Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“Then, five weeks after the arrival of Roshaan, our routine started returning to normal. Briggs began attending the TPUs, then presiding again. He and Clay and the others rejoined us at meals. He let his hair grow, quit shaving. Once in a while, he’d talk baseball, or even make a joke, like the old Spence. What happened in the smokehouse? I don’t know. I never saw Roshaan again.”

“With all respect, Dr. Tritt, I find it hard to believe. That you don’t know what happened to the boy.”

Again the hard gray eyes, roving over me. “Spencer would say nothing about him. None of them would. Absolute lockdown, total silence. When I saw Aaban again, he acted as he always did — ferocious and proud. Angel of Iron was right. We moved him and the others out of White Fire just before Obama closed it. He’s at Gitmo, as we speak. I still don’t know what Spencer did with Roshaan. He refused to tell. It was as if the boy was never there.”

I watched the three dogs in the creek, heads hung to the water, backs lit by the sun. The dark Sierra Nevada and the pale White Mountains were still facing off across Owens Valley, while between them a vulture circled precisely in the blue.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You know what happened to Roshaan.”

Tritt said nothing, and I understood that he had come to the end of his speakable truth on this subject.

He shook his head slowly, as if answering no to a question only he could hear. “Spence knew he was being carried off. By the time the government closed the black sites and put us out of work, Briggs Spencer was a changed man. Maybe not even so much because of what he did, but because of what he believed about what he did.”

“Which was what?”

“That we were American doctors who had saved American lives and protected the safety of Americans at home using enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“What do you believe?”

Tritt helped himself to another beer but didn’t offer me one. He opened it and poured half of it down. “That some men lose their souls but keep their minds. While others keep their souls but lose their minds. We were basically just citizens who tortured people to little effect but made a lot of money. We rigged the results, and the CIA pretty much sang along. I can certainly make excuses. We had to deal with the languages and the dialects and the interpreters and detainees. They were endlessly evasive and inventive. What do you expect them to say under excruciating pain? Most of them screamed out something when they couldn’t take anymore. Something they thought we’d like to hear. Most of them didn’t know what we wanted them to know.”

There was a long silence then while Tritt stared out at the Sierras and dangled his half-empty bottle by its neck. His tone of voice was softer now, more intimate. “I was very concerned about the costs to my people. Most of our CIA officers were poorly trained and inexperienced. But they meant well. They were innocents, in their own self-serving ways. And some of the enlisted men we drafted into Spencer-Tritt, guys like Clay, they were just so damned young. I wondered right off what White Fire would do to them. I have a pretty good idea by now. See, Mr. Ford — most people can’t endure a place like White Fire for long. It’s the equivalent of a psychotic break, but you don’t come out of it. We lived in a world of constant pain and light and sound. A world of anguish and hopelessness. Our nightmares were not just in our heads while we slept, they surrounded us every waking minute of every day. They were real. The torturer is tortured. You do not drown a man strapped to a board without drowning yourself.

“Today, Briggs will claim that none of what we did bothers him. That everything we did was necessary. That we saved American lives with torture. He can’t name one American saved by torture, and not because the name is classified. You will search Hard Truth in vain for one such name. I spent time at every site. I know. Spencer will bring up bin Laden’s courier. But they’d been watching that courier for months. They had him cold. Ghul? The al-Qaeda agent? He’d identified that courier weeks before we got our chance at him. No EITs needed — Ghul just sang. Our little parakeet. We tortured him anyway, just in case there was more. There wasn’t. But everyone thought, at the time, that it was the right thing to do.”

Tritt opened the cooler, pushed his empty bottle into the ice, and came up with another. “You have to understand our circumstances. The pressure on us was enormous. We kept wondering when the next terrorist attack would come. Not only that, but innocent Americans were dying every day in the wars. I remember May 31, 2007. I was in Alexandria, Virginia, dining rather splendidly with some of my government bosses, having just gotten a five-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand-dollar paycheck for one month of work. And a story came on the bar TV — one hundred and twenty-six U.S. servicemen had been killed that month, the deadliest month in Iraq thus far. Eleven more in Afghanistan. Even half drunk I couldn’t escape those young deaths. Then I was back at White Fire. American death hung over us like a curse. How many more? What’s bin Laden going to do next? We needed to torture harder, torture longer, extract more intel — pull it out of them like teeth.”

Tritt paused and turned his hard, small eyes to me again. I would hate looking into those things, hour by hour, while he prolonged my agony. “So, you see, this difference between Briggs and me — in the way we see what happened in the war — is everything. It is why he can fly through the skies and make millions more dollars with the money we made selling torture. And why I sit in this meadow, drinking with the dogs. We are different alloys forged in the same fire.”

He swept his hand around the inside of the cooler but came up empty. Something in his mechanics told me he knew the beers were gone. He wiped his hands together, then drew them down his sun-wrinkled face.

“Clay told me something once,” he said. “It stayed in my mind because I could never figure it out. I had gone to see him in Arcadia, and near the end of our visit he told me he had ‘gotten half of Spencer’s white fire.’”

I waited for the explanation and got none. “What did he mean?”

“I said, ‘Clay, by “gotten” do you mean you understand half of Spencer’s white fire, and what exactly had happened to Roshaan? Or do you mean that you somehow have half of it?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered — he had half of Deimos’s white fire in his possession — and Vazz had the other half.”

“Clay had half of white fire, and John Vazquez had the other half? Help me out here, Doctor.”

“I figured video,” said Tritt. “Spence did, too. We shot quite a bit of it. The agency confiscated all they could find. Very dangerous material, to say the least. We had to close White Fire in a hurry. We figured someone could smuggle out evidence of what we did. We were just never sure who or what.”

I let my memories of the last twenty-four hours blow around in my brain like leaves. Something in there that I needed. It took a while, but I saw it and grabbed it: what Sequoia had texted me the night before, when I’d asked her why Clay had driven all the way to Mendocino County to see John Vazquez.

7:50 PM

Why did Clay go there?

7:51 PM

For part 2 he says

For part two, I wondered.

Vazz’s half of white fire?

From the shade of a cottonwood outside Bishop Airport I called Laura Vazquez and left a message.

The beer had left me dull but jittery. I kept seeing Tritt’s dark, sun-brined skin, his gunmetal-gray eyes. I imagined hooded men in chains, writhing in pain — certainly the inspiration for Clay Hickman’s obsessive paintings. I heard the sound of a human body flung against a wall, the gurgled thrashings of suffocation. I pictured young Roshaan and wondered why Tritt — who had offered me so much of his own tortured soul — still couldn’t bring himself to tell me the boy’s fate.