He glanced into the pen and watched the man struggle against his bonds as pigs sniffed and licked him. His eyes were wide with fear rather than anger, and his shouts were stifled by his filthy gag. Rapp thought he'd seen it all, but this took the cake. He shook his head and walked away from the pen, fishing out his satellite phone. After flipping the large antennae into the upright position he punched in the number General Harley had given him.

A duty officer answered and Rapp asked for the general. Five seconds later Harley was on the line. "Mitch."

"General, have you ID'd the other two prisoners?" With reasonable certainty Rapp had already identified Hassan Izz-al-Din, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, and Ali Saed al-Houri.

"Not yet, but we're working on it."

"What about Langley?"

"As per your request, we're scanning documents as fast as we can and sending them back to the CTC."

"Have your guys, or Jamal's guys, found anything I can use?"

"Oh, there's stuff here," Harley said confidently, "it's just a question of getting it organized. We've got financial records, names, documents on WMD, plans for terrorist attacks...my J2 is telling me we hit the mother lode."

"Good." Time was critical, however. Word would get out quickly that al-Qaeda's command structure had been compromised. Bank accounts would be emptied, people would disappear, and plans would change.

"Listen, General, I can't stress enough how time-sensitive this information is. Have your people made any progress on the computers?"

"Not yet."

"Shit." Rapp ran a hand through his thick black hair. "Does the CTC have Marcus Dumond on it?"

"Let me check."

Rapp looked back at the pen in time to see another body tossed in. Marcus Dumond was the little brother he'd never wanted. A bona fide computer genius and hacker extraordinaire, the social misfit had been personally recruited by Rapp to work for the counterterrorism center at Langley.

The general came back on the line. "They haven't been able to track him down."

Rapp's face twisted into an irritated frown. It was approaching midnight back in the states, and knowing Marcus he was probably hanging out at some cyber café with his friends. "Listen, General, I have to start interrogating these guys, so I need your people to work really fast. The second you learn anything, I want you to call me."

"Roger."

Rapp put the phone away and went back to the pen. His five prisoners were all on their backs writhing in agony as the dirty swine defiled their supposedly purified martyred bodies. He looked to Urda and said, "Have your boys bring them inside."

Rapp then gestured for Urda to follow him. The two men walked a safe distance away from any prying ears. Rapp looked around at the dusty hardscrabble landscape, and asked, "Off the record, how rough have you had to be?"

Urda shrugged. "Afghanistan is a rough place...hell, it shouldn't even be a place. It should be four or five countries. We've got communists, war lords, or drug dealers...however you want to describe them, we've got the Taliban, we've got people who want democracy, and we have a lot of nice men and women who just want to live their lives, and the other assholes who won't let them do it, so what we've got is one gigantic fucking mess."

"You didn't answer my question." Rapp kept his eyes fixed on Urda's. "How rough have you had to be?"

Urda returned his stare with equal intensity. "You mean have I tortured people?"

"Yeah."

He looked back toward the warehouse, obviously not wanting to answer the question. "There have been times where I have let the locals get physical, but I prefer to stay out of it as much as possible."

Watching every twitch of the man's bearded face, Rapp decided he was lying to him, or at least not telling the whole story. A notoriously impatient man, he said, "Jamal, let's cut the shit. I'm guessing you're a pretty straight shooter, but you don't want to say too much because I'm a little too high up on the totem pole."

Urda shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with this line of questioning. Finally he said, "Those pricks back in Washington have no idea how ugly it is over here. They want us to act like we're cops...everything by the book." He spit on the ground, then threw his arms out gesturing at the harsh landscape. "There is no fucking rule book over here."

Rapp nodded. He understood. Having worked in the field for so many years he had very little affinity for the people back in Washington who tried to tell him how to do his job. Before he took this next step, however, he needed to make absolutely certain that he and Urda were of the same mind. "Listen, I'm about to go in there and do something that is so far off the reservation it can never be discussed with anyone...and I mean anyone."

Urda looked away, obviously uncomfortable.

Rapp reached out and grabbed his arm. "I haven't told you the whole story yet. This is not going to be your typical interrogation. We don't have the time to do it properly."

"Why?"

"Because we have reason to believe these guys are planning to detonate a nuclear weapon in Washington, D.C., and we have absolutely no idea how close they are to doing it, or if the little raid we conducted last night will cause them to move up their timetable." Rapp watched the expression change on Urda's face, and he let go of his arm.

"That's right...a nuke," repeated Rapp. "We're talking casualty rates that you and I can't even begin to calculate and the clock is ticking."

Urda's jaw hung slack for a moment and then he said, "My ex-wife and kids live just outside the city."

Not for the first time Rapp thought how lucky he was that his wife was visiting her parents in Wisconsin.

Urda shook his head as if struggling to comprehend the full enormity of the situation. "How big a bomb are we talking?"

"I don't know. That's one of the things I need to find out, and we don't have a lot of time. I need your help. My Arabic and Farsi are good but my Pashto and Urdu are nonexistent."

Rapp pointed toward the pen where the soiled prisoners were being dragged away from the squealing pigs. "I know two of these guys are fluent in Arabic, English, and Pashtu, and one of them speaks only Pashtu and a little bit of Arabic. I don't know what the other two speak. I'm going to need your help translating, but more importantly, I'm going to need your eyes and ears, because we are going to interrogate all five of them together."

Urda turned his attention away from the prisoners and back to the notorious CIA operative. As far as Urda knew, there was only one reason why someone would want to interrogate all five of the prisoners at the same time. His lips twisted into a pensive expression. "There are people who will do this for us," he offered.

Rapp began shaking his head before Urda had finished his sentence. "Nope. It's too important to trust to some warlord's thugs." He pointed at the bound prisoners as they shuffled single file into the building. "The fourth man in line is none other than Ali Saed al-Houri. He helped plan and execute the 9/11 attacks, and if he doesn't start singing like a bird I'm going to kill him right here and now, and I can tell you honestly that I won't lose a wink of sleep over it."

Urda let out a long sigh and looked at the ground as if the burden of what was about to happen was too much.

Rapp's jaw tightened. "I am going to do whatever it takes to get those men to talk. Make no mistake about it." Rapp moved his head to make sure Urda was looking directly at him. "And I mean whatever it takes, so before we go in there I need to know without a doubt that you're going to have the stomach for this, and that when all is said and done, you will never breathe a word of it to anyone."

Urda's thoughts returned to his ex-wife and three children. He pictured all them in their beds, in the house that he used to live in before this job destroyed his marriage. He thought of the reasons why he'd picked his career over his family: his sense of duty, the feeling that he could make a difference in this crazy war on terror, and that someone had to man the ramparts. It was as if all of those previous decisions had led to this one defining moment. The moment where his actions really could make the difference. If there was ever a time to ignore the rule book, this was it.