Situation Room

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.