The Outside Man

by Don Bentley

  Like I said, everyone breaks. It’s what happens next that counts.

  With that in mind, I got to my feet and shook out my arms and legs. For whatever reason, my captors hadn’t used the restraints hanging from the ceiling. I planned on taking advantage of that oversight. Maybe they wanted me to stare at the congealed blood on the shackles and piss myself. Or maybe they didn’t take me for the fighting kind. Either way, they’d made a mistake. I wasn’t the toughest guy around, but I was damn sure the most hardheaded.

  One way or another, this dog wasn’t staying put.

  The steps grew louder, but I resisted the urge to peer through the bars at the top of the door. That would be a rookie mistake. If I were a jailer looking to establish dominance, I’d wait for my detainee to stick his head up to the bars, and then I’d crack him right in the nose.

  No, I had a better idea.

  The door to the cramped cell was hinged instead of sliding like the jail cells in the movies. That meant that it opened outward, which might just work to my advantage. The door was solid steel and therefore heavy. If the rest of my cell was any indication, the hinges were probably not well maintained. In fact, the damp air had most likely rusted them. This would make the door difficult to open.

  Which meant my jailer would have to pull pretty hard.

  Which in turn meant maybe I could give him a little help.

  The footfalls were now right outside my cell. I waited for a moment, struck by indecision as I considered what might happen next. If it were me, I’d take a gander into the cell before opening the door, just in case my inmate was a hardheaded son of a bitch like yours truly. If that happened, my plan was dead on arrival. One look into the tiny confines would reveal my scheme even to the dumbest jailer.

  On the other hand, I didn’t have a plan B. I wasn’t restrained now, but I knew that was too good to last. Besides, I’d heard only one set of footfalls. That meant I was one-on-one with my guard, which were probably the best odds I’d get.

  Ever.

  Hunching into the corner where the hinged side of the door met the wall, I watched the barred window, waiting to see if it darkened. I held my breath for a second and then heard the most glorious of sounds—a bolt-action lock turning.

  Corroded tumblers groaned as metal scratched against metal. To me, the screeching sounded like the opening strains of “Ode to Joy.” The door was about to swing open, and my numb-nuts jailer hadn’t bothered to check the window. Maybe my captors figured the tranquilizer would still have me fast asleep. Or maybe this guy was at the bottom of the jihadi gene pool. I didn’t care either way. All I knew was that I now had a five-in-fifty chance of getting past the invisible fence.

  I wasn’t going to waste it.

  Crouching so that my shoulder was level with the midpart of the door, I coiled my muscles. I pictured how it would go—the door opening, me driving forward, shoulder punching into the metal like it was the final two-a-day football practice of the summer. With a bit of luck, the unexpected assistance from my side of the cell would slam the door outward into my captor’s unsuspecting face. And if luck wasn’t with me, well, it wasn’t like the situation could somehow get worse. Yes, sir. I was positively giddy about my chances. Screw the five in fifty. I bet my odds were at least two in twenty.

  With a final shriek, the lock disengaged, and the door inched open. I waited another heartbeat, allowing the solid steel to gain momentum as it started to swing.

  Then I launched.

  At first, things went exactly according to plan. I sprang out of my modified three-point stance, legs exploding outward, forearms piling into the door with a precision that would have made old Coach Nick Petrie proud. Truth be told, Coach Petrie liked a nip or two of whiskey with his lunch, so he wasn’t always lucid by the end of practice. But if he’d been sober, Coach would have been turning cheetah flips at my superb form.

  Except that as I was plowing the door open, I felt a disconcertingly small amount of resistance. Either Zain’s tranquilizer dart had somehow given me superhuman strength, or smashing the cell’s door into my stupid jailer’s face wasn’t going according to plan.

  Probably because my stupid jailer wasn’t quite so stupid.

  As the door swung all the way open, I realized two things in rapid succession: One, my jailer must have yanked to get the door started and then stepped out of the way. Two, he’d stepped out of the way so that he could better aim the aerosol can now poking through the gap between the door and the frame.

  The can hissed as its contents discharged. I clamped my mouth shut and held my breath, determined not to get knocked out again. I needn’t have worried. At least about getting knocked out anyway. The can did not contain sleeping gas. What it did contain felt like liquid fire splashing over my eyes and nose. The noxious cloud ignited my mucous glands, constricted my airway, and generally made life rather unpleasant.

  Pepper spray.

  Fucking pepper spray.

  Those who didn’t know better might have been lulled into thinking that all aerosol-based skin irritants were created equal. That the tiny cans of Mace college girls carried on their key chains had the same chemical formulation as police-issue pepper spray. Or that what police used to subdue rambunctious crowds mirrored military-grade pepper spray.

  This was not true. College-girl Mace was laughable. Police pepper spray was a bitch, but you could still fight through it. But military-grade pepper spray was a different animal altogether. It reached into your sinus cavities, clamped them shut, and then went to work transforming your mucous membranes into boiling cauldrons of lava. In non–tech speak, getting hit with military pepper spray felt like someone jamming molten forks into your eyeballs while an electrified boa constrictor tried to strangle you.

  Except that the boa was on fire.

  Hell, everything was on fire.

  To paraphrase Frodo, the experience kind of sucked. Once you’ve encountered military-grade pepper spray, you could never mistake it for anything else. Which is why I knew exactly what my supposedly dumb jailer had just used to fumigate my cell.

  My eyes swelled shut within the first second, but I wasn’t going to let a little inconvenience like that stop me. Besides, I didn’t need to see just yet. I could hear the can of pepper spray hissing like a pissed-off cobra just to my right.

  Lowering my head to protect my face from the stream of liquid napalm, I swung my fists up in a tight arc and leapt toward my attacker. As my feet left the floor, I briefly considered how stupid I’d look if I’d misjudged the distance and hit just air.

  Then my angry knuckles found flesh.

  Contact front.

  While the stunt with the slowly opening door was pretty slick, my jailer still had a thing or two to learn about subduing prisoners. Or maybe he’d just never had a prisoner as batshit crazy as me. Either way, things were looking up. I probably had a one-in-ten shot of making it out alive, but those were the best odds I’d had all day.

  One moment my jailer was hosing my luscious locks with pepper spray; the next I was spearing my scalp into his face while pounding his solar plexus with quick jabs. The results were delightful. I still couldn’t see, but neither could he.

  At least that was what I was assuming. Between the reassuring crack my forehead made against his nose, and the high-pitched squealing sound that started when I smothered his tear glands with my pepper-spray-lubed hair, he didn’t seem to be having such a good day.

  I could sympathize.

  Fucking pepper spray.

  My punch knocked him off-balance, and I hooked his leg with my heel and kicked backward. His knee popped as tendons and ligaments gave way to physics. He screamed, grabbing the leg, and I sent a ridge hand scything into his unprotected Adam’s apple. The cartilage gave way, and he tumbled to the ground, where I kicked him in the head until he stopped moving.

  Not exactly Bruce Lee smooth,
but effective all the same.

  Prying open my swollen eyelids, I got my first look around. Our tussle hadn’t exactly been a master class in silent killing, and I was worried about what I’d find. But it wasn’t what I saw that transformed the hopped-up adrenaline feeling I’d been riding into stomach-churning terror.

  It was what I heard.

  Clapping.

  Not the tentative, embarrassed sort of applause that comes after a Braveheart speech falls short or even the restrained golf claps reserved for boardrooms. No, what I heard was the I-don’t-give-a-fuck-who-hears-me kind of clap that drunk Patriots fans let loose on Super Bowl Sunday all over Boston.

  Since I was pretty sure not even a Patriots fan would have hung out in a musty basement-turned–torture chamber, my new landlord had to be somewhere close by. And he was the kind of squirrelly that made my mother-in-law seem normal.

  Pushing my eyelids farther apart, I turned toward the clapping only to feel the air leave my lungs in a rush. My tear-filled eyes burned like they’d been smeared with radioactive sand, but I still recognized the figure standing on the staircase leading to the basement.

  Mr. Suave.

  Or perhaps more fittingly—the Devil.

  “That was quite the performance, Matthew,” the Devil said, shouting over his own clapping. “Quite the performance indeed. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint, but even I was taken aback by your pure unadulterated violence.”

  “Good,” I said, “because what I’m about to do to you will make that look tame.”

  My voice sounded relatively calm, which was a miracle since my throat felt like I’d been gargling with shards of glass. But it wasn’t the effects of the pepper spray I was fighting.

  It was terror.

  The last time I’d stood in front of this man, he’d calmly explained how he was going to kill me like we were talking about the weather. He was a sociopath, and I was stuck in his basement. And as every Tarantino fan knows, the problem with fighting in a basement is that you’re fighting in a basement.

  “Please, Matthew,” the Devil said, shaking his head, “there’s no need for bravado. We understand each other. You and I have gazed into each other’s souls. I know what you’d do if given the chance, but unlike my hapless associate, I won’t provide you the opportunity.”

  He switched to rapid-fire Arabic before I could reply, too fast for me to follow. But I grasped the meaning all the same. Movement confirmed that I wasn’t alone. Far from it. Four men materialized from the shadows. Solid men. Men who’d watched me beat their companion to death without so much as making a sound.

  Just the sort of men the Devil would employ.

  I leapt toward the Devil, thinking that if I could wrap my fingers around his thick throat, I’d at least have the pleasure of taking him with me. But I was much, much too slow. Twin pricks landed in the center of my back. Not a tranquilizer dart this time.

  Something else.

  I took exactly one more step before my limbs seized and every nerve in my body simultaneously screamed. Upon reflection, what I said earlier wasn’t true. There was something I hated more than pepper spray.

  Fucking Tasers.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was the second bucket of water that got my attention. The first sluiced off without completely penetrating the mental fog induced by fifty thousand volts overloading my nervous system. Don’t get me wrong: I’d been tased before. It’s one of the many interrogation techniques you’re “exposed to” during the Army’s infamous Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, program at scenic Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  However, even the hardened instructors who teach the resistance phase tase only in short bursts. Conversely, the Devil’s acolytes had let the juice run until my brain decided to take a little break. I didn’t pass out so much as I lost interest in reality for a bit. That said, nothing brings you back from an electricity-induced coma like a bucket of cold water. In fact, I might have described the experience as refreshingly bracing if my deadened nerves weren’t still on vacation.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The second bucket of water roused my slumbering nervous system with the subtlety of a foghorn. The water caught me full in the face, streaming through my hair and flushing dried pepper spray back into my eyes. I jerked upright as the pain scoured away any remaining confusion.

  Fucking pepper spray.

  “I’m awake,” I said, sputtering, but not before getting drenched again. I tried to wipe the gunk from my face, but my hands and feet were handcuffed to a chair.

  And who says jihadis don’t learn from their mistakes?

  My attempt at speech seemed to have the desired effect. Instead of yet another bucket of water, I heard the creak of a rusty nozzle. Then a stream of water blasted into my face. Sucking in a quick breath, I worked my head through the spray, trying to rinse away the foul chemicals.

  I knew from experience that only an oily compound like dish soap could completely remove the noxious mixture, but this was better than nothing. After several seconds, my ad hoc shower stopped as the rusty faucet creaked again.

  Shaking the moisture from my head and face like a soaked dog, I blew out a held breath and opened my eyes. The Devil sat across from me. He smiled as my blurry vision found him.

  “Good,” the Devil said. “You’re back. My former associate went a bit overboard with the Taser. I was concerned he’d permanently damaged you.”

  “Former?” I said.

  The Devil indicated a crumpled body slumped against the wall to my right with a wave. “I don’t tolerate mistakes,” the Devil said. “They’re not good for business.”

  Once again I wondered just whom I was dealing with. As per the last time we met, the Devil was dressed casually in clothes that tastefully reflected his wealth. Handmade shoes of soft Italian leather. Western slacks and a tailored button-down shirt open at the throat. An outfit a stockbroker might wear to the country club for Sunday-morning brunch. Somehow, the attire looked at home on the Devil, even though we were huddled in a dingy torture chamber.

  “Enough with the Goodfellas shtick,” I said, trying to ignore the trembling in my right finger. “You’re a two-bit thug, plain and simple. Your Santoni shoes and Tom Ford shirts look about as natural on you as lipstick on a pig. You might pretend otherwise, but you’re no different from any other man I’ve put in the dirt. You’ll go down just as easy.”

  Part of the art of surviving an interrogation was keeping the interrogator off-balance. I couldn’t wrap my fingers around the Devil’s windpipe, but if I could crawl inside his head and root around a bit, I might be able to turn things to my advantage. Let’s face it: When the status quo was sitting chained to a chair half naked in an Iraqi dungeon, I really had nowhere to go but up.

  Unfortunately, the Devil wasn’t so accommodating.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” the Devil said, leaning forward, his meaty hands resting on his thighs. “I am different from anyone you’ve ever met. In fact, you’re about to find out just how different.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, shifting my weight to test the give on the chain securing me to the chair. “This sitting-in-the-basement shit is boring.”

  But instead of taking the bait, the Devil leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and smiled. “You’re right, Matthew. The unnecessary delay my former associate caused has made me forget my manners. I haven’t even explained why you’re here.”

  The Devil held out his right hand, palm up, and one of his acolytes moved from where he’d been standing motionless against the wall. I gritted my teeth in preparation for another blast of pepper spray or an equally disagreeable session with the Taser. But it wasn’t an implement of torture the bodyguard placed into the Devil’s expectant hand.

  It was an iPad.

  The Devil took the device, tilted it so he could see, and smiled. “Ah, yes,” he
said, swiping an index finger across the screen, “this one should do nicely.”

  The Devil scooted closer, not near enough that we could touch, but close enough so that my weary eyes could see the device’s black screen.

  “What’s that you Americans say?” the Devil said as another swipe brought the frozen video to life. “A picture’s worth a thousand words? Well, then, this video should be quite valuable indeed.”

  I opened my mouth to give a smart-ass reply, but the words died on my tongue as the video played. Once again, the Devil was full of surprises. The image was of a woman sitting at a café drinking coffee.

  In the grand scale of evilness, this was pretty tame: no jihadis beheading a captive; no shots of chemical weapons employed on men, women, and children; not even a suicide bomber blowing himself and innocent civilians to bits. Just a woman sipping from a cardboard cup. All in all, not too horrible except for one tiny detail.

  The woman in the video was Laila.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When it comes to surviving an interrogation, you can prepare yourself for many things. A video of your wife isn’t one of them. One second I’d been plotting my escape; the next, the world’s greenest eyes sucker punched me. The camera zoomed in, and Laila’s face filled the screen. The resolution was so clear, I found myself reaching toward the image before handcuffs brought me up short.

  For an instant I thought she could see me too. My lips were forming her name when the image froze. I took a breath, let it out. Took another. Exhaled.

  Only then did I look from the iPad to the Devil holding it.

  “You have no idea what you’ve just done,” I said. The words surprised even me. Despite the jumble of emotions, and the hitching in my chest, my voice was calm, and my fingers had stopped twitching.