Mike Lawson - House Divided

He was even more astonished by the job Charles Bradford asked him to do.

By one A.M., Merker and her neighbors appeared to be sleeping. Levy put on a ski mask, took a small gym bag from the trunk of his car, and picked the lock on Merker’s back door. He wasn’t particularly good with lock picks, and it took him almost five minutes. As he entered the house, he noticed a pleasant odor. Merker might have been burning incense or candles before she went to bed.

Merker slept on her back, her mouth slightly open, and there was a lamp on a small table next to her bed. Levy placed the gym bag on the floor, found the lamp’s switch, then pulled the Colt from his shoulder holster. He placed the barrel of the gun against the center of Merker’s forehead and turned on the light.

Merker came awake instantly and saw Levy looming over her, the gun in his hand, the ski mask covering his face. She opened her mouth to scream but Levy prodded her head with the gun and said, “Don’t.” She clamped her mouth shut; her brown eyes were huge with fear.

“If you scream,” Levy said, “I’ll pistol-whip you. If you fight me, I’ll pistol-whip you. I’ll make your face look like a Halloween mask. Do you understand?”

Merker nodded. He noticed that although the woman was clearly frightened, she wasn’t panicking, she wasn’t on the verge of hysteria. She was thinking about how to escape. She was a professional, of some sort.

“What do you want?” Merker said.

Levy didn’t answer. He threw back the sheets covering Merker. She was wearing what looked like men’s boxer shorts and a Garfield-the-cat T-shirt.

“Roll over on your stomach,” Levy said.

“I have money in the freezer,” Merker said. “There’s five hundred dollars in a little Tupperware thing. My credit cards are in my purse.”

“If you don’t turn over onto your stomach immediately,” Levy said, “I’m going to hurt you.”

Merker turned over and Levy reached down into the gym bag for a roll of duct tape. He used the tape to bind her hands, then took her by the shoulders and turned her so she was lying once again on her back.

“What do you want?” Merker asked again.

“I want to know who you work for,” Levy said. “I want to know who sent you to Arlington Hospital to get that man’s fingerprints.”

“What?” she said, feigning confusion, but Levy could tell she wasn’t confused.

“Alberta, tell me who you work for and I’ll leave. If you don’t tell me, then… well, I’m going to make you tell me.”

“I work in the commissary at Fort Meade. I buy stuff: you know, the produce and meat and shit. You got me mixed up with somebody. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, about fingerprints.”

Levy shook his head. “Stand up.”

“Look in my purse if you don’t believe me,” Merker said. “You’ll see my badge for the commissary.”

He was sure she did have such an ID badge. That meant nothing.

“Stand up,” Levy said again.

Merker rose from her bed and for an instant she seemed relieved, probably thinking that if Levy wanted her out of the bed he wasn’t planning to rape her.

“Go to the kitchen,” he said, and gave her a small push in the back.

In the kitchen, Levy turned on the lights. “Sit down in one of those chairs near the table.”

“Look, you got me confused with-”

He backhanded her. He didn’t slap her that hard but she stumbled against the kitchen table.

“Sit in the chair,” he said.

He took the roll of duct tape and wrapped the tape around her chest and legs, binding her to the chair. Her hands were still taped behind her back.

“What do you want?” Merker said.

“I told you. I want to know who you work for.”

“I work for the goddamn army! I work in the commissary at Fort Meade. How many fuckin’ times do I have to tell you? You’re making a mistake.”

Levy took a cloth sack from the gym bag and placed the sack over Merker’s head.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Levy didn’t answer. He tipped back the chair she was sitting in so that she was now lying on her back, her head on the floor, bound to the chair. He then searched the cabinets in the kitchen until he found what he was looking for: cooking pots. One was a five gallon aluminum pot that she probably used for making spaghetti or stews. Two other pots were cast iron and about half that size. He filled all three pots with water.

Waterboarding is a very effective form of persuasion. The prisoner is immobilized, usually on a board or table, a cloth sack is placed over his head, his head is placed in a position lower than his feet-and then water is poured onto the sack. It sounds harmless, and the prisoner isn’t marked in any way-except psychologically. Prisoners subjected to this procedure can have nightmares for life and often develop a number of phobias, some of them completely debilitating, such as an inability to take showers or having panic attacks whenever it rains.

During waterboarding, as the water cascades over the prisoner’s face and into his nose and mouth, his gag reflex kicks in. He begins to choke and cough uncontrollably, and the sensation is identical to drowning, a drowning that never stops. Interrogators have found the technique so effective that hardened men, fanatical terrorists, will sometimes confess in less than five minutes.

“Who do you work for?” Levy said.

“I told you. I…”

Levy began to pour the water onto Merker’s face and she whipped her head from side to side, coughing and choking and gagging, straining against the tape binding her to the chair, the chair bucking off the floor. He poured for almost two minutes-two minutes that would have seemed like an eternity to the woman. When he stopped pouring, Merker sucked in air in huge, ragged gasps, her chest heaving.

“Who do you work for?” Levy said.

She didn’t answer. It sounded as if she might be hyperventilating because of the panic she was certainly feeling, but she didn’t seem to make any attempt to speak.

He began to pour the water again.

Then something strange happened: Merker stopped moving. She just lay there, not choking or trying to evade the water. It appeared as if she’d passed out, but that didn’t make sense. That was one of the nice things about waterboarding: prisoners normally remain conscious, or at least semiconscious, throughout the process.

Levy reached down and felt for a pulse in Merker’s throat.

There was no pulse!

Levy ripped the sack off Merker’s head and performed CPR on her for five minutes. It did no good. Merker was dead.

Levy knelt next to the woman, breathing heavily, completely shocked. There was no way she should have died, not from what he had done to her. She must have had a heart attack or a stroke. She was a chunky woman, but she wasn’t obese. In fact, she looked like she was in pretty good shape. She must have had some sort of preexisting medical condition. That was the only thing that made sense.

What the hell had he done? He hadn’t wanted to kill her-and he wouldn’t have killed her if she’d told him what he wanted to know. She hadn’t seen his face. But now she was dead-and, worst of all, she was the only lead he had. He had just killed the one person who could tell him who their opponent was.

He cut the tape binding Merker to the chair, examined her body, and was relieved to see that he hadn’t taped her so tightly that he’d bruised or marked her. He took a washcloth and soap, gently scrubbed the tape residue from her legs, and pulled the wet Garfield T-shirt off her. He carried her back to her bedroom, placed her back in her bed, put a dry T-shirt on her, then found a hair dryer and blow-dried her short hair. He noticed that her lower lip was somewhat puffy from where he’d struck her, so he took her out of the bed and laid her face down on the floor. That was better: it would look as if she’d risen from her bed and collapsed when she had the first symptoms of whatever killed her, and falling to the floor would account for the bruise he’d caused when he slapped her.