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A woman who could hold her own.
Give as good as she could take.
Snarl and spit before Ice made her submit.
Now Ice’s mind whipped back to the photograph Benson had given him of the woman waiting inside that safe-house.
Waiting for him—even though she wouldn’t know he was coming for her, wouldn’t know what hit her when he got there and did his work.
His cock moved and he swallowed hard. He knew there were no rules in a safe-house outside the United States. That was the whole point of using safe-houses in foreign countries.
Plausible deniability wasn’t just for politicians. In fact CIA owned the concept ever since that National Security Memorandum from 1948 authorized the Agency to break international law so long as the U.S. government could “plausibly deny” involvement. It was effectivelycarte blanchefor the Company, hence the safe-houses all over the world where the only rules were the ones written by the interrogator.
Because CIA had long since figured out that if you wanted to fight terror, then you needed to put your people in positions where they could use every damn weapon available.
You needed to fight terror by inflicting fear, by making it clear there were no American laws protecting your ass, no American media ready to tell your sob-story.
Especially if you were interrogating an American citizen.
“Is it a woman?” came Jack’s voice.
Ice frowned as he cleared his head and pulled up outside the safe-house, parking next to an old model Range Rover, white and beat-up with badly scuffed local license plates.
He glanced at the blacked-out windows of the building. It was just black latex paint on frosted glass sliding windows that were probably bolted shut. A noisy air-conditioning unit sticking out the side of the building was the only sign of life.
Of course, Ice would kill the air-conditioning.
Because the point was to make the woman sweat.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ice sighed into the phone.
“Your first Darkwater mission. Is it a woman?”
Ice sighed again, then swiped Jack’s face off his phone and hung up on his kid brother without another word. He checked his messages to see if Benson had sent anything new over. All he’d gotten so far was the woman’s basic file. Everything else he knew about the woman was just from the one meeting with Benson back in Upstate New York.
Not that Ice needed much more. He had the basics, and that was enough to get under her skin, burrow into her brain, crack her code and make her spill her dirty secrets.
Ice reached into the back seat and grabbed his duffel, stuffed it under the front passenger seat. He’d come here straight from the airport. Civilian flight, so no weapons. No easy access to weapons either. India wasn’t a gun-friendly nation, and there were no U.S. military bases or official CIA stations in the country. U.S. Embassies would have small armories, but Benson and Kaiser wanted this whole thing to happen without any U.S. government knowledge, so Embassies were off limits.
Which meant all Ice had were his hands and his wits.
Should be more than enough.
It was just one woman.
The phone buzzed again.
It was Jack calling back, probably pissed off that Ice had hung up on him. Ice considered ignoring the call, but he was a few minutes early and he sure as hell didn’t want Jack blowing up his phone later when he was in the middle of dealing with this woman.
Because a good interrogation had to be carefully curated.
Meticulously maneuvered.
Perfectly played.
That was Ice’s superpower. He knew how to set the baseline with an interrogation target. He’d picked up the fundamentals when he joined the Army after West Point and signed up with the Military Police division. Then Delta recruited him after Ice showed his chops by hunting down one of their own men who’d gone bad and killed a working girl outside Fort Benning.
Ice had broken that hard-ass Delta guy in a marathon fourteen-hour interrogation, getting a full confession out of the guy, making it go down clean and quiet so the proud Delta Company didn’t look too bad. The guy ended up hanging himself in his cell at Leavenworth, which didn’t bother Ice one damn bit. If anything, the fucker got off easy for killing that girl.
