“This release waives your Fifth Amendment rights. You’re welcome to read through it.”
The tactic had already worked; Betsy’s calm was thoroughly shattered. “This is bullshit! What kind of a setup is this?”
McMurtry smiled sweetly. “Could I just recommend that you take your seat again and lower your voice? As I said, you are under investigation for a felony.”
“So I’m not allowed to get angry?”
“Please sit down, or I will summon a security guard.”
“That’s more bullshit.”
“We have a signed and sworn statement from the DCI’s executive secretary, Mrs. Margaret Hume, that you physically assaulted her, right here on these premises, in April. Given that, and your size advantage, I think I have every reason to fear for my safety.”
Betsy fell back into the wooden chair and uttered the only sentence she could think of that wouldn’t get her in deeper. “I want a lawyer.”
“You don’t get a lawyer. You signed away those rights when you came on board. Now, are you going to sign this release?”
Betsy considered her situation. She didn’t believe for a moment that the Agency would ever charge her with a felony. She was being mind-fucked, pure and simple. She knew it. She didn’t care anymore. She signed. What the hell.
Kim was happy. She already had Betsy on the defensive. She hummed a little tune to herself as she wrapped corrugated hoses around Betsy’s torso above and below her breasts to track her respiration. She attached fingertip detectors to note changes in the galvanic skin response. And then she put on the blood-pressure cuff and pumped it up—tight, tight, tight. Betsy’s arm felt like an iron pipe.
Kim McMurtry took on a stainless-steel sheen when she began to ask the control questions: Is the sky blue? Is your name Betsy Wilson? Is this November? Did your brother commit treason…?
Betsy felt her heart pound into high gear and knew that the needles must be bouncing all over the chart.
“No.”
Kim said nothing, just began another round of questions, most of them of no consequence. Betsy tried to control her breathing, but she knew that for the first time in taking the poly she was shook. She had the feeling that, up on the seventh floor, where all of this was being monitored in real time, money was changing hands. Vandeventer had been rattled; McMurtry took the pool.
“Do you need to go to the toilet? You don’t look well,” Kim said.
“No.”
“We want you to be relaxed.”
“I’m dead,” Betsy said. “Let’s get this over with.” A deep-red rash had spread down her arm. The petechiae—little vessels under the skin—had begun to burst from the pressure of the cuff. She knew that within a couple of hours the rash would spread down the full extent of her arm.
She had done nothing, but she was guilty. She had bought into a closed system. She had seen the inside of the inside, and as Hennessey had pointed out months and months ago, there was nothing there. She must now pay.
“What do you want?” Betsy asked Kim after she had returned from talking to somebody outside in the hallway.
“Nothing else,” Kim said brightly. “Thank you for your cooperation.” She took the sensors from Betsy’s body and said with real sincerity, “Have a nice day now, ya hear?”
She got up and walked out through the checkin point, presumably for the last time. The job that had taken her two years in waiting and security checks and polys and interviews to get had come to this. She walked, as if in a dream, to the desk staffed by the nice-old-wives-of-spies, turned in her badge, and got her coat.
“Bye-bye, dear,” one of the nice-old-wives-of-spies said. Betsy ignored her and, on her way out, stopped in the middle of the CIA seal set into the lobby floor and read the inscription on the wall: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” She took one last look at the stars on the wall and went out into the chilly November afternoon.
As she walked out, dry-eyed and numb, she heard a familiar voice. “Good afternoon, madam, would you be needing a ride downtown?”
“Sure.” She got into the cab and then noticed that Ed Hennessey was waiting for her in the backseat with two cups of coffee.
“Let’s go. You’re late for your welcome-back party.”
Chapter Fourty-Three