Page 86 of Whisper

Without looking at Kris, David stormed out. The room trembled, concrete walls shaking, as he slammed the door behind him.

Dennis straightened his shirt. “Washington has made the call. I’m in charge now. Starting tomorrow, we’re moving him out of his hospital room and into a real cell. Make him feel like the criminal he is. We’re taking everything away. He has to earn what he gets. All the way down to his clothes.”

Days passed.

Kris watched, over the monitors, as Zahawi was sedated, stripped, and moved into a dirt-floored cell. Four brilliant halogen lights hung above him, burning on Zahawi around the clock. He was given one metal chair. The temperature was dropped, the air conditioning cranked up until it was frigidly cold.

Paul had taken over the questioning at Dennis’s command, donning all black and covering his face with a balaclava. The first day of Zahawi’s new interrogation, Paul had strode in and bellowed at Zahawi toget up, get up against the wall. Zahawi had scrambled, moving as fast as he could hobble with his still-healing injuries.

“We know you’re playing games with us, Zahawi!” Paul had roared. “We know you’re lying! We know everything about you! We own you! And we’re going to break you, until you tell us what we want to know!”

“I have told everything—”

“You haven’t! You’re lying!”

“I have told everything—”

“When you lie to me, you will get punished.”

And Paul had left.

Cold, alone, and naked, Zahawi had huddled against the wall for hours.

Zahawi stopped talking the third day Paul barged in, all hours of the day and night, demanding information and calling Zahawi a liar. He stared beyond Paul, eyes vacant, trying to hide his nudity, cover himself as best he could.

Paul scoffed, snorting as his attempts. “I don’t care about your little dick, Zahawi. We grow them bigger in America.”

“We need to rattle him,” Dennis said one day. “I’m going to blast music into his cell. Until he begs for us to turn it off.”

Zahawi didn’t beg. He sat on the floor, eyes closed, stone-faced, until Paul stormed in again. Every time Paul entered, Zahawi jumped up against the wall. He stopped trying to cover himself. He held his chin high.

Kris was torn between staying and enduring alongside Zahawi, and fleeing, escaping to the other side of the compound, the silence of his shared hut with David. But, even there, the walls shook, reverberating off the quiet force of David’s rage.

As much as Kris hated Dennis, hated Paul, David’s hatred went deeper. Darker. Kris felt earthquakes in David’s soul, tremors in his body every time they touched. Darkness filled David’s gaze.

But he refused to speak about it.

When the music failed, Dennis ordered Zahawi be kept awake. Sleep deprivation, and lots of it.

“How the fuck will you know that you’re getting any real intelligence or just the firings of an exhausted mind?” Kris snapped.

“That’s your job,” Dennis snapped back. “Aren’t you the Zahawi expert?”

Zahawi was kept awake for two days, forced to sit upright on the metal chair, his hands cuffed behind him. Anytime he slouched or his eyes slipped closed, Paul, or another all-black-clad officer, was there to scream at him, force him to wake up.

Once, Dennis uncuffed his hands, offered Zahawi a crayon, and held out a notepad. “He’ll write intelligence down, and he won’t know he’s doing it.”

Zahawi stared at the crayon, and then at Dennis. He dropped the crayon.

“Start it all over,” Dennis said. “The music. And then the sleep deprivation. He gets sixteen hours to rest before we begin again.”

“Why thefuckhas the intel from Zahawi stopped?” George, in Islamabad, shouted over the phone at Kris. “What thehellis happening down there?”

“Ask your friends at Langley. They sent some clown here from Psych 101 and told him he would be the one to make Zahawi talk. Never mind that Zahawi’s been talking to me just fine.” Kris paced away from the command center, sucking down his cigarette.

In the distance, David jogged around the airstrip, shirtless, his running shorts sliding up his thighs. Sweat slicked down his skin. Kris wanted to get lost in his back, press his face to David’s skin until he could transport out of there, reappear on a beach somewhere, where the sweat was from the sun and the sand and not the humidity and the rage, the futility of watching their interrogation go to waste.

David had gone quiet since Dennis had thrown him out of the bunker. Rage pulsed off him constantly. Kris spent most of his time in the interrogation cells, watching the monitors as Paul and Dennis tried to break Zahawi. Dennis kept the interrogations random, going at all hours, trying to disrupt Zahawi’s sense of time and place. Kris was keeping to the same schedule, awake for almost twenty-two hours a day. When he finally collapsed in their bed in their hut, David was usually gone, out pounding the runway or working out in the makeshift gym he and the rest of the Special Activities Division—SAD—guys had created. Steel rods with concrete on the ends were the dumbbells and barbells, along with old tires and pieces of chain.