Rules of Betrayal

61

Sultan Haq woke, alarmed.

Bolting upright, he stared into the darkness. A face stared back. Blue eyes. Blond hair. Heavy black-rimmed glasses. It was Revy, the Swiss doctor who had so freely insulted him and his country this evening.

Haq met the man’s regard, despising him, as he viscerally despised all men of the West. For his privilege and arrogance, but mostly for his false, ingrained superiority. The face stared back, saying nothing, yet demanding something of him nonetheless. Haq looked more closely at him, frustration welling up inside him. And more-a nagging certainty that he was being deceived. He looked past the glasses and studied the blue eyes.

His chief interrogator at Camp X-Ray had had blue eyes, and the same blond hair. Looking into Revy’s face, Haq felt himself drawn back into the interrogation room. He remembered the fluorescent lights, his captors’ greedy, dissatisfied faces, the rank breath and insistent questioning, and then the hood, the abrupt tilting of his head, the last desperate breath before the torrent of water. Water in place of breath. Water in place of light. Water coming as death to carry him away on its fluid, relentless waves.

And there, high in the corner, taunting him when the hood was removed and he could breathe again, the undying television, blaring on and on, playing the same dreadful images, the dancing sailors crossing New York City, belting out cheery, hopeful songs. American songs.

Haq closed his eyes to ward off the memories, but they persisted. Images from a different world. A barbarous, deceitful world. A world Haq swore to end.

The interrogator was a soft, weak man, but the blue eyes staring back at him in the darkness were neither soft nor weak. They were formidable adversary’s eyes. And so Haq asked what it was that Revy demanded of him. For what purpose had he lured him from his sleep?

Haq believed in the power of dreams.

Revy didn’t answer, and Haq knew he was baiting him, daring him to guess his secret.

Sultan Haq stared into the darkness until the face receded and there was nothing but black, and a terrible gnawing settled on his soul.