Kingmaker (26 page)

“So Americans get stuck with another corrupt and ineffective president,” the girl said. “So what? It’s not worth you losing your life over.”

“Atsuko, you have to understand that Florian won’t be content with just conquering the United States. As soon as he feels like he has gone as high as he can, he’ll turn his attention to the rest of the world.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What I know is that there is absolutely no limit to the amount of power that Florian will seek, and not a lot of people who can stop him. With his connections to Pearl Knight, he’ll have access to some of the most advanced and powerful military equipment in the world, and I believe that he will use every last piece of it to control as much money, as much land, as many resources—and most importantly, as many
people
—as he possibly can. Atsuko, it’s entirely possible that Florian Lasker could end up being the end of the United States as we know it. The lives of millions of people could be at stake.”

“Maybe,” the girl said. She kissed Alexei gently on the cheek before opening her door. She stepped out into the rain, then leaned back down. “But even if I never see or talk to you again, I don’t want you to be one of them.”

She closed the door and Alexei watched her walk back up the street and turn the corner. Although he knew that the girl represented the best chance he had at getting to Florian, he was surprised to find that some part of him was not sorry that she could not help him. His only regret at the moment was having asked her in the first place.

ENTROPY POOL

Andre has learned that torture is fundamentally about exploiting conditions unforeseen by evolution. The role of negative physiological response is to provide us with incentive to keep ourselves safe. We either correct the conditions causing the discomfort, or we ultimately succumb to them. Either way, stress, fear, and pain are supposed to be fleeting—no more than brief catalysts to convince us to take corrective action. But just as the creativity and ingenuity of mankind has lifted us above so many of nature’s intended limitations, so has it subverted nature’s intended limitations on suffering. The countless evolutionary iterations that have culminated in modern man did not adequately anticipate the possibility of unrelenting and sustained horror without the power to resolve it. The human psyche cannot reconcile the presence of constant excruciating pain without the ability to somehow alleviate it—even through death. Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of man is that his capacity to feel pain seems to be as limitless as his desire to inflict it.

The boy has held nothing back. He has even made up hundreds of details just to have something to say. At this point, he will tell his interrogators whatever they want to hear: confess to any crime; denounce or swear his allegiance to any nation; inform on anyone he has ever met, and even those he has not. His interrogators frankly don’t care if what he is
saying is true or not because everything is cross-referenced, corroborated, and eventually either verified or disproved. It is less important that Andre tells only the truth than it is that he keeps talking. It is better to have an abundance of ambiguous information from which the truth can be distilled than it is to risk missing even a single key element.

Most of his interrogations start out with a review of what they believe to be true:

INTERROGATOR:
What is your name?

STRASSER:
Andre Strasser.

INTERROGATOR:
How old are you?

STRASSER:
Fourteen.

INTERROGATOR:
Where were you born?

STRASSER:
West Baltimore.

INTERROGATOR:
Who is your mother?

STRASSER:
Laticia Martin.

INTERROGATOR:
Where is she?

STRASSER:
She was killed in a raid on a drug lab outside of Washington D.C.

INTERROGATOR:
Who is your father?

STRASSER:
Donte Strasser.

INTERROGATOR:
Where is he?

STRASSER:
I don’t know. Either dead or homeless.

INTERROGATOR:
When did you leave Baltimore?

STRASSER:
I’m not sure. I think between nine months and a year ago.

INTERROGATOR:
Why did you leave Baltimore?

STRASSER:
I got recruited.

INTERROGATOR:
By whom?

STRASSER:
Alexei Drovosek.

INTERROGATOR:
Is Alexei Drovosek an American citizen?

STRASSER:
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
Do you
think
Alexei Drovosek is an American citizen?

STRASSER:
No.

INTERROGATOR:
What do you believe Alexei Drovosek’s nationality to be?

STRASSER:
Russian.

INTERROGATOR:
Have you ever heard Alexei Drovosek referred to as “the Lion” or “Woodcutter” or “Tin Man”?

STRASSER:
No.

INTERROGATOR:
Have you ever heard Alexei Drovosek referred to by any other names?

STRASSER:
No.

INTERROGATOR:
Why did Alexei Drovosek recruit you?

STRASSER:
He wanted me to compete in a tournament.

INTERROGATOR:
What kind of tournament?

STRASSER:
A game called Mechs and Drones.

INTERROGATOR:
Did Alexei Drovosek ever mention Freetown or New Guangdong?

STRASSER:
Yes.

INTERROGATOR:
Which name did he use to refer to it?

STRASSER:
Both.

INTERROGATOR:
Did he tell you that he intended to interfere with the political situation in Sierra Leone?

STRASSER:
Yes.

INTERROGATOR:
Did he instruct you to directly interfere with the protests in Sierra Leone?

STRASSER:
No.

INTERROGATOR:
Did you make the decision to interfere on your own?

STRASSER:
Yes.

INTERROGATOR:
Is Alexei planning on interfering in the upcoming presidential election?

STRASSER:
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
Is Alexei Drovosek currently plotting against the United States government?

STRASSER:
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
Do you believe Alexei Drovosek to be under the influence of any foreign governments?

STRASSER:
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
Do you believe Alexei Drovosek is under the influence of any radical factions?

STRASSER:
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
Do you believe Alexei Drovosek to be an enemy of the United States?

STRASSER:
Yes.

INTERROGATOR:
Where does Alexei Drovosek live?

STRASSER:
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
Why don’t you know?

STRASSER:
He made sure I never knew where I was.

INTERROGATOR:
Do you believe that Alexei Drovosek lives either in or close to the city of Los Angeles?

STRASSER:
Yes.

INTERROGATOR:
What is the shortest amount of time it has ever taken you to get from a location you knew to be in downtown Los Angeles to Alexei Drovosek’s home, or from his home to a location you knew to be in downtown Los Angeles?

STRASSER:
About an hour.

INTERROGATOR:
What was the longest amount of time?

STRASSER:
About two hours.

INTERROGATOR:
Tell me about Alexei Drovosek’s home.

STRASSER:
It looks old, but it’s new.

From there, the questions focus on increasingly specific details about the house. How many rooms are there? What is the approximate layout? How much of the house is below ground? How many people live there? Do planes ever fly overhead? What do the planes look and sound like? How often do they fly over? Are there any other sounds audible from inside or outside the house? How big is the lot the house is on? How many other structures are on the property? Can you see any other structures from anywhere on the property? Has he ever seen or heard a lake, stream, or river nearby? Are there any distinctive smells in or around the house? What kinds of trees are on the property? What kinds of animals and insects has he seen? What does it sound like at night? Describe how the shadows change throughout the day. In what direction does the wind usually blow? How does the water taste? Is there mineral buildup around the sink and shower faucets? How often has it rained since he’s been there? Has the power ever flickered or gone out, and if so, approximately when and for how long? Are there generators on the property? And so on.

Andre does not know how to play this game. He doesn’t know if he should try to convince them that he has told them everything he knows so that he might be transferred to a different kind of facility, or if his life depends on them believing that there are still details he has not yet revealed. He can’t tell if they will kill him when they decide he is no longer of any use, and he is not even certain that he wants to live.

Military black sites are designed to be unpredictable, but they’re never surprising. The methods by which fear, humiliation, and despair are induced might change day to day, but the emotions themselves become as familiar to prisoners as their homes and families and friends once were. The lack of routine becomes a routine in and of itself, and disorientation and confusion become the new state of normalcy. Once prisoners have finally let go of their dignity and self-respect, they become resistant to even the most novel forms of demoralization, and when all hope of calm and clarity and safety is sufficiently abandoned, the only peace left to be had is in death—yet even that their keepers allocate with cruel and reluctant discrimination.

Florian Lasker’s last promotion elevated him to the position of chief hiring officer for all of Pearl Knight Holdings and the entirety of its divisions and subsidiaries. He likes to think of his job as the most complex chess match ever played—one with hundreds of players and thousands of pieces played across a highly dynamic and multidimensional board. Recently he has begun tossing around the term “fractal chess” to describe what it is he does; he does not simply play a single match culminating in whatever election he is preparing for, but rather he engages in games within games within games, all at some level related to one another, the stakes and purses forever compounding, the results of one entire match equating to nothing more than a single move in the larger game containing it. The match Florian is playing this morning will not only determine whether his team wins the next match, but whether he will emerge as the victor among his own contingent.

He has been asked to appear before the entire board of directors as well as the president of the United States in order to help assuage fears that the election will not go as planned. Although the seventy-third floor boardroom appears full to Florian, he is actually the only one physically in the room. Everyone else is projected onto one another’s retinas via tiny lasers embedded inside titanium-rimmed, synthetic sapphire-lens glasses, each virtualized individual matched to his or her own unique pattern on the
back of a conference room chair at a table purposely round to avoid the usual contention of who should be positioned where. Aside from the occasional millisecond or two of lag from network congestion or processor contention, the illusion is very close to flawless; the programmers even thought to use real-time, content-aware filters to dynamically remove the glasses from participants’ faces.

The president of the United States is opposite and to the right of Florian. Despite her years, she has a warm, almost seductively youthful look framed by her medium-length, flirtatious blonde hair. She is wearing a red blazer with a mandarin collar and a string of fat cultured pearls—a symbol which, considering her corporate hosts, is at once blatant and subliminal. To her right is the chairman of the board, Nolan Hardebeck. Hardebeck has managed to turn his middle-aged balding into a high-fashion look by trimming his remaining hair to the length of his facial stubble; by somehow ensuring that his scalp never draws undue attention by being shiny, even when playing racquetball; by chemically, genetically, or otherwise artificially maintaining a healthy tan; and by almost always wearing all black. Most of the remaining members of the Pearl Knight Holdings board of directors—having been made obscenely rich as a result thereof—are in attendance only out of contractual obligation, and therefore appear largely disinterested in the proceedings.

Hardebeck rattles his heavy platinum dive watch, glances down at it, then calls the meeting to order as he traditionally does by drumming his knuckles on the glass surface.

“Let’s hear it, Lasker,” he bursts out. Florian suspects that Hardebeck occasionally uses psychostimulants to take the edge off his personality, but they seem blatantly missing from his physiology at the moment. “We’re not exactly getting positive vibes off this election right now, bro. I hope you have some good news for us.”

Florian is wearing a royal blue pinstriped shirt which complements the intense hue of his eyes. Like Hardebeck, he wears a few days’ worth of the dashing kind of stubble (as opposed to the unkempt variety) on his face and down his neck into the open collar of his shirt. His hair is shorter now—kept in place by just the right amount of styling product—and his demeanor is characteristically calm yet entirely focused.