John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

He handed Andrea a visitor’s pass. “You signing in?”

She answered with a Mona Lisa smile and a little shake of her head.

Banerjee shrugged, and swiped his pass through a slot in one of the turnstiles. “After you.”

“What about Dr. Najib?”

“He’s waiting for us,” Banerjee told her.

“Good. There’s something I’d like to try.”

“And you need a doctor for it?”

Andrea shrugged. “It’s just a precaution. I don’t want to kill the guy.” She paused. “How is he, anyway?”

Banerjee rolled his eyes. “Same as yesterday. I think he’s still in capture shock.”

The interrogation rooms were in the subbasement. Stepping into the elevator, Banerjee pressed the button for B-2. As the doors closed, Muzak played quietly from a speaker above their heads… We all live in a yellow submarine…

“I meant to ask…” Andrea said. “Have you talked to the FBI?”

“Not yet.”

Andrea was pleased. “So they aren’t in the picture.”

“Well, they know about Awad. We’re sending them dailies of his interviews. But I don’t think anyone’s said anything about Faris.”

“Faris?”

“That’s the name on his passport,” Banerjee told her.

“I know, but – What about the fingerprints?”

“Oh, that! Yeah, that’s… that’s a real contradiction. We’re looking into it.”

Andrea gave him her searchlight smile. “So…”

“So, he’s just another detainee. For now, anyway.”

Her smile became even wider. Banerjee thought she had the whitest and most even teeth he’d ever seen. “How long can you keep it like that?”

The lieutenant looked doubtful. “Not long.”

“Well…”

They both knew that the longer Hakim Mussawi remained in Malaysian custody, the more they would get out of him. While the CIA and the military had taken off the gloves after 9/11, they’d put them back on more recently. For a while, torture had been defined in terms of “organ failure.” No organ failure, no torture. Then Abu Ghraib hit the fan and suddenly, hostile interrogation techniques required legal reviews and special permissions that were not granted often enough – to Andrea’s way of thinking.

No one wanted his or her name on a piece of paper saying yes, it was okay to beat the crap out of a prisoner, or, if the spirit moved you, to immerse him in a tub of lye. It could screw up your whole career path.

After the recreational torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, new protocols went into effect. It was still okay to torture people, but you couldn’t actually hurt them. You could terrorize them, but you couldn’t flay them.

Discomfort, even “intense discomfort,” was okay, but only for a while. Prisoners might be placed in stress positions, but there were limits. Only one hour at a time, and no more than four hours in a day.

This would not break a hard man. Better, then, to humiliate him, or bring him to tears by threats to a loved one. That took time, though, and if you were in a hurry, you wanted an ally like Malaysia, which had yet to ratify the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. If the MSB wanted to play by the old rules, sliding splinters of glass and bamboo under the fingernails of the people they detained, that was an internal matter. So long as Andrea didn’t enter the room or ask a direct question, the CIA could take the position that it had nothing to do with the interrogation.

The funny thing, Andrea reflected, was all the crap about whether torture actually worked. Senator McCain insisted that it didn’t, but Andrea could show him a lot of Vietnamese video that gave the lie to that. In her experience, torture worked a treat. Liberals denied it, but that was because they didn’t want to deal with it.

If torture didn’t work, why did the Agency fight so hard to be exempted from prohibitions of the practice? If torture was ineffective, why was it so widely practiced? The fact was, if you tore someone’s fingernails out, that person would probably answer your questions – and truthfully, too, so long as the person was led to believe that things would go harder if the information was found to be false.

Of course, there were limits. Torture stopped working when the person being questioned ran out of secrets. At that point, the subject would begin to make things up to avoid further punishment. But a skilled interrogator would usually know when that point was reached. It was the point at which the subject agreed that, yes, he’d shot John F. Kennedy and set fire to the Reichstag.

“After you…” Banerjee stepped aside as the elevator doors slid open. They entered a vestibule at the end of a long, wide corridor. Fluorescent lights, tiled walls. In some ways, the center resembled a hospital, except that people went in healthy and came out sick – if they came out at all.

A security officer looked up from behind a gray metal desk.

“I’ll sign,” Banerjee said.

The guard handed him a pen. Banerjee scribbled in the Visitor’s Log, checked his watch, and noted the time. Under “Detainee,” he printed the name “Faris.”

The guard glanced at the book, then jerked his head toward the corridor. “Number Eleven,” he said. “I’ll tell Dr. Najib.” He picked up the phone and dialed an extension.

Banerjee led the way. Ahead of them, a man in camouflage fatigues was trying to maneuver a wheelchair through the doorway to one of the rooms. Banerjee gave him a hand with the door, and Andrea saw that it was a woman in the chair, and that she was cuffed to the frame. Her chin was on her chest, and she seemed to be praying.

Then the door closed, and they continued walking toward Room 11. Andrea was struck by how wide the corridor was, as wide almost as the ones in Langley. And like the corridors at home, this one had a color-coded stripe running horizontally along one wall, all the way down to the end. It was a yellow stripe, about six inches wide, but its purpose was the same as the ones at headquarters. Basically, they let people know at a glance if you were somewhere you didn’t belong. Red pass, yellow stripe – you wouldn’t get far.

Arriving at the door to Room 11, Andrea hesitated. Once she entered the room, she was crossing a line. She would no longer be an observer, but a participant.

It’s worth it, she thought.

Still, she hesitated. The room would stink. Places like this always did. Fear and anger soured the sweat of everyone in the room. And if it got rough, there would be other smells as well. Reaching into her handbag, Andrea removed a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. Unscrewing the cap, she dipped a pinky into the grease, then dabbed a bit at each of her nostrils. It was a trick she’d learned in college, working part-time on the weekends at the city morgue. As always, the mentholated scent delivered a rush of half-remembered sensations. For an instant, she was ten again, lying in bed with a cold, the humidifier puffing away at her bedside.

This is so fucked up, she thought. Banerjee knocked. They entered.

The room was a clean, well-lighted place that smelled bad. In the center of the room, Hakim Mussawi was strapped to a stainless-steel table under a buzzing fluorescent light. A nurse was at his side inserting an intravenous feed into his left arm. Hearing Andrea and Banerjee enter, Mussawi raised his head, then fell back in exhaustion.

An elderly doctor in a white coat came over, smiling. “I’m Dr. Najib,” he whispered. The name bar on his coat was covered with a piece of white tape. A sensible precaution, Andrea thought.

“How’s our patient?” Banerjee asked.

“Oh, he’s been a bad boy,” Dr. Najib reported. “He admits nothing!”

“Well, perhaps we can change that,” Andrea said.