through her earbuds was pinpeat. Elegant Cambodian ceremonial music that once played in the courts and temples. Ten instruments collaborating to form a sensual cloud of beauty that was unlike anything Boy had ever heard except the pihat ensembles of Thailand. So lovely. So serene.
She liked playing it very loud at times. It was more appealing than the sound of screams.
Now it played softly. A whisper.
Her heart fluttered with the tinkling notes of the renard-ek, the high-pitched bamboo xylophone. Her breathed flowed in and out with the extended notes of the srelai thom, the large quadruple-reed flute.
So lovely.
Her eyes wanted to drift shut, but she knew that if that happened she would fall asleep. This music could do that to her too easily.
Instead, Boy kept her eyes open and slowly, methodically counted the lines of wood grain in the tabletop.
When the key turned in the lock, she was awake, alert, and calm.
The table was not in line of sight with the front door, else she would not have chosen it as her place to wait. The man entered the house. Boy heard him toss the keys into the ceramic dish he used for that purpose. She heard him turn the lock. The whap of mail landing on the coffee table. One thump, two thumps as he kicked off his loafers. A click, and the TV was on. CNN. Wolf Blitzer was talking about something nobody cared about. He sounded desperate to be relevant.
The man—Professor Harry Seymour, chairman of the experimental aeronautics department at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi—came around the corner and into the dining room. Looking over his shoulder at the TV. Looking the wrong way.
Boy smiled.
S
he waited until he turned around. Waited until he saw her.
Waited until he stiffened with shock and fear and outrage.
Waited until Professor Seymour began to yell.
Attempted to yell.
She did not actually permit him to get a shout as far as his mouth.
As Seymour opened his mouth, she pivoted sideways, supple as a dancer, and kicked him in the throat.
The professor crashed sideways into a breakfront, fell heavily and badly, and hit his head on the way down. He slid all the way to the carpet, choking and gagging, trying to speak, trying to yell, trying to groan, trying to cry out.
In all of those things he failed.
Boy slid off the table and landed on cat feet. She bent over him and punched him in the face three times using a single-knuckle punch that was delivered with a whip of the wrist. No thrust. A thrust would injure her hand. A whip injured only him.
One blow to his left sinus. One blow to his right sinus. A third to the bridge of his nose. His head snapped back from the foot pounds of force lurking within the speed of her punch. The back of his head hit the breakfront.
She knelt quickly and struck Seymour again. A loose slap with the pads of her fingers upward beneath his testicles. A harder blow would galvanize him, coax a scream from him. A loose slap has an entirely different effect. Immediate and comprehensive nausea.
He rolled over onto hands and knees and vomited.
She stepped back and let him.
Vomiting was good. It reduced a man of this kind to shame and the helplessness that came with shame.
She walked behind Seymour and used the tip of her sneaker to kick him in the perineum, exactly between scrotum and anus. The blow was delivered at a slight angle so that the correct nerve clusters would be stunned.
They were, and immediately his bowels let loose. The rich stink of feces filled the room. The man groaned. Another wave of pain and shame.
Those were two of Boy’s favorite tools.
Combined, they were far more effective than agony and fear. Pain—controlled, specific, and moderate—was one key, one dial she turned on people. If the pain was too big, then system-wide shock set in. The body released the wrong chemicals; it sparked a different psychological reaction. It was why classic torturers put bamboo shoots under the fingernails rather than cut the fingers off.
The professor began to cry.
Boy nodded, satisfied.
The man on the floor was big. Two hundred and fifteen soft pounds. She weighed ninety-eight. She was as slender and hard as the knives she loved so dearly.
Boy knelt beside the man and bent close. She kissed his cheek. She ran a tongue around the curve of his ear. He cringed and tried to close into himself. Boy leaned so close that her breath was hot in his ear.
“It doesn’t have to get worse than this,” she said.
Professor Seymour almost stopped breathing. He lay there, rigid, hanging on whatever she would say next.
“You want to talk to me,” she continued. “You want to whisper to me. I know you do. I can feel it. You want to share things with me.”
She reached a hand and gently stroked his crotch, letting each separate fingertip find and caress his flaccid length. His penis twitched.
And what a wonderfully mixed signal that would send to this man’s brain. Boy knew that. Even laying there, beaten, his underwear filled with his own shit, he had just reacted to a woman’s touch.
Exactly as other men had done before this one.
Exactly as Doctor Pharos had said they would when he taught her his methods.
As she continued to touch him, the shame of defeat, the worse shame of having soiled himself, the pain in his nose and sinuses all triggered the first flow of tears. Injuries to the nose always made the eyes water. To the overwhelmed it is impossible to tell the difference between the body’s automatic reaction to facial injuries and tears that are shed as a response to personal weakness. It is because of this unavoidable reaction that so many brave people doubt their courage and believe in a previously unknown cowardice. It’s a way in which the mind breaks itself.
Seymour began to cry.
To sob.
And it was then that Boy knew he would tell her anything.
She stroked him. And she felt him, against will and circumstance, grow hard. If she had started with sexual touch first and proceeded to pain, he would not be able to get hard. One had to know the patterns of things.
Boy knew those patterns so well.
“Please,” begged the professor. And in that moment he probably did not know what he was begging her for.
She smiled.
Yes, this one would tell her anything.
Everything.
Chapter Eight
The Resort
208 Nautical Miles West of Chile
October 13, 1:11 A.M.
“Let’s do this and go home,” I told my team. “Gather all intel. Anything on paper goes with us. Maybe they have some Kings stuff. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Maybe blue pigs will fly out of my ass,” muttered Bunny. I ignored him.
“Double-check that we have IDs on everyone. Disable all weapons. Collect all cell phones, trash any hard lines or radios. Basically, vandalize the crap out of this place.”
“Hooah,” said Top. He stepped out of the cell for a moment, then hurried back. “The other prisoners are in moderately poor shape. Lot of obvious wounds. Untreated cuts. Dislocated fingers.”
“Some ‘resort,’” said Bunny, and then he shook his head. “I am having some weirdly conflicted feelings here, guys. I mean, our intel says that most of the prisoners here are actual scum suckers. Really-bad bad guys. And if I thought there was a bomb about to go off and any of these pricks knew where it was or how to de-arm it, then, well … shit. I guess I’d put my conscience on a back shelf and go all Jack Bauer on them. But that’s, you know, heat-of-the-moment stuff. Needs of the many and all that stuff.”
“You walking in the direction of a point?” asked Top.
Bunny looked at the door to the hallway. “Not sure what I’m saying.”
We all got it, though. We were all warriors. We were all killers. But we were all, each in our own way, idealists. Working for the DMS will do that. It’s nudged us away from either the right or the left side of politics. I had my left-wing, bleeding-heart-liberal moments, and I had my hard-line conservative moments. Pretty much in equal measure these days. It didn’t exactly make me a centrist, and it certainly didn’t make me a libertarian—besides, soldiers shouldn’t play politics. I occasionally did appalling things because the situation was fragile and innocent lives would be lost if I didn’t act. All three of us had. Sam, too.
And yet …
The line between immediate need and breaking the law is blurry at the best of times. And I’m not talking about the laws of states or nations. I’m talking about the laws of basic humanity.
It’s so hard to decide how to think about it. When I first joined the DMS, I was appalled when Mr. Church used deception and carefully worded threats to psychologically coerce crucial information out of a suspect. Church broke the man. As a result, we gained information that ultimately saved millions, perhaps billions, of lives.
Not too many months later, I needed to get a certain code from a man who was about to launch a series of designer pathogens that would have wiped out everyone who didn’t conform to a certain standard of acceptable “whiteness.” Again, billions would have died. He was an old man, and he was injured. However, the clock was ticking down to boom time, and so I did what I had to do. The information he ultimately gave to me stopped that genocide.
So, how was this different?
I don’t really know if I can answer that question. A lot of what was being done to these prisoners was part of a fishing expedition. The prisoners were believed to have knowledge of imminent or long-range threats against America. Due process was denied to them by the Patriot Act because the legal method can be used against it
self. That’s something I understand, but on the whole I wouldn’t wipe my dog’s ass with the Patriot Act. It was quickly written and is poorly thought out, bad policy. People on both sides of the aisle should be working together a little more diligently to replace it with something smarter and saner.
This prison, the Resort, was illegal. No doubt. Any useful intelligence obtained was, in fact, saving lives. However, it was funneled through certain Agency channels for the career benefit of a select few.
Does that matter if the effect is still the saving of lives? Sure, but how much is something that still needs to be looked at.
Is the systematic and continual torture of prisoners justified if they do, indeed, have guilty knowledge and if that information is crucial to saving lives?
That’s what had Bunny’s gut clenched. Mine, too. And Top’s. Standing there in that cell, with no one around but varying degrees of criminals, it was hard to pin your sympathies to the right wall.
I sighed and called it in. Church said that a medical team was on board the chopper.
“What about the staff?” asked Bunny once I was off the call. He looked at the two men who had been interrogating bin Laden. They cowered against the wall in horrified silence.
“P-please!” said one of them, holding up his hands. Throughout our conversation, he’d been pretending to be a hole in the air. Like maybe he thought we’d forget about him. “Please … we were following orders to—”
“Really?” I said. “You’re going with the ‘only following orders’ thing?”
They began protesting. Then begging.
Top drew his Snellig and darted them both.
“Thank you,” said Bunny.
Top shook his head slowly as he shoved his pistol into its holster. “I could have worked on my uncle’s farm. Getting fat and rich growing peaches.”
“Right now,” said Bunny, “that sounds like heaven.”
I nodded to the unconscious men. “Secure them. They’ve got cells waiting for them back home.”
“Be mighty uncomfortable,” said Top. “Them tied up and all. No food or water. No bathroom runs.”
“You have a problem with that?” I asked.