The Accident Man

81

The main problem with torture lies with the human beings on whom it is inflicted. They have a limited capacity for pain. Even the toughest, best-trained soldiers and agents will reach a point where they will say absolutely anything to relieve their suffering, rendering intelligence gathered by means of torture virtually worthless.

Sometimes, of course, intelligence gathering is not the real aim. Sometimes torture is inflicted for its own sake, for the victim’s punishment and the torturer’s pleasure. But now another problem rears its head: If the body is punished beyond a certain point, it simply shuts down, either through unconsciousness or death. It takes real skill, even artistry, to keep the pain and injury at just the right level – not too gentle that they serve no purpose, yet not so harsh that they become counterproductive. A gifted torturer aims for that Goldilocks balance of pain.

It is then that the question of shutdown arises. A mind that can no longer make sense of the world around it or order the information it receives into any coherent meaning will eventually abandon the attempt and retreat into itself. Hallucination takes the place of reality. Memory fails. A person’s very identity begins to slip away.

Samuel Carver was already exhausted and hungry before he even reached Gstaad. Since then, the successive traumas he suffered had weakened him to the point of collapse. He’d made no attempt to resist when they led him back to the cell and strapped him back on the torture chair. When Titov hit him with a final blast from the stun belt, just for the sheer pleasure of hurting him, there was something strangely lifeless about the spasms that had racked his body, as if he were no longer aware of the pain.

Carver didn’t feel the teeth being wrenched from his jaw as his head fought against its straps. When the headphones and light box were switched back on, his overloaded brain rejected the barrage of incoherent stimuli, and Carver drifted into a sort of dream state. His dazzled, dessicated eyes were still wide open, but the blazing whiteness had been replaced by images from his subconscious, long-hidden recollections of people and places fused into a new world of their own.

There were two golden women – at least, he thought there were two: Sometimes they seemed to meld into one, and their bodies and faces were never quite the same from one moment to the next. These women seemed to like him. He sensed their bodies close to him. But when he went to touch them, they drifted away and he couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, though their faces seemed kind and their smiles let him know how happy they were to see him. He wanted to talk to them, to tell them he felt the same way. But he couldn’t speak. No matter how hard he tried, he could not say a word. His mouth just would not move.

He walked through his old school hallways and then straight into the officers’ mess at Poole. All his friends were there. There was an older man – what was he named? Carver loved him very much, but then the older man seemed to be angry with him and Carver was suddenly very frightened, just like he’d been during those first terms at boarding school when the teachers got cross with him and he was all alone, far from home, with no one to comfort him.

And then he was standing in a tunnel, with a car coming toward him, its dazzling headlights filling his eyes, and his eyeballs seemed to burn as if they’d been set on fire and he longed to be somewhere safe and dark, and as he spiraled back through his psyche, he came to a place that was absolutely secure. He was floating in water, only it wasn’t ordinary water because it was rich and sweet. Now he was being pulled from this warm safe place and being dragged out into the cold. He fought and kicked, but it made no difference. He was ripped out into the open. He screamed and yelled and for a moment, everything was all right again. He was cradled in two warm arms and his head was pressed against something deliciously soft and safe and his mouth was filling again with sweetness. But that too was lost, because other hands were grabbing him and taking him away and he was crying again because he wanted to keep feeling that softness and tasting that sweetness.

Finally he became aware, as if watching from the far end of an impossibly long corridor, that something new was happening to him. A blissful darkness had descended and he could feel gentle hands, warm hands touching his face, stroking his forehead and cheeks. These hands seemed different from the ones in his dream. They were somehow more substantial, more real. And it struck him that his mouth seemed to be moving again and he wondered if he could talk.

“Who are you?” he croaked. “Who’s there?”