It went on for a long time-both knees and his left elbow. Breaks and questioning in between. Ulrich sobbed and begged. But he held on to the number. The one thing he knew was that once he gave it, they would kill him.

By the time Clements moved to do his right elbow, the desk and the floor around it were covered in piss and sweat and blood. The Blackwater guys were barely restraining him now, just keeping him from sliding off the desk. He’d lost his glasses, and the room and the faces were a blur. At some point he’d lost control of his bowels and the room stank from it, stank from shit and the smell of his own singed flesh. He couldn’t even scream anymore. Something in his throat had cracked.

“After this,” Clements said, “we do your face.”

“Please,” Ulrich croaked. “Please.”

“We can’t let those tapes come out,” Clements said. “Think of the way they’d undermine people’s confidence in government. Imagine what that would do to national security. Be reasonable now. Do what’s best.”

The drill came closer. A sound came from Ulrich’s mouth, a sound he’d never heard before, a moan, a whine, the involuntary tenor of absolute despair. Clements paused and watched him.

Crying, Ulrich rasped three numbers, three numbers that a moment earlier had seemed so important to him. But they weren’t important anymore. Nothing was important. Not the tapes, not the Caspers, not anything.

All he wanted was for it to be over.

41. The Oligarchy

Hort hadn’t responded. But he was still smiling, a smile Ben found increasingly chilling.

“What do you mean, ‘the late Mr. Ulrich’? And how did you know I was there?”

Hort took a sip of wine. “I mean ‘the late Mr. Ulrich’ because Mr. Ulrich is dead now. I understand he was alive when you left him. Though I’m not sure the building’s security tapes will reflect that.”

Ben felt the blood draining from his face. “Did you set me up, Hort?”

Hort regarded him calmly. “How? By making you go to his office? Having him argue with you in the corridor, with blood all over his face?”

Ben thought of what Larison had told him. He imagined Hort, or whoever, whispering to a reporter, He’d been under a lot of stress… family problems, an arrest in Manila… a grudge against the former vice presidential chief of staff…

“How do you know this? What happened to him?”

“It turns out he had some damaging information about some people who used to report to him. Those people went and got the information back. They didn’t ask nicely.”

“You?”

“CIA.”

“They tortured him.”

“I think Ulrich would have called it ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’”

“What about everything you said, about how torture is always about something else?”

“I didn’t do it, and I wouldn’t have done it. Regardless, I never said torture could never work. Hell, it worked for the French in Algeria.”

“But they lost the war.”

“True. But if losing a war isn’t your concern, and if you know for certain the subject has the precise information you’re after, and if you can immediately test the quality of what you get from the subject without wasting your time on wild goose chases because torture produces a hundred times more chaff than wheat, and if the subject dies afterward so he doesn’t spend the rest of his life on a personal jihad against the nation of the people who did it to him, and if no one ever knows about it so the practice doesn’t recruit thousands more terrorists, sure, it can work. Now, the conditions I just described are almost entirely theoretical and have nothing to do with the program Ulrich and company designed, authorized, and implemented. Unfortunately for Ulrich, he seems to have been the rare exception to the rule that torture isn’t worth the cost. At least, that’s what the CIA thinks.”

“And now someone’s going to try to set me up for what happened to him.”

Hort didn’t answer. Ben thought, You want to see a jihad? When I’m done with you, Larison’s going to feel like your best fucking friend.

“The CIA has the security tapes from Ulrich’s building,” Hort said. “Clements generously offered to hand them over to me. Professional courtesy and all that. But I imagine he made copies. By now I’m sure you’ve noticed, that’s the way it works.”

Ben felt sick. “Then I’m compromised. Permanently.”

“No more so than most of the people in this town. It can be managed.”

“Managed how?”

“I’ve bailed you out before, son. I think you can rely on me to do it again.”

“In exchange for what?”

“I told you. I want you to work with me.”

“I already work with you.”

“I’m talking about a different capacity.”

Ben didn’t answer. If he understood what Hort was saying, he couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.

The waiter brought their steaks and moved off. Hort picked up his knife and fork, cut off a juicy chunk, put it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

“Damn,” he said. “That’s good.”

“What capacity?”

“I think you need a little context first.”

“I’m listening.”

Hort took another bite of steak and washed it down with some wine. “The most important thing is this. America is ruled by an oligarchy. If you want to understand America, you have to understand the oligarchy. And if you don’t understand the oligarchy, you can’t understand America.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean a small group of people having de facto control over a country.”

Ben thought of what Larison had said. “You’re talking about a conspiracy?”

“Not at all. Conspiracies are hidden. The oligarchy is right out in the open. It’s just a collection of people in business, politics, the military, and the media who recognize their interests are better served by cooperation than they would be by competition. There aren’t any secret handshakes. Most of the people who are part of the oligarchy don’t even recognize its existence. If they recognize it at all, they think of it as just a benevolent, informal establishment. They tell themselves it selflessly serves the country’s interests rather than selfishly serving its own.”

Ben was equal parts intrigued and horrified. “How does it work?”

Hort chuckled. “Arthur Andersen was examining Enron. The credit agencies were examining the subprimes. That alone ought to tell you everything you need to know about the way the oligarchy works.”

“But it doesn’t have-I don’t know-rules?”

“There are a few unwritten ones. Number one, above a certain pay grade, a politician can never be prosecuted or imprisoned.”

“What about Nixon?”

“Nixon would never have been prosecuted. He was told that if he resigned, he would be pardoned. And that if he didn’t, he would be assassinated.”

Ben shook his head. It seemed too outlandish to be true. “What about Clinton? He was impeached.”

“Sex is the exception. Because it doesn’t offer a patriotism defense.”

“What about the Caspers? Ecologia? People wouldn’t go to prison for that?”

“Some would have. After all, we know from Abu Ghraib that it’s all about the pictures. No pictures, no proof. No proof, no scandal. No scandal, no convictions. But even with video proof of the Caspers and what was done to them, the real architects would never have suffered. The oligarchy wouldn’t be able to whitewash it the way they did Abu Ghraib, but they’d just scapegoat a slightly higher-level target. The midlevel bureaucrats, the Ulrichs of the world, would be the sacrificial lambs. You see, when the oligarchy looks in the mirror and says, ‘The State is me,’ it’s not inaccurate. It’s not hubris. They’re just describing reality. They’ve made it so.”

“Hort… I don’t understand. You just accept this?”

“I’m a realist, son.”

“You don’t want to fight it?”

“Maybe I would have if I’d been born fifty or seventy years earlier. But the establishment is bigger now, more entrenched. The Roosevelt and Truman expansions were ratified by Eisenhower. Kennedy’s and Johnson’s abuses were ratified by Nixon. Bush Jr.’s extraconstitutional moves have all been ratified by Obama. It’s a ratchet effect. There hasn’t been a federal law in the last sixty years that’s done other than increase the government’s power and influence, and the power and influence of the corporations that manage the government by extension. The leviathan only grows.”