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That was true, Stansfield thought. Very few people understood the bloody rivalry between the Sunnis and the Shias. Each sect was growing more radical--more violent. They couldn't wait any longer. Stansfield lowered his voice. "Stan, in six months' time, I want you operational. Stop trying to run these kids down like it's a Special Forces selection process. Irene's right, I don't really care if they can survive in the forest for a week with nothing more than a fingernail clipper. I want them ready for urban operations. I'm going to task Doc to you full-time. Listen to him. He knows what he's doing."
"Okay ... and after six months?" Hurley asked with a bit of optimism in his voice.
"I'm going to turn you loose. We need to hit these guys back. At a bare minimum I want them lying awake at night worried that they might be next. I want you to scare the shit out of them."
Hurley smiled in anticipation. "I know just what to do."
"Good ... and one last thing. You're almost sixty. This is a young kid's game. Especially your side of the business. Our days are numbered. We need to start trusting these kids more. In another ten years they're going to take over, and we'll probably be dead."
Hurley smiled. "I'm not going down without a fight."
CHAPTER 19
BEIRUT, LEBANON
SAYYED mopped his brow with a rag. The front of his white T-shirt was splattered with the blood of the man who had just confessed to myriad sins. The basement was warm and damp, and he'd been at it for most of the day. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to work so hard to get a man to talk. He was thirsty and hungry, but both needs would have to wait. They were gathered upstairs, nervously waiting to hear what he'd discovered.
Sayyed dropped the pliers on the metal cart. The device bounced and fell open, the serrated clamps releasing a bloody fingernail. There were eight total, strewn about the stainless-steel surface, sticky and gooey with blood and tissue. Sayyed admired his work for a second. Every man was different. For some, the mere threat of physical pain was enough to get them to admit their deception. Others, like this Jewish pig, took a little more work. He'd employed many different methods to get at the truth, but he preferred fingernails and toenails for the simple reason that there were twenty of them. And they grew back.
Sayyed had seen torture practiced in a wide variety of forms. Most sessions were brutish and conducted without forethought or planning. Slapping and kicking was the most common method, but employed against a man who had been desensitized to such things, it was more often than not useless. There were stabbing and slicing and shooting, and although they worked, they also required medical care if you were going to continue to interrogate the individual. There was degradation, such as shoving a man's head in bucket full of human excrement, sticking things in orifices where they didn't belong, and a long list of things Sayyed found distasteful. Electrocution was the only other form that Sayyed would use. It was extremely effective and clean. It's only downside was the potential for heart failure and long-term brain and nerve damage. Sayyed liked to spend time with his subjects. To truly debrief a prisoner took months.
Sayyed could never understand why people would so casually throw away such a valuable commodity. Killing a subject after he admitted to his lies was foolish. As an interrogator you had barely scratched the surface. An admission of guilt was just that and often nothing more. The truly valuable information lay buried in the subject's brain and needed to be slowly and carefully coaxed to the surface. And to do that you needed time.
Sayyed wiped his hands on a blood-smeared towel and said to one of the guards, "Clean the wounds and bandage the fingers. I don't want him getting an infection."
He put on his black dress shirt and left the interrogation room. He continued past the guards and up one flight of stairs. There were a dozen men milling about the lobby. Most were in plain clothes, a few wore fatigues, but all were armed with rifles and sidearms. Sayyed continued up another flight of stairs to the second floor, where he found more armed men milling about the hallway.
He frowned at the sight of them. The presence of so many men was bound to draw attention. His colleagues were far too one-dimensional. They were still thinking of their struggle as a ground battle between vying factions. Car bombs, snipers, and assaults must always be taken into account, but the bigger threat at the moment was the jets flown by Jews and the Americans. These men had not walked here, which meant there were far too many cars parked in front of the building. Sayyed traveled with a light contingent of bodyguards for this very reason. Three or four were usually more than enough. The others were either too paranoid, too proud, or too stupid to see the folly of traveling in such large motorcades.
Eight guards were standing in the hallway outside the office at the back of the building. Sayyed approached one of the more recognizable faces and said, "I pray for the sake of our struggle that no more than six vehicles are parked in front of this building."
The man looked in the direction of the street and without answering took off at a trot.
Sayyed was pleased that at least one of these morons knew how to take orders. He opened the door to the office and found four faces instead of the three he had expected. Mustapha Badredeen, the leader of Islamic Jihad, was at the head of the table. To his right was the leader of Islamic Jihad's paramilitary wing, Imad Mughniyah, and then Colonel Amir Jalil of the Iranian Quds Force. He was Iran's liaison between Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. The last man, Abu Radih, was not welcome, at least not as far as Sayyed was concerned. He was the representative for Fatah, the extremely unreliable band of men who claimed to speak on behalf of the approximately five hundred thousand Palestinians living in Lebanon. In Sayyed's conservative opinion, they were nothing more than a gang of organized mobsters who stumbled from one confrontation to the next leaving a trail of havoc in their wake. They were only good for two things: to use as a buffer against the Jews to the south or as cannon fodder against the Christian militias to the east.
"Well?" Colonel Jalil asked.
Sayyed ignored the Iranian and turned instead to Mustapha Badredeen. "CIA."
"I knew it!" Radih said, excitedly.
Sayyed glanced at the imbecile who had created the problem and said, "You knew no such thing."
"I did so," Radih said defensively.
"How could you have possibly known? What evidence did you have in your possession that pointed to the fact that this man was CIA?"
"I have my sources."
Sayyed laughed at him. It was an empty claim and everyone in the room knew it. "And the businessman you kidnapped last week, what has he told you?"
"He admitted that he is an American agent."
Sayyed was dubious of the claim, but the fool had just painted himself into a corner. "In that case I will need you to turn him over to me."
Radih realized his mistake. "Well ... he has admitted to a lot of things. My men are not done interrogating him."
Sayyed stared at him with a look that told everyone in the room that he didn't believe a word of it.
