Then Castañeda clapped his hands, rubbing the palms together. “Yes, I agree that honesty is a very important part of business. So, amigo, why didn’t you tell me your people were smuggling nuclear weapons into los Estados Unidos? Why did you lie and tell me the bombs were made from C4?”
Dudaev straightened up in the recliner, Tanya’s hands still working his shoulders. Castañeda’s people had been talking about the detonation in Spanish all day, but Dudaev hadn’t understood a word of it. Castañeda had ordered him kept in the dark until there could be some kind of confirmation by his people in the North. Now that Castañeda had received the necessary verification, it was time to get to the bottom of things, time to try to determine whether there was a way to extricate himself from the deadly trap the Chechens had put him in.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dudaev said, his expression marked by a trace of fear. “I don’t know about nuclear weapons.”
Castañeda smiled, saying to the girl, “Ahora, corazón.” Now, sweetheart.
Tanya ran the fingers of one hand through Dudaev’s short-cropped hair while reaching nonchalantly into the small of her back to produce a pearl-handled straight razor, and then gracefully slipping the blade beneath his chin and jerking back his head to expose the jugular vein.
Dudaev let out a sharp, startled cry, grabbing the arms of the leather recliner, his entire body going ramrod stiff.
“Keep still now,” Castañeda said to him quietly, signaling for the woman behind him to come around the sofa. “Lorena is going to make an exposition.”
“Don Antonio,” Dudaev said. “Please. This isn’t necessary. We can—”
Tanya pressed the razor into his flesh to shut him up, increasing her grip on the turf of his hair. He gasped, increasing his own grip on the arms of the recliner.
The other woman, Lorena, also held a straight razor. She knelt with it between Dudaev’s legs and began to carefully cut away the crotch of his khaki trousers. Dudaev shivered, a cold sweat breaking out across his chest as she worked the blade with a surgical dexterity, first cutting away the heavy material of his trousers, and then the thin white cotton of his boxer briefs to fully expose his uncircumcised penis and scrotum without so much as nicking him. Both organs were an unbecoming reddish-purple, shrunken to their minimum as if Dudaev had just come from the pool.
Lorena tossed the swatches of cloth aside and sat back on her haunches, awaiting Castañeda’s instructions.
Castañeda smiled, sitting forward to take up his drink again. “Do I have your attention now, Señor Dudaev?” he asked in a friendly voice.
“Yes, Don Antonio,” croaked the terrified Chechen.
Tanya lessened her grip, though only slightly, so he could speak a bit more clearly.
“Gracias,” he muttered, swallowing hard.
Castañeda took a sip from the glass, setting it aside once more. “It is important for you to listen very carefully now. There is no time for games. You will tell me what you know about the bombs your people have smuggled into the United States. If not, Lorena will cut out your heuvos one by one, and Tanya will feed them to you.” He stood up from the sofa, stepping around the marble table, adjusting the tuck of his black silk shirt as he stood frowning over the shuddering Dudaev.
He put his hands into his pockets, and his overall presence took on an unmistakably menacing air. “Pendejo!” he hissed venomously. “Because of you and your lying friends, I will be hunted to the end of the world! I will be labeled a nuclear terrorist! My government will partner with the gringos, and together they will hunt me down like a rabid dog! Do you understand me? There will be no place on earth for me to hide!”
“Yes, Don Antonio, I understand you very well… but… but, please, I know nothing about nuclear weapons. I can’t imagine what makes you think we have lied to you!”
Castañeda smirked in disgust, turning to lift his drink. “Comienza, Lorena.” Begin.
Lorena took a firm grip on the Chechen’s scrotum, and Tanya pulled back hard on his head, keeping the razor tight against his jugular. Dudaev gasped in pain and then screamed aloud as Lorena sliced out one of his testicles. He reflexively grabbed his groin, but when Tanya depressed the razor hard enough to bite into the flesh of his throat, his bloody hands shot back to the arms of the recliner, his legs quaking uncontrollably as he began to sob. Blood gushed from the incision in his scrotum, running down the front of the recliner to pool on the tile.
Castañeda finished the tequila and tossed aside the glass, which shattered on the floor. Then he snatched the bloody orb from Lorena’s outstretched hand, savagely jamming it down Dudaev’s throat.
“I know you are lying to me!” he shouted into the gagging man’s face. “The fucking bomb went off, you stinking cabrón! It destroyed an entire town!” He pulled his hand from Dudaev’s throat, wiping it off on the Chechen’s white guayabera shirt, and then watched on, grim faced, as the strangling man finally managed to choke down the testicle.
Dudaev sat coughing, suppressing the urge to vomit. “Please!” he begged, his voice trembling. “I don’t know anything. I’m only a legate — an ambassador!”
Castañeda stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. “I don’t know what more to tell you, amigo. You only have one huevo left. After that, Lorena will cut out your eyes. And after that…” He sighed and held out his hands in exasperation. “After that, I fear life will become very unpleasant for you.”
Lorena took a bloody grip on his scrotum once more.
“Stop!” Dudaev shouted, gnashing his teeth in agony and self-loathing, knowing he deserved this fate for having strayed from the path; for having spent the last month living in sin. “I will tell you,” he sobbed shamefully. “Please, just no more cutting — for the love of Allah!”
“Okay then, amigo,” Castañeda said softly, patting the Chechen on the shoulder. “No more cutting, I promise. Now tell me what you know.”
After Dudaev spilled his guts about the two Russian-made RA-115s, Castañeda signaled Tanya to cut his throat. He would use the information when the time was right. When he needed to save himself, he would contact the CIA.
12
Robert Pope, director of SAD, the Special Activities Division of the CIA, arrived at the office of the CIA director, George Shroyer. The director and his deputy, Cletus Webb, were expecting him.
“Good morning,” he said, taking a seat in front of Shroyer’s desk. Pope, a tall man in his midsixties with bright blue eyes and a head of thick white hair, was regarded as somewhat eccentric by his CIA counterparts.
“Good morning.” Shroyer was a hawk-faced individual with a bony nose and peering green eyes. He wouldn’t have dared let on, but he’d been extremely relieved when Pope had requested an immediate meeting. On a personal level, he didn’t care for Pope; he was a little bit afraid of him. But he knew that Pope was probably the most gifted member of the US intelligence community, and if he was asking for a meeting less than twenty-four hours after a nuclear bomb had been detonated on American soil — which was what the army had determined to be the case — there was a good chance he had something important to share.
The president had gone surprisingly easy on Shroyer and the directors of the NSA and FBI during their closed meeting in the Oval Office. All three had expected him to ream their asses good for having been caught completely unaware by what was now being called the “New Mexico Event,” particularly with the presidential election only a couple of months away, but the president was leading in the polls by a margin of greater than 20 percent, and his opponent was seen as weak on foreign policy and even weaker on national defense. The president had crushed him during the first televised debate, and the sad truth was that a terrorist attack on the United States would probably only serve to lock up his reelection. Conspiracy theorists were already lighting up the web, accusing the president of having staged the New Mexico Event for that very reason.