Afterparty (10 page)

“But why would you—?”

“Shhh.” She kneeled next to the duffel. One night on the ward, during one of our after-hours kitchen runs, I’d asked her if picking locks was part of her government training. She laughed, said it was the tweaker itch, one of the side effects of Clarity. A mentor had told her not to fight it. Better to use the itch and get a hobby. So instead of taking apart old vacuum cleaners like a meth head, she attacked locks. Worked her way through the bibles of the field by a guy named Tobias, staying up all night, immersing herself in the craft like parachuting into a foreign country.

Ollie cut the grocery card in two. One half she shaped into a rough key. The other was a narrow strip. She slid the fake key into the lock, then rapped on it with the heel of her shoe. Next she took out the key shape and replaced it with the strip.

She spent the next few minutes poking at the lock’s innards with the wire twist ties. A dollop of sweat popped from the end of her nose. Her fingers trembled.

Bobby watched her, nervously gripping his treasure chest. He said, “It’s okay if you can’t open it.”

Ollie’s head jerked up. “
What
did you say?”

I said, “Kid, let her work.”

“I’m just saying, we could call a locksmith. One time when I was locked out of my car—”

Ollie jerked on the padlock and suddenly it was open. “When you’re popping locks, it’s not
if
it opens,” she said. “It’s how fast.” She sat back on her haunches, looking worn out. “I’m just not up to speed yet.”

“Literally,” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled. “I’ll do better tonight. How about another fortune cookie?”

I unfolded the paper I’d purchased from Brandy. The page was divided into perforated strips, each strip printed with a sentence. I tore one off. It said, “You will be taking a long trip.”

Ollie popped it in her mouth. Bobby nodded at the toolbox and said, “So…?”

Ollie opened the box and began lifting out items: a black velvet bandolier loaded with picks, wrenches, shims, and thin-bladed knives; a top tray full of plastic cases containing electronic components; a lower tray of molded slots for pliers, wire cutters, tiny flashlights, and screwdrivers. Bobby said, “Is that a gun?”

“This?” She picked up a hunk of dark gray plastic with a pistol grip, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. “
This
is a drill,” she said. “Which reminds me, I need to charge this thing before our assault on the house of God.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Reverend Rudy Gallo Velez, naked except for his undershorts, crouched atop a chair in the center of the room in one of the classic stress positions: thighs parallel to the floor, arms tied behind his back, head bowed. A plastic garbage bag, loose at the bottom, covered his head. A figure eight of nylon cord, one loop around his neck, the other around his knees, kept his body in the proper attitude. He’d been in the position, on and off (mostly on), for three hours. He was a strong man, very fit, but sweat gleamed on his skin, and his legs trembled.

The Vincent sat about twenty feet away, his feet propped on the chemjet printer, his hat low across his eyes. A Zane Grey novel was open on his pen. He remained silent, giving Rudy time to think.

The pastor grunted, very quietly. He flexed his bare feet against the seat of the chair. His muscles had to be burning constantly now. Shooting pains would be knifing up his thighs, across his lower back. The discomfort caused by a stress position was psychologically different from that caused directly by the interrogator—say, a punch to the face, or a snapping of a finger bone, both of which the Vincent had inflicted upon Rudy within the first thirty seconds of meeting him—because positional pain seemed to come from within. This predisposed the victim to solicit the torturer’s help to end the suffering.

But a predisposition only. The Vincent could tell, even with the hood obscuring the pastor’s face, that he was not yet sufficiently distressed. Was he resilient because he was a man of the cloth, a gangbanger, or both? A black hand tattoo covered his left shoulder, and an elaborate “13” decorated the side of his neck, both of which marked him as La eMe—Mexican Mafia. If Pastor Rudy had found religion, it was only after a long allegiance with another hierarchical organization.

A novice interrogator might grow impatient at this point, start beating the man to break him down. That would be a mistake. As the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual made clear: Pain was useless. Psychology was everything.

Pain was a tool to get a subject—especially an alpha male like Rudy—into the proper state of mind. Which was why, when the Vincent had surprised the man in the back room of the church, the Vincent had immediately dropped him to the floor with the punch, then bent his finger the wrong way toward his wrist. Swift, unexpected pain hinted at the parameters of the interaction to come, and notified the subject of his change of status, from captain of his fate to passenger on the USS
I Am Fucked
.

For the young man who’d been in the room with Rudy—a gangly African-American who resembled the adopted younger brother of Uncle Sam—that ship had sailed. The black man had tried to run, and the Vincent had collared him like a rodeo calf and slammed him to the cement. The boy was stunned, teetering on unconsciousness, and the Vincent had helped him over that edge.

Despite all the violence and, let’s face it, an impressive display of physical prowess, the pastor refused to answer the Vincent’s questions. What did you give the red-haired woman, Lyda Rose? Where did you get the chemjet printer? Who gave you the ingredients? The pastor only smiled and said, “She took our communion wafers.”

Enhanced coercive interrogation techniques were required. To do the job right, the Vincent needed a private, soundproofed location, preferably one underground with a few metal doors to slam, all the better to convince the victim that he was isolated, helpless, and beyond rescue. Instead he had to improvise with what was available: a plastic bag, a chair, and a windowless warehouse with a cement floor. He’d done more with less.

A few minutes later, Rudy’s legs gave out and he tipped sideways. The chair shot out from under him and smacked the floor. The pastor lay on his side, the noose still enforcing a curled position.

The Vincent tipped back his hat but remained seated. “Are you ready to answer my questions, Rudy?” He thought it intellectually honest to call his victims by their names. He would not turn what he did, and who he did it to, into abstractions. That was for people with no control of their emotions.

The pastor breathed hard under his hood, the plastic hugging his mouth, then inflating. The Vincent flicked to a new page on the pen. “My employer would like you to fill out a brief questionnaire. I can read you the questions and record your answers. Ready?”

The hood moved slightly. The Vincent took that as a nod.

“
One
. ‘Are you a user of the drug that you’ve been distributing?’”

The Vincent waited for several seconds. “All righty, then. I’m going to put that down as a yes.
Two.
‘How long have you been taking the drug and in what dosages?’”

Nothing.

“These aren’t hard questions, Rudy. For research purposes only, not personal at all. Help me out here.”

The Vincent got to his feet. “
Three.
‘Would you say you’ve been taking the drug for less than a week, a week to one month, or longer than a month?’”

The pastor said, “Are you happy?” His voice was muffled by the hood, but he sounded genuinely curious.

The question surprised the Vincent. Usually at this point, the questions were more along the line of “Why are you doing this?” or “What do you want?” or “Why won’t you tell me what to say?”

The Vincent said, “I’m doing well, thanks.” It was sometimes a mistake to let the victim drive the interaction, but at least he was talking. And this was the most interesting conversation the Vincent had had in a while.

“I mean happy with your life,” Rudy said. “With what you’re doing.”

Ah. An appeal to his conscience. Talk about a rhetorical cul-de-sac. The Vincent tucked the pen into his jacket pocket.

“I’m happier than anyone else I know,” he said. “I’m…” What was the word? “Free” was close. “Liberated”? “Unfettered”? “I’m unencumbered.” He moved behind Rudy and pulled him into a sitting position. “I’m like a Goddamn free-range buffalo. Sorry—bison.

“See, you have a god to answer to,” the Vincent said, warming to the topic. “Others have society, or Mom, or the gang. Some voice in your head shaming you when you’ve broken the code. But in my head it’s quiet. Peaceful. Up you go.”

He helped blind Rudy climb back onto the chair, an awkward series of moves.

“You know in your heart what’s right or wrong,” the pastor said.

“I know in my
head
,” the Vincent said. “And what I’ve learned is that it’s not
knowing
what’s right or wrong, it’s
caring
. Feeling the wrongness. See, Rudy, when you see someone you love being hurt, you feel an echo of the pain yourself. You only got to imagine it. I can say, ‘I kicked your grandfather in the balls,’ and you will feel a twinge in your groin. Your morality is not
rational
, or handed down to you on stone tablets by some divine cop, it’s wired into your nervous system.” He patted the man on his sweat-slick back. “Fortunately, there’s a treatment for it.”

“But you’re alone,” Rudy said. “My god is here.”

“He doesn’t seem to be helping you much.” The Vincent leaned close. “Where did the printer come from?”

The man said nothing.

The Vincent said, “I’ll track it down eventually, but you could save me a lot of time. Was it the cartel? Have they branched into desktop drugs?”

The Vincent watched the hood for movement. The man seemed strikingly calm. Breathing deeply, but without the ragged gasps of someone under duress.

“Rudy, you’ve been put in an unfair position. The people who gave you that hardware knew that sooner or later someone like me was going to come around asking questions about it. They knew that you’d tell me eventually.”

The Vincent pulled the hood from the pastor’s head. Rudy’s face was covered in sweat, and he blinked to keep it from running into his eyes.

The Vincent said, “I can tell that you’re a good man, trying to do the right thing. But no one but you expects you to keep all this secret.”

Rudy looked to his left, as if someone had just stepped into the room. The Vincent couldn’t stop himself from glancing in that direction. Of course no one was there.

“I think it’s time we move on to the next phase,” the Vincent said. He walked to his carry-on bag and unzipped it. He took out a pair of pliers, a serrated knife, a roll of duct tape, a punch awl, a plastic bottle of lighter fluid, and a box of kitchen matches. Set them on the floor in a row. They were all new, picked up from the Walmart soon after he’d landed in Toronto.

He made sure Rudy was watching this presentation of the props. The interrogation was, after all, a theatrical performance. You had to engage the victim in the narrative, a story that followed the classic structure: The hero (our victim), faced with a dire situation, overcomes adversity, and achieves his goals. Well, one goal, really: survival. But it was important that that modest happy ending seemed within reach, right around the corner. The Vincent’s job was to inspire not only fear, but hope.

The Vincent picked up the awl. “Rudy, I need you to tell me where you got the printer. It’s not like anything I’ve seen. Was it given to you, or did you buy it? Who did you get it from?”

Rudy shook his head.

“Just one name,” the Vincent said reasonably.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” Rudy said.

“Why not?”

He opened one eye, squinting. “I’m not going to point you toward another brother or sister.”

“So you got it from someone else in the church. One of the members.”

“Not this congregation,” Rudy said. “Not this building.”

“So if I looked for other congregations of—what do you call it? The Church of the Hologrammatic God—I could ask them. Maybe do a few more pastoral visits.”

Rudy said nothing.

“I’m going to level with you,” the Vincent said. “I’d rather not go to all that trouble. But you’re putting me in a corner. If you don’t give me some information that I can take to my employer, then I’m going to have to talk to other people in your church, as I’m talking to you now.”

Rudy glanced to his left again, a gesture that was getting tiresome. The man just wasn’t scared enough. And the Vincent couldn’t just start slicing skin and breaking bones. Pain at that level was counterproductive, not only because of the well-documented willingness of prisoners to say anything to stop it, but because of the opposite: Many victims discovered that their tolerance was higher than they expected. And death threats were worse than useless; hold a gun to a victim’s head, or a blade to his throat, he might start to think he was going to die no matter whether he submitted or not. The Vincent had seen this happen during an interrogation of a poppy farmer in Afghanistan. The army had botched the job, and the farmer shut down completely. He almost seemed to be at peace. By the time the Vincent had arrived at the scene, there wasn’t enough time to win him back. Another human resource, unexploited.

No, it wasn’t death threats that motivated his victims to cooperate, or pain, but
fear
of pain. And this man, Pastor Rudy Gallo Velez, seemed to have an extreme deficit of fear.

If he was drugged—and his employer said that he’d be dealing with criminals and users, starting with the addict Lyda Rose—it was no drug the Vincent had seen before. The Vincent had a bad thought: What if his own medication was interfering with the job? Maybe if he had some of the emotional sensitivity that he possessed when he was off duty and off the meds, then he could figure out where Rudy was vulnerable. But off the meds, the Vincent wouldn’t have the stomach for the job at all.

It was a conundrum.