Her one meal and a change of paper clothes were delivered by her interrogator.
He came to the chair outside her cell at regular intervals to question her. He was very formal. His clothes were neutral and boring, but pressed, and he always wore a tie. Alison didn’t know him and he wouldn’t tell her his name.
“What do people call you?” she would ask. “Just say any name.”
“My name is unimportant.”
She had called him Unimportant for a while, but it was clumsy. So she tried other names: Bert, Voldemort, Condor. But the name that stuck was Secret Agent Man, or Sam.
Sam was middle-aged, paunchy, and humorless but a fine interrogator. He never hurt her physically, but he knew how to get to her, how to worry her and make her desperate for news of her kids.
He also brought incentives with him: a box of food and a clean, blue, one-piece flushable garment.
These items remained under his chair while he tried to break her. Most of the time when he was ready to leave, he slid the parcels under the lowest bar of her cell. Sometimes he took the food and clothes away with him.
Today, as usual, he’d said, “Hello, Ms. Muller. Are you comfortable?”
“Fabulous accommodations, dahling,” she’d said. “If you could have fresh flowers delivered. And a change of linens.”
The interrogator smiled, if you could call the thin stretch of his thin lips a smile. He asked the same questions every day. “Who gave the order to blow up the plane?”
And every time, she said the same thing.
“Like I told you, Secret Agent Man. What I heard is that they were rogue Chinese operatives. I didn’t know them. I don’t know who they were working for. I heard they’re all dead. Now. If you don’t mind telling me, who do I have to blow to get out of this joint?”
“What information have you passed to the Chinese?”
“None. None at all.”
One time, after the questions were done, Secret Agent Man said, “I’ve seen Caroline.”
He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and showed her a photo of her daughter coming out of her middle school building. He said, “She has a bruise on her left arm. See there. I think she may be getting into fights. Or maybe Khalid did this to her.”
Then he’d asked her another of the everyday questions. “Who is your contact in China? Who were you going to meet when you got there?”
“I didn’t have a contact. I was going to be met at the airport. That’s the truth. That’s the truth. It all happened very fast. Remember, please. I am still CIA. I was only going to work over there for us. Molinari knows this. Please. I’ve told you everything. What do I have to do to get out of here?”
Today, after the usual bull, Secret Agent Man had said, “Your meal is a cheese and mushroom frittata. I had one. It’s very good. Bon appétit. I’ll see you soon, Ms. Muller.”
And then he’d left.
Alison had thought of killing herself. She had run headfirst at the wall, but she really couldn’t get any momentum going and had only given herself a headache. A hidden camera watched her. The one time she’d tried to hang herself on the bars, Sam had appeared and said, “No, Ms. Muller. Don’t do that unless you’d like us to take away your clothes. Keep you here in the nude.”
She wasn’t yet desperate enough to drown herself in the toilet. But she was close.
She was going to be here for life.
She was going to die in this underground stone box.
The sooner the better. There was no way out and nothing left to live for. She couldn’t even fantasize anymore. She just couldn’t fool herself into believing in happiness.
She went to the cot, which was chained to the wall, and lay down. She pulled out strands of hair, one at a time, and she started the countdown to the one thing she had to look forward to.
The next meeting with Sam.
He was all she had.
CHAPTER 101
ALISON THOUGHT SHE’D finally gone insane.
She heard men’s voices out of sight in the corridor beyond her cell. She knew both voices. One was Sam, her tormentor. She knew for sure she was crazy, because the other man—was Joe.
First the muffled voices, then the shadows falling across the stone floor. And then they were both at the bars.
Secret Agent Man said, “You have a visitor, Ms. Muller.”
He put the box with her dinner and her one-piece outfit under the chair and then said to Joe, “Take your time. When you’re ready, you know where to find me.”
Alison rushed to the bars and grabbed them.
“Joseph. Have you come to get me out?”
“I could only arrange a visit,” he said.
He brushed her hand with his, then sat in the chair outside the cell. She sat on the floor right against the bars so that she could be close to him.
“Why are you here, then?”
“I wanted to see if you had charmed management into giving you silk sheets and an ocean view.”