Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 24 Lampedusa, Tuesday 3 July [Now]

The fact the Colonel could even name Pierre de Fermat surprised Dr. Petrov, that he could recognize proof of the mathematician's last theorem she found so staggering that she banished the thought from her mind. Something to be processed later, along with an unguarded comment he'd made while he was briefing her on their way to the weights room.

"You know why I got this gig?"

He didn't seem like a man who'd use "gig" in that context. But then he didn't seem like someone who'd ask that kind of question.

"Because of your record?" Katie had Googled him before leaving New York. Those ribbons on his dress uniform meant something. Mostly that he'd taken casualties and held his ground in some of the world's worst shitholes while other units were going to pieces.

"I'm black."

She looked at him then. A bull-necked man with cropped hair turning grey at the edges, flat eyes and a hard smile. He scared her and looking at him Katie wondered if he ever scared himself.

"I don't get it," Katie said.

"What's to get?" said the Colonel. "I'm black and so's he."

Katie glanced at Prisoner Zero and then raised her eyebrows. Sure, the prisoner had olive skin but half the men on the island were darker than this.

"He's not--" she began to say.

Colonel Borgenicht held up one hand, cutting dead her protests. "He is to the Pentagon and the Secretary of State."

The only equation Katie had been able to recognize smeared into the shit of Prisoner Zero's cage was E=MC². And if she was honest, Katie only recognized this because a boyfriend had bought her the T-shirt in her first year at Columbia.

"You want to tell me why you're doing this?"

The naked man didn't even bother to shake his head, just glared through the mesh with flat, light-swallowing eyes. Stubble now grew across his jaw and scalp, making him look like an off-colour recruit for the Aryan Brotherhood, all sneer and crudely cut tattoos.

Katie felt like calling for a marine doctor and demanding that Prisoner Zero's blood be tested. Only this would simultaneously compromise her integrity and independence. The first, by relying on a medical opinion she knew to be partisan. The second... Well, the second was obvious. Katie could imagine Colonel Borgenicht's response on being told that Katie Petrov believed the prisoner was being kept drugged.

That she might care what the Colonel thought was an interesting notion.

"Get me a local doctor." Katie tossed the order over her shoulder, then turned back to Prisoner Zero as if it never occurred to her a suit from the Pentagon might not do as he was told.

"We've got a doctor."

"I want a second opinion."

"On what?"

Katie did her own version of flat-eye. "His physical state," she said.

"Major Dutch is very good."

"Are you officially refusing me a second opinion?"

Katie heard the weights room door shut behind her. The suit would have liked to slam it but the door came fitted with one of those restraining springs designed to stop guests from injuring themselves.

"Now we're alone," said Katie, "you want to tell me why...?" She gestured at numbers cut into the shit which now skimmed a sizeable section of mesh. Letters and numbers, flowing equations and broken words, some of which Katie thought she half recognized and hoped she was wrong.

Disgust was a bad emotion to display in situations like this, so Katie tried to keep her face neutral. She'd been breathing through her mouth ever since Colonel Borgenicht had shown her into the cell. And the fact Katie had been notified at all was a miracle. At least one of the comments she'd overheard suggested the simplest solution would be to bring forward the date for the execution.

Mind you, Katie imagined she'd been meant to hear those.

Shit plastered the mesh. Not lumps of the stuff thrown at the sides of the cage in anger or smeared roughly across its floor, expressions of a furious disgust with life, and Katie had seen both in her three years visiting prisons. Nor was it the clumsy excretal smearing mostly found in dirty protests by those who regarded themselves as political prisoners.

This was a thin, almost translucent skim, completely flat and eerily similar in appearance to cloisonné, where a jeweller fills areas between welded wires with coloured enamel. Onto this surface the man had scratched his equations, using a tiny stub of wire that he still held in one hand.

The room stank and with every hour that passed it stank more. At some point the afternoon sun was going to reach the whitewashed window and the smell would get even worse.

A paper plate had been folded to make a float and the stink of urine suggested Prisoner Zero had thinned his coating to get the right consistency. Speaking as someone who'd waited six weeks for a plasterer, only to have the man who turned up botch the job so badly that he left ridges all across her kitchen wall, Katie had to say that Prisoner Zero was achieving a very professional finish.

"They'll just hose it down," Katie told him.

This was untrue. Master Sergeant Saez had wanted to hose down the cage the moment he saw it, but the Colonel had other ideas, which boiled down to making Prisoner Zero live in his own mess. An approach that fitted Katie's perceptions of the man far better than his familiarity with Fermat.

Katie was expected to issue preliminary findings soon and had little enough to go on. Of course, put another way, she had more than enough to make her case. Sitting naked in a shit-smeared cell was not normal, even for those who made up most of her patients.

All Prisoner Zero had to do was start obsessively jacking off and she could leak to the papers that the man was mentally unfit to stand trial, never mind be executed. Meanwhile, she was stuck in the same shit-smeared cage, so what did that make her?

Pulling a cell phone from her pocket, Katie dialled Master Sergeant Saez. It took five minutes for him to send someone down to the weights room and only then did Specialist Stone discover the Sergeant had given her the wrong keys for the room.

"You finished in here, ma'am?"

Katie shook her head. "I just want to get some cigarettes."

"Good luck," said Specialist Stone. "You planning to walk into Lampedusa?"

"Can't I get some from the bar?"

"All gone and the PX doesn't stock cigarettes anymore."

"There's that vending machine in the lobby."

"Empty."

"Great," said Katie.

"You need them for work, ma'am?"

"Work?"

Specialist Stone nodded at the naked prisoner. "Something to do with him?"

Katie started to shake her head and then stopped when the woman standing in the doorway began to do the same.

"Is it to do with him?"

Katie nodded.

"Okay," said Specialist Stone. "I'm off in ten minutes. I'll take a ride down to the village." That was what the marines called the town, which most of the islanders called their capital. But it was hard for people grown up in Los Angeles and Philadelphia to take seriously a town with an area smaller than some of their malls.

"Not a big deal," said the woman, when Katie started to thank her. "I need some fresh air anyway."

The tobacco was black and the brand nothing that Katie recognized. All the same, she dragged the acrid smoke into her mouth, deadening the faecal stink of Prisoner Zero's cage. Into her mouth and out of her nose, familiar as breathing and almost as welcome.

Katie should have been cross with herself for cracking after five months, but all she felt was relief as nicotine broke the blood-brain barrier and her pulse began to settle. It wasn't that Katie had an addictive personality, she just liked the things.

"Isn't that Fermat?" Katie nodded at the cell wall.

A part of her had been working on the theory that the naked prisoner might react to a Western woman invading his space and perching on the edge of his mattress, openly chain-smoking cigarettes. A wiser part understood that he was unlikely to react to such crude provocation.

After all, Prisoner Zero was a ruthless killer busy playing games with authority. At least he was according to a file she'd just been given by a singularly unhappy Miles Alsdorf. Katie had known the Pentagon had their own choice of psychiatrist examining Prisoner Zero, she just hadn't expected him to reach his conclusion quite so quickly.

And the report made much of Prisoner Zero having tendencies, mostly sociopathic. Nowhere did the report suggest that he was an actual sociopath, because that might posit a degree of non-culpability on the part of the convicted. And anyway, how could she or the Pentagon's tame psychiatrist assert anything but generalities about the prisoner's internal state when he refused to talk?

It all came down to the confession.

"Shit," she said, not caring if the weights room was bugged. "How could you be so fucking stupid?"

Dark eyes held hers and then, as Katie sat frozen, Prisoner Zero reached across and stole her cigarette. Dragging deep, he rolled the smoke from between half-scabbed lips into flaring nostrils and handed the thing back to her.

"That confession," said Katie. "It makes things more difficult."

She knew exactly how stupid a comment this was. If she'd have been Prisoner Zero she'd have said whatever came into her mind as well. She'd seen the report of his injuries, written up carefully by the marine who first examined Prisoner Zero on his arrival on Lampedusa. All those unexplained burns, the torn fingernails and split lip, the lacerated tongue.

"Yeah," said Katie. "I know." Her smile was bitter. "Everyone confesses in the end."