Dark Chant In A Crimson Key

Patreaux rose and went to an antique, carved wooden sideboard, opened it, and took out a decanter filled with a dark amber liquor. He poured the brandy into two balloon snifters, handed one to me. He did not sit back down at the table, but stepped back against the wall next to the sideboard, where his face was half hidden in shadow.

'What occurred to me is that there's a story about Sinclair you may not have heard,' Patreaux said casually. 'As a matter of fact, it involves Amnesty International. I don't know how much of it is true, but it does contradict the general belief that Sinclair has never been captured. I can't verify the veracity of the story, and I frankly can't see how it could be of any use to you.'

'I'd still like to hear it, Gerard.'

The slight man now emerged from the shadows near the sideboard, sat back down across from me. He sipped at his brandy, then set the snifter down to his right. 'One of Amnesty International's chief concerns is, of course, the abuse of human rights- especially the use of torture. Torture is a common practice in many countries, but what is confounding is that today there are upwards of fifty-five countries with governments that officially sanction the use of torture by the police and armed forces. Adding to the horror of this situation is the fact that, in most cases of torture, the aim is not to extract information, but to break the bodies and minds of dissidents; torture becomes a tool of political terror and oppression. The secret police will pick up a known dissident, break him or her beyond repair but still living, and then release that individual back into society, where the condition of the victim's body and mind will serve as a warning to other dissidents of what could happen to them if they do not mend their subversive ways.'

The Swiss paused, either to gather his thoughts or to give me a chance to ask questions. I remained silent, watching him. I knew more than a bit about torture and its long-term effects, perhaps even more than Gerard Patreaux, but I didn't care to talk about it.

Patreaux took another sip of brandy, continued, 'But there are, of course, cases where the purpose of torture is to extract information the authorities feel is vital to state security, or whatever, from an individual who feels it is equally vital to keep the information from the authorities, and would much prefer to die rather than talk. For these people, the perceived emotional anguish they would suffer from talking is greater than the physical agony they are suffering at the moment. If such a person is trained to resist torture, if he or she can successfully evade and dissemble under great duress, then the authorities and their torturers have a real problem. Such a person may very much wish to die, especially after the torturers' first pass at him or her, and this desire can often speed up the process. There is only so much agony the human mind and body can endure at one time before the nervous system begins to shut down, resulting in unconsciousness or a general numbing process. This kind of situation can be even further complicated when the authorities, for one reason or another, must eventually exhibit the victim to the outside world, and it cannot be obvious that the victim has been tortured. This is the problem faced by some renegade police departments in your Western democracies: torture may be used to extract confessions, or sometimes merely to punish, but care must be taken not to leave marks on the victim that could prove embarrassing at a subsequent hearing or trial.

'For these difficult cases, the average torturer-one who knows only how to break bones, burn flesh, or tear out fingernails until the victim talks-just won't get the job done. Since the torturers cannot risk the premature-from their point of view- death of the victim, a specialist is often brought in, someone who can manage to keep retuning the victim's nervous system to register a maximum degree of pain while keeping the victim alive. Very often this person is a specially trained physician. We call these people torture doctors.

'The most successful and notorious torture doctor was a man by the name of Richard Krowl, a renegade Harvard Medical School graduate who, at one time, was considered a brilliant researcher into the causes and treatment of chronic pain. He ended up a torture doctor after he was barred from both research and general practice as a result of conducting secret, unethical, and illegal research experiments at some university. apparently, he really believed he was conducting important research that could be done in no other way.' Patreaux paused, shook his head in disgust. 'You know, it's really quite remarkable how some people can rationalize virtually anything they do, no matter how vile.'

'Indeed,' I agreed quietly.

'After his teaching credentials and license were lifted, Krowl started free-lancing as a torture doctor for various Central and Latin American dictatorships. He ended up with his own special torture institute, if you will, a training facility for torturers located on an island twenty miles off the coast of Chile that was financed, for the most part, by the right-wing governments he was working for. We called it Torture Island, and it was there that Krowl and his staff of resident torturers carried on his so-called research into pain to his heart's content, using as subjects political prisoners his backers had sent there for no other reason than punishment and death. It was also used as a training school for would-be torturers sent there by the sponsoring countries. Krowl would also, on occasion, accept responsibility for extracting information from difficult subjects sent to him by any government or government agency willing to pay his reportedly very high fee. In fact, we have reason to believe that Krowl's services were contracted for, on more than one occasion, by such unlikely and mismatched clients as MI5, the Mossad, the CIA, and the KGB.'

'But you could never prove it.'

'Correct. Ironically, not a few of the torturers on Krowl's staff were former police officers from various countries who had been trained in interrogation techniques in the United States as part of law enforcement exchange programs. Americans, on the whole, aren't all that much interested in torture, as long as it's the citizenry of some other country who are being tortured. Your Congress routinely votes financial aid to right-wing governments widely known to employ torture as a means of political repression. For that reason, in a very real sense Torture Island was largely financed by the recycled tax dollars of American citizens. We felt the situation would change if we could obtain incontrovertible evidence that American citizens had been delivered into the hands of foreign torturers by an agency of their own government. We believed that the outcry in the American media would be sufficient to force the offending governments to withdraw their funding-and use-of Richard Krowl and thus shut down Torture Island.

'The problems involved in obtaining proof were formidable. Because he fancied himself a serious researcher, it was assumed that Dr. Krowl kept voluminous records on the island, but Torture Island was twenty miles offshore, in shark-infested waters, surrounded by jagged coral reefs, with sheer escarpments on all sides. In short, it was inaccessible by any means of transportation except helicopter. There was one scheduled helicopter run per week, to bring in supplies and ferry prisoners, and the skies were carefully watched the rest of the time by heavily armed guards.'

'What about the testimony of former prisoners?' I asked, intrigued by this story of Richard Krowl and Torture Island, but wondering what any of it had to do with John Sinclair.

'The identity of any prisoner sent to Torture Island was always a carefully guarded secret. Many, probably most, of the victims sent there for interrogation were subsequently murdered, probably fed to the sharks. Those marked for return to their societies, even had we been able to identify and find them, would have had their minds so mutilated by the experience that their testimony would have been useless. So, for years, all we were left with were the persistent rumors.'

Patreaux had finished his brandy, and he rose to pour himself another. I waited, increasingly impatient to hear some mention of John Sinclair, but reluctant to interrupt the flow of his words with questions. He poured more brandy into my glass, then began to slowly pace back and forth, his face passing in and out of the shadow cast by a standing lamp next to the sideboard.

'There was one outsider who did manage to get on the island,' he continued in a tone so soft I had to strain to hear him. 'According to the story, he got there by posing as a student sent there for one of Krowl's torture seminars by a Latin American government. In fact, he was an American investigator for Amnesty International. Reportedly, he was actually able to steal a large number of Krowl's files, and he somehow managed to escape from the island with this documentation. Unfortunately, he never got a chance to pass on any of it. He was captured by Krowl's security forces before he could get out of Chile. He was taken back to the island and tortured to death-not to gain information, of course, but to punish, and for use as an object lesson for any other investigator who might be tempted to try the same thing. Amnesty International received his remains in a sealed vacuum container-Krowl wanted us to be able to determine the details of what had been done to him before the corpse deteriorated. An autopsy revealed that he had taken a very long time to die. He had been partially devoured, eaten alive, and the bite marks were human. There were signs of crushed bones, charred flesh, punctured organs, unnatural surgery; so