Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“I volunteer at the vet center once a week,” he said. “And at the parish food hall once a week. And the dog pound two days a week, which is where I got these brutes. And the hospital. Every Monday through Friday. I put in a good hard volunteer day. Hard as I can. My personal take from Spencer-Tritt was twenty million. Well, I gave most of it away. To the Catholics, which is what I am. Used to be.”

I let that observation hang. Chief lay down in front of Tritt, who seemed to wrestle his attention off the distant peaks to look down at his dog. He worked a weather-beaten bare foot against the dog’s ear.

“Tell me about Clay Hickman,” I said.

“Clay? Good kid. One of Spencer’s. He was assigned to a Romanian site in Bucharest — code name White Fire. Centuries ago it had been some nobleman’s estate, then a hotel that Ceaușescu turned into a communist interrogation center. Closed for years after his people executed him. Outbuildings, basements, smokehouse, a big wine cellar. It was still almost stately. But crumbling and haunted, too. It fit in with the rest of the hood, so we were hidden in plain sight. Big property, fenced, heavily wooded. And of course those stone walls kept the noise down. The Dambovita River wasn’t far. The Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service gave it to us because Romania had applied for NATO and wanted U.S. support. I say they ‘gave it to us,’ but of course we paid handsomely for it. I helped lug the suitcases of CIA cash. A few of us got to open one and gawk at it. Three million in five different duffels. Big, heavy duffels. Like most of us, Hickman thought he could save America from terror if he got the right intel out of the prisoners.”

“What do you mean that Clay was one of Spencer’s?”

“We had three teams. Briggs and I each had one, and a CIA guy named Bodart led the third team. Bodart’s guys called themselves the Wranglers, and they dressed up like cowboys sometimes. Sheesh, that was funny. There was overlap and some filling-in between the teams, too — it’s not like we couldn’t switch personnel around if we needed to. But it gave us three eight-hour shifts per day, seven days a week. We were competitive, and each team had a different set of, well, skills. Spencer’s and my team used nicknames. It made the whole experience more livable. The nicknames gave a sense of playacting. Distanced us from what we were doing. My idea. Our teams used the names of Greek gods and heroes. For narrative authority. I was Phobos, god of fear. Briggs was Deimos, god of terror. I think Clay was Asclepius, the god of healing.”

It was making more sense. “Clay says his reason for escaping is to ‘bring white fire to Deimos.’”

Tritt raised his beer, drank most of it down, then lowered his head and the bottle. “Well, we’ll see.”

“Explain.”

“Like I said, White Fire was Langley’s code for our particular site in Bucharest. Then ‘white fire’ got to be our slang for something that couldn’t be resisted, or withstood. Then Briggs claimed the words ‘white fire’ for an original enhanced interrogation technique he was developing. He wouldn’t tell me much about it, but Bodart was in on it. Anyway, Spencer’s white fire was based on a father’s love for his son. The son was the fire that you held your detainee up to. The fire was what you, as an interrogator, learned to exploit.”

Tritt dropped the empty in the cooler and looked up at the mountains again.

“Exploit the son?” I asked.

“Exploit the son. Yes. That was Spencer’s white fire.”

Finally, Tritt looked at me. Handed me another beer. His eyes were armor-gray in the sunlight, spoked and small-pupiled, like those of a snapping turtle.

“To understand white fire,” he said, “you start with Aaban. Aaban was Spencer’s. Middle thirties, a Dari Afghan. His name meant Angel of Iron. He was strong, good-looking, hateful. We believed that Aaban knew bin Laden. Aaban’s grandfather had fought with bin Laden in the wilderness days. Aaban openly associated with Wahhabi jihadis. We had some intel that Aaban might have been in contact with bin Laden.

“So Briggs applied our standard menu. Got nothing useful. He stayed patient. He got creative with the menu combinations and still got nothing of value. Aaban gave us nothing but lies and minor truths we already knew, and half-truths that took hours and hours to verify or finally disprove. He cursed Briggs. Spit on him. Plague of Insects? Nothing. Wallings, sleep deprivation, death metal 24-7? Nothing. Aaban became the man Spence couldn’t break. Aaban survived one hundred and ninety-six waterboardings, personally done by Briggs Spencer. Up to ten sessions a day. We jacked him with amphetamine and kept him awake in a restraint chair for one hundred and eighty hours — that’s seven and a half days. Twice. His legs were pulped by compliance blows. He was chained naked to the ceiling just short of strangulation for days at a time. During the chain sessions, he got little water and no food. Not even diapers. We kept his bucket just out of his reach. We hydrated him rectally, mainly for the humiliation it brought him. It was cold in there, the cellar of an old smokehouse. But Aaban gave us exactly no useful intelligence. Do you find it unpleasant to hear this story?”

“I’d rather listen to a World Series game.”

“Try being there with us. Try hearing and smelling it. Try doing it.”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

He turned those armor-gray eyes on me again. “Not many people would. Although we didn’t hear much in the way of thanks after America found out what we were up to.”

I took a long swig of the beer, Tritt-style.

“Briggs was worried he’d kill Aaban, making Aaban the victor. So he decided to try something outside the menu. A new technique. It took him six months to locate, detain, and transport Aaban’s eleven-year-old son from Afghanistan to White Fire. Three thousand one hundred and seventy miles.”

Chief rose from sleep, shook off the dead grass, and lumbered off toward the creek. Two of the other dogs followed; the last three lifted groggy heads and stayed put. I felt like going to the creek myself, washing off in cold, clean water. I envied the dogs, fearless and lazy, with no comprehension of death.

Rage, Wrath & Fury mustered, ready to unleash themselves on God for how He treats the innocents. For allowing whatever it was that He let happen to Aaban’s son, though I hadn’t even learned the boy’s name yet.

“Roshaan,” said Tritt. “Skinny, shy, terrified. They took him to the smokehouse and put him in with his father.

“A week went by. Life at White Fire proceeded as usual — quiet for short periods, then alive with wailing and music. And the trains and their horns. And the muffled screams from the smokehouse. The pain was... tangible. Even in the dead of night you could feel the ebb and flow of it, like a tide. Oh, I’d think, that’s Bodart’s people rectally hydrating old Mohammed. Or, That must be my guys, walling Qahtani again. I saw less of Briggs, but I knew he was out there in the smokehouse cellar with Aaban and Roshaan.”

I heard those faint cries from the Romanian smokehouse. They came not from the Angel of Iron, but from his son, Roshaan, as he watched. From the boy — innocent, unprotected, and damned. My friends couldn’t control themselves. They screamed: What kind of God are you? How did You allow that to happen? Why?

“Another week went by,” Tritt continued. “When I’d ask him how it was going out there, Briggs would shrug and stare at me. He started losing weight. He developed a bad case of acne on his nose. He began eating his meals alone. He made me post the twice-daily TPUs — the team progress updates — which used to be his job. He became almost silent. He cut his own hair, with an electric clipper, very, very short, but he’d miss places. It looked like he was shaving his face every few hours, because it was always razor-burned and nicked. The only people out there in the smokehouse with him were Clay Hickman and John Vazquez and a couple of others. None of them were talking details. They kept to themselves. Another week went by, and another.