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“Nothing? No calls, no emails, no letters?”
I already know the answer to that thanks to our hackers, so I’m not surprised when the blubbering idiot shakes his head like a wound-up toy. “No, no, I swear! Nothing! No one’s heard from him since he left.”
I turn to Yan. “What do you think?” I ask in Russian. “You believe this piece of shit?”
He studies him, then nods. “Yeah, I think so. Henderson’s too careful to reach out to this one.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
Bending down, I take Bolton’s phone from his pocket and leave him to blubber and bleed on the floor as we walk out of the cabin. Before we leave, I disable his vehicle to make sure he can’t leave for a while.
We have five more assholes to interrogate before this one’s fate is discovered.
23
Peter
The next two people on our list pose about as much challenge as Bolton. The first, Ian Wyles, is a retired schoolteacher who’s Henderson’s uncle twice removed. The two of them used to exchange emails on a regular basis before Henderson’s disappearance, and it’s possible that Henderson might still keep in touch with him somehow.
However, the minute we nab the old man on his way home from the post office, it becomes obvious he doesn’t know anything. He’s so fucking clueless and stunned by our questions that we don’t even bother roughing him up. We just tie him up and leave him with his disabled vehicle in the woods, where he’ll be found in a few hours when his wife comes home and discovers him missing.
The second person, Jennifer Lows, is Henderson’s wife’s friend. A plump, middle-aged woman, she literally shits herself when we grab her outside her parents’ nursing home. Within the first minute of our interrogation, it becomes clear that she’s clueless as well, and we leave her tied behind a dumpster in an alley, gagged and terrified out of her wits but otherwise unharmed.
“Zero for three,” Anton remarks as we peel out of the alley, but I just shrug. This is not unexpected. If Henderson kept in touch with these people, we would’ve likely uncovered it by now. Also, the security around them would’ve been tighter. The fact that they were relatively easy to get to tells me they’re not in Henderson’s inner circle.
The people who matter to him—his wife and children—are as well hidden as any treasure.
In any case, getting information about Henderson’s whereabouts is not our primary goal. This is about sending a message, telling him that no one in his life—no matter how distant a connection—is safe.
We want to enrage and frighten him, because angry, scared men make mistakes.
The next person we go after is a local police officer who happens to be Henderson’s childhood friend. Jimmy Gander, age fifty-five, is one of the oldest cops on the force, and when we grab him outside his favorite bar, he manages to slug Anton in the face before we knock him out.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” Anton mutters as we pull into the woods where we intend to interrogate our captive. “Bastard’s going to get it.”
“No killing unless necessary,” I remind him. “We’re just going to rough him up some if he doesn’t cooperate.”
Anton scowls. “Fuck that shit. I’m going to have a black eye.”
“Shouldn’t have let grandpa get the better of you,” Yan says, smirking. “Maybe we should have him take your place on the team. He certainly seems more skilled.”
“Shut it,” I tell the two of them as our SUV stops in a forest clearing. “You can slug it out later.”
We drag the cop out and wait until he comes to before starting to question him. Like the others, he seems genuinely bewildered by the situation. However, unlike our other targets today, he refuses to answer our questions at first. To Anton’s joy, we end up having to hit him a few times before we hear the usual “don’t know anything” and “haven’t heard from him.” Under other circumstances, I would admire Gander’s loyalty to his friend, but given that we have less than two hours left to question the two remaining people on our list, the delay merely frustrates me.
“Put a fucking bullet in him,” I tell Anton when the cop balks at telling us about the last time he saw Henderson, and Anton gladly obeys the order, shooting Gander in the right shoulder.
After that, there’s no more withholding of answers, just verbal vomit and pleas for a hospital.
“Let’s go,” I tell the guys when I’m confident we got everything we can out of the cop. “Tie him up and leave him here.”
As we drive away, I make a mental note to call 911 and tell them the man’s location when we’re safely in the air.
Henderson’s friend or not, there’s no reason for the cop to die.
We’re on a time crunch now, so we expedite the process by nabbing our last two targets and interrogating them together. We left them for last because they’re even more distant connections of Henderson, so if we hadn’t gotten to them for some reason, it wouldn’t have been a major loss.
