CHAPTER 38

I asked Mercer to have Carol meet me at the snack bar on base. I hadn’t eaten since the day before, and it looked like another long night ahead. I was halfway through my second overcooked burger and was noisily slurping a watery chocolate milkshake when Carol walked in.

How could I tell? Because when she entered, the snack bar was jammed with soldiers loudly bitching about what a lousy week they’d had, or making empty boasts about how they were going to get laid this Friday night, when suddenly everything came to a stop. The room just froze – the opposite effect of throwing a pebble into a still pond. See, Carol wasn’t bad in ye olde looks department, but she wasn’t any great shakes either – only these troops had been penned up on base ever since Whitehall’s arrest, and anything with boobs that walked upright looked damned good to them at that moment.

There was an almost universal gasp of surprise when she wafted across the room and landed at my table. I still looked pretty ravaged from the beatings. And when a hundred or so young minds think exactly the same thought, at exactly the same moment, the psychic echo can be almost deafening: Jesus, what’s she doing with that busted-up hulk? Friggin’ officers get all the luck.

I looked around the room and proudly acknowledged their universal envy, because I’m a guy, and guys don’t really care if jealousy is built on a false foundation. At least I don’t. I take it anywhere I can get it.

“Congratulations on capturing Mrs. Bales,” I said, after she’d sat down.

“Thanks,” she offhandedly responded, like, You know, no big thing; just another day in a secret agent’s life. Not even worth an entry in my diary.

“Hungry?” I asked, munching away on my burger.

She looked at the burger with disgust. “No, I, uh, I’ll get something else to eat. Later.”

“You sure? It might be a long night.”

She was still staring at the greasy thing in my fist. “Quite sure.”

“Okay, have it your way. Here’s what I’d like to do. Can you get me in to see Bales’s wife?”

“If you’d like. Why?”

“Curiosity. I just want to see what she looks like.”

“All right.”

“Then I’d like to spend some time going through Bales’s and Choi’s investigation files.”

“They’ve already been taken from their offices. Bales’s files are at our facility. Choi’s are with the KCIA.”

“But you can get ’em?”

“I suppose. There are a lot of them, though. Box after box filled with them. We could spend all night.”

“I got nothing better to do.”

“I guess I don’t, either,” she sighed, not the least bit happy about that.

“Good,” I said, noisily licking some ketchup off my fingers. “Let’s get moving.”

Then, just as I was standing up, my legs suddenly buckled. If I hadn’t grabbed the corner of the table I would’ve done a free fall onto the floor. Carol rushed around the table and took hold of my shoulders, helping me straighten up.

“Are you all right?”

I shook my head a few times. “I don’t know. Must be the beatings. My body… uh, it’s not working right.”

“We don’t have to do this tonight. We can reschedule.”

“No, it has to be tonight. Please.”

I bravely tried taking another step and my legs buckled again.

So she slipped her arm around my waist, and I put an arm around her shoulder and let her lead me out. After one or two steps, I straightened. Every eye in the room was on us. A hundred disgruntled young faces looked like they’d kill their own mothers to be me.

I’m so slick, sometimes I’m ashamed of myself. But like I said, I’ll take it any way I can get it.

It took thirty minutes to get to the KCIA. It was a nondescript, blocklike gray building located on a busy street. You’d probably pass right by it, except it was the only building I ever saw that had no windows on the first three floors. They started on the fourth floor, and even those were small, pinched, scrawny-looking things.

Carol showed a guard her Agency ID, and she was allowed to enter a gated area and park. Then we left the car and went to the front entrance, where two fairly competent-looking guards took her CIA identification card, called a number, chattered in Korean for a few seconds, then gave us both plastic laminated passes with clips on the back.

Carol seemed to know where she was going, because she led me down a series of halls and up two flights of stairs and into a side office. There were about six men in dark silk suits lounging around drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, quietly bullshitting. They seemed to recognize Carol.

She jabbered in Korean for a few minutes, occasionally putting a finger to her lips in a fretful motion, like a sign of concern. Her manner seemed more reserved, almost subservient, in the presence of Korean men.

One of the men finally stood up and led us through two sets of doors and into another room filled with cigarette smoke. A Korean gentleman was hunched over a table, suit jacket on the back of his chair, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. It was Mr. Kim, Mercer’s KCIA counterpart.

He got up. Carol bowed and made no effort to shake hands. She was reverting to Korean protocols. Then Kim looked at me and stuck out his hand. “Major Drummond, it’s good to see you again.”

“My pleasure,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He grimaced painfully. “It’s not been the best of days.”

I couldn’t resist. “Yeah, that was some screwup this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“That bastard murdered one of my men. He cut his throat like a pig’s.”

I gathered Mr. Kim was no longer dubious about my overheated imagination.

“So how’s your prisoner?” I asked.

“She’s going to be tough.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s had good training. She hasn’t said a word.”

I wasn’t going to tell him, but when I was in the outfit, I’d had some training in interrogation myself. Only mine was always on the receiving end, because the outfit did most of its work inside the bad guys’ territory and was therefore justifiably concerned about our ability to withstand torture and interrogation. Some sadist figured that practice makes perfect, and they gave us lots of it. I therefore consider myself something of an expert in interrogation methods – strictly from the victim’s end of things, of course.

I said, “What are you doing to her?”

“Actually, we don’t use physical techniques. Everybody believes we do, and frankly we encourage the perception.” He lifted his shoulders a little. “It heightens the anxiety of our subjects. The truth is, we prefer sleep deprivation.”

I grinned. Sleep deprivation doesn’t get quick results like yanking out a few fingernails might, but it’s much more effective, because once a prisoner breaks, they break all the way. I know. In training, I’d had it tried on me once. I ended up babbling like a baby.

“Can I see her?”

He shrugged. “If you’d like. Just don’t talk to her.”

We entered a room off to the side. The walls and floors were thickly padded in some solid white material. The padding wasn’t for bouncing bodies off of, but was super-thick sound insulation. The lights in the ceiling were huge and very high-powered. The light was pure white and spectacularly bright, so bright it hurt your eyes and forced you to blink a lot, although even then it penetrated through your lids.

A woman was seated in a chair with her back turned to us. There were white straps completely immobilizing her, so she couldn’t move a limb or even her head. There was some kind of eye halter strapped around her head that forced her eyelids to stay open, which after a while gets pretty painful because the eyeballs get dry and sore. Even the chair was painted white. In fact, the only color in the room was the flesh tone of her skin. She was entirely naked. She’d been stripped and left nude to add to her humiliation and sense of vulnerability. The monochromatic whiteness was done to amplify the effects of her sleep deprivation. To multiply her humiliation, they would keep feeding her liquids and foods, so she peed and shat all over herself.