Troy stalked to a table beside the door to the small cell, which was located in a far corner of the mansion’s large basement. As kids, Troy and Jack had tried many times to find out what was behind the triple-locked steel door. Only after Troy was initiated into RC7 had his father brought him down here and shown him.
He dropped the whip on the table, picked up a cattle prod, and moved back to where Hamid was hanging from the beam. Troy held the prod up to Hamid’s anxious eyes after he’d lifted the blindfold slightly off the terrorist’s nose. “Eight thousand volts, my friend, and this is just the second tool in a long line of things I have to make your night very uncomfortable.” He hesitated, to let the message sink in. “Tell me what you’re doing in my country, and tell me right now. Otherwise, it’ll be a very long evening for one of us.”
Hamid took several short, quick breaths, looked as if he might say something, but then turned his head away.
“What are you doing in my country?” Troy demanded harshly as he held the device closer and closer to Hamid’s neck. “Tell me now or—”
Troy whipped around when there was a sharp knock on the door, then hurried to it, opened it a crack, and peered out. Jack was standing there looking mad as hell.
“We need to talk.”
“Get out of here.”
“We need to talk,” Jack repeated angrily.
“Wait.” Troy hurried back to Hamid, pulled the blindfold down, and then hustled back to the door. “What are you doing down here?” he demanded as he moved out of the cell and pulled the steel door shut behind them.
“You know I know about this place.”
“So?”
“I told you not to use this place to torture anyone again. I don’t want people like this anywhere near Mom. You got me?”
“I don’t have time for this, Jack. Get the hell out of here and don’t come back. Go to Paris and enjoy your vacation. Enjoy it knowing people like me are keeping you safe.”
Jack brought his hands up as Troy stepped toward him. “Fuck you, brother.”
CHAPTER 16
“Hello, Drexel.” Bill Jensen leaned down to pat the golden retriever. It was a big, handsome male with a light blond, perfectly brushed coat. “Good boy,” he said before extending his hand to the man the dog had come with. “That’s a great-looking animal, John.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jensen.”
“Call me Bill, John. We’ve known each other too long and been through too much together.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bill chuckled wryly as he pointed at a chair. “Sit down, son.” There would be no breaking Ward’s formality tonight.
Ward was one of Red Cell Seven’s nineteen field leaders. Blond like his dog and slightly shy of six feet tall, Ward was in his late thirties. He’d been inside RC7 for sixteen years, and he was as loyal as a man could be, just like all the others inside the cell, Bill thought to himself. At this point the unit had 209 agents, the most in its history. And they were all as committed to the cause as any group of men had ever been.
“What can I do for you tonight?” Bill asked as he and Ward sat down on opposite sides of a small table.
“This is a little difficult.” As Ward eased into his chair, he nodded for the golden retriever to lie down beside him on the floor. It did so obediently, putting its huge head on its paws while it gazed up at Ward with big brown eyes. “Sorry in advance for what I’m about to ask. I don’t want to irritate you, Mr. Jensen.”
Bill winced. He felt old enough these days without a man who was almost forty addressing him as “mister,” especially on his birthday.
Unfortunately, Bill understood. He was in his sixties, but he’d always felt like he looked younger than his age — until recently. In the last nine months his hair had gone completely silver and gray, and the creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth had dug deep. That quickly he was looking older than his age instead of younger.
That had struck him squarely between the eyes this morning as he’d stared long and hard into the bathroom mirror of this cabin in western New York State that he and Shane Maddux were using. The face staring back looked old, very old. Perhaps the pressure involved in all this was finally getting to him. And being away from Cheryl for so long was making that pressure seem twice as bad. But he had to keep running Red Cell Seven. No one else could, at this critical stage in the cell’s history. They were under attack from too many directions.
“You won’t irritate me, John,” Bill said reassuringly. “What’s the problem?”
“I need to understand how we justify ourselves,” Ward replied candidly.
Bill hadn’t been expecting a philosophical question, because John Ward wasn’t one to get lost in those weeds. “Well, I—”
“No, no,” Ward interrupted. “I didn’t mean it that way, sir. I meant pragmatically,” he explained. “What gives us the authority to act as we do?”
“Okay.”
“We’ve got rumors in the ranks, sir. Some of the men are worried about facing serious criminal charges, given the way we operate. They keep reading about all these congressional inquiries going on all the time, and after a while it hits home. And then we get all these pronouncements from President Dorn about how the interrogation techniques we use will not be tolerated and that those who use them will be prosecuted.” Ward shook his head. “Dorn isn’t doing this country any favors.”
“I know it,” Bill muttered as he glanced at the mirror hanging on the wall above the fireplace. Maddux was watching from the other side of the wall. “This’ll help,” he said confidently, withdrawing a single piece of faded paper from a large envelope lying on the table in front of him. He’d anticipated the reason for Ward’s visit tonight, with Maddux’s help, of course. “Take a look.”
Ward leaned forward to get a better look at the document Bill had just slid across the table.
“Read it,” Bill ordered, motioning. Ward couldn’t possibly have finished it that quickly. “Take your time. Go on.”
When he’d read the document thoroughly, Ward nodded. “It’s the Executive Order from Richard Nixon. I’ve heard about it, and I appreciate what it says here about us being immune from prosecution. But how exactly does that—”
“Hold it up to the light,” Bill instructed. “Now focus on the lower left-hand corner,” he said after Ward picked it up.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look through the page, like you’re looking at one of those 3-D pictures.”
Ward chuckled. “I can’t do that thing, sir. I’ve tried before.”
“You can do anything you put your mind to, John. Focus.”
Ward was silent for nearly thirty seconds as he held the paper up and stared. “My God,” he finally murmured, “I see it. It’s a seven. Tiny, but it’s clearly a seven.”
“That’s right. Roger Carlson had it attached to the document back in the nineties.”
Bill thought back to the day twenty years ago that he and Carlson had labored up Gannett Peak to retrieve that original Order from the cave. And then a week later they’d scaled the mountain again to put the document back after the imprint had been affixed to it. Roger had never let the Order out of his sight the entire time it was away from the cave — except when he slept, and then he kept it in a locked briefcase that was handcuffed to his wrist.
“Only a few individuals in the world know that document exists,” Bill continued. “Nine of them are the Supreme Court justices.” He took the paper back and replaced it in the envelope as he glanced again at the mirror. “The justices know about Red Cell Seven, they know about the document, and they know what to look for on the document. If anyone ever tried to prosecute us for anything, this document would be presented to the justices in a private session of the court, and whoever had brought the charges would be arrested immediately. And I do mean whoever, and I do mean immediately.” The obvious implication was that “whoever” included anyone in the executive branch, and Bill could actually see the confidence working its way back into Ward’s expression. “Believe me, John, as long as we have this document, we are absolutely immune from prosecution of any kind.”