Erik Audé has been talking for nearly an hour, hardly pausing for air. But now it seems he's said everything he had to say. He lets his fingers slip slowly from the rusted metal grate that separates him from the world outside and pushes up a pair of cheap sunglasses with blue lenses. (They seemed so ludicrously out of place in this prison.)

"Well, what do you think?" he finally asks. "Do you think I'm guilty?"

chapter continues

advertisement

"I think you're a long way from Hollywood," I tell him.

Pakistan map, with major cities

You can't get any farther from Hollywood than this sun-bleached bone of a prison, tossed on the side of a road in a filthy corner of the Pakistani Punjab. It's just a few dozen miles from the Kashmir, one of the most dangerous places in the world, where a million soldiers, Pakistanis and Indians, both armed with nuclear weapons, are facing off at this very moment, inches from war.

It's a place that echoes with the muttered curses of 5,000 men crammed into a prison designed to hold fewer than half that number. Among them are Hindu militants, Nigerian drug dealers and Afghan pimps. Religious extremists who proudly boast that they're enemies of the state and friends and followers of the Saudi millionaire murderer Osama Bin Laden are all included in the mix.

Here Erik Audé is just one more accused drug courier caught at the Islamabad airport with a suitcase full of opium, a nobody in a United Nations of nobodies. Just like everyone else, he would have to learn to live in this prison, learn to endure beatings from guards and even come to accept them, chanting, almost as a mantra, "It's the way they do things here." Whatever they told him to do, even if they told him in Urdu, he'd do it.

The only thing he wouldn't do was follow his lawyer's recommendation, plead guilty, throw himself on the mercy of the court, and hope for a lenient sentence. "I can't do that," he'd tell his lawyer. "I'm not guilty."

It's been four months since Audé left home. Nowadays, he spends his nights wondering whether the whispered threats from the Taliban in the next cell are just empty words or something more. He spends his days playing back in his mind the events that led him to this place. It's like watching the same movie over and over again, daily rushes from a location shot in hell.

email print