Sword of Allah (29 page)

The two doctors, Lieutenant Colonels Randy Curtis and Juraj Vojnomirovic, watched the prisoner through a closed-circuit television from the comfort of an air-conditioned control room. A vague whiff of detergent and ether hung in the air, lending the impression that this was a hospital. And indeed it was, of a sort. Extraction was its specialty, not of cancers or malignant organs at the hands of competent surgeons, but of something far harder to isolate and remove: information.

The subject under their watchful observation was strapped into a chair, sensors taped to his head and torso. Bags pregnant with clear fluids hung heavily from posts on
either side, feeding cannulae inserted into the ropy cephalic veins in his forearms that were bound to armrests with webbing. The palms of his hands were open like that of a supplicant.

‘What do you think, Voj?’ asked Curtis, who wore a white coat over combat greens and clutched a clipboard in one hand while he scanned the subject’s vital signs. He ran a pencil down the left hand column, mentally ticking off the physical implications of each observation.

‘I think we will turn him inside out and see if he stinks,’ said Vojnomirovic with a face utterly immune to the horror to come.

‘Well, they all do that, Voj. The good, the bad and the consummately ugly. What I meant was, do you think he’s ready?’

‘As ready as he’ll ever be,’ said Vojnomirovic, massaging his chin contemplatively. ‘His vitals are good, and he has reacted well to the sensory deprivation program since he arrived. It’s my turn to be the devil, no?’

‘Y’know, Voj, sometimes your enthusiasm scares me. But no, it isn’t your turn.’

‘I will toss you for it.’

Curtis felt in his pocket for change and pulled out a quarter. ‘You call,’ he said as he flicked the coin in the air.

‘And maybe it is time you moved to supply or something. Heads.’

Curtis caught the coin on the flat of the clipboard and presented the result to Vojnomirovic with a flourish. ‘Tails. You lose.’

Vojnomirovic shrugged. ‘Just don’t fuck it up, eh?’

‘Jesus, Voj, you can be such a schizy sonofabitch,’ said Curtis. ‘Don’t you turn Baltic on me now.’

Juraj Vojnomirovic had been drafted into the Serbian army that ‘cleansed’ Bosnia, after it had come to someone’s attention that he was a psychiatrist. They put his expertise to good use in the army’s interrogation team. His understanding and application of hallucinogenic drugs, the subject of a paper he’d written, had been far more effective at extracting information from spies and captured officers than the electrodes and smouldering cigarette tips conventionally utilised in such instances; and so his abilities soon came to the attention of Amnesty International and other human rights and United Nations groups. When the world came looking for people to blame for all the hate and loathing that had bubbled to the surface when the war had exhausted itself, Juraj Vojnomirovic’s name was on the list. But he had disappeared. His new employers, the Americans, were keen to remove him from the limelight while they learned from his practical experience.

Curtis leaned over the bench and checked the prisoner’s vitals one more time. Vojnomirovic was absolutely right. This was one mother-fucker they did not want to lose. On arrival, the prisoner had been asked in a civilised, straightforward manner to capitulate – help the good guys fight the evildoers and give straight answers to straight questions – but he had preferred silence. And so he’d been handed over to Curtis and Vojnomirovic. They put him on the standard program of deprivation: denied him sleep, sound, colour, human contact and even solid food for four days and five nights. The treatment had broken down much of the subject’s resistance, his heart rate and blood pressure indicating intense levels of stress. Three to five days were usually more than enough. Still, though, he had
not broken, which meant one of three things: one, that his will was strong; two, that he had such heinous secrets lurking within that he was afraid to give them up; three, that he had nothing whatsoever of any value to divulge. The odds were strongly in favour of number two. So now it was time for the next phase: to administer the medicine that would storm his senses like a pack of rabid dogs whipped and beaten to insatiable levels of hatred.

‘Okay, Doctor Evil, let’s see what you can do,’ said Vojnomirovic. ‘I think this one is strong. I recommend starting with three hundred micrograms. Perhaps this terrorist would like to see what terror is all about.’

Curtis whistled softly. ‘Jesus, Voj, remind me never to get on your bad side. See you in – what – four hours?’

‘Yes, he should be well and truly softened up by then,’ said Vojnomirovic as he opened the door, letting in a wave of cool air freshly spiced with disinfectant that cleared Curtis’s sinuses.

‘Hey, when you come back, bring me a cup of coffee, will ya?’ Curtis called out to Vojnomirovic’s back as the door closed with a hiss, the rubber soles of his boots squeaking with the sound of a child’s rusty swing as he walked off down the linoleum corridor. Curtis looked at the subject again. The man’s eyelids were heavy and drool hung from his chin. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ Curtis said softly as he touched the keyboard on the laptop in front of him. The command sent a massive dose of EA-1729, otherwise known as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, into the subject’s right radial vein. He then took a seat on a chair and waited for the first signs from the subject that indicated the hounds were at the gate.
Kadar Al-Jahani had no idea what day it was or how long he’d been in captivity. His state of mind was such that he even doubted
who
he was, reality having been ripped from him by his captors. He was initially surprised by how well he’d been treated. There had been interviews and he’d been asked a barrage of questions, the interrogators almost gentlemanly in their approach. Naturally, he had refused to cooperate, erecting walls of silence behind which to hide. These Americans regarded themselves as a humane people, wearing their heightened sense of what it meant to be ‘civilised’ like a badge of arrogance. Surely they were incapable of the sort of torture his countrymen, with no civil rights niceties to adhere to, might have chosen to employ. But the Americans were no fools. What had surprised him were the
questions
. They obviously knew of his role in the embassy hit, about the gunrunning and, this was most disconcerting, they were aware of his relationship with Duat. How they knew these things was a mystery to him, and it took every ounce of willpower to keep his surprise at their knowledge of his activities from his eyes. But, he observed with immense satisfaction, they knew no details, naively expecting that he would supply them, that he would simply answer their questions. He told them nothing. That had changed their attitude.

They moved him from his original cell to one with walls, floor and ceiling the colour of sun-bleached bone. The cell was utterly silent. There was no night or day. They inserted a catheter in his penis and tubes carried fluids into his forearms. They strapped him to a chair naked and denied him sleep, jolts of electricity hitting the soles of his feet like broken bottles when he dared to close
his eyes. And they left him alone with his breathing and his heartbeat.

Kadar Al-Jahani sat in this semi-conscious void where there was no light or dark, no stimulation save for the pain inflicted when sleep almost overcame him. Indeed, he had started to use the electric charges as his last anchors to the physical world when the realisation that he was on the verge of nothingness became too much to bear. And now exhaustion was his enemy. Every fibre of his body craved sleep like an addict denied supply.

The agony of complete dislocation caused tears to flow freely from his eyes and down his cheeks, the drops spattering on his chest and thighs. The sensitivity of his skin had increased a hundredfold and he cried out in alarm at the pain of the droplets hitting his naked nervous system. He believed the noise he made forced the walls to bow outwards, as if they were made of stretched rubber. He blinked with surprise and then he started to shake.

Lieutenant Colonel Randy Curtis heard the subject yell. He checked the monitor and saw the man’s body spasm, straining against the webbing. He appeared to relax momentarily and then the first of the convulsions began. He smiled with professional satisfaction. So far, the subject’s reactions were nothing extraordinary.

The Kadar Al-Jahani that was human had retreated far inside a long tunnel, largely protected from the assault of sensory deprivation the way a rabbit hides from a fox by retreating to the depths of its burrow. But something new was shaking the very foundations of Kadar’s world, something ominous and brutal that the conscious remnant of the man could not grapple with, and he shook violently with fear.

And suddenly Kadar Al-Jahani was back in his body, wrenched from hiding. He blinked. The walls appeared to breathe, expanding and contracting like diaphragms. Kadar felt himself being dragged slowly towards one of the walls with every breath. And then a white mouth pale as death opened in front of him as he drew near, revealing curved serpentine fangs leaking drops of green poison that steamed and hissed when they hit the floor. A blast of fetid air that smelled of eviscerated intestine rolled over him and he urinated with fear, filling the bag. He slammed his eyes shut to keep out the horror. And when he opened them again, he was no longer Kadar Al-Jahani the grown man, but Kadar the small boy, lying in his bed. He looked around frightened, for he knew that something terrible and deeply disturbing had turned the world he had known utterly inside out. He looked at the floor and it moved, a sea of cockroaches roiling and pitching over each other, and the air was full of their clicking sounds as millions of pairs of legs and mandibles thrust and parried.

Kadar Al-Jahani began to cry, for the bed was filling with blood. Somehow he knew what would come next, he felt the movement of the hateful creatures that populated his childhood and adolescent nightmares. Rats. He felt them under his sheets, running up and down, rummaging under his body. One of them ran up on his stomach and sat back on its haunches and laughed, its face not rat-like at all but human. He cried out to his parents for help but his lips had been sewn shut. And then the air was full of strange creatures and people in various stages of decay, floating towards him in the air. He forced his lips open to
scream, ripping the stitches from his lips. Blood filled his mouth and it tasted of sand.

Vojnomirovic opened the door and came in backwards, his hands full with cups of coffee and toasted Pop-Tarts.

‘Thanks, Voj, I knew you’d come through,’ said Curtis, relieving Vojnomirovic of the tarts and one of the cups before its contents spilled. ‘You’re just in time. I think we may have overdone it here.’

‘What’s up?’

Curtis gestured at the monitor and turned up the sound. A primeval howl boomed from the speakers, an agonised sound that might have come from an animal in a trap, the jaws of which had closed on the doomed creature’s shattered limb. The subject’s back was arched in the chair as if infected with tetanus, eyes wide with terror and fear, while blood flowed freely from his mouth, becoming thick red strings that ran down his chin and chest and pooled in his groin.

‘Bitten his tongue again, by the looks of things,’ said Vojnomirovic.

‘We’ve got to start using those rubber protectors,’ Curtis said as he munched on a Pop-Tart. ‘Have a look at his vitals.’

Vojnomirovic didn’t need to glance at the information on screen to see that the subject’s heart was badly stressed. He sipped his coffee contemplatively. ‘Okay, time for Mr Nice Guy,’ he said. ‘Give it to him.’

Curtis tapped the keystroke on the laptop that would release a large, soothing dose of the barbiturate sodium pentothal into the subject’s bloodstream, rescuing the subject almost instantly from the LSD-induced madness that had become his terrifying reality.

‘Okay, I’m ready,’ said Vojnomirovic, grabbing a bottle of water off the desk. He opened the door and it hissed closed behind him. A few second later, he appeared on the monitor as a door cracked open in the subject’s cell, coincidentally in the precise spot where Kadar Al-Jahani had seen the white fanged mouth.

The pentothal worked quickly, observed Vojnomirovic as the subject’s muscles began to relax. He was right about the man having bitten his tongue, but fortunately the damage was minor. He could easily have bitten it off and then drowned in his own blood as it gushed into his mouth, and he made a mental note to insist on the rubber mouth guards from here on.

Vojnomirovic watched as Kadar Al-Jahani’s breathing slowed and he slumped in the chair, exhausted. He then released the webbing that held the man’s head to the chair and, in his softest, most soothing voice, said, ‘Kadar, are you all right? It’s okay…It’s okay…’ He put the bottle to the subject’s lips and let the cool water slowly dribble into his mouth. The subject’s red-streaked tongue swept over his lips and his eyes opened. When he saw Vojnomirovic leaning over him, offering him the water, he began to cry.

‘Make them stop, make them stop,’ he said in Arabic, and then in English, ‘please…’

‘Yes, I can make them stop for a little while, Kadar, but only you can make them stop permanently.’

‘How…how can I?’ he asked thickly, a slick sheet of red mucus covering his lips and chin.

Vojnomirovic wiped the man’s face with a towel. ‘You can tell them what you know,’ he said, offering more water
from the bottle. ‘Start with the embassy in Jakarta. Tell them what happened there.’

‘But I don’t know anything. I don’t. Please. I don’t know anything.’

‘Well then, I can’t make the dreams stop. I can try, but unless you help me, they won’t listen.’

Somehow, Kadar Al-Jahani had been able to step back out through the white snake’s mouth and shut it behind him, locking out the hideous world beyond that was a ghastly fusion of memory and nightmare. He knew, somehow, that these people induced the frightful pictures, but could they control them at will? The man who had rescued him from the madness was obviously his saviour. Kadar Al-Jahani looked at him briefly and thought he saw a halo, a Christian symbol of holiness, over his head. He wanted to embrace the man like a son would hold his father. But something was not right. There was a price. Information. A voice within Kadar Al-Jahani told him to be wary, careful, that the information he kept within was not to be divulged. The voice belonged to a part of Kadar that was unconvinced that the captors could release the nightmares at will.