The Voting Machine

The Judas Chair

I woke in a separate room, still naked, strapped in a harness, suspended on a pulley hanging from the ceiling. Beside me sat a strange-looking chair. It was twisted and metallic. The base of the seat rose up like a mountain toward a pointy spike. Glistening ridges and grooves ran down the sides to the seat's triangular base, each jagged edge as sharp as a razor blade.

My interrogators stood in front of me joined by another woman, Teresa Swan.

"I shouldn't have to be here," Teresa said to the agents, not aware that I was awake.

"Shiro doesn't trust you," the woman who called herself Polk said. "We don't trust you."

"Shiro wouldn't want me involved in this. I deal with the clients."

"Then why did you get involved with Temo?" Decatur asked. "You gave Temo the gun. We didn't tell you to do that. If you hadn't done that we wouldn't have had to improvise."

"I don't take orders from you," Teresa said. "Besides, didn't it work out in your favor?"

"Our favor."

"Our favor. Without the gun you'd have no case against him. You wouldn't have been able to do any of this."

"Why did you plant the gun, Teresa? You didn't know the plan," Decatur said.

"You don't have any idea what I know."

"You know less than us. We know your name. You don't know ours. But that isn't very important right now. What's important is your loyalty. Now, you'll have the chance to prove it."

Teresa never looked at me once during their entire conversation. Decatur and Polk were fastening a rope and handle, a device connected to the pulley on the ceiling that held my harness. They ordered Teresa to check my harness for proper tightening.

"You know I did nothing wrong, Teresa. You've always known who I am," I whispered as she stood close by and tugged the straps.

"That's true," she replied in a tone loud enough for them to hear her. "And you've always known who I am, Temo. I have to protect my son. That's always been my priority. You could never figure out your priorities. That's how you got in this mess in the first place."

Decatur stepped forward for a final inspection of the pulley system that was designed to raise and lower my harness. Then he crouched close to the blade-like mountain that rose out of the seat, gently dabbing the pointed tip until it pricked his finger tip and blood trickled down the spike in a thin stream.

"It's called the Judas Chair," Decatur said. "It comes from the Crusades. They had enemies who couldn't be bought or frightened."

Decatur yanked a rope fastened to the pulley, raising my harness a few feet higher. He had tied a loop at the end of the handle, so that he could slip his forearm through and get a firmer grip. At the side of the chair there was a latch that locked the pulley and controlled the slack of the rope. The latch was the only thing that kept me from falling to the ground in my harness.

"Are you a Catholic, Temo?" he said. "That's how I was raised until I realized that they had it all wrong. The Sunday School teachers were always telling me to compare myself to Christ. They should've been telling me to compare myself to Judas. Everyone betrays what they believe in. Everyone ends up hurting the ones they love the most."

"Shiro reads your emails, Temo. You probably figured that out by now. There are people in the organization with every type of specialization. Our expertise is these intimate question-and-answer sessions. So if you know that we can read your emails, you also realize the Gina stole some very valuable information from Shiro, information that can't find its way into the wrong hands. Now she was smart enough not to send it to you electronically, because she knows we would've intercepted it. So she must've hidden it somewhere and provided directions in a place that she thought we couldn't access, a place like your brain."