The lieutenant slapped his face. “The truth.”
McGarvey opened his eyes. “Fuck you.”
The lieutenant rolled the battery cart back. He dipped the sponges in the pitcher of water, flipped the power switch and jammed them against McGarvey’s bare chest.
A massive pain roared through Mac’s body, rebounding from the top of his skull; every muscle, even those controlling the movements of his eyes, went into spasms so tightly he thought for a split instant that his bones would break.
Suddenly it was over and he slumped back, any lingering effects of waterboarding completely gone.
“Your real name, please,” the lieutenant said.
“Fuck you!”
The lieutenant pushed the sponges onto McGarvey’s chest.
Mac heaved against the restraining straps and roared in pain. He kept screaming even after the lieutenant pulled the sponges away.
“Do I have your attention now?”
McGarvey let his head loll to the left so that he could see the door. The guards had not come despite the noise he’d made. He felt the strap around his right wrist and willed that arm to completely relax.
“Your real name. Let’s start there, or I’ll be forced to let the current run through your body much longer than one or two seconds.”
McGarvey shook his head. “Four-seven-nine,” he croaked, barely above a whisper.
The lieutenant flipped the power switch off and laid the wands on the cart. He bent down closer to McGarvey. “Four-seven-nine,” he said. “What comes next?”
The man’s breath smelled of onions and curry and something else unpleasant.
“What comes next?”
McGarvey slipped his right hand free. “Six,” he whispered.
The lieutenant bent even closer.
McGarvey suddenly reached up and clamped his hand around the lieutenant’s throat, compressing the carotid artery on one side.
The lieutenant tried to pull away, but McGarvey was strapped to the table and his grip was too powerful to break. Blood started to gush from where one of Mac’s fingertips broke through the man’s skin.
He got his other hand free and rolled halfway onto his side, grabbing the lieutenant’s neck with both hands, crushing the man’s larynx and compressing the other carotid artery. He looked into the man’s eyes.
“I told you that I would kill you.”
The light slowly faded from the lieutenant’s eyes, his faced turned a deep purple and finally his legs collapsed and McGarvey let him slump to the floor.
Torture was a useful tool if it was handled properly. The point was to hurt the prisoner but not damage him permanently, and certainly keep him well enough restrained that he couldn’t hurt his interrogator.
McGarvey undid the straps around his legs, got off the table and checked the lieutenant’s pulse, but there was none; the man was dead.
He listened at the door but there was nothing to be heard, so he went back to the lieutenant’s body, undressed it and got into the man’s clothes. The boots were a little tight, but not impossibly so, and the uniform blouse stank of sweat.
Strapping on the holster, he checked the pistol, which was an old American-issued nine-millimeter Beretta, with a full nine-round magazine and one in the chamber.
He listened again at the door for a moment, then eased it open. The corridor was empty, and for all intents and purposes the building could have been deserted or asleep. The red lights on the camera at both ends of the short corridor winked off. The system had just shut down, and the only reason why that he could think of, other than a system power failure, was Otto.
Slipping out he raced to the stairs at the end of the corridor and took them up two at a time, taking great care to make no noise.
At the top a steel door was closed but when he tested the handle it was not locked. He opened it a crack and looked out. A broad corridor led to the right, blocked by a gate about twenty feet away. A lone guard sat at a table, his back to the gate; beyond him was another steel door.
To the left about fifteen feet away was yet another door but no guard. No one was expecting trouble.
Moving on the balls of his feet McGarvey hurried to the left. He glanced over his shoulder, but the guard had not moved. The door was unlocked and Mac opened it and slipped through into an anteroom about ten feet on a side. Stairs led up to the left and another door, this one with a thick glass window, was straight ahead.
Outside was a covered driveway, a closed garage door to the left and a guard positioned behind glass directly across from it. Two uniformed men sat behind a slightly raised platform inside.
This was a sally port designed to admit prisoners into the building, where they would be taken directly below to the interrogation center.
The garage door rumbled open and a truck came in and stopped. Two armed soldiers got out of the back and stood aside as a half-dozen prisoners in ragged clothing, their wrists in manacles, their ankles shackled on short chains, emerged.
The man from the glass booth met the driver and had him sign something on a clipboard. He said something to the armed guards with the prisoners and the driver came across directly to the steel door.
McGarvey sprinted for the stairs and stopped halfway up.
The driver and the two armed guards and the prisoners came into the anteroom and started up the stairs.
FIFTY-FIVE
Pete walked out of the embassy and hurried down the long drive to Post One, where the two marines on duty had been advised she was on her way. They opened the small service gate, but neither of them said a word to her. She just nodded and headed down the street.
A military jeep turned the corner a half block away, but nothing else moved anywhere in the Red Zone so far as she could see.
It was possible that Austin was playing games with her, agreeing just to get her out of his hair, at least temporarily. And if she was to be picked up by the Pakistani police, so be it. Because of her diplomatic passport she would be sent home immediately.
But when she’d mentioned retaliation from Otto and from Kirk he’d got the message loud and clear. She’d seen it in his eyes. The man had a job to do here, but he was no fool, he had respect.
A block and a half farther she came to Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Road, the bridge across the Jinnah Stream, which flowed south into the lake to her left, when a red Mercedes C-class sedan with a taxi light on its roof came out of nowhere and pulled up at the curb.
The passenger-side front window was open and a familiar figure dressed in a Manchester United sweatshirt and jeans leaned over. “He’s already made his break, get in,” the driver said in a Texas accent.
“Milt, am I ever glad to see you,” Pete said and climbed into the backseat.
Milt Thomas was a deep-cover operative working for the CIA and the Islamabad police. His job for the local cops was to report on any passengers of interest he picked up either at the airport or the three hotels that catered mostly to foreigners. His job for the CIA over the past three years he’d been in country was the same. She and McGarvey had met him last year when they’d been on an op here.
“I talked to Otto three minutes ago. Mac’s on the move.”
“Where is he exactly?”
“Right at this moment we don’t know. But he was in an interrogation cell in the basement with Lieutenant Nabeel Khosa, who’s the ISI’s chief interrogator — read torturer—and just a few minutes ago he appeared at the doorway in Khosa’s uniform. Otto thinks he got the surveillance system shut down before Mac was spotted. Anyway, there’s been no alarm so far. Otto will warn us if it happens. He also wanted me to call him when I picked you up.”
“I hope you have a plan,” Pete said.