wave a hundred meters tall hitting the United States. Or it might be ten meters. Or less.”
“Okay, Katie. I appreciate knowing.”
“I’m sorry to give you bad news.”
“Look at the bright side. I didn’t just lie through my teeth to the President of the United States.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He laughed. “Never mind. Thanks, Katie. I need to get off and make another call.” He hesitated. “Are you thinking of leaving the area?”
“No, Bill. Too much to do here. And too many good friends.”
“I understand. I’ll keep you informed, okay?”
“Okay, Bill.”
“Later.” He switched off, then hit the speed dial button for the secure line to the Art Room.
He needed to let them know of the President’s decision.
Lia’s ears were ringing, blood drooled from her mouth and nose, and her left eye was swollen almost shut. After he’d spent all of that time showing her the nightmarish implements of torture in his bag, the beating the smiling man had given her with his bare fists had been brutal, direct, and startlingly unexpected. She’d thought she’d been beginning to understand Feng’s interrogator, but his savage response to her defiance had left her shaken and uncertain, as well as hurting.
Then, after the beating, he’d begun puttering about the chamber, smiling, chatting pleasantly, attaching straps to the four corners of the table, and finally showing her once again each implement in his bag, carefully explaining what each was for.
The stress, the sheer terror, was building in Lia to a near-unbearable point, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath coming in sharp, short gasps, her teeth chattering in her bruised jaw.
“Now this … this is one of my favorites,” the man said, holding up a lancet with a long, slightly curving blade that gleamed like oil in the light. He brought it to within a couple of inches of her eyes, turning it slowly in front of her. “A flensing blade … you understand? For skinning the subject. For example, I can use it to slice through your skin just … here …” Reaching down, he dragged his fingertip lightly across her upper thigh, from groin to hip. She flinched at the touch, and his smile broadened.
“I cut all the way around your leg, you see,” he continued, “and then use just the tip of blade to
“The entire process lasts, oh, perhaps an hour, an hour and a half. The time depends on how often you pass out from the pain, and on how long it takes to revive you each time. And then, of course, we go to the other leg … and your arms … eventually we get to your face. It’s necessary to proceed slowly to avoid having you lose too much blood …”
Her own pulse thundered in Lia’s ears as the nightmare monologue dragged on, louder, it seemed, even than the sounds of drilling from outside. She told herself that this was part of the actual torture, a psychological softening up that would leave her more vulnerable to drugs or to the actual touch of a scalpel when it finally came.
Her training had emphasized going along with an interrogator, giving him what he wanted, if necessary. The important thing was to keep her wits about her, to resist going into shock, to keep alert for the possibility,
“Please …” she said. Her lips were dry and cracked, despite the sweat drenching her face. “Please don’t …”
“You have something you wish to tell me?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Your name, for a start.” With precise, businesslike movements he replaced the lancet in the canvas carrier. “We’ve not been properly introduced, you see. I am Dr. Taysir al-Dahabi. Oh, yes! I am a medical doctor. The University of Cairo. It helps to be able to monitor my subject’s condition as I work. And you are?”
“C–Cathy Chung,” she said. Her voice cracked with the effort.
“Ah, yes. The name on your ID card we found in among your things. And you work for?”
“The U.S. State Department.”
“I see, I see.” He extracted a notebook and pen from the bag and wrote something with quick, flowing scribbles. “That matches the fact of the ID itself, of course. But why should I believe you? If, as my employers believe, you are CIA, that would all be part of an internally consistent story, a legend, as I believe spies call it.”
“I … I
“Yes, but you are nowhere close to being broken yet. Broken to the point where you are
An inarticulate whimper escaped Lia’s lips; she did it for effect, but she didn’t have to reach down far to find it.
“I’ll tell you what, Cathy. I’ll call you Cathy for now, anyway, until we learn more about you … about the
“Anything …”
“Very well. I’m going to have one of the guards untie you and remove the handcuffs. You will then remove your hiking boots and place them under the chair. The other guard will have very specific orders. If you try to escape, if you so much as
Lia nodded.
“Say ‘Yes, Doctor.’ ”
“Y-yes, Doctor.”
“Very well.” Al-Dahabi turned and spoke rapidly to the guards in Arabic, too rapidly for her to understand most of it, though she caught the words for “shoot,” “knees,” and “be watchful.”
Al-Dahabi stepped back from the chair and moved his black bag well out of reach. One guard leaned his AK against the tunnel wall and walked slowly toward her, keeping to one side so that he did not at any time block the other guard’s line of fire.
The remaining man, smiling as broadly as al-Dahabi, raised his weapon and took aim at her legs.
It had taken Charlie Dean more than twenty minutes to work his way down the gully, a crawl of perhaps fifty yards, made with exacting, slow, and painstaking caution. His eventual objective, the mouth of the cave, was still over a hundred yards away — and that was a straight-line distance, not the length of the twists and turns he would need to make to stay behind boulders and within eroded gullies in the crater floor.
There were those two sentries ahead as well, still perched on a rock. One faced the cave, his back toward Dean; the other, beside the first, was facing Dean. The two were chatting with one another, but every so often the guard on the right would look up and scan the ridgetop, the gully, and the bare slopes of the crater’s interior.
Another guard, Dean noticed, was on top of the crater rim, over on the opposite side of the bowl. He was sitting on the ground, smoking a cigarette.
So far, the tech-Ghillie had worked as advertised, its photo-reactive surface darkening to the same tone as the shadows in the gully and at the crater floor. Dean, his face only partially exposed beneath the blanket, watched the guard on the right carefully, timing his movements for those moments when the man was talking to his friend, freezing motionless when he began scanning the hillside.
The two were perhaps a hundred yards away now, just ten yards in front of the cave mouth. The racket from the drilling rig, more or less muted up at the top of the hill, was in full voice down here, and the air was filled with a
