Afraid of the Dark

January
Three years later
Chapter Two

It was Jack Swyteck’s second trip to Cuba in the past three weeks. He had yet to meet a Cuban.

Miami was his home, and while it was true that Miami was closer to Havana than to Orlando, Jack’s flight to the Oriente Province at the southeastern tip of the island was over four hundred air miles. His personal escorts from the naval airstrip to the detention facility were two U.S. marines, a blue-eyed farm boy from Kansas and a first-generation Mexican-American from Los Angeles. His co-counsel, a JAG lawyer assigned to the case despite her client’s obvious discomfort with a female attorney, was from the South Side of Chicago. The civilian translator from Mogadishu was delivering Jack’s words in Somali and, occasionally, Arabic. Jack’s client was from East Africa. A spinmaster might have made the argument that the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo was just as much a melting pot as the nation that ran it. To Jack, the whole place felt more like a ticking time bomb.

“I’m not a government interrogator,” said Jack, but he was essentially talking to the walls. Four of them, to be exact, an eight-by-ten steel-and-concrete shed, with a separate holding cell and bunk to the left.

Jack’s client said nothing. It was playing out exactly the way Jack’s first visit to Guantanamo had-the lawyer talking, the client too distrustful to acknowledge his existence.

The briefing material estimated that Prisoner No. 977 was in his mid-twenties, but three years of confinement and various forms of government “enhanced interrogation” tactics had aged him beyond his years. His thin, dark face was dull and weary. His long black beard was gnarled, his fingernails brittle and yellowed. His first language was officially listed as Somali, but no one seemed to know for certain. There were no confirmed reports of his ever having uttered a word to anyone at Gitmo.

“Maybe he speaks Pashto or Farsi,” said Jack. “Can we try another language?”

“Only if you get another translator,” the interpreter said.

There was no time for that. In sixteen hours Jack was scheduled to be in federal court in Washington arguing for the prisoner’s release. As habeas corpus proceedings went, this one was in a class by itself, but Jack had the pedigree to handle it. Some fifteen years ago, a four-year stint with the Freedom Institute had been Jack’s first job out of law school. His father was the governor of Florida at the time, a man who’d campaigned on a strong pro-death-penalty platform. Jack was hardly the perfect fit for a ragtag group of former hippies who worked only capital cases, but he and his old boss Neil Goderich had remained close over the years. It was Neil who’d asked Jack to take the case of Prisoner No. 977. Jack had no illusions of selling his friends and family on the everybody-deserves-a-lawyer argument. It was a huge pro bono undertaking for a sole practitioner, but Jack kept his involvement quiet-until it came time for the government to clear his visit to Gitmo, and the FBI background check left his neighbors wondering if he was a mob lawyer on the verge of indictment. Finally, he had to come clean. The reactions were pretty uniform.

Are you kidding me?

You’re defending a terrorist?

His best friend, Theo Knight-a death row inmate until Jack and a DNA test had proved his innocence more than a decade ago-was the only one to shrug it off: “Dude, know what GITMO stands for? Giving Interrogation Teams More Options.”

Funny, kind of-if you were pounding back beers at one of Theo’s bars in Miami. But once the airplane landed at Gitmo, there wasn’t a lot of laughter. Jack had read the report from the former prosecutor, who had resigned from the case in disgust. Prisoner No. 977 had been rounded up by Ethiopian troops from a suspected al-Qaeda safe house in southern Somalia. He was accused of sheltering Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, who was responsible for planning the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 2002 car-bombing attack in Kenya and missile attack on an Israeli airliner. A handwritten confession was the centerpiece of the case against him. He didn’t write it. The one-page document was handed to him for his signature after several days of beatings, forced administration of drugs, and threats against his family. It was written in a language (Amharic) that he didn’t speak, and he signed with his thumbprint, which was consistent with reports that he was completely illiterate. The Ethiopians turned him over to the Americans, to whom he refused to speak. Prison logs reflected that Prisoner No. 977 attempted to kill himself eleven hours after arriving at Gitmo. Eight weeks later he was on the so-called “frequent flier” program, where, in a two-week period, he was moved to a new cell 112 times-an average of every three hours-in order to ensure he was sleep deprived and disoriented. Over the three years at Guantanamo, he was repeatedly subjected to extreme cold, bright lights, and various stress positions, and he was often kept in solitary confinement.

Still, he refused to speak to anyone-even to his lawyer.

“I’m here to help you,” said Jack, almost pleading now. “You have no way of knowing this, but in twenty-eight of the thirty-three detainee cases heard since last January, federal judges in my country have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison. Many of those men were held without charges far longer than you.”

The prisoner’s gaze drifted away. He looked at the prayer mat rolled neatly and resting atop his bunk, then up at the large clock on the wall, then back out to nothing. There was no reason for him to trust Jack. None.

Fifteen minutes passed, Jack’s words meeting with silence. Even on death row, Jack never had a client ignore him like this.

What now?

Jack glanced at the JAG lawyer to his right, then looked at the prisoner, who was now leaning back in his chair. This was going nowhere. It was absurd, really-the Yale-educated attorney sitting at a card table in a dank shed trying to explain habeas corpus to an illiterate peasant who was chained to the floor. Jack was running out of time, and becoming anxious was not going to help. He considered his next move, then completely shifted gears.

“My mother and grandmother were actually born in Cuba,” Jack said.

Jack paused for the translator. He knew very little about the man in shackles before him. But he knew that he must have family. Maybe they could connect on that level. The prisoner hadn’t seen or spoken to his loved ones in years. With a deep breath, Jack pushed forward with his last chance at a breakthrough.

“My mother left the island when she was seventeen, a couple years after Fidel Castro came into power. Her name was Anna. My grandmother put her on an airplane alone and sent her to live with relatives in Tampa. I can’t even imagine how painful it must have been to watch her daughter go, but Abuela refused to let her child live under a dictator. She hoped to get off the island and reunite in a few months. It took much longer. She missed my mother’s wedding. She missed the birth of her only grandchild-that would be me. It took forty years for my grandmother to finally get out of Cuba. By then, I was in my thirties, and my mother was long gone. Doctors didn’t know much about preeclampsia back then. She died soon after I was born.”

The translation brought no reaction. Forget “I’m sorry.” Jack didn’t tell that story often, but it was the first time in his life that he’d told it without drawing so much as a blink of the eye.

“What I’m trying to say is that I know what it must be like to be separated from your family,” Jack said, and then he waited.

The prisoner looked up, impassive, his demeanor unchanged.

Time was running out. Jack could feel his heart beating faster, the prospect of failure strangling him. He struggled to maintain an even tone as he spoke.

“I also know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do.”

Jack told him about his friend Theo Knight-arrested as a teenager, an innocent man who had wasted four years of his youth on death row, twice having come so close to the electric chair that he’d eaten his last meal and had his head and ankles shaved for placement of the electrodes. It was hard not to get energized when talking about Theo, and Jack’s words were coming so fast that the translator was having trouble keeping up.

“Four years,” said Jack. “That’s even longer than you’ve been here. Now Theo is a free man. My best friend. He owns two bars in Miami, plays the saxophone every Saturday night at a joint he calls Cy’s Place in honor of his great-uncle. Everybody wants to be Theo.”

Jack didn’t mention that all of his other clients from those days were either dead or still on death row. He just let the thought of Theo and his newfound freedom hang in the gulf between them. But the prisoner was unmoved.

Family. Get back to family.

Jack was about to start talking again, then stopped, deciding to steer clear of his famous father. Tales of the former cop who had signed more death warrants than any other governor in Florida’s history probably wouldn’t endear Jack to a man in shackles. Jack was running out of angles. He was down to Grandpa Swyteck-his father’s eighty-seven-year-old father.

“I visited him in the nursing home a few weeks ago,” said Jack. “He has Alzheimer’s.”

Jack stopped. The prisoner looked at him curiously, as if-perhaps-he had been listening with interest to Jack’s stories about his grandmother and Theo and was expecting Jack to say more about his grandfather. But Jack wasn’t sure what to say next. It suddenly occurred to him how little he knew about the old man. A momentary sense of sadness came over him.

“He was born in the Czech Republic,” Jack said. “Czechoslovakia, it was called then.”

Finally a reaction-though Jack wasn’t sure what had triggered it. He simply watched as the prisoner sat up, rested his forearms atop the card table, and looked Jack in the eye. There was another long stretch of silence, and then finally, in a moment that nearly blew away Jack and everyone else in the room, the man’s lips moved.

“I have been there,” he said. “In Prague.”

The JAG lawyer looked at Jack, then at the prisoner, then back again. “He speaks,” she said in disbelief.

Jack took one more long look around the room, at the cell and the steel bunk and the steel toilet and the O-ring drilled into the floor attached to the man’s ankles. Then he leaned forward in his chair, looking straight at the man in front of him.

“Yeah, how ’bout that,” said Jack. “In perfect English.”