Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 15 Lampedusa, Saturday 30 June [Now]

The office was tiny, stacked with boxes. On one wall a work roster gave duties to Antonio, Marc and Gus, bar staff who'd long since been sent back to their villages. A marine artificer had bolted a steel grill across the room's only window, reducing the daylight to baroque shards which ran across the top of a desk as if escaping from a painting.

An electric fan on a small filing cabinet swung back and forth. Every time it reached hard right it glitched, clattering noisily as it stripped plastic gears, before beginning to swing back again. Prisoner Zero would have liked to fix it but both his feet were shackled to a chair.

"Have they been treating you well?"

Prisoner Zero looked at the redhead in the doorway and then flicked his gaze to the marine and the suit behind. The suit wore black Armani, with a red tie and white shirt. His shoes were expensive but dusty, the side effect of not being senior enough to rate his own jeep. On his little finger was a graduation ring. It looked expensive.

"Doesn't he talk?"

The suit's question was addressed to his military escort. The man was a civilian so Master Sergeant Saez didn't bother to answer.

"I'm Katie."

Stepping towards the chair, Dr. Petrov held out one hand and waited. When the prisoner didn't take it, she kept her hand extended, apparently counting off the seconds behind watchful green eyes. At a point known only to herself, Katie Petrov dropped her hand and nodded.

"I'm Bill Logan," said the suit. "And this is Dr. Petrov. She'll be asking you some questions."

"Everything you tell me will be in confidence." Katie's voice was firm and the glance she gave Bill Logan was heavy with meaning. "I want you to know that."

"I'll leave you with him then."

"That would probably be a good idea." Turning to the desk, Katie picked up a manila file and flicked it open. Inside was a single piece of lined paper, blank on both sides. She usually used a Psion Organiser to record her notes and then downloaded them to her laptop, but this was different.

"Undo the shackles," she told the marine. "And then let me have the room to myself."

"The shackles are to stay on, ma'am," Master Sergeant Saez said. "And I'm to stay here."

"Not a chance," said Katie Petrov. "I don't talk to patients in front of third parties. It's unethical."

"For your own safety, ma'am."

The psychiatrist smiled. "I have a black belt in jitsu," she said. "I work out for two hours a day. Look at him..." She nodded at Prisoner Zero who sat, head down, staring at dust that danced in the shards of sunlight, his body encased in a filthy orange jump suit. "Do you really think he's a threat?"

"He tried to kill the President."

"With an antique rifle," said Katie Petrov, "from almost half a mile away. And I'm not the President, thank God."

"All the same," said the Master Sergeant. "My orders are to stay with the prisoner."

"Really?"

Master Sergeant Saez nodded.

"Then we have a problem," Katie told Bill Logan. Shutting her file with a snap, Katie ignored the marine, nodded politely to Prisoner Zero and prepared to vacate the room designated her office.

"Where are you going?" Bill Logan was media coordinator for this operation, his temporary release from CavourCohen Media coming after a brief call to Max Cohen from someone unspecified at the Pentagon.

"Where do you think?" Katie said. "If you can fly me out to the middle of nowhere then presumably you can fly me back again."

She eyeballed the man in the black suit, gaze firm. She knew exactly who Logan was and how he'd made his reputation, but since the man hadn't bothered to introduce himself properly Katie chose to think of him in the abstract, as a hanging for expensive clothes and limited outlooks. Doing this made it easier not to feel worried by her decision.

"We'll get another psychiatrist," said Bill Logan. "That won't be hard. And you're only here because you went to college with the President's son. In fact, we can make a virtue of this. Announce that you felt compromised by your knowledge of the First Family. Unable to assess the maniac who tried to kill--"

"Except that's not what I'll be announcing," Katie said, "is it?" She put her folder back on the desk and turned to face the man. Without even realizing, she fell into a combat pose. A fact not missed by Master Sergeant Saez, who took a second look at her, reappraising.

"What I'll announce," she said, "is that I turned down this assignment because you refused to give me proper access to Prisoner Zero. A man who is quite obviously drugged. To this statement, I'll add a rider. That, in my personal opinion, flying me out to this godforsaken island was nothing more than a cynical media exercise by the Secretary of Defense designed to keep the White House quiet..."

"Okay," said Katie. Picking up her pencil, she wrote "30 June" at the top of her piece of paper, then added "Isola di Lampedusa" and "Session One."

If in doubt begin at the beginning.

Under that, Katie wrote "Question One."

Beyond the window, marines continued to crunch their way across gravel, coming to the end of a path and then starting back, their swivel a rasp of stone against metal. The sound reminded Katie of her childhood. Not that she'd spent her childhood on military bases. Her father had owned a gold Dunhill lighter, the kind with a revolving pillar built into one corner. Turning the pillar made steel grind against flint to create the spark.

She'd loved that lighter.

"Tell me about your childhood," Katie Petrov said.

It was the question few clients could resist. Occasionally some patient would throw a tantrum and flatly refuse to answer, which was an answer in itself. And often Katie found herself explaining that just because something bad had happened didn't make it significant. As for the number of times ex-lovers had lain there in the dark, still burning from the afterglow, to paint the night with their when I was young...

Looking up from her sheet of paper, Katie found the prisoner staring at her. For a second she thought Prisoner Zero was looking at her breasts and then she realized, even as she blushed and grew angry with herself for blushing, that it wasn't her breasts which interested him but the 2b pencil in her hand.

"You want this?"

The pencil was entirely black, little more than a stub, with "Calvin Klein" written in script down one side and a black rubber at the top, slightly chewed.

"From an old boyfriend," she said. "A fashion journalist. We didn't last long." Men talked about themselves when they felt insecure, women when they were at their most confident. And Katie worked on the basis of information exchange; not everyone in the profession approved but it worked for her.

Prisoner Zero's eyes never left her hand, his gaze animal and hard. Working in prisons had taught Katie that almost anything could be used as a weapon. This was why her pencil was short and blunt. Too short really to hold properly, which made the thing too short to be used as a weapon. At least Katie hoped so.

"You want it?"

The man nodded.

"Then say so."

Prisoner Zero transferred his gaze from her hand to her face. He looked younger than she'd been led to expect and strangely vulnerable now that his beard and tangled hair were gone. It was hard to reconcile him with the bug-eyed fanatic featured on the front of every paper.

"Say yes," said Katie, "and you can have it. At least until the end of the session."

The man simply stared at her.

"I know you understand."

Holding out his hand, the man waited. And Katie had to force herself not to gasp at the lacerations across his palm.

"They did that to you?"

Was that a shake of his head? Katie Petrov wasn't sure. All she knew was that the man's hand remained out and his gaze had returned to the pencil.

"Okay," she said, "why not?"

Prisoner Zero tore the pencil's eraser from its sheath with his teeth and bit flat its hollow black tube. Then he ripped open the front of his orange jump suit, slid his arms from the sleeves and began to drop his trousers.

"What are you--?" Katie was about to hit the attack alarm she'd been given and which hung on a paper ribbon around her neck, when Prisoner Zero sat down again and began to use the flattened metal tube to scratch rapid lines into his thighs, blood beading the middle of the lines where his improvised blade dug deepest.

When the map was finished, Prisoner Zero flipped round the pencil, sucked blood from the edge of the metal and then used the pencil's point to sketch an identical map on the inside of his jump suit. Only then did he stand up, almost as if nothing had happened, and shuffle his arms back into the sleeves.

"Put it on the desk," said Katie. "If you've finished with it."

So he did, placing the pencil parallel to the edge, with its blunt lead just touching the corner of the manila file. This was to stop the pencil from rolling away. The ripped-free eraser he balanced on end just below the point of the pencil, like the dot on an exclamation mark.

Katie now knew three things about Prisoner Zero. He manifested self-destructive tendencies, he was anal, in the broader, less accurate sense of being meticulous and he was uncircumcised, which was definitely culturally counter-intuitive. He was also either unashamed of his nakedness or oblivious, because nothing in his recent behaviour suggested exhibitionism.

Actually, Katie knew four facts, although it took a few seconds for her memory of the needle's spoor to sink in. He'd been a drug addict at some time in his life, which undoubtedly meant he had a previous criminal record. And that should make it marginally easier to pin an identity on the man.

"I've been told you speak English," Katie said. "But if you're not comfortable with that then I also speak French and a little Arabic..."

Nothing. Just those eyes, as empty as deep space.

"You've lived in the US?" Katie Petrov glanced at her notes from habit and remembered they were blank. "Nationality?" she wrote at the top, adding her question mark as an afterthought.

"Tell me about your mother."

No answer.

Prisoner Zero watched while the woman made a note.

"What?" she asked, when she finally looked up. "Why do you smile?"

That pencil, the paper, Prisoner Zero wanted to say. He suspected, inasmuch as he thought about it, that they were intentionally old-fashioned to make him feel secure. As if a laptop might somehow be too foreign, too American.

In this he was wrong.

She'd demanded and got doctor-patient confidentiality in all matters except any directly affecting Homeland Security, which she was duty bound to report immediately, and Katie Petrov didn't want some spook with a Van Phrecker sat next door recording every keystroke she made, so she used a pencil and paper. It was her own attempt to keep the interview secure.