by Jack Du Brul
“Screw you.” That pathetic rejoinder was the best Mercer could come up with. Sun had rewired his nervous system and brought him to a plateau of hypersensitivity that left him more vulnerable than anything he’d ever felt before. He could feel his body in ways he’d never experienced. He could sense the tingle of his hair growing and the pulse of blood through the tiniest capillaries. His fear, too, felt amplified.
Sun bent so his foul breath caressed Mercer’s face. “There are special houses in China where highly skilled women use this technique to bring men to unobtainable levels of ecstasy. In the state you are in right now I can insert another two needles and you would not believe the pleasure.” Sun’s voice dropped to a reverent whisper. “There’s an old story of a vengeful concubine driving an emperor insane by forcing him to an orgasm that lasted for eight straight days.”
He straightened. “That is not to be your fate.” With a deft move he slid a needle into a spot on Mercer’s shoulder and suddenly a lightning bolt seemed to explode in Mercer’s mouth as if all his teeth had shattered. The sensation was so far beyond pain that it had no name. It stripped away a layer of rationality like a sheet of paper from a notebook.
Sun withdrew the needle and the agony stopped instantly, leaving Mercer’s mouth numb and swimming in saliva. “I should have warned you that the pathways are not as direct as you might suspect. Feel what happens to your heart when I place a needle here.” Sun twisted a thinner needle behind Mercer’s ear.
Mercer’s state made him more than aware of his heart. He could feel each beat, each opening and closing of the valves, and the tremendous wash of blood in his aorta. With a little concentration he felt he could almost control it. Sun showed him he could not.
As the tiny needle hit a specific nerve in the soft area behind his right ear Mercer’s heart simply stopped. There was no beat, no surge, nothing. He was dead. Yet he could think and see and feel himself dying further. But there was no surge of panic. He couldn’t pump the adrenaline that controlled such a reaction. Terror filled his eyes, widening them to impossible proportions, imploring his indifferent torturer to give him his life back. Sun left the needle in for two seconds that felt longer than eternity. When it was pulled free and the nerve pathway it had blocked reopened, Mercer’s heart jump started itself and beat on as if nothing had happened.
“Now you know what I can do to you,” Sun said. “I will give you this one chance to answer Mr. Liu’s questions.”
“Ask,” Mercer said, unable to believe the defeat in his voice.
Sun placed a micro-recorder on the table next to Mercer’s head. “It was you who saw the gold shipment at the Hatcherly warehouse.”
“Yes.”
“Who was with you in the warehouse?”
“A CIA operative named Felix Leiter.” Mercer lied in his defeated monotone. His acting was Oscar quality. “That’s all I knew him as.”
“Was it a CIA team who helped you escape at the fence?”
“No. They were mercenaries flown in from Bogota.”
For fifteen minutes, Mercer spun a tale of CIA intrigue, adding details like code names and the location of fictitious safe houses. He told Sun the story that Liu Yousheng would want to hear, about how the United States was fumbling blindly, not understanding what was happening. He made it sound as though his contact would most likely back off now that Mercer was captured because this operation wasn’t officially sanctioned by Langley.
Sun had conducted hundreds of interrogations and knew how to probe a story from a dozen directions looking for inconsistencies. His questions came rapid-fire and continued for an hour in which Mercer piled lie on top of lie in a web that was as complex as it was delicate. Through it all, Sun couldn’t trip up his victim. Not once did Mercer slip. Each answer served only to back up an earlier fact. The code names didn’t change, addresses remained the same, and timelines, which are the hardest to keep straight, remained linear and plausible.
Mercer judged Sun perfectly. Despite the ruined skin and lifeless eyes he sensed a change in Sun’s emotion during the second hour of questioning that signaled the torturer was satisfied he’d extracted the truth from his victim. The session was coming to an end, which meant so would Mercer’s life. He’d bought himself a little more time but knew that continuing the charade would buy him no more. It was time to fight, and pray he could survive what Sun would do to him.
“You mentioned how the mercenaries came to Panama,” Sun asked for the eighth time.
“They flew in from Medellin on a charter plane.” The mistake was intentional, a tiny gaff that the interrogator recognized instantly.
The deranged acupuncturist looked at Mercer sharply, a deadly look that made it easier for Mercer to let fear flood across his face. “You said the mercenaries came from Bogota. Now you say Medellin.”
“I can’t remember,” Mercer stammered, making his guilt even more apparent.
Because of how he’d been strapped to the table, Mercer couldn’t see that Sun was poised over his left hand with one of his needles. For a fraction of a second, Mercer felt the needle twisting into his flesh and then it felt like a blowtorch had been applied to his scalp. He could almost hear his hair burning away and smell it turning to ash. The pain raced across his scalp like a spreading pool of burning fuel. He convulsed against his straps at the unholy agony, clamping his jaw to keep from screaming, to keep the flames from pouring down his throat.
But there was no fire. It was an electrical stimulus that created the pain, a figment of his own body chemistry. No matter how he tried to rationalize that idea, the pain burned through, crystalline and savage.
Sun lowered his face over Mercer’s. “Speak to me,” he soothed. “Let me hear you speak.”
A whimper escaped past Mercer’s lips.
“Yes, like that,” Sun coaxed, almost sexually.
Turning his head as much as the restraints allowed, Mercer screamed into Sun’s ear as loud as he could, a shriek that would have damaged the hearing of a younger person. Sun stepped back and slid the needle from Mercer’s hand. No anger, no annoyance, no sign that the scream bothered him.
“Bogota or Medellin?” The needle went back in along Mercer’s ribs and another went near his nipple on the opposite side of his chest.
It was as if the two points were joined through his torso by an electric current. To Mercer, his flesh felt like it was being cored out, drilled from his body by the pain.
His first slip had been intentional, but Mercer’s second mistake was an accident. “Bogota,” he gasped.
Had he stuck with the new lie and said Medellin, Sun would have been forced to pick apart the story piece by piece, possibly going easier on Mercer.
Instinctively Sun had seen through all the deceptions and knew that the truth was that Mercer had made up the whole story. “Very good,” he congratulated with genuine surprise.
“You almost had me. Now we get to start from the beginning, only this time I’ve already given you your one chance.”
Needles went in, connecting nerve points that evolution kept intentionally separate, opening pathways for agony never meant to be endured.
How long it went on, Mercer would never know. Lost in a raging flood of pain, time had never had less meaning. Like an artist, Mr. Sun played Mercer’s body against itself, generating agony upon agony with his slender needles, cleverly multiplying the anguish at times and backing it off at others but never leaving his subject free. Only occasionally would he ask a question, and even then he wouldn’t wait for an answer. He was lost in a command performance, conducting an orchestra of sensation to generate the maximum amount of pain.
Through it Mercer fought, retelling parts of his earlier story and then just maintaining his silence when it became too much to think straight. But he knew that was the object of Sun’s work, to empty him of everything except the pain so that he would beg to answer a question.
A needle between his fingers had made his eyeballs seem to collapse like they had been
pierced and their fluids drained away. It was the worst yet. Sun added another needle that felt like a smoldering ember had settled in Mercer’s lungs. Each breath became a fiery torture. Mercer was losing himself to the pain. One more element, the barest touch, and he knew he’d never recover.
He had to find something to hold on to, an anchor to keep him rooted to the rational world that existed beyond the agonized shell of his body. Like a swimmer tossed in the surf, he had to find a rock to cling to that kept his head above the drowning pain. Images cascaded in his mind, thoughts of what meant most to him.
Accomplishments. They whirled past so fast he could grasp none. None of them meant anything now.
Women he’d known. He caught a blur of faces and snippets of conversation before they were all banished by the agony.
His nanny, Juma. She appeared in his imagination so anguished by what he was going through that he let her go.
His mother and father. He held their image in his mind for just a moment before they disappeared, each looking at him sadly, as if they had let him down once again by not giving him the haven he so desperately needed now.
Friends. Harry White back at Tiny’s Bar tricking an unsuspecting customer into buying him drinks by flipping a pair of double-headed coins. Even Harry faded into the agony.
God, what was there? his soul cried. What did it matter to stop Liu Yousheng? Who was he to protect Lauren and Bruneseau? What did they mean to him? Surely, not this.
Sun trailed his finger across Mercer’s cheek and it felt like two inches of flesh had been peeled back. He knew he was screaming, had been for many minutes, but couldn’t hear it any longer.
There was nothing that he could use to get beyond what Sun was doing to him. There would be no refuge, no trick he could play in his own mind to free himself from the torture. He was about to break. Knew it. Hated it.
Harry hadn’t used a pair of double-sided coins. There’d only been one, a two-headed quarter he’d picked up at a novelty shop.
Someplace beyond his chest, he felt a distant blooming of agony around one knee, like it had been smashed with a sledgehammer and the shards of bone ground against each other. Mercer felt the back of his teeth with his tongue. Somehow his mouth had closed. He’d stopped screaming.
And it hadn’t been a customer Harry had tricked. The son of a bitch had used the coin on me. I must have bought him four drinks before I figured it out.
“Talk to me!” Sun screamed.
Mercer ignored him, hardly noticing his hand being dipped in molten steel.
“Fool me once, shame on you,” Harry had cackled when he’d been found out. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Then he added to the old adage. “Fool me four times in a row and I’m the biggest goddamned huckleberry to ever fall off the lettuce truck.”
“Answer me,” Sun screamed again. “Who was with you at the warehouse?”
Not lettuce truck. He’d said turnip truck. Biggest goddamned huckleberry to ever fall off the turnip truck.
Mercer could never hope to beat back the pain being inflicted. No human could. What he’d found was a shelter where the waves of agony washed against a mental barrier. This shield could only be as strong as his emotional connection to it. Rather than break Mercer completely, Sun had rendered him down to that one thing that the pain would never transcend. Mercer would never have thought it was Harry. His parents, yes, his dedication to his own ideals, possibly, even the memory of some of the women he’d loved. But Harry?
Who was Harry to him? To get further past the pain, that question demanded an answer. Friend wasn’t enough and father figure sounded like a new-age cop-out. What was he, then? He is I, Mercer realized. Or who I want to be in forty-plus years. Not the booze or the cigarettes or the bad jokes. It’s the loyalty he inspires, the steadfast dedication of a favor asked being a favor granted. Harry was the kind of person that people would talk about for decades after he’s gone—a phenomenon rarely seen beyond family groups and sports legends. He touched those around him in unexpected ways, but always leaving them a little better for it. Lauren had learned that in just days. And Roddy was ready to get into a war because of Harry’s friendship to his dead father.
It was a revelation to finally understand that despite all of Harry’s faults, he’d been Mercer’s role model, the person he had unconsciously patterned at least part of himself after. Nearly a decade of Harry’s friendship and influence had made Mercer the man he was now. And then he realized that his old friend had been his lifeline all along—the anchor not just through this agony but through the years they’d known each other.
Sun sensed his work was no longer producing the desired results. He hadn’t expected an American to understand the ways to slip from the needles’ touch, yet he could see that Mercer was dodging the pain. Inflicting more would accomplish nothing. He pulled just one of the needles he’d inserted to open the locus points and the fragile system of artificial pathways he’d created collapsed.
In one instant, all the pain, even the memory of the pain, vanished. Mercer was left slightly breathless. He knew what he’d just endured and it took a moment for his mind to adjust to the fact that there would be no aftereffects. To his body, it was as if the past hours of torment hadn’t happened, even if he recalled that his ankles had just seconds before felt like they’d been melted to the bone.
The torturer dipped his eyes in respect as he plucked needles from Mercer’s skin and returned them to their carrying cloth. He shut off the tape recorder. “Well done. While you have beaten the needles, don’t consider it a victory. Mr. Liu has given me two days to get the information he wants. Tomorrow I will begin with the clamps and hammers.” Sun tied up his bundle of needles. “Getting beyond self-generated pain is one thing. Let’s see how you do when I actually roast your feet and crush your testicles in a vise. Feeling pain is one thing, watching your body being mutilated while feeling it is quite another, I assure you.”
Mercer remained silent as his eyes shot a smoldering defiance. Sun turned for the door and guards came in to take Mercer back to his cell, leaving him with only a bowl of water and another of rice as well as a slop bucket with a lid.
He lay on the floor for an hour, slowly recovering from the unworldly experience. He massaged out a few muscles that had cramped under the pain, but other than that he felt pretty good. The smell of food made his stomach constrict and he had such a thirst that the small amount of saliva in his mouth felt like paste. Still, he couldn’t trust the offerings left by the Chinese. He was certain that either the food or the water was drugged, both probably, so he poured them into the metallic chamber pot. He settled his back against the wall of his cell, examining each surface of the bare room under the glow of the low-watt lightbulb.
“Okay, Harry,” he whispered. “Your inspiration bought me a couple more hours. Any idea what I can do with them?”
Escape, dumbass. Mercer could almost hear the imagined response.
“Easy for you to say. I’m in a concrete room with a locked steel door. The hinges are on the outside. There’s a rusty ventilation grille above the door that’s about one foot wide and eight inches tall. Other than the light fixture hardwired through conduit, I’ve got nothing but a couple of empty bowls, one nearly overflowing chamber pot and a pair of boxer shorts. What would you suggest?”
Of course there was no answer.
The cell had probably been built as a storeroom. When he’d been dragged down the hall by the guards, Mercer had seen a hallway with ten identical doors. Some kind of secure underground warehouse was his guess. But it couldn’t have been better designed as an escape-proof prison either. With his meager possessions, Mercer knew there was no way he was getting out before his next conversation with Mr. Sun.
“Now if only I had a screwdriver. . . .”
The Twenty Devils Mine Cocle Province, Panama
Beyond the office windows, Liu Yousheng could see the side of the mountain had been sculpted back so it resembled the type of terrace farm s
een all over southeast Asia. Rather than leveling land to produce flat plots for planting, the heavy machinery tearing into the hill searched for one of the most precious metals in the world. Of the different types of gold mining, strip mining is by far the most destructive. The mountain was being eaten, as if by a cancer, its flanks peeled away systematically to get to the gold-bearing ore underneath. The raw earth appeared red, rich in iron oxide—rust—but still it looked as though the soil bled from its wounds.
The deal he’d reached with former president Ochoa was that the open mine would be refilled once they reached the end of the ore strata, called a banket reef. With him out of the way, and the pliable Omar Quintero now living in the Heron Palace, Liu no longer concerned himself with the ecological devastation. The jungle would eventually reclaim the pit. In two hundred years or so.
Another earlier concession to Ochoa that Liu could now ignore was the installation of a state-of-the-art processing plant to ensure none of the mercury used to separate gold from the crushed ore escaped into the water table. Liu had yet to activate the plant. Same went for the rolling mill that used monstrous drums filled with metal balls to pulverize the ore to a fine powder. It had lain idle since its construction.
The only machines in operation at the Twenty Devils Mine were the excavators, dump trucks, and bulldozers that endlessly pulled down more of the mountain the geologic reports said was the best suited for his operation.
He reflected how those reports had cost a fortune to come by. Drill crews had been hired to take hundreds of core samples, consulting geologists brought in to interpret the data, and an army of workers employed to pan the rivers and streams that flowed down from the hills in the area. In the end, they said exactly what Liu knew they would, that this mountain was a virtual mother lode of gold. The bullion that had been in the Hatcherly warehouse was proof, with their newly designed Republic of Panama seals stamping them 99.99 percent pure. That gold was reported to have come from panning, drilling, and surface recovery.
