this connected to itself since it was just a few cells suspended in your mother’s womb. The needles allow impulses to flow so freely that your brain is actually working harder to maintain a steady flow of your life force, your
“Screw you.” That pathetic rejoinder was the best Mercer could come up with. Sun had rewired his nervous system and brought him to a plateau of hypersensitivity that left him more vulnerable than anything he’d ever felt before. He could feel his body in ways he’d never experienced. He could sense the tingle of his hair growing and the pulse of blood through the tiniest capillaries. His fear, too, felt amplified.
Sun bent so his foul breath caressed Mercer’s face. “There are special houses in China where highly skilled women use this technique to bring men to unobtainable levels of ecstasy. In the state you are in right now I can insert another two needles and you would not believe the pleasure.” Sun’s voice dropped to a reverent whisper. “There’s an old story of a vengeful concubine driving an emperor insane by forcing him to an orgasm that lasted for eight straight days.”
He straightened. “That is not to be your fate.” With a deft move he slid a needle into a spot on Mercer’s shoulder and suddenly a lightning bolt seemed to explode in Mercer’s mouth as if all his teeth had shattered. The sensation was so far beyond pain that it had no name. It stripped away a layer of rationality like a sheet of paper from a notebook.
Sun withdrew the needle and the agony stopped instantly, leaving Mercer’s mouth numb and swimming in saliva. “I should have warned you that the pathways are not as direct as you might suspect. Feel what happens to your heart when I place a needle here.” Sun twisted a thinner needle behind Mercer’s ear.
Mercer’s state made him more than aware of his heart. He could feel each beat, each opening and closing of the valves, and the tremendous wash of blood in his aorta. With a little concentration he felt he could almost control it. Sun showed him he could not.
As the tiny needle hit a specific nerve in the soft area behind his right ear Mercer’s heart simply stopped. There was no beat, no surge, nothing. He was dead. Yet he could think and see and feel himself dying further. But there was no surge of panic. He couldn’t pump the adrenaline that controlled such a reaction. Terror filled his eyes, widening them to impossible proportions, imploring his indifferent torturer to give him his life back. Sun left the needle in for two seconds that felt longer than eternity. When it was pulled free and the nerve pathway it had blocked reopened, Mercer’s heart jump started itself and beat on as if nothing had happened.
“Now you know what I can do to you,” Sun said. “I will give you this one chance to answer Mr. Liu’s questions.”
“Ask,” Mercer said, unable to believe the defeat in his voice.
Sun placed a micro-recorder on the table next to Mercer’s head. “It was you who saw the gold shipment at the Hatcherly warehouse.”
“Yes.”
“Who was with you in the warehouse?”
“A CIA operative named Felix Leiter.” Mercer lied in his defeated monotone. His acting was Oscar quality. “That’s all I knew him as.”
“Was it a CIA team who helped you escape at the fence?”
“No. They were mercenaries flown in from Bogota.”
For fifteen minutes, Mercer spun a tale of CIA intrigue, adding details like code names and the location of fictitious safe houses. He told Sun the story that Liu Yousheng would want to hear, about how the United States was fumbling blindly, not understanding what was happening. He made it sound as though his contact would most likely back off now that Mercer was captured because this operation wasn’t officially sanctioned by Langley.
Sun had conducted hundreds of interrogations and knew how to probe a story from a dozen directions looking for inconsistencies. His questions came rapid-fire and continued for an hour in which Mercer piled lie on top of lie in a web that was as complex as it was delicate. Through it all, Sun couldn’t trip up his victim. Not once did Mercer slip. Each answer served only to back up an earlier fact. The code names didn’t change, addresses remained the same, and timelines, which are the hardest to keep straight, remained linear and plausible.
Mercer judged Sun perfectly. Despite the ruined skin and lifeless eyes he sensed a change in Sun’s emotion during the second hour of questioning that signaled the torturer was satisfied he’d extracted the truth from his victim. The session was coming to an end, which meant so would Mercer’s life. He’d bought himself a little more time but knew that continuing the charade would buy him no more. It was time to fight, and pray he could survive what Sun would do to him.
“You mentioned how the mercenaries came to Panama,” Sun asked for the eighth time.
“They flew in from Medellin on a charter plane.” The mistake was intentional, a tiny gaff that the interrogator recognized instantly.
The deranged acupuncturist looked at Mercer sharply, a deadly look that made it easier for Mercer to let fear flood across his face. “You said the mercenaries came from Bogota. Now you say Medellin.”
“I can’t remember,” Mercer stammered, making his guilt even more apparent.
Because of how he’d been strapped to the table, Mercer couldn’t see that Sun was poised over his left hand with one of his needles. For a fraction of a second, Mercer felt the needle twisting into his flesh and then it felt like a blowtorch had been applied to his scalp. He could almost hear his hair burning away and smell it turning to ash. The pain raced across his scalp like a spreading pool of burning fuel. He convulsed against his straps at the unholy agony, clamping his jaw to keep from screaming, to keep the flames from pouring down his throat.
But there was no fire. It was an electrical stimulus that created the pain, a figment of his own body chemistry. No matter how he tried to rationalize that idea, the pain burned through, crystalline and savage.
Sun lowered his face over Mercer’s. “Speak to me,” he soothed. “Let me hear you speak.”
A whimper escaped past Mercer’s lips.
“Yes, like that,” Sun coaxed, almost sexually.
Turning his head as much as the restraints allowed, Mercer screamed into Sun’s ear as loud as he could, a shriek that would have damaged the hearing of a younger person. Sun stepped back and slid the needle from Mercer’s hand. No anger, no annoyance, no sign that the scream bothered him.
“Bogota or Medellin?” The needle went back in along Mercer’s ribs and another went near his nipple on the opposite side of his chest.
It was as if the two points were joined through his torso by an electric current. To Mercer, his flesh felt like it was being cored out, drilled from his body by the pain.
His first slip had been intentional, but Mercer’s second mistake was an accident. “Bogota,” he gasped.
Had he stuck with the new lie and said Medellin, Sun would have been forced to pick apart the story piece by piece, possibly going easier on Mercer.
Instinctively Sun had seen through all the deceptions and knew that the truth was that Mercer had made up the whole story. “Very good,” he congratulated with genuine surprise.
“You almost had me. Now we get to start from the beginning, only this time I’ve already given you your one chance.”
Needles went in, connecting nerve points that evolution kept intentionally separate, opening pathways for agony never meant to be endured.
How long it went on, Mercer would never know. Lost in a raging flood of pain, time had never had less meaning. Like an artist, Mr. Sun played Mercer’s body against itself, generating agony upon agony with his slender needles, cleverly multiplying the anguish at times and backing it off at others but never leaving his subject free. Only occasionally would he ask a question, and even then he wouldn’t wait for an answer. He was lost in a command performance, conducting an orchestra of sensation to generate the maximum amount of pain.
Through it Mercer fought, retelling parts of his earlier story and then just maintaining his silence when it became too much to think straight. But he knew that was the object of Sun’s work, to empty him of everything except the pain so that he would beg to answer a question.
A needle between his fingers had made his eyeballs seem to collapse like they had been pierced and their fluids drained away. It was the worst yet. Sun added another needle that felt like a smoldering ember had settled in Mercer’s lungs. Each breath became a fiery torture. Mercer was losing himself to the pain. One more element, the barest touch, and he knew he’d never recover.
He had to find something to hold on to, an anchor to keep him rooted to the rational world that existed
