Mahogany's Dream Read online

  Dunleavy reached down into his case again. This sudden movement made Tsang flinch backwards in fear. This time he pulled out a different manila folder, which he turned inside out and then stood upright on the table. The side facing Tsang had a large photograph clamped to it. “This is Liang, your wife. She’s a little ugly for my taste, but if you lie to me or give me an unsatisfactory answer, that won’t stop me from going down to your house on Mesa Drive and beating the shit out of her until she’s even uglier. If you really piss me off by playing dumb, I’ll stick chopsticks up her ass when I’m done.”

  Tsang gasped.

  Dunleavy went on. “You really fucked up when you stole data from one of my labs. That helium pump design was so fucking advanced that the chinks won’t be able to make heads or tails of it without the compression intervals, which I presume would’ve been your next job.”

  Tsang just hung his head. He knew that all of his answers would be unsatisfactory.

  __________

  Brian could hear Tsang’s screams through the wall. The shrieks were so loud they made his teeth chatter.

  After Dunleavy had begun his questioning and received no satisfactory answers, he made good on some of his threats. Brian was certain the things he saw in that room would give him nightmares for weeks.

  When he couldn’t stand to watch anymore, he stormed out the room and called Bruce again, who confirmed that he was not, repeat not, to interfere with Dunleavy’s interrogation. So he had gone back to the room and stood outside the door, where he was determined to stay until Dunleavy was finished with Tsang. He justified this decision with what he considered unassailable logic: If Dunleavy killed Tsang, he would tell the investigators that he had not been in the room when it happened. This gave him a modicum of comfort, which Tsang’s blood-curdling yells chipped away at immediately.

  At one point he went back to his desk at the Data Room to retrieve a pair of foam earplugs that he hoped would drown out Tsang’s screams of agony. They didn’t help much. He could still hear Tsang’s screams through bone conduction.

  At last, around three o’clock, Dunleavy emerged from the room. After locking the door behind him with keys Brian didn’t know he had, he turned to the young agent and said, “Wanna grab some beers?”

  __________

  They went to a local bar and grille named The Manhattan Project. It was still early. Brian usually got off work at five and then made it to the Cancer Center by six, so when Dunleavy invited him for drinks, he’d thought, Why not? After the day he’d had so far, he needed a drink.

  At the bar, Brian was astonished when Dunleavy transformed into a completely different persona than the one he had met earlier at the Base.

  When he asked about this miraculous transformation, Dunleavy told him, “Oh, that’s just my interrogator’s alter ego. That’s nothing. That’s just work.”

  Mostly in jest, Brian asked him how many alter egos he had.

  Dunleavy thought for a few seconds and then said, “At least three: One for my interview subjects, one for the Senate Intelligence Committee and one for all other situations.”

  Brian asked him which one he was having drinks with.

  Dunleavy said, “The real me. The regular me.”

  Multiple personalities and human rights violations aside, Brian eventually found himself thinking that Dunleavy was not such a bad guy. He’d told Brian that he’d just turned forty and had a doctorate in organizational behavior from Ohio State. He said he worked for the Interview, Interrogation and Debriefing unit of the Bureau, which he claimed was an elite squad of only seven specially trained agents based in Washington.

  According to Dunleavy, the I.I.D.’s chief function was “debriefing” foreign intelligence agents and their American assets. He said he’d been with the unit for the last twelve years and it was the most gratifying work he’d ever done.

  Brian told him that in his four years with the Bureau, he’d never once heard of the I.I.D. Dunleavy said that was normal. Because of the highly classified information sometimes divulged to I.I.D. agents during their interrogations, the unit had an UMBRA security designation, the Government’s highest.

  “It can’t be all that secret,” Brian remarked, “if it’s on your business card.”

  “I can see you didn’t graduate number one in your class at the Academy,” Dunleavy answered sardonically.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Which other unit of the Bureau uses the acronym I-I-D?”

  Brian searched his mind but could find no answer.

  “The I.T. Procurement Department,” Dunleavy finally answered for him.

  “That’s not an operating unit,” Brian squawked. “That’s just a support unit.” He said the word “support” with a dismissive tone, as if it somehow didn’t count.

  Dunleavy looked at him as if he were a dunce failing an easy quiz. “So the boiler room in your basement is not a part of your house?”

  While Brian pondered that, Dunleavy ordered another round of beers for the two of them.

  “So you really tell people you work for the I.T. department,” Brian said.

  “Or the INS,” Dunleavy said with a sly smile. “Depends on the situation. In general, I don’t tell anybody anything. But if some nosey prick presses me, then yeah, I tell em’ that I buy printers for secretaries and that I don’t even know how to use a gun.”

  “Huh,” Brian said. “So you’re telling me that your job is basically to fly around the country smacking people while letting everybody believe you pick the lowest priced ink cartridges.” The beers were beginning to affect him.

  “My job,” Dunleavy said, slightly bemused, “is to obtain information after incompetent people like you allow classified data to be compromised. That little smack I laid on Tsang was just my personal twist. Physical assault is not necessary to conduct a transparent interrogation. In fact, it’s officially discouraged. But I’ve found that it tends to put my interview subjects in the right frame of mind for my Unsatisfactory Answer speech.”

  Brian was incredulous. This guy couldn’t be serious. He would’ve blamed the nonsensical words he was hearing on the alcohol, but Dunleavy had barely touched any of the beer bottles now crowding their table.

  “Transparent interrogation?” Brian asked. If nothing else, Dunleavy was chock full of entertaining little phrases he’d never heard before. “Is that I.T. jargon or spy jargon?” Brian asked between giggles. He was beginning to feel ever so tipsy.

  Dunleavy didn’t laugh. “That’s how we refer to our principal information gathering technique. It’s called transparent because, if done properly, it produces no physically detectable evidence that the subject was interrogated at all.”

  “Like a smack instead of a punch,” Brian said.

  “Exactly,” Dunleavy said. “The first thing they teach you in I.I.D. training is that The Three Steps are superior to two fists.”

  Brian raised his eyebrows, gesturing his companion to keep talking.

  “There are three steps to an effective debriefing: humiliation, intimidation and interpretation. The first two steps involve interrelated types of psychological manipulation. The last step has to do with making sense of all the information you hear when the subject starts spilling his guts after the first two steps.”

  Dunleavy grabbed a handful of beer nuts and tossed it into his mouth.

  “If everything is so cut and dry,” Brian asked, “then why do you need a station officer to observe?”

  “Technical requirement of the Geneva Convention,” Dunleavy warbled, his mouth full of nuts. “You can’t detain foreign nationals without the presence of an outside observer.”

  “But you told Tsang the Geneva Convention didn’t exist in that room!”

  Dunleavy just kept chewing.

  “Let me guess,” Brian said, “step two: intimidation.”

  “Right,” Dunleavy said again. “But that’s not all there is to it. My job is to obtain information. Your job is to take care
of everything else. You know, anything that might distract me from focusing on my job.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like making sure the subject stays alive. Food. Water. That type of thing.”

  “What?” Brian exclaimed. “When were you planning to let me know that, after Tsang dies from malnutrition?”

  Dunleavy looked down at his watch. “Well Sport, if you take him something to eat now, he’ll be okay.” He glanced back up at Brian. “And you still should have plenty of time to make it to the Bernallilo Center.”

  “Oh shit,” Brian said as he looked at his own watch. “I have to go.”

  He bid a hasty goodbye to Dunleavy and then headed over to the bar and ordered a cold platter to go for Tsang. He paid for the platter and the beers with his debit card and then rushed out the door.

  Dunleavy sat at the table smiling. Before walking back to his hotel, he stopped by the bar.

  _________

  The next morning, day two of the debriefing, Dunleavy arrived at the Base to find small groups of white-coated researchers milling about aimlessly. With the Data Room shut down, they simply had nothing to do. Some of them whispered and pointed accusingly as he passed by. He paid them no mind. He would have cared only if they hadn’t acted that way.

  Upon his arrival the day before, he’d told Dr. Stitz that he was an auditor from the Inspector General’s office sent there to perform a spot check on the lab’s data security procedures. This cover, which Dr. Stitz had confirmed with a call to Washington, sufficiently explained his consultations with the station officer and their need to temporarily close the Data Room.

  As he walked down the hall leading to the overflow supply room where he had left Tsang, he saw Brian opening a box of bottled water with the tip of his car key. Three empty plastic bags from Albertsons littered the floor. He chuckled. He liked the kid.

  “Morning, Sport.”

  Brian grunted a reply, but didn’t look up from the box of water.

  “How’s Bruce this morning?”

  The question made Brian pause. He had indeed called his boss again. He wanted his orders in writing.

  Dunleavy held out a curled sheet of thermal fax paper. “This came for you this morning.”

  Brian snatched the paper. It was a memo from Bruce instructing him to assist Dunleavy with his “project”. “How did you get this?” Brian asked.

  “Bruce faxed it to my hotel and asked me to deliver it to you. You realize he couldn’t fax it to the lab where any one of these pencil-necked geeks could just pick it up off the fax machine.”

  Brian understood that, but he still scrutinized the fax closely. “The header says there were four pages. Where’re the rest?”

  “The rest of the fax was for me,” Dunleavy said.

  Brian couldn’t think of any reason why Bruce would send Dunleavy private correspondence in the same transmission as his memo. But then, just a day earlier, he hadn’t even known that operatives like Dunleavy existed. And if it were really true that Tsang was stealing classified data and Dunleavy had caught on to it, then in a sense Dunleavy had saved his ass. Nonetheless, he was looking forward to getting the interrogation over with. He wasn’t trained for it and this Dunleavy character made him uncomfortable.

  Rummaging through the trove of groceries scattered around Brian’s feet, Dunleavy said, “Jeez, did you get enough food?”

  “Uh, I wasn’t sure how long this thing would go on, so I got enough for— “

  “Six debriefings,” Dunleavy said. He bent down and picked up a box of frosted strawberry Pop Tarts. “You think this will make a man tell you his secrets?”

  Brian blinked at the box. “I tried to get stuff we could store at room temperature.”

  Dunleavy gave him the same look from the bar. “The best and the brightest,” he said. Then he unlocked the door and became a different person again.

  __________

  Tsang was huddled on the floor in a corner of the room. He was completely naked. The room was freezing cold. He shivered uncontrollably. The air stank of rotting food and sweat.

  The lights suddenly came on.

  Tsang peed on the floor when he saw that the Red Dragon had returned.

  Dunleavy sat at the table and methodically unpacked his case. When he was done, he said, “So, Dr. Tsang, do you have my answers yet?”

  Tsang swallowed hard.

  __________

  Torture. That was simply the only word Brian knew to describe the things that were done to Tsang in that room. Dunleavy could hide behind all the semantics he wanted to, but this was plain, unadulterated torture. And it turned his stomach.

  At one point, after Tsang had protested his innocence for perhaps the hundredth time, Dunleavy abruptly announced, “It’s time for the Clarifier.” After that he went to his case and retrieved a long black tool of some kind. The object was about a foot in length, with a tapered cylindrical shaft resting on top of a thick, rectangular Base. The shaft vaguely reminded Brian of the accessory nozzle tip that attached to the hose of his vacuum cleaner. Dunleavy unfurled a long AC cord and plugged one end into the base of the object and the other end into the wall socket.

  “See this, Dr. Tsang?” He held the device in the air. “This is the Clarifier. We call it that because it has a remarkable tendency to produce sudden bouts of clarity in those unlucky enough to experience its persuasiveness.” He walked over to Tsang, who was slouched in a chair, and got face-to-face with his emaciated subject. “I’m going to stick this in your ear because YOU’RE NOT FUCKING HEARING ME!” He turned to Brian and said, “Hold him still.”

  “What?” Brian said, surprised. “I thought I was just here to observe.”

  “You’re here to do what I tell you to do. Now hold him still or call your wife for bail money.”

  Brian decided that Dunleavy’s interrogation persona was an asshole. He reluctantly walked across the room and bear hugged Tsang from behind, pressing him to the chair. Tsang was so eviscerated he offered no resistance. It was like hugging a rag doll.

  Dunleavy came over, grabbed a fist full of Tsang’s hair, and then rammed the shaft of the device into Tsang’s ear. Tsang yelped like a wounded dog. But that was nothing compared to the deafening shriek he let off when Dunleavy toggled a switch on the device. Tsang’s whole body convulsed violently. The chair vibrated and bounced as Tsang found the energy to flee the pain. Brian had trouble holding on.

  Dunleavy cut the switch and everything was calm again.

  Brian breathed quickly, relaxing his grip on Tsang. Then, without warning, Dunleavy toggled the switch again. More screaming and convulsing. Tsang clawed at Brian’s hands, tearing the skin. Brian did not let go, though he turned his head and closed his eyes in an effort to blunt his revulsion.

  The lights in the ceiling began to flicker. Suddenly the bulbs became unnaturally, blindingly bright. Dunleavy’s device began visibly vibrating.

  Brian thought he heard a muffled pop.

  Then everything went black and Tsang’s body went limp.

  “Shit,” Brian said into the darkness. “The pulse test.”

  One of the AFRL labs at the Base had been working on an early prototype of the JDAM warhead, a weapon designed to neutralize an enemy’s electrical systems by emitting a powerful electromagnetic burst over a wide radius. Because of the havoc the low-power test bursts wreaked on the Base’s own systems, they were always preceded by a warning memo. Brian had seen such a memo taped to the door of the Data Room earlier that morning. In his rush to call Bruce and avoid becoming Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant for another day of debriefing, the memo had completely slipped his mind.

  “Pulse test?” Dunleavy said. “Are you saying there was a JDAM test scheduled for today?” That’s why everybody was standing around.

  Before Brian could answer, the back-up generators kicked in and everything went back to normal. Everything except for Tsang. When Dunleavy saw the stream of blood suppurating from Tsang’s ear, he temporarily lost interest i
n Brian’s negligence. “Dammit,” he said. “The tympanic membrane must have ruptured from the spike.” Brian wasn’t sure if he were referring to his device or Tsang’s ear. Dunleavy pulled a white hotel hand towel from his case, which he used to wipe Tsang’s blood off the tip of his device. He abruptly paused and looked over his shoulder at Brian. “You can let him go now.”

  Brian realized he was still holding Tsang’s body to the chair. A glob of Tsang’s blood dripped down into his sleeve. He yanked his arms away as if it were acid. Tsang’s body immediately crumpled to the floor.

  For a terrifying moment, Brian thought Tsang was dead. He felt prickles of sweat forming in pores all over his body. Dunleavy kept cleaning his device. Brian bent down and pressed two fingers under Tsang’s jowl. He felt a weak pulse, which caused a wave of relief to spread over him. Tsang was merely unconscious.

  Brian whipped out his cell phone and flipped it open.