Carl snorted. “How the fuck am I supposed to know someone else’s bank accounts, you stupid mu’fucker?”
Klipser and the doctor looked at each other. The doctor narrowed his eyes. This was something he hadn’t given them before—attitude. It felt good too. It made Carl feel powerful, even while he was helpless.
The three men on the laptop screen looked like hoodlums to Carl. They looked like drug-runners he had seen growing up in his hometown of Compton, except these were Mexicans, not Blacks. In some of the surveillance photos they wore Khakis or Chinos, and untucked shirts of muted colors, like beige and cream and soft pastel mauve. They wore hats, earrings, and so many thick gold chains that each one of them looked like he might fall over at any moment if he leaned too far off-center.
In some of the photos, the men wore ridiculously expensive full-length tan cashmere or black leather coats. In the close-up photos they looked cocky, like they were at the top of the hoodlum food chain, like they knew nobody would dare mess with them.
“I don’t know those assholes,” Carl said. “So quit flappin’ your shit-hole at me and let’s get on with this.”
“Where’s the girl, Mr. Reyes?”
Carl laughed. “She’s dead, bitch! You’ve wasted all this time torturing the wrong guy, when you should have been out looking for her.” He paused as he glared at Agent Klipser. “Besides, do I look like a fucking Reyes, you white-trash, racist piece of shit?”
Agent Klipser remained silent, so he continued his rant: “You fucking pussies. I’m a patriot and a decorated Air Force officer. I’ve been entrusted with military secrets less than a hundred people on the planet know about. Even the president and congress aren’t briefed on the kinds of projects I’ve worked on.”
Klipser seemed nonplussed. “Where is the girl?”
“Fuck you,” Carl said. He’d had enough of their nonsense. He needed to get through the torture session so he could make his escape. “I don’t know anything about that fucking girl.”
Klipser, calm as ever, said, “I’m prepared to get much more aggressive with our questioning.”
“More aggressive!? Bring it on, you prick. I think you’re running out of torture techniques, dickhead. I don’t know where your fucking girl is. So quit yappin’ at me and bring the pain.”
They brought the pain.
Three hours later the doctor removed all the electrical leads from his body. The guards reentered the room and unstrapped his leather restraints. They started to drag his depleted body off the table, but they backed off suddenly when they realized he was still conscious.
He took a deep breath and rolled onto his side. He groaned and pivoted on his butt to sit up under his own power. He paused on the edge of the table with his feet resting on the floor and his palms parked on each side of his butt to keep from wobbling too much.
He glanced over at Klipser and sneered at him. He wanted to shout and cuss at him, but his throat was too raw from screaming. He could tell the man was clearly displeased with the doctor’s lack of progress. Or maybe the agent was pissed because Carl didn’t succumb completely to their torture. He twisted and tossed a cocky grin behind him at the stunned doctor.
“Is that all you got, Doc?” he said hoarsely. To Klipser, he said, “You ain’t shit, bitch. We can do this all day every day, but I still don’t know where that fucking girl is.”
He turned away and slid off the torture bed, then pretended to stumble and lose his balance. He ended up on his hands and knees on the concrete floor, and both guards stepped forward to grab an arm. That’s when he attacked.
Chapter 14
1706 EST Day 11
Arlington Heights, VA Operations House
Agent Nancy Palmer paced back and forth across the operations room. As she walked, she rolled her shoulders forward six times, then backward six, taking a slow deep breath with each roll. She did a variety of standing stretches, mostly in-place moves to relieve tension.
She paused and looked over the shoulders of the two analysts on duty. They were entrenched in the research tasks she’d given them earlier, but that wasn’t why she didn’t interrupt their work. She needed time to think, and she often did her best thinking on her feet. While stretching, a corner of her brain continued to pull at irritating fragments of evidence about the terrorist, trying to make sense of them.
Her shift began at four o’clock in the afternoon. She and McGrath each had twelve-hour shifts that overlapped slightly at start and finish, and she’d been on duty for a little over an hour.
It was day number eleven for Alfonso Reyes, and Pete Klipser hadn’t broken him yet. That in itself was incredible. No terror suspect had ever endured the new regimen of interrogation procedures for more than three days. Most were babbling after less than a day of interrogation, giving up the requested information and even revealing secrets not asked for.
There had been several times when they thought Reyes had broken. Many of the sessions had left him a sobbing, whimpering shadow of a man, and he had pleaded for mercy every time except the current session. He screamed and hollered and cursed, but he didn’t beg and he didn’t cooperate. All he gave Pete was attitude. That anomaly gave Palmer pause and she was still trying to process that. It was as though the man had somehow discovered a well of inner strength.
Aaron McGrath was under increasing pressure from the president about their lack of progress. The whole purpose of the TER agency was to break down the will of a terrorist and get fast results by any means necessary, to save lives and prevent attacks on the American homeland. Yet, they were in the eleventh day of the terror event, and the suspect was still resisting, refusing to give them the vital information they needed to find Melissa Mallory.
Agent Palmer knew Aaron was the wrong choice to lead the investigation because he was too close to the victim. She knew first-hand the kind of inner turmoil and stress that was eating at his gut. Still, there was no way he was going to willingly relinquish command of the TER team, and the president most certainly was not going to remove him. That meant Palmer couldn’t reveal the new suspicions about the terrorist that had been teasing her brain for the last hour.
She stopped in the middle of the room, unaware that she’d begun pacing again. Knees locked, she leaned over, placed her palms flat on the carpeted floor and held that stretch for almost a minute. The carpet was a deep tan color with a tough knit texture. It looked expensive, unlike the cheap pile carpet in her own apartment.
Still leaning over, she massaged her hamstrings for a few seconds. The black fabric of her cotton-wool suit was tight against her body, but it flexed easily and allowed her to move freely.
Slowly, she raised upright with her chin tucked against her chest until she was standing straight. Then she rolled her head again and returned her attention to the terrorist.
She’d heard of extreme cases where foreign agents were programmed under hypnosis and other subconscious conditioning. In fact, they were so well conditioned that they actually believed the lies and misinformation they would likely give up under harsh interrogation. She suspected that those agents were prepped for possible capture by being subjected to the same kind of intense interrogation techniques they were likely to face if captured. The idea was that realistic torture training would help them to be even more believable as they divulged misinformation under duress.
Alfonso Reyes was no espionage agent, though. He was a mid-level cartel drug lord. He was a bully who had risen in the ranks by threatening and terrorizing lesser employees or others affiliated with his drug trade. He succeeded in business because he could instill fear. His hold on others came from his small army of thugs, not from any skills or training he possessed.
There was absolutely nothing in any dossier on the man that suggested he’d had any kind of advanced covert ops training. So it was unfathomable that an untrained and unconditioned drug lord could survive eleven days on the table. To make matters even more unbelievable, Reyes wasn’t even giving up misinformation. He
was giving up no information.
Under torture, the man had given no coherent deception that would be expected of a trained operator. His babble had bounced from one extreme to the other. First, he said he didn’t know the girl. Then, he claimed she was dead. Later, he proclaimed that he wanted a ransom, but the amount he wanted varied from a few hundred thousand to a few million, depending on what phase of interrogation he was in. Finally, he said he’d release her if the torture stopped. And all that was in the same interrogation session! In later sessions, he seemed not to remember what he had claimed or how much ransom he wanted in the previous sessions.
And he’d done that repeatedly for eleven days!
Pete Klipser couldn’t have survived eleven days of that kind of interrogation. Hell, she didn’t think even she could endure what Reyes had been subjected to. There was no denying the obvious conclusion. The man was either extremely well-conditioned or they had the wrong man.
An hour ago the thought first entered her mind that maybe Johnson/Reyes might be some kind of deep-cover operator—American or otherwise. If that was the case, then any record of his true background and identity would be buried so deep, not even the TER could access it.
Over the last few days, the TER team had had many debates over whether or not this man, who called himself Carl Johnson, was in fact Alfonso Reyes using an alias. The consensus came back unanimous every time. There were simply too many known physical traits that were too similar to be coincidence—height, weight, eye color, genetic baldness, body style, skin color, etc.
Just to be certain they weren’t overlooking important facts or forming biased opinions, McGrath had commissioned the CIA to perform an independent assessment of all the data they had on their prisoner. Their conclusion was exactly the same.
The man they held in custody was Alfonso Reyes.
Palmer went back over to her management console and pulled up the terrorist’s main file folder. The FBI had matched the suspect’s fingerprints and DNA with an American man known as Carl Johnson, but a covert alias would be expected to withstand that level of scrutiny. Unfortunately, no such data existed for the Mexican National known to be a cartel drug lord, though Palmer suspected high-level interference within the Mexican government was effectively road-blocking the complete sharing of law enforcement records.
Alfonso Reyes flaunted his wealth on the international stage and was perceived as a globe-trotting playboy and philanthropist. In his media interviews, he spoke perfect English, like the man they had in custody, and had no accent or ethnic dialect. That Carl Johnson’s file indicated he was African American—actually half-black and half-white—and not Hispanic was irrelevant.
She continued to parse the file, still looking for details she might have missed before. She sought anything that supported her theory that the man in custody was not Alfonso Reyes. She believed it, but she couldn’t prove it. Even as that thought tumbled through her brain, she turned her attention back to the window on her monitor showing the interrogation in progress.
Agent Palmer tapped her keyboard and routed the audio of the ongoing session to her wireless comm unit. Finally, she found the proof and, even though she was looking for it, it still hit her like a punch in the gut. She gasped at the words she heard in her ear.
“You fucking pussies,” the suspect said. “I’m a patriot and a decorated Air Force officer. I’ve been entrusted with military secrets less than a hundred people on the planet know about. Even the president and congress aren’t briefed on the kinds of projects I’ve worked on.”
Palmer stood up so suddenly her chair tipped over backward. In her peripheral view, she saw the two analysts, Lisa and Jimmy, rotate in their chairs, and she turned to face them.
“Christ, we do have the wrong man!”
Chapter 15
1728 EST Day 11
Location: Unknown
Carl rolled off the table and pretended to stumble on wobbly legs. He fell to his hands and knees. The guard on his right had his left leg slightly forward, so when he bent from the waist his extended leg bore most of his weight. Carl, balanced on his right hand, slammed his left palm into the guard’s knee joint. He aimed through the man’s knee. The man’s leg bent unnaturally backward, and Carl heard the joint pop. That sound was followed by the man’s scream of agony as he hopped away on his right foot.
At the same time, Carl kicked backward in a one-legged mule kick. It was a poorly aimed strike, because it had been many years since he’d taken any kind of martial arts training. He just hoped to hit some part—any part—of the other guard, or his attempt at escape would be short-lived.
His heel caught the man on the inside of his hip. A couple inches to the left and that guard also would have been down for the count. The man stepped back at the weak attack, giving Carl enough time to get to his feet and roll across the torture table. It was still damp from his perspiration and from voiding his bladder under torture.
He rolled off the other side and grabbed the surprised doctor by the lapels of his white smock. The man may have been an agency man, but he was not combat trained. Carl kneed him in the groin and slammed his face into the corner of the torture device’s metal distribution box.
The first impact burst the doctor’s right eye in a squirt of clear liquid. Carl pulled his screaming head up and rammed it down a second time, caving in his right temple. He died instantly, but even as Carl let him fall he was aware that Agent Klipser was lunging toward him from the left end of the torture table. Carl grabbed the first object he could find—a stylus from the doctor’s hand-held pad—and charged at Klipser. He was intent only on stabbing the stylus into the agent’s eye.
Agent Klipser carried a sidearm in a holster on his belt, and Carl saw the man smoothly reaching for the weapon. That was Carl’s plan.
Suicide by cop.
A fiery pain ripped through Carl’s body, and he hit the floor hard. He realized he was not dead, not free. Agent Klipser had not shot him. The guard that Carl had merely pushed aside with his back-kick had tazered him.
He quickly discovered two facts. First, the pain from the Taser was short-lived, and it wasn’t even a fraction as painful as the electro-shock torture he’d endured for the past few weeks. Second, his body was paralyzed only momentarily. It was as though all the weeks of electro-shock torture had built up a resistance in him or had desensitized his body to the pain.
He lost the stylus, but he jumped back up and went for Klipser again. Or rather, he tried to. He was yanked off his feet and spun around in mid-air, only to be slammed face-first across the torture table. The guard twisted his right arm painfully up behind his back, but at this point Carl stopped resisting. He just lay there as the man put him in the shackles again.
There was no point in struggling. He had made his attempt at freedom, and he had failed. That plan was over, and he knew the guards would never give him another opportunity. The torture would continue.
The guard man-handled him back to his cell and chained him to the wall. Then the guard left, and Carl started laughing and cursing at the camera. The guard had forgotten to turn on the blasting music.
Carl had made them nervous. He’d made them angry. In his attempt at escape, he’d given them something they hadn’t planned on—an injured mate and a dead doctor. The guard was angry, and Carl had a feeling Klipser was too.
Rage and anger simmered inside Carl. He found himself glaring at the little fish-eye camera lens mounted above the door. He found himself talking to it.
“You better fucking kill me, Agent Klipser,” he said. “Because if I ever get out of here, I’ll spend every dime I have to hunt you down. There’s nowhere on the planet you can hide. And you can tell that fuckhead McGrath the same thing. I’ll find him too.”
Carl paused, then added, “And everybody that works for him.”
Chapter 16
1731 EST Day 11
Location: Unknown
As Aaron McGrath walked into the operations room, he concentrated
on keeping his game face on so no one would sense the conflicts roiling inside him. He’d been asleep less than half an hour when Palmer made the “All hands on deck!” call after the disastrous event at the interrogation house. Before his nap, the president had chewed his ass good. Upon entering the operations room, he quickly learned he had a dead doctor and a wounded operator, both taken down by an untrained fifty-three-year-old civilian.
“Fucking incredible,” he murmured to himself. He immediately regretted that small outburst because Palmer heard him, and she’d known him long enough to know how uncharacteristic such an outburst was for him.
The two off-duty analysts came trudging downstairs a few seconds later. Both had stopped in the kitchen first and entered the op center with a cold turkey sandwich in one hand and a can of Red Bull in the other.
McGrath got straight to the point. “What’s our status over there, Pete?”
Palmer spoke first. “We now believe with certainty that the man in custody is not Alfonso Reyes. He is who he says he is, an American named Carl Johnson. We also believe that he is a body-double who was put in play to divert our resources from the initial search for Melissa.”
McGrath growled under his breath, then said, “It was a very successful diversion.”
Palmer said, “Reyes would have known his double would be interrogated, though he probably would not have known about the harsh regimen reserved for top-tier terrorists. Not that it would have made any difference to Reyes. He still would have used the man as a deception.”
McGrath glanced at Klipser’s image on the left monitor. The agent clearly was not happy that he’d been unable to break the terrorist, and now they had a probable explanation why. The only way a man could possibly survive such a harsh interrogation was to truly believe what he was saying was the truth. The only way that would be possible was if the man had no knowledge of the kidnapping and, therefore, had no information to give them.
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