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The Powers That Be
Cliff Ryder
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jonathan Morgan for his contribution to this work.
PROLOGUE
Francisco Garcia Romero’s world had been reduced to two sensations: light and pain.
The light came from the bare, wire-caged, hundred-watt bulb in his windowless, four-by-eight-foot punishment cell. Always burning, it turned the already sweltering space into a cramped oven, and had long ago stripped Francisco of any notion of the time of day. It limited his sleep to fitful minutes here and there, throwing his arm over his eyes until it cramped and he moved, which exposed his face to the harsh glare again. Its brilliance burned into his retinas. The light exposed every mark on his naked body, every bruise, every cut, every mosquito bite, every sore in stark relief, revealing the pitiful shell of the man and father he used to be.
Emaciated and filthy, he huddled on the dirty concrete floor of his cell in Quivicán maximum-security prison, with no mattress, blanket or even a concrete bed to sleep on. It had been a good day so far, because the hole in the floor where he relieved himself—when he could muster both the energy to do so and the fortitude to handle the pain it caused—hadn’t overflowed yet. Also, he had managed to keep down the cup of watery, unidentifiable soup and handful of rice that had been doled out a few hours earlier. But the rattle of his cell door as it was unlocked meant that time was at an end.
“¡Número treinta y cinco, salga!” One of the fatigue-clad guards barked the order. Since his detention had begun here, the guards had only referred to him by a number—thirty-five.
Francisco crawled to the door and out into the hallway, where the two men grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him to his feet, ignoring his whimper of pain as his shoulder was wrenched back. They placed him against the wall and searched him—a seemingly useless gesture, since he was already naked, that was meant to humiliate and further degrade him. Francisco waited with his legs apart, wondering which pair would accompany him this time. There was only a casual inspection of his buttocks today, so it must have been Guards Three and Four, as he called them. The other pair of guards, One and Two, took an unpleasant interest in certain parts of his anatomy, and used every opportunity to torment him with the ends of their batons or other items.
Satisfied he wasn’t carrying any contraband, the two guards pushed him down the hall toward the interrogation area. As he did every time this happened, Francisco whispered his usual litany:
“Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos,
Santificado sea tu Nombre.
Venga tu reino,
Hágase tu voluntad,
En la tierra como en el cielo….”
He always tried to finish the Lord’s Prayer before being silenced by one of the guards or entering the interrogation room. If he could do that, he believed it gave him the inner strength to resist whatever they had planned for him. And just like every other time he had been taken to these small rooms, a part of him wondered if this time he would break under the endless torture, and tell them everything he knew.
As he shuffled down the hallway, he tried to ignore the flashes of pain from his battered body. Everything hurt, from the deep throbbing of his improperly-healed shoulder, injured in his very first interrogation and beating, to the burning pain in his rectum from the near constant diarrhea combined with torn sphincter muscles and the resulting infection from when he had been sodomized a few weeks
