A far-off chime from an unseen speaker, a minor-key triad, and Hal Ambler opened his sleep-sticky eyes.
Was it truly morning? In his windowless room, he had no way of telling. But it was
his morning. Recessed into the ceiling, soft fluorescent lights grew in intensity over a half-hour period: a technological dawn, made brighter by the whiteness of his surroundings. A pretend day, at least, was beginning. Ambler's room was nine feet by twelve feet; the floors were tiled with white vinyl, and the walls were covered with white PVC foam, a dense, rubbery material, slightly yielding to the touch, like a wrestling mat. Before long, the hatch-style door would slide open, making a hydraulic sigh as it did. He knew these details, and hundreds like them. It was the stuff of life in a high-security facility, if you could call it a life. He experienced stretches of grim lucidity, intervals of a fugue state. A larger sense that he had been abducted, not just his body but also his soul.
In the course of a nearly two-decade career as a clandestine operative, Ambler had occasionally been taken captive-it had happened in Chechnya and in Algeria-and he had been subjected to periods of solitary confinement. He knew that the circumstance wasn't conducive to deep thoughts, soul-searching, or philosophical inquiry. Rather, the mind filled with scraps of advertising jingles, pop songs with half-remembered lyrics, and an acute consciousness of small bodily discomforts. It eddied, drifted, and seldom went anywhere interesting, for it was ultimately tethered to the curious agony of isolation. Those who had trained him for the life of an operative had tried to prepare him for such eventualities. The challenge, they had always insisted, was to keep the mind from attacking itself, like a stomach digesting its own lining.
Yet on Parrish Island, he wasn't in the hands of his enemies; he was being held by his own government, the government in whose service he had spent his career.
And he did not know why.
Why someone might be interned here wasn't a mystery to him. As a member of the branch of U.S. intelligence known as Consular Operations, he had heard about the facility on Parrish Island. Ambler understood, too, why such a facility had to exist; everyone was susceptible to the frailties of the human mind, including those in possession of highly guarded secrets. But it was dangerous to allow just any psychiatrist access to such a patient. That was a lesson learned the hard way, during the Cold War, when a Berlin-born psychoanalyst in Alexandria whose clientele included several top government officials came to be exposed as a conduit to East Germany's notorious Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit.
Yet none of this explained why Hal Ambler found himself here, ever since-but how long had it been? His training had stressed the importance of keeping track of time when in confinement. Somehow he had failed to do so, and his questions about duration went unanswered. Had it been six months, a year, more? There was so much he did not know. One thing he did know was that if he did not escape soon, he really would go mad.
Ambler could not decide whether the observance of it was his rescue or his ruin. Quietly and efficiently, he completed his personal calisthenics regimen, finishing with a hundred one-armed push-ups, alternating between left and right. Ambler was permitted to bathe every other day; this was not one of them. At a small white sink in a corner of his room, he brushed his teeth. The toothbrush handle, he noticed, was made of a soft, rubbery polymer, lest a piece of hard plastic be sharpened into a weapon. He pressed a touch latch, and a compact electric shaver slid from a compartment above the sink. He was permitted precisely 120 seconds of use before he had to return the sensor-tagged device to its security compartment; otherwise an alarm would chime. After he finished, Ambler splashed water on his face and ran his wet fingers through his hair, finger-combing it into some sort of order. There was no mirror; no reflective surface anywhere. Even the glass in the ward was treated with some antireflective coating. All to some therapeutic end, no doubt. He donned his "day suit," the white cotton smock and loose, elastic-waisted trousers that were the inmates' uniform.
He turned slowly when he heard the door slide open, and smelled the pine-scented disinfectant that always lingered around the hallway. It was, as usual, a heavyset