The Hydra Protocol (45 page)

For hours they kept him moving. He couldn’t keep up the pace, so the blows came more and more often. Eventually even the pain and the jeers couldn’t keep him from just shuffling his feet, stumbling along as they pulled his arm and dragged him. He fell down on his knees, and they dragged him back up to his feet. His chin dropped to his chest, and someone grabbed his hair and pulled it back.

He kept moving, as best he could. It got to the point where he wanted it, wanted to keep walking, because the alternative was so hellish. It got to the point where he wanted to please the orderlies, make them happy—if he could just walk, if he could walk a few more steps, maybe they would stop laughing—

He must have blacked out. He must have just collapsed. Because suddenly his face hurt like he’d scraped it on the pavement, and when he opened his eyes, he saw feet all around him, shoes—and then Kalin, who was squatting down next to him. Squatting and holding an empty hypodermic needle.

Chapel reared up like a startled bull, whooping for breath. His eyes snapped wide open, and he could feel his heart jumping around in his chest like it was trying to break free of his rib cage. Every muscle in his body twitched and shook, and he had a desperate need to urinate.

“What—did—you—give—me?” he demanded, through chattering teeth.

Kalin flicked the end of his needle. “Adrenaline,” he said. “Not quite enough to give you a heart attack, but enough to keep you awake. Now. Back on your feet.”

“Are you ready to tell me your name?” Kalin asked, pen poised.

Chapel couldn’t stop blinking. His eyes hurt, a deep, dull ache. He moved his head to try to get away from it. It didn’t work. His eyes hurt. He—he had already—he’d already—his eyes hurt.

He was pretty sure there had been more in the last needle than just adrenaline.

“Drugging me. You’re . . . you’re drugging me, that’s—that’s illegal, it’s—you’re giving me medical treatment without my consent. You can’t—it’s illegal.”

“What is your name?” Kalin asked.

“I know my rights!” Chapel shouted. He tried to grab for the notebook, but Kalin was too fast for him, yanking it out of the way. Chapel turned around and went to the wall and pressed his face against it. He scratched at his scalp. “You have to let me shower. You have to feed me. You have to let me sleep. You can’t drug me like this. I have rights!”

“Human beings have rights,” Kalin pointed out.

“Exactly. Yes. Human beings have rights,” Chapel said. He knew how he sounded. He knew how he was acting. He couldn’t help it. He needed to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep, not with the drugs they’d given him. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t sit down, couldn’t stand still.

His eyes hurt. A deep, profound ache. His eyes wanted to sleep. They wanted to close, but they couldn’t. He could only blink, over and over and over again.

“You don’t seem to have a name.”

“I have a name! You can’t have it,” Chapel insisted.

“If you don’t have a name,” Kalin said, as if Chapel hadn’t spoken, “that makes you a nonperson. Nonpersons don’t have any rights.”

Chapel turned and stared at him. Staring was easy. His eyes wouldn’t close
. I’m a person
, he thought.
I am a person. I am a person.

“If you tell me your name, you can sleep. You can eat. We’ll even hose you down,” Kalin said, with a smile.

“I—I have a name,” Chapel insisted.

“I know. Just tell me what it is. Really, what’s the worst that can happen?”

Chapel tried to remember. He tried to remember why he couldn’t give this man his name. He was sure there was a good reason. He just had it. He just had the reason, he just had to remember. Remember why—

Kalin clicked his pen. Got ready to write something down.

“In your own time,” he said.

Chapel stared and stared and stared. He opened his mouth. He felt like something was going to come out. Words. Two words. A name.

“Indira Gandhi,” he said.

The look on Kalin’s face made him laugh. And laugh and laugh.

“David Cameron,” he tried, which was even funnier. Then he thought of the funniest name of all.

“My name is Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin, and I’ll be conducting your interview,” he said. And that was just hysterical.

He was still laughing when Kalin got up and picked up his chair. The notebook was nowhere to be seen.

“I apologize,” Kalin said.

Chapel stopped laughing instantly.

“I underestimated you,” Kalin told him. “It’s clear you’ve been trained to counter this kind of persuasion. Sleep deprivation isn’t going to work on you.”

“It’s—not?”

“We find it highly effective with most people. But there are limits to what can be done this way. Sleep deprivation can even be fatal if it’s taken too far. The first queen Elizabeth of England died of insomnia, did you know that?”

“That’s my name,” Chapel tried. “Queen Elizabeth.”

Kalin shook his head. “I could keep you awake longer, but then you would die. And that wouldn’t help me finish my report. So go ahead and sleep.” He shrugged and headed for the door. “The drugs will wear off in a few hours, and then I imagine you’ll sleep very well indeed. That’s good. I’ll want you clear-headed tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? What happens then?”

“That’s when we take things to the next level.”

Chapel woke up on the tiled floor of his room, his eyes slowly opening. He stretched out his arm, his legs, luxuriating in how rested he felt. He was sore from lying all night on the hard tiles, but he didn’t care. He felt a million times better than he had the day before.

He was considering his options—most of which involved rolling over and taking a nap—when there was a knock at the door. It opened before he could even realize he should say something, and an orderly came in, bearing a tray of food. Dry toast and some water. Chapel didn’t protest how plain it was. His stomach had shrunk from going without for so long, and he probably couldn’t have handled anything more complex. The orderly left again without a word, before Chapel could ask for more.

A little while later a different orderly came in and took the tray away. Then Kalin came in, carrying two chairs. He set them down facing each other and gestured for Chapel to sit in one of them.

“You look well,” Kalin told him, with a smile that showed some actual warmth. “I’m glad. You know I don’t want to cause you pain, don’t you? I hope you understand that. That I don’t take any pleasure in what we’ve done to you.”

Chapel considered sneering, but he didn’t want to give Kalin the satisfaction.

“You don’t want to give me your name, we’ve established that,” Kalin told him. He made a dismissive gesture, as if he were shooing away a pesky insect. “Okay.
Konyechno
, as we say in Russia.”

Chapel forced himself not to flinch, hearing Nadia’s favorite word out of this man’s mouth.

“You know the term? It means more than just ‘okay’ or ‘of course.’ There’s no exact translation into English. Perhaps you have heard of our famous Slavic fatalism. The way we simply accept that the world is not made for our pleasure, to our desires. We say
‘konyechno’
to mean this. Perhaps the best English equivalent would be, ‘What are you going to do?’”

“So you’ve given up? You’re going to release me with an official apology?”

Kalin smiled again. “American optimism. Perhaps that’s what won the Cold War. Okay. All right.
Konyechno
. I give up . . . at least, I will stop asking for your name. There are other questions that I’d like answers to. I’d like to know how you met the terrorist Asimova.” He took his pen and his notebook out. “I’d like to know what you were doing at Aralsk-30. I’d like to know what her plan was. She was in charge, yes? She was giving the orders? We’ve established that much, but I’d like confirmation.”

“For your report.”

“Yes. Exactly. For my report. Where should we start?”

“Sorry,” Chapel said. “I don’t have the answers you want.”

“You mean you won’t give them to me,” Kalin suggested.

“Believe what you want,” Chapel said. He draped his arm over the back of his chair. It was immensely comforting to have furniture at his disposal again. “So where I’m from—”

“Which is?” Kalin asked, his pen coming up.

“—the police have this tactic they use during interrogations,” Chapel went on, “called Good Cop Bad Cop. Two police officers enter the interrogation room and the first one threatens the suspect with jail. He shouts and demands answers and slams the wall and gets right up in the suspect’s face. The suspect, naturally, refuses to answer anything. He’s afraid of the bad cop, you see.”

“Understandably.”

Chapel nodded. “Eventually, the bad cop gets so frustrated he says he has to leave the room. That he’s going to hurt the suspect if he has to look at him for one more second. The other cop, the good cop, closes the door behind him and tells the suspect how sorry he is, that the bad cop is a hothead and dangerous and he wishes he didn’t have to work with him. He tells the suspect that things aren’t actually so bad, that he understands why the suspect did what he did. He promises him all kinds of favors. He gets the suspect coffee or food. He makes friends with the suspect. Of course, it’s all an act. Both cops know it. But it’s surprisingly effective. Given the chance to talk to a friendly face, many suspects will just give themselves away.”

“Interesting,” Kalin said. “But I don’t see the point. There’s only one of me.”

“Exactly,” Chapel said. “That’s why this isn’t going to work. I’ll never think of you as a friend, Kalin. And I’ll never answer your questions.”

The senior lieutenant nodded in understanding and tapped his pen on the edge of his notebook. “You
have
been trained to resist interrogation, haven’t you? Very impressive. Very good. But you’re wrong about one thing—I’m not trying to fool you here. I harbor no illusions that you’re going to start to like me. I am not trying to instill Stockholm syndrome in you, no, nothing like that.”

“Okay,” Chapel said.

“No, no. You see, I wasn’t trained by American policemen. I was trained by the KGB. You understand, of course, that the old men I learned from were experts at this sort of thing. Masters of getting at secrets. They had their own technique. One of them, one of the most simple, one of the most effective was based on the idea of operant conditioning. Do you know the term? No? Let me tell you how it works. I begin with something bad, something unpleasant. Say, I keep a man awake for days until he begins to break down psychologically. Then—out of nowhere—I stop. I let him sleep. I give him food. I let him feel good again, safe again. I let him remember what it was like to be warm and comfortable. I let him remember how much he has lost. Because—and this is the effective part—it makes what comes next so very, very much worse.”

Chapel froze in his chair. He forced himself not to give anything away.

Kalin rose from his chair. “Come,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I want you to see the next step.”

Kalin led him out into a wide hallway that curved gently as it followed the round shape of the hospital. They passed by a number of doors, some of which were ajar, though Chapel could see nothing in the rooms beyond. He wondered for the first time if he were the only inmate here.

One door opened, and a pair of big orderlies stepped out. They nodded respectfully to Kalin and then fell in behind him and Chapel. They said nothing, and they didn’t meet Chapel’s eye.

“Torture,” Kalin told Chapel as they walked, “has a rather long history. As soon as there were kings and priests, I imagine, there was a need for torturers. As long as there were heretics and dissidents. Think of all the ways it used to be done—the rack, the iron maiden, the thumbscrews. An enormous amount of human ingenuity has gone into finding ways to make people talk. But in ancient times it was always looked on as a craft. Perhaps an art form. It took the KGB to bring torture into the modern era. To bring science to the problem of persuasion. To make a technology out of it.”

They reached a junction in the corridor, and Kalin gestured for them to walk deeper into the building, away from the windows.

“For seventy years they worked at it, testing out new techniques, new drugs, new methods of causing pain. They studied how their subjects responded to each tactic. They made charts and graphs of how long human beings could withstand, say, having hot irons placed against the soles of their feet, or how long they could go without food before they would begin raving. They tested all the famous truth serums—scopolamine, sodium pentathol, amobarbital—measuring each dosage so carefully, compiling lists of control questions and polygraph results. For decades they honed and refined their methods, always looking for the new way, the
best
way to reach the truth.”

They came to a bank of elevators. Kalin summoned one with the press of a button and they all stepped inside, the orderlies flanking Chapel on either side. Maybe they thought he was going to attack Kalin. Try to kill him.

He’d thought about it. But he knew that no matter how much satisfaction he might get from strangling his interrogator, it would make no difference. Moscow would just send another one straightaway.

As the elevator descended, Kalin continued his lecture. “After seventy years of this, most of what they had learned was what
didn’t
work. How useless most torture really was. Cause enough pain and a man will tell you anything—but you can never know if what he tells you is true or simply what he thinks you want to hear. Testimony given under the influence of drugs is as likely to be fabricated—pure fantasy—as it is to reflect reality. But they did learn one basic principle about torture. One thing they could be sure of: every subject is different.”

The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out. Chapel thought they might be in the basement of the hospital. The air was much cooler down there, and a little clammy. The walls were all tiled, and drains were set at periodic intervals in the floor, as if this level needed to be hosed down frequently. Even the lighting was different—harsher, more direct. Instead of the recessed bulbs on the higher floors, here the light came from hanging lamps, each of them inside its own steel cage.