Free The Volunteer by Michael Ross

slapped me (far more humiliating for a man than a punch) when I gave less than satisfactory answers, and kicked me at random intervals. They asked why I was unmarried and why I never took pictures of pretty girls. They made all kinds of comments about my manhood and sexual preferences. When one stopped, the other one started in on me. One tried to appear kind and the other was mean—classic good cop, bad cop.
    After about eight hours of this, they started taking things up a notch. Jack put a hood over my head. They stripped me naked and cuffed my hands behind my back. I then heard electronic buzzing. Over the din I could hear Kevin saying, “We’re going to run some high-voltage current through your balls and see if that makes you talk.” All I could see was a thick cable through the bottom of the hood. I really started to panic at that point, and pleaded with them to believe that I was who I said I was, and not a criminal.
    I never got the shock. All of a sudden, they stopped what they were doing and told me to collect my things and get dressed.
    One of the cops who’d arrested me forty-eight hours earlier took me out to the parking lot. Someone had brought my rental car from the hotel. He handed me my car keys and told me, “Get the fuck out of Dodge.” I looked at him blankly and he snarled at me, “You’re free, idiot!” I was euphoric and would have hugged him had I not remembered that he arrested me in the first place. He also didn’t look like the hugging type.
    And so there I was, a little while later, with Oren and Elan in the lounge of the Sheraton Hotel, looking at the waves crash on the beach and sipping a ginger ale.
    â€œHow do you think you did?” asked Elan. It was one of the rare moments when he actually talked to me, as opposed to merely staring at me.
    â€œTerribly,” was all I could answer.
    Oren regarded me with compassion. “We thought you did well. You stuck to your story and have earned the right to get on with the next phase of your training. Only a small percentage get this far.” So it was a training exercise after all. It was so well-staged that I hadn’t a clue—like something you’d see in Mission Impossible . I felt a confused mixture of anger and relief.
    â€œI’d like to go home and stay there. This is not a life for me,” I told them. I was horrified by the reality of what could happen to me in this job. It was all great when I was taking pictures of boats on a beach or whatnot. But being captured and subjected to genital electrocution—that was a different story.
    Oren said matter-of-factly, “We can’t let you go home like this. You need a couple of days to decompress—then you can go home.” They probably thought I wouldn’t return if they let me go right then and there. They were right.
    I found out a few days later that I had undergone an interrogation by two of the Shin Bet’s finest (Shin Bet is Israel’s domestic security service, and one of its mandates is counterintelligence—hence they have the capability to weed out spies.) Oren told me that one of the two would be coming over later with a videocassette of the interrogation, and we would discuss it.
    When Oren showed up with Jack, I was cool in my reception, wearing my injured pride on my sleeve. Jack took it all with a grain of salt. He’d probably been through this dozens of times,
    I was embarrassed by the tape, and it was hard to watch. To his credit, Jack kept things on a professional level, and the experience turned out to be very instructive. Once again, I learned a lot about myself. Some of it wasn’t pretty. I was a mess and looked like hell. Maybe we should never see ourselves in such situations. But that was me on the TV screen, and I couldn’t hide from what had happened.
    When Jack left, he shook my hand and told me that I had done well. “Don’t feel bad,” he said.