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going to get out? In his few nightmarish days within the beast, he’d already run into guys who’d been here for years—
years
—without being sentenced, without even a hearing. He imagined that once you passed a certain point in a system like this one, the overseers wouldn’t let you up for air even if by some amazing coincidence they became aware of your case. At that point, after all, your story would be an embarrassment to them. And the worse your treatment, the more sympathetic your circumstances, the more egregious the entire story, the more culpable they would all be. After a certain amount of time without a hearing, being innocent would probably be the worst thing that could happen to someone in a place like this. What were they going to do, admit that for three, five, seven years, they’d caged up a guy who—
oops
—hadn’t even done anything, and never even gave him a hearing? Yeah, fat chance of that. Better to just leave you where you are. You’d been there that long already, and it wasn’t like anyone was asking about you. Let sleeping dogs lie, baby. Wait long enough, and eventually they’d be sleeping for good.
    The next morning, as he dozed on the concrete, he was awakened by a hard poke in his ribs, which were still bruised from some well-placed kicks delivered by Manila’s finest. He shot to his feet, his back to the wall, adrenaline rocketing through him. Three guards regarded him, their truncheons out. He looked from one to the other. Reasonably good odds, maybe, but what was he going to do—cut through these three and then levitate over the wall?
    One of the guards motioned with his truncheon. Ben nodded and started walking.
    They took him to a small room with faded green cinder block walls and a single rattling fan that in its uselessness seemed only to worsen the clinging wet heat. A black man in jeans, sneakers, and a red polo shirt, obviously fit and somewhere in his fifties, was sitting at a peeling linoleum table in the center of the room, his shaved head beaded in perspiration. He shook his head in mild disapproval as Ben entered.
    “Damn, son,” he said in his gravelly Mississippi Delta baritone. “You look like shit warmed over.”
    Despite everything that had happened between them, and despite the humiliation of having his commander find him like this, Ben was so flooded with relief his legs went rubbery. He knew his situation was bad, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how near he’d been to actual despair, how convinced he had begun to feel that no one would ever find him.
    He breathed in and out a few times, pulling himself together. When he trusted himself to speak, he said, “What are you doing here, Hort?”
    Hort laughed, the sound deep and not at all unfriendly. As always, Ben was struck by the man’s complete ease and confidence, by his natural command presence. Colonel Scott Horton was a legend in the black ops community. He had personally designed and now commanded Ben’s secret unit, the absurdly blandly named Intelligence Support Activity, and his exploits in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were such that he was held in awe not just by his men, but even by the Joint Special Operations Command brass who were his nominal superiors.
    The laugh slowly died away, a paternal grin lingering in its aftermath. “When I heard they had visiting hours in hell, I just couldn’t stay away.”
    “I don’t need you to bail me out.”
    This was so obviously untrue Ben immediately felt like a blustering child for saying it, and expected another baritone chuckle in response.
    Instead, Hort said, “It’s not a question of what you need. I’m responsible for you.”
    Ben knew he was being stupid, but anger was the only thing keeping him together and he was afraid to let it go. “Got a funny way of showing it.”
    “Don’t ask me to apologize for putting the mission ahead of the man, son. I already told you, it was the toughest call I’ve ever had to