404 Documents, Installment Five: Interrogation.

(Read all 404 Documents)

The interrogation room was nothing special. An office conference room. The ceiling fan whirred slowly overhead and the fluorescent lights flickered, flooding the interior with a dingy and unnaturally greenish yellow hue. The man seated opposite me was husky, forty-something going on seven-hundred, and world-weary. I could tell this from the lines and bags under his eyes, like the rings on the inside of a hewn tree. Those sunken circles made his face seem like that of a raccoon's, which may have been comical in any other setting.

“I’m Agent Trevino,” he said, the tone of his voice doing nothing to dispel my narrative.

“Agent 888,” I replied, a little more cheery than one might expect from someone that’d just been dropped and bagged. “Oppositional-defiant, I guess,” I said aloud accidentally. Silence. I chuckled and feigned a smile in an attempt to break the thick tension that was hanging in the air. You could have cut it with a knife.

“Christ, you kids,” the man muttered, leaning back in his chair. “Alright, I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them, you know. In a way that makes some kind of fucking sense.”

I nodded.

“What was that stunt you pulled today?”

“It was a prank.”

“A prank?”

“Yeah.”

“To start, it’s illegal to go into a public place as a group with your face covered. Did you know that?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t actually.”

“Oh, so you didn’t hear about those kids on wall street getting bagged and tagged for wearing those Guy Fawkes masks for their little sit ins?”

Silence.

He tapped a finger on the table. “I’m going to cut to it. There was an anonymous tip of a terrorist attack on the mall. So the hammer came down pretty hard. If you can answer a few things for me, we’ll overlook the criminal charges and you can overlook the splint on your shin, yeah?”

I looked down, only then realizing what had happened. I had a vague recollection of being in a hospital and getting a morphine injection. The pieces clicked suddenly into place. Not oppositional-defiance. I was high as a fucking kite on acid holding another kite on ketamine 20,000 leagues under a sea of tits. Hold on. A tip? Fucking Bradley. I wanted to be angry but I couldn’t find that emotion. There was just a warm gooey blob where anger was supposed to be.

“What do you know about Babylon?” he asked.

“They’re a band, right?”

He scrutinized my face. “Yeah.”

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

He frowned. “Stop trying to be cute. They’re wanted for starting an insurrection. A couple of shows got nasty. Their fans and possibly even the musicians themselves have a lot of connections to a suspected terrorist organization. Sleeper agents popping up all over the place, it’s like playing whack-a-mole.”

“Ah.” My eyes narrowed. Why would he tell me that? Was he testing me?

“I wouldn’t know anything about all that, sir. I’ll be honest with you too, OK? A friend of mine put us up to this stunt, I mean he suggested it and we thought it would be funny. And I bet you dollars to donuts that he was the one that gave you that anonymous tip. I am so going to kick his ass.” The best cover story is often the truth.

“Donuts? Was that supposed to be a cop joke?”

“Hm. Sorry.”

“No, it was pretty funny. I’m not a cop, I’m a US Marshall. Once upon a time was LAPD, but it’s not like we can’t take a fucking joke from some twenty-something roleplaying nerd playing dress up.”

“I’m 33,” I said.

“Mm, right. Whatever. Look. You’re free to go.”