by Jack Du Brul
Why the hell had Rene gone into the camp? Mercer wondered, then forced the thought out of his head. He had to clear it completely-erase the past few days in order to convince Liu that he knew of nothing beyond Gary Barber’s mysterious death.
For ten minutes Mercer made a show of ignoring the soldier, using the time to let his mind calm down and his body to recover from the fire-hose onslaught. Then came a commotion beyond the open door and a moment later another Chinese, this one dressed in an expensive business suit, entered the cell. Mercer gave him a passing glance, noting his slender build and rather tired eyes, before returning his attention to a particularly bothersome hangnail. He finally bit at the sliver of skin and spat it on the floor. A drop of blood welled from the tiny wound.
“Wouldn’t have a Band-Aid, would you?” Mercer asked, finally paying attention to the executive. He’d already assumed he was in the presence of Liu Yousheng.
“That cut will soon be the least of your worries,” Liu replied. “Do you know where you are and who I am?”
Mercer looked around the cell, as if seeing its utilitarianism for the first time. “Well, this hotel doesn’t look familiar, but you do. I’ve seen your commercials for dog food on TV. Aren’t you Pup E. Chow?”
“I expected more than insults from you, Dr. Mercer,” Liu said. “You are Philip Mercer, aren’t you?”
“Sorry. My name’s Al Abama, from California. I was taking one of those adventure cruises from Europe aboard a car carrier with my sister, Carol Ina. She lives in Wisconsin.” Mercer smiled. “Check the passenger manifest if you don’t believe me.”
Liu shook his head, as if disappointed in his prisoner. “Your acquisition of the Lepinay journal started out as a minor distraction in Paris. But suddenly you’ve become a rather significant obstacle. I’m curious how you accomplished this feat.”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Interestingly,” Liu continued as if Mercer hadn’t spoken, “the two bodies we recovered at the lake don’t appear to be American. One had a tattoo we traced to a German motorcycle gang called Das Gremium on his shoulder. I had assumed you were working with the CIA. Maybe I was wrong. Care to comment?”
“Not particularly,” Mercer said, and then his voice hardened. “Let’s cut the bull. I know who you are. You know me. All I wanted was to discover what happened to my friend Gary. I know now that you had nothing to do with his death. It was a freakish accident. I have no quarrel with you, and if you let me go I’ll be on the next plane back to the States and you can do whatever you want down here. I have no connection to the CIA, the FBI or even the ASPCA. I can’t hurt you. There’s no need for you to hurt me.”
Liu almost seemed to consider Mercer’s plea. “It is possible that you are telling me the truth.” Menace filled his every word. “But even if it were, it wouldn’t matter. Your meddling has cost me too much already. More importantly, you have forced me to act in ways I rather wish to avoid. I prefer bank transfers and balance sheets, not bullets. It is because of you there has been so much bloodshed. I am working a business deal and you’re acting like an American cowboy, shooting first and asking questions later. Had you understood that my actions here will prevent countless deaths later, you wouldn’t have involved yourself the way you have.”
“Tell me what you’re doing,” Mercer invited. “Maybe we can come to an understanding.”
“That time is past.”
“Then kill me now!” Mercer’s startling shout rocked Liu back. “Quit these stupid games and put a bullet in my head. I’ve got nothing you want so end it right here.”
“Again”-Liu smiled, pleased at what he thought was the first crack in Mercer’s studied calm-“I don’t think that’s true either. I think you have a great deal to tell me.” He called out for more guards.
Mercer allowed the soldiers to overwhelm him, reserving his strength for when the interrogation started. A moment later he was cuffed to a stretcher and carried down a cinder-block corridor to another cell. This one was as cool as the previous one, making Mercer guess they were underground. The stretcher was placed on a metal table and additional restraints were put in place to keep him completely immobile. The guards cleared out.
Liu moved to the head of the table. “We won’t see each other again, Dr. Mercer, so I will do you the honor of wishing you a peaceable journey.”
From his supine position, Mercer couldn’t see the other man who stepped into the room but got a real bad feeling just from the distaste that showed on Liu’s face.
“You have my list of questions, Mr. Sun. Get them answered.” Liu stepped from the room, purposefully staying as far from Sun as he could.
A skeletal head suddenly loomed into Mercer’s view. Had Mercer been able, he would have recoiled. The face was cadaverous, sunken and shriveled like a mummy. Flakes of skin spilled off like thick dandruff. The man’s breath enveloped Mercer in a stench like rotted meat. Mr. Sun’s teeth were nearly black. Sun traced a finger along Mercer’s cheek, marveling at the elasticity of his skin. The finger felt like a claw from a dead bird. Mercer noted angrily that the man was wearing his TAG Heuer watch.
“I haven’t been friends with an American in a long time.” Sun spoke decent English in a voice filled with wonder, like a child’s. It made Mercer’s flesh crawl. “There was one we found smuggling weapons into Tibet about six years ago, but he could only be my friend for a little while so I don’t count him. My last real American friend was an air force pilot who came to me during the end of your war in Vietnam. We were friends until 1983.”
The realization that this Mr. Sun considered the victims of his torture as friends made Mercer swallow reflexively. Whatever psychological problems allowed Sun to torture another human had become something worse, he realized. Sun liked what he did, needed it, for all Mercer knew. Despite the cell’s low temperature, sweat began to run from his pores.
“My last American friend kept a secret from me at the end,” Sun continued, his black eyes losing focus as he recalled the airman he had mutilated long ago. “He let a fingernail grow without any of his guards noticing. One night he sharpened it on the wall of his cell and used it to cut through the tissue under his tongue. We found him the next morning. He had swallowed his tongue to suffocate himself.” He returned from the memory. “Toward the end, our conversations were not that good, but I still think of our earlier times together. I never figured out how he could keep speaking for so long. For years he kept it up. Remarkable.”
Mercer realized by “speaking” Sun meant screaming. The conversations were between Sun’s instruments of torture and the pain they invoked.
“Anyway,” the interrogator continued, “I have you now. We can’t be friends for very long, I’m afraid. Mr. Liu is pressed for time. Still, I think our talks will be interesting.” Sun unrolled a black cloth next to Mercer’s head. It contained a collection of fine acupuncture needles. Hundreds of them.
On the auto carrier, when Mercer had given himself up, he’d known something like this would be in store. He’d willingly traded the promise of torture for a little more time alive. Seeing Sun for the first time, and his needles, he wondered if letting those soldiers kill him wouldn’t have been smarter.
“There are many ways to get someone to talk,” Sun said conversationally. “The threat of death is usually enough for most people. Because of your situation, you know your death is inevitable so that won’t work. Mutilation is another way. People fear permanent injury as much as they fear dying. Again, permanent for you is only a day or two. Not much of a threat, eh?”
“Works for me,” Mercer rasped, his throat so dry it felt like he’d swallowed the contents of an hourglass. “What do you want to know?”
When Sun smiled, a shower of skin flakes fell from around his mouth. “I think you make a joke with me. Our conversation hasn’t even started yet. In your situation, my job is to make you believe that death is better than what I will do to you. To reach that goal you must first answer my q
uestions. Answering me is the only way I will give you death. Do you understand?”
Sun didn’t wait for a reply. Using a technique forged long before recorded history he began inserting needles into Mercer’s body, first breaking skin with a quick flick of his fingers then twisting them deeper. Mercer had braced himself for pain but felt nothing but a minor discomfort as each needle was drilled a short way into his body. He felt no ill effects as Sun inserted forty needles into various parts of his body. Most were on his neck, chest, and stomach, while others had been stuck between his fingers and at each ankle.
“There.” Sun stepped back to admire his handiwork. “The meridian paths are open. Your body hasn’t been 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 chi, between all the newly opened locus points. It’s like a power plant that suddenly has to supply dozens of additional homes. Do you feel a little more tired?”
“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 beyond the agonized shell of his body. Like a swimmer tossed in the surf, he had to find a rock to cling to that kept his head above the drowning pain. Images cascaded in his mind, thoughts of what meant most to him.