She sat down again maybe there was an anxiety about her. She'd go before the tribunal and it would decide what was to be done to her. He wanted her begging for mercy and was tempted to go in there and start beating her himself, but he knew this had to be done by the book. He wished she looked more distressed, that she'd broken down, but there'd be plenty of time for that. She was pacing back and forth, looking thoughtful and calm. They should have picked her up a year ago. They had the bitch and they could make her suffer. He didn't understand why the order had gone out now he was just delighted that it had. She just had to steel her mind as well.Ĭolonel Garcia pushed aside the guards, irritated by their ribald laughter, and peered through the eyehole. She wasn't an athlete by any means, but she was healthy and toned, able to drive herself on runs till she was retching with the effort. This was one of the reasons she'd kept herself so physically fit with runs and gym sessions. The thought of torture, of course, made her blood run cold. Of course they'd torture her, she told herself: she had to be prepared for that. And the basement at Petra Negra meant only one thing: the torture cells. She hadn't been taken down any stairs, but she thought the van may have gone down a ramp before they'd bundled her out. Of course it was possible this was just an interior room on the ground floor, but she feared this was a cell in the basement. The fact there was no window troubled her. They'd hooded her in the van, of course, but the distance made sense. She was pretty sure knew where she was: the notorious Petra Negra jail in the capital. The door was solid, cased in metal, but she suspected they were watching her through the peephole, waiting to see how she'd react. The only light came from a grimy bulb set into the ceiling, streaked with cobwebs and the flickering bodies of a couple of desultory moths.
The cell was perhaps 12 feet long and eight feet wide, bare but for the bench – a thick plank supported by two chains – on the back wall. She stood up and paced across the dusty floor again.
Her wrists were cuffed painfully behind her, and her feet were bare, her shoes having fallen off as they'd hustled her from the garden of the hotel into the van. Look, they were saying she's one of them.Īnd so she sat now in a cell, dressed preposterously in a sumptuous blue dress that left her right shoulder bare. And what better way to make people believe she was part of a neo-con US conspiracy than by seizing her when she was at a fancy party for foreigners, done up in an expensive ball-gown. The regime wanted people to know she'd been arrested, that nobody was immune: it wanted to make a statement. Not for her the dawn raid, the mysterious disappearance. What she hadn't expected was that they would come for her then, at the New Year's party at the swishest hotel in town. She had known they would come to silence her. The junta couldn't allow her to keep condemning them, to keep exposing their abuses, on television and in print. There had been those who had said the fact her father was American, the fact she was a US citizen, would protect her, but she had known, deep down, that eventually they would come for her.
She had known this day would come but that didn't mean she was prepared for it.
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