Islands in the Net (45 page)

The capital of the F.A.C.T. They were the
secret police
here, the people who ran the place. They were running a nation ruined beyond hope, a series of monstrous camps.

In a sudden repellent flash of insight Laura understood how FACT had casually carried out massacres. There was a sump of misery in this camp city big enough to choke the world. She had always known it was bad in Africa, but she'd never known that life here meant so utterly little. She realized with a rush of fatalistic terror that her own life was simply too small to matter anymore. She was in hell now and they did things differently here.

At last they rolled past a barbed-wire fence, into a cleared area, dust and tarmac and skeletal watchtowers. Ahead—Laura's heart leapt—the familiar, friendly look of brown walls of concretized sand. They were approaching a fat domed building, much like her own Rizome Lodge in Galveston. It was much bigger, though. Efficiently built. Progressive and modern, the same techniques David had chosen.

Thinking of David was something so amazingly painful that she shut it off at once.

Then they rolled into the building, through its double walls of solid sand four feet thick, under cruel portcullises of welded iron.

The van stopped. A wait.

The European flung open the doors. “Out.”

She stepped out into dazzling heat. She was in a bare arena, round baked-earth exercise yard surrounded by a two-story ring of brown fortress walls. The European led her to an iron hatchway, an armored door leading into the prison. Two guards loomed behind her. They went inside, into a hall lit by cheap sunlight pipes bracketed to the ceiling. “Showers,” the European said.

The word had an evil ring. Laura stopped in place. “I don't want to go to the showers.”

“There's a toilet, too,” the European offered.

She shook her head. The European looked over her shoulder and nodded fractionally.

A club hit her from behind, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. It was as if she'd been struck by lightning. Her entire right side went numb and she fell to her knees.

Then the shock faded and pain began to seep in. True pain, not the pastel thing she'd called “pain” in the past, but a sensation truly profound, biological. She couldn't believe that that was all, that she'd simply been hit with a stick. She could already feel it, changing her life.

“Get up,” he said, in the same tired voice. She got up. They took her to the showers.

There was a prison matron there. They stripped her, and the woman did a body-cavity search, the men examining Laura's nakedness with distant professional interest. She was pushed into the shower and handed a cake of raw lye that stank of insecticide. The water was hard and briny and wouldn't lather. It shut off before she had rinsed.

She got out. Her clothes and shoes had been stolen. The prison matron jabbed her in the buttock with five cc's of yellow fluid. She felt it sink in and sting.

The European and his two goons left, and two female goons showed up. Laura was given trousers and shirt of striped black-and-white canvas, creased and rough. She put them on, trembling. Either the injection was beginning to take effect or else she was scaring herself into the belief that it was. She felt lightheaded and sick and not far from genuine craziness.

She kept thinking that there was going to come a time when she could take a stand and demand that they kill her with her dignity intact. But they didn't seem anxious to kill her, and she didn't feel anxious to die, and she was beginning to realize that a human being could be beaten into almost anything. She didn't want to be hit again, not till she had a better grip on herself.

The matron said something in Creole French and indicated the toilet. Laura shook her head. The matron looked at her as if she were an idiot, and shrugged, and made a note on her clipboard.

Then two female goons cuffed her hands behind her back. One of them pulled a billy club, wrapped it cleverly through the metal chain of the old-fashioned handcuffs, and levered Laura's arms up in their sockets until she was forced to double over. They then marched her out, steering her like a grocery cart, down the hall, and up narrow stairs barred at top and bottom. Then, on the upper floor, past a long series of iron doors equipped with sliding peepholes.

They stopped at cell #31, then waited there until a turnkey showed up. It took about five minutes, and they passed the time chewing gum and wisecracking about Laura in some Malian dialect.

The turnkey finally flung the door open and they threw her in. The door slammed. “Hey!” Laura shouted. “I'm handcuffed! You forgot your handcuffs!” The peephole opened and she saw a human eye and part of the bridge of a nose. It shut again.

She was in a cell. In a prison. In a fascist state. In Africa.

She began to wonder if there were worse places in the world. Could anything be worse? Yes, she thought, she could be sick.

She began to feel feverish.

An hour is:

A minute and a minute and a minute and a minute and a minute.

And a minute, and a minute, and a minute and a minute and a minute.

Then another, and another minute, and another, and yet another, and another.

And a minute, then two more minutes. Then, two more minutes.

Then, two minutes. Then, two minutes. Then a minute.

Then a similar minute. Then two more. And two more again.

That's thirty minutes so far.

So do them all over again.

Laura's cell was slightly less than four paces long and slightly more than three paces across. It was about the size of the bathroom in the place-where-she'd-used-to-live, the place she didn't allow herself to think about. Much of this space was taken up by her bunk. It had four legs of tubular steel, and a support frame of flattened iron struts. Atop the frame was a mattress of striped cotton ticking, stuffed with straw. The mattress smelled, faintly and not completely unpleasantly, of a stranger's long sickness. One end was lightly spattered with faded bloodstains.

There was a window hole in the wall of the cell. It was a good-sized hole, almost six inches around, the size of a drainpipe. It was approximately four feet long, bored through the massive concretized sand, and it had a crisscrossed grill of thin metal at the far end. By standing directly before the hole Laura could see a simmering patch of yellowish desert sky. Faint gusts of heated air sometimes rippled down the tube.

The cell had no plumbing. But she learned the routine quickly, from hearing other prisoners. You banged the door and yelled, in Malian Creole French, if you knew it. After a certain period, depending on whim, one of the guards would show and take you to the latrine: a cell much like the others, but with a hole in the floor.

She heard the screaming for the first time on her sixth day. It seemed to be oozing up from the thick floor beneath her feet. She had never heard such inhuman screaming, not even during the riot in Singapore. There was a primal quality to it that could pass through solid barriers: concrete, metal, bone, the human skull. Compared to this howling the screams of mob panic were only a kind of gaiety.

She could not make out any words, but she could hear that there were pauses, and occasionally she thought she could hear a low electrical buzzing.

They would unlock her handcuffs for meals and for the latrine. They would then seal them up again, tightly, carefully, high on her wrists, so she couldn't wriggle through the circle of her own arms and get her hands in front of her. As if it mattered, as if she might break free with a single bound and tear her steel door from its hinges with her fingernails.

After a week her shoulders were in a constant state of low-level pain, and she had worn raw patches on her chin and cheek from sleeping on her stomach. She did not complain, however. She had briefly spotted one of her fellow prisoners, an Asian man, Japanese she thought. He was handcuffed, his legs were fettered, and he wore a blindfold.

During the second week, they began handcuffing her hands from the front. This made an amazing difference. She felt with giddy irrationality that she had truly accomplished something, that some kind of minor but definite message had been sent her from the prison administration.

Surely, she thought, as she lay waiting for sleep, her mind gently and luxuriously disintegrating, some mark had been made, maybe only a check on a clipboard, but some kind of institutional formality had taken place. She existed.

In the morning she convinced herself that it could not possibly mean anything. She began doing pushups.

She kept track of days by scratching the grainy wall under her bunk with the edge of her handcuffs. On her twenty-first day she was taken out, given another shower and another body search, and taken to meet the Inspector of Prisons.

The Inspector of Prisons was a large smiling sunburned white American. He wore a long silk djellaba, blue suit pants, and elaborate leather sandals. He met her in an air-conditioned office downstairs, with metal chairs and a large steel desk topped with lacquered plywood. There were gold-framed portraits on the walls, men in uniform:
GALTIERI, NORTH, MACARTHUR
.

A goon sat Laura down in a metal folding chair in front of the desk. After sweltering days in her cell, the air conditioning felt arctic, and she shivered.

The goon unlatched her handcuffs. The skin below them was calloused, the left wrist had an oozing scab.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Webster,” said the Inspector.

“Hello,” Laura said. Her voice was rusty.

“Have some coffee. It's very good. Kenyan.” The Inspector slid a cup and saucer across the desk. “They had good rains this year.”

Laura nodded dumbly. She picked up the coffee and sipped it. She had been eating prison fare for weeks: scop, with the occasional bowl of porridge. And drinking the harsh metallic water, two liters every day, salted, to prevent heatstroke. The hot coffee hit her mouth with an astonishing gush of richness, like Belgian chocolate. Her head swam.

“I'm the Inspector of Prisons,” said the Inspector of Prisons. “On my usual tour of duty here, you see.”

“What is this place?”

The Inspector smiled. “This is the Moussa Traore Penal Reform Institute, in Bamako.”

“What day is this?”

“It's …” He checked his watchphone. “December 6, 2023. Wednesday.”

“Do my people know I'm still alive?”

“I see you're getting right to the crux of matters,” said the Inspector languidly. “As a matter of fact, Mrs. Webster, no. They don't know. You see, you represent a serious breach of security. It's causing us a bit of a headache.”

“A bit of a headache.”

“Yes.… You see, thanks to the peculiar circumstances in which we saved your life, you've learned that we possess the Bomb.”

“What? I don't understand.”

He frowned slightly. “The
Bomb
, the atomic bomb.”

“That's it?” Laura said. “You're keeping me here because of an atomic bomb?”

The frown deepened. “What's the point of this? You've been on the
Thermopylae
. Our ship.”

“You mean the
boat
, the submarine?”

He stared at her. “Should I speak more clearly?”

“I'm a little confused,” Laura said giddily. “I just spent three weeks in solitary.” She put her cup onto the desk, carefully, hand shaking.

She paused, trying to sort her thoughts. “I don't believe you,” she told him at last. “I saw a submarine, but I don't know that it's a genuine nuclear missile submarine. I have only your word for that, and the word of the crew onboard. The more I think about it the harder it is to believe. None of the old nuclear governments were stupid enough to lose an entire submarine. Especially with nuclear missiles onboard.”

“You certainly have a touching faith in governments,” said the Inspector. “If we have the launch platform, it scarcely matters where or how we got the warheads, does it? The point is that the Vienna Convention
does
believe in our deterrent, and our arrangement with them requires that we keep our deterrent secret. But you know the secret, you see.”

“I don't believe that the Vienna Convention would make a deal with nuclear terrorists.”

“Possibly not,” said the Inspector, “but we are
counter
terrorists. Vienna knows very well that we are doing their own work for them. But imagine the unhappy reaction if the news spread that our Republic of Mali had become a nuclear superpower.”

“What reaction,” Laura said dully.

“Well,” he said, “the great unwashed, the global mob, would panic. Someone would do something rash and we would be forced to use our deterrent, unnecessarily.”

“You mean explode an atomic bomb somewhere.”

“We'd have no choice. Though it's not a course we would relish.”

“Okay, suppose I believe you,” Laura said. The coffee was hitting her now, nerving her up like fine champagne. “How can you sit there and tell me that you would explode an atomic bomb? Can't you see that that's all out of proportion to whatever you want to accomplish?”

The Inspector shook his head slowly. “Do you know how many people have died in Africa in the last twenty years? Something over eighty millions. It staggers the mind, doesn't it: eighty millions. And the hell of it is that even
that
has barely got a handle on it: the situation is getting
worse
. Africa is sick, she needs major surgery. The side shows we've run in Singapore and Grenada are like
public relations events
compared to what's necessary here. But without a deterrent, we won't be left alone to accomplish what's necessary.”

“You mean genocide.”

He shook his head ruefully, as if he'd heard it all before and expected better from her. “We want to save the African from himself. We can give these people the order they need to survive. What does Vienna offer? Nothing. Because Africa's regimes are sovereign national governments, most of them Vienna signatories! Sometimes Vienna dabbles in subverting a particularly loathsome regime—but Vienna gives no permanent solution. The outside world has written Africa off.”