The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [59]
“Good,” said Squinty encouragingly. “We are making progress, Kirthis Kanakaratnam. So now tell me, what country were you working for?”
There were, of course, many other ways of making a subject become cooperative, but, of course, none of them produced any truthful confessions from Ranjit since he had no crimes to confess.
This exasperated his interrogators. The one he called Squinty complained. “You are making us look bad, Ranjit, or Kirthis, or whoever you are. Listen to me. It will go easier for you if you just stop denying you are Kirthis Kanakaratnam.”
Ranjit tried taking the advice. Then it did go easier, a little.
14
RENDITION TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER
Although Ranjit hadn’t known any part of it, quite a few things had been going on outside the walls of his place of detention. Cathedrals had been blown up, railroad trains derailed, office buildings poisoned with radioactive dust in their ventilation systems. And assassinations? Oh, yes, there had been plenty of assassinations, by throat-cutting or defenestration from an upper floor; by handgun, shotgun, and assault rifle; quite often by poisoning, administered in sometimes quite ingenious ways. Not to mention, in one case, assassination by dropping a piano on the victim’s head, and in another, by standing on the victim’s chest to hold him to the bottom of his bathtub as its taps filled it with lukewarm water. And, of course, there were the wars. Perhaps the most violent of the new ones revived an old plague spot as a Sunni incursion into Kurdish territory threatened to set off another round of the turmoil that characterized post-occupation Iraq.
However, not everything that had transpired had been bad. Under the close supervision of four of the five Scandinavian nations—Iceland, with its own domestic unrest, stayed outside the group—several of the most bitterly fought wars were in, however brief, remission. Even Myanmar, the country that was more commonly called Burma (except by its own intransigent governing clique), had without warning released all of its political prisoners and invited foreign diplomats to monitor its next set of elections. Finally—a development that would have greatly pleased Ranjit, if he could have known of it—after endless stalling, the World Bank had come through with a decent billion-dollar start-up grant for an actual Artsutanov space elevator. True, a World Bank grant was a long way from the actual wheels turning, with the cars going up and down the cables, the hardware that you could hop onto and be drawn to low earth orbit at three hundred kilometers an hour. But it was a real first step.
Those, of course, were not the only data with a significant bearing on his own life that Ranjit did not know. For example, he didn’t know why he had been taken to this place and why he had been tortured in it. And then, when the torturing had stopped, he didn’t know why that had happened, either. Ranjit had never heard of extraordinary rendition or the momentous decision that had been handed down, decades earlier, by the British Law Lords.
Of course, Ranjit’s torturers could have helped him out with some information if they had chosen to. They didn’t choose to.
After the first day without inflicted pain, he didn’t see Bruno, the belly-slap and electrical-cable guy, again at all. He did see Squinty quite often, but only after Squinty had extracted a promise from him that he would stop asking why he had been tortured and whether he would ever be released, and indeed pretty much any question that Ranjit really wanted answered. Squinty did supply a tiny bit of information. (“Bruno? Oh, he’s been promoted upstairs. He just doesn’t know what to do with a prisoner unless he’s hurting him, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be hurting you anymore.”)
That was, Ranjit reminded himself, a fact of life not to be scorned. It was a big improvement over the previous diet of thrashings and water-boardings. But it was, especially after Squinty quit coming around because Ranjit couldn