Anxiously, Val stood behind me with my pistol in her hand. I lifted the stainless-steel dermatome from my canvas bag and held it in front of the hostage. “Have you ever seen one of these?”

With his mouth taped shut, I didn’t expect him to respond. I did, however, want to make the entire process of torturing him as dramatic as possible. In my experience and training, I’d learned the more dramatic the process of torture, the more favorable the results.

“It’s a dermatome. It’s like an electronic potato peeler, but for human skin,” I explained. “Surgeons use them to surgically remove a bed of flesh when they do a skin graft. I’m going to shave a ten-inch strip off your stomach, and then we’ll have a question-answer session. Each time I ask a question and you don’t answer it, we’ll shave off another section.”

He thrashed back and forth in opposition.

I lifted the end of the cord. “Would you plug this in for me?”

Val took the cord end and plugged it into the wall outlet. “I don’t think I can watch this.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect you to.” I cringed in an overly theatrical manner. “It’s gruesome as hell. They use anesthesia when they do it in the hospital. I can’t fathom how bad something like this is going feel. Imagine having a two-inch wide swath of your entire bed of skin peeled off—all the way to the muscle—by some amateur with an electronic fucking potato peeler.”

Val paced the floor behind me as I sat on his thighs and lifted his tee shirt to his chest. I pressed it firmly against his flesh and turned it on. The rotating wheel forced his flesh against a two-inch wide surgical blade. A thick layer of skin began to peel away from the muscle.

His screams were muffled by the rag I’d stuffed into his mouth. He arched his back until the pain was too intense for him to continue. A few seconds later, his body went limp as he slipped into unconsciousness.

I continued stripping the flesh from his torso until I reached his chest. When the device came to a stop, a foot-long section of flesh was tangled in the rotating wheel. With a gloved hand, I removed the rectangular-shaped section of skin and draped it over his forehead.

I set the device aside, stood, and stretched my legs. I glanced at my bearded hostage. A bloody two-inch by twelve-inch rectangular section of muscle was exposed along his midsection.

“I’ll wake his ass up in a minute,” I said. “We’ll see what he has to say about things.”

“How are you going to wake him up?”

“I’ll give him an epinephrine shot.”

“What are you going to ask him when he wakes up?”

“First, who he works for. Second, where the flash drive is. Third, who gave him the order to kill us.” I glanced over my shoulder. “I think that’s about it.”

“He was saying all kinds of crazy stuff to me, earlier. Just so you know.”

“Like what?”

“He said I was a double agent. That I worked for FBI’s secret intelligence or some crazy crap. That I was working for them and the DNI at the same time. I have no idea what he was talking about. I can’t believe I’ve been friends with them for the last three years.”

“Proves that you never truly know who someone is,” I said without a second thought of what she’d said. “They were checking up on you since the day you started at New Dawn.”

She crossed her arms and glared at the hostage. “I think they’ve been planning to kill me since day one.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. As soon as you did something to make them feel their security was at risk.”

I got an epinephrine pen from the bag and stabbed it into Jack’s leg. The adrenaline surge caused him to jolt into a hyper state of consciousness.

I folded my arms across my chest and gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “I’m going to ask a question. You’ll give a brief answer. Understand the benefit of being brief. I don’t have the patience to listen to explanations. If you answer briefly and truthfully, we’ll move on to the next question. If not, I’ll shove the rag in your mouth and we’ll start over. Understood?”

He nodded.

I removed the rag. “Who do you work for?”

“The Director…of National…Intelligence.”

“Anyone else?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No.”

“Who sent you to my home?”

“I took…” He exhaled a long breath. “I took an assignment to find a someone…we believed there was…someone had been planted within the DNI by the FBI’s Intelligence Branch. They used information…the President was coerced…forced to support certain causes that he was strongly opposed to. They traced the information—”

“Are you aware of the definition of the word brief?” I asked in a sarcastic tone.

He nodded.

“I’ve known you for an hour and a half, and I’ve been pissed off for that entire fucking time. I have zero patience for your bullshit right now,” I explained. “Give me the name of who sent you to my home this evening, or the next strip of skin is coming off. This time, it’ll be your face.”

“Trevino,” he blurted.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Told you.”

Val nodded.

I looked at the soon-to-be-dead hostage. “Did Trevino send the New Dawn Operators?”

“I have no idea.”

“Where’s the flash drive?”

“Trevino has it,” he responded.

While I contemplated my next question, the telltale thwack of a silenced pistol being fired caused me to flinch.

The hostage’s head exploded. Fragments of skull, brain, and flesh splattered across the floor.

“Jesus!” I spun around.

Frozen in place, she stared blankly at his body, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d done.

I took the pistol from her shaking hand. “Was that an accident?”

“I don’t think so. I think I just snapped,” she stammered. “It just kind of went off when I was thinking about it. Maybe it was my subconscious at work.”

Filled with disbelief that it could have been an accident, I gave her a look. “You’re serious?”

“Sorry.” She exhaled a long breath. “You said you were going to ask him those three questions. You asked them. I was really done listening to him.”

I glanced at the dead hostage and shook my head. A sigh of frustration escaped me. “I wasn’t done interrogating him.”

“I said I was sorry,” she snapped back. “But that asshole lied to me for three years, beat the shit out of me in your kitchen, and then tossed me into the trunk of a fucking car with a bag over my head. He was going to kill us both. He got what he deserved, it was just bad timing.”

We had only one place left where we could possibly get answers. I glanced at the dead hostage and then at her. “You’re right, it was bad timing. Really bad timing.”