The Good Son

20

T hey took Cynthia to the basement of the main NSA building, OPS-2A, where the police force that monitors Crypto City has its headquarters. She was placed in the canonical windowless room with a table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. There was no sound from outside, the only noise the whir from the overhead vent. At one corner of the ceiling hung a small closed-circuit TV camera.

She sat and avoided looking at the camera. The Dutch courage from the martinis was rapidly fading, and this vexed the martinis, so that they no longer wanted to dwell in this unprofitable belly. Along with her spicy lunch they were sending urgent messages that they wished to leave, perhaps to decorate the sterile top of that table, or the floor.

Cynthia took deep breaths; she attempted calming thoughts. A fine cool sweat bloomed on her forehead. The door to the room opened and the two security men who had lifted her walked in. One was a mild-looking Latino; the other was a taller man with a flat ugly face and small, deep-set, piggy blue eyes. The tall one, the obvious bad cop, walked around the table and stood just out of her peripheral vision, leaning against the wall. The Latino sat down on the chair opposite her. He extended his hand and she took it, aware of how clammy her own was.

“Gene Arbenz,” he said. “That’s Bill Cavanagh over there. We’re here to explain your situation as it now stands.”

“Can I make a phone call?”

“Not at this time, Cynthia.”

“Well, when can I make one?”

“I don’t have any information on that,” said Arbenz.

“Then why don’t you find someone who has that information?”

She felt the wind of movement behind her and Cavanagh leaped forward and slammed his hand down on the table with a shocking noise that made her bladder give way for a second, dampening her underwear.

His mouth was inches from her ear; she could smell his aftershave as he said, “Why don’t you fucking shut up and listen!”

Arbenz cast an admonitory look at his colleague. “Bill? Let me handle this, okay?”

Cavanagh grunted and went back to the wall.

Arbenz smiled and said, “Look, Cynthia, in a little while this is going to be out of our hands. You know what we usually do in security; we put up posters and check bags, and we run like a small-town police force for the facilities here at Meade. We’re not set up to, like, interrogate terrorists.”

“I’m not a terrorist. I haven’t done anything wrong.” She heard the quaver in her voice.

“Yeah, well the bosses think you have, and I have to say it looks real bad for you. A terrorist mole in NSA? With Top Secret clearance? Holy shit, Cynthia, this is going to go all the way to the White House. So I’m advising you informally, speaking as part of the NSA family, if there’s anything you’re holding back, now’s the time to let it out.”

“I’m not holding anything back. I’m telling the truth.”

“Maybe, but the best way to put everyone’s mind at ease in that regard is to tell us about the money.”

“What money?”

Arbenz sighed, as if he were so tired of hearing the pathetic lies of the guilty. “The money, Cynthia. In the Swiss account. Who paid it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t have any Swiss account.”

“Yes, you do. Over fifty thousand dollars has been run through that account in the last week, sent in and drawn out in ten-thousand-dollar increments. We need to know the source and where it is now.”

“I don’t-”

“Who paid it, Cynthia?” snarled Cavanagh behind her. “Who paid you to sell out your country? Fucking little gook bitch, we let her into this country and this is how she acts.”

Arbenz frowned at this. “Cavanagh, cut it out!”

Cavanagh cursed and walked to a corner of the room and slouched against the wall, an actor in a well-rehearsed play. Cynthia had seen the play too, like everyone else with a television, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t working.

“I’m sorry about that,” said Arbenz gently. “There’s never any need for that kind of language. But the problem, Cynthia, the problem is, we got you. I mean, we have this.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a plastic evidence bag. In the bag was a thumb drive.

“You kept this in your mailbox. It’s got the codes for your Swiss account and the decrypt code for the encrypted e-mails on your laptop. We’ve read them and they lay out the whole plot. How you were paid to convince NSA that there was no theft of nuclear material.”

“There wasn’t. The whole thing was a scam. And I never saw that drive before.”

“Then what about Mr. Borden? Do you deny that you got him to hack into the CIA computers? Borden is being very cooperative, Cynthia. He told us everything.”

Cynthia felt a pang of fear. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “I was trying to prevent a mistake. The intercepts were clearly phony and I can prove it with voiceprint analysis. The whole thing is part of a rogue CIA plot and I’ve been framed and you’re falling for it.”

“That’s a little too fancy, honey, don’t you think?” said Cavanagh.

“It’s the truth,” she said.

“Liar,” said Cavanagh.

Arbenz let out a small sigh. “Okay, then, in that case let me tell you what’s going to happen. In a few minutes a female officer will come in here and take all your clothes and jewelry, your watch, everything, and she will subject you to a full body-cavity search. You will be given other clothes to wear. You’ll be taken to a holding cell in this building. After that, agents of another federal agency will remove you from this site and take you to another facility for further interrogation. Do you understand that?”

“Yes. What other agency?”

“I have no information on that,” said Arbenz, “but you read the papers, you know what happens to suspected terrorists nowadays. They disappear. Stuff is done to them. And they talk; sooner or later, they all talk. So there’s no point in holding out. Cynthia, I’m trying to help you here. Please, for your own sake: Who’s your contact? Where’s the money? Who got you into this mess?”

Cynthia remained silent. After waiting a few long minutes, the two men left. She sat in the chair, trying to forget about her stomach and her bladder. She wondered what it would take to break her; not much, she thought, if they broke Arab terrorists they shouldn’t have a bit of trouble with a stupid American girl who’d had things fairly easy her whole life and who really believed in nothing much except her own career.

A black woman came in, portly, blank-faced, carrying a large paper bag. She dumped a bright orange garment onto the table.

In a robotic voice she said, “Are you menstruating or pregnant at this time?”

“No.”

“Are you currently infected with the HIV virus?”

“No.”

“Take off all your clothes and jewelry and put them in this bag. Here is a marker. When you have removed your things and placed them in the bag, lick the tape, seal the bag, and sign your name on the tape. Then lean over and grasp the edge of the table.”

Cynthia had often wondered in a vague way about how the monster regimes of the twentieth century got so many people-millions of them-to drop the human dignity that went with clothing and stand naked before men who were going to torture and murder them, but now she understood very well that there is hard-wired into the human psyche the false idea that someone who has absolute power over your body will be, must be, ultimately benevolent. Children are this way; human life would be impossible without that innate compact, and the evil ones of the earth exploit it to their ends. So children submit meekly to murder at the hands of their loved ones, and naked women march in orderly rows, holding their naked children’s hands, to the edge of the execution pits.

So now she was naked, bent over, and the woman told her to spread her legs, wider, wider. Cynthia stared wildly over her shoulder and saw that the woman looked at her in a way she had never been looked at by another woman, as an object to be processed, and she did process her, shoving her glove into Cynthia’s body cavities, first the mouth, and then, greased up, the vagina and rectum. Cynthia had heard that when rape occurred some women survived the horror by disassociating from their bodies, by making themselves believe it was not happening to them. She thought now that she would never be able to do this; she was failing now even in response to this lesser violation. Her body was too plainly importunate; it wanted to pee, to weep, and to puke, and it was all she could manage to keep these things from happening simultaneously.

The woman directed her to don the orange garment, and she did and placed the cotton slippers on her feet. She sat down again and waited, with legs crossed around her bursting bladder. Time passed, six minutes or six hours, she could not tell, and this was yet another way of announcing that she was cut off from the clock-bound society from which she issued; her time was now worth nothing, ergo she was nothing, an object, like a desk or a bar of metal.

The door opened after however long, and a small compact man and a quite large woman came in, both wearing gray suits, both with quite ordinary faces; she would not have spared a glance at them on the street. She asked to go to the toilet. They declined to answer but worked silently and swiftly to manacle her hands and feet, connecting the chains to a broad leather belt. They placed a cloth hood over her head and led her away.

A ride in some kind of truck ensued. The exhaust fumes and the motion of the vehicle overcame the last of Cynthia’s physical resistance, her body betrayed her then and she wet herself and vomited into the hood, and the stench of this kept her stomach heaving long after it had been drained of its contents. No one helped her. Now she cried.

They had to half-carry her out of the van; her feet tripped on a short flight of stairs and she lost a slipper. She heard the swish and hum of an elevator. A door opened. Someone removed her manacles and the hood. She stood unsteadily, blinking in a harsh light. She was in a small room lined with white tiles, like a bus station restroom. She tried not to breathe in her own stink. Vomit smeared her face and the chest of her prison suit and her crotch and thighs were soaked and starting to chill. Overhead a caged light fixture held two bare incandescent bulbs and next to it an eye bolt had been affixed to the ceiling, which was covered in what looked like gray foam panels. There was a steel drain in the concrete floor. Frigid air poured from low vents.

In front of her was a steel table and behind it, seated in a red plastic office chair, was a man: short brown hair with a widow’s peak, dark interested eyes, the bland face of a middle manager. He had a folder and a pad in front of him, a government ballpoint in his hand. Behind him was a closed door with no knob or handle.

“Don’t look at me,” he ordered in a calm voice, a dog trainer’s voice, a flat midwestern accent. “Look at the wall. There’s a black spot on the wall. Look at that.”

She looked at the spot and asked, “Can I get cleaned up?” Her voice sounded strange to her ears, as if she had become someone else in the last hour-if it was only an hour. She had no idea.

“Of course, after you’ve answered a few questions,” said the man. “Satisfactorily answered. The way this works, Cynthia, is you give us a little and we give you a little, yes? So. Let’s start. Name?”

She gave her name, address, social security number, phone number, date of birth, place of birth, education, residence history, marital status, occupation, job history, parents’ names, their dates and places of birth, and then she asked, “Why do you need this? You know all this. It’s all in my personnel jacket.”

“No, Cynthia,” said the man, “you don’t ask the questions. You don’t say anything unless you’re asked a question. Let’s start over. Name?”

Again he went through the same questions. She gave the same answers.

Then he asked, “When did you first have contact with a terrorist organization?”

“There is no terrorist organization. I’m being framed by rogue elements in the CIA.”

“You’re lying. Who paid you the money to conceal the uranium theft?”

“I’m not lying. There was no uranium theft. You’re going to invade Pakistan for no reason and lose the war against the Taliban.”

“That’s not an answer to a question. Let’s begin again. Name?”

She looked at him. She noticed he had a flesh-colored button in his ear. “I want to get clean,” she said. “Please, won’t you let me clean myself? I have to use the toilet.”

“Look at the wall!” he said. “Name? Say your name!”

She said nothing. The man was also silent for a moment and then rose and, after gathering his materials, turned to the door behind him, which opened. He went through it, and in the door appeared a man in tan coveralls with a black hose nozzle in his hands. From this shot a powerful jet of freezing water. It knocked her down and played up and down her body. Water filled her mouth and she coughed violently and curled up, with her curved back facing the stream. The jet tore at the loose waistband of her prison trousers dragging them down, exposing her buttocks. The water blasted at this area for a long time.

The water shut off. She lay on the hard floor shivering, listening to the water gurgle down the drain. A voice said, “Get up!”

She pulled up her pants and stood on wobbling legs. There was a different man in the room, a heavier man with crisp sandy hair and damp blue eyes. He was dabbing at splashes on the table and chair with a white towel. He sat and said, “Don’t look at me. Look at the wall.” He opened his file. “What is your name?” he said.

She had long ago lost track of time. What followed could have lasted an hour, or three, or twenty-four. The questions were the same: who paid the money; who devised the plan; who were the other operatives in their cell?

For long periods she was mute. Twice she soiled herself and they hosed her down. At a certain point she could no longer stand, so they rigged a cable to the eye bolt in the ceiling, passed a loop of rope under her arms, and held her upright with that, so that it produced a tearing pain in the delicate flesh of her armpits if she did not stand on her feet.

At one point the interrogator started on her father. He’d been through a reeducation camp. Maybe he hated the United States. Had he taught her to hate her country? Maybe we should bring him in here and ask him. Was he involved in the plot? She must have told her father about it, a dutiful Vietnamese daughter. They would bring him in. Who was her contact? Who paid the money?

Cynthia had stopped shivering. She knew that was a bad sign, it was the beginning of hypothermia. Or maybe a good sign, maybe this would soon be over. The interrogator shouted at her. That was new. It was the sandy-haired one. She looked at him and saw that he looked worried, there was a furrow in his brow.

“Don’t look at me!” he yelled “Look at the wall!”

Cynthia looked at the round black spot. It had grown larger, she saw, and it grew larger still until it blotted out the room. She sagged, she stopped feeling the cable cutting, she stopped feeling anything.

Now she was warm again. The ceiling over her head when she opened her eyes was made of ordinary acoustic tiles. She studied the pattern of the dots in the tiles for a while. Gradually, the rest of her environment came into focus. She was in some sort of hospital room. It had a window, with drawn venetian blinds on it, baby blue blinds. She was in a hospital bed and there was an IV bag hanging there with a tube that went into her arm. She wore a hospital gown and they had spread an electric blanket over her. She felt a little hungry, but not thirsty. Her armpits stung, but not too badly. She felt drowsy. They had given her drugs.

This was part of the torture, she knew. Get her comfortable and warm, relieve her pain. Then, after a while, they would come in again and ask her questions, and if this time she did not answer to their satisfaction they would take her back to the tile room. She would break then, she knew. She would tell them anything to make it stop; she would invent whole universes of terror, ingenious plots; she would name as accomplices anyone they cared to mention. She had nothing left in her to resist this. So she waited for the torturers to return, and after a while she drifted into sleep.

She awakened to the sound of the door opening. Harry Anspach entered.

Why was she not surprised?

He pulled up a visitor’s chair and sat down. “Well, Cynthia,” he said, “this is quite a little mess you’ve made for yourself.”

“Where am I?” she asked.

“In a secure location. How are you feeling?”

“Do you care?”

He looked startled and a little hurt. He was very good, she thought; the impersonation was wonderfully accurate.

“Of course I care. How can you ask that? That’s why I’m here.”

When she said nothing, he went on. “I used every chip I had to get in to see you. People are extremely annoyed at your… I don’t know what to call it. Your interference. Why did you do it?”

“I did my job, Harry. The incercepts were fakes and I can prove it. There’s a rogue unit in the CIA that will do anything to protect the operation called SHOWBOAT and they arranged to frame me with phony e-mails and Swiss bank accounts. That’s the truth. And they had me tortured so I would confess to something that’s not true.”

“Oh, nonsense! You haven’t been tortured. You’re an American citizen and this is the United States. We don’t torture Americans in this country.”

She stared at him. He seemed genuinely shocked. “Whatever, Harry. So what happens now?”

“Well, there are people who think that rendition would be an appropriate disposition in your case. I’ve been arguing against it, of course, but you’re not helping with this absurd story that some nonexistent operation in the CIA is having you framed.”

“I was framed.”

“Cynthia, listen to me! I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the only thing I can think of that would make you act this way is some kind of psychotic break. You work so hard, you’re so intense… well, it happens. The fact is, we have positive scientific evidence, irrefutable evidence, that nuclear material was stolen from the Pakistani facility at Kahuta.”

“That can’t be,” said Cynthia. “What kind of irrefutable evidence?”

“William Craig. When he was released he was given a complete physical, and of course his clothes were minutely examined for traces that might suggest where the hostages he was with were being held. That analysis found definite traces of uranium dust on his clothes, and the composition of that uranium precisely matched that used by the Pakistanis as part of their nuclear bomb manufacturing process.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that for one second. You’re lying to me, because… because you’re involved in SHOWBOAT too. And that’s why you’ve been so nice to me, because you knew when you started your scam I was the only one who could figure it out. You’ve been manipulating me for years.”

She stared into the perfect startled innocence of his face. He really is the best, she thought, I was playing way out of my league.

“And you ratted me out, didn’t you? I’m here because you told someone I was on to your scam and they set up all this crap about secret messages and Swiss accounts.”

“Cynthia, listen to yourself!” cried Anspach. “Do you hear how insane that sounds? Look, I know you’re not a terrorist, not really. You had a little-let’s say a lapse in judgment and maybe someone took advantage of it. Okay, but now’s the time to recover. You need to tell us who set all this up. Do you even know? You must have had some contact. Come on, kid, give me something… anything.”

She was silent. He leaned closer, his face inches away from hers. She couldn’t look at it.

He said, “Cynthia! Look at me! You’ll disappear. Have you any idea what will happen to you in Syria? In Egypt? You’re a woman-do I have to draw you a picture? Please! Think of your father, your friends. What end could conceivably be worth imposing that kind of suffering on yourself and your loved ones?”

“Nothing could,” she said. “Which is itself an argument that I’m telling the truth.”

He sighed and drew away from her. “Well, I tried,” he said, and it seemed to her that he was about to say something else, when the door opened and a man she didn’t know stuck his head in and gestured urgently. Anspach rose and left the room.

Cynthia lay back and looked at the window. She couldn’t see anything out of it from the bed, so she threw back the covers and the electric blanket and tottered over to the window, pulling the IV stand on its wheels. She opened the blinds to find that the window was made of milky translucent glass. She found this amusing, blinds over milky glass? Yes, too, too symbolic of the intelligence community.

She could see that it was daytime and that it was raining. The raindrops were visible as shadows running down, each making its own track against the glass. She watched them for a while, wondering whether she would ever again feel rain on her skin, until her legs grew wobbly and she returned to bed.

She dozed. A woman in blue scrubs entered and adjusted her IV. Cynthia asked what drug she was getting but the woman would not answer. Sometime later, the woman returned with a bag lunch: a prepackaged ham sandwich, a plastic bottle of water, and an apple. She ate everything. The window went gray and then became a dark mirror reflecting the room.

Some hours (she thought) after that occurred, the door opened and two women came in. They said nothing to her as they removed her hospital gown and shoved her arms into a canvas straitjacket, nor did they answer her increasingly frantic questions as they threw her back on the bed and put an adult diaper on her. They taped her mouth and placed opaque glasses on her eyes and padded earphones on her head, through which she heard nothing but loud static. They put her in a wheelchair, cuffed her ankles to it and wheeled her off.

She tried to keep track of time by counting, but lost the count somewhere in the tens of thousands and besides, what did it matter? She thought she might be on an airplane because she felt the kind of acceleration and shaking that you get on a plane, but there was no way to tell for sure. They might want her to think she was on one. She thought a lot about her life and how stupid and trivial it had been and how her highest desire had been to be one of the people who could do to human beings what was being done to her. She understood that her real interest in SHOWBOAT was not a good citizen’s outrage but a kind of sick envy; she wanted to be included in the cabal; she wanted to know the innermost of innermost secrets, to get into the boys’ clubhouse at last. She thought about being crazy and about the fake intercepts and whether it was in fact madness that had made her doubt them, and about whether or not Harry was lying about them finding uranium on Craig. She discovered she no longer cared. She was not filled with a lust for revenge. Her lust was only for having her diaper changed.

The wheelchair, after having been stationary for some incalculable time, now moved again. It rocked as if it were in a motor vehicle. It rolled again. It stopped. Someone ripped the tape from her mouth, and the earphones came off her ears. She felt a sharp pinch on her earlobe and then a more painful one in on the flesh of her inner thigh, and she knew what that meant and what was about to happen to her and her bladder gave way again as she shook in terror.

It did not take many shocks before she told them everything they wanted to know. She implicated every person she had ever known with a Muslim name: a friend from high school, her college Arabic teacher, the man who ran a falafel stand in Adams-Morgan, they were all part of the plot, and she told them who had paid her the money, and who her contact was and everything, using depths of creativity she had not known she possessed.

When they thought she had been sufficiently drained for the moment, they put her in a cell. They had taken off the diaper and given her rough cotton pajamas to wear, but they had not allowed her to clean herself. They had manacled her hands and chained her ankles together. The cell was as large as the bathroom in her apartment and contained a yellow plastic bucket. She did not think she was in the United States anymore.

They fed her twice a day, a rice gruel in the morning and two flat loaves like large pitas later in the day, and water in a can. This occurred twelve times. No one spoke to her and she was not interrogated again. On the thirteenth day her door opened and instead of the food there was a female warder with brown skin and a hijab on her head. She was holding a basin of soapy water, a washcloth, and a ragged towel. She pushed these into the cell with her foot and dropped a pair of fresh pajamas next to them. She unlocked Cynthia’s shackles, and gestured silently to the materials, making motions indicating that the prisoner should clean herself and change clothes.

Cynthia wept with gratitude for a while and then did as she had been told. She wanted nothing more than to please this wonderful woman, she wanted it more than she had ever wanted to be the national security advisor. She waited, clean, smelling like laundry in her fresh pajamas. The woman relocked the manacles but left the ankle chains off. She placed a burlap sack over Cynthia’s head and led her for a while, through doors, up a short flight of steps, into a room. The bag came off. She was in a small room with a steel grille on one wall and a wooden chair placed in front of the grille. On the other side of the grille was a middle-aged man in a dark suit, with thick, coarse, black hair graying at the temples and a gentle, intelligent face the color of doeskin.

When he saw her enter he said, “Ms. Lam? Ms. Cynthia Lam?”

Cythnia sat down in the chair. She felt tears start again at the sound of her full name and the honorific Ms., at the prospect of being treated like a human person again, but she suppressed them, fearing it was one more interrogator’s trick.

“Yes, that’s my name. Who are you?”

“Oh, thank God!” exclaimed the man. “You have no idea how much trouble I have been through to find you. I have had not only to go through official channels but unofficial ones as well, if you understand my meaning, and in this country, unfortunately, unofficial channels are the only ones that work.”

“What country is this?” she asked, staring at him through the grille.

“Why, you are in Egypt, my dear woman. And I am bending my every resource to get you out of it. It is just that you are so very unofficial, and they fear to take cognizance of holding you. I mean that until they admit they have you, they cannot very well release you. The Americans are, I believe, satisfied that they, and you, have been the victims of a hoax; the evidence is irrefutable, and of course they would very much like to forget it has ever happened. Such embarrassment for the government! But there is you, of course-”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

He smiled and issued a self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, forgive me,” he said. “I am Farid B. Laghari, at your service. I am your lawyer.”