If his interrogators came close enough, he would spit in their faces. With luck, they would become enraged enough to beat him into unconsciousness.
The door swung open, and — after uncounted hours in semi-darkness — even the relatively weak florescent light from the corridor was enough to make Sonam’s eyes blink and water. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was not in for another encounter with the soldiers. This was something different.
The man standing in the open doorway was small framed, and very neat in appearance. He was Chinese, like the soldiers, but the resemblance seemed to end with that. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and he had none of the swagger of the military men. There was nothing brutish-looking about him. He looked like a clerk, or a petty bureaucrat. The man’s eyes were lifeless, like the eyes of a doll. His features were quite ordinary, and his expression appeared to signal mild indifference.
Squinting toward this unremarkable figure, Sonam wondered if the little man had wandered in by mistake.
He was still puzzling over this new development when another man entered the room, carrying a black nylon zipper bag and a small wooden folding table. Like the clerk, this man was dressed in civilian clothes. He quickly erected the table, laid the nylon bag on the tabletop, and exited the room, closing the door behind him.
The clerk did not look at the black bag, but Sonam felt his own eyes drawn to it. The nylon was scuffed, and the seams were gray with hard use. He knew suddenly that the expressionless little man was not a clerk, and — with equal suddenness — he realized that he did not want to see what was inside that bag.
The little man spoke without preamble. “I will ask you questions,” he said. His voice was low and inflectionless. He did not mangle the Tibetan language, as so many of the Chinese did. Unlike Sonam, whose speech was shaded by the Indian influence of Dharamsala, the man had almost no accent.
Sonam stared at him without speaking.
“You will answer my questions,” the little man said. “Please understand that this is not a boast, and it is not a prediction. It is a simple statement of fact. You will answer my questions.”
Still, Sonam said nothing.
The man walked to the table and unzipped the nylon bag. He looked up at Sonam, his face as impassive as ever. “You may answer my questions now, in relative comfort, or you can answer them six hours from now, when you have no fingers, no testicles, no eyes, and your throat is raw from screaming.”
Sonam knew instinctively that these were not empty threats. There was no hint of malice in the man’s voice, but there was not a trace of mercy either.
The man reached into the nylon bag, and pulled out a pair of long-handled pliers with a heavy-looking square head. “I will ask you questions,” he said again. He opened and closed the pliers several times, as though testing the movement of the metal jaws. “The first time you refuse to answer, I will clamp these upon the index finger of your right hand, and I will crush it to a bloody pulp.”
He stared directly into Sonam’s eyes. “Do you understand?”
Sonam’s head began to nod almost of its own accord, but he caught himself and held his muscles rigid. He would not answer, even with a gesture.
The little man stepped forward, stopping within easy reach of the chair.
Sonam remembered his plan to spit in the face of his torturer. The man was certainly close enough now, but Sonam’s mouth had gone dry. He could not summon a single drop of saliva.
He flinched as the man grasped his right hand. He tried to jerk his hand away, but his forearms were strapped to the arms of the chair at wrist and elbow.
The steel jaws of the pliers were cold as they closed around his finger, midway between the second and third knuckles. There was a brief twinge of discomfort as the serrated teeth of tool pinched his skin, but the little man adjusted the alignment of the pliers, and the sensation vanished.
Sonam saw it when it happened, the minute shift in posture as the little man tensed the muscles of his upper body and rammed the handles of the pliers together.
The pain ripped through Sonam, piercing him as deeply and profoundly as the Chinese rifle bullet had done. The bone in his finger splintered and gave way with an obscenely liquid crack that he heard and felt with equal clarity. His vision narrowed, and then collapsed upon itself until all he could see was a searing pinprick of blood-colored light.
His mouth was flooded with the bitter taste of adrenaline, and still the steel jaws continued to move toward each other — crunching through shards of bone, crushing muscle, tendon, and flesh into a formless mass of pulverized meat.
The heavy square jaws met, the section of finger between them smashed into a ribbon of bloody gel. But the pliers were not finished yet. They twisted and pulled, opening and closing repeatedly, like a crocodile trying to get a better grip on the prey trapped between its teeth. The metal jaws worked their way upward and downward from their starting place, searching for undamaged bits of the mangled finger, finding the broken ends of shattered bones, grinding everything to ragged mush.
Sonam’s finger — the thing that had once been his finger — became the very center of the universe. It eclipsed everything. There was nothing else. No life. No world. No thought. Only the ravenous metal jaws, and the pain.
It took him at least a minute to realize that he was screaming. High-pitched keening wails that sounded more animal than human. It took him a minute or two more to force himself to stop. At last, he managed to bring it under control, and he sagged against the straps of the chair, sobbing.
Distantly, through the pounding roar of his pain, he heard the voice of the little man.
“I prefer to begin with a small demonstration,” the voice said. “Something effective enough to gain your attention, but small enough for you to recover from if you choose to cooperate.”
There was still no malice in the man’s speech. No suggestion of threat, and no flavor of sadism. This was not the voice of a man who caused pain for his own pleasure. It was the voice of unconditional confidence, and flawless willpower. And Sonam knew that the little man would not give up the task until his objective had been met. He would not beat his victim into unconsciousness, and he would not make stupid mistakes. He would work methodically and meticulously, and he absolutely would not stop until he had the information he had come for. It would happen now, while there was still enough of Sonam’s body left intact to call itself human, or it would happen hours from now, when there was very little remaining but pain and shredded flesh.
“We will begin again,” the little man said. “I will ask you questions, and you will answer them. Do you understand?”
Sonam nodded.
“Good,” the little man said. “The site of my next demonstration will be your left testicle. If you lie to me, or if you refuse to answer my questions again, I crush your testicle just as thoroughly as I have crushed your finger. Do you understand?”
Sonam nodded again. “I…” His voice was a guttural croak. “I will… tell you… what you want to know…”
“Yes,” the little man said quietly. “I know you will.”
CHAPTER 4