“Wayson, you cannot possibly expect anyone to believe that,” the man said, though something in the tone of his voice made me think that he might.
“I suppose if you didn’t know about the attack, the next question makes no sense. Still, you must be in contact with someone, Wayson. A bright man like you would not come out to the enemy fleet without telling somebody.”
Sighing slightly, the man climbed to his feet and I saw that he had the harness in his hands. There was a plastic bar in the middle of the harness. This he slipped into my mouth, pinning my tongue in place behind my teeth. I put up some resistance; but I was weak and he won easily enough. He laced the harness around my face then synched it to the strap across my forehead.
“Is there another spy on this ship?”
I could not speak, of course; and now that my face was bound and my breathing obstructed, my pulse, heartbeat, and stress readings were no doubt off the charts.
“Nothing to say for yourself?” the man said as he picked up the wand. This time he touched the wand to my throat, just below the corner of my jaw. The pain was all encompassing. My muscles clamped and my thoughts turned into a silver explosion.
The wand traveled slowly down my neck, over my collar-bone, and then paused just above my heart. The agony was exquisite. My hands clenched into fists, and my fists pounded involuntarily up and down between the table and the restraints. My jaw clamped down on that plastic bit. My eyes screwed into tiny slits, which was good because I lay staring up into that blinding light.
During the moment itself, as the stream of electricity seemed to stab into my body like an endless blade, I lost all thought and control. If the man had asked me a question and I had somehow been able to hear him and I was intelligent enough to understand and answer, I would have told him anything he wanted. I do not know if he asked questions during the torture itself. He must have known that I could not hear, could not think, could not speak. I lay on that table a straining, suffering, quivering mass, no more intelligent than the electricity that so overwhelmed my brain.
From my heart, the wand moved down across the flat of my stomach. Had I been cognizant, I would have worried about the man dragging that wand across my genitals, but he paused over my lower abdominal muscles, and then he placed the wand back on the table.
“Wayson, you just survived three minutes and twenty-two seconds of two thousand volts. If you were truly riding the lightning in an old-fashioned electric chair, your eyes would have melted and your hair would have caught on fire. Do you still say that you’ve never heard of Tuscany?” the man asked.
Thanks to the hormone, which likely flooded my veins in excessive quantities, my thoughts came back the moment the wand went away. I was in pain, no doubt about that. I felt worn out and weak, but I was back in control the moment the electricity stopped.
A whimper left my lips. I was not sure if it was real or I pretended it. I did not cry. I did not even whimper again. When the man removed the harness from my mouth, I whispered, “I did not know about Tuscany.”
“Is there another spy on this ship?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” All the strength left my body this time. I lay flat on the table without enough strength to so much as turn my head. A layer of sweat covered my body. The cold air in the office bit into my damp skin, but I was calm. The hormones left me calm and resigned.
“You know what, Harris,” the man said in a voice so informal that I might not have recognized it, “I think I believe you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Between the initial beating I received from Sam the jailor and the time that I woke up again inside my cell, nearly twenty-four hours had passed. The ringing in my head was the worst I had ever felt, but my body did not hurt too badly. Sam had left some nasty bruises on my ribs. That was the worst of it. My left bicep and right calf had deep charley horses where the interrogator stabbed me with his needles. As for the electrocution, some of my muscles were strained from fighting against the restraining straps. For the most part, I felt no worse than I would have felt after a really tough day at the gym.
During the time I was being interrogated, I caught a lucky break. The Confederate Arms sent ten ships to Odessa, a wealthy planet in the Sagittarius Arm that supported the Revolution. They did not intend to attack the planet, this was a blockade-running mission.
A flotilla of U.A. Navy destroyers and fighter carriers met them as they emerged. The Confederate ships tried to escape without engaging the Sagittarius Fleet. The U.A. ships followed. Two Hinode battleships were destroyed. The others fled until they could broadcast to safety.
Since I was deep in the bowels of the ship, stripped to my briefs and strapped to an interrogation table when the battle occurred, Crowley must have decided that I had nothing to do with it. The Confederate Arms said there was a leak in the chain of command and blamed the Mogats. The Mogats said that the Japanese should have been better prepared for the battle. I personally wanted all sides to blame Tom Halverson. With any luck, they might even shoot the bastard and me with the same firing squad.
The door down the hall opened. Someone walked toward my cell, his hard-soled shoes clanked against the metal grid floor. I did not bother climbing from my cot. At any moment, I thought, Sam would step into view. If he came close enough, I would kill him. I would snap his neck. I was marked to die anyway, and dying sooner might mean avoiding another torture session. So I lay on my cot facing the far wall of my cell, curled into a ball and acting defeated.
The steps stopped at the edge of my cell. “I have a gift for you, Colonel Harris,” Yamashiro said. “This is a gentleman’s gift. No one else needs to know that I gave it to you.”
For one wild moment I thought he had smuggled a gun into the brig. I spun over on my cot so that I faced him. Yamashiro stood right in front of my cell leaning forward into the bars. He held on to the bars with his right hand, and reached toward me with his left. That hand was cupped around something, my “gentleman’s gift.”
I sat up and stared through the bars at the man. Our eyes met for a moment, then he nodded down toward the gift he had offered me. I stood and approached.
“You’re not supposed to stand so close to the bars,” I said. “It’s dangerous. A prisoner could grab your arm and pin you against the bars.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Yamashiro said. As I drew closer and looked at his offered hand, I noticed the calloused skin along the edge of it. A short and powerful build, sandpaper hands—these were the signs of training in judo or jujitsu.
Yamashiro turned his hand so that the palm faced up. His fingers still curled over the gift hiding it. As I approached, the fingers spread revealing their secret. I saw nuggets of glass and wadded up wires that looked like they were made of gold. Yamashiro smiled. “It was a fine magic trick.”
Seconds passed as I stared at that hand filled with sparkling gems of broken glass, my heart sinking in my chest. Then I realized that the pulverized mediaLink shades he held had gold frames. The ones I left on the bridge had cheap black plastic frames. “A young ensign found them in a communications station on the bridge.”
“Then you have more than one spy on your hands,” I said. “I’ve never seen those before.”
Yamashiro’s smile spread. “No? The shades you left had black frames. These were the best I could do on short notice.” He closed his fist again and pulled his hand back through the bars.
“Where are the real ones?” I asked.
“Right where you left them,” Yamashiro said. “I thought they might be more valuable just as you left them. Having unseen ears can be a powerful tool.”
I worried about Halverson setting a trap by giving faux orders in range of those shades. I imagined intelligence relaying those orders to Huang and Huang sending the Doctrinaire into an ambush. What kind of trap could stop a ship like that? Then I remembered that Yamashiro had called this a “gentleman’s gift.” Why had he come and why had he not told Crowley about my little trick?