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 report 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.
“Damn, son,” he said in his gravelly Mississippi Delta baritone. “You look like shit warmed over.”
Despite everything that had happened between them, and despite the humiliation of having his commander find him like this, Ben was so flooded with relief his legs went rubbery. He knew his situation was bad, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how near he’d been to actual despair, how convinced he was beginning to feel that no one would ever find him.
He breathed in and out a few times, pulling himself together. When he trusted himself to speak, he said, “What are you doing here, Hort?”
Hort laughed, the sound deep and not at all unfriendly. As always, Ben was struck by the man’s complete ease and confidence, by his natural command presence. Colonel Scott Horton was a legend in the black ops community. He had personally designed and now commanded Ben’s secret unit, the absurdly blandly named Intelligence Support Activity, and his exploits in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were such that he was held in awe not just by his men, but even by the Joint Special Operations Command brass who were his nominal superiors.
The laugh slowly died away, a paternal grin lingering in its aftermath. “When I heard they had visiting hours in hell, I just couldn’t stay away.”
“I don’t need you to bail me out.”
This was so obviously untrue Ben immediately felt like a blustering child for saying it, and expected another baritone chuckle in response.
Instead, Hort said, “It’s not a question of what you need. I’m responsible for you.”
Ben knew he was being stupid, but anger was the only thing keeping him together and he was afraid to let it go. “Got a funny way of showing it.”
“Don’t ask me to apologize for putting the mission ahead of the man, son. I already told you, it was the toughest call I’ve ever had to make.”
Hort had been tasked with securing and erasing all knowledge of an encryption application called Obsidian. The op started with the liquidation of the inventor and the patent examiner, and would have taken out Ben’s younger brother, Alex, too, who was the inventor’s lawyer, along with Sarah Hosseini, an associate at Alex’s Silicon Valley firm. But Alex had realized he was in over his head and had called his big brother for help. Together, they’d managed to turn things around, though not before Hort, in the service of putting the mission before the man, had tried to erase all three of them.
“Yeah, well don’t ask me to apologize for not forgetting.”
Hort nodded, his expression grave. “That seems fair.”
Ben walked over to the chair opposite Hort, pulled it away from the table, and sat. He knew Hort would read it as a concession, but he didn’t care. He’d never felt so wrung out. His ribs ached, he’d only half slept since all this shit had started, and much as he hated to admit it, he was terrified Hort would leave as suddenly as he’d materialized. It was a ridiculous fear, but he couldn’t shake it no matter how much he blustered.
“How’d you find me?” he said quietly.
Hort nodded, as though expecting the question. “Pressure from the Australians. You’re lucky you killed one of theirs. If it had been a local, they’d have just dumped you here and no one would ever have heard from you again.”
Ben felt something sink in his chest. He realized he’d still been hoping the cops had lied to him. The hope suddenly felt stupid, and he knew he just hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, admit what he’d done.
“The guy was a sailor?” he said.
“Royal Marine, yeah.”
He’d known as much already, but somehow having Hort confirm it eliminated Ben’s ability to deal with the guy as an abstraction. Having this little window opened on the guy’s humanity made part of Ben want to push it open further, but he knew better. Still, even the speculation was no picnic. Had he been married? He’d been pretty young, so maybe not. And Ben hadn’t seen a ring, though he supposed the guy might have removed one before a night of carousing on Burgos Street. Regardless, he would have had parents. Maybe brothers or sisters. He thought of Katie, his younger sister, who’d died in a car accident as a high school junior, and what her death had done to his family. The thought that he probably had caused something similar to someone else’s family because he was too sullen to just walk away from some woofing was suddenly making him feel sick. Not to mention the guy himself was never coming back, either.
“Anyway,” Hort said, “the Aussies made local law enforcement go to all the hotels in Makati, asking whether there was a guest who was supposed to check out but who’d ghosted off instead. It didn’t take them long to find the right hotel, the right guest, to have the room safe opened, to check the guest’s passport. When they found out you were American, they contacted the U.S. embassy. When the embassy realized who you were, they contacted JSOC. And here I am.”