Scott saw Hicks decide it was senseless to argue anymore.
Hicks sighed. “Fine. C’mon, Weatherman. Looks like you’re going to learn the fine art of persuasion.”
Tuesday, December 30
I-25, Southern Colorado
Oneness. Wholeness. Completeness. With the first explosion that had rocked Platte River Stadium, Hakeem’s doppelgänger had died. Now he was free to live as a single, united person. The elation he felt was almost more than he could stand.
He rolled down the car window and let the 75 mph arctic blast hit him full in the face. He yelled out into the darkness, “I am Hakeem Qasim, from the honorable family of Qasim! Fear me! Fear my family! Fear my people!”
Quickly the rushing air became too much for him, and he rolled the window back up, switched on the heated seats, and cranked the heater to full blast. He laughed at his impetuousness. More emotions than he knew what to do with.
He felt the brass coin hanging from his neck, now icy to the touch. Uncle, I have done it! Thank you for giving me the strength to take revenge.
The late-model Lexus RX 350 hummed southward along I-25. The SUV was the last luxury he had allowed himself from his old life. His only disappointment was that the man who had kept it for him the three weeks since he had bought it had been a smoker. But Hakeem had a hard time feeling any anger. Five hours ago, the man had become shahid-the third of the seven martyrs at Platte River Stadium.
But there weren’t seven martyrs, were there? Hakeem cursed the second man, whose bomb had failed to go off. If he had been a coward or had been killed before completing his mission, Hakeem hoped Allah would deal with him terribly. If he had been caught, then it could mean trouble. Either way, Hakeem knew he had better keep watching his back.
He saw another mile marker and calculated the time till he arrived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at just under four hours. There he would look for the Holiday Inn Express on South Valley Drive. After parking, some “friends” would approach him, give him a forged American passport, and then usher him across the border into Mexico. This was the only part of the plan that made him nervous-mainly because it was the only part of the plan that was out of his control.
Once in Mexico, Hakeem would be taken south to Mexico City. There he would use another forged passport-this one from the Estados Unidos Mexicanos-to board a flight across the ocean to where he would receive a hero’s welcome. He couldn’t wait to get home and reexperience his youth-the taste of the food his mother had cooked, the smell of the men after a long day’s work, the feel of a prayer rug under his knees.
Hakeem knew the celebration would be short-lived. His goal was not to go back and live a hero’s life. He was only going back to reconnect and regroup. Soon it would be time to return to America; there was still work to be done here.
Hicks, Scott, and Khadi stood in the hall outside the door to the interrogation room.
“Remind me to scratch Porter off my Christmas list,” Hicks grumbled.
“Yeah; like I warned you, he’s a class-A horse’s… uh… patoot,” Scott said, changing course midsentence on Khadi’s behalf.
For her part, Khadi did nothing to acknowledge Scott’s act of gallantry.
Scott continued. “Obviously, Porter and the higher-ups want no new marks on this guy. Probably so they can splash his picture across the media outlets like a prize trout on the cover of Field & Stream. So, since I’m obviously new to this, is this a situation where you would consider something like waterboarding?”
“Could be,” Hick replied. “But I’m not in the mood for the mess. I’ve got something else in mind. It’s a little process I learned from Amos Tsarfati, a friend of mine in the Mossad. I spent a few weeks with him not long ago on a sort of technique exchange program. You ever heard of ‘shaking’?”
“Shaking?” Khadi jumped in. “Isn’t that dangerous? I remember some Palestinian guy getting killed during a shaking. As a result, the Israeli Supreme Court banned it. It’s been out of their playbook since ’99.”
“Has it? Guess Amos didn’t get the memo.”
“I’ve heard of shaking, but I guess I’m not sure exactly what it means,” Scott said. He wasn’t thrilled about the direction things seemed to be heading.
“What does it sound like?” Hicks asked.
“Like grabbing hold of someone and shaking him,” Scott answered.
“Bingo!”
“But can just shaking a person really get him to talk?”
“Trust me, when I’m done this guy won’t be talking-he’ll be singing. Khadi, I want you right next to me, so you don’t miss a word he might mutter. Weatherman, you find a corner and enjoy the show.”
As they walked through the door, Khadi gave an inquisitive look to Scott. “Weatherman?”
“It’s a long story.”
Hicks strode across the room, sat on the corner of the table, and pushed the prisoner’s chair back with his foot. He stared at the would-be martyr for more than a minute. The man defiantly stared back. Then Hicks uttered one word: “Al-Hazz?”
Scott recognized the Arabic term for “shaking,” and he saw a brief flash of fear in the prisoner’s eyes. Almost immediately, the man regained his composure.
Hicks leaned closer until he was less than a foot away from the man’s face. “Al-Hazz?”
This time the man tried to spit his defiance into Hicks’s face, but his mouth was so swollen that it mostly dropped on his chin.
Hicks merely smiled and nodded. “Al-Hazz it is.” He stood and grabbed the man’s collar. He called back to Scott while Khadi gave a simultaneous interpretation to the prisoner, “Mr. Ross, the goal of al-Hazz is to shake long enough that it causes severe pain but not so long that it causes lethal intracranial bleeding. It’s a fine line that admittedly I’ve never quite gotten the hang of.”
Hicks began violently shaking the man backward and forward. The man’s head flopped like a rag doll’s. Hicks continued to shake him for fifteen seconds, and then abruptly stopped. The man’s brain, however, continued its movement for another moment. That, combined with the damage already done to his face and head, caused the man to scream out in pain.
“Who is your contact?” Hicks yelled in the man’s face as Khadi translated the words in his ear.
The man gradually got control of himself, but his head continued lolling up and down. Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet Hicks’s. Again he futilely tried to spit in Hicks’s face.
Hicks grabbed the man’s collar and began shaking him again. This time the man’s screams began early on and continued far beyond the twenty seconds of violence.
“Who is your contact?” Hicks repeated.
Now when he tried spitting, the terrorist could only weakly puff out air.
Hicks grabbed the man’s face in his right hand, making sure that his thumb pressed hard into the man’s shattered left cheek. “You’re going to tell me what I want to know. It’s simply a question of how much you’re going to make me work.”
Scott shifted from one foot to the other as he watched this from his little corner of the room. He wasn’t squeamish. Less than two weeks ago he had pinned a man’s hand to a bench with his knife. He knew there were things that needed to be done to get this all-important information. But that didn’t mean he needed to stand here and watch it. Just because he was going to eat a burger didn’t mean he needed to watch them slaughter the cow. He slipped out the door and began walking down the hallway.
Porter stepped out of the viewing room and yelled after him, “Ross, get back here! I told you to stay in that room!”
Scott had had it. He was finished watching Hicks torture the suspect. He needed some air, and no amount of yelling or threatening was going to make him turn around. Over his shoulder, he displayed a hand gesture that expressed his disagreement with Porter’s suggestion. He regretted it immediately, but there was no taking it back. He continued walking, slowly picking up his pace, until he burst through the front door.