They came for Tyra in the dead of night, while I was two hundred miles away. Kicked down the front and back doors after cutting the power, rushed her bedroom, threw a black bag over her head and hauled her away. At the same time I watched, impassively, as one of my interrogators pulled teeth from a stubborn detainee, Tyra was getting packed in an unmarked van and driven off to a black site. Bastards.

I knew nothing of it for hours. I was doing, as I had done since the Revolution, my job: hunting down dissidents and rebels, getting every scrap of information I could, whether it was real evidence or simply conjured up to make the agony stop. There are those who will read this and shudder at the thought, who know the history and thus know what a monster I am. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered to me. I did what I had to, to survive. My conscience was clear then, and in light of what followed, it’s clear once more.

But it wasn’t when Party Secretary Hull surprised me at the entrance to the detention center with his personal guard and that sniveling little shit Ingram. My conscience caught up with me as they drove me to the Party Headquarters in the capitol and sat me down before the top dogs in the country to denounce all the things I’d done at their behest over the past decade and a half. Murder, torture, conspiracy after conspiracy, backstabbing and backbiting. They accused me of preparing to seize power illegally.

“…a power-hungry madman,” Ingram, the last to ramble on and on about my crimes, finished his diatribe, “Whose sole objective since the Great Revolution has been to depose and murder this Council, and seize control as dictator.”

“You’ve heard the charges, Security Director Musitano,” Hull said to me after his cronies banged their fists on the table demanding my execution. He had a knowing smile, a devious little gash in his face that I recognized from when he’d condemned the last democratic leader of the country to death, “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I want it seen to that my wife is looked after,” I answered without a hint of emotion. In fairness, this much I had seen coming. One does not rise in the hierarchy of such a vicious government without expecting his comeuppance. I’d been prepared for death since we were young men concocting the murder of policemen before the Revolution had even taken shape.

“She is being investigated as an accomplice to your crimes,” Ingram said, “By my officers. God willing, she’ll be found guilty as you are and shot.”

This, of course, was their great mistake. In the histories I’ve read, my motivations were something of an enigma—why didn’t I do as they said and seize power? Why, when I was dragged off to the prison in the capitol and slip my coded message to an agent in Ingram’s organization, was I planning a return to the republic?

That night was torture. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t even spit on me or curse my name—no, Director of Internal Security Musitano was locked in a lightless, windowless cell to be ignored until his execution the following morning. They wanted me to know that I would be forgotten, stricken from the records, damnatio memoriae, punished from that moment to eternity. They thought that would bother me. In truth, the anguish I felt was for Tyra. A woman whose only crime was growing up down the street from me, falling in love with a man whose obsession bordered on the psychotic. Her only crime was marrying an evil man. Sometimes, her crime was tempering that man’s violence with her warmth, with her efforts to help the masses stricken with poverty in our Revolution’s wake.

My people seized the armory within the prison first. Mere minutes before my execution would have taken place, gunfire rocked the building as they annihilated the gate guards and let in a convoy of Internal Security troops loyal to me and me alone. I heard screams, pleas for mercy, the whoomp of grenades through concrete, the wet slap of shredded meat on the ground. I was released, and from there we worked quickly.

Ingram was in bed with one of his young concubines when we caught him at home. We spared the poor girl, but in working to learn Tyra’s location we skinned most of Ingram’s bloated, disgusting body. I never knew the man had such resistance in him. For him, I did not passively watch. His last words to me, spoken through burbling blood, were:

“You’re too late…too late to save her…if you’d been quicker…”

He was right, of course. By the time I had boots on the ground and Tyra’s black site she’d been dead for hours. I was with them, fast-roping in with the second wave. When I found her body, half-buried in a shallow grave outside the facility, I fell to my knees and screamed. Many, many people would pay for her death.

For a few years after democracy was restored to this battered, splintering nation, I was considered a hero. I never did anything to dispel the stories, I suppose, but at the same time I never encouraged them. I knew my comeuppance was on its way, that as the Truth and Reconciliation Committees continued their investigation all would come to light. Soon, I’ll face the same fate as I was supposed to the night of Tyra’s murder. That’s all right. Maybe now that people have read this they’ll understand why I spent fifteen years as the master of torture and interrogation, of double-agents and betrayals so foul there isn’t a hot enough place in Hell to put me. They’ll understand that if they hadn’t come for Tyra in the dead of night, if they’d assured me she would live a long and happy life in luxury, I’d have sold out every human being on the world and myself.