Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

I was impressed by young Clay Hickman at SERE. “Nell is going to eat this up.”

He smiled. “So did Dr. Spencer.”

He pretty much hired me on the spot,” said Clay. “I was still Air Force, but he got me reassigned to the Spencer-Tritt team. He got the brass to do whatever he wanted. They just shuffled some papers, sent me to Ali AFB for one week to learn my cover as a Spooky mechanic, then cut me loose to go to Romania. It’s called sheep dipping. On that flight from Iraq to Romania, I thought I was joining the most elite team of specialists in the world. The absolute cutting edge — saving lives by asking questions.”

“That must have been something, for a rich kid heading for Stanford a year before.” I caught my misstep, hoped Clay did not.

“I never told you about Stanford.”

“It was in Dr. Paige Hulet’s background on you.”

Clay looked at me for a long beat. I wondered how it must feel to have a receding tide of psychotropic drugs still eddying inside you. How it must feel to not quite trust the only mind you have.

“When we landed outside Bucharest it was early morning. First light. We traveled into the city in unmarked Romanian government vehicles. The black site was in the city limits, an old estate, set back from a road not far from the river. Going through Bucharest I saw the sun’s rays on the buildings, and none of the trees had leaves. It was cold and bleak. And I felt this strange mixture of adventure and dread. I was excited and afraid.”

“Describe the site.”

“Seven acres, an old mansion and outbuildings. It had belonged to a nobleman, then became a hotel, then a communist torture chamber. Then it was abandoned. By the time the CIA got it for us, it was run-down. There were busy railroad tracks nearby, which covered some of the sounds. Thick walls, too. We drove through an electric gate and parked in the old livery. I watched the gate roll closed and learned my first lesson about working in a prison: You’re a prisoner, too, man.”

“What month was it?”

“March. It was always March at White Fire.”

Clay picked up the pistol, casually moved the slide to check the chamber. The steel and springs, so well-machined, sounded loud and precise in the cramped room. He placed his index finger alongside the barrel as if to calm it, then set the weapon back on the bed beside him. He looked out the front window, then back to the bathroom.

“Are you afraid right now?” I asked.

“Prepared.”

“For what?”

“Mr. Wills — they are after me.”

“Who?”

He shook his head slowly. “Please don’t turn out to be a fool.”

I looked at the swordfighting dolls on the desk not far from me, performing in the down-glow of the lamp. Then across the room to Clay. His shadowed face was unclear in the poor light, but his eyes were bright flecks. In that moment he looked no more than nineteen or twenty years old. Sequoia’s age. He seemed so partial, so incomplete. I wondered how three years of war and torture, followed by years of psychosis and commitment to Arcadia — an exclusive wellness community for treatment of mental and emotional disorders — where young Clay Hickman was prescribed powerful drugs not to help but to subdue him, could have left him so strangely... What was the word... Blameless? Untouched?

For the next few minutes he described what Timothy Tritt had talked about: the pressure to prevent the next 9/11, to get bin Laden, the American lives being risked and lost on bloody foreign soil. He talked about the cold and filth of White Fire, the incessant music and light, the compliance blows, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, walling, chainings. All of the monstering. And how the words white fire came to mean an irresistible torture, a kind of holy grail for the interrogators, a technique that, supposedly, no detainee could defeat.

“This is important background,” Clay said. “Things Nell will need to know if she is to tell the story of Aaban properly.”

Clay painted Aaban much as Tritt had — a large, proud, physically intimidating terrorist with personal ties to bin Laden and his organization. As in Tritt’s telling, Aaban refused to break while they subjected him to the entire CIA — Spencer-Tritt “menu.”

I tried my best to react as if hearing these things for the first time. I checked my phone to make sure it was recording, then looked again at the swordfighters. I noted that an opening on one fighter’s baggy pants had been sloppily sutured with a rubber band, where one of the video sticks had been hidden all these years.

“Aaban is a truly fascinating character,” I said.

Clay cleared his throat softly. “He might not even be in Dr. Spencer’s book. Dr. Spencer will tell a story that makes a hero out of himself. But I know the true Aaban story.”

I was tempted to confirm Aaban’s absence from Hard Truth , based on the book’s index.

“I want the world to see what... we did to Aaban,” Clay continued. “This story is about me, too. Dr. Spencer was my supervisor at White Fire. This is about us. ”

He turned his head and stared dreamily at the mirror. I sensed him drifting away.

“Clay,” I said. “It’s important that we get to the video you mentioned. It will have to be clear and compelling for Nell and KPBS to even consider it.”

“Don’t rush me. I have the video. We recorded almost everything we did, to document our methods and successes and failures. We wanted a scientific record that could be built on in future wars. But some of it I recorded without Dr. Spencer knowing. Some of it Vazz recorded. Early in 2009, we were ordered to turn over any recorded material to the agency. Just before White Fire was closed. Vazz and I thought our secret videos would be destroyed, so we made copies, added some of the other recorded stuff, brought them home inside the fighting dolls. Something told me, even way back then in Romania, when I was nineteen years old and trying to gather actionable intelligence and save American lives, that everything we did was going to be denied. I already felt like I was beginning to lose it, Mr. Wills. Felt my mind slipping away, right into the cracks of those cold walls. I wanted a record of who I was and what we did. I didn’t want to remember myself as a weak man living in a nightmare. There is roughly one hour of video I can show you.”

“Roll it, Clay.”

He hopped off the bed, pushed the gun back into the waistband of his jeans, went into the bathroom and realigned the mirror on the wall. “Can you see the alley from where you are?”

“Who are you expecting?”

“Dr. Spencer and his old agency employers. You can’t conceive of my importance to them.”

“Do they know what you have?”

“They suspect. That is their training and nature. I told Dr. Spencer I have ‘white fire’ for him. I didn’t tell him exactly what it was. I want him to see it for the first time on Nell’s show. With me. You don’t see a problem with getting Dr. Spencer on the show, do you?”

I had to think fast on that one. “No problem at all. We just tell him it’s to promote Hard Truth .”

“Mr. Wills, it is nonnegotiable that Dr. Spencer be on the show with me. He must be.”

“I’ll make your wishes clear to Nell.”

“He’ll be surprised when he sees what I’m about to show you,” said Clay. “But he will have the chance to explain himself.”

Clay went to the front door, checked the flimsy chain lock, and opened the curtain maybe one more inch. Then he sat down and tapped some keys on the laptop.

“Aaban came to White Fire in June of 2008. Now, the first thing you’ll see is three guys shackled together in orange jumpsuits, being marched from a Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service SUV toward the detainee entrance to White Fire. ISIS now dresses their kills in orange as a reminder of how we dressed them . The detainee entrance was within a side courtyard, just in case neighbors or delivery people got curious about who we were and what we were doing. Aaban is the middle guy. The strong-looking one. Scared me when I first got up close to him.”