Mike stood up. "Well," he said.
Kenai interrupted him with one hand held up, palm out.
The door opened and Rick stuck his head back in. "I'll take a look at the Arabian Knight's scripts again, too, Kenai."
"You bet," Kenai said. "Just in case," Rick said. "You bet," Kenai said again. Rick nodded and withdrew.
With a sigh, Bill said, "Why he's commander, I guess." Laurel looked at Joel. "Just how bad do we need to launch this frickin' satellite, anyway?"
Only she didn't say frickin'.
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA
"He woke up on the C-12," Patrick told Kallendorf on the phone. "He shouted a bunch of questions, in the worst English accent you've ever heard, and in German. We didn't answer him."
Kallendorf was impatient. "You didn't feed him, you didn't water him, you let him pee and shit where he sat. SOP, Patrick, I get it. What's he saying?"
"It's only been a day and a half, sir. We haven't even gotten him to admit to his own name yet. We have to be patient."
"Patient, my ass!" Kallendorf said.
The bellow was clearly audible all the way across the room. Bob and Mary pretended not to hear. Ahmed, clearly enjoying himself, made a fist and pretended to jerk off, rolling his eyes and letting his tongue loll out of his mouth.
"Isa's got a timetable, Patrick, which means our clock is ticking, too. You make that little son of a bitch squeal like Ned Beatty in Deliverance or you tell him I'll be down there myself to bite his nuts off with my teeth!"
Kallendorf slammed the phone down. His ears ringing slightly, Patrick replaced the receiver and heaved a relieved sigh. It could have been a lot worse.
Ahmed grinned at him. Bob, a short, hairless man with bulging biceps, looked at the ceiling. Mary, even shorter and thin almost to the point of emaciation, looked at the floor.
Robert Shadura was an ex-Ranger who had seen action under fire from Panama to Beruit to Afghanistan. When he had to retire, he'd settled in New York and done consulting work with an international security agency that specialized in the return of kidnapped American businessmen, which subsidized his basement flat on the Upper West Side. He entertained no leftover angst from any of the wars he had fought in, had no drinking habit, no family, and his only sin was a lust for Harley hogs, three of which were parked in a rented garage off Canal Street and one of which was an antique, a 1912 8XE V-Twin Legend, lovingly restored, that was worth over a hundred grand. He wouldn't have taken a million for it.
He was also a gifted actor. In the South Side Players, the amateur theatrical group to which he belonged, he was famous for his portrayal of Macbeth in the Scots play, and he doubled as choreographer for all the fight scenes in all the plays the South Side Players produced. He looked thirty-five, was actually fifty-two, and dated an unending series of beautiful actresses. All such relationships ended amicably, and one so blessed had been known to say in an awed, grateful voice, "I never met a man with such control!"
On occasion, at the behest of his country, Bob left the Harleys and the actresses behind for short periods of time when he allowed himself to be called back into service as an interrogator, a skill he had perfected in Iraq.
"Before we were so rudely interrupted," Patrick said. "You were saying?"
Bob, one of those admirable underlings with no interest, prurient or otherwise, in the doings of his superiors, resumed his narrative without so much as a blink. "He says he was going to Mexico on vacation. He says he never heard of Isa. He says he's a German national, he is innocent of any wrongdoing, and he demands to see his consul."
"How does he explain the forged Canadian passport in the name of Baghel Maysara?"
"He doesn't."
"He doesn't yet," Mary said, her voice as wispy as her appearance.
Mary Maria Santangelo weighed about a quarter of what Bob did, who was at least twice her age, and the closest she'd ever come to the armed services was an ROTC troop drilling on the Harvard quad when her date walked her home to her dorm on the Radcliffe campus. She looked like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Persephone stepped down from the frame, only rather less well-nourished. A massive quantity of black hair was bundled back in a ponytail so heavy it looked as if it should bend her slender neck backwards from the sheer weight of it all.
Mary was a history major, with a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. She had an eidetic memory and to the distinct disapprobation of his superiors Ahmed had made Mary free of the CIA files on terrorism. With her training in history she was able to digest massive quantities of data to place people into a proper context and events into a proper chronology. The result was an eerie ability to pull the one tiny nugget of information necessary to nudge an interrogatee over the edge from intransigence to cooperation. There were times when it seemed she could read people's minds. She'd been called a witch, and more than one detainee had made the sign to warn off evil in her presence.
She and Bob had two things in common: an unparalleled ability to elicit information from unwilling witnesses, and a long list of lovers.
Make that three. They both liked women.
Mary was also an intuitive chameleon, with the ability to become whatever the detainee wanted at the moment of his greatest need.
They worked extremely well together, bringing in results where other gator teams threw up their hands and walked away. When Ahmed had asked Patrick who he wanted for gators, Patrick's answer had been instantaneous. "Bob and Mary."
Ahmed had looked and felt doubtful. "They can be a little volatile."
"They can be spontaneously combustible," Patrick had said. "But we want results fast, and we want lethal information, right?
Intel that produced the death of a known terrorist. "Yes," Ahmed said, "we want lethal information."
"Bob and Mary are the best interrogators in the business. They trained half the people in Task Force 145. They'll get it done."
"You want him to get the full treatment?"
"Everything," Patrick said. "I want this guy scared. I want him thinking Abu Ghraib's still in business, and that he's got a front-row cell reserved just for him. I want him thinking we're sending him to Egypt or Romania for questioning if he doesn't talk to us in Gitmo. I want him scared shitless, Ahmed."
Looking at them now, Patrick saw nothing inherently terrifying in either Bob or Mary. Well, between the biceps and the tattoos, he might have been afraid of Bob if he'd bumped into him outside a biker bar. Mary, an ethereal waif with large, dark, tip-tilted eyes that looked always on the verge of tears, not to mention bony hips that looked always on the verge of slipping out of her inevitable low-rider jeans, didn't look strong enough to swat a fly, let alone scare the shit out of a hardened terrorist.
But they were the best. "We don't have a lot of time, folks," he said.
Bob and Mary exchanged an expressionless look. "How did you pick him up?"
"Idiot used his own name on an email. One of our guys was running a new program on a random e-comm search. I'd just sent out the BOTLF on our friend here, and his pal Yussuf, and their boss Isa. The guy inputs the names and runs the search, which-okay, this is as much as I understand. This program has the ability to search for hot-button words on the Internet, words like 'bin Laden' and 'al Qaeda' and-"
"'Isa,"'Ahmed said.
"Yes, and 'Isa,' and this program can also trace them back to their originating server. Always supposing they aren't smart enough to route it through a couple of other servers to mess up the data trail."
"And he wasn't smart enough."
"He's been keeping his head down for six months. I think the serenity of his existence might have led him to believe that he was invisible."
"Ah," Bob said, "one of those." He smiled at Mary. "Ladies first?"