Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

On-screen, Aaban was no longer dangling painfully from the ceiling. Instead he was strapped into a squat wooden chair, his feet locked into clumsy-looking steel boots fastened to the floor, his arms crossed in straitjacket sleeves lashed behind his back. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit again. His hair had been shorn short and his beard clumsily cut back.

“One night Aaban woke up screaming. I ran in and found him clutching the bars, breathing hard. No explanation from him, so the next day I cued up the surveillance video. They slept in the light, right? So I could see what had rattled him while he slept. It was just a cockroach inspecting his face. But it woke him and he went off. We realized how badly Aaban was afraid of bugs. Funny — strong guy like that, killed men face-to-face, probably cut their throats with a knife, but a bug totally freaked him. We used to have an approved menu technique we called Plague of Insects. We weren’t supposed to use it anymore, but that didn’t mean we’d forgotten how. That day we put Aaban back in the chair.”

Across from Aaban sat Briggs Spencer, in a simple folding chair. Spencer held up a black cloth bag to the man standing next to him, Timothy Tritt. I hardly recognized Tritt, looking so unlike the emaciated, long-haired man living in the barn in Owens Valley. This Tritt was trimly built and well-groomed. Still, I saw the hardness in his eyes, the almost reptilian smallness of pupil. The lack of emotion. He held out a clear-glass gallon jar for Aaban to see. The camera jostled, then came in closer to capture the jarful of busy insects and Aaban’s face behind the glass. Some crawled, some beat their wings, some raised their pincers, others slid along the glass, legs working as Tritt tilted the bottle. Aaban’s eyes were wide and I could tell he was trying to hold himself together. I recognized spiders and grasshoppers and cockroaches but not much else. Some looked like scorpions without stingers. Some were beetles. Some were big, especially the roaches. Tritt unscrewed the lid and dumped the creatures into Spencer’s uplifted black bag, then smacked the bottom of the jar to make sure they all made it in.

“Where is bin Laden?” asked Spencer. The camera pulled back. Spencer held the bag closed at the top with one hand, lightly patting the body of it with the other, as if trying to disperse the bugs.

“Allahu Akbar.”

“Allah cannot save you from this,” said Spencer. His voice was firm but gentle, almost condescending. “I can. I can save you, Aaban. Where is bin Laden?”

Aaban spit at Spencer. I couldn’t tell if he hit him or not. Spencer leaned back, then stood up straight and looked down at Aaban. Spencer, back then, still looked like the slugging all-American first baseman captured in his college baseball pictures — wholesome and forthright. His expression showed pity. His eyes teared up. He held his chin high and I could see the moral quiver in it. I heard Tritt’s words: We were selling our souls; but we didn’t know it yet.

Spencer stepped forward, opened the bag, and quickly pulled it over Aaban’s head.

Tritt circled a roll of duct tape around Aaban’s neck, the tape rasping off to make a tight seal.

Aaban violently threw his head from side to side, wrenched his arms in their sleeves, strained to free his feet, which were locked by the ankles in the steel boots. Blood trickled down the steel. His screams were powerful and pitiable. The only word I recognized was “Allah.”

I sat in the little motel room and heard the cars hissing by on Coast Highway while Spencer and Tritt and Clay and John Vazquez applied their “enhanced techniques.” Back then, I’d known that things like this were going on in secret places, far from America. I’d rolled it into the price of freedom. We all did. We had our best people on the case, didn’t we? They were calling the shots. But until now I’d never seen what we were doing. Up close. I’d never faced it. I felt a portion of Aaban’s agony, a fraction of it — what I could handle. The rest ran off me. I also felt, very clearly, the pain of doing what Spencer and Tritt and Clay and Vazz were doing. I just now began to understand what it had cost them. “Christ,” I said.

“Nell doesn’t have to show this,” said Clay. He sounded almost forlorn. “It’s just background.”

“He tells you nothing?”

“He told us about his mujahideen days in the summer of 1985—listed his friends and villages and the ways they died. He named the stars and planets he could see during each season of the year from the poppy fields in the Sangin valley. He described his wives.”

Spencer stood with a finger pressed thoughtfully to his lips, contemplating Aaban as he thrashed. Tritt’s primordial eyes seemed more drawn than repelled. Beside me, Clay regarded the monitor with what appeared to be blank resignation.

“I’ll fast-forward.”

Clay tapped the keyboard and the scene cut to Tritt, unwinding the duct tape and yanking the black sack from Aaban’s head. Aaban looked up at Spencer with wild eyes and blew a cockroach into his face.

“We worked on Aaban like this for six months,” Clay said. “He gave no actionable intelligence. The opposite. He taunted and lied and offered minor truths we already knew. Just before Christmas, Dr. Spencer announced that he’d dreamed of a new EIT. It wasn’t new, really, just an escalation of things we’d tried before. We’d threaten their families. Threaten to kill their mothers and children and wives. Bullshit, of course, and most of them knew it. But Spencer wanted to take it further. He was naming it ‘white fire,’ after the idea that he’d found the one irresistible, infallible, undefeatable torture.”

Of course, I knew. “Which was?”

“Aaban’s son. It took six months, but Dr. Spencer brought him to Romania. Here he is, arriving at White Fire.”

A rail-thin boy stepped down from the high backseat of the vehicle. He wore baggy Western trousers and a button-down collar shirt and athletic shoes much too big for him. He clutched a sun-faded backpack against his chest with both hands. His hair was short and lank, and even in the video taken from yards away you could see the fear in his eyes. Clay, dressed in jeans and a heavy jacket, stood waiting for him to climb out, and when he did, offered his hand. The boy shook it. Moe, the same interpreter who had been in on the walling, fell into step on the other side of the boy and the three continued across the courtyard.

“Roshaan,” said Clay. “It means ‘brightly lit’ or ‘bright-lighted.’ He was eleven years old, Aaban’s youngest child and only son. Which made him the most beloved person in Aaban’s life. You’ll see.”

Next came video of Clay leading Roshaan to his father’s dungeon in the smokehouse cellar. The video shooter trailed along behind, camera jumping. In a sere, snow-dusted barnyard, Clay and Roshaan descended stone steps and stopped at a heavy-looking wooden door with a window of steel mesh at eye level to an adult. Roshaan looked up at the window, then back at the camera, with an expression of hope that I’ll never forget. Clay ordered Aaban away from the door, then swung it open and let the boy inside. The cameraman followed. Clay stood to the side and Roshaan ran to his father, who swept him off his feet and held him to his body. They whispered and spoke over each other, and I could see Roshaan working his head into the crook of his father’s neck, the boy’s black hair mixing with Aaban’s growing beard. They were both crying.

“Day one of Dr. Spencer’s white fire,” said Clay. “Watch.”

I didn’t want to watch. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be tortured in front of your young son. Or imagine what damage it would do to the boy.