How long it went on, Mercer would never know. Lost in a raging flood of pain, time had never had less meaning. Like an artist, Mr. Sun played Mercer’s body against itself, generating agony upon agony with his slender needles, cleverly multiplying the anguish at times and backing it off at others but never leaving his subject free. Only occasionally would he ask a question, and even then he wouldn’t wait for an answer. He was lost in a command performance, conducting an orchestra of sensation to generate the maximum amount of pain.
Through it Mercer fought, retelling parts of his earlier story and then just maintaining his silence when it became too much to think straight. But he knew that was the object of Sun’s work, to empty him of everything except the pain so that he would beg to answer a question.
A needle between his fingers had made his eyeballs seem to collapse like they had been pierced and their fluids drained away. It was the worst yet. Sun added another needle that felt like a smoldering ember had settled in Mercer’s lungs. Each breath became a fiery torture. Mercer was losing himself to the pain. One more element, the barest touch, and he knew he’d never recover.
He had to find something to hold on to, an anchor to keep him rooted to the rational world that existed beyond the agonized shell of his body. Like a swimmer tossed in the surf, he had to find a rock to cling to that kept his head above the drowning pain. Images cascaded in his mind, thoughts of what meant most to him.
Accomplishments. They whirled past so fast he could grasp none. None of them meant anything now.
Women he’d known. He caught a blur of faces and snippets of conversation before they were all banished by the agony.
His nanny, Juma. She appeared in his imagination so anguished by what he was going through that he let her go.
His mother and father. He held their image in his mind for just a moment before they disappeared, each looking at him sadly, as if they had let him down once again by not giving him the haven he so desperately needed now.
Friends. Harry White back at Tiny’s Bar tricking an unsuspecting customer into buying him drinks by flipping a pair of double-headed coins. Even Harry faded into the agony.
God, what was there? his soul cried. What did it matter to stop Liu Yousheng? Who was he to protect Lauren and Bruneseau? What did they mean to him? Surely, not this.
Sun trailed his finger across Mercer’s cheek and it felt like two inches of flesh had been peeled back. He knew he was screaming, had been for many minutes, but couldn’t hear it any longer.
There was nothing that he could use to get beyond what Sun was doing to him. There would be no refuge, no trick he could play in his own mind to free himself from the torture. He was about to break. Knew it. Hated it.
Harry hadn’t used a pair of double-sided coins. There’d only been one, a two-headed quarter he’d picked up at a novelty shop.
Someplace beyond his chest, he felt a distant blooming of agony around one knee, like it had been smashed with a sledgehammer and the shards of bone ground against each other. Mercer felt the back of his teeth with his tongue. Somehow his mouth had closed. He’d stopped screaming.
And it hadn’t been a customer Harry had tricked. The son of a bitch had used the coin on me. I must have bought him four drinks before I figured it out.
“Talk to me!” Sun screamed.
Mercer ignored him, hardly noticing his hand being dipped in molten steel.
“Fool me once, shame on you,” Harry had cackled when he’d been found out. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Then he added to the old adage. “Fool me four times in a row and I’m the biggest goddamned huckleberry to ever fall off the lettuce truck.”
“Answer me,” Sun screamed again. “Who was with you at the warehouse?”
Not lettuce truck. He’d said turnip truck. Biggest goddamned huckleberry to ever fall off the turnip truck.
Mercer could never hope to beat back the pain being inflicted. No human could. What he’d found was a shelter where the waves of agony washed against a mental barrier. This shield could only be as strong as his emotional connection to it. Rather than break Mercer completely, Sun had rendered him down to that one thing that the pain would never transcend. Mercer would never have thought it was Harry. His parents, yes, his dedication to his own ideals, possibly, even the memory of some of the women he’d loved. But Harry?
Who was Harry to him? To get further past the pain, that question demanded an answer. Friend wasn’t enough and father figure sounded like a new-age cop-out. What was he, then? He is I, Mercer realized. Or who I want to be in forty-plus years. Not the booze or the cigarettes or the bad jokes. It’s the loyalty he inspires, the steadfast dedication of a favor asked being a favor granted. Harry was the kind of person that people would talk about for decades after he’s gone—a phenomenon rarely seen beyond family groups and sports legends. He touched those around him in unexpected ways, but always leaving them a little better for it. Lauren had learned that in just days. And Roddy was ready to get into a war because of Harry’s friendship to his dead father.
It was a revelation to finally understand that despite all of Harry’s faults, he’d been Mercer’s role model, the person he had unconsciously patterned at least part of himself after. Nearly a decade of Harry’s friendship and influence had made Mercer the man he was now. And then he realized that his old friend had been his lifeline all along—the anchor not just through this agony but through the years they’d known each other.
Sun sensed his work was no longer producing the desired results. He hadn’t expected an American to understand the ways to slip from the needles’ touch, yet he could see that Mercer was dodging the pain. Inflicting more would accomplish nothing. He pulled just one of the needles he’d inserted to open the locus points and the fragile system of artificial pathways he’d created collapsed.
In one instant, all the pain, even the memory of the pain, vanished. Mercer was left slightly breathless. He knew what he’d just endured and it took a moment for his mind to adjust to the fact that there would be no aftereffects. To his body, it was as if the past hours of torment hadn’t happened, even if he recalled that his ankles had just seconds before felt like they’d been melted to the bone.
The torturer dipped his eyes in respect as he plucked needles from Mercer’s skin and returned them to their carrying cloth. He shut off the tape recorder. “Well done. While you have beaten the needles, don’t consider it a victory. Mr. Liu has given me two days to get the information he wants. Tomorrow I will begin with the clamps and hammers.” Sun tied up his bundle of needles. “Getting beyond self-generated pain is one thing. Let’s see how you do when I actually roast your feet and crush your testicles in a vise. Feeling pain is one thing, watching your body being mutilated while feeling it is quite another, I assure you.”
Mercer remained silent as his eyes shot a smoldering defiance. Sun turned for the door and guards came in to take Mercer back to his cell, leaving him with only a bowl of water and another of rice as well as a slop bucket with a lid.
He lay on the floor for an hour, slowly recovering from the unworldly experience. He massaged out a few muscles that had cramped under the pain, but other than that he felt pretty good. The smell of food made his stomach constrict and he had such a thirst that the small amount of saliva in his mouth felt like paste. Still, he couldn’t trust the offerings left by the Chinese. He was certain that either the food or the water was drugged, both probably, so he poured them into the metallic chamber pot. He settled his back against the wall of his cell, examining each surface of the bare room under the glow of the low-watt lightbulb.