Situation Room

“No, they don’t,” he said. “We’ve got some home-growns in here, too.”

“Are they hiding out from the cartels?” Swann said.

Winn stared straight ahead. “Gentlemen, I’m sure there are aspects of your work that you aren’t at liberty to discuss. The same holds true for me.”

After a few minutes they had traveled to the far side of the camp from the helipad and administration buildings. The car stopped. There was no one around – no prisoners, no workers, no one at all. A small cabin sat by itself on a desultory dirt lot.

The men stepped out. The lot was barren, hard-packed earth. Any sense of camp activity, or even life itself, was far away from here.

Pete Winn handed Luke a key ring. There was only one key on it. Winn’s face was hard now. His eyes were steely and cold. His demeanor had completed its drastic change from the uncertain functionary who had greeted them on the helicopter pad, to whatever it was now.

“The existence of this cabin is classified. Officially, it doesn’t exist, nor does this prisoner. Your visit here does not exist. The Chinese government has made no inquiries, official or backdoor, into the whereabouts of a man named Li Quiangguo. My understanding is the Chinese have acted like they have nothing to hide or to be concerned about, and have even offered assistance in finding the source of the hack into the dam operating system.”

He gestured with his head toward the cabin.

“The walls of the cabin are soundproof. The key opens an equipment cabinet in the back room. If you feel you need equipment to facilitate your interrogation, you may find what you’re looking for in that cabinet.”

Luke nodded, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t like the assumption these people all seemed to make that he had been called in here to torture the prisoner.

Had he tortured people before? He supposed he had, depending on the definition of that word. But no one had ever called him into a situation with the idea that he was going to torture a suspect. If they did, they’d be pretty foolish – there were people far more versed at it than Luke. When he had done it in the past, it was on the fly and he was improvising, almost always because a subject had critical information and Luke needed that information now.

Pete Winn went on, but now his manner was more relaxed, and his words were mundane.

“If you need anything, lunch, beer, dinner, or you want the car to return you to the helipad, just pick up the telephone in the cabin and dial zero. We’ll send you what you need. We can put you up on the base for the night if you like, and provide any kind of toiletries or personal items. Soap, shampoo, shavers – we have all that stuff. We can also get you a change of clothes, within reason.”

“Thank you,” Luke said.

“I’m going to leave you to it,” Winn said. “Good luck.”

When the man was gone, Luke stopped to talk with his men outside the cabin. Green mountains towered around them outside the camp fence. The camp seemed to be built inside a bowl.

“Swann, how many years were you in China?”

“Six.”

“In what part?”

“All around. I lived in Beijing mostly, but I spent a lot of time in Shanghai and Chongqing, also a little bit in the south, in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.”

“Okay, I want you to watch this guy closely, get any indications from him that you can. Anything at all. Where you think he might be from. How old he might be. His level of education. His level of computer know-how. Is he even from China at all? Susan Hopkins’s people told me the guy is perfectly fluent in English. What are the chances he was born here in the States, or in Canada, or Hong Kong? Or anywhere at all, really. There are Chinese people everywhere.”

Swann shook his head. “If the guy’s an operative, I’m not going to know that stuff. He’ll be too good at hiding his origins.”

“Guess,” Luke said. “It’s not a math problem. There are no right or wrong answers. I just want to get your sense.”

Swann nodded. “Got it.”

Now Luke looked at him closely. “How squeamish are you?”

He had never worried about Swann’s personality before, but it occurred to him now that Swann could be something of a weak link in there.

“Squeamish? Squeamish, like how?”

“Ed and I may need to get serious in there.”

“Well, give me a heads-up and I’ll go for a little walk around these beautiful grounds.”

“If you do, make sure you wave to the snipers,” Ed Newsam said.

About a hundred yards away was a three-story guard tower. Luke and Swann glanced at it. A man with a rifle stood in the tower, apparently targeting them. From this distance, it looked like he had the rifle pointed right at them, and he was sighting down the scope.

“Can he hit us from there?” Swann said.

“With his eyes closed,” Luke said.

“He’s just practicing though,” Ed said. “Relieving a little boredom.”

They went inside.

*

The man wore a bright yellow jumpsuit. He sat on a metal folding chair in the middle of an empty room. He was large, with broad shoulders, thick arms and legs, and a prominent stomach.

He wore a black hood over his head. His wrists were cuffed behind his back. His legs were cuffed together at the ankles. He was slumped forward, as if sleeping. With the hood over his head, it was impossible to tell.

Luke pulled the hood from the man’s head. The man jerked in seeming surprise, and sat up. His jet black hair was mussed – it stood up in tufts in a few places, was flattened down in others. Even with the hood removed, he still wore airplane blinders – the kind people put over their faces to sleep on long flights.

He yawned as if waking from an afternoon nap.

“Li Quiangguo,” Luke said. “Ni hui shuo yingyu ma?”

In Mandarin Chinese, his words translated to Do you speak English?

The man smiled broadly. “Call me Johnny,” he said. “Please. It’s what I use here in the West. And let’s speak English. It makes it easier for everybody, especially me.”

The man’s English was the American version, certainly, but with no accent or regional flavor of any kind. Luke might have said he sounded like he was from the Midwest. But really, he didn’t sound like he was from anywhere. He could have been beamed down from a spaceship.

“Why is it easier for you?” Luke said.

“It’s easier on my ears. It means I don’t have to listen to people like you butcher the beautiful Chinese language.”

Now Luke smiled. “Tell me, Li. Why didn’t you kill yourself when you had the chance?”

Li made a face of exaggerated surprise, even disgust. “Why would I do that? I like America. And I’ve been treated pretty well so far.”

It was an interesting thing to say, considering that it came from a man who had been manacled to a metal chair overnight, with a black hood and airplane blinders on his head, in a detention center that didn’t exist, and with no way to contact the outside world. He was not technically under arrest and he hadn’t seen a lawyer. A lot of people might not agree that his arrangements constituted being treated well. Some might say he had been disappeared. Yes, he hadn’t been tortured, but for most people, lack of torture was a pretty low threshold.

Li almost seemed to read Luke’s mind. “I heard birds chirping outside this morning. That’s how I knew it was a new day.”