“He may be signing off on the final drafts; he has to. But these concepts…they’re not his. The methodology isn’t his. It’s too unrestrained…too hard-line.” August paused. “Bronson is a diplomat, a career civil servant. He’s teleconferenced, written reports, and caressed ass cheeks his whole career to get where he’s at. He’s not a pro, and he’s definitely no operative.”
Gil rotated left in his seat. “Slow down. What are you implying?”
August regarded his fellow agent. “Read between the lines, Gil. These methods, techniques and tactics…it’s tradecraft.”
“You’re shitting me.”
August shook his head. “I wish I were.”
“Well, who’s feeding them to Bronson?”
August gritted his teeth. “If I tell you this, you can’t share it. I mean it, Gil. From this point forward, you are sworn to secrecy. What I divulge, you take with you to the grave.”
“Done.”
August paused for a good while, peered over, then uttered his wife’s name.
Gil Norris’s eyes expanded. “You’re fucking joking.”
“Bronson had her brought in to assist the op not long after I transferred out of the Annex,” he explained, his tone dampening. “She’s been working closely with him ever since, and I’m telling you, every scheme in that postscript is a rewritten copycat pirated from the CIA anti-insurgency playbook. They’re atrocious. And they’re just the beginning.”
“And you know this for certain?”
August shrugged. “Married couples talk sometimes. I remember tidbits of things she’d let slip when she’d had a little too much white zin; like the new and improved anti-insurgency methods the CIA established in the Middle East and Afghanistan after their black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques went mainstream and the entire civilized world learned just how fucked up they were. Black sites still existed but were mandated to become a lighter shade of gray. Interrogations remained status quo; they had to be, but the methods of breaking respondents were augmented to fall in accordance with basic human rights and international law. The approaches that worked best were deemed torture and couldn’t be used anymore.
“In short order they learned that one-on-one vanilla interrogator-versus-respondent interrogation didn’t always work. In fact, it did so rarely since most of the respondents were typically military or civilian operatives who’d received months of resistance training. The CIA needed a boost. The thinktank geeks at Langley did some brainstorming, and it didn’t take long to discover one. They brought in the respondent’s family, the children, specifically. They’d scare the hell out of them with dogs barking and foaming at the mouth at them, make them watch cockfights or put cages of rats, spiders, or snakes beside them, kill a family of rabbits, whatever it took to make them scream, cry and urinate themselves. Made for a lot more willing respondent, most times.”
“I would think so,” Gil reacted, almost chuckling.
August regarded him with a sharp eye for a split second. “But there were times when those lengths still didn’t work, for whatever reason, so they resorted to something else entirely. Direct action, switching their focus to widespread, brutal collateral damage. One anniversary, I took Bea to Outback Steakhouse. She loved that place. She had a blood rare filet that night, some sangria, and damn near put down a fifth of Evan Williams on her own.”
Gil licked his lips. “I could do that right about now.”
“She told me about this Mullah Muttaqi…one of the Taliban’s ministers of intelligence, a mark so notorious that her team was given a carte blanche directive to find him and bring him in. They commandeered a platoon of Expeditionary Marines, raided houses and businesses, plundered an entire region to get him. They spent two days interrogating him one-on-one; all conventional methods proved to be ineffective. No matter what they tried, they just couldn’t break him. He just laughed in their faces, quoted excerpts from the Koran, and prayed.
“So they went after his family. They tied his wife up right in front of him and grilled her for hours, and I mean literally, as in they placed a dozen quartz heat lamps over her chair. Blistered every inch of her skin on her face and shoulders…but he didn’t budge. They got her wet and hit her with electricity, and nothing. They put a gun to her head, and he just flat out told them to pull the trigger. They moved on to his son and his three-year-old little girl with Down syndrome after that. Interrogators yelled at them, subjected them to barking dogs, loud death metal music, and snuff films. Both kids soiled themselves and were left to sit tied to chairs for two days in their own waste while the flies ate at them. The hardheaded son of a bitch still wouldn’t give.
“Her team was beside themselves, but those results only steeled Beatrice. She’s always been an…overachiever. She pulled a few strings with some of her assets at the Pentagon. Some calls were made, a story was manufactured, intel fabricated, and a kinetic operation came into being in the essence of a false flag. Muttaqi’s village was grated into compost by several thousand thirty-millimeter depleted uranium rounds from a squadron of A-10s. They made a second pass and carpet-bombed anything that was left, wiped about two hundred and fifty people—men, women, and children—off the map. They showed him the video, and he didn’t believe it, so they took him there and let him see the destruction for himself. They told him his sister’s village was next, and the planes were already airborne. A hundred people lived there, including his ninety-year-old grandmother. His sister had five children and twins on the way. It broke him.”
Gil was beyond the point of being intrigued. “Well, goddamn. That was a gnarly scandal. Of course, you do realize there’s no way any of what you just said wasn’t classified.”
August groaned. “Probably was then, not like it matters today. The only thing that matters is what we’re about to do now, on the domestic front. And what
