'Yeah, I can get in touch with Bilton. He'll understand. What's our window?'
'The caller agreed to give us five days to put together the diamonds.'
'What? You've only got five days to find this guy and air him out?'
'It's more complicated than just airing him out. He says he's got the video rigged to an electronic dead-man switch. If he fails to disarm the switch at a preset interval, the video gets uploaded.'
Hot bile surged into Ulrich's throat. He pulled a bottle of Maalox Maximum Strength from a desk drawer, unscrewed the cap, and took a huge mouthful. He grimaced, his eyes watering, and swallowed.
'Anything else?' he managed to ask.
'Yeah. If this thing goes south, we'll want to have our stories straight.'
'If this thing goes south,' Ulrich said, his mouth pasty with the taste of the Maalox, 'it won't matter what our stories are.'
He realized when Clements didn't respond that he'd been hoping he would. Nothing could have confirmed Ulrich's point more emphatically than the silence on the other end of the phone.
'I'll get in touch with Bilton right away,' Ulrich said. 'Let's keep each other posted.'
He hung up, put his glasses on the table, and sat for a moment with his face in his hands.
There was nothing he could do. The Agency was in charge, Ulrich's involvement was reduced to that of a messenger boy… They were done, they were all done. Ever since the tapes were first discovered missing, he'd been living on borrowed time. No, since before then, even. Since he'd first figured out what to do with the Caspers. That's what had killed him. He just hadn't realized it until now.
It wasn't fair. For so many years, he'd tried so hard to protect the nation, and he just… he just couldn't anymore. And without him, who would?
And then some deep part of himself cut through the thickening mists of despair. He wasn't helpless. He didn't need to defer to the idiots at the CIA who had caused this catastrophe in the first place. He didn't have the power he'd once wielded, true, but he still had the contacts. In the end, the contacts might matter more. All he had to do was use them. Use them well.
He put his glasses back on, took another swallow of Maalox, and picked up the secure phone.
3
Lungs of a Dragon On his second day in the Manila city jail, Ben was still telling himself it could have been worse. But it wasn't easy to figure out how.
Out of habit, he'd been traveling sterile. His passport, his wallet, anything that could identify him-it was all inside the safe in his room at the Manila Mandarin Oriental. Even the magnetic room key was under a loose cobblestone on Paseo de Roxas, where he'd left it when he first set out that evening. The Philippines didn't fingerprint visitors at immigration, at least not yet, so at the moment of his arrest, the only clue to his identity was the five thousand pesos and change in his jeans pocket. Which was no clue at all, thank God.
His mind had been a shambles of conflicting emotions: exultation at having fought and prevailed; worry that he'd accidentally killed someone; fury at having been so stupid and incompetent; fear about what was going to happen to him. On top of everything else, humiliation. Being arrested by the local third world gendarmerie was about the biggest embarrassment a black ops soldier could suffer. He'd laughed at stories of guys it had happened to, thought they were fuckups and incompetents. But look at him now. He was one of them.
He was determined to keep his options open, to say nothing that might unwittingly preclude subsequent possibilities. He didn't respond when the cops told him one of the men he'd fought was dead, his neck broken. Maybe they were lying, though his gut told him, sickeningly, it was true. He was silent when they pretended they were his friends, he was silent when they knocked him down and beat the shit out of him. Part of him was aware that his silence was probably making things worse. But having lost control of everything else, he found himself clinging to whatever pathetic sense of dignity and power he could derive from the simple ability to deny his interrogators his voice.
Eventually they told him they didn't care, the guy he killed wasn't Filipino and he wasn't Filipino so why were they wasting their time? They'd dumped him in the Manila city jail, which Ben quickly learned from some of its English-speaking inhabitants had been built for a thousand inmates and currently housed more than five times that number. There were people of all ages, mostly Filipino but a few foreigners, too, convicted murderers serving life sentences alongside ordinary people who couldn't afford bail and were just waiting for their day in court. It was so hot the concrete walls caused second-degree burns, so crowded the prisoners had to sleep side by side on the ground in shifts, and stank so badly from the accreted decades of concentrated piss and nonstop sweat and endemic diarrhea that you could feel the miasma on your skin like something moving and alive, something trying to worm its way into your pores so it could dissolve you from the inside out.
There was an open-air pavilion where the prisoners were served food. Twice a day, the same watery, yellowish gray porridge smelling like rotting fish. On his first morning, Ben choked it down, knowing he had to eat to stay strong, then barely made it to the corner of the pavilion before throwing it all up. A bony but tough-looking Thai guy with brown skin as drawn and dried as jerky laughed and said, 'No worry! Everyone do first time, sometime second time, third time. Soon-soon, okay, yum-yum.'
'Yum, huh?' Ben said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
'Not yum-yum, you die,' the Thai guy said. 'So you make yum-yum.'
No one messed with him-his size and demeanor took care of that-but so what? Dummying up, he began to realize, was just a multiplication of his initial stupidity. Had the cops even filled out any paperwork? He couldn't remember seeing any. Looking around at the shifting ranks of scrawny, gap-toothed prisoners, all of them filthy and haggard and sweating bare-chested in the heat, he could easily imagine himself being forgotten here.
On the third day, with the magnitude of his fuckup gnawing at his mind and fear settling like some dark obstruction deep in his chest, he approached the guy who looked like the head guard and asked to call the U.S. consulate. The guy didn't even look at him, he just laughed to himself and tapped his truncheon. Ben told him he was an American citizen, there'd been a mistake, he needed to talk to the consulate, okay? The guy's laugh drifted away and his gaze shifted to Ben. His eyes were flat and his fingers curled around the hilt of his truncheon. Ben felt a surge of anger and pictured himself snatching the puke's truncheon off his belt and braining him with it. But he managed to shove the anger back, knowing it was what had landed him here in the first place, knowing that as bad as things were, uncorking on a guard would make them infinitely, permanently worse.
As he lay down that night on the radiant, piss-stained concrete floor of the small cell he shared with a dozen other prisoners, he remembered a moment from his jungle training. They'd dropped him in a part of the Everglades so dense that even at noon the sun was just a dim green glow at the top of the tree canopy. He had three days to reach his objective, alone, and a day in he started wondering, if he didn't make it out, how would anyone even find him? He remembered the feeling of being lost and alone, monumentally insignificant in an indifferent, alien world. And now he was fighting that feeling again, that creeping, childlike dread at having been abandoned somewhere, orphaned, marooned.
He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders as though trying to prove he was even still there. Nobody knew what had happened to him. Eventually, when he didn't report in, the military would go looking, but where? He'd been inhaled like a dust mote into the lungs of a dragon. And every breath the dragon took carried him deeper into its body and farther from the light. He was in so deep already, how was he ever going to get out? In his few nightmarish days within the beast, he'd already run into guys who'd been here for years-years-without being sentenced, without even a hearing. He imagined that once you passed a certain point in a system like this one, the overseers wouldn't let you up for air even if by some amazing coincidence they became aware of your case. At that point, after all, your story would be an embarrassment to them. And the worse your treatment, the more sympathetic your circumstances, the more egregious the entire story, the more culpable they would all be. After a certain amount of time without a hearing, being innocent would probably be the worst thing that could happen to someone in a place like this. What were they going to do, admit that for three, five, seven years, they'd caged up a guy who-oops-hadn't even done anything, and never even gave him a hearing? Yeah, fat chance of that. Better to just leave you where you are. You'd been there that long already, and it wasn't like anyone was asking about you. Let sleeping dogs lie, baby. Wait long enough, and eventually they'd be sleeping for good.
