In front of her was a steel table and behind it, seated in a red plastic office chair, was a man: short brown hair with a widow’s peak, dark interested eyes, the bland face of a middle manager. He had a folder and a pad in front of him, a government ballpoint in his hand. Behind him was a closed door with no knob or handle.

“Don’t look at me,” he ordered in a calm voice, a dog trainer’s voice, a flat midwestern accent. “Look at the wall. There’s a black spot on the wall. Look at that.”

She looked at the spot and asked, “Can I get cleaned up?” Her voice sounded strange to her ears, as if she had become someone else in the last hour-if it was only an hour. She had no idea.

“Of course, after you’ve answered a few questions,” said the man. “Satisfactorily answered. The way this works, Cynthia, is you give us a little and we give you a little, yes? So. Let’s start. Name?”

She gave her name, address, social security number, phone number, date of birth, place of birth, education, residence history, marital status, occupation, job history, parents’ names, their dates and places of birth, and then she asked, “Why do you need this? You know all this. It’s all in my personnel jacket.”

“No, Cynthia,” said the man, “you don’t ask the questions. You don’t say anything unless you’re asked a question. Let’s start over. Name?”

Again he went through the same questions. She gave the same answers.

Then he asked, “When did you first have contact with a terrorist organization?”

“There is no terrorist organization. I’m being framed by rogue elements in the CIA.”

“You’re lying. Who paid you the money to conceal the uranium theft?”

“I’m not lying. There was no uranium theft. You’re going to invade Pakistan for no reason and lose the war against the Taliban.”

“That’s not an answer to a question. Let’s begin again. Name?”

She looked at him. She noticed he had a flesh-colored button in his ear. “I want to get clean,” she said. “Please, won’t you let me clean myself? I have to use the toilet.”

“Look at the wall!” he said. “Name? Say your name!”

She said nothing. The man was also silent for a moment and then rose and, after gathering his materials, turned to the door behind him, which opened. He went through it, and in the door appeared a man in tan coveralls with a black hose nozzle in his hands. From this shot a powerful jet of freezing water. It knocked her down and played up and down her body. Water filled her mouth and she coughed violently and curled up, with her curved back facing the stream. The jet tore at the loose waistband of her prison trousers dragging them down, exposing her buttocks. The water blasted at this area for a long time.

The water shut off. She lay on the hard floor shivering, listening to the water gurgle down the drain. A voice said, “Get up!”

She pulled up her pants and stood on wobbling legs. There was a different man in the room, a heavier man with crisp sandy hair and damp blue eyes. He was dabbing at splashes on the table and chair with a white towel. He sat and said, “Don’t look at me. Look at the wall.” He opened his file. “What is your name?” he said.

She had long ago lost track of time. What followed could have lasted an hour, or three, or twenty-four. The questions were the same: who paid the money; who devised the plan; who were the other operatives in their cell?

For long periods she was mute. Twice she soiled herself and they hosed her down. At a certain point she could no longer stand, so they rigged a cable to the eye bolt in the ceiling, passed a loop of rope under her arms, and held her upright with that, so that it produced a tearing pain in the delicate flesh of her armpits if she did not stand on her feet.

At one point the interrogator started on her father. He’d been through a reeducation camp. Maybe he hated the United States. Had he taught her to hate her country? Maybe we should bring him in here and ask him. Was he involved in the plot? She must have told her father about it, a dutiful Vietnamese daughter. They would bring him in. Who was her contact? Who paid the money?

Cynthia had stopped shivering. She knew that was a bad sign, it was the beginning of hypothermia. Or maybe a good sign, maybe this would soon be over. The interrogator shouted at her. That was new. It was the sandy-haired one. She looked at him and saw that he looked worried, there was a furrow in his brow.

“Don’t look at me!” he yelled “Look at the wall!”

Cynthia looked at the round black spot. It had grown larger, she saw, and it grew larger still until it blotted out the room. She sagged, she stopped feeling the cable cutting, she stopped feeling anything.

Now she was warm again. The ceiling over her head when she opened her eyes was made of ordinary acoustic tiles. She studied the pattern of the dots in the tiles for a while. Gradually, the rest of her environment came into focus. She was in some sort of hospital room. It had a window, with drawn venetian blinds on it, baby blue blinds. She was in a hospital bed and there was an IV bag hanging there with a tube that went into her arm. She wore a hospital gown and they had spread an electric blanket over her. She felt a little hungry, but not thirsty. Her armpits stung, but not too badly. She felt drowsy. They had given her drugs.

This was part of the torture, she knew. Get her comfortable and warm, relieve her pain. Then, after a while, they would come in again and ask her questions, and if this time she did not answer to their satisfaction they would take her back to the tile room. She would break then, she knew. She would tell them anything to make it stop; she would invent whole universes of terror, ingenious plots; she would name as accomplices anyone they cared to mention. She had nothing left in her to resist this. So she waited for the torturers to return, and after a while she drifted into sleep.

She awakened to the sound of the door opening. Harry Anspach entered.

Why was she not surprised?

He pulled up a visitor’s chair and sat down. “Well, Cynthia,” he said, “this is quite a little mess you’ve made for yourself.”

“Where am I?” she asked.

“In a secure location. How are you feeling?”

“Do you care?”

He looked startled and a little hurt. He was very good, she thought; the impersonation was wonderfully accurate.

“Of course I care. How can you ask that? That’s why I’m here.”

When she said nothing, he went on. “I used every chip I had to get in to see you. People are extremely annoyed at your… I don’t know what to call it. Your interference. Why did you do it?”

“I did my job, Harry. The incercepts were fakes and I can prove it. There’s a rogue unit in the CIA that will do anything to protect the operation called SHOWBOAT and they arranged to frame me with phony e-mails and Swiss bank accounts. That’s the truth. And they had me tortured so I would confess to something that’s not true.”

“Oh, nonsense! You haven’t been tortured. You’re an American citizen and this is the United States. We don’t torture Americans in this country.”

She stared at him. He seemed genuinely shocked. “Whatever, Harry. So what happens now?”

“Well, there are people who think that rendition would be an appropriate disposition in your case. I’ve been arguing against it, of course, but you’re not helping with this absurd story that some nonexistent operation in the CIA is having you framed.”

“I was framed.”

“Cynthia, listen to me! I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the only thing I can think of that would make you act this way is some kind of psychotic break. You work so hard, you’re so intense… well, it happens. The fact is, we have positive scientific evidence, irrefutable evidence, that nuclear material was stolen from the Pakistani facility at Kahuta.”