“Me?” he said with a wry grin. “I’m priceless.”

CHAPTER 3
DAVIS

camp five echo, guantanamo bay

They were being treated like animals.

“Stay on the blue line and don’t make eye contact.”

Kevin Davis silently complied with the order being barked at him as he walked down the corridor lined with impenetrable red steel doors. The two military guards escorting him wore splash masks and blue rubber gloves. The conditions were beastly and unrelenting, but Davis swallowed his discomfort.

A germophobe by nature, he felt naked in his suit, which hung loosely off his whippet-thin frame. It had fit when he purchased it at Macy’s five years ago, but he had lost twenty pounds since his anxiety had taken its toll on his appetite.

Davis knew that the interview was a long shot, but he was out of options. Camp Five Echo was notoriously the worst known place a prisoner of the Global War on Terrorism could find himself. As Davis passed the tiny cells, he glanced furtively through the windows to see prisoners pacing and pulling their hair. Davis had read reports that over a hundred prisoners in Gitmo suffered from psychosis, but to see it firsthand was deeply unnerving.

On a long enough timeline, any caged sentient being would internalize the psychologically fracturing fact that it had lost all free will and control over its environment. In animals, the resulting condition was known as zoochosis, and it affected everything from bears to monkeys to killer whales. The creatures began exhibiting repetitive stereotypic behavior ranging from walking in circles to rocking, to compulsive self-mutilation, caught in an infinite loop as unwavering as their surroundings.

Davis was also a prisoner. As his colleagues at the agency derisively put it, he was a GS-13 bagman. A series of unlucky choices had charted the course to his current professional doldrums. When he joined the CIA fifteen years ago, he had been eager to distance himself from the darker aspects of the War on Terror, so he became a money laundering specialist whose primary theater of operations was a cubicle at Langley. Through no fault of his own, he told himself, he had been involved in a bunch of dead-end investigations. They all had been thwarted by the murky Hawala banking systems that most Middle Eastern terror groups relied on. The most recent task group he’d been assigned to was a Gaddafi money laundering investigation that had also been fruitless. In a highly superstitious profession, Davis was now radioactive.

With no one willing to risk bringing his bad juju into their orbit, he now haunted the halls of Langley without being assigned to any new taskings. And because he wasn’t taking any scalps, he was stuck indefinitely at GS-13 pay grade, which was proving insufficient to support his family’s lifestyle. With his oldest about to matriculate at a private elementary school, money was tighter than ever.

Davis paused as the guard directed him to the door where he would be meeting with the detainee. He had read about the enhanced interrogation Riduan had been subjected to, and he worried that the man might be too far gone to be of use. But Riduan was the only prisoner at Gitmo from Sumatra, which meant that he alone might hold the key to a GS-14 promotion.