The Merchant of Secrets by Caroline Lowther

concealed beneath its surface a demonic disposition
and an appetite for violence which his victims in Afghanistan knew all too
well.  Looking at him became  something akin to being forced to
witness a violent crime; I couldn’t  separate  the face in front of
me from the mental image of the torture of children I had read about in the
reports, despite all my efforts to the contrary. I looked away, recognizing
this as a pivotal moment in my life ,  a moment of
awakening when  my opinion on torture, waterboarding or any other type,
had changed at least for this one case, at least for this one person.  For
David Jones any type of torture would have been okay. And if there’s one case,
surely there’d be another? Within seconds of first coming into the room and
into the presence of this monster, he had already altered me. Mullaly was curiously absent. Flumm was absent too. So was Colin. I wondered if they knew about this, but Flumm , Colin and Mullaly had
chosen not to attend for reasons I would discover later. Jones was relaxed in
his chair, smiling with his left arm slung comfortably over the back of the
chair while Todd was wearing reflective glasses that obscured his eyes. The
others, the onlookers, appeared as though they hadn’t bathed in a week.
     
     “I invited your boss to this meeting today but he
elected not to come,” Todd said, smiling at his perceived advantage to finally
get his victim alone and unguarded.
     
    “Caroline,” he continued, “I’d like you to meet Dave
Jones.” Todd bent his neck slightly to the right to acknowledge the person
sitting next to him. I was at first overwhelmed by fear and anxiety and then a
series of   unfamiliar emotions welled up within
me; I wanted to lunge at Jones and to strangle him as he brought out a dark
side that I didn’t know existed within me. The monster I had been reading a bout
whom until the very moment existed only in newspaper print and in our files was
now before me in this small room. The child rapist, drug dealer, pimp, extortionist
and I were sharin g breathing space. It more than horrified me and
it was more than I could bear. I couldn’t understand any of this; why Todd was
pretending that Jones was one of the good guys. The world had turned upside
down and nothing made sense anymore.
     
    “Todd, why are you bringing Jones into our office, don’t
you know what he did to women and children in Afghanistan”? I asked, trying to
elicit from him some acknowledgement of Jones’ horrific deeds and the
mortification I felt at being in Jones’ presence.
     
    “I’ll tell you why, Caroline. What happened between him
and a few women a long time ago is none of your business. Mr. Jones here is the
President of PFG Corporation and prior to that he was one of our best field
operatives, with 20 years of experience, including 10 years in Afghanistan.”
     
    Todd was heaping exultant praise upon the Devil? I
thought I must be in Hell. There are certain breeds of human being that
shouldn’t be free to walk the streets and Jones was one of them. Jones had
defiled the reputation of every American soldier stationed in Afghanistan. In a
country  where one American soldier commits an act of murder other 
U.S. soldiers are captured and killed in retaliation, there’s no telling which
innocent American soldiers might have paid  with their lives for the
crimes committed by Jones. How many American throats were slit in bloody
revenge for Jone’s villainous rampages?  And yet
all of his horrors were whitewashed as if they had never happened and his
record had been cleansed so that Jones would never pay for what he had done.
     
    My disgust with our government at that moment cut deep
into my gut. I began to contemplate quitting my job and moving to Canada, away
from this government which seemed to have lost all moral focus.  I had spent
the better part of 8 years of my life on the technological forefront of three
wars; Iraq, Afghanistan, and defense of