As he spoke, Guererro took a slender case from an inside pocket. Hakim feared the hypodermic but, far worse, dreaded the fact that he was bathed in sweat. He prepared to flail his body, hoping to destroy the injector or waste its unknown contents.
Guerrero was far too battle-wise. He chose a nearby stick of the iron-hard Manzanita and, with a by-your-leave gesture to the camera, suddenly deluged Hakim with blows. It became a flood, a torrent, a sea of torment, and Hakim realized that the thin shrieking was his own. He, Hakim Arif, mewling like any craven Berber? He invoked his paladin's wisdom, ". . . no longer actor, but spectator, thought not to care how my body jerked and squealed."
Jerking and squealing, Hakim cared too much to feel the prick of the needle in his hip.
Hakim rallied with great shuddering gasps, rolled onto his back, and fought down a horror he had expected never to meet. His emissary, pain, had turned against him.
Guerrero leaned easily against a boulder, tossing and catching a drycell battery of respectable voltage. "You have long been a subject of KGB study at Lubianka in Moscow," he glowered, "and I am impressed by our psychologists. You built a legend with your vain volunteer anguish, Hakim, and never knew that the operative word was volunteer." His face changed to something still uglier. "You will divulge two items. The first, Fat'ah accounts. The second is your new Damascus site." He raised the stick and Hakim cowered, but the things that touched his naked flesh were merely the drycell terminals.
Merely an onslaught of unbearable suffering. Hakim needed no verbal assurance to learn that the drug made each joint in his body a locus of gruesome response to even the mildest electrical stimulus. When his spasm had passed he had fouled himself, to the syncopation of Guerrero's laughter.
"Your funds," Guerrero said, extending the drycell, and Hakim bleated out a stream of in-formation. Squinting into the overcast as if to confirm the satellite link thirty-six thousand kilometers away in its unchanging position overhead, Guerrero grinned. "Coding, I am told, is automatic, and gracias a Dios for small favors. But it may take minutes to check your figures. Perhaps in Los Angeles, perhaps Berne or at Lubianka. But if you lie, you must understand that I will quickly know it. Lie to me, Hakim. Please. It justifies me."
Raging at himself, Hakim hurriedly amended crucial figures. The pain in his joints did not linger but its memory overhung him like a cliff. Through it all, degrading, enervating, the sinuous path of Guerrero's amusement followed each of Hakim's capitulations.
When Hakim fell silent, Guerrero pressed his demand. "You are learning, I see. Now: the Damascus site, the new one. The Americans would like to know it, too, but they tend to impose order slowly. We shall be more efficient even without Pentothal." Hakim squeezed his eyes tight-shut, breathing quickly, wondering if it were really possible to swallow one's tongue—and then the drycell raked his bicep and jawline.
Hakim was transfixed, skewered on a billion lances that spun in his body, growing to fiery pinwheels that consumed him, drove all else from his being. Hakim was a synonym of appalling agony. Guerrero, who had previously laughed for the necessary effect, punished his lower lip between his teeth and looked away. He wished he were back soldiering under Torrijos, hauling garrison garbage, anything but this filthy duty.
Yet appearances were everything and, "Again? I hope you resist," he lied, and had to caution Hakim to answer more slowly. Under torture, the answers came in a fitful rhythm; a phrase, shallow breathing, another strangled phrase, a sob, and still another phrase. Hakim was finished so soon that Guerrero knew embarrassment. He had hurried, and now he needed only wait. The military, he shrugged to himself, must be the same everywhere.
Waiting for his van's radio speaker to verify or deny, Guerrero viewed his keening captive with glum distaste. "The girl was more man than you," he said in innocent chauvinism. "Chaim accepted capture, but not she. Another agent took her knife. She fought. When he pointed the knife at her belly, she embraced him. I never heard the sound of a knife like that before, it—"
"Kill me," he heard Hakim plead.
"Before I know how truly you betray Fat'ah? For shame."
"Yes, for shame. Kill me!"
"Because you were so quick to surrender? Because you are not your beloved Lawrence, but only a small puppeteer? Absurd, Hakim. Think yourself lucky to know what you are, at last: a primitive little executive, a controller—even of yourself as victim. Is it so much more glorious to be a masochist pure and simple, than what you really are?"
"Enough! End it," Hakim begged.
"As you ended it for the comedian, perhaps. Let me tell you the greatest joke you will ever hear, Hakim, you snot-gobbling little coward. It is on both of us, but chiefly on you. The big blond one, Kenton, is neither a blond nor a Kenton. I dusted his fingerprints and transmitted them while you sought your damned newspapers. Something about him disturbed me.
"Last night I received a message which I deciphered twice to be certain—and still I wonder how it can be true: Kenton is your Jewish target, Maurice Everett." Guerrero laughed aloud, slapped his belly in a gesture more violent than pleasant. "I hoped you would learn it for your-self so that I could record more of your butchery. But it was unnecessary. As it was, I waited for days on orders to record your disposal of Charlie George. Without those orders, my work would have been simpler." Guerrero spat in irritation.
Hakim stared. The Soviet security organ had waited only to obtain audiovisual records of Fat'ah killing the comedian? He fathomed the KGB logic gradually, and concluded that they could use such evidence to justify reprisals in Syria, when and if it suited them.
Another thought brought a measure of calm: he still had control over Guerrero's future. Hakim exercised it. "It was not my intent to kill Charlie George," he said distinctly. "And we left him alive."
Guerrero said nothing for ten seconds. "The video record will show that he died," he asserted, licking lips that were suddenly dry.
"It will show his breathing tube, and also what we both already know: that he is an actor." Their eyes met in angry silence.
Guerrero insisted, "The record will vindicate me," and Hakim knew that Guerrero too was posturing for the benefit of the camera pickup. His own effectiveness contaminated by haste, Guerrero would be forced to return—to kill Charlie George himself. And Everett as well, eliminating the last witness.
Guerrero approached again with the drycell and locked his gaze to Hakim's for the last time. Torture would prove nothing more, and Guerrero feared what it might seem to prove. The crowning irony was that under further torture, Hakim might only further compromise his torturer. Hakim trembled in tears, but did not drop his eyes. Guerrero laid the drycell on a stone.
Hakim did not recognize the coded sequence from the van but saw Guerrero register relief at a musical signal. In any case, Hakim in his weakness had told the truth. Guerrero was lashing Hakim's feet with wire at the time, and resumed the job until his prisoner was positioned; feet spread, knees bent, face up. Enraged at Hakim's revelation, Guerrero had chosen a vengeance option. He enjoyed that choice but did not realize its full expense to himself as he stalked to his van and returned.
Guerrero tore a strip of tape, placed it dangling from a branch before Hakim's eyes, and stuck a capsule to the tape within range of Hakim's mouth. "Before I knew you, Arif, I would not do what I do now. Let us say it is for Rashid, whom I hated to sacrifice. Did you think the bomb shackles jammed themselves?" He read the surge of anger that raced across Hakim's face. "So: no, I will not end your life—but you will. I wonder if you are devout, and if your followers in Damascus are. In any event, the capsule acts quickly. Exercise your control, Hakim; take one last life on television." With that, he whisked Hakim's van keys away. He brought the drycell near Hakim's side and the Iraqi arched away as well as he might, lashed to bushes by lengths of his garrotte wire.