by Barry Eisler
“I don’t know how to contact him,” Dox said. “He contacts me.”
“How?”
“He calls me. Always from a different number. But I haven’t heard from him in months.”
“Not true, Dox. You saw him three months ago. In Barcelona.”
Dox blinked, then instantly recovered. “I was in Barcelona to take in the Gaudí architecture and meet some nice Spanish ladies. You’re fishing and you know it.”
Hilger had been fishing—he knew from customs records Dox had spent four days in Barcelona, and had no idea whether he’d seen Rain there. But the gambit had paid off with that single, involuntary blink.
A long moment went by. Hilger said, “Last chance. Do you have something you want to say?”
Dox glanced at his feet again, then turned his head to Hilger and smiled. “It looks bleak for our hero, I’ll say that.”
Pancho smiled and picked up a bath towel. He started to move in.
“No,” Hilger said. “You’re running too hot, and you know it.” He nodded to Demeere. “Do it.”
Demeere took the towel from Pancho. Pancho looked at Dox and said, “You’re lucky, pendejo. This time.”
Dox smiled and said something in Spanish again. Pancho’s nostrils twitched and he strained forward like a Doberman on a leash.
“Outside,” Hilger said.
Pancho shook his head. “No, I’m okay. If you’re not going to let me do it, at least let me watch. I want to hear him blubbering with his voice as high as a little girl’s.”
“Out,” Hilger said again.
Pancho shot one more glance at Dox, then nodded and started to head for the door. Dox said, “I’m going to miss you, Uncle Fester. Y’all come back and visit, you hear?”
Then Demeere was lifting Dox’s head, wrapping the towel around it with clinical ease. Dox tried to twist away, but the reflex was useless. Guthrie stood astride him on the table and turned on the hose. He looked at Hilger. Hilger nodded.
Guthrie aimed the hose onto Dox’s chest. The cold water hit the towel and immediately soaked through it. Dox twisted his head left and right, but Guthrie kept the water flowing onto the towel. A minute passed, during which Hilger knew Dox was holding his breath. Then suddenly the big man was choking and coughing, his body bucking against the table and the restraints around his wrists and ankles. Guthrie kept the water flowing for a few more seconds, then diverted it to the side.
The advantage of the towel was that it modulated the amount of water the subject could actually swallow, while still causing suffocation and thus the sensation of drowning. The sensation was what you wanted because that was enough to produce the panic response. Actual drowning was counterproductive because when you’re unconscious, you’re no longer panicking, and being revived from drowning can sometimes produce euphoria—not exactly the goal of a hostile interrogation. Actual drowning was also risky: if the subject died, you sure as hell couldn’t interrogate him. Besides, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save Abdul the terrorist suspect you were torturing a minute earlier wasn’t considered good form in the community.
“Anything you want to tell me?” Hilger said, no more loudly than was necessary to get Dox’s attention. “Or do you want to do it again?”
The coughing subsided, but Dox didn’t answer. Hilger nodded to Guthrie, who turned the hose onto Dox’s face again.
They repeated the process twice more, then again. On the fifth time, when Guthrie diverted the hose, they saw vomit flowing from under the towel. Hilger judged this the right moment. If they went on much longer, panic would be replaced by exhaustion, and Hilger would have to change to more brutal tactics, which he preferred not to do—more, he recognized, for his own sake than for Dox’s.
Hilger nodded to Demeere, who stepped in and peeled the towel away. Guthrie hosed the mess off Dox’s face. Dox jerked back and forth, blindly trying to avoid the spray. Guthrie turned aside the hose. Dox wheezed and gagged, then threw up again with a choking, strangled scream.
“Nothing funny to say?” Hilger asked, and was immediately ashamed of himself.
But Dox was past humor now. His chest heaved in the cadences of barely controlled panic. His teeth were chattering and his hands shook in their manacles. His breath whistled in and out in whimpers, and Hilger realized the man was crying.
Hilger pushed aside his shame and disgust. He leaned forward and said, “I don’t want to know where he is, just how to contact him.”
Dox shook his head.
Hilger said, “You’ve already held out longer than Khaled Sheikh fucking Mohammed, you know that? And he held out as long as anyone I’ve ever seen. But no one can hold out against this forever. No one. Why don’t you tell me what I need to know. Otherwise we’re going to do it again. And again.”
Hilger waited a long moment, then nodded to Demeere. The Belgian stepped forward with the towel. He lifted Dox’s head, but Dox shook free.
“All right!” Dox shouted, his voice hoarse. “All right.” He let out a stream of foul words that Hilger had never heard strung together quite so inventively, not even during his time with the linguistically creative men of Third Special Forces in the first Gulf War.
They waited. When the invective had subsided, Dox said, “It’s a secure bulletin board.” He told them the URL, and Demeere wrote it down.
“How often does he check it?” Hilger asked.
“I don’t know. We’re not in touch that often. I’d guess once a day, if that.”
“Good. That means we’ve got twenty-four hours.”
“For what?”
“For Rain to get back to us. If I haven’t heard from him by then, I’ll assume what you’ve given me is inaccurate. In which case, I’ll have to ask you again. And probably not as nicely as I did just now.”
Dox turned his head and spat. “Yeah? What are you going to do, behead me and sell the videotape to Al Jazeera?”
Hilger looked at him. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”
“Really? Why don’t you tell me the difference? Because I can’t see it.”
Hilger waited a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was cold.
“The ends,” he said. He was still looking at Dox, but it was Rain he was thinking of. “It’s all about the ends.”
6
ALTHOUGH THE martial arts world is vastly bigger today than it was when I got started in judo in the seventies, I still had to be careful. My face was known not only at the Kodokan in Tokyo, but also at Carlinhos Gracie’s jiu-jitsu academy, where I’d trained obsessively for the year I’d lived in Rio. No one at either club knew my name, but if someone from either happened to be training in Paris, I didn’t want to deal with questions about what I was doing here or where I was living.
There’s a cost/benefit equation in all decisions, though, and my need to train was strong enough to outweigh the risks involved. It wasn’t just a question of keeping my skills sharp, although that was part of it. Like my nocturnal excursions, training soothed an anxious part of me. So I worked out five afternoons a week at a place called the RD Sporting Club, on the boulevard Saint-Denis near the Saint-Martin canal. The club had a variety of equipment—mats, gloves, bags—and plenty of tough partners to train with. And I was glad for the opportunity to use my French, too.
Every day, usually after a workout, I would stop by an Internet café, always a different one, to check the bulletin board I used with Dox. We weren’t in touch that often, but I liked the routine. I’d done something similar for a long time with Midori before our rupture, at which point I’d shut that board down. I realized afterward that I missed the possibility of a message, that I had grown used to living with the pleasure of a small quotidian hope.
I almost hated to admit it, because Dox’s boisterousness, wise-cracking, and willingness to wing it on tradecraft drove me crazy, but he was now as close a friend as I’d ever had. I hadn’t much cared for him when we’d first met, in Afghanistan. He was damn capable in the field
, but his constant antics and outsized personality grated on me. Then, a few years ago, some elements in the CIA had tried to draw on the Afghan connection in sending Dox after me in Rio. Instead, the two of us wound up working together. The partnership was of necessity at first, and I distrusted him. But at Kwai Chung harbor in Hong Kong, he’d walked away from a bag with five million dollars in it to save my life. With that one remarkable act, he’d blasted through my defenses and altered my whole worldview. I still struggled with the aftermath. Would I have done the same for him? Today I wouldn’t hesitate, but at the time…no, I had to admit, at the time I wouldn’t have. I didn’t trust anyone back then, didn’t think anyone was worthy of trust. I believed in preemptive betrayal. There was a line I heard in a movie once: “Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight…or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight.” That was me. There was nothing wrong with betrayal, just with letting the other guy beat you to it. But Dox had changed my view. The only person I could think of who had affected me as profoundly was Delilah.
One day, on one of these forays to an Internet café, I saw there was a message waiting from the big sniper. I smiled and opened it, expecting nothing more than a report on the weather in Bali and maybe a hint of some fresh sexual conquest. The usual, from Dox.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The message said, We got to your friend near his villa on Bali. He’s with us, and for now he’s okay. But if we haven’t heard from you within twenty-four hours from posting this message, we can’t guarantee his continued comfort.
I felt the blood draining from my face, an adrenaline dump in my gut. There was no way it was a joke. Dox liked to give me a hard time, but this would be crossing a line. I looked up from the terminal and glanced around, instinctively, uselessly, then looked back at the message. There was a phone number—Dox’s mobile. That was all.
The message had been left at 2:00 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time. That was 3:00 A.M. in Paris. So…shit, over twelve hours ago. Less than twelve to go.
I purged and closed the browser, then walked outside. Cars shot along the boulevard de Magenta, dead leaves skittering in their backwash. Pedestrians dodged me, intent on their destinations, heads down against the chill winter breeze, shoulders hunched. A multitude of urgent questions and frightened thoughts were crowding me, trying to get inside, and for a few minutes I concentrated only on my breathing, letting the cold air work to clear my mind.
What do you know, I thought. Not what you suspect; what you know. Start with that.
What it boiled down to wasn’t very much. Someone had gotten to Dox. Whoever it was, they were good. They’d forced him to give up the bulletin board, which meant they were ruthless. Now they wanted something from me.
What else? The board was compromised. If they were good enough to take out Dox, they’d be good enough to hack the site and determine the location of the terminal from which I’d just accessed it. In fact, I had to assume they’d just gotten a ping confirming for them that I was currently in Paris.
Shit, I thought. Shit.
If I called from Paris, it would give them a second means of determining my current position. But if they’d already hacked the bulletin board, what they’d get from a phone call would be redundant.
I thought about using the remaining time to go somewhere else, another city in France, maybe, or a quick train trip to Brussels, or Frankfurt. But I immediately rejected the notion. If they logged the time and location of the bulletin board access and then the call came hours later from elsewhere, it would look like I was trying to obscure my current location, which would mean Paris was in some way significant to me. Better to act as though my presence here was as fleeting as it was irrelevant. Which meant making the call right now, right here.
I turned on the prepaid GSM phone I was carrying. I had bought it in New York months earlier, and hadn’t yet used it in Paris, or even in Barcelona. If they tracked its provenance it would create another distracting datapoint about where I might be found.
I slipped a Bluetooth earpiece in place, input Dox’s number, and waited. It rang once, twice, three times. This was theater, I knew. The people who had set this up would have the phone close at hand. The wait was intended to suggest nonchalance, power, control.
On the fourth ring, someone picked up. A voice I didn’t recognize said simply, “Yes.”
“I got your message,” I said.
“Wait a moment,” the voice said. There was a slight, indeterminate European accent.
I looked at my watch, tracking the second hand’s gradual sweep. Five seconds, ten. The wait was supposed to put me on edge. Having the underling answer was intended to let me know I was dealing with a group, an organization, and to make me feel alone and powerless by comparison.
That’s all right, I thought. I’ve gone up against groups before. Maybe I’ll get to show you how it’s done.
But intelligence first. Action after.
A full minute went by. Then a voice I did recognize said, “Hello, John.”
I waited a moment, then said, “Hello, Hilger.”
If he was surprised I knew it was him, he didn’t reveal it. Not that he had too much cause for astonishment, after the way we’d locked horns in the past. The first time, Dox and I had killed a half-French, half-Algerian arms dealer named Belghazi whom Hilger was working with; then, just a few months later, Delilah, Dox, and I had taken out another bad guy Hilger had recruited, a terrorist named Al-Jib, along with a bad-apple Israeli access agent called Manny. That was the op in which Delilah’s colleague, Gil, had died. Hilger had shot him.
I realized that with someone as dangerous and connected as Hilger, I never should have treated any of it as concluded. My understanding was that he’d left the government and opened up his own shop, a kind of privatized intelligence operation, more shadowy, better connected, and substantially less accountable than private security firms like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. I thought Hong Kong had blown his operation out of the water, but apparently Hilger had been wearing a life vest.
A long moment went by. The silence was intended to get me to blurt something out, to betray eagerness. More tactics, I thought. He’s still shaping the battlefield.
I looked at my watch again. It was a stainless steel Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Grande Taille with a brown leather band. I might have worn a Traser, but I tend to avoid anything that could be recognized as tactical. People who know, know. Besides, I just have a weakness for a fine watch like the Grande Taille. I thought about all the care that went into its design and its manufacture, imagined the craftsmen working on it, wearing spectacles, using magnifying glasses and precision tools to get the complications just right…
“I have a job I want you to do,” Hilger said, finally. “Three of them, in fact. Do the jobs, and Dox lives. Don’t do them, and he dies.”
“Put him on the phone,” I said, keeping my voice casual.
I wondered if he would refuse. I would have judged that stupid—I wasn’t going to do a damn thing without what’s known in the kidnap trade as “proof of life”—but on the other hand, in a negotiation, you don’t give anything away for free. Hilger might want to position a few words with Dox as a concession. He’d been staging this thing carefully so far; maybe he’d want to stage it a bit more.
But he didn’t. He just said, “Wait.”
Thirty seconds later, I heard Dox’s baritone twang. “Howdy, partner.”
I was about to admonish him not to call me that because I didn’t want Hilger to think we were close. But he went on: “Just so you know, these four boys have got us on the speakerphone.”
Speakerphone. I should have anticipated that, and it was smart of Dox to tell me. It was also smart to slip in the mention of their numbers. Hilger might not have minded that; he probably hoped to intimidate me with the odds.
There was a down note in Dox’s tone that was entirely unlike the rampantly cocksure persona I had come to tolerate, and eventually to like. A flood of emotions wanted to engulf me ag
ain: relief that he was alive, worry about what might happen next, anger that he’d allowed himself to be taken. I struggled to push it all aside, then felt that deep, icy part of me breaking through to the surface and taking the controls. And the feeling that came with it was nothing but relief. Finally, a reason for my fear. A reason not to struggle against the creature inside me.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I’m alive. I reckon that’s what this conversation is intended to establish.”
“You know where you are?”
“On a boat. Wish I could tell you more.”
Then he was gone, and Hilger was back on the line. “We’ll use the bulletin board,” he said.
From the suddenness with which he’d grabbed the phone, I gathered he was concerned Dox might tell me something more, something useful. But what?
“No,” I told him. “What you’ve got to tell me, you can tell me to my face.”
“No. We do it my way, or…”
“Or you can fuck off.” And with that, I pressed the “End call” button.
Or rather, the iceman did. The iceman knew that if I didn’t establish some measure of control early on, I’d always be reacting, always trying to recover, every step of the way, until finally, no matter how desperate my efforts, or feverish my hope, Dox would be dead, and probably I along with him.
I looked at the Grande Taille again, watching the second hand’s smooth sweep. I could feel my heart beating steadily, my pulse rate just a little above normal. I was inside myself, suspended somewhere only I could recognize, disconnected, severed from events.
I watched the second hand’s slow sweep. One circuit. Two. Another. The street was gone. My focus was no larger than the movement on the watch face.
The second hand was beginning its fifth rotation when the phone buzzed. I saw Dox’s number on the screen and pressed “Answer.”
Hilger said, “You’re lucky your number got stored in this phone’s caller ID just now. Otherwise your friend would already be dead. Now listen, there’s something I want you to hear.”