The man had only advanced a few feet into the doorway, but he stood funny, as if one side of his body were heavier than the other.
“What’s wrong?” Graham asked, reading the expression on the man’s face as one of anger. “I’m right here.”
“I knew where you were,” the man said. He showed an odd smile, an unnerving smile. Then he shifted his weight to point something at Graham.
At first, it registered to Graham as a gun. He started to dive for cover, but before he could hit the floor, a spray of high-pressure water was on the way. The sheer volume of the flow told Graham that it was from a fire hose. When the solid pillar of water hit him in his chest, it threw him backward and down onto the floor.
The stream pummeled him with bruising force, knocking the air from his lungs. When the man redirected the stream to his face, Graham brought his hands up to protect his eyes. Even with his face covered, the water got into his nose and mouth and choked him. The act of coughing brought in more water, and he thought he was drowning.
The pillar of water shifted in an instant, and then it started tearing up his belly and his legs. Again, he tried to cover up, but then the stream returned to his face. As soon as he covered it, the stream went back to his balls. This asshole in the doorway was having a great time.
Graham rolled on the floor to turn his back to his attacker. The force of the stream pushed him across the floor until he was pressed up against the far wall.
Still the hydraulic beating continued, raking the length of his body, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. This went on for at least two minutes. There’d be brief respites of five, ten, maybe fifteen seconds when the water stream wasn’t being driven directly into his body, but the flow continued.
And then it stopped, a smash cut from full on to full off.
The attacker didn’t say a word before he left. Graham heard the door close and the lock slide back into place. Then all he heard were the sounds of water dripping and draining and puddling. It was a sound that was worse than silence.
When he was sure he was alone again, he rolled away from the wall and onto his back, and from there to a sitting position. Water ran from everywhere. Where it wasn’t running off a surface, it dripped in a rapid, staccato rhythm that might as well have been a stream. He sat in a puddle that was at least an inch deep, maybe deeper. He could not have been more soaked, not if he had jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool. Every surface of the room was soaked, in fact. Not a dry square inch to be found anywhere.
As he rose to his feet, he noted that the water was deep enough to cover his toes. When he walked, his feet created tiny bow waves that rippled across the width of the room.
When the coolers kicked on again, he understood what they were doing.
They were going to freeze him to death.
Anton Datsik sat at his desk in the study of his modest home in Arlington, Virginia, playing solitaire on his computer as he waited for the phone call that had to come soon if it were to be of any use. When it arrived, he answered on the first ring. “Tell me you have news I want to hear,” he said.
“I do,” the woman said. “We know where the boy is. He’s in the custody of the Chechens as we speak. There’s an old meatpacking plant in Detroit.” She gave him the address.
“How do you know this?” Datsik asked.
“I just know,” she said.
“Who else knows?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Does your boss know?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Or if she does, I don’t know how. My sources and hers are entirely different. And mine are much more reliable.”
Datsik typed the address into his computer to check out the location. It was both urban and accessible. He checked the clock. “How long has he been there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one hour. Not much more, I don’t believe.”
“Are you there on the scene?”
“I am not.”
“They cannot be allowed to leave,” Datsik said.
“I believe that is what the Agency hired you for.” There was defiance in her voice this time that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t like it. “I have done my part,” she said. “I have delivered him to you. Now be sure to tell—”
Datsik clicked off. He knew what she was going to ask and didn’t need for that to be out in space for the NSA to listen to. Besides, he had more pressing matters to attend to.
Using a different phone — an encrypted satellite phone that was dedicated to a single purpose — he dialed a number and waited.
Philip Baxter answered on the second ring. “Yes,” he said.
“The clock is ticking,” Datsik said. “I need a plane, eight parachutes, and a pilot who has no memory.”
Baker paused. In the background, Datsik could hear the sound of a television. Sounded like a romance. “Do you know what time it is? How am I—”
“I can end this tonight,” Datsik said. “But I have to work quickly. Telling you the truth, it might already be too late. In two or three more hours, this will either be over, or the world will have nuclear-capable terrorists. All of that, my friend, is on your shoulders.”
He deliberately used the most provocative words he could conjure.
“Your team is ready?”
“It is.”
Another pause. “I’ll get back to you in ten minutes,” Baxter said.
LeBron hadn’t exaggerated. His crib was indeed just a few hundred feet away, the first house on the corner. It took LeBron and his crew less time to walk the distance than it took Boxers to drive. Big Guy parked the Expedition in the alley behind the house and locked the doors.
“Somebody steals this car, they’re gonna get quite a stash,” Boxers said.
It was a hell of point, but they didn’t have a lot of choice. Jonathan was betting on the fact that within the neighborhood, stealing from LeBron was understood to be a bad decision.
“Maybe I should stay out here and guard it,” Boxers offered.
“I’d rather you be inside,” Jonathan said. “It’s only the two of us this time around, and we’re on a really tight clock. I want your opinions.”
Boxers laughed. “Are you really going to plan an 0300 op off the word of a bunch of gangbangers?”
Jonathan scowled. “It’s local intel. We do it all the time. These guys know more about their neighborhood than we do.”
“We don’t even know if the guys they don’t like inside that factory are the same guys we don’t like.”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.” This wasn’t like Big Guy. “Why’s there a bug up your ass on this?”
Boxers started to speak, then changed his mind.
“Talk to me, Box.”
“You know we’re gonna get screwed in this thing, right?” Boxers said. “We’ve got government agencies fighting each other for a piece of this pie, and we’re the ones in the middle who don’t officially give a shit about the outcome so long as we extract the PC from the bad guys.”
Jonathan shrugged. “That’s what we do,” he said. “We’re mission oriented, not politically oriented.”
“Big words,” Boxers said. “Where are you going to be when we’re in the middle of a crossfire between FBI and CIA?”
Jonathan recognized that his answer would seem obtuse, but he didn’t mean it that way. “We’re going to save the PC,” he said. Really, it was the most obvious thing in the world. “The alternative is to let the PC die. That won’t happen. Not on my watch.”
“And what do we do about the bodies that bear government credentials?”
“We say that they shouldn’t have tried to kill a child.” Even in the most cynical corners of the most corrupt governments on the planet — of which, unfortunately, the United States was numbered, thanks to the Dar-mond administration — it was understood that children were not to be harmed in political operations.