life experience would ever get into it had to be vanishingly small.
At any rate, there were files on secret DARPA contracts going back to 1978, files relating to U.S. State Department black ops in Central America going back to the 1940s. Obviously, Lindsay had a tangle of ties to the military communities in both Belize and Guatemala, not to mention a rogue’s gallery of other countries. Whatever the overall goal of the project was, it was clearly ongoing. But at the moment I was only interested in one aspect of it. On an impulse, I searched this batch of files for Felix AND Garcia-Torres.
The search flagged over two hundred files. My heartbeat shifted into neutral. I took a Ziploc bag out of my pocket, dug the two still-damp Kleenex wads out of it, and ate them. Gak. Another slug of soda. Ahh. Good to the last drop.
The first file showed that Felix and Garcia-Torres were the same person, the same Corporal Jorge Garcia- Torres, now a commander in the Guatemalan Army Air Corps, who was at the top of my (s)hit list, responsible for my parents’ murder in the G2 massacre at my village. It was obvious that he was on Warren’s payroll. Damn it. I knew it, I finger-fucking knew it! Hot spit. You’re a dead guy, I’m going to work this connection until you die screaming, you fuck!!!
As I reconstructed it, Garcia-Torres and Lindsay knew each other from way back-at least since the 1970s, when the land that is now the Stake was one of John Hull’s training camps for the paramilitary squads who were helping run cocaine for Oliver North’s group “under the aegis of Bush the First.” Since then, Garcia-Torres-now a commander-had acted as Lindsay’s main contact in the Guatemalan military.
Despite the detaching qualities of the tsam lic, my teeth were chattering with rage. I was already getting that blue taste and that ringing in my carapace. I checked in on Marena again. She and Max were in her car, which meant she’d get here in a little over a half an hour if she didn’t stop for anything, which she wouldn’t. Come on, Jeddidiah. It’s in there. Find it. Find it.
(96)
For now I left out No Way’s middle names, even though one of them, Jose, was how he got his nickname. Instead I just searched for QUINONES and XILOX. Eleven files came up. One was a Bosch. dv4 from the day after the downloading, when we were still at Ix Ruinas and I’d still been under some anesthesia. I clicked it open. At first I couldn’t tell what the image was, and then it sort of clarified into Grgur’s big scalpy head bobbing close to the camera in green greasy grainy enhanced night-vision and a little light from a red-filtered lamp. One of the ugly Alarcon brothers-I couldn’t tell whether it was Leonidas or Luis-asked him something about what I guess was Ana’s diversionary squad and he said something back, but I couldn’t make it out. It was weird how completely I’d missed that whole strain of activity at the time, the patrol coming through and confronting them and everything, it was like I’d had a minilobotomy. Grgur’s head moved aside and I could see No Way’s face and naked upper body about two meters from the camera, his skin glowing phosphor-gray in the visible darkness.
Uh-oh, I thought. Bad deal. Bad. Bad.
No Way-basically my best friend, and my only real friend who remembered the crazy life-was at an angle on a blanket and a pair of hands was putting a blood-pressure cuff around his upper left arm. There was a sort of thick monocle surgical-taped over one eye and his other eye was taped open. He was wearing a black headband like the one I’d had for the downloading. I was getting that unfun gravityless feeling like the part of your face where you live is still okay but the dorsal side of your body-starting from your back teeth-is all melting away, like that Peter Lorre knockoff at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. A torso passed in front of the camera and then another hand pulled a drooly bit of tape-wrapped rag out of No Way’s mouth. He’d been knocked out and transported. I’d always thought No Way was so alert nobody could ever sucker him. But I guess your own crew can usually get the drop on you. Or maybe even his own communicator or some other piece of equipment had had a remote-fired restraint stunner planted inside it. He started trying to say something but I couldn’t hear anything, just Grgur and the Alarcon boys talking about whether they’d found anything. They must have strip-searched him. When the torso moved away I could see that No Way’s arms were pinned under big nylon sandbags like Whitefoods. A window came up in the lower right of the screen that said the software and field unit they were using was from Royal Ordnance, which I think is a subsidiary of British Aerospace. The window looked pretty much like the Norton System Doctor interface, except instead of Disk Integrity and everything it had temperature, skin temperature, blood pressure, respiration, muscle tension, “Estimated Voice Stress Level,” galvanic skin resistance, electroencephalograph, and a bunch of other exotic readouts. Of course, I couldn’t see the controls or anything, but from the one window it seemed like a pretty sophisticated gadget. Electroshock is pretty much the only kind of interrogation device anyone uses these days, since it’s so convenient and effective and doesn’t leave major marks. But I’d been hearing lately that even with a lot of conductant some of the Amnesty International types were figuring out how to tell if someone had been tortured from collagen calcification or some other histological change in the skin cells. So the deal now was to use pulses of AC voltages at very low amperage, like you were using an old hand-cranked magneto. Then ideally the current wouldn’t arc or cause burns. On this particular unit the bar graph went all the way down to fifty volts-which probably wouldn’t hurt much more than a good-sized pinch of carpet static-and up to sixty thousand volts, which could cause a heart attack if you weren’t healthy. I couldn’t see the electrical leads in the shot, but if they were following common practice one would be a large conductor, with a lot of conductant, clipped to the flap of skin between two toes, and the other would have been inserted in his anus or urethra. Leonidas Alarcon bent his head down, made sure No Way was breathing, and then wrapped his mouth and neck in a sort of big puffy yoke made of white rags. No Way’s head stuck up out of it like it had sunken halfway into an Elizabethan lace collar. Someone threaded what I guessed was a little microphone into the front of the muffler. No Way would be able to breathe and talk, barely, but if he started yelling it wouldn’t be loud. Evidently they weren’t far from the site. Where, presumably, the Guate patrol was stomping around.
“No Way?” Grgur’s voice said. “It’s Grgur. You know who I am, right?”
Someone flicked on the microphone. It picked up No Way’s voice pretty well:
“… quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,” he was mumbling, “ verbo et opere: mea culpa- ”
“Come on, don’t worry,” Grgur said, “we’re not going to hurt you, but we do need you to answer a few questions before we take you into detention.”
“… beatum Ioannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum, omnes Sanctos…”
“Hey. Pancho? You understand? You’re getting too uptight about this. Knock it off.” They let him finish, though. Maybe they were all too Catholic to zap him in the middle of a confiteor.
“… et vos, fratres, et te, pater, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum. Amen.”
I fucked up, I thought. I’d always said I wouldn’t trust anybody, and then I’d done it anyway, and once again I’d fucked up royal “Good,” Grgur’s voice said. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to just test this for a second.” The voltmeter bar slid up to seven thousand volts and back. No Way’s body arched a bit, and there was an exhalation of air, but he didn’t scream. If you’ve felt it, you know that the pain of electricity is like nothing else, it seems to come from within your own body and not from a foreign source. It’s like your cells decided to fry themselves. I couldn’t help seeing some of the readouts, pupillary size dilating from five millimeters to seven, muscle tension bouncing from sixty-five to ninety and back, galvanic skin resistance-that is, the conductivity of the electrolytes in the skin- going up twenty percent, the whole nine yards. Leonidas Alarcon looked back at the camera, which I guess was just the little teleconferencing lens in the screen frame of Grgur’s phone. He listened to the night sounds for a minute.
“Okay,” Leonidas said.
“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur’s voice asked. His voice had a new police-trained ring to it, with less of a Slavic accent than before. He sounded bored but I got the feeling that under that he was in a hurry.
“Hey, you’re getting a hard-on,” No Way rasped in Spanish. “Check it out, he likes his work.”
“Could you tell us your name, please?” Grgur repeated.
“Quinones Xiloch,” No Way said. Maybe he’d decided to get this over with as fast as possible.
“Could you tell us your age, please?”
“Thirty-four.”
Grgur paused for a minute, probably watching the readouts. The electroencephalograph seemed to be set to flag peaks, troughs, and unusual concentrations of the sinusoidal alpha waves over different time intervals. Right
