5

KAHLID’S DECISION TO leave Ryan alone with a camera and twelve pictures of broken limbs worked both against Ryan and for him.

Against him in that the photographs were disturbing.

For him in that Kahlid’s intentions gave his mind something to consider. A puzzle to piece together. A string of new dots to connect with the picture he was already forming. Data to process with the absorption and care that he’d trained his mind to apply when confronted with disconnected pieces of information.

The camera’s purpose was obviously to record his every reaction on tape and transmit those reactions real-time to a monitor now being watched by Kahlid himself. In addition, the camera was meant to keep Ryan on guard. Like any organ, the mind could only function so long before tiring, and remaining on guard would hasten that exhaustion. An obvious intention on Kahlid’s part.

Less obvious were the photographs of the broken children. Again, the mystery of them was undoubtedly designed to wear on his mind as much as the horror they presented.

It was unlikely that Kahlid had any idea what Ryan’s occupation was, but he’d scored one small victory because Ryan couldn’t help but to set his mind on overdrive in an attempt to understand the mystery put before him.

What did Kahlid, who had been very thoughtful in this abduction, hope to gain by making this particular choice? Beyond pointing out the obvious connection between the U.S. military bombing Iraq and the unfortunate collateral damage resulting from war, Kahlid had little to gain. He surely could have found a far more manipulative incentive than this attempt to disturb him with pictures, however gruesome they were.

Which meant that Ryan was missing something. Kahlid had more up his sleeve. He was manipulating Ryan in a subversive way. There was more meaning here. Much more meaning.

Ryan slouched in the chair with his arms shackled behind him, searching his mind for answers. He left no stone unturned, no possibility unconsidered, no thread unexplored. But the answer eluded him.

Unless there was no answer, the possibility of which only added to his mental gymnastics.

The light overhead flickered once; otherwise the only movement in the room came from the blinking camera light and his own periodic shifting to keep blood flowing to his extremities.

An hour went by. Two hours. Three. He began to lose track of time. Also part of Kahlid’s plan.

Most humans gave up on unsolved puzzles within a matter of minutes. Those who purchased and played games like Myst could contemplate a single puzzle for twenty or thirty minutes before growing bored with the lack of progress and pulling out the cheat sheet.

The best code breakers could spend days or weeks on a single challenge and remain engaged. But the conundrum facing Ryan contained an element that shifted the balance in his mind. He was staring at images that began to disturb him, not for the mystery in them but for the brutality in them. Not being an emotional man, he found his reaction awkward.

The more he studied what he could see of the victims, the more he felt sucked into their plight. Unlike the thousands of similar photos he’d scanned since coming to the desert, he had time with these images.

Instead of using his mind to understand Kahlid’s purpose in leaving him alone with the images, he began to analyze the puzzle in each broken body like he imagined a forensic scientist might.

How had the building collapsed? A nearby hit or a direct hit? Did the victims fall to the bottom before the falling concrete blocks? Which bones had been broken first? How much abuse could a human body sustain? How many breaks could one human being suffer before dying from internal bleeding? How long had the children lived?

Wearing him down was Kahlid’s objective, he knew that much. And he was succeeding on that level. But there was more. There had to be.

At some point Ryan woke without realizing he’d fallen asleep. Pain flared in his back and right shoulder and he tried to ease it by shifting to his left. The camera still winked red. The photographs still hung on the wall. His BDU trousers were wet from his own urine.

Nothing else had changed.

Ryan sat in the chair for yet another long time before the latch finally clacked and the door swung open. Kahlid walked in bearing a bottle of Evian water and some yellow rice cakes. He shut the door behind him, studied Ryan with dark but gentle eyes, and then crossed to him.

Without a word he opened the bottle, pressed it to Ryan’s lips, and fed him like a mother might feed her child. Ryan sucked down the liquid, surprised at his thirst.

Kahlid withdrew the bottle and set it on the table next to the rice cakes. “There’s a bucket in the corner. I will remove your chains so that you can relieve yourself and stretch your bones. If you attempt to escape, I will put a bullet through your thigh. Do you understand?”

Ryan blinked.

Kahlid rounded his chair, unfastened the shackles, and helped him to his feet. His joints felt like fire and it took him half a minute to loosen the stiffness. Hobbling over to a lone bucket and roll of toilet paper in the back corner, he glanced around his prison, but there was nothing new to see. Just the lone chair, the table, the camera, and the photographs.

He used the bucket and walked back to the chair. The locks on the chains were made by Master Lock.

“Go ahead, stretch, get your blood flowing. I need you to be exhausted, but not in pain to the point of indifference.”

Ryan’s mind began to spin again. Kahlid could hardly utter a word without complicating matters for him. Navy Intelligence could use a man like him.

“That’s enough. Please”—his captor motioned to the chair —“sit.”

Thirty seconds later Ryan was back in chains, staring at Kahlid. It occurred to him that the brief reprieve had worked against him. Chained again, he felt a surge of hopelessness that wouldn’t have been as acute without the reminder of freedom.

All expected techniques, and effective.

“According to your uniform, you are an officer,” Kahlid said. “Not that it matters. You have extraordinary control of your mind. You don’t express emotion very well. You might even be emotionally repressed. Worse, you might even be proud of yourself for not succumbing to my blatant attempts to affect your emotions. What you don’t know is that this will only work against you.”

Again, expected.

A slight, nearly sympathetic smile crossed Kahlid’s mouth. “You’re in intelligence, aren’t you? G-2? Again, just a guess. Tell me, how would you judge the effectiveness of my methods to break you thus far?”

No harm in engaging the man on this level. “You’re good. Predictable at times and unorthodox at the same time. But I don’t think you understand me very well. We both know that I’m already dead. None of this matters to me. Yes, it would be nice to die quickly, but we both know that you won’t allow that. So I’m left with no option but to suffer whatever you have in mind for a matter of hours, days, or weeks and then die.”

“So calculating. Arabs are far more passionate than Americans are, I think. Everything makes so much sense in your perfect world, doesn’t it? Now you’ve come over here to show us poor Arabs how to enter your perfect world.”

Ryan didn’t think a rebuttal would help matters.

The man’s shoulders sagged and he frowned. “Okay then, you leave me without a choice. We will play our game. But you must know one thing before I tell you what my intentions are. Many would say that I am insane. What I’m about to do will be heralded as inhuman by my own brothers. But you give me no choice.”

“Like I said, I’m already dead,” Ryan said.

“Yes.” Kahlid looked at the pictures. “And so are they. Killed by Satan himself, whom you don’t seem to care about, because you don’t believe in God.”

Kahlid swiveled to him, and Ryan saw the change in his eyes immediately. Something in his mind had shifted.

“Do you know how many women and children your war on our country has killed? Do you have any notion at all of how many thousands of innocent victims the Great Satan has left dead in my country?”

A small voice whispered a warning in Ryan’s mind, but he couldn’t make it out.

“They all die; they die, they are butchered by your bombs and your missiles and it’s all so clinical and distant—you don’t feel the pain because it’s so far away and because you don’t understand the wailing of the mothers and fathers and of God himself when you kill the children!”

He spat the words with bitterness.

“So now”—he paused, taking a deep breath through his nostrils and closing his eyes—“you are going to help me bring the pain of our loss to all the mothers and fathers of your country.”

Ryan’s eyes snapped open.

“Do you understand yet?”

The man thrust his finger back at the photographs. “If Satan had killed a few children on the streets of any town in your country, horror would settle in the hearts of millions. Ted Bundy kills a few dozen women and the press screams foul, foul, foul. Your Beltway Killer shoots a handful of people on the streets of your capital and the country cries out with outrage!”

Kahlid blinked. “But Satan comes here and kills thousands of women and children and not a single tear is shed. And I tell myself, I have to turn the thousands into one. If they can see just one die, they will understand our pain.”

“This is madness,” Ryan said.

The man’s nostrils flared. “Bring him in!”

The door swung open and a shirtless young man, perhaps fifteen, walked in, wearing an expression that looked part confused, part curious.

“Ahmed.” Kahlid smiled at the boy. “Come here, Ahmed.”

The boy walked over to Kahlid tentatively, eyes wide at the sight before him.

Kahlid put his hand on the youth’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t speak a word of English. Which is good, because if he knew that I was going to kill him the way my own son was killed—that I was going to crush his bones—he would cause quite a scene.”

Nausea swept through Ryan’s gut.

“I don’t have a building to drop on him, so I’m going to break his bones with a hammer. To be more accurate, you’re going to break his bones. You will kill him, just as you killed my wife and my child one year ago to this day. No one cried because no one saw. So you will do it again, and this time we will put it on film.”

He wouldn’t kill, of course. How could they force him to kill? But the mere suggestion of it made his mind swim.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” was all he could manage.

“You can save this child a fate that neither of us would wish upon him,” Kahlid said. “You’re wearing a wedding band; tell us where your wife and children live. I have some friends in your country who are waiting for my call. They will go to your home, kill your wife and your child on camera so that the whole world will know how painful even one lost child can be. Look into the camera and tell us to execute your child and I will spare this one.”

Ryan’s mind refused to process his thoughts logically for a few beats. What was he being asked to do? Surely they… Surely this man didn’t…

Then the game altered in his mind and he knew that he wasn’t the only one who would die here in this room. They would use empathetic pain to break him. Survivor guilt and self-loathing, meant to crush his will.

The ease with which he made his decision surprised even him. It was as if a steel wall had gone up in his mind, shutting off all but his stoic resolve. If it came down to it and this man was not bluffing, then he would have to accept the death of this boy, however monstrous it seemed. The alternative was simply an impossibility.

“You’ll only make them hate you more,” he said.

“I don’t think so. Americans have a great capacity for forgiveness once they understand a man’s pain. Their problem is that they don’t understand our pain.”

He wasn’t bluffing, was he? The man actually intended to go through with this.

“I will leave Ahmed with you for six hours. Then I will return and kill him, unless you are willing to sacrifice your child’s life for his. And then”—a tear formed on the edge of Kahlid’s eyes and slipped down his cheek—“then we will bring in the second one. A girl named Miriam. You’ve killed thousands, but I beg of you, don’t make me kill even one more.”