Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Monday, February 22, 2044

“O y now Lessing knew every crack in the floor and every flake in MJ the plaster of the corridor leading to Sonny’s office. The brick walls were painted a scuffed red-brown to shoulder height, then whitewashed the rest of the way up to the high ceiling. The floor was a muddy mahogany in color, daubed thick here and thin there, so that half a dozen older coats showed through. The building looked and smelled ancient, but it dated back only to the reconstruction after the expulsion of Israel’s Arab population some thirty years before. Lessing assumed his prison was part of some larger police complex, but no one ever said where it was. His guards, two dark-skinned North African Jews, had once spoken of Derekh Shekhem Street as being just outside; that meant northeastern Jerusalem, if memory served him right.

Inside this warren Sonny — the only name his interrogator ever used — occupied an office of relative splendor: beige walls, Venetian blinds, scarlet-and-blue Arab carpets, pictures of Israel’s bewhis-kered founders, a couple of landscape paintings, a decent desk (under an untidy mound of papers and files), a silver coffee service that had been “liberated” from a mansion in Damascus, a Japanese television set, a Taiwanese stereo, a Chinese VCR, and a Korean laser-disc player with all the frills. Sonny’s chair too was a wonder of chrome and fake lcopardskin. Even his “guests” got cushioned seats and their choice of soda, beer, or coffee.

Sonny himself was short, stocky, and mid-thirtyish. Like many Jews of Slavic extraction, his hair was short, curly-frizzy, and as blonde as a starlet’s bottle job. He wore open-necked, knit sport shirts, pastel pants (lime green last week), and expensive running shoes. He was an officer of ARAD, Israel ‘s intelligence service, an organization built upon the traditions of many that had gone before: the Mossad, the CIA, the KGB, the OSS, the Cheka…. Sonny was but a modem incarnation in a line of inquisitors that stretched all the way back to the dungeons of old Assyria.

Not that he had ever harmed Lessing. Indeed, he had never so much as breathed on him. To Sonny, Lessing was a rosh katan, a “little head”: small fry, a nothing, a nobody, a mere who had been unlucky enough to be on the wrong side when the shit came down. After establishing Lessing’s status in the Party of Humankind and discovering that he was almost apolitical, Sonny took no further professional interest. He did summon Lessing in occasionally, but mostly to talk about movies, food, clothes, slang, Banger pom-queens, and sports — anything modem, anything American. Sonny’s secret yearning, it seemed, was to share the joys of those sainted souls who dwelt in Beverly Hills, perhaps eventually to live in the empyrean realm of Malibu itself!

So far Lessing had had an easy time of it. His captors did indeed strip him, search him, and issue him the inevitable blue jogging suit. They then put him into a comfortable cell — more like a room in a college dormitory — which contained a bed, a toilet, a washstand, a table that folded out from the wall, and a chair. The food was edible, and he had no complaints about his treatment. A Spartan might have griped about too much luxury!

He did have a bad moment at first, trying to hide the Khalifa’s zombie pill; yet it turned out to be simple. The Izzies weren’t expecting him to be carrying anything. A dentist inspected his teeth for suicide capsules, and the body search was humiliating, but that was all. He easily wiggled his tiny treasure out of his head bandage and into a seam in the jogging suit without anyone seeing. Later he transferred it to the hollow metal tube of the toilet-paper fixture in his cell. It was still there the last time he had looked.

No one suspected him of having anything to do with Pacov — no one here in Israel, anyway. Of this he was certain. Through Sonny and his guards, Lessing kept track of the influenza that had struck Israel recently, but he had no way of telling whether it was the first kiss of Pacov-1 ‘s silvery scythe or just the usual winter blahs. When two weeks passed without incident, he began to think that Pacov-2’s black cylinder had not ruptured — or was ineffective — or had been found and neutralized when Richmond’s corpse was prepared for burial. Perhaps they had planted it with him. What irony: bloody-minded old Richmond pushing up Pacov-scented daisies!

Why weren’t the Izzies curious about the contents of Richmond’s pockets? Few people carry around a glassine envelope containing shards of mirror-bright plastic and an eroded-looking black cylinder. In this post-Pacov age it was impossible not to be suspicious of such bric-a-brac! Had both containers decayed beyond recognition? Perhaps some hapless sailor had stolen the black cylinder, thinking it was valuable — or a morgue attendant — or one of Richmond’s relatives to whom the body had been handed over?

Where was Pacov-2?

A related puzzle: why weren’t Richmond’s superiors asking questions? Whoever had sent him must believe that the mission had failed — that the kikibird had never found Lessing’s Pacov — otherwise they’d already be here. Still, wouldn’t they send out some other poor sucker — a martyr or an unwitting human sacrifice — to check?

Sonny did ask about Richmond, the pit dug in Lessing’s living room floor, and the execution of Bauer. Lessing had aplausible story ready: Richmond had been greedy, working for himself as well as his handlers, and Bauer had tried to buy his life with a cache of SS documents — and Lessing’s cash reserve for Club Lingahnie operations. Sonny ingested this without blinking. Whether he believed it was something else; the man was no fool.

The zillion-dollar question was Pacov-2 itself. If the tube were intact there was no immediate problem. Not now. But later? Ever? If it had ruptured, the possibilities were dreadful. In spite of his earlier resolve, Lessing found he had no stomach for genocide. From Sonny’s window hecould see men, women, and children. Most were Israelis, but some were Arabs or foreigners. He had no feelings for them, neither love nor hate; yet he did not want them to die because of him.

What choice did he — and they — have anyway? If Pacov were truly loose, he couldn’t save them. They would all be infected by now. Any person who didn’t swallow a zombie pill — who knew when! — and assuming the stuff worked — was dead. Running wouldn’t help, even if there were some place to run. Why cause a senseless panic? Let Pacov ‘s customers enjoy their last days in happy ignorance.

His logic gave him no peace. He couldn’t sleep. The prison doctor prescribed sleeping pills.

Sonny seemed genuinely concerned. “What’re you scared of, Lessing? You haven’t been hurt… and you’re a lot safer here with us than with your Nazi buddies. In a month or two, after the excitement about Ponape dies down, we’ll let you go, and you can rejoin your old mere unit. Colonel Copley’s working for us now, up near Sverdlovsk Did you know?”

Lessing did not enlighten him. He decided that Pacov — Death, God, the Devil, Mother Nature, the Tooth Fairy — whoever or whatever — must take its course.

He also discovered that his own private grief came first. The fate of the world no longer concerned him. All he wanted was to mourn Jameela, secretly, alone, down in the innermost sanctuary of his soul.

Jameela….

She was always there. He never saw her as the vivacious girl he had loved in Lucknow, nor even the out-of-place housewife she became later on Ponape. No, she appeared always as a silent huddle of silver and ice-blue on their bedroom floor. Over and over again he felt the limp, lolling looseness when he raised her head, and he smelled her sandalwood perfume mingled with acrid gunpowder and the reek of blood. He dreamed— he couldn’t help it— and he awoke with his cheeks wet with tears.

Real men don’t cry? Bullshit! It’s the real men who do cry.

Sonny wouldn’t talk about the raid on Club Lingahnie. An Indian woman? Who could say? The Izzie commandos kept no tally of enemy casualties, he said. They struck efficiently, thumbed any who got in their way, and left again. Sonny wouldn’t even admit to the existence of other prisoners, although Lessing had seen Abu Talib and thought he had glimpsed Mrs. Delacroix back on the destroyer. No, Sonny preferred to talk about golf, glitter, and girls instead.

This morning the two taciturn guards ushered Lessing to the “visitor’s chair” in Sonny’s office and departed. He immediately got up and went to look out of the window, his sole contact with the external world. People, cars, vans, army vehicles, bicycles— everything appeared normal. But weren’t there too many soldiers? And why was that convoy of military ambulances and medical trucks travelling north, toward Jerusalem’s new Kahane Airport? Nablus, Ramallah, and the highway eastward to Syria and Iraq lay in that direction, too. Was the convoy going to join Israel’s forces in southern Russia— or was it racing toward a sudden outbreak of a disease no one dared name?

He was being paranoid. There was nothing wrong down on the street. People smiled, talked, argued, hawked their wares, and bustled or dawdled as they saw fit. The newspaper peddlers squatted idly beside their bundles; no mob clamored to read of disaster . The boy with the boom-box on his shoulder was swinging along in time to some catchy rhythm, not listening to emergency reports of spreading death. The twoblack-garbed Orthodox rabbis were debating theology — or dinner — and not the end of the world.

Sonny came in scowling. Behind him was another, white-haired man, a dignified bureaucrat in a blue-black suit and conservative, charcoal tie.

Lessing knew at once that this was no Israeli; this was trouble.

His stomach sank.

“Mr. Shapiro, Alan Lessing.” Sonny said. He sat down and pointed the newcomer to a chair.

Shapiro didn’t sit. He walked around behind Lessing, looking at

him from all angles.

“Want to see my tail?” Lessing inquired mildly. “That s where I’ve got my swastika tattooed… right up underneath it.”

“Shut up, Lessing,” Sonny ordered. “This is no joke.”

“Why isn’t this man classified as a Section Six?” Shapiro spoke over Lessing’s head. His flat, nasal accent was American: probably New York City.

“Why? He knows less about the Party of Humankind than my ten-year-old daughter.”

The older man pursed his lips and frowned. He dug out a ballpoint pen and a pad of paper. “He was right in there with Mulder, Borchardt, the Caw woman, Meisingcr, the lot.”

“You want my tapes? My notes? He’s been cooperative.”

“They all are until you get down under the surface.”

“I know my job “

“Of course.” Shapiro tapped stained dentures with the pen. “What did he tell you about Jennifer Caw, for instance? That she’s left-handed? That she inherited the fortunes of two South American Nazi families and is rich as sin? That she lures seventeen-year-old Party recruits into her boudoir and makes ’em lick the honcypot?”

Sonny bridled. “Lessing’s given us whatever we asked, as much as he knows.”

“And Anneliese Mcisinger? An ex-whore — used to be Emma Delacroix’s lesbian lover, once they cured her of herpes, the clap, and syphilis. Lucky for the old lady she didn’t have AIDS! Did this Lessing talk about her? Come on, Colonel Elazar, what didn’t this bastard tell you?” It was the first time Lessing had heard Sonny’s last name.

“I think he gave us what’s important: Meisinger’s a speech writer, a Party hack, one of the authors of their fake book, The Sun of Humankind. We knew all about her private life….”

“He tell you he was screwing her… in New Orleans?”

“Bullshit!” Lessing commented succinctly. “You want pom, go buy yourself a magazine!”

Shapiro eyed him. “You Nazis are smart sons of bitches.”

“I’m no Nazi “

“Sure.”

“I don’t think he is,” Sonny — Elazar — said slowly. “He’s just a hired mere. Old Mulder liked him and kept him around.”

“Have you asked him about the Holocaust?” Shapiro shot back. “How does he stand on that? He was exposed to every conceivable anti-Semitic, racist, fascist, revisionist line… to the neo-Nazis, the hard-liners. They had no effect on him? Otherwise, Colonel, otherwise!”

“So I haven’t had time to take him down to Yad Vashem.”

“I doubt that would do any good. I hear Yad Vashem’s got lifesize, colored holograms now. You can walk around in a full-scale blow-up of the photographs, watch the Nazis gassing people, look at it just like you were there. It’s enough to make a stone statue weep. But I don’t think this man would be affected by it, nor by diaries, photographs, displays of hair, shoes, and gold teeth. Your Mr. Lessing wouldn’t give a shit. He’s a mere, a sociopath, a cold fish to begin with, and now that his revisionist pals have given him books to read he’s gone over all the way… maybe not as an ideologue but as a soldier for the faith.” Shapiro tapped his pen against his teeth and waited. Lessing said nothing.

“Thought so. Well, Colonel, how about it? Section Six for this prisoner?” Shapiro dug into the breast pocket of his immaculate suit coat. “You need authorization? I’ve got it, both from our people in the States and from your bureau chief here.”

“Why? Why this man?” Sonny squinted at the proffered paper, then tossed it dowa “What can he possibly know?”

Shapiro retrieved his document before it became a permanent part of the clutter on Sonny’s desk. “I think we’ll find something interesting. You remember Richmond, the agent who died on Ponape? Just between us, Mordechai Richmond was a sharp operator, but he didn’t share everything… not with his handlers in our Vigilantes for Zion, not with the American government, and not with you people. He had irons in fires nobody even knows are lit We’re not sure who put him on Lessing’s case in the first place… so many died in Washington and New York when Starak hit.”

“Richmond was after Lessing? Specifically? Personally?”

“We think so. But why? Nazi business? Maybe, maybe not. Richmond never told anybody. Now he’s flower food.”

“Others must know. Someone…?”

“Nobody we can find. And we can’t get into the big computer, Eighty-Five, any more, now that Outram’s racists control what’s left of the American government.” Shapiro paused to run manicured fingernails through his snow-white mane. Lessing wondered if it was a wig. “All we’ve got is this bastard. Let’s get serious with him. Why don’t we ask him what he knows about Richmond’s mission on Ponape?”

“I did.” Sonny repeated Lessing’s answer.

Shapiro emitted a derisive hiccough. “It doesn’t stand up! Richmond was chasing Lessing long before Ponape… since India, in fact Lessing didn’t have any SS records or any cash back then. But let’s just pretend that this was Richmond’s motive; where are the records and the money now? Lessing killed Levi and a couple of your commandos. Then, according to his story, he ran out after Richmond, found his wife and the German woman dead, and chased Richmond down to the shore. Where’s the boodle, Colonel?”

Lessing got up. He hated sitting while people talked over his head. He said, “I dumped it. I grabbed it to keep it out of your people’s hands. I was headed out into the bushes with it when I saw Richmond had slipped out… when I heard the… the… shots.”

“Won’t do.” Shapiro shook his head like a disapproving school-marm.

“I had instructions from Mr. Mulder to destroy the stuff rather than let you opfoes have it, but I didn’t have time. I hid it in the ravine and piled leaves over it. It’s probably still there.” Lessing hoped he sounded sincere. Sonny was frowning.

Shapiro snorted. “Really? Let’s reconstruct. Richmond’s only a few steps ahead of you. He’s on his way to bring help. You have to stop him. Maybe you do grab the contents of your metal box… papers, packets of money, whatever… but then you hear shots, screams. Do you finish gathering it up? Even you aren’t that cool a customer. Don’t you drop a paper or a bill or two?” The pen returned to teeth-tapping. “Remember, the commandos went through your house later looking for information. They found nothing. Zilch. Your box was empty.”

“I told you what happened. I did get the stuff out and hide it. How can you say different? You don’t know how many minutes passed after I shot Levi… before I went chasing out after Richmond. You weren’t there. The Israeli strike force was only on Ponape for an hour or two. Did they search every bush?”

Shapiro sighed. “If you believe that, Colonel Elazar, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’ll sell you.” Sonny looked blank, and the other got up to smooth out the wrinkles in his trousers. Palestine could be hot, even in February. “Let’s ask Herr Obergruppenführer Lessing, here, some questions.”

“Authorization, Colonel. Right there. The head office of the Vigilantes for Zion… and your own superiors as well.” Shapiro tapped his document reverently, as though it were the Ten Commandments. He went to the door and summoned the two guards himself. “I don’t have time for this.”

Sonny peered again at Shapiro’s paper, then surrendered. He signed to the guards. The taller of the two pulled out a pair of cuffs and struck a professional pose. The smaller one drew his rubber truncheon from its belt-sheath. He looked as though he had performed this duty often and enjoyed it more each time.

Lessing held out his wrists. Why give them an excuse to beat on him? He still had hopes that Sonny would believe his story — or some amended version of it.

The guards whirled him around, secured his hands behind his back, and propelled him through Sonny’s inner office to a door at the rear. Sonny unlocked this to reveal a short stairway. The guard with the club shoved Lessing in and simultaneously tripped him so that he plunged down a dozen steps to smash his cheek and shoulder against the rough concrete at the bottom. He staggered up to see the trunchcon-wielder descending after him. Sonny snarled something in Hebrew, and the man desisted.

“Why protect this man?” Shapiro protested. “Damn it, he’s one of them!”

“Soft interrogation works better than hard. Especially with a mere like Lessing.”

Shapiro uttered a dignified snort. “Not with these Nazis! Murderers!”

Sonny asked, “So do you want to do the torturing here?

“Me? Certainly not!” Shapiro bridled. “I am physically offended by violence. Elicitation of information…”

“Torture!”

“Interrogation. That’s your job, Colonel.”

“The one time I met Richmond, he told me a story,” Sonny said, “about some neo-Nazi back in Detroit. Pain didn’t faze him. Richmond’s people finally castrated him and shot him full of female hormones. He lost all his body-hair and grew teats like a cow! They dressed him up in leather and black lace and stuck him in a gay brothel in Vegas. Made him earn his bread and water packing fudge and playing flutes. After a year he started to sing… told Richmond everything he knew. Didn’t help him much; the sonuvabitch was ungrateful enough to die of AIDS.”

Shapiro eyed him wordlessly.

“Come on, Mr. High-buck Liberal Humanitarian! Your squeamishness stinks! You… and my bosses… give the orders, but you don’t see what happens! To you it’s all on paper, all orders and ‘implementation of Project HB, sub-paragraph C!’ It’s people like me who have to do the messy work… and listen to the screams. Those screams don’t stop when I get home at night. I hear them in my dreams.”

“Colonel, I’ll have to report…”

“Go ahead. My superiors know how I feel. They don’t care. Get the job done quickly and efficiently, they say. No crap about ‘human rights’; the people we interrogate aren’t Jews. We use tough methods, you use them, everybody uses them.”

“The security of Israel… of our enterprise…”

Lessing interrupted, “Isn’t that what you accused the Nazis of doing? Drab, faceless bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann? The men who were supposed to have sent trainloads of people off to the ‘gas chambers?’”

They ignored him. Shapiro drew a shaky breath and faced the Israeli eye to eye. “The State of Israel wasn’t built by turning the other cheek. Colonel! We Jews worked for it, we lived for it, and we died for it. In the process we made a lot of our enemies die for it, too. We did these things because otherwise we’d have been annihilated a dozen times over along the way, all through history… in Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Rome, medieval Europe, Russia, and Nazi Germany!”

Lessing tried to say something about “manifest destiny” and the “Chosen People,” but the smaller guard struck him judiciously on the buttocks with his club. It stung.

“You Americans!” Sonny banged a fist upon the peeling cement wall. “So easy to talk of ‘we Jews!’ So simple to advise us about what ought to be done over here, in Israel! I’m glad I’m just a glorified policeman!”

Shapiro’s face was a closed door, unseeing, unhealing. “You’ve been at your job too long, Colonel Elazar. Just get the relevant information out of this prisoner. I don’t need any lectures.”

“Fine. Agreed, damn it. But you’re coming with us. You’re the one with the authorization.”

“I refuse. I don’t have “

“Time? I think you have. For once one of you desk-soldiers is going to see what happens when you give orders!” Sonny snapped his fingers at his guards. The taller one stepped back to escort Mr. Shapiro down the steps.

The corridor at the bottom of the stairs opened into a long hallway lined on both sides with featureless, black-painted doors. Lessing noted cameras and spy-devices: everything that moved in these nether regions was watched. Sonny advanced halfway down the passage and spoke into a grill beside one of the doors.

“Guided tour?” Lessing inquired. “Now you show me the rack, the thumbscrews, the electrodes, the ball-snippers?”

“This is not my choice, Alan! We… I am no sadist.”

“Once a guest talks you put him back together and pay his hotel bill while he recuperates? Free drinks? Meals on the house? Ticket to the opera?”

“You’re not some Arab terrorist, some glittery-eyed ‘freedom fighter.’”

“Would that make torture okay if I were?”

Shapiro snarled at him. “Israel is surrounded by enemies, even after a century of war, after defeating all her foes… even after Pacov! And there is the Holocaust. That must never happen again.”

“Where was a ‘Holocaust’… the way you people say it was.”

“See?” Shapiro shrilled. “See? I told you so! He is a goddamned Nazi!” He looked almost gleeful.

The room beyond the door was perhaps twenty feet square. Its walls were white-painted concrete blocks, its floor a dull, resilient, brown plastic that deadened sound. A uniformed nurse, a squat, dark-haired woman in her fifties, laid down a book and arose from a desk by the door.

In the center of the room, partly hidden behind a welter of machines and consoles, stood a tilted metal table. An intravenous-drip hookup stuck up above this like some kind of futuristic gallows. Lights winked on a display board at the nurse’s station, and an EKG monitor screen splashed hollow, green light across the white-swathed figure upon the table. The air reverberated to a high, barely audible, wheezing susurration.

Lessing looked. He couldn’t help it.

Bare feet protruded at each of the table’s bottom comers. The ankles were wrapped — bound — with stretchy, soft, Ty-Do plastic straps, holding the legs apart in an uncomfortable “Y.” Tubes emerged from a thick diaper over the groin to disappear into an aperture in the table’s shiny surface. A padded belt like a Japanese sumo wrestler’s girdle crossed the prisoner’s stomach. Above this, the man’s black-furred chest had been shaved here and there to allow the attachment of monitoring devices. The victim’s arms, angled wide and bound like his feet, stuck up above the top edge of the table. The hands were shapeless lumps, the fingers kept apart with cotton pads. The head was a muffled globe, a faceless sphere of bandages, tubes, wires, and sensors. Swing lights and chrome-plated machines hung from retractable arms overhead, their cold glitter more fearsome than any medieval instrument of torment

Resistance was useless. These people played the latest games. He might hold out for a while, but sooner or later he’d crack. Anybody would. Then they’d reel him in like a fish. Nobody could withstand modem, sophisticated interrogation.

Lessing struggled for calm. He had already decided to sing like the proverbial bird. He had nothing to hide, no comrades or cause that would suffer if he confessed every sin all the way back to the third grade! He knew nothing of value about the Party of Humankind, Mulder, Liese, or the others. And he’d happily tell Sonny about Marvelous Gap, Pacov, Richmond — whatever he wanted to hear.

He gathered his courage. He’d just have to live through whatever they did to him.

Maybe he could fake it. He hoped they wouldn’t use sexual-sadistic techniques on him. Lessing had always thought of himself as tough, a loner who might not join the high school biker gang but who wasn’t to be messed with either. He could take — he had taken — wounds and pain and hardship. This was different. Castra-tion, impotence, and sexual humiliation were bugaboos for American males — for all males — and Alan Lessing was no exception. Whoever that hapless neo-Nazi in Detroit had been, he had had real courage to hold out against the things they had done to him.

The problem was making his “confession” ring true. Sonny was clever, but Lessing thought he could be convinced. Shapiro, on the other hand, wouldn’t believe him until he had screamed his lungs out for an hour or two first. Lessing discovered that he didn’t mind pretending to fear — to fake raw cowardice, if necessary — before Sonny, the guards, or even the woman; he’d still be able to live with himself. But he did not want to grovel in front of Shapiro like some poor Arab kid caught chucking rocks at an Izzie patrol.

Sonny was speaking. “…The beta-carboline series. Less drastic, no damage to tissues, yet more certain than physical methods. Sometimes there’re psychological traumas afterwards, but no scars, no mutilation. Deaths from it are minimal, and it leaves no visible effects anybody can complain about.”

“What… what does it do?” Shapiro looked pale around the gills.

“It’s an anxiety drug, a mood-alterer. You feel terror like you can’t believe. Stark, raw fear, anxiety without cause, panic that almost literally scares you to death.”

The Vizzie swallowed. “Is that all? Is… is that… enough?”

“Usually. When it isn’t we add a dribble of LSD.”

“A hairy ride through the funhouse,” Lessing remarked.

“Or a dose of succinylcholine. That paralyzes every muscle except the heart. The subject can’t twitch an eyelid, can’t swallow, can’t even breathe, although he… or she… is fully conscious. A respirator is needed to keep the person from suffocating. It’s a hell of a sensation, let me tell you. I tried it once to see how it felt.”

It was Lessing ‘s turn to swallow. It was becoming hard to stay cool. He addressed Sonny. “Who… who is that… there, on the table?”

“Your Syrian friend, Muhammad Abu Talib. He’s been telling us all about the network of SS corporations, Herman Mulder, the Athens connection, a certain Dr. Theologides, the structure of the Party in the Third World… everything he knows or ever thought he knew.”

Lessing’s mouth was filled with ashes. “Can he… can he hear us?”

“No.” Sonny shook his tight, golden curls. “He’s listening to a tape of our questions, over and over. Sometimes we interrupt with violent, deafening noise and dissonance, sometimes with soft music, lullabies, and sweet persuasion. The IV gives him a dose of fear drugs at irregular intervals. When they wear off, we take the rubber conformer gag out of his mouth and ask him more questions. He never knows how long the sessions last, what time it is, whether it’s night or day. We can keep him like this indefinitely, totally cut off, completely disoriented, fed intravenously. He can’t even have a heart attack and die on us. Medical science sees to that.” He nodded to the nurse, who stared impassively back.

Shapiro made a gagging noise. Sonny sighed and said, “Come on, Alan. Let’s go next door and get this over with.”

Lessing had always thought of himself as a strong man, one who could put up a good fight with his hands tied behind his back — literally. Sonny’s guards proved otherwise. He got in just one solid kick and had the satisfaction of seeing the little one with the truncheon double over gasping. Then the other guard kneed him and knelt on the small of his back. His blue jumpsuit was ripped away, and he was dragged naked, writhing and cursing, through the door, along the hall, and into a room identical to the first. They heaved him up and dumped him onto a table like Abu Talib’s. Its surface was a sheet of ice against his spine.

He hardly felt the Ty-Do straps being wound around his wrists and ankles. They pried his mouth open and inserted a rubber conformer. It tasted terrible, and he gagged and struggled to spit it out, but to no avail. Then they smeared his eyes with some kind of grease and bandaged them shut. Fingers lifted his penis to insert a catheter. It hurt like fire. A plastic tube slid into his anus. Finally they inserted plugs into his ears and stuck cold, metallic spiders — monitors — to his temples and his chest.

The world became a dark and silent place.

He couldn’t feel his fingers, and the padded girdle kepi him from humping up and banging his buttocks on the table. At first the cramps in his spreadeagled arms and legs were awful, but these subsided. Sensation slowly ebbed away as his body became used to the bonds and the frigid mirror-surface of the table. His breathing slowed, and the thunder of blood in his temples died away.

A voice spoke in his ear. It was loud, much too loud, electronically amplified and altered to a rasping, grating roar. It probably belonged to Sonny, although it no longer sounded like anything human. It said, “Sorry… uh… that’s better. Wiggle your left foot if you can hear me.”

He hardly knew when the IV needle slid into his forearm.

Silence. Peace.

Apprehension. Worry.

A tinge of dread

A solid wall of fear, a great tidal wave, a rolling, surging billow of panic.

It swept toward him, above and over him. It came crashing down, smashing his defenses, shattering his resolve, swirling and splashing, seething into every crevice of his brain. Terror ripped along his muscles, gushed into his bloodstream, roared through his arteries, raced in to choke his heart, his eyes, his mouth. He clamped down upon the gag to keep from shrieking, then realized that he was shrieking anyway.

The stench of sweat, feces, and acrid urine clogged his nostrils; smell was the one sense they couldn’t take away from him.

The wave subsided, gurgled turgidly, and disappeared into the featureless distance. He sagged against his bonds, trembling, limp with relief.

Another, greater, darker, and more fearsome wave loomed on the horizon. Helpless, he watched it come. Screaming didn’t help at all.

The grating voice slapped against his eardrums like a physical blow. “Now, Alan. Tell us about Richmond.” Impersonal fingers pried the rubber gag from between his teeth.

He had to hold out, make it seem that he was trying to keep his secret. Could he stand another assault? God damn it, if Abu Talib could, then so could he.

“No,” he husked. “No way!”

This time it was much, much worse. Perhaps they added a dose of some pain-drug. The fingers exchanged the gag in his mouth for another with a vacuum attachment, preventing him from strangling on his own vomit.

The next time he saw visions. Sonny had mentioned LSD. His mother was there, watching his shame, watching him shudder and twist and bawl and fill the bottle under the table with yellow piss. She sniffed, made a face, and dragged him off, down into the basement. There she made him take off all his clothes, and then she switched him with a branch from the little tree in the front yard. He had played with matches, hadn’t he? Wasn’t he the one who had set the Larsons’ tool shed afire? Didn’t he know his dad had to pay Mr. Larson twenty-three dollars for the damage? No good Christian family had to put up with such shenanigans! Next thing he’d be drinking and smoking pot and… and…! By the Lord, he’d work it off: a month of Saturdays at the pet shop cleaning the dog-runs!

The worst of it was that he glimpsed Mavis, the Larsons’ daughter, two years older than he, watching his torment through the laundry room window — and laughing like the witch-bitch she was! His humiliation would be all over school by tomorrow.

Later came much grimmer memories: dust-faced Angolan corpses, mutilated Syrian children rising up from the stones of their blasted homes, his own dead comrades, sacks of bone, meat, and offal that a second ago had been living, breathing human beings. Once more he saw the mere girl he had loved, too briefly, in Damascus. He watched her die again, watched her blood seep through the thick khaki of her uniform, dribble from her sleeve, well up into her mouth and stain her lips and chin.

He howled. And, honor of horrors, so did she, keening right along in ghastly harmony, even though she was dead.

Jameela appeared as well. He had been expecting her.

He heard the shots, the screams, and he saw the silver-ice-blue bundle on the bedroom floor. The harsh, external voice rasped wicked suggestions into his ear, and his wife’s body jerked back up to half-life, one eye open, the other closed, her tongue protruding, her blood and the filth of dying soiling her silken garments. Jameela danced for him, Indian Kathak-style, arms akimbo, tresses flying, head bobbing, and feet pounding. She would have been beautiful, had it not been for her blood-caked death wounds, clear and dreadful in the pearly moonlight. Lessing danced with her too, unable to help himself. Then, at the voice’s behest, he performed obscenities upon Jameela’s corpse while Richmond, Bauer and Helga, the Israeli nurse, Sonny and Shapiro, Liese and Jennifer Caw, prim Borchardt and sardonic Wrench, and a cast of thousands ogled, cheered, whistled, and egged him on.

After that it got really bad.

He didn’t know when they quit. He awoke as they were wrestling him off the metal table and strapping him, face down and still naked, onto a gumey. He had a dizzy view of Sonny above him, shaking his head. Shapiro lurked in the background, too, his face strained and pasty.

“A real Totenkopf,” Sonny whispered. “Not a Nazi but a genocidal maniac who makes all the Nazis who ever lived look like amateurs. How could I have known?”

“You should have interrogated him properly!”

“We didn’t have a clue! God damn Richmond to hell! And if Lessing’s telling the truth, it would’ve been too late even if he’d told us this story the minute he arrived!”

“But is it true? Could he be lying to set us off on the wrong track? Can you give him some sort of truth serum? We have to find out!”

“There’s no such thing as truth serum, except in spy novels,” Sonny sneered. “Interrogation… soft or hard… is the only way. I had no idea, no idea!”

“Oh, Israel!” Shapiro’s voice took on a mourning, keening tone. “Oh, Israel!” His eyes became round. “And us? What about us!”

The guards were rolling the gumey away. Lessing struggled to speak, but his battered, mangled lips wouldn’t work. His throat was so raw he could barely breathe.

“We’ll get him back here as soon as he’s able,” Sonny was saying grimly. “Run him through his story over and over again. You get on the phone to your people in the States… find out what you car about progress on Pacov research…”

He heard no more. The two guards wheeled him into an elevator at the far end of the corridor. There they upended the gumey and proceeded to beat him, very carefully, with their truncheons. They didn’t touch his face but concentrated on his ribs, his belly, his thighs, and his genitals. Then they tipped the gumey up the other way, so that he hung head downward from its straps, and the smaller guard used his rubber club as a dildo while the other hit him in places they might otherwise have missed His tormentors kept calling him “Palestinian pig” and “terrorist.”

Afterward they took him back to his cell: the neat, bare room he had left so blithely that morning. They sat him down crosslegged on the floor and shackled his wrists and ankles so tightly that he could not straighten his limbs. The bigger guard, whose English was better, then told him precisely what they would do to him in the sessions to come. Finally the smaller man urinated on him. Only then did they leave him alone.

Consciousness flickered in and out. Terror and hallucination blew through the open doors of his mind like windy ghosts. He hurt, terribly, but his physical pain was nothing compared to the miasma of fear that churned and coiled inside and all around him. He was still suffering the after-effects of the drugs. Too, Sonny had mentioned further sessions: Lessing was now a full-fledged customer of Section Six. Aside from beta carboline and other chemicals, he would now be subjected to the unfriendly ministrations of the guards. Sonny pretended not to tolerate sadism, not openly, but he must surely be aware of it. Pain, degradation, and terror were, after all, the specialties of the house.

He couldn’t take it. He had not known before, but he did now: Alan Lessing was no hero. He was not immune.

No one was. Interrogation had become an art-form in the twenty-first century.

He rolled and crawled and struggled across the tiled floor to the washstand. He gasped; his manacles were thin steel circlets, and they cut into his flesh like hot wires. His captors were undoubtedly watching; let them think he was trying to drink from the toilet bowl.

There was a way out. He had one card left to play.

He caught the toilet paper roll in his teeth. He twisted at it, worrying and tugging, until its metal holder came open. The Khalifa’s tiny “zombie pill” rolled out of the hollow tube. He hawked up saliva and doubled over, quickly, so that the guards would not have time to see and stop him.

The pill tasted bitter on his tongue. He strove to swallow, almost lost it, and finally choked it down. He lay still.

The door clanged open. He heard noise and outcry. Hands clawed at his shoulders, jerking his head back. Rough fingers jabbed down into his throat, grabbed at his tongue, pinched his nose. Somebody yelled, “Suicide pill! Doctor…!” Other voices yammered in Hebrew.

The ceiling light dimmed, rocked, brightened again, went dark. Pain, dead and dull, crawled up from his belly. Leaden was a good word for it.

Blackness all around. Jameela. Oh, Jameela