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“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Is that ayes?” Rapp said.
“Shit. I’d love to help, kid, but I’m really swamped right now.”
Rapp ground his teeth. Why had he ever imagined the old codger would ever have a change of heart? “Fine, I’ll—”
“Just busting your balls. Of course I’m in. See you soon.”
The humor in Stan Hurley’s gravelly voice was almost too much to bear. Rapp wished he could hang up. He couldn’t.
Not yet.
“Thank you,” Rapp said. “I mean it.”
Hurley had already ended the connection.
Rapp swore as he placed the handset back onto its cradle.
He should have felt relieved.
He didn’t.
CHAPTER 24
WASHINGTON, DC
HAVEyou ever provided classified information to a foreign government?”
Zeke Williams had been expecting this question, but hearing it voiced so casually still gave him pause. All polygraphers were not created equal. Some wanted to delve into your personal life for the enjoyment of hearing you confess to cheating on your eighth-grade science test. Still others were all about the steamy details of forbidden office romances or a fling with a friend’s spouse. The very best examiners resisted the urge to become a voyeur in a stranger’s life in favor of getting to what really mattered—was the person on the other end of the polygraph machine a foreign asset?
The unassuming man with thinning blond hair, oversize black spectacles, and a small paunch seemed to fit that category. He’d begun the interview with a few perfunctory statements about the nature of a polygraph examination, what he intended to cover, and what he did not. This speech was not new to Zeke. As someone who’d held clearances at the secret level and above for almost two decades, he was well acquainted with what would follow. Still, the polygrapher’s approachhad thrown him off-balance. Usually an examiner started with a few inane questions meant to relax the subject.
Not today.
“Never,” Zeke said.
“?‘Yes’ or ‘no’ answers only, please. Have you ever provided classified information to a foreign government?”
“No.”
The faint sound of a keyboard clacking drifted from where the examiner was seated behind and to his left, but Zeke tried not to dwell on the ambient noise. The examiner might be flagging the answer for follow-up, fine-tuning the polygraph, or simply fiddling with the machine to keep Zeke off balance. There was no way to know what the examiner was seeing, so Zeke didn’t try to speculate. Instead he kept his attention on the centimeter-sized paint chip that marred the far wall’s otherwise flawless beige color scheme.
Like most interrogation rooms, the décor emphasized function over form. The bare walls were devoid of decoration, the carpeting an anemic shade of gray, and the chairs were constructed of a sturdy, but not particularly comfortable, form of composite wood. Something not quite plastic, but still a far cry from anything that had ever taken nourishment from soil or sunlight.
Unlike many government offices that owed their blandness to regulations stating that any decorations purchased with taxpayer dollars must be sourced from companies that checked the two boxes most important to any government contractor—technically feasible and the lowest price—the polygrapher’s room was designed to look sterile. In the ever-evolving science of detecting lies, current orthodoxy dictated that while the interviewee shouldn’t be made physically uncomfortable, there was nothing wrong with inducing a little mental stress.
In the same way in which the average person filled uncomfortably long silences with idle chatter, a polygrapher wanted his subject to feel as though they had nowhere to hide from his questions. This was why no pictures of windswept beachscapes graced the walls. Instead ofartwork or soothing music, the subject experienced only the examiner’s voice and thetap, tap, tapof his fingers against a hidden keyboard. But this room offered a haven from the sterility in the form of a minuscule blemish on the wall’s otherwise uniform surface. Zeke almost smiled at the image of a fellow interviewee scratching the mark into the paint with his fingernail during one of the examiner’s numerous exits from the room.
He sighed instead.
No one smiled during a polygraph examination.
No one.
“Please try to keep your breathing regular. Uneven respiration makes my job harder and might require us to revisit earlier questions. I don’t want to be here any longer than necessary.”
Zeke doubted this very much.
