He stood up. “I must go now,” he said. “But some others will take very good care of you.” The sarcastic smile flashed across his face again.
I was left alone in the room. A few minutes later, a man came in and said they would have to take me to another place. Playing for time, I asked if I could use the bathroom. He said it was across the hall and told me to go quickly. Other plainclothesmen stood in front of the interrogation room; one of them held a blindfold and handcuffs.
The bathroom was very dirty, but I thought it best to use it, since I didn’t know when I’d get another chance. In the mirror above the filthy sink, I stared at my pale face and bloodshot eyes. I was worried they would separate me from Nick. Whatever happens now, you will not allow them to break you, I thought. You won’t break. It’s your body, not your soul, Souad. You will not break.
I opened the door. One of the men said they would have to blindfold me and take me somewhere else. “I’m not going without my colleague,” I said in a loud voice, hoping that Nick would hear me.
“We need to go now,” another man told me. I began to scream: “My name is Souad Mekhennet. I am a journalist. I will only go with my colleague Nicholas Kulish.” My aim was to tell the other prisoners that I was here, or had been here. If I were to die or if anything else happened to me, I wanted to make sure someone would know my name.
One of the men began to tap his left foot impatiently. “Stop shouting, or we will need to use other methods,” he said.
The door to an interrogation room opened, and an officer came out. “What is going on here?” he said. (I would learn later that this was Nick’s room, and the officer was the chatty but creepy English speaker.)
“I don’t want to leave without my colleague,” I said.
“You need to go now,” the officer responded. “We need this room for the next interrogation. Your colleague will come soon.”
They blindfolded me and we started to walk. I heard the footsteps of several men. Two of them were holding me by my arms and shoulders, while another walked very close behind me. I heard a woman screaming. They led me toward the sound. I tried to stay calm and breathe. Are they raping her? Will they rape me now too? A door opened and we passed the screaming woman. I told myself again, Whatever is happening now, it is only your body. One of the men was breathing heavily into my ear. I could feel his breath on my neck, too, as if he were saying, You’re next. I did my best to ignore it. Don’t break down. You will not break down.
We walked further until a door was opened and I was taken inside. There they removed the blindfold. I stood in a small bare room with white walls and six orange plastic chairs. The tile floor was gray and dirty. A large clouded glass window let in a bit of light, but not much, since it was night. The room was very cold. A couple of moments later, Nick and Z were brought in.
“Did they beat you?” Nick and I asked Z after the men had left.
“No, I’m okay,” he replied. So it wasn’t his screams I had heard during my interrogation. They’d questioned him, he said, but he’d told them he was only the driver and didn’t know much about what we were doing.
We compared notes on our interrogations and learned that the questions had been fairly mundane. They’d asked Z how long he’d been working with us, who had hired him, where we’d been, and whom we had met. Nick was asked about the reasons for our Egypt trip, who he worked for, and why we’d chosen to come when we did. As we talked, a picture came into focus. It seemed that our jailers thought that Nick and I were part of a possible conspiracy against Egypt, or could have been made to look that way. At the time, the Egyptian security services were accusing U.S. and European nongovernmental organizations and political groups of having orchestrated the protests, so the fact that Nick and I had arrived before the demonstrations, as well as the equipment and money found in the car, might indicate to some that we’d helped organize them. I already had a black mark against me for having smuggled out the Nazi briefcase. At the time, a few Egyptian media outlets had raised questions about my being a spy who was telling Dr. Heim’s story as a way to damage Egypt’s reputation. It sounded crazy, but from what we knew about how the Egyptian government thought and operated, it kind of made sense, in a warped kind of way.
At first, communication with our guards was relatively consistent; one of the nicer intelligence officers brought each of us a Pepsi and a small package of Oreos, saying, “Let me see what I can do for you.” Later, he came back into the room, sat next to me, and told me that he loved Morocco. We started talking and it turned out that he had served at the Egyptian embassy in Rabat.
“Why did you get yourself into this situation?” he asked me.
“You guys brought us into this situation. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
He leaned close to my ear and whispered, “You should thank God that you ended up here. We know you. We know who you are. There are other places where they would just see you as a woman, do you understand?”
I begged them to release us, telling them I wasn’t feeling well. They sent a doctor with a blood-pressure gauge. I remembered former detainees telling me that before the guards used electroshock, their jailers would bring a medic to examine them, to see how much torture they could survive.
“You need to be checked?” the doctor asked me, smiling.
“No, no. I think I’m okay,” I replied.
We asked repeatedly to speak to our embassies or to the Times, but we were told to wait. After a while, some of the men we’d seen earlier came back to talk to us.
“We know you’re just journalists,” one of them said, “but we can’t release you because it’s very dark outside and it’s very dangerous.”
“Just give us our phones. We can call the U.S. embassy,” I said. Our jailers refused.
The room was freezing cold, and it was difficult to sleep with only the hard plastic chairs to lie on. I thought about my past, about all that had gone wrong and all the things I wanted to do in my life. Maybe we would never get out of here. Maybe we would die here.
There is a saying that walls have ears. In rooms like this one, walls also have voices—voices that belong to the others who have been detained there. During our long night, I read Arabic graffiti written on those walls. “Allah, please release me from my pain,” someone had scribbled. “Ahmad, 4.5.2010,” another wall read.
I thought about whether I should leave my name behind. Maybe then at least people would know that we—that I—had been there. “Who knows what they’ll do with us,” Z told me, his whole body shaking. I asked if he was afraid, but he said he was freezing.