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I said nothing.
Steward stood, grinning. “You think this is an interrogation? You think...what, that you can sit there all stoic and strong and not give me anything?” He leaned down to me. “There’s nothing I need from you. See, I told your buddies you’d be going to a deep, dark cell for the rest of your life. But I don’t like loose ends.”
He opened a drawer and took out a floppy, transparent IV bag. My stomach shrunk down to a cold, hard knot.
“Amazing stuff,” he told me, weighing the bag in his hand. “Comes out of a lab in Europe. Very expensive.” He crouched so he could look right into my eyes. “What it does is, it triggers all of the body’s pain receptors. It causes no actual damage, so it’s perfect for interrogations: no bruises, no broken bones, no evidence. It’s how we get answers in a hurry, when there’s no time to take someone off to a black site.”
He took an alcohol wipe and began cleaning a spot on my forearm with exaggerated care. “Of course, we have to be careful.” He took out an IV needle and slowly, painfully, inserted it into my vein, taping it in place. “Your body isn’t designed to experience that level of pain for any length of time. The heart just gives out. So we normally only run the IV a little way open, and only for a little while. We don’t want someone dying before we get our answers.”
He hung the IV bag on a stand, then connected it to the needle in my arm. “Of course,” he said, mock-thoughtfully, “in your case, we don’t need any information. So we can just run it full open.” He twisted the knob on the IV bag, opening the flow all the way. “And we’ll just go until your heart gives up. It’ll look like you died of a heart attack.”
He smiled, then sat down on the edge of the table to watch.
I glowered at him, trying not to show any fear. But my eyes kept going to the clear liquid working its way down the tube towards my arm. I took quick little breaths, trying to brace myself. The liquid reached the needle and I dug my fingernails into my palms—
And then I could feel the liquid flowering inside me and spreading through my body. Everything it touched erupted in blinding, white-hot agony. I screwed my eyes closed and gave a guttural grunt. First, it was my arm. Then my shoulder and chest. It kept spreading and the pain kept building.
Steward leaned closer. “I want you to know that this is nothing, nothing, compared to what we’ll do to Yeshevskaya. I’m going to fly her out of here to one of our black sites in the Middle East, somewhere there are no rules at all. And in between making her scream in pain, guess what I’m going to be doing to her?”
No. I tried to believe that he was just trying to psych me out. But I could hear that urgency, that lust in his voice again. This was real.
“Not just me,” he said. “My men, too. All of us. But I’ll make sure that the last thing she ever sees, just before I put a gun to her head, is my face, grinning down at her.”
Fear and anger ballooned inside me, pushing back the pain, and I managed to open my eyes to glare at him.
He grinned. “Attaboy.” He settled back again to watch. The pain was still building and I began to sweat and pant: it felt like insects were gnawing on every nerve ending. But worse was the sick dread in my stomach, the thought of what they were going to do to her.
The agony increased and I couldn’t hold it back: I started to scream. And as I screamed again and again, there was a coldness in my bones like nothing I’d ever felt. Loneliness. Even in my darkest times, even on an icy rooftop in Berlin or stranded in the jungle in Ecuador, I’d been with my friends. Now I knew what it was like for Tanya, being on her own.
No one was coming to save me because I didn’t have a friend in the world.
54
JD
We were all sitting in the chopper, ready to go. But Gina hadn’t started the engines and I didn’t have the heart to give the order. We all just sat there, brooding.
We needed to fly back to New York, drop off the helicopter we’d rented and swap back to the plane. Then we could fly home to Colorado. Our mission was complete.
Except…no one had planned for it to end like this.
Cal wasn’t whittling, for once, he just stared at the floor. Gabriel, who would normally be figuring out a way to sweet-talk the rental staff into a discount, just sat there morosely. Bradan, normally so silent and still, shifted in his seat uneasily and even Danny, who I could always rely on for a smile, didn’t look glad to be going home.
