The Good Son (60 page)

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.