I drew the thick needle through a wide arc, scraping against the bone. Grgur didn’t groan but I felt his involuntary tense and shiver. That’s nothing, I thought.
“You understand I look like Tony Sic, but I’m-ah-I’m Jed.”
“Yuh. Somebody said-”
“Come on. Who is your steward of long things?”
“Huh?”
“Your commanding officer.”
“Lindsay Warren,” he said.
“Who put up the money?”
“For what?”
“For the Stake, in Belize,” I said. I tried not to look at the drifts of precancerous dander under his pathetic thinning sideburns.
“Lindsay’s investors.”
“Who’s Lindsay’s superior?”
“As far as I know, um, I don’t think…”
“Hurry up.”
“I think Lindsay’s his own boss.”
“Really? Okay, how do I get in there?”
“Where?”
“His office. At the Stake.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d still better get some codes and names and whatever on the table. I’m serious.”
“I’m serious, I don’t know.”
“Okay, you obviously have nothing to offer.” I drew the needle back and scraped it over and over into his mandible toward his teeth, not widening the single puncture but etching a deep line in the bone, over and over, like I was jerking him off. He started shrieking way back in his throat but I gave him a full twenty strokes before stopping. Working on him was getting me back on track.
“There’s a Warren weapons test on for December twenty-first,” I said. “I want you to help me find out about it.”
“Okay.”
“So, okay, tell me about it.”
He paused like he was thinking of making something up, but he must have decided not to.
“I don’t know,” he said, “there’s a Christmas party at the Hyperbowl, if there’s something on for the Stake I’m not in on it.”
“How do I get to see Lindsay?”
“I don’t even know when he’ll be back, they move his schedule around-”
“Please, be terse.” When the stuff took effect he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything. “What codes do you have?”
“I just have a card.”
“How long is it good for?”
“Forever.”
I eased the needle in further, pushing it down from above with my finger, under his loose, bristly skin, until the point threaded into the base of his number-three molar. He tensed. Maggots of waxy sweat welled up out of his pores.
“Come on, how often does the card change?”
“All the time, it’s live-”
“I mean the whole card.”
“It gets replaced every week. I get the new one in two days.”
I felt footsteps again, and voices I couldn’t make out went down another hall, more urgent and official- sounding this time. I jammed the drift of cotton into Grgur’s face.
(107)
Twenty beats later I heard them come around on the other side into the nursing station and run off.
It’s a big sun day, I thought. Excellent. They’re following the badges. I eased up on the wad.
Grgur seemed immobile so I started doing some repair work on my cast-mace, taping in a few scalpels in a sawtooth pattern and then rewrapping the outside with regular white surgical tape.
“Who gave Jed-Sub-One the fake anticoagulant?” I asked.
“When?”
“Back on Halloween.”
“I don’t know, some other cutout.”
“Why?”
“We were not going to kill you, we were only supposed to bring him-you-in.”
“Bring me in to whom?” I asked. I scraped him again. He just squeal-whimpered a little. “Grgur? Seriously. To whom?”
“To Mr. Warren,” he said.
“Who else was going to be there?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what was the next step?”
“We were just going to move you out, we’re here to protect you.”
“We were here to protect you,” I said, trying to imitate him.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “If you walk out of here you’re dead, they know where we are, the whole place is covered… you’re sick, they put stuff in you that’s going to kill you if you don’t let them take care of you-”
“You’re crazy,” I said, sounding a bit more like him. I tried to raise my voice to the pitch he’d have if he weren’t so hoarse. “You’re a dead man. They know where we are. I’m here to protect you. You’re crazy. I’m here to protect you.” It wasn’t brilliant, but I thought it might pass.
Grgur must have gotten what I was up to because he shut up, but I wadded and scraped him again. Tough or not, he screamed and screamed. The cotton wad buzzed like a vibrator.
“Come on,” I said. “Who doesn’t like me? I mean, the most?”
“No, that’s the way it is.” He was starting to sound a little slushy.
“All right, let’s just chat, then. Tell me about Lindso’s Grand Prize Game.”
“I don’t know about things like that.”
I held the wad over his mouth and dug the needle in under the tooth. I didn’t find the nerve right away, but a few hundred beats after I did find it his eyes started tearing and five-score beats later he was screeching into the wad.
It’s kind of intimate and pathetic when someone actually breaks, when his whole tough-guy thing-which is a big part of his sense of self-just evaporates. Sometimes an interrogator can start feeling sorry for the subject at that point and stop pushing as hard, and then, even though the subject’s in a pretty bad way, he might still notice and start withholding information. I didn’t have that problem, though.
“Come on.”
“Let. Um. Me think. For… a minute. Okay, please?”
“Forget it,” I said, “you’re right, you can’t help me.” It was probably true, this whole session was a waste of time. Anyway, they must be finding those badges by now. Better hustle.
It had made me feel a lot better, though. Not out of revenge, like I cared about No Way or anything, but just more like I was back on my sacrificer track.
“You’re going to check me out of here.”
“Whatever you say, asshole,” he whispered.
