Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Uh-oh, I thought. Bad deal. Bad. Bad.

No Way-basically my best friend, and my only real friend who remembered the crazy life-was at an angle on a blanket and a pair of hands was putting a blood-pressure cuff around his upper left arm. There was a sort of thick monocle surgical-taped over one eye and his other eye was taped open. He was wearing a black headband like the one I’d had for the downloading. I was getting that unfun gravityless feeling like the part of your face where you live is still okay but the dorsal side of your body-starting from your back teeth-is all melting away, like that Peter Lorre knockoff at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. A torso passed in front of the camera and then another hand pulled a drooly bit of tape-wrapped rag out of No Way’s mouth. He’d been knocked out and transported. I’d always thought No Way was so alert nobody could ever sucker him. But I guess your own crew can usually get the drop on you. Or maybe even his own communicator or some other piece of equipment had had a remote-fired restraint stunner planted inside it. He started trying to say something but I couldn’t hear anything, just Grgur and the Alarcon boys talking about whether they’d found anything. They must have strip-searched him. When the torso moved away I could see that No Way’s arms were pinned under big nylon sandbags like Whitefoods. A window came up in the lower right of the screen that said the software and field unit they were using was from Royal Ordnance, which I think is a subsidiary of British Aerospace. The window looked pretty much like the Norton System Doctor interface, except instead of Disk Integrity and everything it had temperature, skin temperature, blood pressure, respiration, muscle tension, “Estimated Voice Stress Level,” galvanic skin resistance, electroencephalograph, and a bunch of other exotic readouts. Of course, I couldn’t see the controls or anything, but from the one window it seemed like a pretty sophisticated gadget. Electroshock is pretty much the only kind of interrogation device anyone uses these days, since it’s so convenient and effective and doesn’t leave major marks. But I’d been hearing lately that even with a lot of conductant some of the Amnesty International types were figuring out how to tell if someone had been tortured from collagen calcification or some other histological change in the skin cells. So the deal now was to use pulses of AC voltages at very low amperage, like you were using an old hand-cranked magneto. Then ideally the current wouldn’t arc or cause burns. On this particular unit the bar graph went all the way down to fifty volts-which probably wouldn’t hurt much more than a good-sized pinch of carpet static-and up to sixty thousand volts, which could cause a heart attack if you weren’t healthy. I couldn’t see the electrical leads in the shot, but if they were following common practice one would be a large conductor, with a lot of conductant, clipped to the flap of skin between two toes, and the other would have been inserted in his anus or urethra. Leonidas Alarcon bent his head down, made sure No Way was breathing, and then wrapped his mouth and neck in a sort of big puffy yoke made of white rags. No Way’s head stuck up out of it like it had sunken halfway into an Elizabethan lace collar. Someone threaded what I guessed was a little microphone into the front of the muffler. No Way would be able to breathe and talk, barely, but if he started yelling it wouldn’t be loud. Evidently they weren’t far from the site. Where, presumably, the Guate patrol was stomping around.

“No Way?” Grgur’s voice said. “It’s Grgur. You know who I am, right?”

Someone flicked on the microphone. It picked up No Way’s voice pretty well:

“… quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,” he was mumbling, “ verbo et opere: mea culpa- ”

“Come on, don’t worry,” Grgur said, “we’re not going to hurt you, but we do need you to answer a few questions before we take you into detention.”

“… beatum Ioannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum, omnes Sanctos…”

“Hey. Pancho? You understand? You’re getting too uptight about this. Knock it off.” They let him finish, though. Maybe they were all too Catholic to zap him in the middle of a confiteor.

“… et vos, fratres, et te, pater, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum. Amen.”

I fucked up, I thought. I’d always said I wouldn’t trust anybody, and then I’d done it anyway, and once again I’d fucked up royal “Good,” Grgur’s voice said. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to just test this for a second.” The voltmeter bar slid up to seven thousand volts and back. No Way’s body arched a bit, and there was an exhalation of air, but he didn’t scream. If you’ve felt it, you know that the pain of electricity is like nothing else, it seems to come from within your own body and not from a foreign source. It’s like your cells decided to fry themselves. I couldn’t help seeing some of the readouts, pupillary size dilating from five millimeters to seven, muscle tension bouncing from sixty-five to ninety and back, galvanic skin resistance-that is, the conductivity of the electrolytes in the skin-going up twenty percent, the whole nine yards. Leonidas Alarcon looked back at the camera, which I guess was just the little teleconferencing lens in the screen frame of Grgur’s phone. He listened to the night sounds for a minute.

“Okay,” Leonidas said.

“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur’s voice asked. His voice had a new police-trained ring to it, with less of a Slavic accent than before. He sounded bored but I got the feeling that under that he was in a hurry.

“Hey, you’re getting a hard-on,” No Way rasped in Spanish. “Check it out, he likes his work.”

“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur repeated.

“Quinones Xiloch,” No Way said. Maybe he’d decided to get this over with as fast as possible.

“Could you tell us your age, please?”

“Thirty-four.”

Grgur paused for a minute, probably watching the readouts. The electroencephalograph seemed to be set to flag peaks, troughs, and unusual concentrations of the sinusoidal alpha waves over different time intervals. Right now it was wavering between 10 and 13 Hz, which I guess polygraph devotees would call normal stress.

“Would you please tell us, what is your primary affiliation or loyalty?” Grgur asked.

“EGP,” No Way said. That is, the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.

“Would you list your military affiliations?”

“EGP only.”

“Would you tell us your position within that organization?”

“Clase de tropa,” No Way said. It was like a noncommissioned officer.

“Would you tell us your serial number?”

“There are no numbers.”

Grgur didn’t pursue it. Maybe he knew it was true. Anyway, the program recalibrated itself and marked the response as normal.

“Would you please tell us your commanding officer within that organization?”

“Carlos.” Carlos was the head of the whole movement, like Marcos had been in southern Mexico in the early nineties, and like Marcos he wore sunglasses and a bandana and nobody knew who he really was. Or whether he was even one person.

“Would you tell us the names of the other officers in your cell?”

“Rodriguez, Infante, Kauffman, Noxac, Rueda.”

“None of those check out,” Grgur said.

“Then I don’t know the real ones,” No Way said.

“Would you tell us the names of the other officers in your cell?”

“Rodriguez, Infante, Zaya-”

The voltmeter darted to ten thousand and hung there for 2.1 seconds. No Way’s backed arched and bounced and he let out a tiny whistling screech.

“That’s bullshit,” Grgur said. “Listen. Would you please tell us the name of your contact?”