Randy White - Dead Silence

The ceiling was pitched, twenty feet high, with a loft. On the main beam, a winch was bolted to a boom, used for hauling up bales of hay or machinery that needed to be stored in the loft. It was an electric winch. Tonight, it had hauled up a six-foot man, suspending him like a trophy fish.

Myles heard me as I banged my way into the room, or the sudden darkness had frightened him, because I heard his scarred vocal chords whisper, “Don’t! Don’t… Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

Surprise! He was alive. When he pleaded, “Lights on… can’t see,” I hesitated before finding the nearest switch. I removed the night vision monocular as banks of neon flooded the room with the cheery luminescence of a retail shop. Anyone outside could see us now. I didn’t like it, but the man had been through enough without adding to his fear.

I knelt beside him, saying, “It’s me… Ford. I’ll get you down. You’ll be okay.”

Myles moaned, “No more hurt me… Please, can’t… Sit it. ..? Can’t stand it no more!,” as the cable made abbreviated pendulum arcs, caused by his recent convulsing, a musculature response to pain. He was having difficulty selecting words and forming sentences. It was because of what Navarro and Yanquez had done to his brain.

I found the winch toggle and lowered Myles almost to the floor before using one arm to lift his weight while my free hand threaded the cable hooks out of his ankles. I attempted a slow, gentle pull, but his reaction told me it was better to do it fast, in one swift motion, like ripping adhesive tape off a wound.

The man screamed again, twice, then began to sob, as I carried him to a stack of hay bales in the corner and placed him on his back. His body felt as light as that of a withered old man.

As I freed his hands, I asked, “Why’d they do this? What did they want?” Myles’s eyes blinked open. “Dr. Ford…?” His relief was audible-and also misplaced, considering what I had done to him earlier.

“You’re safe. You’ll be okay after I call an ambulance.”

It was a lie, but he was too damaged to discern truth.

“Where’s my phone?”

“Phone,” he whispered. “They took… your phone… the Spanish man… sillll-verr-haired man… Woman called… the

… the Cuban answered… Woman’s name is… I saw her picture in the… Nawww York Times…” Myles stuttered, fighting to retrieve words. “The woman… she is in… the Amerr-ii-can Sin

… Sin… Senate.”

Barbara Hayes-Sorrento had tried to call me. Rene Navarro had answered, and still had my phone.

“Did the man know who she was?” A pointless question. Of course he knew, for the same reason Myles knew. I log names with the same exacting consistency I log specimens: last name, first name, title, address. The data would have flashed on the caller-ID screen.

“The Cuban… called her… Snn-Snn-Senator. He asked her. .. to come…”

“Where? Did she agree?”

Myles replied with a helpless shrug: Don’t know.

I said, “Rest for a second, maybe you’ll remember,” as my brain began a rapid review of associated data. Barbara had told me that she was meeting Will Chaser’s foster grandparents tonight in Tampa, then going to a vacation home owned by a senator from Oklahoma. Barbara would have arrived by now. It was likely she’d called me from the airport. Just as likely, she was in a hurry, as always, and started talking the instant the man answered, telling him, “We just landed in Tampa,” or something like that.

I asked, “Your neighbor, the senator, is he from Minnesota?” I was trying to compute the odds. The Senate is the most exclusive club in the country-only a hundred members-but about half spend part of the winter in Florida. A statistical guess: twenty-some on the Atlantic Coast, twenty-some on the Gulf. Still, the coincidence was unlikely, unless…

Myles appeared to shake his head- No, not from Minnesota- more concerned with what had happened to his wife. He whispered, “Did they

… hurt her? I didn’t tell them… where my wife… where Roxanne… was hiding! They hurt me… threatened to kill me.. . but I didn’t… tell them!”

The man’s eyes widened, proud he had defended his wife, but his wife was Connie, not Roxanne Sofvia. It was impossible to know if he’d confused the names or his loyalty. But he had refused. Nothing else mattered.

“Hiding where?” I asked.

“Drove to a friend’s… house… Saw them coming… from the beach… the… Cubans. Told her it… was business… didn’t want her… around.”

I was thinking about Detective Palmer, worried she would confront the Cubans if they’d gone to the house, searching for Connie Myles. I was also looking around the room for a water spigot and a working telephone, or even an alarm button like the one in the Range Rover.

There wasn’t much I could do for the man but summon an ambulance and try to get some water down him. He’d lost a lot of blood and needed fluids. I told myself water might keep him alive, but it wasn’t true. Even if he did live, would he want to?

Myles continued talking as I filled an empty Coke bottle from a water-trough spigot, but he was difficult to understand because the wiring of his brain had been scrambled. Most of what he said was disconnected gibberish. He transposed words or selected nonsensical ones that conveyed no meaning. Inside his head, I guessed, the synapse junctions had to be sparking like meteorites. Even so, I managed to piece together the story.

The Cubans had tried to force him to fly to the Bahamas. They didn’t believe him when he told them Lear employees had flown his plane to Miami that afternoon for servicing. That’s when the bigger man, Yanquez, grabbed Myles and strung him from a rafter.

The interrogators not only wanted the truth, they wanted to neutralize Myles as a witness by erasing his memory but also keep him alive as long as possible. A hostage is still a hostage, whatever his condition, as long as he is breathing.

As they questioned the multimillionaire, the silver-haired Cuban-the veteran interrogator, Rene Navarro-used a power drill to systematically destroy the cerebral lobes that had just provided the answers he’d demanded. It was a brutal, ingenious way of covering their tracks.

The human brain possesses the symmetry of a walnut, and its similarly wrinkled skin has the effect of increasing the neuron surface area. A channel divides the brain into left and right hemispheres. Like a walnut, the hemispheres appear to be twins, but they function differently.

The right hemisphere is associated with creativity, the left with logic. We remember the lyrics of even inane songs for years yet struggle to memorize poems or numerical chains because the right brain storehouses music while the more tidy, less fanciful left brain organizes linear data and is also quick to trash what isn’t vital.

Navarro had a physician’s understanding of how the brain functions, the duties of the various lobes and where they were located within the cranial vault. To create maximum terror but minimize damage, he had begun at the back of Nelson’s head, on the creative side. That, too, was ingenious. After the first penetration, there was less chance of Myles tricking them by composing a believable lie.

There were several entry points. I didn’t count them, but at least one had pierced the cerebellum, which is the command post of coordination and balance. If Myles lived, he would spend his remaining years in a wheelchair.

Judging from Navarro’s knowledge of physiology, and his reputation for cruelty, he had probably waited until the end before targeting the man’s forehead, behind which lies the highly evolved neocortex.

The neocortex is the oversized mammalian brain, complex in its layering and abilities. Memory is stored in many regions, but it’s the frontal lobe that makes us distinctive as individuals, capable of deep reasoning and original thought.