Jamie stretched his sore muscles out, leaning back in the folding chair.  His hands moved to the nape of his neck and brushed against his close-cropped hair.  The shoulder-length locks were gone, and his nervous habit of tugging them into a ponytail was missed.

It was a new haircut for a new life.  A life he never wanted.  An afterlife.

Jamie felt like he had died.  He was a spirit descended down into hell.  And his private circle of torment happened to look like a gray shit-box bunker, where the demons imprisoned little girls and stayed up all night waiting for them to turn into monstrosities.

The four principle Shayatin, the evil djinn, were upfront and center.  Close as thieves Blass, Gracie, and Horus sat at the main console. 

Jamie had liked Horus at first, but it soon became clear that he was one of the leaders of this travesty.  He was one of the elite that controlled things down here and kept everyone else in the dark and in line.  Yesterday, they had all been in some secret meeting together.  Probably to discuss what horrors to inflict on that innocent child.

In the second row, just behind them, not moving, barely twitching, sat the great Iblis himself.  The ruler of the underworld, the master of lies, Maxwell Wiley.

From Jamie's vantage in the back row, he could see them all.  He could see them too well, but mercifully he could not see the girl in that pen.  He had been forced to watch her last night, as she sobbed in that horrible cell.  It didn't look anything like the cell that had broken him, but it was exactly the same.

After nine days in it — nine days to forget who he was — he was taken to a room with a table and two chairs.  His guards handcuffed him to a bar on the table and left him alone.  It was the first time since his arrest that he felt like he was in the twenty-first century and that he hadn't fallen through some time warp to the middle ages or some dystopian future.  The chairs were upholstered, the walls were painted, and the door actually had a glass window in it.  This could be a room meant for human beings.

He had no idea how long they let him sit there, by the time the man in the suit showed up, Jamie was sleeping.

For nine days, sirens, flashing lights, and loud music jarred every second of the day and night, when he wasn't being questioned.  This new interrogation room with nothing but the silent hum of ventilation was pure bliss.  But all good things come to an end.

The man cleared his throat and slammed the door, violently throwing Jamie into consciousness. 

 He hadn't seen this man before.  He didn't look like CIA, or Military Intelligence, or whoever the hell had been keeping him prisoner.  He looked like a pharmaceutical rep or a college administrator.  Jamie was certain he wasn't either of these.

The man smiled at him pleasantly, flashing white teeth in not too broad a grin.  It didn't look like he was trying to be friendly.  It just seemed like he was happy with what he was doing.  Even if all he was doing was taking out a pile of files from his briefcase.

"Jamal Haddad."  He meshed his fingers together and placed his hands on top of the files, as he leaned forward.  "I'm here to inform you your life is over."

Tell me something I don't know. 

The man's smile didn't waver.  Apparently, the end of Jamie's life was not a significant enough event to ruin his cheerful mood.

"The question is: how do you want it to end?"  With a speed that Jamie's bleary eyes picked up as a blur, he drew back, picked up the top folder, and slapped down like a giant playing card.  "Door number one!  You maintain your innocence and face American justice.  This means a trial after a suitable interrogation period." 

"You mean they'll torture me until I confess to something."  The words creaked out of his dry mouth.  The defiance in his brain was undercut by the weakness in his body.

"The U.S. Government does not torture."  The man rubbed his chin, the smile wavered.  "We very carefully craft the wording in our laws to prevent that."

Surprising honesty.  Perhaps it was a ploy to get Jamie to trust him.  It didn't work.

His taunting smile returned, and he opened the folder to reveal its complete lack of contents.  "Pick this.  And I have nothing for you.  I leave, and the CIA, DOD, and DOJ get to fight over who gets to parade you in front of the media."

If Jamie's tongue wasn't so thick and sluggish — a mirror of his brain — he might have tried to argue his innocence, again.  Whatever good that would do.  Nobody seemed to care what he had to say.  But part of him felt he should denounce the tenuous evidence against him, as often as possible, to whoever was in front of him.  Staying silent felt like an admission.  It felt like giving up. 

Jamie had been questioned enough to know what little they had on him, and it would have been laughable, except there had not been one funny thing in his life since they kicked down his door at five in the morning.

The sum total of their case against him was a lapsed student visa in '07, a fifty dollar donation to a charity group with links to Hezbollah, and a visit to New York City, the same weekend as a car with explosives was found in Times Square.  It was flimsy evidence, but an effective noose around his neck.

It didn't matter to anyone that the visa was a youthful oversight, and he was only in the country illegally for two weeks; or that he thought he was donating to a school program for special needs children; or that his employer had sent him for consultation with a research team in Westchester County, and the only time he spent in Manhattan was the taxi ride to and from LaGuardia. 

All that mattered was that they called him a terrorist, and they treated him like one.

Slap.  The next folder came down. 

"Door number two!" the man in the suit said, returning to his chipper game show host voice.  "You give evidence against some of your friends and you are deported home."  He flipped it open to reveal a blank confession sheet.

So torture and death in the land of my birth, instead of here.

"That's not my home.  And you know I'm as good as dead if I go back there."  They wouldn't hesitate to hand down a death sentence.  Not after how publically he had denounced their human rights abuses.  And not with a terrorism allegation hanging over his head.  The only question was how long they would beat him before they sent him to meet the executioner's ax.

The man shrugged apologetically.  "Yes, the Saudis aren't very tolerant of your kind.  Are they?  Well, today's your lucky day, because..."

Slap.

His grin widened, and he mimicked a carnival barker as he opened the last folder to reveal a thick document filled with small print.  "Door number three!  The mystery prize." 

The blocks of text were just hazy shapes in Jamie's fog of exhaustion.  "It looks like a contract."

It was only days later after he had rested and regained some strength from eating proper food, that his arrest began to look awfully convenient in light of Project LARS's need for a world-class geneticist.  But by then his future had been signed away.  Wiley's deck of cards had been stacked against him from the beginning.

Paulson had started working on a stick of gum.  He was off by himself, to Jamie's left, in the corner with his arms folded.  There were two empty chairs separating them, but all Jamie could hear was him chewing with his mouth open.  On every third chew, the side of his mouth twisted into a grimace, like he was about to launch into a bad James Cagney imitation, but he just resumed munching the gum.  Chaw-chaw-chee.  Chaw-chaw-chee.  The rational part of Jamie's brain just wished he would stop.  The fantasy-prone part envisioned jamming a pen into Paulson's ear.

The noise wound up his already overwrought nerves.  It took all his self-control not to jump out of his chair and scream.  A knife was twisting in his belly.  All he could think about was that girl scared and alone in there, while everyone gawked and grew bored.  All because of some ridiculous superstition that made them think werewolves existed.  Stupid-stupid-stupid.

Watching her last night, he couldn't help seeing his sister curled up on that beige pallet. 

Nadia was only ten.  With her glimmering black hair and golden skin, she couldn't have looked more different than the pale, blonde girl in the cage.  But they would be sisters in their innocence and their fear.

He hadn't seen sweet Nadia in six years.  Not since he came out and decided to live life on his own terms.  He threw away the life he was born into – the one with his parents and Nadia.  Now the life he had built, the one with Glen, had been ripped away.

He should have just let them execute him.  He was nothing but a ghost.

They had buried him down in this hell to suffer and to cause suffering.

He was utterly alone.

Chaw-chaw-chee