Jeff Abbott: Adrenaline

The smallest circle, painted in red, marked my desk, in the center of the office.

“The bomb was planted right under your desk. It was disguised to look like a small external hard drive, plugged into your system.”

I stared at the map of destruction.

“Lucy handled all the hard drive installs in the office.”

“No.”

“How easy it must have been for her. Did she set up the bomb right under your boss’s nose, James’s nose, Victoria’s nose? Your nose?”

Each word felt like a knife sliding under my skin.

“The bomb is placed where Lucy can most easily hide it without anyone noticing. Did she feel some guilt, sentencing her husband, the father of her child, to death? So she warns you. You walk out right before the explosion.” In case I didn’t understand the implication.

“Shut up,” I said. I had not snapped or growled at anyone. I had focused and kept my calm while pleading my innocence. But this. Now. I couldn’t take it. “Shut up, shut up, shut the hell up.”

“Help me prove this woman a traitor. Think. Think of what you must have known. Try to remember.” This woman. Not calling her Lucy, not calling her my wife. Trying to establish an otherness for her, a separation between us. No.

“Lucy is innocent.” My voice wasn’t calm. The bomb being planted under my desk unnerved me.

“Then maybe you’re the one who’s the bad guy,” he said. “Maybe you’re framing her. Maybe you planted the bomb. Did you have someone take her away? Kill her and your own child?”

The rage, buried in me, surged like a killing fever. I wanted to strangle the lies out of his throat. I am starting to crack. I saw my hands start to shake. I felt heat rise in my eyes. But I couldn’t break. He wanted me to surrender control. I wouldn’t. “There has to be another explanation,” I said.

“That explanation is Lucy. The money. The bomb. It points to Lucy. She had the access to the account. She could have smuggled in the bomb.” His voice slid, low and soft. Howell had the barest Southern accent. “I am your only friend left, Sam. The rest of the Company and our British friends want to see you burn. I will help you but not unless you help me.” I saw how damned I was in their narrow gaze. The evidence of the financial account. The bomb, hidden in a way that Lucy or I could have done it. That was all they needed. I was screwed, even being innocent.

“You will never see the outside of this prison again if you don’t tell me what you know. Stop protecting Lucy, or stop protecting what you thought she was.”

He wanted me to call Lucy a traitor. To agree with him, to accept this impossible possibility. “No. She’s innocent. That man took her.”

“She got you out of there and then she left you behind. She betrayed her country and then she betrayed you.”

“No.”

Howell slapped me. Hard. I didn’t expect it because he looked like a professor, and professors don’t slap. “That’s reality, coming and waking you up, Sam. Tell me what you know.”

“Don’t be an idiot. If I wanted to bomb the building I wouldn’t have been there. I would have been long gone. You know I’m innocent, and you’re just going through the motions because it’s easier to lean on me than to go find the real bad guys. I have no deal to make because I have nothing to give.”

“Then you are a prize fool.” He left and then he came back five minutes later with a cold bottle of water. Beads crowned the plastic. And I wanted it so badly. He set it down in front of me but I didn’t reach for it.

“I want you,” he said, “to entertain the possibility that nothing you knew about Lucy Capra was true.”

Tears welled at the back of my eyes. I won’t let him see, I thought. But cameras were pointed at me, all the time. He would see me weep on tape. I kept my face still; kept the tears inside. For now. I would wait for the darkness, for the safety of the crook of my elbow. I would not let them see me hurt.

He watched me, like he’d trumped my hand. “I know you’re thirsty. You haven’t had water in three days. Did you know it had been that long? Drink up, Sam. I want your throat working. You have things to tell me.”

I took the water. I drank it. And as I finished, he pulled out the earphones, the eye covers. Two women wheeled in the cart with the meds.

Sodium thiopental, scopolamine, experimentals. Say hello to my blood. Maybe they gave me all of them-I felt more than one needle slide under my skin. Howell asked his soft questions again, and this time I heard other voices asking me the same, and I told them the bone-marrow truth: I do not know. I am not a traitor. I never did anything wrong. I babbled answers to every question about my life with Lucy. I told them about our lovemaking, our friends in London, our trips back home, any times she went to the Continent to explore on her own. I didn’t know what she did in those weeks I was undercover, playing a role in Prague, pretending to be a smuggler looking for illicit goods to ship. I told them whatever was in my brain. I became an oil spill of words.

But there was the bomb, and there was the Caymans account, and that was enough. I must have known more, they decided. I must have had suspicions. Howell kept saying he wanted to believe me, like that belief topped his Christmas list. I said I knew nothing.

So they moved on past the chemicals.

The eye covers-which completely cut off my vision-made me feel like I’d been dropped into a hole that never ended. The earphones blasted music into my head: a hell’s jukebox of saccharine ballads, brain-crushing psychedelic rock I didn’t recognize, teeth-rattling rap. The rest of the time the sound was this high-pitched noise that made every nerve feel like it was sparking, like a broken cable. I lost all track of time, of place, of any sense that I remained tethered to the world.

The cure for that was pain. Howell wasn’t there when guards came in and they beat me for a solid ten minutes. Fists and feet. It was an expert ass-kicking. They didn’t mar my face but the rest of me purpled into a bruise. I curled into a ball. They gave me water, let me spit out a gob of blood. They looked at the gob as though gauging how much more I could take before passing a limit. Then they beat me again, kicking me harder. My spine and my legs felt on the verge of breaking. They were delightfully precise, careful not to break my ribs or my chin or my spine.

They asked the same questions. I gave the same answers.

I don’t know how long I resisted the sensory deprivation treatments. Minutes under the noise and the blackness can feel like endless hours.

Lucy. The Bundle that was a boy. That was the thread I seized, the scant hope that I would be believed. They had to be searching for her, desperately. They would find her, and when they did, they would find the answers. The explanation as to why Lucy and I were framed, why they took Lucy, why they destroyed the Holborn office. Find the line, just like on the parkour runs. There was a line to the truth. I just had to find it.

They left me alone with my pain for a few hours and then they returned and they dragged me into another room. They strapped me to a flat piece of wood. It moved. I felt my feet rise. My head descended toward the stone floor.

No, no, no. I fought against the straps. The sensory deprivation was allowed. It remained legal. This, no.

It wasn’t Howell standing above me, a cloth in one hand, a bucket in the other. The man wore a hood. I didn’t know his voice. I screamed for Howell.

“Mr. Howell isn’t here,” the hooded man said.

“Please don’t. Please.” I’d been through this before, in training. I knew what horror was coming and I struggled against the bonds, panic exploding in my chest like a mine. Because with the water on your face, you say what you have to. And if you know nothing, you truly know nothing, you will babble any torrent of words to get it to stop. You will tell any lie.