“Did Yassine search you after your bath?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“Because he searched me.”
“So what? Did he find anything on you?” I asked, sensing that Theo had done something wrong.
“Yeah, a piece of paper with writing on it.”
Apparently, after Theo’s arrival, the emir had given him a red pen and some paper. Minutes after he finished explaining this to me, the Little Judge and Yassine burst into the room.
“Where’s the red pen!” screamed Yassine, throwing Theo up against the back wall.
“Hey, Jumu’ah,” said the Little Judge casually, walking by me without so much as a glance. He was holding a 9mm pistol and wearing a Puma baseball cap.
They didn’t beat Theo on this occasion, just put him against the wall as if they might execute him on the spot as they searched the room for the pen.
The first time I saw Yassine hit him I have to admit I almost laughed—which sounds horrible, I know. Look, judge me after you’ve spent time in a terrorist prison. Anyway, Yassine stood at the door, holding an AK-47 by the barrel. He called Theo over and then balled up his free hand.
“I know karate,” he said, wearing a big smile.
“Really?” Theo replied.
And then Yassine demonstrated his Wu-Tang style by punching him, right in the rib cage.
“Do you want to see more? Do you want to see more?” he asked enthusiastically.
“No, no, that’s enough,” said Theo.
It was weird seeing that side of Yassine. With me he was always respectful and even protective, but with Theo there was nothing but pure, brutal hatred. Our captors all hated Theo, the spy, and I only really realized how fortunate I was in my treatment when I compared myself to him. At first I tried sticking up for him when the guards beat on him, but I quickly saw that my attempts to do so were futile. They just enjoyed it too much.
Another time, the Little Judge came storming into the room and kicked him in the chest while wearing bubblegum-pink Crocs. I had seen these slippers through the bottom of my cap while on bathroom runs on many occasions, but never knew who was wearing them. All I knew was that whoever they belonged to always tripped Theo and then booted him in the ass as he stumbled like a clown. I don’t even know why he kicked him that day. He just busted into the room, stomped Theo’s chest, and then started yelling at him in Arabic with his hands on his hips. He was so mad spit was flying out of his mouth and all over Theo. Then he left as suddenly as he arrived and slammed the door behind him. I think he was just blowing off some steam.
Picture being locked in a room with your polar opposite, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with no end in sight. Sharing a cell with another American could have been something that made me feel less alone, but it didn’t work out that way; instead it made things worse, being that it kind of felt like I was locked in a room with John du Pont. As much as I felt sorry for Theo, I began to despise him almost as soon as I met him. Not because he was stupid or because he was weak—I despised him because he didn’t seem to have an ounce of loyalty in his entire body, or even really understand the concept. To me, his motivation for entering Syria in the first place demonstrated this perfectly.
“So you came here to try and make money off of Tice?” I’d asked, early in his story.
“That’s the point,” he said.
To me this meant that if I had gone missing first, he would have been just as eager to use my bad luck to make some money and give his career a boost. The fact that he was there to exploit the misfortune of another American who was in the exact same position as me was hard to accept. It was a blow to my morale; in my darker moments it made me wonder what I had done to deserve the same fate as someone who had all but asked for what happened to him by letting greed and ambition completely obliterate common sense.
Theo told me that besides being a journalist who’d written two books, one of which “briefly examined” Islamic extremism, he was also a professor (which turned out to be a lie), and that his goal was to become an expert on Middle Eastern affairs and give lectures on the region for boatloads of money, like the guy in The Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, things didn’t seem to be working out for him at the moment, and his once-impressive résumé, along with the fact that he had lived in Yemen and Damascus and yet didn’t have a soul in the entire country to vouch for him, all only made him look more like a spy. When I asked how exactly an American citizen goes about living in Damascus for two years, he said the government didn’t know he was there, at one point going so far as to say he was “undercover”—yet at the same time he had a valid visa, issued by the Syrian government. Nothing he told me ever added up. He even had two names, Theo Padnos and Peter Theo Curtis; the jihadis didn’t know about the first one, which he asked me to keep between us.
Along with Arabic, Theo also spoke French, German, and Russian.
“Why would they ever think you’re a spy?” I remember saying when I heard that one.
As if having them think he was a spy wasn’t bad enough, he’d “confessed” immediately the first time he was tortured, saying whatever they wanted in order to get them to stop after just one
