“Do you want him in an interrogation room?” Colonel Wintrem asked.
Holmes nodded. “But one with a desk and something comfortable for Mancur.”
“Comfortable?” the colonel asked, cocking the only eyebrow he had on display.
“Yes. I think he’s had quite enough for one day.”
Wintrem pivoted sharply and made a crisp exit.
Holmes sensed disapproval. Didn’t care.
He turned back to the large screen as the last of Mancur’s fingers was unbound from the wooden armrest. The first thing the detainee did was shake out his hand, as if he’d suffered a shock. In a manner of speaking, he had.
Mancur stood on his own power. Not all of them did after they’d been through a round with Tire Iron and the canine corps.
Holmes saw a mix of fear and fury in Mancur’s expression. Even as the deputy director took note of that, the younger man expressed open disgust when Tire Iron directed two guards to chain him up once more. The full treatment followed: cuffs on the wrists and ankles, and the encumbering chain that linked them both.
Poor son of a bitch.
Holmes didn’t have an ounce of pity for the guilty. String ’em up and let ’em swing. But Mancur appeared to be innocent, unless he was a complete psychopath capable of beating the most sophisticated devices ever designed to test a man’s honesty. Holmes doubted that. But he knew that Mancur’s abuse by his government would likely have stripped the detainee of any lofty illusions about the intelligence services — the world in which he was about to be offered a post.
Yet Holmes had been around long enough to know that it was absolutely necessary for Mancur to have suffered the deepest, most abject fear of what could happen to him, if he was to have even the slimmest hope of surviving as a U.S. operative. The deputy director knew it was optimistic to even think that the Saudi would sign on, given the open resentment he continued to see on the man’s face. But if Mancur were to agree to work for the government that had just put him through his miseries, he might well have to draw on visceral hatred of the U.S. to prove himself to the enemy in the near future. Hatred, in those circumstances, could be a real survival tool. Sometimes the only one you had left.
Holmes buzzed Donna Warnes to check if Agent Anders had returned. He had ordered her to take a breather after witnessing Mancur’s “testing,” the clinical term used for the process that their prisoner had endured.
“She’s just walked in,” Donna replied formally.
“Tell her we’ll be meeting with Mancur momentarily.”
Tire Iron marched Ruhi out to the corridor. Only after starting back to the elevator — and breathing fresh air for the first time in an hour — did he realize that he’d been saturated with the dog’s scent when the beast had climbed on top of him and tried to rip off his face. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to stand the sight of another dog. Like many Muslims, even lapsed ones, he’d had no great love of them to begin with.
As he passed the kennel, now on his right, he picked up a strong whiff of the scent again — and braced himself for the beast crashing against the cyclone fence. But the animal was either giving him a pass or busy terrorizing some other poor slob.
As he waited for the elevator, he told Tire Iron that he’d urinated on himself.
“Because you’re a pussy,” the behemoth responded.
But after taking him up to another floor unmarked on the elevator panel, Tire Iron and the other guard led him into a room with tall, slate-gray lockers. A man entered with a change of clothes, damp facecloth, and towel.
Ruhi’s cuffs and manacles were removed, and he was ordered to strip down and clean up. Unchained, but hardly unguarded — all three men surrounded him. Each wielded a Taser. He gave them no cause to use it.
Freshly attired, and feeling much less foul, Ruhi was escorted farther down the hallway by the same two guards who had been with him throughout his ordeal. They led him into another room that was about half the size of the one in which he’d been subjected to the dog. It was also furnished differently. A utilitarian-looking metal desk sat in front of the wall that he faced upon entry. A high-backed leather chair rose behind it, and an armchair squatted to the side.
The guards sat Ruhi directly in front of the desk. Though less cushy than the other two chairs, it was still a step up from where he’d last perched.
The room also, thankfully, contained none of the apparatus for waterboarding that had given Ruhi such pause earlier — and no doubt had provided near-death experiences for other detainees.
At the very least, where he now sat contained the veneer of civilization. But then again, he reminded himself, so had America until the attack.
Lana’s pulse was racing as she worked on Mancur’s computers. She’d just found the cyber equivalent of a military feint — a deceptive move designed to throw off an investigator — and batted it down. The success, which felt pivotal, came after two hours of intricate efforts so intense that the time that had passed might have been no more than ten minutes. She’d been lost in the underworld of the cybersphere.
But lost only to time, because she felt certain that she was getting closer to key data. She didn’t know that empirically but sensed it much as blood-spatter analysts, after poring through hundreds of photographs and lab results, might find themselves beginning to read the direction and intensity of a fatal blow. For Lana, it was purely intuitive at this point — and wholly gratifying.
She called Jensen. “I need the last code we wrote for our foreign friends,” she said elliptically, unwilling to trust phones when the much more sophisticated cybersecurity of the country had been compromised so fatally.
“It’s on the way, even as we speak,” Jensen said. “Thar she blows.” Always a nautical man at heart.
With an even faster “Thanks,” Lana hung up and put to work the most advanced tools of her trade bit by bit.
“Or should I say byte by byte?”
She often talked to herself when the trail warmed up. A good sign, and recognizing the sound of her own voice made her smile.
As she neared her quarry, she reminded herself that hackers came up with complex schemes and programs, but nothing in the universe was as molecularly complex as a human’s cerebral cortex. And right now, she was putting every bit—“Or should I say byte?”—of hers into action.
She was still smiling.
Holmes adjusted his tie before entering the interrogation room. He always did that, believing he was according a detainee a degree of dignity by appearing before him as well attired as he would for the president. After what constituted a mock torture session, a man could feel all hugger-mugger. They’d already started to grant him at least a semblance of control when they permitted him to clean up. Now, if Holmes was right about Mancur, the next step to letting him reclaim his manhood would come by giving him a chance to vent. That’s why, for the moment, he’d meet alone with him. Well, strictly speaking, the guards would be there, but not Agent Anders.
The overriding truth of the seconds before they brought Mancur into the room was that Holmes had liked what he had seen of him. Ruhi, as he was beginning to think of him, had not broken under pressure.
What Holmes did not expect was how fast Mancur would pounce. As Holmes stepped into the room, Ruhi’s guards stood back from the chained detainee.
Mancur took one look at Holmes and yelled, “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re a player. You reek of it, and you should know that I’m innocent before you put any goddamn dogs near me again.”
Holmes didn’t respond immediately, and when he did he surprised not only Mancur but the man’s warders.