They did it to me twice before they even asked a question. Until that moment, I believed Officer Farner was simply punishing me. But no, their process had an object. While dripping water onto the towel, a new voice said, “Where is the stuff Sally Matheson put together to blackmail her husband?”
“I don’t know,” I coughed, trying to place the genteel Southern accent.
“We know you have it.”
“I don’t! I never had it.”
“You’re lying. You quoted from it to Tommy Russo this morning.”
“No! Somebody emailed me that. Anonymous source. You can look in my phone. Look in my phone!”
“Stop for a minute,” said the voice.
Until those words, I’d existed only moment to moment.
The prospect of even temporary cessation of the pain and terror filled me with shameful gratitude. In less than two minutes I’d learned that I would betray anything I knew, everyone I loved. How could it be so easy to break a man? How could it be that some men had held out for days or weeks or months against torture? The only answer I could imagine was that there are degrees of torture. Pain is one thing; terror is another. Pain can be isolated by the mind, objectified, distanced, even befriended. Terror is a wild animal trying to claw its way out of your chest.
“Take that blindfold off,” said the genteel voice.
A strong hand yanked the towel from around my head, banging the back of my skull against the bench. Beau Holland stood over me, his golfer’s tan dark and rich above a salmon-colored button-down. His eyes contained a mixture of malice and pleasure, and when he smiled, his Chiclet-white porcelain veneers shone in the dim room.
“I warned you this morning,” he said. “You didn’t listen. Listen now. You had two phones when they brought you in.”
“The email I quoted from is in my iPhone. Look at it. You’ll see the sender used some high-tech anonymous program to send it. We tried to trace it, but it’s impossible.”
Holland nodded to the man in the hood. “What’s your password?”
“Zero-five-two-seven-seven-two.”
“Good boy. You don’t like drowning on dry land, do you?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“I would if I could. I’d save myself a lot of time.” Another smile. “What’s your second phone for?”
“That isn’t mine. One of the Watchman employees Pine fired gave it to me today.”
Holland thought about that. “Who does it connect to? A source?”
“I don’t know.”
“I guess it’s time to play again.”
“Damn right,” said Officer Farner, picking up the water jug.
“Not yet,” said Holland. “Have you found his emails?”
The hooded man answered, “Got an email with a big PDF sent by a Mark Felt.”
Holland laughed. “A source with a sense of humor. Whoever sent that is going to be giving me deep throat before they’re finished.”
He crouched easily beside the bench and looked into my eyes from inches away. “Am I going to have to tell them to keep going? Or are we going to have a civil conversation?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Good boy. I need one name from you, McEwan. Who did Sally Matheson give her cache to? Think hard before you answer. Because these Rhodes Scholars here are going to keep going until you tell them. You might as well start where it’s going to end anyway.”
“Sounds like you’re trying to talk him into giving you a piece of ass,” Farner muttered.
“You want severance pay with your pink slip?” Holland asked without even looking at the cop.
“No, sir. I mean, sorry, Mr. Holland.”
Beau Holland raised his hand and gave my cheek two friendly pats. “You heard my question. Now’s your chance to answer. Think hard, McEwan.”
Fear unlike anything I’d ever known turned my bowels to water. When I crouched in that house in Ramadi, waiting for the final insurgent assault, I never felt this. Back there, at least I had a rifle. I could do something. Even after they captured me, and I lay helpless on the kitchen table while they argued about cutting my throat, something told me that if I died, it would be because I was American. But facing Beau Holland in this stinking basement was the worst torture of all. I didn’t have the information he wanted, but he believed I did—which meant that he would drown me for no reason.
“Beau, listen,” I started. “I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t even—”
“Wrap his head again,” Holland ordered, getting to his feet. “Go till he gives me the name.”
Farner laughed in anticipation of taking out his hatred of Holland on me. Then he wrapped the cold towel around my head once more, binding it to the bench. I strained my back and neck hard enough to snap ligaments, even break bones, but I couldn’t evade the little cascade of water falling onto the towel.
I’m drowning again.
I gasp, breathe water, choke, suck in more water. A man screams questions in my ear, over and over, but I can’t give him what he wants. They tip the bench to drain my windpipe, give me a few sips of air, then start again. My chest muscles burn as the animal inside claws between my heart and sternum. My brain feels like it’s being squeezed out of my ears. In the epicenter of my terror, a shattering truth blooms like a silent, slow-motion explosion, answering a question that has haunted me for years—
This is what my son felt as he sank to the bottom of that swimming pool. Above him, the surface lay utterly silent, or rippled under a breeze, reflecting the muffled crystalline laughter of women’s voices from inside the condo. But at the bottom my little boy endured this horror with no comprehension of what was happening to him.
He knew only that he was alone.
“WHO SENT THIS EMAIL?” roars the voice.
“He’s not hearing you. He’s out of it. Give him a second. We may have to turn him over again.”
I’ve been plunged into the most Kafkaesque nightmare imaginable: being killed for information I don’t have.
“Come on! We need to clear his trachea and sinuses!”
Someone twists my neck, and the towel is ripped away again.
“Let’s lay the whole bench over this time,” says the man in the hood. “He’s gray.”
As they take hold of the bench and tilt me left, a door opens and slams against a wall, reverberating through the tiled room.
“Sheriff Iverson says stop,” says a new voice.
“Stop?” says Farner. “Why?”
“I ain’t paid to ask questions like that. Sheriff says stop, you fuckin’ stop. Put him in the drunk tank.”
“This is absurd,” Beau Holland declares. “Iverson said I should stop? Has he talked to Claude Buckman?”
“All I know is Arthur Pine is on his way to talk to this guy. Right now.”
“The lawyer?” Farner asks. “That slimy bastard?”
“Judas is what he is,” says Holland.
“Get that fool dried off!” yells the deputy. “Throw him in the drunk tank like the sheriff said.”
Arthur Pine comes to the bars of the drunk tank alone. Even at this hour he’s wearing a suit, a brown pinstripe. It’s plain from his expression that he’d rather be anywhere but here. I’m sitting on a metal shelf bed jutting from the wall, and I don’t get up. Ten minutes after they brought me here, I started vomiting water and stomach acid. Most of it I managed to get into the toilet hole, but the rest is on the floor.
“Say what you’ve got to say,” I croak, and my ribs scream in protest. “I won’t be getting up.”
Pine watches me without saying anything.
“Your minions just waterboarded me.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Fuck you, Arthur. My father’s in the hospital, probably dying, and I’m getting waterboarded by your Poker Club brownshirts.”
“Then why in God’s name did you hit Max with a hammer? Surely you knew something like this would happen?”
I carefully hug my ribs, trying to muffle the pain to a manageable level.
“Were you trying to get that video from him?” Pine speculates. “Seems like a waste, since we already have it.”
“Do you? Because I’d be damned surprised to learn that a survivor like Max Matheson gave you his only hole card.”
A flinch in Pine’s face tells me my guess hit home.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” I tell him. “I don’t care about Max’s video. Because he can’t use it.”
Now I have the lawyer’s attention. “Why is that?”