Page 105 of The Session

After his first trip to Exuma, Mark had taken an interest in surveying the various islands and noticed a suspiciously large number of them were markedly underdeveloped—except for runways.

Many of them had been built alongside a half century of drug trafficking. It was so common that even one of Disney’s private-island cruise ship destinations had once belonged to a cartel and still retained the remnants of a drug plane, now woven into Disney lore.

The vehicle turned right onto an unmarked exit and drove down a narrow road lined with palm trees and thick brush. It finally came to a clearing where a barbed-wire fence surrounded a concrete bunker.

“That doesn’t look good,” Mark muttered under his breath.

His escort opened the door and directed Mark toward the outer gate, following close behind.

Mark could hear the hum of a generator in the background, powering the security lights around the perimeter and giving off a faint diesel smell.

Mark stopped a few feet from the fence, where he saw a closed-circuit camera aimed down at him. A moment later, the gate buzzed, and his escort swung it open.

“Inside,” the man commanded.

“I don’t think so,” Mark replied.

“We can walk you in or drag you in—your choice,” the man told him.

Mark looked back at the armed men with rifles slung over their chests and decided a confrontation would not end well for him.

They walked across gravel to the front of the bunker. There was a click, and his escort reached out, grabbed the door handle, and pulled it open.

“Inside,” he repeated, pushing Mark ahead of him.

They walked down a long, dark corridor.

“Stop,” the man warned as they reached a point midway to an interior door.

He turned the doorknob and pushed it open. Inside was a small, poorly lit room with three metal chairs and a metal table.

“Sit down,” the man instructed.

Mark sat with his back to the wall. His escort then backed away and shut the door.

As soon as Mark heard footsteps receding, he took out his phone. There was no service, as he’d been told.

He got up and tried the door. It was locked.

He considered pounding on it but knew they were well aware he was here. They could see him from the small camera in the corner pointing at him.

He thought back to Lightman’s lessons on dealing with intense interviews, such as being cross-examined.

Lightman said that after exhaustive interviews with trainers at the CIA and FBI, what mattered wasn’t a story you could recite in words but a story you could visualize. If they asked what he was doing on Eleuthera, there was no point denying that he’d visited Kevin’s bungalow. What he needed was to visualize another reason for being there besides investigating the murder.

Mark retraced the steps in his mind, imagining he wanted to learn more about the brother he never knew. He saw himself walking up the steps, too embarrassed to ask for the key, wandering around and letting his curiosity get the better of him as he unlatched the door to explore the interior and look at the photographs—to try to understand his sibling’s war.

Mark visualized himself sitting in the wooden chair out on the deck, trying to put himself in Kevin’s place.

I wanted to know what he was like, Mark thought, settling on a version of the truth he could say comfortably without revealing his real intentions.

Mark waited for the door to unlock and the handle to turn, as he held on to that truth as hard as he could.

Traitor

Mark sat back down in the chair and decided to do one of Lightman’s meditation exercises to pass the time. He’d rather appear calm and collected than panicked, though internally he wasn’t sure how he would react to whatever happened next.

He began with a visualization method, starting with the first letter of the alphabet and imagining an animal that began with that letter, then interacting with it.