In the early years of the Iraq War a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And crucially what does he know?
In pursuit of that information an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture which extracts 'perfect confessions' is retrieved from the vaults.
Over the course of four days a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama bin Laden L. Paul Bremer Condoleezza Rice Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal.
