CHAPTER SEVEN
PROLOGUE
Torture was unreliable. They had tried it in the past and found that the subject didn’t necessarily tell the truth.
He said whatever he thought would stop the pain.
CIA Agent Wes Donaldson watched the man at the table through the one-way mirror. Shuaib Marfazda sat passively on the other side of the glass, seated in a straight-backed wooden chair. He hadn’t been tied to the chair, or in any other way restrained. Yet he sat as if his arms and legs had been immobilized. The only parts of his body that moved were his fingers as they tapped out some unrecognizable drumroll on the tabletop. His eyes stared straight ahead as if they’d been welded into place.
Donaldson glanced at his wristwatch, then looked through the glass at the door leading from the interrogation room into the hall. Marfazda assumed it was locked. It wasn’t. They had long ago passed the point where it was necessary to lock him in. Or use any other physical bonds, for that matter. Marfazda’s mind had become its own restraint.
No, Donaldson thought, Shuaib Marfazda, now lived in a CIA-created reality that was no more real than a child’s bedtime story. They had, in many ways, convinced him that down was up and up was down, red stop lights meant go and green meant stop. And it had all been accomplished without ever once touching the Hamas terrorist.
The door to the observation room opened suddenly. Donaldson turned to his side to see Jed Coffman’s broad, six-five frame block the light from the hallway. Coffman closed the door behind him, then moved to Donaldson’s side at the mirror. The big CIA operative frowned. “He ready?”
“Probably.” Donaldson nodded. “He’s showing most of the signs. If you wanted to compare his brain to spaghetti, I’d say it’s been boiled to a point somewhere between medium and soft.”
“I think of them more as little men made out of modeling clay,” Coffman said seriously. “We take them, smash them flat, then rebuild them the way we want them.” The tall man’s hand rose to his chin where he scratched a week’s worth of stubble. “Of course we leave enough between their ears for them to tell us everything they know.” He turned toward Donaldson. “What say we give him another few more minutes? It can’t hurt, and I could use a cup. Want some?”
Donaldson shook his head as Coffman crossed the room to the coffee machine. In the reflection of the glass, he saw the tall man lift the carafe and pour coffee into a cup. Peering through the reflection he continued to watch the terrorist on the other side of the one-way mirror. Again, Marfazda’s fingers began to drum out some unknown rhythm on the table. The finger taps had begun a few hours before, but in the past ninety minutes they’d started coming at regular five-minute intervals. Now they occurred every few seconds.
Donaldson knew every subject reacted differently to the preinterrogation process, but it had been his experience that they each showed some outward sign when they neared the breaking point.
Marfazda’s just happened to be tapping. It meant he was on the verge of that point now.
The CIA man let his mind drift back over the past few months. Shuaib Marfazda had been captured during an attempt to blow up a Beirut café frequented by Americans. A U.S. Department of State representative—a retired army colonel—had spotted several wires of his “suicide bomb” sticking out of his shirt collar as he opened the café door. Thinking quickly, the colonel had smashed the brass handle of his walking stick into the back of the man’s head.
Coffman had happened to be in the café himself at the time. Trained as an explosives expert, he had dismantled the bomb before Marfazda had regained consciousness or the Israeli authorities could arrive. The terrorist was then quickly transported to a CIA safehouse in Beirut.
Marfazda’s first few weeks had been spent in solitary confinement, in a bedroom stripped of furniture, with barred windows whose panes were painted black. The only human contact he’d had was watching an unidentified hand slide a food tray through the slot in his door twice a day. Unknown to him, a tiny microcam had been hidden in the bare lightbulb at the top of his room, which put out the same dull, monotonous half-light twenty-four hours a day. The Hamas terrorist’s every movement and facial expression—practically every thought—had been monitored ’round the clock by CIA psychiatrists and psychologists. And while Marfazda was slowly being broken down—or “smashed like clay” to use Coffman’s metaphor—CIA investigators had conducted an extensive background check.
While the café was to have been his final act, Marfazda already had plenty of blood on his hands. Bits and pieces of information had linked him to other atrocities in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq.
When the time seemed right Marfazda had suddenly, and without explanation, been transferred to a larger, brighter cell with five beds and four cell mates. All four of them had been CIA operatives of Arabic descent. Some intelligence had been gained that way as Marfazda—starved for human contact—had let his guard down partially among these men who presented themselves as fellow political prisoners. Through them Donaldson and Coffman had learned of the Soviet mole.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a man calling himself Russell James had held on to his job as an American biochemical weapons research scientist, waited for the dust to settle around the world, then found more lucrative work among the various terrorist organizations of the Middle East.
Marfazda had been taken back to solitary confinement when the intelligence information he’d unwittingly passed on finally dried up, and he had been there for nearly six months. He was now what the psychologists monitoring him called “ripe.” It was an expression they used to describe the dangerously short period between the time when he’d give up his last bits of information in return for a promise of freedom, and the time when his mind turned into the overcooked spaghetti to which Donaldson had compared it.
“Let’s go,” Donaldson said to Coffman, and the two men opened the door, stepped out into the hall, then entered the interrogation room next to it. “Marhaba,” he said to the confused man who stared at him from the other side of the table. He and Coffman sat across the table from the terrorist.
“We have a proposition for you,” Coffman said.
Marfazda
