Warrior Knight

by Aarti V Raman

“Indeed, Mr. Iyer.”

  Krivi he looked at the Plexiglass and said, “Stop tape and sound. Pronto.”

  There was a beat of silence in the room.

  Pedro laughed. “You don’t want my interrogation to be the stuff of what you spooks teach future spooks on how tos?”

  Krivi shrugged. “I don’t want any record of you leaving this country in a body bag to be found, Panetta. The Woodpecker has to think you are still alive and merely being a disobedient little dog.”

  Pedro raised one, well-shaped brow. “The Woodpecker? Is your company naming people after birds now, Mr. Iyer?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Pedro,” Krivi answered mildly, while he opened the bag and extracted a rolled-up oil cloth. The sort that held handy tools or surgical instruments. “I am not going to say it again, because you know as well as I do, what I can do, what the people behind me are going to let me do to you. So let’s just say that if you fuck with me, I will bore a hole in your right eye with this sweet little hypodermic needle.”

  Krivi held up a large needle, the kind they used to give tranquilizer shots to large animals like horses and elephants.

  Pedro didn’t blink an eyelash, but then again, he wasn’t expected to. This tack of torture, he was ready and equipped for.

  Krivi replaced the needle in his oilcloth and removed a rusty, serrated-edged knife. It wasn’t very big, more a throwing knife than anything else

  “You know why you’re here. We finally connected the money trail that began in a job in Libya to you, Panetta, that we know was executed by Wood. The British ambassador’s convoy. Remember?”

  Pedro did not answer whether he remembered or not.

  “And then, like the idiot that I never expected you to be, you actually put up the bastard in your hotel, which everyone in Cancun knows is owned by you.” Krivi smiled mockingly. “How dumb are you, Pedro?”

  “I am not dumb, Mr. Iyer. And it is all just hearsay, what they say down in Mexico… You cannot legally tie me up to anything that happened in that hotel and you know it.”

  “I don’t have to, motherfucker.” Krivi grinned. A fast, sharp, lethal flash of teeth as he looked critically at the knife. “No court of law is going to give a damn what I do to you in the next few minutes.”

  “What are you going to do to me, Iyer? Pull out my toenails, my fingernails and my skin? What are you going to do to me that can break me?”

  Krivi smiled. “I am going to make a tiny little cut on your little toe with this here knife.”

  Pedro grinned too. “That’s it? You’re going to give me a little cut? And then what?”

  Krivi, ran a hand down the edge of the dull blade. “Do you know about the fastest-acting snake venom in the world, Pedro?”

  Pedro looked bored.

  “It’s the diamondback. Commonly found in the hottest regions of the world, like Texas, Australia and Africa and in some parts of the Equatorial region.” He let out a heaving sigh. “Deadly stuff…Diamondback venom. It’s pretty much lethal, until the anti-venin is introduced in the bloodstream as soon as possible.”

  Pedro’s next smile was not as cool as he wanted it to be.

  “The other interesting thing about diamondback venom is the rate at which it travels through the human body,” Krivi pontificated. “Spreading through veins and muscles, paralyzing everything that it can: stopping the intestines from moving, the kidneys from functioning. But you know what goes first, Pedro?”

  Pedro nodded at the black, medical bag. “Do you have a diamondback inside there that will get attracted to the scent of my blood while you give me your tiny cut, Iyer?”

  “Do you know what goes first, Pedro?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Krivi reached out and pulled back Pedro’s elbow as far as it would go in such a sharp movement that he couldn’t stop the scream that came gurgling out as the muscle broke under impact.

  “Touch. You stop feeling your limbs and your extremities.” Krivi answered matter-of-factly.

  Pedro cradled his useless, paining hand with the other against his chest.

  Krivi rounded the chair and placed his hip against the edge of the table, looked at the other man kindly. Pedro was wincing, but other than that, there was not much expression on his face.

  “Remember this pain, Pedro. It’s going away soon enough. And oh, no.” Krivi shook his head. “I don’t have a diamondback in my medical bag. They are not allowed in Britain, you see. Endangered species and all that.”

  Sweat pearled on Pedro’s brow with the pain and the effort of keeping mum.

  “This blade here, has been used to cut out the venom out of a diamondback three months ago and been kept in readiness for a guest such as you.”

  Sweat was now dripping Pedro’s forehead in rivulets. He cradled his broken hand closer, higher to his chest as the temperature started rising inside the room. Again, as per Krivi’s instructions.

  “Heat, is another factor that apparently speeds up the process, Pedro. The hotter you get, the faster the venom will spread. But the thing is this.” Krivi knelt down and looked at Pedro’s neatly manicured feet.

  “I make an incision here, barely half an inch.” He demonstrated on Pedro’s toe; who looked on with a dull kind of horror. “And it would still take about an hour for the venom to have worked its way to just the tops of your thighs. Since, the amount of venom going in is going to not be too much.”

  “Krivi, Iyer—"

  “I was thinking, by then, we could let our in-house medics perform another kind of surgery…work for their pay. Tell me, Pedro? Have you heard of a vasectomy?”’

  Pedro swallowed.

  Krivi smiled genially, man to man, all sympathy. “Then you must surely know what a penectomy is.”

  “It’s not even a real word, Iyer.” But Pedro’s words were slurring, both from the pain radiating up his elbow, the unbearable heat in the room and the vivid pictures Krivi was painting.

  He couldn’t look at the tiny blade anymore without his limbs shuddering.

  “I don’t know, man…I heard the docs use it for the first time, today. It basically means the removal of a male’s penis from the base.” Krivi used the knife’s end to point. “To the tip.”

  Pedro swallowed, his breathing shallow as he contemplated the removal of his male pride, for a deadly, terrifying second.

  “And see, here is the thing, Pedro,” Krivi continued conversationally. “I only need your tongue and your brain to be active and coherent, by the time this little interrogation ends. Every other part of you can be fucked up, cut out and fed to the dogs and I couldn’t give a shit. You understand?”

  Pedro swallowed again. “Iyer—"

  “And I haven’t even shown you the little home video I had made.” Krivi swished the blade in Pedro’s direction. “Just for you.”

  Pedro closed his eyes, as a very real wave of despair washed over him. “I can’t tell you anything, Iyer. I know nothing.”

  Krivi said, “Excuse me,” just like he would if he were at a cocktail party making small talk and went out of the little room.

  Pedro looked at the Plexiglass partition and whispered, “Please. Let me out. I know nothing. I am just a hotel owner. I know nothing.”

  There were tears in those fearless eyes.

  “Please, if you people know any mercy. Let me go. I will tell no one of where I have been. Please. Help me. Help me, please.”

  Krivi came back in, bringing a small digital camcorder. It had the necessary wires to connect itself to the giant TV and, with the efficiency of an expert; he quickly attached the wires to the TV and watched as the screen flickered to life.

  Pedro screamed as he saw the first image.

  ~~~~~

  Ziya tightly gripped the arms of the chair she was sitting in, as she saw the cold, clinical, almost inhuman way in which Krivi went about trying to ‘extract’ information from Pedro Panetta. The rest of the unit was silent as they watched a master at work.

  She’d alrea
dy retched once, as he talked about performing the penectomy on Pedro. And, was afraid, she’d do it again.

  It wasn’t enough that he was breaking a man, but that he seemed to find a measure of calm in the way in which he was doing it,

  Now, she watched as he played Pedro a video clip of a glass tub of water, in which someone had placed a car battery. They stood a doll in the tub of water, salt water, and then switched the car battery.

  Krivi said, “Salt is the best conductor of electricity, as we all know. But what most of us don’t know, is that when a car battery is mixed with water, the resultant mixture is actually hydrochloric acid, which again, as we all know, is corrosive and eats through everything.”

  The doll’s hands, legs, its large, blue plastic eyes melted in a garish, horrifying mixture of pink and plastic. Krivi paused at the water bubbling and spilling out of the little glass tub.

  Ziya stuffed a hand in her mouth, her face rigid in a rictus of terror.

  Pedro wiped sweat off his brow and nose and regarded Krivi with resignation.“If you are going to feed me snake venom and cut my dick off, why should I be afraid of death by acid, Iyer?”

  Krivi smiled, and it was a diamondback smile, even though Ziya had not seen one in her life.

  “I am so glad you asked that bright question, Pedro.”

  He pressed the play button on the camera, and the next frame was a little house somewhere, with pink curtains and a child’s toys scattered around the floor. A Barbie doll, a sand box set, a pair of pink fairy wings and ballerina shoes, gave every evidence that the room belonged to a little girl.

  Pedro moaned, low in his throat. “No.” He shook his head, cradling his elbow in his hand. “No, Madre Dio, no. No.” He started talking in rapid Spanish.

  A little girl came into the frame, right then. She had bright red curls and wore a summer yellow frock. She dragged around a doll, which had one bent leg, sticking out at an angle.

  “That’s Benjy,” Pedro whispered, his eyes sticking to the screen like a starved dog’s. A hopeless, starving dog.

  “Indeed it is. Henrietta, our agent, has heard several delightful tales of Benjy the Brave.” Krivi shot Pedro a bland look. “That doll you saw you in the demo was Nancy, Benjy’s pal. Kelly doesn’t know she is missing yet.”

  Pedro sniffed once, twice, three times, before he closed his eyes and one tear rolled down one sweaty cheek. “You’re a monster, Krivi.”

  “I want The Woodpecker. Names, dates, current associates, whereabouts, hideouts. I want info and I want it now.”

  “Please…don’t touch Kelly, please, not Kelly.”

  Krivi knelt down in front of Pedro’s chair and tipped his streaming, wet chin up and said, “If you do not co-operate with me right fucking now, I will make the call, Pedro. I will, so help me god, make you watch while your kid burns in a vat of slow-cooking acid into nothingness.”

  “Please, please…” Pedro slipped down from the chair and started crying, soundlessly, helplessly.

  “I won’t kill you;” he continued, ruthlessly. “I will just make you watch this video over and over again… until you can’t sleep, can’t eat. Until you start gnawing at your own bones in order to get rid of the images, and I won’t let you do that either.”

  I will keep you alive in this room, till you’re an old, old man, driven by the memories of your daughter dying, never growing up, never having her first kiss, never getting married, never calling her father, Papa again.”

  Krivi supported Pedro who broken down completely at the end of the little speech, his face hidden in the crook of Krivi’s neck.

  “And even if I leave her alive, what do you think is going to happen once he finds out about your little girl, Pedro?” Krivi asked, softly, sympathetically. “The Woodpecker leaves no witnesses, you know that. What do you think happens to little Kelly when that animal gets his hands on her?”

  Pedro’s sobs grew worse.

  “Let me help you. Let me help Kelly. You know I can. You know I will, if I give my word.” Krivi switched to the role of confidant, the friend in instants, knowing he almost had the man.

  Watching him gain the broken man’s pathetic gratitude made Ziya absolutely sick. She walked out, uncaring that three of their precious agents followed her back to her temporary on foot.

  She couldn’t take it anymore.

  Thirty-Five

  Almost three hours later, Krivi guzzled down, what seemed like a gallon of water as he came into the viewing room and saw that it was deserted.

  No Ziya.

  A feeling of disquiet filled him because he knew she had wanted to stay, had been determined to stay. Things must have become terrible for her to leave without at least informing him.

  He hadn’t thought of her, consciously, because that would have made him disgusted with what he had done… what he’d had to do in order to get the information they wanted.

  Torturing someone took a certain kind of humanity out of you, as did every dirty deed you ever did, and he felt…tired, dirty, unclean.

  He wanted to go home to wash off the day’s events. Even though in the end, Pedro Panetta had been just like every last one of them.

  He had broken down, because it was biology. And he had sung like a motherfucking canary.

  And, Krivi knew, with no false pride that it had all been because of him and the mind game he had played so cruelly, so effectively and with such ruthless tenacity. It didn’t make him feel bad or good.

  It was just the way it was. Some men were good at rocket science, he was good at torturing people into giving information.

  You played to your skill set.

  It had always been that way. But today, for the first time in as long as he could remember…he was…weary of what had just transpired.

  He wanted to go home…

  To Ziya.

  It surprised him sincerely that he thought of her as home at all, and added to his growing sense of unease, shame and weariness as he went back to her.

  ~~~~~~

  Ziya couldn’t keep still, anymore. She moved around the little hotel suite they were put up in. It was more like a service apartment than anything else, with a kitchenette that held food supplies Krivi had picked up at a nearby chain store supermarket.

  There was a proper bedroom that they now shared, because what was the point in pretending they were anything other than lovers.

  There was even a living room kind of space with a sagging couch and hard-backed chairs that blended with the kitchenette and made for a cozy scene if one were inclined to think teal walls could be cozy.

  She had come to think of this apartment as a refuge against the outside world, because it held her clothes and shoes and her favorite shampoo, that her lover had so thoughtfully stocked the bathroom shelves with.

  He was a caring, kind man in every action that he took for her.

  He had saved her,

  From certain death. From an explosion. From rape and assault at the hands of an animal.

  He had been her hero even when he had coldly, clinically told her the truth about why he had come into her life in the first place.

  She’d though she understood, exactly, how much of a conscience he didn’t have. How…flexible his moral compass was, when it came to discharging his duty.

  Yet…

  Today, seeing the torture and debasement of humanity, both in Pedro and Krivi had scared her gutless.

  There was blood on his hands.

  It wasn’t a shadow or an illusion, or a story she could tell herself in the middle of the night. What he did wasn’t romantic or even remotely heroic. There was nothing distant about it; it was all hands-on.

  There was blood on his hands.

  And the way he had looked at that moment, like a triumphant warrior before he had twisted the criminal’s elbow back, in a smooth, competent gesture, had made it seem that he wasn’t just proficient or good at hurting people but that he enjoyed it at some basic level.

  As if there was some m
ore of the caveman in him, than there was in the rest of them. At that moment, he wasn’t the Krivi who made sweet, searing love to her every chance he got.

  He was…an animal. A soldier.

  A warrior.

  He was doing his job and she couldn’t, not in a million years, wrap her head around what he could do for his job.

  He could calmly torture a man without breaking into the slightest sweat, supremely comfortable with instruments of torture, the wielding of them and everything that came after that.

  Blood didn’t deter him.

  Neither did pain or screams.

  There was something de-human about the way he’d gone about interrogating and breaking the man, that she had initially found strangely fascinating to watch. Like watching a snake hypnotize its prey, lulling it into complacence and security before striking like the deadly creature that it was and devouring it whole.

  It was humanity at its basest, at its very degrading worst.

  She had thought the person who was responsible for taking away Noor and Sam was bad, terrible: a true monster.

  She was coming to see that the people who were willing to go after The Woodpecker were no less, no different than him.

  They had the same sort of moral vacuum when it came to getting what they wanted. Whether it was information or an actual person or even something as simple as an address.

  No limits. No rules.

  That was the rule.

  And Krivi Iyer had written the rulebook for counter-terrorism 101.

  And he was the man who she was living with, sharing her life with. And no matter what she tried to tell herself, no matter how much the cold acid burn of hate churned in her gut over what had happened to Noor and Sam, a part of her…that small, ordinary, protected, ignorant part of her that lived in every common person, that part had looked at him and what he was doing… and judged.

  She knew she had no right to, that what he was doing was necessary, was needed. That someone had to be willing to push the boundaries of right and wrong to catch heinous terrorists who had a rap sheet that was a list of crimes against humanity but…

  How could she sleep with a man, share her life, her very body with a man who had that kind of ruthless determination, tenacity and sheer cold-bloodedness?