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Holy shit,Walter thinks, and he grabs his Motorola radio.
“Quinn, Hope, we’ve got a medical emergency in Cell Two!”
Walter grabs a first-aid kit and heads for the stairwell leading downstairs as he flicks on the light. The rules and regulations for being bad babysitters here in this hidden CIA safe house are few and far between, but the big one is to protect the prisoner. Mistreatment and torture and waterboarding and starvation are all fine, but by the end of the day, the prisoner still has to be alive.
And this one—on his watch!—has just slit her wrists.
Damn her!
Walter skids to a halt before one of the four solid and keypad-locked doors in the basement. He drops the first-aid kit and punches in the access code, and the door swings open.
The air inside the cell is cold as it washes over him. Must be at the low point of the thermostat control.
The woman is on her knees, sobbing. Blood has pooled on the floor in two puddles near her bloody wrists.
“Hey, get up!” he yells.
The woman doesn’t move.
“Get up, damn it!” he yells again, wondering why in hell Quinn is taking so damn long to get here. He needs to bandage those wrists up,now;Walter knows from experience just how quickly someone can bleed out from severed wrist arteries.
She’s gibbering now, making no sense, and he steps forward, ready to grab her hair if need be, when the woman springs up and, with the heel of her right hand, breaks his nose.
Chapter76
IN THEmovies and TV shows, nailing a guy’s nose with the heel of your hand will drive bone fragments into his brain and instantly kill him. But real life is always messier than the movies: I’ve hurt the heel of my right hand and only stunned one of my captors. Still, I use those key few seconds to punch him in the throat and kick out his legs.
He thumps to the concrete floor. I grab his radio and strip him of his pistol, then stomp on his throat with my bare foot.
There’s the crack and crunch of bone and cartilage shattering; obscene gurglings strain out of his mouth, and I drag him into my former cell, then return to the hallway and slam the door shut.
There.
Short hallway and a stairwell, headingup up upand the hell out of here.
So far, no shooting.
I’m pleased.
I start moving on bare feet, the rear of my head hurting something awful. As I get to the stairs, a heavyset guy in jeans and a black turtleneck sweater rolls out, holding a pistol in one hand and a white case with a red cross in the other.
He looks surprised.
I’m not.
I expected it.
But he moves fast, throwing the case at me and swinging around to grab his pistol with both hands to assume the proper shooting position. Me, I’m not in the mood to be proper, so I start shooting with my right hand extended. At least two shots nail him in the chest and drop him in a jumble of arms and legs.
I keep on running.
Right up the stairs.
Out into a small room. To the right, a kitchen. To the rear, another narrow set of stairs, going up. To the left, a living room transformed into a control center for this little slice of black sites.
To the front, a blessed door.
I make it to the door, open it up, and run outside, dropping the radio, just in case it has a tracer device on it.
