Inside Out: A novel Page 3

  Yeah, in a different mood.

  The guy glanced left and right at his buddies as though sharing his amusement, but in fact seeking reassurance. “You believe this guy?” he said. Then he turned back to Ben. “Hey. Look at me when I talk to you.”

  Ben felt it coming. He wasn’t even trying to stop it anymore.

  The guy raised his right hand and went to jab his outstretched finger into Ben’s chest. “I said—”

  Ben shot his left hand out and wrapped the guy’s finger in his fist. He stepped in and bent the finger savagely back. There was a sound like snapping tinder. The guy shrieked and plummeted to his knees. The sounds of conversation and laughter ceased and Ben could sense people reorienting, trying to figure out what had caused that bloodcurdling sound. Ben bent what was left of the finger farther back and twisted it. The guy shrieked again, his face contorted in pain.

  The guy to the left choked up on his pool cue and started to bring it around, and Ben instantly realized he’d been wrong about them turning tail. A klaxon went off in his mind and some deep-seated setting instantly ratcheted from bar fight to combat. He snatched his glass off the bar and flung gin into the guy’s face. The guy recoiled and started to turn away. Ben grabbed a bar stool and swung it in a tight arc, going for center mass, getting his hips and full hundred and ninety behind it. The guy made the mistake of trying to duck, and the stool caught him in the head instead of the shoulder and blasted him sideways.

  Somebody shouted. People started scrambling away. The third guy was backpedaling, his left arm out, his right hand reaching for the back of his belt, obviously going for a weapon, trying to gain an additional half second to deploy it. Ben bellowed a war cry and lunged forward, swatting away the guy’s outstretched arm, grabbing and securing his right wrist, attacking his eyes with his free hand. The guy screamed and tried to shake free and something clattered to the floor. Ben shot a knee into his balls. The guy doubled over and Ben let him go. He saw the first guy was coming shakily to his feet. He stepped in, wrapped his fingers in the first guy’s hair, yanked him forward, and clubbed him in the back of the neck. The guy’s arms spasmed and Ben felt something crack under his fist.

  He spun to face the other two. They were twisting and groaning. The first guy was splayed on the floor, motionless.

  A thought flashed through his mind, sobering in its clarity: did I kill him?

  He looked toward the exit. The patrons had scattered to the periphery and the center of the bar was clear, but ten feet away, between Ben and the door, four wiry Filipinos were pointing pistols at him. Off-duty cops? Another thought flashed through his mind:

  Shit, what are the chances?

  Two of them were starting to fan out to his flanks now, the two in the center moving forward, pistols still forward, one guy producing a pair of handcuffs from the back of his belt.

  Right now? Chances look about a hundred percent.

  Even if he’d been armed, and he wasn’t, dropping all four without getting shot in return would have required a hell of a lot of luck. He briefly considered raising his arms to show he was no threat and just walking past them to the exit. But their quick reaction to the disturbance, and the tactical way they were approaching him now, told Ben these guys were experienced, that they’d be happy to shoot him before suffering the humiliation of letting him just walk on by.

  Ben looked around and saw people holding up cellphones. They were taking his picture. Or video.

  He glanced at the Australians again. Two were still twisting. The other was still inert. The red haze was suddenly gone and a chill rippled through him. He raised his hands, palms forward, and thought, Oh, shit.

  2

  Falling

  Ulrich looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the K Street traffic twelve stories below, his feet perched on his mahogany desk, a wireless headset snug against his ear. “Thanks, Jim,” he said. “Really appreciated your time last week. And my client is just delighted the senator understands how counterproductive any additional regulation would be on top of what the industry is already burdened with. If you have any other questions, I know it would be their pleasure to arrange another golf outing. And of course you can count on their complete support. You bet. Thanks again.”

  He clicked off and thought, Done and done. Lobbying wasn’t so different from governing, really. He was making ten times his public-sector salary, which was nice, and his office furniture was a hell of a lot better than what he’d had in room 268 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, too, but other than that? Well, his work was no longer stamped secret, true, but nor would it have done for the public to have too close a peek at the way lobbyists made laws. The main thing was, the priorities were the same, and so were the methods. It was all about who you knew, and how you could get who you knew what they wanted.

  His other phone buzzed—the secure line that went straight to his desk and not through his secretary. He put his feet down and picked up the corded handset. “Ulrich.”

  “It’s Clements. Are you alone?”

  Clements was still the number two guy at CIA, having been passed over for the number one slot by the new administration in favor of an outsider. He was a good contact—one of many Ulrich used to maintain his influence among the city’s elite.

  “Yeah, I’m alone. What is it?”

  “We have a problem.”

  Ulrich’s chest tightened and he immediately thought, the tapes.

  “Go on.”

  “You know how in the end we all assumed the tapes had been destroyed by a patriot?”

  God, he hated being right all the time. “Yes.”

  “The director got a call this morning telling him to go to a website. He did. The tapes are all online.”

  “What the—”

  “Wait. They’re not public. The website is encrypted. The caller wants a hundred million dollars in uncut diamonds, or he decrypts the files and uploads them to YouTube and every media outlet in the United States and abroad.”

  Ulrich felt clammy sweat spring out under his arms and along his back. He was momentarily at a loss. If this had happened when he had the full authority of the vice president’s office behind him, he would have instantly taken control, and taking control would have calmed him. As it was, he felt trapped, in sudden thrall to this dimwit to whom he ought to be issuing orders. He felt horribly, uncharacteristically helpless.

  Which raised a question. “Why are you calling me?” he said.

  There was a pause. “The director just contacted the Justice Department. They’re bringing in the FBI.”

  “The FBI … no. Impossible. No one could be that stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid. He’s new. No previous connection to the Agency. He’s covering his ass by following procedure.”

  The room was suddenly stifling and Ulrich felt like he was falling. So much time had gone by. He hadn’t even thought about the tapes in … he couldn’t remember. He really had come to believe they were gone—launch all the investigations you want, it doesn’t matter because the tapes no longer exist.

  He’d never been so wrong.

  “You used to work with Bilton, right?” he heard Clements say. “The president’s counterterrorism adviser?”

  “I know him. Why?”

  “Call him. He’s got the ear of the national security adviser. We’re going to stonewall the Bureau, and the Bureau will go to the national security adviser to mediate. When they do, we want a sympathetic ear. All we need to do is keep the Bureau on a leash for a few days while we go after whoever is behind this.”

  “This is what we did last time. We didn’t find anything, remember?”

  “That was last time. This time, something new—something major—is in play. This guy, or this organization, whoever it is, they’re calling us. Creating websites. Issuing instructions. At some point, they’ll have to tell us how to deliver the diamonds. All that adds up to a whole series of opportunities we didn’t have before. The director’s mad
e me point man on this and I’ve already assembled a team—same kind of discreet team we used last time. So we can handle it quietly—but not if the Bureau gets involved and starts treating it as a criminal case.”

  Ulrich exhaled a deep breath. Clements was right, he had to admit. Embarrassing to have him point out something Ulrich had missed, but he was right.

  “Yeah, I can get in touch with Bilton. He’ll understand. What’s our window?”

  “The caller agreed to give us five days to put together the diamonds.”

  “What? You’ve only got five days to find this guy and air him out?”

  “It’s more complicated than just airing him out. He says he’s got the video rigged to an electronic dead-man switch. If he fails to disarm the switch at a preset interval, the video gets uploaded.”

  Hot bile surged into Ulrich’s throat. He pulled a bottle of Maalox Maximum Strength from a desk drawer, unscrewed the cap, and took a huge mouthful. He grimaced, his eyes watering, and swallowed.

  “Anything else?” he managed to ask.

  “Yeah. If this thing goes south, we’ll want to have our stories straight.”

  “If this thing goes south,” Ulrich said, his mouth pasty with the taste of the Maalox, “it won’t matter what our stories are.”

  He realized when Clements didn’t respond that he’d been hoping he would. Nothing could have confirmed Ulrich’s point more emphatically than the silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I’ll get in touch with Bilton right away,” Ulrich said. “Let’s keep each other posted.”

  He hung up, put his glasses on the table, and sat for a moment with his face in his hands.

  There was nothing he could do. The Agency was in charge, Ulrich’s involvement was reduced to that of a messenger boy … They were done, they were all done. Ever since the tapes were first discovered missing, he’d been living on borrowed time. No, since before then, even. Since he’d first figured out what to do with the Caspers. That’s what had killed him. He just hadn’t realized it until now.

  It wasn’t fair. For so many years, he’d tried so hard to protect the nation, and he just … he just couldn’t anymore. And without him, who would?

  And then some deep part of himself cut through the thickening mists of despair. He wasn’t helpless. He didn’t need to defer to the idiots at the CIA who had caused this catastrophe in the first place. He didn’t have the power he’d once wielded, true, but he still had the contacts. In the end, the contacts might matter more. All he had to do was use them. Use them well.

  He put his glasses back on, took another swallow of Maalox, and picked up the secure phone.

  3

  Lungs of a Dragon

  On his second day in the Manila city jail, Ben was still telling himself it could have been worse. But it wasn’t easy to figure out how.

  Out of habit, he’d been traveling sterile. His passport, his wallet, anything that could identify him—it was all inside the safe in his room at the Manila Mandarin Oriental. Even the magnetic room key was under a loose cobblestone on Paseo de Roxas, where he’d left it when he first set out that evening. The Philippines didn’t fingerprint visitors at immigration, at least not yet, so at the moment of his arrest, the only clue to his identity was the five thousand pesos and change in his jeans pocket. Which was no clue at all, thank God.

  His mind had been a shambles of conflicting emotions: exultation at having fought and prevailed; worry that he’d accidentally killed someone; fury at having been so stupid and incompetent; fear about what was going to happen to him. On top of everything else, humiliation. Being arrested by the local third world gendarmerie was about the biggest embarrassment a black ops soldier could suffer. He’d laughed at stories of guys it had happened to, thought they were fuckups and incompetents. But look at him now. He was one of them.

  He was determined to keep his options open, to say nothing that might unwittingly preclude subsequent possibilities. He didn’t respond when the cops told him one of the men he’d fought was dead, his neck broken. Maybe they were lying, though his gut told him, sickeningly, it was true. He was silent when they pretended they were his friends, he was silent when they knocked him down and beat the shit out of him. Part of him was aware that his silence was probably making things worse. But having lost control of everything else, he found himself clinging to whatever pathetic sense of dignity and power he could derive from the simple ability to deny his interrogators his voice.

  Eventually they told him they didn’t care, the guy he killed wasn’t Filipino and he wasn’t Filipino so why were they wasting their time? They’d dumped him in the Manila city jail, which Ben quickly learned from some of its English-speaking inhabitants had been built for a thousand inmates and currently housed more than five times that number. There were people of all ages, mostly Filipino but a few foreigners, too, convicted murderers serving life sentences alongside ordinary people who couldn’t afford bail and were just waiting for their day in court. It was so hot the concrete walls caused second-degree burns, so crowded the prisoners had to sleep side by side on the ground in shifts, and stank so badly from the accreted decades of concentrated piss and nonstop sweat and endemic diarrhea that you could feel the miasma on your skin like something moving and alive, something trying to worm its way into your pores so it could dissolve you from the inside out.

  There was an open-air pavilion where the prisoners were served food. Twice a day, the same watery, yellowish gray porridge smelling like rotting fish. On his first morning, Ben choked it down, knowing he had to eat to stay strong, then barely made it to the corner of the pavilion before throwing it all up. A bony but tough-looking Thai guy with brown skin as drawn and dried as jerky laughed and said, “No worry! Everyone do first time, sometime second time, third time. Soon-soon, okay, yum-yum.”

  “Yum, huh?” Ben said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Not yum-yum, you die,” the Thai guy said. “So you make yum-yum.”

  No one messed with him—his size and demeanor took care of that—but so what? Dummying up, he began to realize, was just a multiplication of his initial stupidity. Had the cops even filled out any paperwork? He couldn’t remember seeing any. Looking around at the shifting ranks of scrawny, gap-toothed prisoners, all of them filthy and haggard and sweating bare-chested in the heat, he could easily imagine himself being forgotten here.

  On the third day, with the magnitude of his fuckup gnawing at his mind and fear settling like some dark obstruction deep in his chest, he approached the guy who looked like the head guard and asked to call the U.S. consulate. The guy didn’t even look at him, he just laughed to himself and tapped his truncheon. Ben told him he was an American citizen, there’d been a mistake, he needed to talk to the consulate, okay? The guy’s laugh drifted away and his gaze shifted to Ben. His eyes were flat and his fingers curled around the hilt of his truncheon. Ben felt a surge of anger and pictured himself snatching the puke’s truncheon off his belt and braining him with it. But he managed to shove the anger back, knowing it was what had landed him here in the first place, knowing that as bad as things were, uncorking on a guard would make them infinitely, permanently worse.

  As he lay down that night on the radiant, piss-stained concrete floor of the small cell he shared with a dozen other prisoners, he remembered a moment from his jungle training. They’d dropped him in a part of the Everglades so dense that even at noon the sun was just a dim green glow at the top of the tree canopy. He had three days to reach his objective, alone, and a day in he started wondering, if he didn’t make it out, how would anyone even find him? He remembered the feeling of being lost and alone, monumentally insignificant in an indifferent, alien world. And now he was fighting that feeling again, that creeping, childlike dread at having been abandoned somewhere, orphaned, marooned.

  He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders as though trying to prove he was even still there. Nobody knew what had happened to him. Eventually, when he didn’t re
port in, the military would go looking, but where? He’d been inhaled like a dust mote into the lungs of a dragon. And every breath the dragon took carried him deeper into its body and farther from the light. He was in so deep already, how was he ever going to get out? In his few nightmarish days within the beast, he’d already run into guys who’d been here for years—years—without being sentenced, without even a hearing. He imagined that once you passed a certain point in a system like this one, the overseers wouldn’t let you up for air even if by some amazing coincidence they became aware of your case. At that point, after all, your story would be an embarrassment to them. And the worse your treatment, the more sympathetic your circumstances, the more egregious the entire story, the more culpable they would all be. After a certain amount of time without a hearing, being innocent would probably be the worst thing that could happen to someone in a place like this. What were they going to do, admit that for three, five, seven years, they’d caged up a guy who—oops—hadn’t even done anything, and never even gave him a hearing? Yeah, fat chance of that. Better to just leave you where you are. You’d been there that long already, and it wasn’t like anyone was asking about you. Let sleeping dogs lie, baby. Wait long enough, and eventually they’d be sleeping for good.

  The next morning, as he dozed on the concrete, he was awakened by a hard poke in his ribs, which were still bruised from some well-placed kicks delivered by Manila’s finest. He shot to his feet, his back to the wall, adrenaline rocketing through him. Three guards regarded him, their truncheons out. He looked from one to the other. Reasonably good odds, maybe, but what was he going to do—cut through these three and then levitate over the wall?

  One of the guards motioned with his truncheon. Ben nodded and started walking.

  They took him to a small room with faded green cinder-block walls and a single rattling fan that in its uselessness seemed only to worsen the clinging wet heat. A black man in jeans, sneakers, and a red polo shirt, obviously fit and somewhere in his fifties, was sitting at a peeling linoleum table in the center of the room, his shaved head beaded in perspiration. He shook his head in mild disapproval as Ben entered.