“Yes,” Andy Reeves says slowly and with great care, “that is the official story.”
Reeves just keeps staring at me. I think about the orange blur that I assumed was a jumpsuit. I think about the secure location. I think about the need for secrecy. I think about the helicopter coming in at night under the cover of darkness and silence.
“You guys captured him. You brought him to the base.”
We had all heard the rumors back then, hadn’t we? I remember something else now, Leo—something you told me, but I don’t remember when. We had to be in high school. You were fascinated by what the media had then labeled the “war on terror.” You told me about them—harsh, dark places overseas where they took enemy combatants to make them talk, not to regular POW camps, but to . . .
“The base,” I say out loud. “It was a black site.”
Andy Reeves looks back out the front windshield again. “We had black sites in countries like Afghanistan, Lithuania, Thailand, places with code names like the Salt Pit and Bright Light and the Quartz . . .” His voice fades out. “There’s one CIA prison on an island in the Indian Ocean, one used to be a horse-riding school, one was even in a storefront, hiding in plain sight. They were crucial in our fight on terrorism. It was where our military would hold high-value foreign detainees for the purposes of enhanced interrogation.”
Enhanced interrogation.
“It made sense keeping them in these foreign countries,” Reeves continues. “Most of our enemy combatants were foreigners, so why bring them here? The legal technicalities are complicated, but if you interrogate an enemy combatant off American soil, the laws can be, shall we say, finessed. And you can be for or against enhanced interrogation. That’s fine; I don’t care. But don’t comfort yourself in the lie that it didn’t get us good intel or save lives. It did. That’s the moral out people give themselves, isn’t it? ‘I’m against torture,’ they say. ‘Oh yeah? Suppose beating up a monster who slaughtered thousands would save your child’s life—would you do it?’ and they can’t answer. They can’t say, ‘Sure, I’ll sacrifice my own child for my moral stand,’ so they come up with a smug rationalization like, ‘It doesn’t work anyway.’”
Andy Reeves turns, and his look is as heavy as the ages.
“Torture works. That’s the horror of it.”
I feel the chill, sitting in this dark car alone with this man, even as he is warming up to the tale. I’ve seen this before. It is so terrible a secret, so horrible a confession, and yet once you feel free to unburden yourself, once you let go and start talking, the sense of relief makes your mouth go into free fall.
“The problem was an obvious one. Forget overseas. There were—still are—terror cells right here in the United States. More than you can imagine. Most are American citizens, pathetic nihilists who get off on violence and mass destruction. But if we arrest them here in the United States, they have rights and due process and attorneys and all that. They wouldn’t talk, and maybe, just maybe, a big attack is imminent.”
“So you’d grab a suspect,” I say. “You’d stick them on a stealth helicopter, you’d take them to that base, you’d interrogate them.”
“Can you imagine a better place for a site like that?”
I say nothing.
“The detainees . . . they never stayed with us long. We used to call the base Purgatory. From there we could decide to let you go to Heaven or send you overseas to Hell.”
“And how would you determine that?”
Reeves turns and looks right through me. That’s all the answer he is going to give, and that’s all the answer I need.
“Now get to the part about my brother,” I say.
“There is no part with your brother. That’s the end of the story.”
“No, my friend, it’s not. I now know that he and his friends made a tape of an American citizen being illegally held.”
His face darkens. “We saved lives.”
“Not my brother’s,” I say. “Not Diana’s.”
“We had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even know about a tape until you showed it to me.”
I try to read his face for the lie, but Andy Reeves is no amateur. Still, I don’t see deception there. Did Reeves not know about the tape? How could that be?
I have one last card to play, and I play it.
“If you didn’t know about the tape,” I say, “why were you looking for Maura?”
“Who?”
This time the lie is easy to spot. I make a face.
“You questioned her mother,” I say. “More than that, I think you, what, took her to your little black site? Did something so she’d forget whatever you did to her there?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I showed her your picture, Andy. She confirmed that it was you who interrogated her.”
He stares back at the front windshield and slowly shakes his head. “You don’t understand a thing.”
“Our deal was you come clean,” I say. “If you’re just going to jerk me around—”
“Open the glove compartment,” he says.
“What?”
Andy Reeves sighs. “Just open the glove compartment, okay?”
I reach toward the glove compartment, turning my head for just a second to find the button to open it, but that is enough. His fist—I assume it’s his fist, because I never see it—lands square in the spot between my left temple and cheekbone. The impact knocks my head to the right and rattles my teeth. Numbness runs down my cheek and into my neck.
He digs his hand into the glove compartment.
My head is still swimming, but one thought makes its way to the surface.
Gun. He’s going for a gun.
His hand is grasping something metallic. Can’t make it out, but do I really need to? I get enough of my bearings to grab his wrist with both of my hands. This leaves both of my hands occupied while one of his remains free. He uses that hand now to pummel me with short punches to my ribs.
I don’t let go.
He starts turning and twisting his wrist, trying to break free or maybe . . . yes, he’s trying maybe to angle the muzzle toward me. I slide one of my hands down far enough to cover his fingers. None are on a trigger. I press down hard now. He can angle the gun, but without a finger on a trigger, he can’t hurt.
That’s what I’m thinking right now: I have his fingers so he can’t shoot me. I’m safe.
And that thinking ends up being tragically wrong.
He twists one more time. For a second I feel the cold metal hit the top of my hand. But only for a second. I see now that it’s not a gun. It’s too long. It’s in the shape of a baton. I hear the crackle of electricity and feel the pain at the same time, the kind of pain that closes down everything else, that makes you recoil to avoid any more of it.
The volts run up my arm, rendering it useless.
Andy Reeves easily pulls his wrist free of my now-nonexistent grip. Then with a gleeful smile, he pushes the device—stun baton, electric cattle prod, I don’t know—against my torso.
I start to convulse.
He does it again. My muscles won’t work anymore.
He reaches into the backseat and pulls out something else. I can’t see what it is. A tire iron, maybe. A baseball bat. I don’t know. I’ll never know.
He hits me in the head with it once, then again, and then there is nothing.
Chapter Twenty-six
I swim my way to consciousness in the strangest way.
Do you know the dreams where you can’t do the smallest of physical tasks? You try to run from danger, but it’s like every step is a trudge through wet snow at hip height. I was feeling something like that now. I wanted to move, to run, to escape, but I was frozen in place, like my whole body was encased in heavy lead.
When I blink my eyes open, I’m lying on my back. I see pipes and exposed beams. A ceiling. In an old basement. I try to stay cool, calm, not make any sudden moves.
I try to turn my head to take in my surroundings.
But I can’t.