The Good Son (59 page)

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.