Marc Cameron - Act of Terror

Palmer pointed to the doorway with an open hand. “They’re through there.”

A single lightbulb tried feebly to fight away the darkness. Thin tan carpet did little to absorb the sound of their footfalls on the creaky wood. The walls to the stairway were painted glossy white and adorned with a cluttered mix of more family photographs. The broken frames and glass of two lay shattered on the steps, indicating a struggle. The moldy, metallic smell of terror and urine met Quinn on a wall of dank air from below.

“So, the woman who lived here is one of the victims,” Quinn said, half to himself. The air grew moist as they made their way single file down the stairs-it was cooler, but no more comfortable. Even surrounded by people he knew, the heaviness in the house made him grateful for the familiar bulk of a pistol under his jacket.

“Brilliant police work.” Kurt Bodington stepped around a concrete block wall at the bottom of the steps. “I suddenly find myself surrounded by crack investigators.” A sneer dripped from his voice. Quinn had never met the director of the FBI but found it easy to dislike him instantly. The man was, after all, a lawyer.

Palmer stepped closer to a silent Hispanic woman who’d come around the corner behind Bodington. She was tall, with an athletic build that reminded Quinn of a lifeguard. A shimmering dark blue blouse accented the light tan of her suit. Sensible shoes, as black as her hair, made Quinn think she might be FBI. The hint of humility in her amber-flecked eyes made him wonder.

“Agent Veronica Garcia with the CIA,” Palmer said. “She’s the one who discovered the bodies this morning.”

“Has an uncanny habit of being at the wrong place at precisely the right moment, if you ask me,” Bodington grumbled.

Garcia shrugged off the insult, but her eyes flashed daggers. She kept her hands clasped behind her back, as if to restrain them from slapping Director Bodington.

“Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Garcia.” Quinn raised his blue glove. “I’d shake your hand, but… anyhow, anyone who Director Bodington dislikes is a friend of mine…”

“Let’s get to the yolk of the egg,” Palmer said, jaw muscles clenching as he glared at both men. “You two can duel at high noon after this is over.”

Virginia Ross stepped around the corner of an unfinished Sheetrock wall. Thibodaux gave Quinn a tiny nod, agreeing with Arnie’s earlier assessment. More academic than clandestine operator, Ross wore fancy blue pumps, navy slacks, and a yellow blouse. Smallish shoulders and broad hips made her look like an inverted blueberry ice cream cone.

Operator or not, she was more savvy in the ways of politics than Bodington, and enough of a spy to project a measure of tense civility.

“Officer Garcia was conducting a background check on Agent Arbakova. She stopped by a little after seven this morning and stumbled onto this interrogation site-”

“Interrogation site…” Quinn mused as they rounded the corner into the stark light of the open basement. It was interesting that Palmer had introduced Garcia as an agent, but her boss had called her “officer.”

Bodington breathed in quickly through his nose, mouth clenched in a tight line, as if disgusted at having to discuss such things with anyone outside his own realm of control.

“Interrogation site?” Thibodaux whispered, swaying like a giant tree as he took in the gruesome sight in front of them. “Is that what we’re calling this now?”

The nude body of a dead man hung upside down in the center of the ten-by-twenty-foot unfinished basement room. His swollen feet were tied together by rough cords draped over a fearsome metal hook in an exposed rafter. Bare copper wires looped around each big toe, then ran to a small, gas-powered welding generator on a folding table a few feet away. The dead man’s fingertips were raw and bloody from clawing at the rough concrete floor. His head-down position had caused his belly to distend horribly. His face was puffed and unrecognizable. Pooling fluids leaked from his nose and gaping mouth to the bare concrete below. A closer inspection revealed circular electric burns to his groin and wrists as well as his ankles. The wires around each big toe sunk deeply into charred, blackened flesh.

Quinn had seen this sort of thing before. A colonel in the Afghan KHED had suspected a teenage goatherd of involvement with the Taliban. The evidence against the kid had been overwhelming, but many Afghans like him had been pressed into service. Few possessed the zeal of their Saudi and Chechen compatriots and gave up information easily.

Quinn had arrived too late to stop the interrogation. The colonel had hung the nude boy from a rafter by his feet, run copper wires to his big toes and increased the voltage until he twitched like a marionette. “The Dance of Death,” the colonel had called it.

The colonel had been from Hazara-a tribe particularly mistreated by the primarily Pashtun Taliban. The boy was Pashtun-and that had been enough to kill him, no matter what he’d known or hadn’t known.

Quinn studied the man hanging from the hook in front of him. Like the KHED colonel, whoever had done this had had an agenda beyond interrogation. The depth of human cruelty never ceased to amaze him, even though he himself had caused the death of more than a few enemies of his country-and even a certain amount of pain.

This was not an interrogation. This was someone’s entertainment.

Quinn stepped closer to the hanging body, studying the scorched flesh behind the dead man’s knees. There came a point in any “enhanced” interrogation when the subject would say anything to stop the pain. That point had come and gone with this one long before the torture had stopped. Anyone trained by an American intelligence agency would know that-if they even cared.

“We know who he was?” Quinn said.

“One of ours,” Virginia Ross said, eyes darting nervously around the room. She took a tentative step closer to the body. Her eyes suddenly locked on the congealing pool of fluids under the dead man’s yawning mouth, she seemed not to know where to put her feet. Her words came in short spurts with a hard swallow in between each phrase. “Tom Haddad… he was an analyst… assigned to the Middle East desk.”

“Is his name on Congressman Drake’s list?” Quinn asked, knowing the answer before it came.

“It is,” Ross said, swallowing again. “He transferred back to Langley from Cairo three months ago.”

Quinn turned to look at Bodington, but said nothing.

The FBI director returned his glare for a long moment before shaking his head. “We weren’t looking at him for anything, if that’s what you were thinking.”

Quinn didn’t know whether to believe either director. It wasn’t unheard of for the Bureau to watch Agency assets without informing their bosses-or vice versa, though the CIA wasn’t supposed to conduct operations on American soil. Quinn did a lot of things he wasn’t “supposed” to do, so he naturally assumed the CIA did what was necessary to get the job done.

“If he’s not on anyone’s radar, how’d he get on the list?” Thibodaux asked. “Maybe he really was a mole.”

“We’ve yet to figure that one out,” Palmer said grimly, nodding toward an empty chair with shreds of duct tape at the arms and legs. “There’s one more.”

Someone had been tied there, likely made to watch.

“Worse than this?” Thibodaux moaned. He turned to Quinn. “I’m gonna need one of my grandmama’s good-luck gris-gris bags to protect me. This place is chockablock full of evil, beb.”

“It’s a woman.” Palmer held open the door to a small unfinished storeroom. “This is… was her house.”