The phone emitted a low beep followed by the wail of a high-pitched alarm, and I knew the self-destruct app had been activated. Drago’s eyebrows settled low over his eyes as the phone’s screen began to erode. “What’s happening?”
“What do you think’s happening, Mr. Phelps?” I couldn’t help the Mission Impossible reference even though my throat burned with every word.
The man with the black eyes snatched the iPhone from Drago’s hand. He stared at the corrosion eating the screen. His fingers opened. The phone clattered to the floor. The screen cracked. Smoke curled from the broken glass.
He kicked the phone and sent it spinning across the floor. He glared, his eyes sharp with malice. “Don’t be so proud of yourself, Mr. Moreau.”
He turned and whispered a command to his fellow Guards. They moved with the precision and speed of a well-oiled machine. One released the wire pinning me to the pole. The other two yanked me to my feet, hoisted me onto the table, and pulled me across the rough surface until my head dangled over one edge, my legs over the other. They tightened the wires around my chest, wrist, and neck and held me down. I knew what was coming.
The man with black eyes walked around the table, a bucket in hand, water sloshing over its rim. He set the bucket on the floor between us. “Waterboarding. Such a twisted creation. And I applaud the twisted minds inside your CIA for its invention. Almost the perfect torture. Leaves no marks and breaks all resistance.”
He had it pretty much right. I guessed I could start talking and save myself the trouble, but I was probably dead in any case.
He barked another order. The Guard who responded had a blank face and a surprisingly pale complexion. He fished a towel from the bucket. He wrung the towel and water rained back down. I heard Drago laugh.
Time slowed. I reached deep inside myself and called on whatever reserve of determination and grit I had left. Every detail came into sharp focus. The drip, drip, drip of water splattering on the floor. The dank odor of decay. The pockmarks on Drago’s bladelike nose. The dull luster of his crooked teeth. Dust motes circling the bare light bulb like crows above a carcass.
“You can beg for mercy,” the man with black eyes said. “Or you can endure the terror. In any case, you will answer my questions.”
The man with the towel draped it over my face. It smelled of mildew. I filled my lungs with air an instant before water drenched the towel and forced it heavy and flat against my features.
Someone came down hard on my midsection with his fist. My stomach seized. I gasped, sucking in air … and water.
The water gushed up my nose, down my throat, and into my lungs. A lever tripped in a distant part of my brain that went straight to survival mode.
More water drenched the towel, and I convulsed.
Pain control has very little to do with this. With some pain, you can retreat deep into your soul and fend off the most brutal blow. But there is no such pain in drowning. It’s a gigantic monster of terror that rampages through your consciousness. Your mind flails. Panic seizes your soul.
I thrashed against the table. My lungs screamed for air. A veil of darkness descended inside my head an instant before the towel was pulled away. The pain of coughing was almost unbearable. I tasted something salty in my mouth. I turned my head and spit water and blood.
“We’re going to do this all night,” a voice whispered. It was Drago. “First we’ll break you. And then we’ll break you into a million pieces.”
He was a complete blur, but I couldn’t let that go unanswered. “Rat.” It came out a raspy croak, but at least it came out.
The man with the towel yanked my head straight. He draped the towel over my face again. The material was as cold as a drowned corpse.
I readied myself for the onslaught. And then I heard the Voice. It was hardly more than a whisper. It was telling me to save myself. It was saying, Tell them what they want. You’ve done enough. You’ve given enough.
We’re told about this — that if things got bad enough, the Voice was inevitable. I had never believed it. The Voice was for others, not me. Not bad-to-the-bone Jake Conlan. But they also said that the Voice wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was a defense mechanism. You could suppress it, but it would return, louder and more insistent. It was how you dealt with it that counted.
I gulped air, buying a few precious seconds.
Water sloshed from the bucket and soaked through the towel like a flood. It pressed against my eyes like thumbs of steel and clasped my face like dead fingers. I puffed hard to keep my airways clear.
I knew the bastards would hit me again, and I readied my stomach for the blow. It came hard and metallic: the butt of a rifle. I fought, but it wasn’t enough. My lungs exploded. A howl traveling through my throat and mouth was swallowed by the onslaught of water. Water flooded my nose and burned my sinuses. I bucked against the table, my body screaming for air and release, panic driving me toward the edge.
The Voice returned, louder and more insistent. Save yourself. Tell them. About the attack. About Fouraz. About Charlie and Leila. Denounce the lot of them: Rutledge, Elliot, the Great Satan. All of them.
The water stopped. The towel fell away. I gagged and coughed and felt pain in places I hadn’t even known existed. Complete and utter exhaustion. Not defeat. But close.
I needed something to hang onto, something to focus on, something to fight back with. Anything. So I crashed through a door in my memory and came away with a picture of home, of Cathy and the kids. But the picture hurt too much, so I pushed it aside and crashed through another door. I found myself standing in Arlington Cemetery. The gravestone staring back at me belonged to my dad. This picture didn’t work any better than the one before it, but it served a purpose. I was suddenly back where I had begun and every ounce of my focus was centered on the memorial bracelets cutting into my wrists. My hands were soaked with sweat and water, but I knew the Semtex coating the bracelets was insoluble. So was the primer. The problem wasn’t the weapon; the weapon was a thing of beauty. No, the problem was gaining enough leverage to ignite it. Then again, even if I did succeed in igniting it, the explosive would probably blow my hands off, and then where would I be.
What the hell! Go for it, Jake. If nothing else, die trying. Hard to argue with that, so I tugged furiously at the wire binding my wrists and felt the brush of metal on metal.
“I know why you’re here,” the man with the black eyes was saying. He set a fresh bucket of water by my head on the table. “We know you entered the facilities at Qom and Natanz without invitation or authorization. We know that you left a trail of dead bodies in your wake. We know that you have been colluding with traitorous elements throughout our country. What I want are names.”
A sound like the whoosh of a hydraulic motor echoed throughout the warehouse. The man with the black eyes looked in the direction of the sound and smiled. “For you, things are about to get much worse.”
CHAPTER 30
I put a name to the sound: hydraulic doors opening. Then a second sound filled the air: distant footsteps echoing down a long hallway.
“My comrades have arrived,” the man with black eyes said.
“Now you’ll talk,” Ora Drago said, his voice painted with intense satisfaction.
I twisted my wrists and snapped one bracelet against the other. Come on, goddamn it! It did it again, heard a pop and a hiss, like a match bursting into flames. The primer ignited, the Semtex detonated, and my skin began to melt. That was the bad news. The good news was that the explosion had also turned the wire binding my wrists into molten metal. My hands were suddenly free.