Seven Grams of Lead (21 page)

From Montgomery, Musseridge took a wobbly eight-passenger puddle jumper to Mobile. The rental place at the airport stuck him with a too-small car that smelled of cigarette smoke and the flowery spray meant to mask cigarette smoke. Thing rode like it
was put together from Legos. He took it around the horseshoe-shaped Mobile Bay to Point Clear, which surprised him. Who the hell knew Alabama had a picture-perfect waterside village catering to superrich people?

Mallery’s sixty-two-foot catamaran, worth what Musseridge could earn in his career if the Bureau let him stay on past age 100, was gone from the marina. Left its slip sometime during the night, the harbormaster said. Mobile Bay led to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf led to the rest of the world.

Alabama private vessel license decals were fitted with transponders, but the Coast Guard couldn’t raise a signal from the catamaran. There were any number of legitimate explanations for transponder failure, Musseridge heard from a lieutenant at the Coast Guard’s District Eight headquarters in downtown Mobile. But Musseridge had long since ruled out legitimate explanations.

He set to work on the paperwork for an Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution warrant and a global BOLO—be on the lookout—with instructions to all Interpol members to capture Thornton and Mallery.

With a series
of hisses and pings, the cell door opened. Flattop stepped in, his beam sweeping the floor until finding the scorpion, in the middle of the cell.

“Batter up,” Flattop said to Thornton.

Using the wall, Thornton pulled himself up, one hand over the other. Heavy lifting for him, a function of undernourishment and an electrolyte balance at dangerously low levels. He managed to circumvent the scorpion on the way out.

Now, he believed, the worst was over. He could gorge on a Souper Meal and drink water until he burst. Nothing he might say under narcosis would dispel the doubt he’d planted in his captors; the drugs wouldn’t be trusted. As for Bow Tie, going through
the same questions over and over again was an interrogator’s most effective tool to trip up a liar. All Thornton needed to do was stick to his story, which was true, other than the name Meade. Easy enough, he thought. As long his memory remained operational, he would survive.

He realized the error in his thinking as soon as he entered the interview room. The chairs had been replaced by a simple metal twin-bed frame, the kind you might see in a college dorm. Its support was six horizontal metal slats and the same number of thin coils stretched lengthwise. Beneath this grid was a red electrical cord, clamped onto of one of the metal slats and running along the floor to a retrofitted car battery.

The interrogator stood by the battery. He wore a fresh-pressed shirt, another crisp lab coat, and another brightly colored bow tie—and he seemed in spirits to match. He waved at the bed frame the way a game show hostess might at a fabulous prize. “This is a
parilla.
” He rolled the
r
in the Spanish fashion and pronounced the
l
’s as
y
’s. “The term derives from the cooking grill of the same name used in South America. General Pinochet liked to call this version the Chilean Polygraph.”

Thornton tried to steel himself with the football player’s reminder that pain is temporary. It may last a minute or an hour or all day, but it subsides eventually. Quitting, however, lasts a lifetime. And that wouldn’t be long here.

“Take off his clothes,” the interrogator told Flattop.

Thornton reflexively took a step away from the guard.

Patting the baton hanging from his belt, Flattop said, “Don’t make this tougher than it’s gotta be.”

Thornton offered no resistance as the guard pried off the tight prison jumpsuit.

“Now lie down on the
parilla
,” Bow Tie said. “Flat on your back, legs spread apart, arms above your head.”

Thornton complied, trying to desensitize himself. On contact with the metal slats, though, goose bumps rose over most of his skin. The narrow coils running lengthwise bit into his upper back, and their bite was an itch compared to the too-narrow metal cuffs the men used to clamp his wrists and ankles to the corners of the frame.

“Spectacular,” said the interrogator once Thornton was secured.

From a coat pocket, the man withdrew a coiled black electrical cord labeled in red capital letters embossed on white tape:
LINE NUMBER 2
. Thornton pictured Bow Tie burning the midnight oil with his labeling machine.

The interrogator let the cord drop to the floor, then plugged its pronged end into the car battery. To Flattop he said,
“Agua, por favor.”

Flattop unscrewed the cap from an ordinary plastic water bottle, then tossed a few ounces onto
Thornton’s bare chest. Although the water was room temperature, it made Thornton shiver. He asked, “Anything I can tell you to save a bit of electricity here?”

Bow Tie knelt by Thornton’s left shoulder. “Who’s Meade?” His breath delivered a bitter whiff of coffee.

“I wish I could tell you.”

“Well then, this should jog your memory.” The interrogator raised the black cord gingerly. At its tip was a small electrode emitting a benign buzz. Sounded like an electric shaver. On contact with the bed frame, it had the effect of a lightning bolt. Searing current blistered Thornton everywhere he was exposed to the metal, the energy seemingly sufficient to thrust him up to the ceiling if not for the shackles slicing into and burning his wrists and ankles. Fiery pain tore up his spine and into his head and extremities, along the way rending his muscles and tendons from the bone and sending them into violent convulsions. At the same time, it felt as though his blood vessels were bursting. The pain was like the worst toothache he’d ever had, everywhere in his body at once.

Involuntarily moaning, he tried to roll to his left, away from the current. He succeeded, providing only an instant of relief before a different part of the grid dealt a jolt as potent as the first. A grin divided Flattop’s stubble.

Closing his eyes against the pain, Thornton flailed. There was no escape; anyplace he landed blasted him
with fresh current. An incandescent white plume took hold of his consciousness and spread. If it swallowed him altogether and put an end to this agony, he thought, it might be for the best. Then his spine and the base of his skull cracked down onto the slats.

The interrogator was speaking. Thornton couldn’t make out the words through the static in his head. The current had ceased, at least for the moment. Opening his eyes, he took a deep breath of air, which smelled like roasted meat. He retched. But he still could breathe. Surprisingly, he remained in one piece. The static dimmed to a dull buzz, through which he made out, “Who is Meade?” Bow Tie was kneeling by his left shoulder. “Your choice, Russell.” He held the electrode an inch off the bed frame. “Tell me who Meade is, or another
parilla
ride.”

Thornton let his head settle onto a slat, wary of a shock. To his relief, he felt only cool, smooth metal flatten his spikes of hair. He shut his eyes and sighed, as if in resignation.

“Andy Miller,” he said.

The interrogator said nothing, but his eyes gleamed with triumph.

Andrew Miller had been a research analyst, at least nominally, for the NSA. Thornton had read about him on one of the natsec news aggregators
RealStory
subscribed to. Miller had died in a Beltway traffic accident last week. The NSA employed 90,000 people—on the books. Miller was the sixth most common name
in the United States, after Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones and before Davis. Chances were the NSA had several legitimate Andy Millers, and maybe one or two more who’d used the name as an alias. Thornton suspected that his life now hinged on “agency contact Andy Miller” proving no more enlightening to his captors than “agency contact.”

In 1966, the
U.S. government got into the prostitution business, opening brothels in New York City, San Francisco, and Stinson Beach, California, in each case with the blessing and cooperation of the local police. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics took a piece of the action, too, in the role of drug dealer. The prostitutes, many of whom were placed on the government payroll, duped johns into taking acid. Researchers from the CIA’s off-the-books MK-ULTRA unit sat on the other side of two-way mirrors in hope of learning to use LSD to induce subjects to reveal secrets or do the bidding of the U.S. government. The operation lasted just a few months before Congress got wind of it and played its customary role, from the Agency’s perspective, of rain on a parade.

In 1998, a similar program was launched by another American service, the Bureau of Industry and Security, the clandestine operations division of the Department of Commerce. As his first order of business, the leader of the initiative, Peter Canning, sought to avoid repeating the CIA’s mistake: He secured a confederate on Capitol Hill, then congressman Gordon Langlind, who vouched for the sanctity of the Department of Commerce’s $25 million Currency Classification Initiative. With the funds, Canning used cutouts to open brothels in Washington, Moscow, and Geneva. The Geneva branch paid dividends within a week, when a video of the director of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Industry and Energy—in bed with a woman who was not his wife—netted an American cartel including Langlind Petrochemical the exclusive drilling rights to a vast oilfield beneath the Caspian Sea, in spite of the fact that British Petroleum’s bid had exceeded the cartel’s by $100 million.

Two years later, there was an accident at the then burgeoning honey trap chain’s new Paris branch, which was located in a charming art nouveau apartment building in the eighth arrondissement, two blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. A client paid for rough play but took it too far, strangling his hostess. These things happened. The problem in this instance was that the client was a CIA officer.

The manager called Canning, who was based at
the time at the DOC’s Moscow station. A few hours later, Canning hurried from a private jet at Charles de Gaulle to a car bound for the eighth arrondissement. On arrival at the brothel, he firmly tied, taped, and stuffed the girl’s corpse into a suitcase weighted with a pair of forty-five-pound barbells. He then rolled the suitcase two blocks and dropped it into a dark, deep stretch of the Seine. The CIA officer—who had a wife and three children—Canning let walk. Save him for a rainy day, Canning thought.

The rainy day came eleven years later, when Canning got into the E-bomb business. He gave the CIA officer the choice of explaining the Paris video to his family and colleagues, or doing a little work on the side. The man agreed, believing the side work was for the Department of Commerce. Today, after a search of Thornton’s New York apartment proved fruitless, Canning asked his Langley asset to scour the proprietary Intelink for Andy Millers.

Canning heard back while walking through Times Square to his hotel at ten thirty
P
.
M
., though he would never have guessed the time based upon the crowds and the neon conflagration. His buzzing phone, to anyone not in the know, signified the availability of an update for his stock market app.

He hurried to the hotel next door to his, parked himself at one of the public computer terminals in the busy lobby, and logged on to the Yahoo! account he’d created for this purpose. The in-box contained
no e-mails. He would have been surprised if it had. His spam folder contained one, headed
SUPER BUY VIAGRA
. He clicked it open and scanned the message:
Viagra 120mg x 650 pills = $95.
He noted the second digit of each value: 2-5-5.

He crossed Seventh Avenue to a sports bar that was to giant television screens what Times Square was to billboards. The place was ablaze with game telecasts, mostly West Coast NHL and college basketball. Canning couldn’t hear any of it over the cheering crowd. He didn’t care. His objective was wireless Internet access for the laptop he’d bought for $400 in cash this morning at a no-name electronics shop on Canal Street.

Procuring a seat in a dark corner, he logged onto JamOnAndOn, “a site where musicians can commune, collaborate and critique.” Its 10,000 users, mostly aspiring musicians, found the critique hard to come by. Take this month’s entry number 255,
Give it up, babe.
The song had attracted a total of just three listeners since its posting last week. Each listener had given it three stars of a possible five, none of them bothering to write in the Constructive Comments box. Canning ignored the song itself but activated software that extracted and decrypted the text that was randomly distributed among the pixels representing sound waves. He came away with a list compiled by his CIA asset.

The first person on the list, Andrew M. Miller Jr.,
twenty-seven years old, worked as a systems analyst in the NSA’s Comprehensive National Cyber-Security Initiative Data Center at Camp Williams, Utah. He qualified for handicapped parking, probably disqualifying him from the fieldwork required on the Thornton case. Also he went not by Andy or even Andrew, but by his middle name, Mitchell.

Candidate number two was Stanford School of Engineering’s former dean, Andrew C. Miller, sixty-one. He now supervised the NSA’s Trailblazer program, a data-mining initiative in Milwaukee. A possibility, but not a good one given his lack of ops experience.

Langley had an operations officer at Moscow station née Andrea “Andi” Miller, a twenty-eight-year-old whose first job after college had been at Fort Meade. She had sent multiple cables from Moscow to CIA HQs each day for the past three weeks, signifying she was deep into a case there, in all likelihood eliminating her, too, as Thornton’s agency contact.

Canning’s eye fell to the eighth and final entry, a forty-six-year-old research analyst. This Andrew Miller’s CV concluded with the account of his recent death posted by Global Security Newswire.

Canning checked the Internet histories he’d hacked into and then imported to his laptop from the personal computer in the spare bedroom Thornton used as an office. And there it was: The blogger had read the Global Security Newswire report on the Beltway traffic accident.