tight.
He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through the plastic cuffs and my hands were my own again.
“Thanks,” I said.
He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumps of clay on the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, they tingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made me cry out. I put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. I didn’t trust myself to stay on my feet.
As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently and rocking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It was all I could do to keep from sobbing — I covered my mouth and held the sounds in. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.
Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the door. I cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuck it all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but only found a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my hands and stepped out of the john.
“What were you doing in there?” the guy said.
“Using the facilities,” I said. He turned me around and grabbed my hands and I felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wrists had swollen since the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruelly into my tender skin, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out.
He shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down, who, I saw now, was Jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek.
“Are you OK?” I asked him, and my friend with the utility belt abruptly put his hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the back of my head off the truck’s metal wall with a sound like a clock striking one. “No talking,” he said as I struggled to refocus my eyes.
I didn’t like these people. I decided right then that they would pay a price for all this.
One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup of coffee — they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Starbucks, I saw — and they had an indistinct conversation that involved a fair bit of laughter.
Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air, not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the slice of outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was dark out, and raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that’s part mist.
The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that’s when I knew that I wasn’t a prisoner of some terrorists — I was a prisoner of the United States of America.
They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for us one at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. As close as I could work it — counting seconds off in my head, one hippopotami, two hippopotami — the interviews lasted about seven minutes each. My head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal.
I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Up close, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the corners of her mouth.
“Thanks,” I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and then dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic politeness, but it had been drilled into me.
She didn’t twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the truck and behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat in it. Two of them — Severe Haircut woman and utility belt man — looked at me from their ergonomic super-chairs.
They had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and backpack spread out on it.
“Hello, Marcus,” Severe Haircut woman said. “We have some questions for you.”
“Am I under arrest?” I asked. This wasn’t an idle question. If you’re not under arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can’t do to you. For starters, they can’t hold you forever without arresting you, giving you a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was I ever going to talk to a lawyer.
“What’s this for?” she said, holding up my phone. The screen was showing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data without giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message — an animated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture — because I liked to customize my gear.
“Am I under arrest?” I repeated. They can’t make you answer any questions if you’re not under arrest, and when you ask if you’re under arrest, they have to answer you. It’s the rules.
“You’re being detained by the Department of Homeland Security,” the woman snapped.
“Am I under arrest?”
“You’re going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now.” She didn’t say, “or else,” but it was implied.
“I would like to contact an attorney,” I said. “I would like to know what I’ve been charged with. I would like to see some form of identification from both of you.”
The two agents exchanged looks.
“I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,” Severe Haircut woman said. “I think you should do that right now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don’t look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now, what is this for?”
“You think I’m a terrorist? I’m seventeen years old!”
“Just the right age — Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You’ve posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public Internet.”
