“She explained that fear might cause a prisoner to tell you something, but if you took away hope — any hope of rescue, any hope of ever seeing their family again, any hope of the pain abating, any hope of continuing on — they will tell you everything.”

A chill runs down my arm, the hairs standing on end.

I glance at my father.

He is rigid.

I think back to my twenty-three hour nightmare: lying on the sand bank, having not eaten in days, Opik’s corpse ten feet to my left, Lassie having been swept away to die, Ingrid and my unborn child never to be seen again.

Helpless.

Hopeless.

I turn back to Sidney and say, “And this is when you recruited her to run a new program.”

He nods. “The Sleep Control Program.”

“Why sleep?”

“Over the course of a hundred and sixty projects on behavior modification, the results from the projects concerned with sleep modification were the most impactful. It was well known that sleep deprivation caused prisoners to physically wear down, to hallucinate, to go crazy, but the results from both sleep amplification and dream modification testing were incredible.”

“By dream modification, you mean nightmares.”

He nods.

As if reading my thoughts, he says, “How do we do it? Well, it is far from an exact science. I will give you the short version.” He takes a sip of his scotch and two deep breaths. “Creating a nightmare is like trying to create a tornado. You can’t do it. However, if you have the right conditions, a blanket of warm moist air near the surface and a layer of cold air above that, and perhaps some southwesterly winds, then you create an instability where a tornado might form. That is precisely what we try to create in the brain, an instability.”

Ewen glances at both of us to make sure we are still with him, that he isn’t shooting scientific gibberish three feet over our heads.

My father and I both nod our understanding.

“We use three compounds,” Ewen says. “The first, our warm air, suppresses certain neurotransmitters — serotonin, dopamine, several more — while enhancing others, mainly melatonin.”

I was quite familiar with melatonin. In my teens, I had an operation to remove my pineal gland — a gland located in the center of the brain — which releases melatonin, the hormone that controls the sleep-wake cycle. My pineal gland was three times the normal size and was thought to be the cause of my Henry Bins.

It was not.

“The second compound, our layer of cold air, supercharges the limbic system, the area of the brain which controls primitive, raw emotions: fear, hate, anger, love, jealousy—”

“Hope,” my father utters.

“Yes, and hope.”

“And what is the third compound?” I ask, ready to move onto the next question in my arsenal but somewhat transfixed by the science of it all.