Situation Room

Li almost seemed to read Luke’s mind. “I heard birds chirping outside this morning. That’s how I knew it was a new day.”

Luke reached with one hand and pulled off the man’s airplane blinders. “Birds at sunrise. That’s very nice. I’m glad to hear you’ve enjoyed your stay so far. Unfortunately, things are about to change.”

“Ah.” The man’s eyes squinted in the sudden brightness. He scanned the room, took in Swann and Ed Newsam. The eyes settled on Ed.

Ed was leaned up against one wall. He seemed very relaxed, and at the same time, menacing. His body barely moved. There was so much potential energy stored inside of it, he was like a storm about to happen. His eyes never left the Chinese man’s eyes.

“I see,” Li said.

Luke nodded. “Yes. You do.”

Li’s face hardened. “I’m a tourist. This is all a case of mistaken identity.”

“If you’re a tourist,” Ed said, “maybe you’d like to give us the names and contact information of your family, so we can let them know where you are. You know, and tell them that you’re doing fine.”

Li shook his head. “I would like to contact the Chinese embassy.”

“Our superiors have already done that for you,” Luke said. It wasn’t true, as far he knew. He began to inch out on a limb, but a limb he felt would hold his weight.

“It was a backchannel conversation, as you might imagine, given the sensitivity of the situation,” he said. “You may be disturbed to know that the Chinese government says you aren’t real. There are no school records, no job records, no hometown or family background. They’ve seen a scan of your passport, and they’ve determined that it’s a clever forgery.”

Li stared straight ahead. He didn’t respond.

Luke let the moment draw out. There was no reason to fill it with more talk. He had seen subjects break as soon as they realized their handlers had disavowed them. Break wasn’t even the right word. Sometimes, when they suddenly found themselves without a country, they simply switched sides.

“Li, did you hear me? They’re not going to protect you. You’re not going to get away from this. You didn’t take your pill when you could have, and now you’re here. There is no way out. As far as your people are concerned, you don’t exist, and you never existed. The facility you’re in right now doesn’t exist. You could end up stuffed inside a fifty-five-gallon drum at the bottom of the ocean, or in a shallow ditch in the wilderness, with crows picking out your eyes… No one will care. No one will even know.”

The man still didn’t say a word. He just stared straight ahead.

“Li, what do you know about the Black Rock Dam, and how the floodgates opened?”

“I don’t know anything.”

Luke waited a few beats, then went on. “Well, let me tell you what I know. At last count, more than a thousand people have died. Do you have any idea how upset that makes me? It makes me want to take revenge for their deaths. It makes me want to find a scapegoat, and make that person pay. You’re a convenient scapegoat, aren’t you, Li? A man that nobody cares about, nobody remembers, and no one will miss. I’ll tell you something else. I know you’ve been trained to resist interrogation. That only makes me happier. It means I can take my time. We can stay here for days, or even weeks. We have people working on that dam problem. They’ll figure out what happened. We don’t need whatever pitiful information you might have. I don’t even want it, to be honest. I just want to hurt you. The more you just sit there, the more I want to do it.”

Now Luke squatted down on his haunches near Li’s face. He was inches away, so close that his breath exhaled on Li’s cheeks. “We’re going to get to know each other pretty well in here, okay, Li? Eventually, I’m going to know everything about you.”

Luke glanced at Swann. Swann stood in a corner by the steel-barred window. He hadn’t said a word since they walked in here. He looked out at the concrete compound and the lush green hillsides surrounding it. Swann was an analyst, a data guy. Luke imagined he might never have thought about how data was sometimes extracted. Death threats were just the beginning.

“Li, the man’s talking to you,” Ed said.

Li managed a smile then. It was a sickly smile, and there was no humor in it at all. “Please,” he said. “Call me Johnny.”

* * *

An hour passed. Luke and Ed had taken turns talking to Li, but with no real effect. If anything, Li was becoming more confident. He had evidently decided that a few hard smacks from Ed were the most he was going to get.

Now Luke was watching Swann again.

“Okay, Swann,” he said. “Now is a good time to take that walk around the camp.”

A few minutes before, Luke had opened the cabinet with the key Pete Winn had given him. The cabinet was more of a utility closet than an actual cabinet. Inside was a fold-out table, a little bit like an ironing board, but wider, lower to the ground, and much more sturdy. It was about seven feet long and four feet wide.

When Luke and Ed set it up, the table had a noticeable incline. On the higher side, there were manacles for the subject’s ankles. In the middle were leather straps for tying down the subject’s wrists, and a large one in the center for the subject’s waist. At the lower end was a metal ring for securing the subject’s head to the table.

It was a platform for water torture.

When they brought the table out, Li became visibly agitated. He knew what it was right away. Of course he did. He was an intelligence agent, a field operative, and they had all seen it as part of their training. Americans, Chinese, whoever. Luke had watched a live demonstration of the technique once upon a time. A hardened CIA agent, a man who had come to the agency out of the Navy SEALs, who had been in-country in numerous hotspots, was the test subject.

How they convinced this man to volunteer was something Luke never found out. Maybe he got a bonus. It should have been a big one. The agent seemed relaxed before the demonstration. He was laughing and joking with his soon-to-be tormentors. Once the procedure started, he transformed instantly. He lasted twenty-four seconds before he used the safe word to make it stop. They timed it.

“You have to know that this is against the Geneva Conventions,” Li said, his voice shaking just a little. “It’s against…”

“Last I checked, we’re not in Geneva,” Luke said. “In fact, we aren’t anywhere at all. As I mentioned earlier, this facility doesn’t exist, and neither does anyone named Li Quiangguo.”

Luke busied himself with the other implements he had taken out of the closet. They included two large watering cans, like the kind a nice older lady would use to water her gardens. There were also locks for the manacles and leather straps on the board. And finally there were a number of medium-sized heavy cloth towels and a roll of cellophane. If the towels didn’t work, they could always move on to the cellophane. Luke happened to know that the CIA didn’t bother with cloth towels.

“Man,” Ed said. “I haven’t done anything like this since Afghanistan. It’s been at least five years.”

“Then your experience is more recent than mine,” Luke said. “So we’ll let you do the honors. How’d it go when you did it?”

Ed shrugged. “Scary. We had a couple of them die on us. It’s not like some of the other methods I’ve seen. You can electrocute people all day, as long as the current is right. It hurts but it doesn’t kill them. People do die from this. They drown. They get brain damage. They have heart attacks. This is real.”

“Listen,” Li said. His entire body was trembling now. “Waterboarding is against all the laws of war. It is recognized as torture by every international body. You are committing a human rights violation.”

“Man, you’re all about rules and regulations all of a sudden,” Ed said. “My way of thinking, someone deliberately floods out thousands of people, I’m not dealing with a human at that point. I’d say you forfeited your human rights.”

“Guys,” Swann said. “I don’t feel right about this.”

Luke glanced at him. “Swann, I told you it was a good time for you to leave. Take about twenty minutes. That should be plenty.”

Swann’s face turned red. “Luke, everything I’ve read says that this won’t even give you decent intelligence. He’ll just lie to make it stop.”

Luke couldn’t remember a single time when Swann had questioned his actions before. He’d be curious to know if Swann was questioning his actions now. Either way, he just shook his head.

“Swann, you can’t believe everything you read. I’ve seen this get actionable, accurate intelligence from people in a matter of minutes. And because Mr. Li is our guest here, we’ll be able to quickly verify any claims he makes. We can also revisit those claims with him if they turn out to be inaccurate. The truth is they don’t want people to do this because as Li so accurately points out, it qualifies as torture. But it works, and in the right circumstances, it works really, really well.”

Luke gestured around the empty room. “And these are the right circumstances.”

Swann was staring now. “Luke…”

Luke raised a hand. “Swann. Out. Please.” He gestured at the door.

Swann shook his head. His face was very red now. He seemed on the verge of trembling himself. “Why did you even call me in for this?” he said. “I don’t work for the FBI anymore, and neither do you.”

Luke almost smiled. He didn’t know how Swann really felt, but he couldn’t have scripted this better than it was turning out. This was good cop, bad cop on steroids.

“By the end of this day, I’m going to need your skills,” Luke said. “But not for this. Now get lost. Please. And notice how polite I’ve been so far. In a minute I’m going to lose my temper.”

“I’m going to lodge a formal complaint,” Swann said.

“Please do. You know who I work for. Your complaint will get as far as the office shredder. It will go right down the memory hole. But do it anyway, as an intellectual exercise.”

“I plan to,” Swann said. With that, he went out the door. He pulled it tight behind him, but did not slam it.

Luke exhaled. He looked at Ed. “Ed, can you please fill up these watering cans at the kitchen sink? We’re going to need them in a minute.”

Ed gave a devilish half-smile. “With pleasure.”

As he picked up the watering cans, he stared at Li. He showed Li the crazy giant eyeball look that he sometimes used on people. It was a look that gave even Luke the willies. It made Ed seem psychotic. It made him look like a man who found sadism pleasurable. Luke wasn’t sure where that look came from, or what it meant. He didn’t really want to know.

“Brother,” Ed said to Li. “Your day is about to get a lot longer.”

As Ed busied himself in the cabin’s tiny kitchen, Luke looked closely at Li. The man was quaking now. His entire body vibrated as if some low current of electricity was running through it. His eyes had become wide and scared.

“You’ve seen this before, haven’t you?” Luke said.

Li nodded. “Yes.”

“On prisoners?”

“Yes.”

“It’s bad,” Luke said. “It’s very bad. No one holds up against it.”

“I know,” Li said.

Luke glanced at the kitchen. Ed was taking his sweet time in there. “And Ed… you must know how he is. He enjoys this kind of thing.”

Li didn’t say anything to that. His face turned bright red, and then gradually morphed to dark red. It seemed like there was an explosion going on inside him, and he was trying to contain it. He squeezed his eyes shut. His teeth clenched, then started chattering. His whole body began to shudder.

“I’m cold,” he said. “I can’t do this.”

Just then, something occurred to Luke.

“They’ve done it to you,” he said. “Your own people.” It wasn’t a question. He knew it like he knew his own name. Li had been waterboarded before now, and in all likelihood, it was the Chinese government that had done it.

Suddenly Li’s mouth opened in a scream. It was a silent scream, his jaws opened to their full extension. It somehow reminded Luke of a werewolf howling in agony during the bone-breaking transition from human to canine form. Except there was no sound. Almost nothing came out of Li, just a low gagging sort of noise deep in his throat.

His entire body was stiff now, every muscle tensed as if the electrical current had just gone up ten notches.

“You were a traitor,” Luke said. “An enemy of the state. But you were rehabilitated in prison. Torture was part of the process. They made you into an agent, but not a valuable one. You’re one of the expendables. That’s why you were out here in the field, and that’s why you had cyanide pills. If you got caught, you were supposed to kill yourself. There was almost no way you wouldn’t get caught, right? But you didn’t do it, Li. You didn’t kill yourself, and now we’re the only hope you’ve got.”

“Please!” Li shouted. “Please don’t do it!”

The man’s body shook uncontrollably. More than that. A smell started to come from him, the thick humid smell of feces.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God. Help me. Help me.”

“What’s going on here?” Ed said as he returned with the watering cans. He made a face as the smell hit his nose. “Oh, man.”

Luke raised his eyebrows. He almost felt sympathy for this man. Then he thought of the more than a thousand dead, and the many thousands who had lost their homes. Nothing, no negative life experience, could justify doing that.

“Yeah, Li’s a mess,” he said. “He’s a trauma case. Looks like this isn’t his first time around with waterboarding.”

Ed nodded. “Good. So he knows the drill already.” He looked down at Li. “We’re gonna do it anyway, you hear me, girly boy? We don’t care about the smell, so if that’s your game, it didn’t work.” Ed glanced at Luke. “I’ve seen this before. People try it because they think that the smell is so rank we won’t want to go forward. Or maybe we’ll take pity on them. Or whatever.” He shook his head. “The smell is nasty, but I’ve never seen it work. We wouldn’t be here if we were the sensitive type, Li. I’ve smelled men after they’ve been disemboweled. Believe me, it’s worse than anything you can push out the regular way.”

“Please,” Li said again. He said it quietly now, almost a whisper. His body was shaking out of control. He hung his head and stared at the floor. “Please don’t do it. I can’t take it.”

“Give me something,” Luke said. “Give me something good, and then we’ll see. Look at me, Li.”

Li’s head hung even lower. He shook it. “I cannot look at you now.” His face made a grimace, a mask of humiliation. Then he started crying.

“Help me. Please help me.”

“You better give me something,” Luke said. “Or we’re going to get started.”

Luke stood ten feet away and watched him. Li was slumped over in the chair, his head low, his arms tight behind his broad back, his entire body trembling. There was no organization to it – every part seemed to be doing something different and unrelated to every other part. Luke noticed now that the crotch of Li’s jumpsuit was wet. He had also pissed himself.

Luke took a deep breath. They’d have to get somebody in here to clean this guy up.

“Li?” he said.

Li was still facing the ground. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “There is a warehouse. It’s a small warehouse, with an office. An importer of Chinese goods. In the office, everything is explained.”

“Whose office is it?” Luke said.

“Mine.”

“It’s a front?” Ed said.

Li tried to shrug. His body jittered and jived. His teeth chattered as he talked. “Mostly. It had to be somewhat functional, or else there is no cover story.”

“Where is it?”

Li mumbled something.

“What?” Luke said. “I don’t hear you. If you play with me, we’re going to do this the hard way. You think Ed wants you off the hook? Think again.”

“It’s in Atlanta,” Li said, clear and firm now, as if telling it was a relief. “The warehouse is in Atlanta. That’s where I was based.”

Luke smiled.

“Well, you can give us the address, and we can fly down to Atlanta. We’ll be right back in a few hours.” He put his hand on Li’s shoulder. “God help you if we find out you’re lying.”

*

“Nice job, Swann,” Luke said. “I couldn’t have asked for better if I had written the script myself.”

“Did I ever mention I was in the theater club in high school? I played Mack the Knife one year.”

“You missed your calling,” Luke said. “You could’ve gone to Hollywood based on what I saw in there.”

They moved down the concrete walkway toward the waiting black SUV. Two men in FEMA jumpsuits had just exited the SUV and gone into the cabin. Luke glanced at the surroundings. All around them were fences and razor wire. Behind the closest guard tower, a steep green hillside rose up toward the northern mountains of Georgia.

Swann smiled. “I tried to put just the right note of moral indignation into it.”

“You had me fooled,” Ed said.

“Well, it was real. I didn’t have to act. I’m really not for torturing people.”

“Neither are we,” Ed said. “At least, not all the time.”

“Did you do it?” Swann said.

Luke smiled. “What do you think?”

Swann shook his head. “I was gone only ten minutes before you came out, so I’m guessing that you didn’t.”

Ed clapped him on the back. “Keep guessing, data analyst.”

“Well, did you or didn’t you?” Swann said. “Guys?”

Within minutes, the three of them were back on the helicopter, rising over the dense forest and headed south to Atlanta.

CHAPTER SIX

10:05 a.m.

United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC

“Congressman, thank you for coming.”

Susan Hopkins reached out to shake the hand of the tall man in the sharp blue suit. He was United States Representative from Ohio, Michael Parowski. He had prematurely white hair and squinty pale blue eyes. Fifty-five years old, he was handsome in a rugged, Marlboro man sort of way. Blue-collar born and bred, he had the big stone hands and the broad shoulders of a man who started his career as an iron worker.

Susan knew his story. H was a lifelong bachelor. He grew up in Akron, the son of immigrants from Poland. As a teenager, he was a Golden Gloves fighter. The industrial cities of the north, Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland, were his stronghold. His support up there was unshakeable. More than that, it was mythic, the stuff of legend. He was on his ninth term in the House, and his reelections were a breeze, an afterthought.

Would Michael Parowski get reelected in northern Ohio? Would the sun come up again tomorrow? Would the Earth continue to spin on its axis? If you dropped an egg, would it fall to the kitchen floor? He was as inevitable as the laws of physics. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Susan had seen the videos of him wading into the crowds at union rallies, holidays, and ethnic festivals (where he did not discriminate – Polish, Greek, Puerto Rican, Italian, African-American, Irish, Mexican, Vietnamese – if you had an ethnicity, he was your man). He was a hand-shaker, a back-slapper, a high-fiver, and a hugger. His signature move was the whisper.

In the midst of mayhem and chaos, dozens or even hundreds of people pressing close to him, he would invariably take some older woman one step aside and whisper something in her ear. Sometimes the women would laugh, sometimes they would blush, sometimes they would wag a finger at him. The crowds adored it, and none of the women ever repeated what he said. It was political theatre of the highest order, the kind that Susan, frankly, loved.

Here in DC, he was a union man all the way – the AFL-CIO gave him a 100 percent rating. He was one of labor’s best friends on Capitol Hill. He was more wobbly on some of Susan’s other issues: women’s rights, gay rights, the environment. But not so much that it was a deal breaker, and in a sense, his strengths complemented hers. She could speak with passion about clean water and clean air, and about women’s health, and he could equal her passion when he talked about the plight of the American worker.

Even so, Susan wasn’t sure he was the perfect fit, but the Party elders assured her he was. They wanted him on board more than anything. Truth be told, they had practically made the decision for her. And what they really wanted from him, besides his popularity, was his toughness. He was the baddest man in the room. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, and it at least appeared that he didn’t sleep. He lived on airplanes, bouncing back and forth to his district like a ping-pong ball. He would be on the Hill for committee meetings and votes at all hours, at a cemetery in Youngstown in the morning six hours later, fresh and alert, tears in his eyes, wrapping his big strong arms around the mother of a dead serviceman as she melted against his chest.

If his enemies claimed that he had quietly remained friends with a couple of the mobsters who he spent his childhood with in the old neighborhood… well, that only added to the image. He was soft, he was hard, he was loyal, and he was no one to mess with.

He gave her a bright smile. “Madam President, to what do I owe this honor?”

“Please, Michael. It’s still Susan.”

“Okay. Susan.”

She led him back into her study. As Vice President, she had long ago dispensed with holding important meetings in her office. She preferred the somewhat informal feel, and the beautiful surroundings, of the study. When they walked in, Kat Lopez was already there and waiting.

“Do you know my chief-of-staff, Kat Lopez?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

The two shook hands. Kat gave him one of her rare smiles. “Congressman, I’ve been a big fan of yours since I was in college.”

“When was that, last year?”

Kat did something out of character then. She blushed. It was fast, disappearing almost as soon as it arrived, but it was there. The man had an effect on people.

Susan offered Parowski a chair. “Shall we sit down?”

Parowski settled into one of the comfortable armchairs. Susan sat facing him. Kat stood behind her.

“Mike, we’ve known each other a long time. So I’m not going to dance around. As you know, I abruptly became President when Thomas Hayes died. It took me this long to get my wheels under me. And I delayed picking my Vice President until the crisis seemed like it was over.”

“I’ve heard some rumblings about what happened yesterday,” Parowski said.

Susan nodded. “It’s true. We believe it was a terror attack. But we’ll survive it like we did the others, and we’re going to move forward even stronger and more resilient than before. And one way we’re going to do that is with a strong Vice President.”

Parowski stared at her.

Susan nodded. “You.”

He glanced up at Kat Lopez, then back at Susan. He smiled. Then he laughed.

“I thought you were going to ask me to herd some votes for you on the Hill.”

“I am,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to do that. But as the Vice President and the President of the Senate, not as the Congressman from Ohio.”

She raised her hands. “I know. It feels like I’m throwing this is in your lap, and I am. But I’ve been putting feelers out, and holding little hush-hush secretive meetings for the past six weeks. You’re the name that comes up again and again. You’re the one with massive popularity in your own district, and broad appeal across the entire northern tier of the United States, and even in conservative working class districts across the south. And you’re the tireless campaigner who can ride hard with me when the time comes to run for reelection.”

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“Take your time,” Susan said. “I don’t want to rush you.”

His smile became broader. Now he raised his hands, almost as if imploring the heavens. “What can I say? It’s a dream come true. I love what you’re doing. You held this country together at a time when it could have splintered apart. You were a lot tougher than anyone gave you credit for.”

“Thank you,” Susan said. If he could have seen her in the early days, weeping alone in this very room when she thought ninety thousand people were going to die from the Ebola attack, would he still think that?

She nodded to herself. Probably more than ever.

He pointed at her with his thick index finger. “I’ll tell you something else. I always knew that about you. I can read people with the best of them. I learned it as a kid, and I saw it in you years ago, when you first came to DC. Ask anybody. When June sixth came, I told people don’t worry, we’re in good hands. I told that to the people who were still alive on the Hill, I told it to the TV shows, and I told it personally to at least ten thousand people in my district.”