That was the thing about the Revolutionary Guards. They were used to dealing with ordinary citizens and common criminals. Put a gun barrel up to their heads and they’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Fear had always been their greatest ally.
I wasn’t afraid. I was prepared to die. That was a fairly insurmountable position when you’re up against the clock like the Guards were. They had resorted to pain. I’d been trained to compartmentalize pain, and it worked pretty well. But the wire cutting into my neck was on the verge of crushing my esophagus, and I had passed out three or four times by now. They’d broken three of my fingers, and they’d broken my nose, which really pissed me off.
Ice-cold water splashed against my face. I woke with an angry, confused start. I jerked against restraints holding my arms against my sides. A headache sagged in my skull like a heated iron weight. My insides lurched like those of a man coming off a really bad drunk. They’d shot me up with something, but all it had done was make me sick.
I heard my name. Actually three names. The three names on my passports. Green, Swan, Moreau. “Well, which is it?” The man’s voice sounded dirty and smug. Did he really have time to be smug?
I turned my head, saw shadows, and tried to blink my eyes into focus. There was something filmy and wet pooling in my eyes. I didn’t know it was blood until it ran down my cheek and over my lips. I’d tasted blood more times than I cared to admit, and this was it. Coppery, salty, sickly sweet.
I got my bearings. I was propped up in a chair. The chair was wired to a concrete pillar. My torso, legs, and arms were wired to the chair. A garrote wired my neck to the pillar. My arms were locked behind the chair. My hands were wired together. The memorial bracelets on each wrist cut into my skin. My elbows and shoulders had gone completely numb. How much time had passed?
“Mr. Moreau,” the voice repeated.
He loomed before me, one light-colored shape in the middle of four similar silhouettes in the deep gloom.
I backtracked. My MEK compatriots and I had been lured into an ambush at the warehouse across the river from the street market. Giv and Zand had been shot dead. I’d taken a boot in the head, care of …
Ora Drago. The MEK’s second-in-command in Amsterdam. And the traitor Charlie and I had been tracking since I’d arrived in Tehran. We’d been so close. But close doesn’t count for much in a counterintelligence op. Close got you dead or captured. Dead may have been the better alternative in this case.
But it occurred to me that the situation wasn’t hopeless. They’d kept me alive. And they wouldn’t have done that without a very good reason. Obviously they needed to know how much I knew. And just as obviously, I hadn’t given them anything yet. Okay, so the odds weren’t exactly even, but long odds were better than none.
I’d trained with some of the toughest sons of bitches who’d ever served Uncle Sam — U.S. Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, Green Berets, Marine Force Recon, Air Force Pararescue, Delta Force — and I wasn’t about to stain their reputations by giving in to a bunch of lowlife thugs. Oh, yeah, and then there was Mr. Elliot. I couldn’t imagine what he would think if I knuckled under, and I didn’t want to find out. He’d know by now that something was wrong. He’d have pulled out all the stops, trying to find me. That was our deal. I go in; he makes sure I get out. A good guy to have on your side.
I willed myself past the headache and the nausea, tried to lift my head, and nearly choked myself to death on the neck wire.
“I bet you’d like us to loosen that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Moreau?” The accent was Persian, but there was the hint of a European influence. I clenched my eyes and filled my lungs with a slow breath. It felt like my insides were on fire, but when I opened my eyes again, my vision had cleared enough for me to make a split-second assessment of the situation. I was in a warehouse, but not the one where the ambush had occurred. The room was large and dank and made for this kind of thing. I saw a water tank. I saw an electrical generator. I saw a table lined with surgical equipment like scalpels and clamps and hypodermic needles.
A viciously bright light poured down on me from the exposed beams in the ceiling, and Drago and four black beards hovered just outside the light.
Drago glowered, the set of his narrow face as menacing as a truncheon. His eyes were hooded by wiry and expressive eyebrows that cinched together like the ends of a frazzled cable.
“Turncoat!” I was proud of myself for getting out at least one word before a fist shot out from the shadows and exploded against my cheek.
“How imaginative. You’ve gone from traitor and rat to turncoat.”
I didn’t remember calling him a rat, but that sounded like me. “How does snake in the grass sound?” I hissed.
“Show him,” one of the Guards said. He stepped forward, shading the light, as if he wanted me to see him. I blinked away the blood and squinted. He was the slightest of the four Guards, with an equine face, bulbous nose, and uncomfortably black eyes. “Show him.”
Drago held a bundle of documents in his right hand. He held my iPhone in his left. I was more interested in the memory stick I’d been after when all hell broke loose. The locations of the Sejil-2 missiles and their warheads were all that mattered. Every other piece of intel I’d provided had been confirmed and verified. Why was it that the most important piece of the puzzle was always the last piece? Without that, all the bunker busters in the world wouldn’t be enough to stop Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear offensive. Armageddon. Our worst nightmare.
Two of the Guards closed in on me. I could smell their sweat, and that was probably the idea. Intimidating the prisoner as the interrogation intensified — or so they thought.
“Let us start with the phone,” the skinny man with black eyes said. Drago aimed the screen of the iPhone at me. At least now I had the chain of command: Drago was someone the Revolutionary Guards would use, and when he had nothing left to give them, he would end up hanging from his neck in a place where every member of the MEK could see him. “What is the access code?”
I didn’t answer. I ground my teeth and stared. Finally, I said, “I can’t think with this wire around my neck.”
“Maybe it’s not tight enough.” The man with the black eyes snapped his fingers. The soldier on his left moved up so fast that he was grabbing the garrote and ratcheting the tension on the wire before I had time to fill my lungs. The wire cut into my neck. I gagged and coughed and felt the pressure building in my head. I was on the verge of passing out when the echo of the man snapping his fingers hung in the air. The man behind me gave the wire a centimeter or two of slack. I coughed so violently that my insides turned to knots.
They waited until the coughing stopped. “The code or the wire. It makes no difference to me,” I heard the man with black eyes say eventually. “What will it be, Mr. Moreau? Choose.”
“Okay,” I croaked through the spittle bubbling on my lips. Giving them the code would probably seal my fate, but at least I could see the look on their faces.
“I didn’t expect you to break so easily,” Ora Drago said with a sneer. “How disappointing!”
“Shut up,” the man with the black eyes said. He put a fist under my chin and lifted my head. “The code.”
“One. Nine. Backslash. Two. Eight. Backslash. One. Eight.”
“You Americans,” Drago said. He entered the number, his fingers jabbing the screen, a man eager to prove to his superiors that he had thwarted the Great Satan and captured one of its demons.