Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

A murmur of voices, soft and comforting. The pack swayed. Slowly and with collective resolve, it shuffled, many-footed and cumbersome, toward the big table, where finally Clay was deposited onto a wooden bench. Rex, Patricia, and Paige untangled themselves and stood close, hands still on him. Sequoia squeezed in by his side.

With the noontime sunlight hitting his face I saw that Clay’s confusion was being beaten back by other forces. Curiosity? Surprise? His eyes — hazel and blue — looked up at the people around him, and I realized he was seeing them for the first time in years from outside the drug-induced cage in which Briggs Spencer had locked him. Wonder and doubt. Hope and fear. He flattened his palms on the table as if to rise, but the hands remained heavy on his shoulders, and Sequoia held fast to his arm.

I followed Clay’s gaze to Wesley’s video camera, waiting on its tripod nearby. Then to Lindsey’s pink laptop, loaded with her editing software, and to Lindsey herself, who gave him a calm and welcoming look. “I hear you’ve got some video for us to see,” she said. “And a story to tell.”

“But where’s Nell Flanagan? And all the TV cameras?”

“I’m Lindsey. I was a Reaper sensor ball operator for three years of my life. I’ve been in war, and I know video and what to do with it.”

He looked at me, implosion on his face.

“She’s not coming, Clay,” I said.

“Where’s Dr. Spencer?”

I sat down across from him, and looked him hard in the eyes. “He’s not coming, either. His book is out next week. He wrote almost nothing about Aaban and Roshaan. It’s up to you to do that.”

“You betrayed me.”

“I’m giving you a chance to tell your story to the world.”

He looked at me with cold resentment but said nothing.

“Listen,” I said. “You run your video and explain what happened at White Fire. Wesley will tape you. When you’re done, Lindsey will cut your story down and edit it over ten minutes of your video. Then upload it to YouTube. Ten minutes is what they give you, Clay. To tell your story to the world.”

I watched the emotions come to his face. Rolling beneath its surface like swells. Anger. Disbelief. Disappointment. Determination. Anger again. Then a long, indecipherable gaze at the pond. Clay Hickman’s thousand-yard stare. His former selves seemed to parade across his face: the newborn not expected to live, the pained infant, the struggling boy, the determined adolescent, the healing teenager discovering the power of his own will, the young man gaining strength and trying to please, the scholar and the champion athlete who watched the planes hit the towers on TV again and again and joined the Air Force to fight back.

“Clay,” I said. “You’ve got an hour of video and we’ve got an hour to make this happen. I know you wanted Nell and Spencer here, but your bottle is half full, young man.”

“Come home,” said Paige Hulet. “We want you back, Clay.”

“Please,” said Patricia.

“Bring the white fire to Deimos,” said Sequoia. “Right now.”

“Son?” asked Rex. “You can do this. You always did whatever you put your mind to.”

Clay closed his eyes and lifted his chin. Like a bird dog into the wind. His face was peaceful now and he looked asleep. The breeze shivered his white hair. “I got to the prison in March. It was cold. My first thought when I saw the old building was You’re not going to be the same when you leave here. If you ever do. ”

Clay’s introduction to White Fire brought silence from his audience. The forbidding stone exterior. The naked trees and fretful sky and the blackening piles of snow against the courtyard walls. Clay climbing out of a Romanian government truck, puffs of condensation from his nostrils. Shuffling across the stones, raising a hand to the camera, an uncertain smile. Nineteen by then. Just a boy.

Soft exclamations.

Then a montage of interior shots: the “lobby” entrance and the mess and the small dark rooms where the Americans lived, then the cells and interrogation rooms with the ceiling chains and shackles, the plastic screens for walling, the isolation boxes and restraint chairs, the waterboards.

Murmurs and grunts. “Oh, Clay,” his mother said softly. “You were never that.”

Wesley wedged himself in closer to record Clay in response. “I was part of the team, Mom.”

“He did what he had to do, Pat,” said Rex.

Then Aaban arriving in the White Fire courtyard, glaring at the camera with hatred in his eyes. Next a blast of death metal music and Aaban writhing on his toes, dangling by ceiling chains as Briggs Spencer interrogated him. Then Aaban with the Plague of Insects being lowered over his head. Aaban in a wooden collar, walled, and walled again. Spencer’s questions, patient and monotonous. Compliance blows, legs pulped. Aaban convulsing on the waterboard, Clay’s arms locked around his towel-smothered head, torquing his body for breath as Dr. Briggs Spencer aimed the next rush of water. Gargled agony and Spencer’s relentless interrogation.

Silence under the palapa.

A smash cut to the courtyard of White Fire and the arrival of a young boy. “Roshaan,” said Clay. “Aaban’s son. Eleven years old. Dr. Spencer thought we could exploit the boy to get to the father.”

“Good god,” said Paige.

“No,” said Rex.

“You didn’t,” said Patricia.

My burner phone vibrated. I stepped away from the show and checked my watch.

Dick: “I got pulled over for speeding outside El Centro. Eighty-five in the seventy. Exactly thirty-eight minutes ago. Couldn’t talk my way out of it so I stood there in the sun while the son of a bitch wrote me up. Kept an eye on the cars that passed me. So guess what? A black Charger and a white Range Rover went by. Blacked out windows, just like you said. Kind of close together, too, like a team. It took the cop forever to cite me, like he was just learning how to print or something. When he finally handed me the ticket to sign I saw the same black Charger and white Range Rover coming back in the other direction. Moving right along, this time. Back toward San Diego.”

“Turn the transmitter off and keep going.”

“Sorry, Roland. They had to have made me. I had your lucky hat on and everything.”

“You did well. Keep going.”

I rang off. My ruse had worked so far: by the time DeMaris and Tice had discovered that I was not the truck driver in the white hat, they were well on their way to Yuma. Now that they knew something was up, they would have to figure Rancho de los Robles, but they were over an hour away. Time enough. And more good news: Bodart, tracking the phone GPS in my truck, had the high-tech luxury of following from a much greater distance. Miles, in fact. So it was possible that he had missed the speeding stop altogether and was still headed west for Arizona. Possible.

I had my hour.

Back to the patio. Groans of disgust as Briggs Spencer aimed another flood into Aaban’s anguished face. Young Roshaan stood in the background, plainly terrified.

The next minutes played out with all of the nightmare choreography I remembered. Roshaan’s rush for his chained father, Clay’s takedown and choke hold on the boy, the Malinois growling midair, the frantic scramble to revive Roshaan, and the staggering, unbelieving realization that he was dead.

For a long while I heard nothing but the hiss of the April breeze in the palm fronds of the palapa.

Then came the scenes that Clay wouldn’t show me in the Oceanside motel. As they played out, I understood why. First, Roshaan’s body, lying curled up and wrapped in blankets in what appeared to be a very old steamer trunk. Someone had combed his hair and placed bricks around him. The room was dark but Roshaan rested pale in a beam of icy light. Then a cut to Clay and John Vazquez. They were bulkily dressed against the cold — gloves, watch caps pulled down snug — and push-pulling the heavy trunk across a river walk caked in dirty snow. The trunk was wrapped in chains and padlocks and it scraped loudly. The Dambovita flowed just beyond them, high, black, and sullen. The two men grunted and their breath hung in the cold air, and Donald Tice’s hands shook as he held the camera. Clay and Vazz grunted and muscled the trunk up onto the stone wall and rested for a moment, looking at each other. Clay glanced at Tice. Then the rasp of trunk and chain on icy stone, and the sudden dive. Roshaan made a neat, small splash and vanished.