Dead or Alive

burning, burning, burning… inside his chest, burning. His heart was burning alive, burning as he felt it. Not beating, not sending blood to his body, but burning like dry wood, like gasoline, like paper, burning, burning, burning… burning while he lived. If this was death, then death was a terrible thing, his mind thought… the worst thing. He’d inflicted this on others. He’d shot Russian soldiers-infidels, all of them, but still he’d ended their lives, put them through this… and thought it amusing? Entertaining. Part of Allah’s will? Did Allah find this amusing, too? The pain continued to grow, to become unendurable. But he had to endure it. It would not go away. Nor could he. He could not run from it, not pray aloud to Allah to stop it, not deny it. It was there. It became all of reality. It overwhelmed all of his consciousness. It became everything. It was a fire in the middle of his body, and it was burning him up from the inside out, and it was more terrible than he’d ever imagined it to be. Was not death quick in coming? Was not Allah merciful in all things? Why, then, was Allah permitting this to happen to him? He wanted to grit his teeth to fight against the pain-he wanted, he needed, to scream aloud to protect himself from the agony that lived inside his body.

But he couldn’t command his body to do anything at all. All of reality was pain. Everything he could see and hear and feel was pain. Even the Lord Allah was pain…

Allah was doing this to him. If everything in the world was God’s will, then had God willed this on him? How was that possible? Was not God a god of infinite mercy? Where the hell was His mercy now? Had Allah deserted him? Why?

Why?

WHY ?

Then his mind faded into unconsciousness, with a final epilogue of searing pain to see him on his way.

On the EKG readout, the first irregularities showed up. That got Pasternak’s attention. Ordinarily in the OR, as anesthesiologist, it was his job to keep watch on the patient’s vital signs. That included the EKG machine, and he was, in fact, rather a skillful diagnostic cardiologist himself. He had to pay very close attention now. They didn’t want to kill this worthless fuck, and more was the pity. He could have just given him a death such as few men had ever experienced, a fitting punishment for his crimes, but he was a physician, not an executioner, Pasternak told himself, pulling himself back from the edge of a tall and deadly cliff. No, they had to bring this one back. So he reached for the ventilator mask. The “patient,” as he thought of him, was unconscious by now. He pressed the mask onto his face and pressed the button, and the machine shot air into the flaccid, deflated lungs. Pasternak looked up.

“Okay, mark the time. We’re breathing him now. Patient is doubtless unconscious now, and we’re infusing air into his lungs. This ought to take three or four minutes, I think. Could one of you come over here?”

Chavez was closest, and came at once.

“Put those paddles on his chest and hold them there.”

Ding did that, turning to look at the EKG readout. The electronic tracings had settled down and were repeating themselves regularly but not in sinus rhythm, something his wife might have recognized but to him were just like things he’d seen on TV. To his left, Dr. Pasternak was hitting the ventilator button at regular intervals of maybe eight or nine seconds. “What’s the score, Doc?” Chavez asked.

“His heart is settled down now that it’s getting oxygen. The succinylcholine will wear off in another couple of minutes. When you see his body moving, then it’ll be mostly over. I’ll breathe him for another four minutes or so,” the doc reported.

“What did he go through?”

“You never want to find that out. We gave him the equivalent of a massive heart attack. The pain would have been intense-I mean, really miserable. For him, maybe that’s just too damned bad, but it would have been pretty fucking awful. We’ll see how he responds to it in a couple of minutes, guys, but he’s been through something that nobody will ever want to repeat. He probably thinks he’s just seen the bottom floor of hell. I guess we’ll see what that does-did to him-in a few minutes.”

It took four minutes and thirty seconds before the legs moved. Dr. Pasternak looked at the EKG readout on the resuscitator and relaxed. The Emir was out of the influence of the succinylcholine, and his muscles were now under the control of his nerves, the way they were supposed to be.

“He’ll be unconscious for a few minutes, until his brain is fully suffused with oxygenated blood,” the anesthesiologist explained. “We’ll let him awaken normally, and then we can talk with him.”

“What’s his mental state going to be?” This was Clark asking the question. He’d never seen anything even remotely like this before.

“That depends. I suppose it’s possible that he might remain strong and resistive, but I would not expect that. He’s been through a singular and very, very adverse experience. He will not want to repeat it. He’s been through pain that makes childbirth seem like a picnic in Central Park. I can only speculate how dreadful it’s been for him. I don’t know anyone who’s been through this-well, maybe some people who’ve been through massive coronaries, but they don’t usually remember the intensity of the pain. The brain doesn’t work that way. It erases great pain as a defense mechanism. Not this time. He will remember the experience of it, if not the pain itself. If that experience doesn’t frighten him beyond anything he’s ever experienced, well, then we’re talking about John Wayne on amphetamines. People like that do not exist in the real world. There’s the complication of his religious beliefs. Those can be pretty strong. How strong, well, we’ll have to see, but if he resists us from this point on, I will be surprised.”

“If he does, can we repeat the experience?” Clark asked.

Pasternak turned. “Yes, we can-almost indefinitely. I’ve heard around the shop at Columbia that the East German Stasi used this technique to interrogate political and espionage prisoners, and that it was uniformly successful. They stopped using it-I don’t know why. Maybe it was too evil even for them. As I said yesterday, this is off the syllabus from the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. The guy who ran the Stasi was Jewish, as I recall- Marcus Wolf, I think his name was-and maybe it affected him on that basis.”

“How are you feeling, Rich?” Hendley asked.

“I’m fine. But he isn’t.” The doc paused. “Will they still execute this guy?”

“Depends on who ends up getting him,” Hendley replied. “If the FBI gets him, he’ll go through the federal court system, and if he does, then eventually he goes night-night at Terre Haute, Indiana, after due process of law. That’s not our concern, really.”

Because what he’s just been through was quite a lot worse than that, Pasternak didn’t say. His conscience was under control, but it was making noise. This really was out of Josef Mengele’s play- book, and that wasn’t something calculated to make a New York Jew happy. But his brother’s body had never been recovered, squashed to atoms by the collapsing WTC tower. He didn’t even have a grave that he could visit with Mike’s kids. And this bastard had made that happen, and so Rich Pasternak told his conscience to be quiet. He was doing if not God’s work, then his family’s work, and that was fine with him. His conscience would have to be quiet about it.

“What’s this guy’s name exactly?” Pasternak asked.

Clark handled the answer: “Saif Rahman Yasin. He’s child number fifty-plus of his father, a man of commendable vigor, his dad was, also tight with the Saudi Royal Family.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that.”

“He hates the Saudi Royals more than he hates Israel,” Clark explained. “They tried to whack him about six years ago, but they blew the mission. He hates them because of corruption, so he says. I guess they have some-I mean, a huge amount of-money controlled by a relatively small number of people, and you’re going to get some, but compared to Washington, it isn’t all that bad. I’ve been there. I learned the language there back in the 1980s. The Saudis I’ve met are pretty good people. Their religion is different from mine, but hell, so are the Baptists. The Saudis want this mutt dead more than we do, believe it or not. They’d love to drive him to Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh and take his head off with a sword. To them, he’s spit on their country, and their king, and their religion. Three for three, and that’s pretty bad over there. Doc, the Saudis are not the same as we are, but neither are the Brits, okay? I’ve lived there, too.”

“What do you think we ought to do with him?”

“Above my pay grade, sir. We can always kill him, but better to do that in public-hell, do it at halftime at the Super Bowl with instant replay and color commentary from the network TV crew. I could live with that. But it’s