Executive orders - Tom Clancy [264]
THE SECOND GROUP of ten criminals was little different from the first, except that in this one there was not a condemned apostate. It was easy to dislike them, Moudi thought, looking at the group with their sallow faces and slinking mannerisms. It was their expressions most of all. They looked like criminals, never quite meeting his eyes, glancing this way and that, always, it seemed, searching for a way out, a trick, an angle, something underhanded. The combination of fear and lingering brutality on their faces. They were not just men, and while that seemed to the doctor a puerile observation, it did mark them as different from himself and the people he knew, and therefore as the bearers of lives which were unimportant.
We have some sick people here, he told them. You have been assigned to look after them. If you do this job well, you will be trained as hospital aides for work at your prisons. If not, you will be returned to your cells and your sentences. If any of you misbehaves, your punishment will be immediate and severe. They all nodded. They knew about severe treatment. Iranian prisons were not noted for their amenities. Nor, it would seem, for good food. They all had pale skin and rheumy eyes. Well, what solicitude did such people merit? the physician asked himself. Each of them was guilty of known crimes, all of them serious, and what unknown crimes lay in their pasts only the criminals and Allah knew. What pity Moudi felt for them was residual, a result of his medical training, which compelled him to view them as human beings no matter what. That he could overcome. Robbers, thieves, pederasts all, they'd violated the law in a country where law was a thing of God, and if it was stern, it was also fair. If their treatment was harsh by Western standards-Europeans and Americans had the strangest ideas about human rights; what of the rights of the victims of such people?-that was just too bad, Moudi told himself, distancing himself from the people before him. Amnesty International had long since stopped complaining about his country's prisons. Perhaps they could devote their attention to other things, like the treatment of the Faithful in other lands. There was not a Sister Jean Baptiste among them, and she was dead, and that was written, and what remained was to see if their fates had been penned by the same hand in the book of life and death. He nodded to the head guard, who shouted at the new aides. They even stood insolently, Moudi saw. Well, they'd all see about that.
They'd all been pre-processed, stripped, showered, shaved, disinfected, and dressed in surgical greens with single-digit numbers on the back. They wore cloth slippers. The armed guards led them off to the air-lock doors, inside of which were the army medics, supplemented by a single armed guard, who kept his distance, a pistol in his gloved hands. Moudi returned to the security room to watch on the TV system. On the black-and-white monitors he watched them pad down the corridor, eyes shifting left and right in curiosity-and doubtless looking for a way out. All the eyes lingered on the guard, who was never less than four meters distant. Along the way, each of the new arrivals was handed a plastic bucket with various simple tools inside-the buckets also were numbered.
They'd all started somewhat at seeing the medics in their protective suits, but shuffled along anyway. It was at the entrance of the treatment room that they stopped. It must have been the smell, or perhaps the sight. Slow to pick up on the situation, one of their number had finally realized that whatever this was-
On the monitor, a medic gestured at the one who