Donaldson glanced at his wristwatch, then looked through the glass at the door leading from the interrogation room into the hall. Marfazda assumed it was locked. It wasn’t. They had long ago passed the point where it was necessary to lock him in. Or use any other physical bonds, for that matter. Marfazda’s mind had become its own restraint.
No, Donaldson thought, Shuaib Marfazda, now lived in a CIA-created reality that was no more real than a child’s bedtime story. They had, in many ways, convinced him that down was up and up was down, red stop lights meant go and green meant stop. And it had all been accomplished without ever once touching the Hamas terrorist.
The door to the observation room opened suddenly. Donaldson turned to his side to see Jed Coffman’s broad, six-five frame block the light from the hallway. Coffman closed the door behind him, then moved to Donaldson’s side at the mirror. The big CIA operative frowned. “He ready?”
“Probably.” Donaldson nodded. “He’s showing most of the signs. If you wanted to compare his brain to spaghetti, I’d say it’s been boiled to a point somewhere between medium and soft.”
“I think of them more as little men made out of modeling clay,” Coffman said seriously. “We take them, smash them flat, then rebuild them the way we want them.” The tall man’s hand rose to his chin where he scratched a week’s worth of stubble. “Of course we leave enough between their ears for them to tell us everything they know.” He turned toward Donaldson. “What say we give him another few more minutes? It can’t hurt, and I could use a cup. Want some?”
Donaldson shook his head as Coffman crossed the room to the coffee machine. In the reflection of the glass, he saw the tall man lift the carafe and pour coffee into a cup. Peering through the reflection he continued to watch the terrorist on the other side of the one-way mirror. Again, Marfazda’s fingers began to drum out some unknown rhythm on the table. The finger taps had begun a few hours before, but in the past ninety minutes they’d started coming at regular five-minute intervals. Now they occurred every few seconds.
Donaldson knew every subject reacted differently to the preinterrogation process, but it had been his experience that they each showed some outward sign when they neared the breaking point.
Marfazda’s just happened to be tapping. It meant he was on the verge of that point now.
The CIA man let his mind drift back over the past few months. Shuaib Marfazda had been captured during an attempt to blow up a Beirut café frequented by Americans. A U.S. Department of State representative—a retired army colonel—had spotted several wires of his “suicide bomb” sticking out of his shirt collar as he opened the café door. Thinking quickly, the colonel had smashed the brass handle of his walking stick into the back of the man’s head.
Coffman had happened to be in the café himself at the time. Trained as an explosives expert, he had dismantled the bomb before Marfazda had regained consciousness or the Israeli authorities could arrive. The terrorist was then quickly transported to a CIA safehouse in Beirut.
Marfazda’s first few weeks had been spent in solitary confinement, in a bedroom stripped of furniture, with barred windows whose panes were painted black. The only human contact he’d had was watching an unidentified hand slide a food tray through the slot in his door twice a day. Unknown to him, a tiny microcam had been hidden in the bare lightbulb at the top of his room, which put out the same dull, monotonous half-light twenty-four hours a day. The Hamas terrorist’s every movement and facial expression—practically every thought—had been monitored ’round the clock by CIA psychiatrists and psychologists. And while Marfazda was slowly being broken down—or “smashed like clay” to use Coffman’s metaphor—CIA investigators had conducted an extensive background check.
While the café was to have been his final act, Marfazda already had plenty of blood on his hands. Bits and pieces of information had linked him to other atrocities in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq.
When the time seemed right Marfazda had suddenly, and without explanation, been transferred to a larger, brighter cell with five beds and four cell mates. All four of them had been CIA operatives of Arabic descent. Some intelligence had been gained that way as Marfazda—starved for human contact—had let his guard down partially among these men who presented themselves as fellow political prisoners. Through them Donaldson and Coffman had learned of the Soviet mole.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a man calling himself Russell James had held on to his job as an American biochemical weapons research scientist, waited for the dust to settle around the world, then found more lucrative work among the various terrorist organizations of the Middle East.
Marfazda had been taken back to solitary confinement when the intelligence information he’d unwittingly passed on finally dried up, and he had been there for nearly six months. He was now what the psychologists monitoring him called “ripe.” It was an expression they used to describe the dangerously short period between the time when he’d give up his last bits of information in return for a promise of freedom, and the time when his mind turned into the overcooked spaghetti to which Donaldson had compared it.
“Let’s go,” Donaldson said to Coffman, and the two men opened the door, stepped out into the hall, then entered the interrogation room next to it. “Marhaba,” he said to the confused man who stared at him from the other side of the table. He and Coffman sat across the table from the terrorist.
“We have a proposition for you,” Coffman said.
Marfazda didn’t answer. His mind had slowed, and was still processing the fact that he was no longer alone. Donaldson waited; he had seen it all many times before. The brain was like a muscle—use it, and it got stronger. But put it in a position where it deals only with simple things and it atrophies and drops to that pace.
“What is the proposition?” Marfazda finally asked in slurred Arabic.
Donaldson smiled in a fatherly way. There was an art to what he was about to do, and that art was staying only a half step ahead of the sluggish brain across the table from him. It was a fine line to walk. Go too fast and the subject became confused. But take things too slow and even a torpid mind like Marfazda’s might figure out what was going on.
“We have no further use for you,” Donaldson said, also in Arabic. He paused to let it sink in and saw a flicker of fear enter the broken terrorist’s eyes. It was obvious he thought that meant he was about to be killed.
“Please,” Donaldson said, the smile still on his face. “Forget your fears. We are Americans. We do not kill people such as you. Surely you know that.” Again he waited, knowing the terrorist’s own indoctrination was working against him now.
Relief entered Marfazda’s brain and Donaldson saw it on his face. Yes, Shuaib, the CIA man thought. Think back to what you have been taught. Americans aren’t only evil, we’re weak. We want only to use drugs, drink and fornicate, and we’re afraid to kill our enemies because we have no Allah behind us.
A few seconds after the terrorist’s face had changed from fear to relief, it took on an expression of superior smugness. Again, Donaldson knew what the man was thinking.
Had Marfazda been on the other side of the table, he wouldn’t have been so weak.
“We want only one thing from you,” Donaldson said in Arabic. “And it’s something we already know. We just need confirmation. Give it to us, and you go free.” He sat back away from the table, crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. Closing his eyes, he switched to English when he said, “That is another flaw in our system. We must have all intelligence confirmed by at least two sources before we send it back to Washington.” He kept his eyes closed as he continued to speak. “Even then the sons of bitches take ages to make a decision.”
Beneath the table, Donaldson felt the toe of Coffman’s shoe nudge his calf. It meant that while his eyes were closed, Marfazda had responded to Donaldson’s English. From the time of his capture, the terrorist had maintained a complete ignorance of the language. But the agents posing as prisoners had relayed back to them that he often seemed