Deadline Man

“Wake up, asshole.”

A hand slaps my face hard. I awake to the sting rippling out into the nerves of my left cheek. My eyes are nearly blinded by the light. My body won’t move. I slowly focus on Bill, the slimmer of the two agents. He kneels before me, his moonlike face inches from mine.

“He’s awake.”

He backs away and I can see his partner, Stu, standing behind him, his arms crossed. They are both dressed in jeans and jackets. I am still shivering hard from the cold. Slowly, the world returns.

We are in a long gray room that probably measures twelve feet wide and twenty feet long. The walls are gray cinderblocks. A long gray institutional table sits in the middle, a darker piece of rubber running around the edge of the top. Two gray chairs are placed beneath it. Four tall gray lockers are in the far corner. A gray door holds down the opposite corner. It has a small reflective window in it. My arms and legs are cuffed to a heavy metal chair. I catalog all this so I don’t start screaming. Moving my head still hurts, so I just try to take it all in with my eyes. Above me are hanging banks of fluorescent lights. The floor is concrete and has a drain in the middle.

It’s never good to be shackled in a room with a drain in the middle of the floor.

I’m completely naked, one with the chair. It seems as if it was built for it—locked down to the floor with bolts. My arms are held straight down and handcuffed to loops in the metal of the chair. My legs are similarly shackled. There’s little room to move. Between the handcuffs and the welded attachment of the chair is only one link of steel chain. The metal burns me with transmitted cold. A wide leather strap circles my chest and goes behind the chair back. Little scars sit prominently at my solar plexus. The Taser hit. My butt hurts from sitting on the metal seat—how many hours? How many days? My first insane thought is that I have a column due on Monday. Then: I missed my interview with Pete Montgomery.

Bill pulls up one of the chairs and places it directly in front of me, chair-back facing me. He straddles it and stares at me. Stu picks up the other chair and positions himself at my right, just at the outside of my peripheral vision. My left cheek and eye are throbbing with pain. I’m shaking from the cold again.

“You’re in violation of a National Security Letter. You have no rights. Let’s get that out of the way right now, because I don’t have time for your games.” Bill sounds very reasonable, his pastor-like face kind and reassuring.

“You can be

held incommunicado forever if we choose,” he goes on, as if laying out the Bible study class for the next several Sundays. “We can put you in stress positions. We can put you in a box. Are you claustrophobic? We’ll find out. Maybe you’ll find out.”

Stu’s large hand covers the side of my face and turns my head toward him. My neck muscles spasm in pain. “We can beat you and kick you all we want,” he says. “We can stick your ass on a jet and take you to Syria where they really mean business. By comparison, we’re nice guys.”

“I’m cold.” I hear my voice for the first time.

“You like that? We can make it colder.” Stu pushes my head back into the straight-ahead position. “We can stick you in a coffin and bury you for a day with just enough air to breathe, if you’re careful. God, I wish we could. But we don’t have time.”

“Where’s Megan?” Bill folds his arms atop the back of the chair and watches my face.

Megan. My mind slowly comes out of the deep freeze. Of all the pieces I have: Troy’s murder, the CIA connection, whatever funny business is going on in Olympic Defense Systems—it always comes back to the missing girl. And from his question, they believe I know where she is. I’m too cold to think it through in my head, to be clever. I try.

I shrug. Then, “She’s in a safe place.” I can barely talk because my teeth keep chattering. “And the plan is to go public if I don’t check in within twenty-four hours.”

Bill smiles slightly. He looks like an amused lizard. “You’re a really bad liar.” But he had hesitated just a second. His eyes had flitted to Stu before he talked. He’s not sure that I’m bluffing.

“She knows more than you think,” I continue. “We have it all down. Eleven-eleven, asshole.” His eyes flicker. “And we have it in sworn affidavits. It’s going to be published, no matter what.”

“You’re not even going to be working for that fish wrap,” Stu says, “if you ever get free again.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say, gathering strength as I keep spinning the yarn. “There are other reporters and other news organizations involved. Do you think I’d just leave it to myself? Or to the cowards who are my bosses.” I make myself laugh. “And we know about you two: your little death squad. Pretty soon the world will know. You bastards killed Pam and you’re going to pay.”

Bill’s jaw tightens and he stands, throwing the chair theatrically against the wall. The noise is shattering, amplified by the concrete and cinder blocks of the room. Stu stands, too. Bill strides out the door and closes it behind him. Stu hits some kind of lever out of my line of sight. The chair back collapses and I fall back. My abdominal muscles turn in painful knots. Another metal-on-metal sound, as if the chair is locked into a new position. My body is bent so my lower legs are still aimed at the floor but the rest of me is nearly horizontal. Then my feet go up and my lower body is tilted high. The chair is meant to do this. I stare up at Stu’s immobile face and the overhead lights. Then the door opens and Bill walks in more slowly.

He’s carrying a clear plastic gallon jug.

He tosses what looks like a black hand-towel to his partner. He puts his face close to mine, his breath smelling of peppermint.

“Did you ever do this as a military intelligence officer?”

“I was an Army journalist.” My voice in unsteady with the upwelling terror inside me.

“Sure.”

Bill speaks out of my line of sight. “You were a trained interrogator. What would you do?”

The blood in my veins feels like it’s turning to ice. “I know torture doesn’t work. Very inefficient…”

“Army pussy,” Stu says. “I’ve read your jacket. You were also trained for black ops. You were a trained killer.” His heavy-jawed face is two inches from mine, like a drill sergeant’s.