For the next six hours I buried my head in the emails, photographs and case notes that formed the skeleton of Brodie Wilson’s life. Only when I had put flesh on the bone – giving names to my kids, assigning them birth dates which I would remember even under duress, listening to the God-awful music loaded on the MP3 player – did I close the computer and tilt the seat back.
I wasn’t going to sleep. I wanted to think about the one other thing which had been on my mind: what was in my file.
Chapter Twelve
I HAVE SEEN men so scared they defecate themselves. I have seen men who are about to die get an erection. But I have only ever seen one man so terrified that he did both at the same time.
He was a prisoner at Khun Yuam, the CIA black prison hidden in the lawless jungle along the Thai–Burma border. As I mentioned, I went there as a young man because one of the guards had died in questionable circumstances and, given the nature of the dark arts that were practised within its walls and the high value of its prisoners, any unusual death had to be investigated. That was my job, as raw and inexperienced as I was.
The military guard who died – an American of Latvian descent known as Smokey Joe – was an unpleasant piece of work, the sort of guy who would break your arm then knock you down for not saluting. He had been found floating in a back eddy of a roaring river and, while somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make it appear that he had fallen from a dilapidated rope footbridge, I wasn’t convinced.
I chose a CIA interrogator from the prison’s staff because he was about the same size as Smokey Joe and, without telling him why, asked him to accompany me to the bridge. A dozen of his colleagues and an even larger number of guards walked with us, everybody expecting me to explain my theory of exactly what might have happened. Instead, I had a long length of elasticized rope. Too worried about losing face in front of his colleagues, the CIA guy barely objected when I tied the rope around his ankle, secured the other end to a thick wooden beam and told him to jump.
Five times he either made the leap or we simulated someone pushing him, and we quickly established two things: it would have been impossible under those conditions for Smokey Joe to have left a smear of blood I had found on a boulder halfway down and – second – the interrogator didn’t have much stomach for makeshift bungee jumping.
The splash of blood meant that the guard would have had to be hurled off the footbridge like a javelin and, on account of his size, it would have taken two men. It wasn’t hard to narrow down the suspects – the bridge was only used by prison guards going to buy cheap booze at a smugglers’ camp on the nearby border or opium couriers avoiding military patrols on the highway. I opted for the opium couriers.
For several days I camped under a rocky overhang near the bridge with six Special Forces soldiers attached to the CIA. It was just before dusk on the fourth day when we heard someone coming – a tough guy with a fair bit of Montagnard tribesman in him by the look of his face. He was barefoot and shirtless, a long scar from what was probably a machete running across his ribs. Over his shoulder he had an old M16 assault rifle and a filthy Mickey Mouse backpack. Inside it, undoubtedly, were bricks of No. 2 opium wrapped in rags, starting their long journey on to the streets of America and Europe.
He was whistling an Elton John number through stained teeth when the Special Forces guys jumped him. ‘Crocodile Rock’ died in his throat, the M16 fell, he didn’t have time to get out his long-bladed machete and he stared at me with a mix of defiance and hatred. Two minutes of listening to his glib story about only rarely using the trail and being in Chiang Mai a week ago and I knew he was lying.
I decided to take him back to the cinder-block prison, where I thought a few days in the crushing heat of one of the solitary-confinement cells might make him more cooperative. The CIA guys, most of whom liked Smokey Joe because of his willingness to hit prisoners without being asked twice, had other ideas. They didn’t feel like wasting time by interviewing him or asking a young guy from The Division if they could take over the interrogation.
Deciding to use what their manuals coyly called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, they filled a large concrete bathtub in a corner of the prison hospital. Only when the water was almost at the top did a couple of guards drag in the courier – blindfolded, shackled hand and foot.
Almost immediately I wished I had told the agency guys it was my case and to get the hell back to their cages. Sure, you can convince yourself the rules of life are different when you’re working in the national interest, but this wasn’t even remotely connected to that. When I look back I think I was overawed or I just wanted to be part of the team – the psychology of the small group, as the experts call it. Whatever it was, to my shame, I said nothing.