The Administration Series (78 page)

On Thursday morning, the fourth day of Carnac's unwelcome occupation of his office, Sara came in with an expression suggesting that she thought she had interesting gossip.

"He knows Warrick," she announced.

"Who knows Warrick?" Toreth asked, knowing perfectly well whom she meant, but hoping in vain it would be someone else. Carnac was out of his hair this morning, bothering the psych assessors about their profiling techniques, and he'd rather not have to think about the man more than necessary.

"Carnac knows him. From years ago, I think, but he definitely knows him. Isn't that a weird coincidence?"

"Not really." And not that he cared if it was.

She looked disappointed, but before she could say anything else an unpleasant idea struck him. "Why was he talking about Warrick at all?"

Sara stared at him for a moment, and he could see the lies racing behind her eyes. Luckily for his fragile temper, she didn't use any of them.

"I, um, think I mentioned him first. He, er, asked about you. Whether you, um . . . "

"Whether I, um,
what
?"

"Whether you had a regular thing going on."

He felt his anger poised, balanced on a knife-edge between Sara and Carnac. Then it tipped decisively.
Bastard
. What the fuck was he playing at?

"And you just told him?" he asked.

She shook her head, but it wasn't a denial. "I — yes. Yes, I did. God, I'm sorry." She did sound it, which was slightly mollifying. "I don't know why . . . I didn't think."

"No, you didn't." He was angry enough for some to spill over. "You were too busy gazing into his bright blue fuck-me eyes, weren't you? Well, you're wasting your time. Unless you're planning on having the operation, you don't have a prayer."

"Really?" She actually looked a little crestfallen, and his jaw clenched. He took a deep breath. Not her fault, he told himself firmly. Carnac had been fishing, obviously, and he could hardly be expected not to land her. When would the man finish here, fuck off, and stop disordering Toreth's nice, quiet life?

He ought to ask what else she'd said, but he didn't want to hear it. "Just go away," he said. "Go away, and try not to tell him anything more. If there
is
anything you haven't told him already."

He watched her go, then called up the list of prisoners with currently active high-level damage waivers. Time to see if he couldn't find something to encourage Carnac on his way.

At the end of the first week, Carnac sat in his hotel room, listening to music and reading interrogation transcripts that he wished he had in hard-copy form so that he could tear every page into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. He had arrived at I&I with a conviction that interrogation was crude, wasteful and barbaric, and nothing he had learned since had shaken that. However, he had added revolting and grotesque to the collection of adjectives.

Despite the futility of the investigation, he had conscientiously created a project outline which required, among other things, numerous initial interviews with interrogators, investigators and their hybrid cousins, the para-investigators.

Job title had made little difference to his findings.

His subjects had varied in attitude from bored to hostile. Questions about aspects of the job they found unpleasant had elicited a range of baffled expressions, and an impressive list of management, procedural and paperwork grievances. Faced with prisoner and interrogation scenarios which could be expected to provoke sympathy and outrage in actual human beings, they had given answers which might have been lifted verbatim from the I&I training manual.

Except that, of course, they hadn't been. The replies were spontaneous and they had genuinely believed every word. The last faint hopes that he might discover something unexpected (that, say, the Administration's carefully trained monstrosities were all secret bleeding hearts who faked their interrogation transcripts) were quickly dashed.

Even with his self-created hobby project, it was still simultaneously one of the dullest and the most distasteful assignments Carnac had ever experienced.

On the fourth day of his sentence (as he was beginning to think of it), at the end of an afternoon spent going over some of the theoretical aspects of interrogation, Toreth had said to him, "You know, you ought to see this stuff first hand. I could arrange something for tomorrow, if you've got the time."

In other words, you've come to poke your nose into our work, so can you handle seeing it? A pointless, irritating test of machismo. Regrettably, it was also absolutely necessary that he go through with it if he was to expect any cooperation within the Division. It would be worth putting up with anything, he had thought, to make the stay there shorter.

On reflection, he could almost count that as one of his rare misjudgments. He would give a great deal not to have the memory of today, ready to spring to mind in the future whenever he casually included 'send for interrogation' in a strategy outline.

Toreth had actually enjoyed it. Not the interrogation per se (which was, after all, merely a day's work for him), but the opportunity to demonstrate his profession to an outsider who might appreciate it. He had, in essence, been showing off, making it a textbook job for Carnac's benefit. That it was also clearly intended to traumatise the unwanted spook was quite a separate issue.

From a purely technical viewpoint, Toreth was very good at it. Horrendously, stomach-turningly good. He'd even managed to work in a running commentary, with only a small reduction in the efficiency of the interrogation. It had added, perhaps, an extra twenty minutes of suffering for the prisoner and for Carnac.

Empathy was a requirement for a socioanalyst. He knew how other people thought, what they felt. What they wanted, what made them too afraid to try to obtain it, what would tip them over one edge or another. It was an instinctive skill that he could no longer switch off. Usually, though, the knowledge was applied at a distance. He worked through the filter of security files, psych profiles, and the compiled results of research and thousands of case studies.

He proposed and others disposed. This had been a new experience for him.

Minds, personalities, psyches — these were Carnac's stock in trade. Tedious as he found most people in the flesh, he'd never realised how ghastly it would be to see someone being destroyed in front of him. To watch Toreth find every crack, every emerging weakness, and to exploit them mercilessly to strip away another layer of resistance. Turning the prisoner into the thing Toreth required, not the person he had been before he entered this hell.

When one thoroughly understood how people in general behaved, people in the particular became dismally predictable. Sitting in that room, trying not to listen to what was being said and done, he'd known exactly what would happen from the moment they'd brought in the prisoner. He'd read the man's file and it had been nothing if not profoundly ordinary. Mildly surprising, in fact, that someone so average had found the determination to rebel against Administration rule.

In a way, the worst part had been knowing that the man would break in the end, and that all the pain and degradation his resistance generated was ultimately futile. Knowing, indeed, when he would break and that it wouldn't be yet. After an hour or two he'd had to fight back the urge to plead with the prisoner to give it up, for both their sakes.

There had been one positive outcome from the interrogation: he had always been curious about the phrase, 'the stench of fear'. Emotions seemed to be an unlikely source of an olfactory experience. Well, now he understood.

"He'll crack tomorrow," Toreth had said with casual, uncaring confidence, after the guards had finally taken the man back to his cell. "Of course, there's no real need to do it — the woman we arrested with him has already talked. She didn't have the same quality of interrogation resistance treatments he'd had. But he came in with a level eight waiver, so I thought he'd make a good example. Do you want to finish it off in the morning? I know it's Saturday, but I can come in if you'd like to see it."

He'd managed a polite refusal, although by that time he could cheerfully have murdered Toreth, and every other interrogator in the building, so that what he had just witnessed would never happen to another human being again. For a few irrational minutes he had wanted nothing more than to get away from the interrogation building, throw up, and resign from the Socioanalysis Division, even if it meant he had to sleep on the streets for the rest of his natural life.

It had passed, of course — his training carried him through moments like that. Then, as they had walked through the endless security doors, back up to the relative sanity of the investigation levels, Toreth had turned to him and asked, "So, do you want to fuck?" It had been the only time since they'd met that he had directly initiated the sex.

Once they were back in the office, Carnac had let him fuck him, because the distraction of having Toreth inside him was better than dwelling on the memory of what he'd watched the man do. They had to work together for the remainder of the assignment, after all.

It was the first time they had got as far as penetration, but there wasn't a great deal of discussion involved, merely a gesture enquiring whether he preferred the wall or desk. He'd decided the desk would be easier on his calves. Neither was there any question about who would be doing what to whom.

Toreth was a talented partner, when he made the effort to be. That time he had been calculating and controlled. Minimal foreplay, and then Toreth's weight above him, deliberately applied. He'd hurt him — not much, just enough to make a point — and he'd made sure that Carnac came first. After that he had held him down on the desk as he finished, fucking him hard, not making any sound at all as he came. Then he'd pulled out and walked off, leaving Carnac flat on the desk, sticky and breathless.

On reflection, an entertainingly stereotypical display of dominance and territoriality, pressing home, so to speak, his physical superiority and training. Carnac hadn't cared. In fact, he'd rather enjoyed it, apart from a forgetful moment later on when, sitting down on a too-hard chair, his eyes had crossed so far that he'd briefly stared down his own optic nerves.

Toreth, of course, had been hoping that the brutal sex and the interrogation would in combination encourage him to ask for a new departmental liaison. Far from it. Carnac had encountered enough apprehension and cringing respect in the course of his career that Toreth's attitude was, at least, refreshing. If he'd cared about the job in hand, it would have been different. As it was, it simply let him know that he had succeeded in making Toreth take notice of him.

He might try Sara again on Monday. She had become unexpectedly reticent over the last couple of days, which probably meant that she had let slip to Toreth that Carnac had been asking questions about him. Annoying, but there had been no practical way to keep her quiet. In any case, he suspected he had already got most of the useful information out of her, and what she had held back would be inconveniently difficult to extract.

He put down the transcripts and considered his progress so far. What
had
he learned from Sara?

Reading between the lines — not a challenge with the woman — Toreth seemed to have had an uninterestingly unpleasant childhood, which held some explanations, but no immediately useful leverage. It had been impressive that she knew anything about it at all (further unrequired evidence that Toreth had a genuine relationship with his admin), and mildly interesting that she had actually met his parents. Unfortunately, the details of the encounter had fallen under 'information held back'.

She had also slept with him, as Carnac had suspected she must have. Just once, and there had been no explanation offered as to why, although according to her, one or two encounters seemed to be a modal length relationship for Toreth.

That was an interesting fact in itself — an interesting pathology. Perhaps he had been mistaken in his earlier assessment, and continued sexual contact might yield results through sheer repetition: familiarity breeding intimacy, rather than contempt. It was worth a try, as well as being what he had planned to do anyway. Now that he had made his impression, it might be time to see if he could moderate Toreth's view of him from dislike to something more suitable for his project.

They returned to Warrick's flat after a morning at the gym that had, unusually, failed to put Toreth in a better mood. That was a shame, because he'd only recently managed to chivvy Warrick along to the gym at all. Swimming was about the only thing that he would find time for, although Toreth suspected (immodestly) that it had more to do with seeing him wet and mostly naked than any enthusiasm for exercise. Although he didn't know why that should be such a draw, when Warrick could see him wet and entirely naked any time he wanted to.