something to eat?'
'Yes,' Kendrick choked, his stomach squirming painfully at the thought.
Stenzer's smile broadened just a touch. Not a smirk but a genuine smile, as if things were going just fine.
'Okay, then.' Stenzer folded his hands together on his desk. 'But I'd like you to answer some questions first.'
At first, the routine was unvarying.
They kept Kendrick in the same empty, windowless subterranean cell he'd first been placed in. He had no pillow, no blankets. Daylight became a distant memory.
Any tenuous sources of information he had about the outside world were now cut off. One thing Kendrick realized for certain: nobody was coming to save him.
The last news he'd heard was that there had been some kind of rebellion among America's East Coast states, though he found this almost impossible to imagine. Supposedly, large sections of the United States armed forces had started fighting among themselves, with casualties in the thousands. Verifying the truth of this was impossible, of course. If such a rift really had occurred, it must have happened only a few weeks after his arrest.
Kendrick could imagine the causes, however. It would have started with the rot that had turned fertile wheat fields into millions of acres of sterile ruin, withering and dying under what was perceived as a biological and genetic attack by some invisible enemy. How easy it had been then to reduce America to a paranoid police state.
For a while he was tortured randomly. Guards would beat him with hoses if he fell asleep. Sometimes he let himself drop off anyway, enjoying a few blissful seconds of unconscious peace before the men in uniforms slammed the cell door open again.
At other times he would be asked repeated questions about people he did not know and had never heard of, about places he might have heard of but knew only from the pages of magazines.
Occasionally, as Kendrick was led down the long corridor for a session with Stenzer, he would see men in lab coats who looked like doctors or scientists walking past him. They spared him no glances: he was beneath them, he realized. Their faces told him that they considered him merely a traitor, and a criminal.
Kendrick faced Stenzer across the plastic desk for what seemed like the thousandth time, yet he couldn't even remember being taken out of his cell.
There was always hot food and coffee on these occasions. Kendrick's interrogator followed a routine where he'd get himself a coffee and a doughnut while reading through his eepsheet messages. Every time this happened Kendrick felt like he was trapped in some unique version of Hell, looking in from behind a one-way mirror while some office worker ingested his morning dose of carbohydrate and caffeine before pursuing a mundane life that Kendrick could now only dream of. The strange thing was that, despite his hatred for Stenzer -an emotion so intense that the old Kendrick could scarcely have imagined feeling it towards another human being – he found himself irrationally trying to please the lieutenant.
For a while he'd thought that the morning routine with the coffee and doughnuts formed a part of the general torture. But then he wondered if it was instead more on a par with the lack of response he got from the soldiers and scientists moving purposefully along the subterranean corridors of the Maze, an unintentional cruelty that served to weaken him further nonetheless.
Stenzer finished reading his eepsheet, then folded his hands into each other again and scrutinized Kendrick.
'August thirteen, time fourteen hundred hours. Interview with subject Gallmon, charges relating to' – Stenzer's eyes flicked down to the eepsheet – 'subverting the government of the American people by aiding and abetting its enemy.' Stenzer stared closely at him. 'Mr Gallmon, are you prepared to answer some questions today?'
'I don't know any of these people you tell me about,' Kendrick mumbled. 'I never met any of them. I'm not a terrorist.'
'But your wife did meet with some of them?'
Kendrick couldn't remember how many times they had spoken exactly these words to each other. 'I don't know,' Kendrick replied automatically. 'She interviewed people. She was a journalist, like me. Meeting someone doesn't imply collusion with them. I know I haven't done anything wrong.'
'Mr Gallmon,' Stenzer said, almost gently, 'if you're innocent, why would we have brought you all the way down here, to this place?'
Kendrick's stare met Stenzer's. 'Where are we?'
And then… something amazing happened.
Stenzer stood and poured a second cup of coffee, then held it out in front of Kendrick's face. Kendrick eyed the cream-coloured cup as though it was going to bite him.
'It's all right,' said Stenzer. 'Take it.'
At first Kendrick hesitated, but then he reached out and took the coffee cup in both hands. By contrast with the jungle far above his head, the Maze was cold and the warmth of the mug flowed into him like a liquid sun melting into the core of his soul. The scent and the steam of it made his head swim, as if he had just been handed back a tiny sliver of his previous life. At that point he felt at his very weakest.
'You can have a doughnut too if you want. Just help yourself.'
Stenzer's voice had an almost conspiratorial tone that Kendrick had never heard before. He sipped at the coffee and grunted at the flavour of it. He then reached over and picked up a cream doughnut, watching Stenzer with frightened animal eyes. Stenzer only nodded encouragingly.
The interrogator did something to his eepsheet and it greyed out; Kendrick could see that he'd turned it off. 'Listen, right now what goes on in here is between us. Nobody knows what I'm really saying to you. Do you understand?'
Kendrick touched the creamy edge of the doughnut to his mouth and felt a surge of bile rise halfway up the back of his throat. Then the confectionery was in him, his hands cramming the sugary dough into his mouth, filling him with a rush of warmth and pleasure.
Kendrick swallowed and coughed. 'I don't believe you,' he continued wearily. Of course the room was bugged. Of course they would record everything.
'Mr Gallmon – Kendrick – we both know this is a waste of time.' Stenzer stared at him. 'We both know this is going nowhere. Do you understand what I'm saying?'
'I'm not sure.'
Stenzer shook his head. The sugar had now entered Kendrick's bloodstream, making him as blissful as a newborn baby. Stenzer came around the desk, putting one hand almost paternally on his shoulder.
'Listen to me,' Stenzer said in a low voice. 'I can't do this any more. Do you understand me?' Kendrick turned slightly and stared at him.
'I'm serious,' Stenzer insisted. 'I can't go on treating you this way any more. So when you come here, you eat what you like and I won't tell the guards.'
Stenzer picked up another doughnut and handed it to Kendrick. Kendrick took it and forced himself to take more time eating it. The idea that Stenzer actually meant what he said formed a tiny brief blossom of hope deep within his chest, but he pushed the idea away.
He was, after all, in Hell. Hope was an impossible commodity in Hell.
'Tell me about yourself,' Stenzer continued. Kendrick finished the doughnut and drained the last of the steaming black coffee.
'I've told you everything I know.' The same thing he had become used to saying, over and over, week after week.
'Yes, I know,' said Stenzer. 'But I want to know who you are – who you really are. There are files that tell me things about you, about your family and your life, your job. But they don't tell me everything I want.'
