Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 12 Lampedusa, Thursday 28 June [Now]

It was sweat and dirt, not heredity, which gave Prisoner Zero's hair its texture. Something the marine specialist cutting it understood because her boyfriend was black, while her Lieutenant and the Pentagon official standing beside him were not.

After three swipes either side, Prisoner Zero was left with a greying Mohican, a fact that raised a half smile so private it never reached his face. And then the Mohican was gone, buzzed away in a clatter of cheap blades. The clippers were local, garishly chromed and came with five attachments, one for each setting. At the moment the blades were naked, resulting in a crop fine enough to draw blood when they caught a mosquito bite on the back of Prisoner Zero's neck.

It was his first morning at Camp Freedom and beyond the Mediterranean headland dawn was transmuting sullen waves to mercury, while a shoal of flying fish turned unseen to slivers of silver. No fishing boats were allowed near the Punta dell'Acqua, and the tiny cove below the headland had been closed with a chain across its entrance, much as might have happened five hundred years earlier.

The mostly German tourists who originally occupied the hotel had been shipped to other resorts on Lampedusa or sent home.

Where once Turkish raiders landed war parties and Sicilian princes banished their enemies the USS Harry S. Truman was now anchored. For the first time in months, pregnant Tunisian clandestini weren't staggering through waves or crawling up narrow beaches, too tired even to beg for asylum. As a local Forza Italia spokesman said, sometimes good came from bad.

"Now the beard."

More clippers, starting on Prisoner Zero's jaw, at a point just below his left ear. Once again the hair came away in coarse strips, greyer than before. The marine wielding the clippers finished the left side and started on the right, leaving the man handcuffed to the chair with a long goatee that was almost a cliché of how a terrorist should look.

Examining her handiwork Marine Stone shrugged, took a fistful of the goatee and switched her clippers back on. The prisoner's face was pale from lack of sunlight and sallow, almost olive. He didn't look like an Arab to her, but what did she know?

She was just there to do what she was told.

Lieutenant Ashcroft and the civilian were arguing security arrangements and it seemed to be the man in the suit who was making most of the complaints, all of them idiotic.

The island of Lampedusa was seven miles long and two miles wide and its nearest land mass was North Africa, a mere seventy-one miles away, whereas Sicily, the island to which Lampedusa belonged in spirit if not geographically, was twice that distance. At its peak, during high summer, nine hundred North African asylum seekers a month washed up on what was Italian soil.

"Body hair," ordered the civilian and Specialist Stone glanced at her lieutenant for confirmation, realizing too late that this was a bad move. "Got a problem with that?" the civilian demanded.

"Yes, sir." Her voice was flat. "I have, sir."

"And your problem is what?"

"He's handcuffed to a chair. And wearing clothes, sir."

They shackled the naked prisoner to a bench in the hotel gym, face up, wrists fixed to the legs at one end and ankles to the legs at the other. "They" being Master Sergeant Saez and the man from the Pentagon. None of the current round of visitors wearing suits and shades had bothered to introduce themselves to Specialist Stone; she was only some lowly peon in marine intelligence.

Maybe it was need to know.

Clicking on her clippers, Specialist Stone took the suit at his word and removed all of Prisoner Zero's body hair, starting with his lower legs. When she got to his genitals she just kept going, moving aside his shrunken prick with casual insouciance before starting on his stomach and then chest, around the nipples and under his arms.

Prisoner Zero stank, there was no doubt about that, the kind of stink she remembered from weekend visits to the Chicago Zoo with her father. Even the suit was close enough to notice it.

"He needs a bath," said the Lieutenant.

"No," the suit said. "What he needs is a shower."

"This is de-licing, right?" the Lieutenant asked, when Master Sergeant Saez had finished hosing Prisoner Zero down with water taken from a fire point.

The suit shook his head.

"Then why shave the body hair?"

"Why?" The suit smiled at Lieutenant Ashcroft as if he were a child and a particularly simple one at that. "I'd have thought that was obvious," he said. "We're making it easier to attach electrodes."

Lieutenant Ashcroft wasn't the only one to hope the man was joking.

The first reference to Lampedusa occurred in a letter from Pope Leon III to Charlemagne, Emperor of the West, informing him of a battle between the Byzantines and an Arab army. In 1436 Alfonso of Aragon presented the island to Giovanni de Caro. In 1661, its owner, Ferdinand Tommasi, received the title of prince from the King of Spain. Seventy-five years later, when the English Earl of Sandwich visited the island, he found only one inhabitant.

None of this the Lieutenant had known the evening before, as he piloted a helicopter across the darkening waters of the Mediterranean, with its cargo of three men in suits, five marines and one manacled prisoner.

He had orders, a flight chart downloaded from the Italians, a map reference and GPS positioning in case he still couldn't find the place. As it was, all he actually needed to do was play spot the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

There'd been a suggestion that the USS Harry S. Truman should be positioned off Lampedusa's south-western tip, between Punta dell' Acqua and the Tunisian coast, but this was felt to be unnecessarily insulting to Tunis, and anyway everyone from the President down knew there was nothing the USS Truman couldn't do equally well from the Sicilian side, thirty miles to the north-east...

"Get to it," the Master Sergeant had told a corporal as Lieutenant Ashcroft released the doors and the corporal had nodded at two marines. Together they'd manoeuvred the blindfolded prisoner into the doorway, down some steps and onto a small patch of withered lawn.

Away to one side, a dozen SLRs whirred and a Fox Network reporter began her spiel to camera. Stating the obvious, as always. No one rushed forward or jostled for position. The rules for journalists had been set out in advance, in triplicate, to be signed by department heads.

They were the chosen, flown by the Pentagon to a tiny island in the Mediterranean owned by Italy. And the Italians had been delighted to loan its western tip to the Pentagon. It said so on the press release.

"Walk," demanded the Master Sergeant and Prisoner Zero did, while two marines on either side gripped his upper arms. The swathe of crepe hiding the man's eyes was held in place by a strip of duct tape that circled his entire skull. Plastic cuffs locked his wrists behind his back and a short length of shackle secured both ankles. His shoes were gone and so was the ring he'd worn on his little finger.

Some of the finest linguists at the Pentagon were currently failing to come up with a translation of the flowing script engraved into its red stone, despite using the latest in translation software. This was because it was written in an old form of Persian. Prisoner Zero had no idea what it said either.

He understood colloquial French, that much was now confirmed. A quick and dirty CAT scan having produced language recognition patterns for this, Arabic and rudimentary Berber.

That he spoke English was known from his interrogation.

If Prisoner Zero now failed to acknowledge a single order it was because he chose not to rather than because he didn't understand what was being said. Master Sergeant Saez had his own opinion on that but had been told to keep it to himself, especially while the press were around.

"So," said the small man, walking over to where Prisoner Zero stood shivering and naked in the early morning light. "This is our man, right?"

As if it could be anybody else.

Lieutenant Ashcroft sighed, mostly at the fact that the Pentagon's representative had excused himself the moment the lawyer came through the doorway and begun to introduce himself. Behind Miles Alsdorf stood Colonel Borgenicht, commandant of the newly named Camp Freedom. He was looking less than happy.

"Yes, sir. This is Prisoner Zero."

Both Colonel Borgenicht and the lawyer paused to examine the man, water dripping from his naked body.

"What happened to his hair?"

"I shaved it off, sir." The answer came from a Marine Specialist so short that she barely stood level with the White House lawyer, who had a career's worth of Cuban heels and hand-made suits behind him, even back in the days when he couldn't afford them.

"And why exactly did you cut it off?" asked Miles Alsdorf. He was holding a very expensive briefcase in one hand and wore this year's Rolex Presidential. Given what the White House was paying for his counsel on this matter, he could easily afford both.

Specialist Stone looked towards Lieutenant Ashcroft. Only the Lieutenant was busy not meeting her eyes.

"Because those were my orders, sir."

"And who gave this order?"

"A man in a suit, sir. He didn't give his name."

Miles Alsdorf's frown was usually reserved for opposing counsel. "You do know, don't you," he said, speaking to the Colonel, "that the President himself is taking a personal interest in this case?"

"So is the Secretary of Defense," said Colonel Borgenicht. The current spat between the White House and the Pentagon was their business. He was a career officer and hoped to keep it that way.

The corridor leading to his cage Prisoner Zero drew from memory, scratching it into the skin of his arm with a thumbnail. The only problem with this was that his map kept fading.

At the end of the corridor was a door and through that door could be found the hotel's swimming pool, its showers and changing rooms. Two marines had been in the process of emptying the pool, using an electric pump, when Prisoner Zero was marched by. Maybe they expected him to try to drown himself.

He currently wore a pair of trousers made from coarse orange paper, designed to fasten with a cord. The cord was also made of paper and broke easily. The prisoner knew this because he'd broken it.

He'd received four injections and been told he'd get antibiotics three times a day with his food. The cigarette burns on the inside of his thigh had been cleaned without comment by a marine paramedic, swabbed with some antiseptic and then dressed with a strip of synthetic skin. They were taking remarkably good care of him for someone they intended to kill.

And they did still intend to execute him, because more lethal injections were scheduled for two weeks to the day, Thursday 12 July. Although, as Master Sergeant Saez had pointed out, if the Pentagon was allowed its way, Prisoner Zero would already be up against a wall.

Fittingly enough, the wall Master Sergeant Saez had in mind was the one Prisoner Zero first noticed when Specialist Stone ripped free his blindfold the night before, and the prisoner found himself staring at a tourist hotel.

Almost pink in the twilight, the wall was meant to look as if it had stood forever. Only a workman had plastered the thing too soon, certainly before the mortar holding the breeze blocks had had a chance to dry, and angular cracks now indicated stress points in the structure underneath.

In the wall was a wrought-iron gate. This had been padlocked and sheeted on both sides with steel plates which were held in place by bolts. Next to the gate was a flowerbed and this had been trampled down. After the wall, the door and the flowerbed, the next thing Prisoner Zero had noticed was a curl of dog shit on the earth, turning to ash with age.

As Prisoner Zero scratched maps into his arm, Specialist Stone got busy painting out a window opposite Prisoner Zero's cage. Obliterating a stretch of ragged cliff with blue sea beyond, the dissonance between ochre rock and the utterly flat blueness of the Mediterranean an indication of the depth of the drop.

In one dimension, the blue was so close as to be part of the same, while in another it was obviously and entirely separate. As it was in the dimension beyond that.

Gulls, dark-headed and greedy, spun on the thermals above the edge of the cliff and then dropped away, like bit parts in some conjuring trick. Butterflies danced beyond the glass and then they were gone, along with the cliff, gulls and his sight of the sea, whitewashed away with a heavy brush.

It had all been very beautiful, in some ways more real than anything he'd ever seen, and yet Prisoner Zero had trouble working out what all this had to do with him. He should have been elsewhere. In America, most probably on the lawn of the White House with the latest rifle and laser sights. Saving the future from itself.

"Are they treating you well enough?"

Miles Alsdorf must have been told what to expect because his face expressed no surprise at finding his client held in a cage made by welding together huge sheets of steel mesh. The big surprise for Miles Alsdorf was that he'd won his fight for daily access.

The cage had been welded into place in the middle of the hotel weights room, which had been cleared of dumbbells and a pair of dual-stack multigyms, although mats were still piled below a large window; now whitewashed, padlocked and covered with mesh left over from welding the cage.

"Colonel Borgenicht's just been explaining it to me," Miles Alsdorf added, stepping into the room and shutting out the guards behind him. "They don't want to lose you."

Silence greeted this comment but he kept smiling all the same. He'd defended New York cop-killers, three black teenagers accused of raping the daughter of a Texas senator and a self-confessed baby-smotherer, a twenty-three-year-old from Kansas too deep into heroin even to remember how she got pregnant. And once, about fifteen years before, he'd defended the butcher of Lyons, an octogenarian Nazi whose senility stopped him from even knowing that he'd committed the crime.

"I'm Miles," said the man, "Miles Alsdorf, remember? I've been retained as your lawyer. We need to appeal," he added. "And the sooner the better." Lifting his briefcase, he looked around for a place to put it and realized too late that there wasn't one. So he put it down again and squatted on one side of the wire, while Prisoner Zero sat, his knees tucked up under his chin, on the other.

Pulling a Dictaphone from his pocket, Miles described the cage in short, clipped sentences, making particular reference to the fact that the prisoner's slop bucket had no lid and that visitors such as himself had nowhere to sit. And then something else occurred to him.

"How are you supposed to know where Mecca is?"

Prisoner Zero stared at him.

"I thought people like you had to pray five times a day?"

Like me?

Only if they believe in God, Prisoner Zero wanted to say, but he didn't; believe in God or say it either. He believed in cold equations, Quantum Foam and in time, which he knew had two mutually compatible shapes. The first spiralled out like an ice-cream cone, widening in circles from a single point at the bottom, the other was spherical.

He'd chased down some of the equations twenty years before, thinking about little else towards the end and always reaching the same conclusion. Time was a marble.

A book had held his proof. A cheap notebook mostly full of songs, with tattered corners and a vomit stain across the back. Its final pages were brittle and wavy from cat pee, where Miu had got trapped indoors one weekend and been reduced to pissing on Prisoner Zero's notes and a pile of New Scientists in one corner. The nearest thing she could find to a litter tray.

That would have been the last summer in Amsterdam. The year Johnny Thunders issued Hurt Me on the New Rose label. The year of New England.