FIFTY-TWO
Dogs? Jack didn’t know what she was talking about, either.
“That’s right,” she told Miguel. “Didn’t you ever see tracking dogs in that shithole where you lived and practiced killing innocent people?
“How long has it been since you took a bath? Huh, Miguel? A week? Two weeks? When you raped me and I had a chance to smell your filthy body up close and personal, I guessed it had been a month.
“Tracking dogs, you see, can track lost kids, lost people, abducted people, all kinds of people, and I’d bet all of those people had bathed within a day or two. So I don’t imagine that tracking dogs would have the slightest trouble tracking your stink back to the place where you and your goat-fucking friends are building that bomb.
“So, you see?” She patted his cheek again. “It’s okay. We don’t really need you to talk. We’ll just let the dogs come get a sniff of your stinking ass and they’ll lead us right back to your friends.
“After that—” She cut the side of his left arm, making him flinch. “—I’m going to cut off this arm, right about here. It’s useless, now, anyway. Then I’ll put a tourniquet around the stump so you don’t bleed to death.” She grinned down at him. “Do you know what I’m going to do with you, then?”
Miguel, his one eye wide, shook his head.
“Then, I’m going to take you back over to that building where you strung me up by that rope and left me hanging by my neck to choke to death.”
He let out a whine.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to hang you like you hanged me.” She swept a hand before him. “Put that thought right out of your mind. It seemed like an eternity to me as I was hanging there, unable to get a breath, choking to death, but I imagine that in reality it wouldn’t have taken long to die that way. It would have soon been over.”
“You see …” he said in defense, “we wanted you to die quickly. We had mercy on you to give you a quick death—so you would not suffer.”
“That’s nice,” she said, smiling down at him again, “but you haven’t earned the right to die quickly. What I’m going to do with you, my little rapist killer zealot, is strip you naked like I was, but rather than hang you by your neck, I’m going to hang you by that stump of a left arm.
“You know what I’m going to do then?” He was too transfixed by her to answer. “Then I’m going to let those dogs that tracked your scent back to your friends come in and have at you as you hang there, helpless.”
“Dogs … ?” he whined.
“A pack of big dogs like that will go all crazy wild over fresh meat. They will strip your leg muscles right off the bone and eat it while you watch, unable to do anything to stop it.
“Since you’ll be naked, the dominant dog will likely go for your genitals, first. Do you know what the English word ‘genitals’ means, Miguel?” When he didn’t answer, she jostled them with the tip of her knife. “It means these little boys here. Dogs like these tender parts. It’s a prized treat.”
Her voice was so calm, so soft, so sexy, that she was even frightening Jack.
The man under her cried out in realization of his ignoble fate. She let him weep and tremble for a moment; then she leaned in again.
“Do you want to know what else I’m going to do to you when you’re hanging there in that lonely building, much like you did to me? Hmm, Miguel?”
Terrified, he could only shake his head.
She poked his abdomen with her knife—not enough to stab him, but enough for him to feel it and flinch and for it to bleed. “I’m going to stick my knife into you, right down here, just enough for me to be able to reach in with a finger and hook your intestine, then I’ll pull out a few feet of it. Kind of like I did with your eyeball, ya know?
“I’m going to let that few feet of your gut dangle out of you while you hang there, helpless. Do you know why I’m going to do that? Because dogs love entrails. They’ll grab hold of that bit of your intestine and they’ll pull and pull, tugging more out, fighting over it, yanking, tossing their heads from side to side to get it free, pulling more and more of it out of you while some of the other dogs start to fight over your genitals, tearing at them from either side.
“Every agonizing day you hang there, still alive, the meat hanging off your bones, every horrifying hour, every terrifying, torturous second that will seem like it lasts forever, you will wish for nothing more from your god than to die a quick death. But your god will not come to grant you that quick death. The dogs, though, when they get hungry, will wake from their nap to rip some more meat from your bones.”
She grabbed his right wrist and twisted it. “And bones can hurt a lot, Miguel.” Jack could hear the bone in his broken forearm crunch and grind together as she twisted his wrist back and forth.
Miguel shrieked in pain, his cries turning to sobs at what awaited him. Jack could see that the man was starting to go into shock. She didn’t have much time left to get him to confess what he knew. He thought she knew it as well.
“So, Miguel, I’m going to give you this one last chance to spare yourself that very, very long, agonizing, humiliating death for nothing. One last chance to answer before we bring in the dogs. One last chance to tell me where your friends are—to tell me where they are building that bomb. One last chance to earn yourself a quick death so you can go be with Allah.
“But if you don’t want to tell me,” she said as she patted his cheek again, “that’s all right. We will simply go get the dogs and they will track your stink back to them in no time.”
She leaned in and looked into his eye. “Time’s up.”
Miguel shook and cried as he muttered prayers in Spanish.
Finally, he lifted his broken right arm over his chest and pointed the best he could to his left.
“I need more than that,” she said, sounding totally unimpressed.
“That way,” Miguel said, “the way you saw us coming from. Go that way until you get to the yard with all the train axles. Turn left. Go maybe three hundred meters until you see an alleyway to your right. If you look down that alleyway, you will see the end of a big brick building with an arched roof. You will see a rolling door on the end. That is where the others are.”
Angela looked back up at Jack. He nodded that he believed the man. Thinking they had tracking dogs meant they would quickly find where he had come from anyway. Tracking dogs meant he would suffer for nothing. That ruse had taken all the fight out of him. Resistance had become pointless in his mind.
“Do you remember my promise to all of you when you were beating me nearly to death?”
“No, señorita,” he whined.
She put the tip of her knife on his chest, just off to the left side of his breastbone. “I promised to kill all of you. Remember?”
He nodded reluctantly.
“You should have believed me. I’ve killed your three buddies—this one tonight and the other two when you drove up to my house. Remember? Only you are left. All your training, all that planning, and all that work you’ve all done is going to mean nothing now that you have betrayed all your friends.”
Angela rose up enough to put both hands on the end of the knife handle as she stiffened her arms. “Oh, and Miguel? I want you to know. We don’t have any dogs.”
He cried out at realizing he had been tricked.
She dropped her full weight onto the knife. It sliced his heart in half and he was dead in seconds.
Jack wiped sweat from his face. That was the most brutal interrogation he had ever witnessed. And he had witnessed a number of them in other countries. It was also the most efficient and effective.
This woman was utterly ruthless.
He could have stopped it at any time, and might have, except that he was now sure that these terrorists had a nuclear weapon, it was viable, and they were on the brink of using it. If that happened, New York City would become a radioactive wasteland. The electromagnetic pulse from that bomb would likely knock out all electronic and electrical devices for a large part of the East Coast.
The consequences for the country were unimaginable. The world would be forever changed.
At that moment, in this place, in a situation this incredibly dangerous, he doubted anyone but this girl with her knife could have gotten the information any faster. He didn’t really know anything about her life, but everything in her life had led her to being the right person in the right place at the right time.
In the end, it wasn’t really the torture; it was the trick she had played on him, the word picture she had painted in his mind about the dogs. The things she had already done gave her the credibility to make that trick work.
She had blood on her hands and arms almost up to her elbows. Her bare legs were smeared with blood.
“I know that what you just did was far from easy or pleasant. But I hope you will take comfort in knowing that you may just have saved the lives of countless people.”
“Are you kidding?” She swiped some hair off her cheek with the back of her wrist. The blood on her matched her lipstick. “I haven’t felt this alive for a long time.”
Jack again wondered who the hell he was dealing with.
Angela pointed off into a weedy area. “Help me drag these two over there.”
Jack peered off into the moonlit weeds. “Why?”
“We can’t afford to have any lookouts patrolling the area discover them and send up an alarm. There’s a cistern over there. We can dump them down inside.”
That actually made sense.
“How do you know there’s a cistern over there?” Jack asked as they each grabbed one of Miguel’s legs.
“Because,” she said as they dragged him close and dropped his legs, “I met a man once who dumped the body of a girl with red hair down there. I recognize the place from seeing it in his mind.”
Jack slid the heavy lid aside as he shot her a suspicious look. “What happened to him?”
“He went down a different hole.”
Jack was having a hard time keeping up with everything he was learning about her. It was obvious that her “interrogation” technique wasn’t something she’d thought up on the spot. Not many people would have had the stomach to do that to another human being, regardless of what they were guilty of.
She seemed to relish it. Of course, after what they had done to her, he supposed he couldn’t blame her.
Once they had dumped both men down into the cistern, Angela went back for the eyeball she had cut out and tossed it in. Jack slid the lid back on.
They needed to hurry and find the place where the men were building an atom bomb.
Jack hoped they weren’t already on the road with it.
“We had better get going,” he said. “We may not have much time to stop them.”