Brad Thor - The Athena Project

Alex Cooper was standing outside the door to the room where Heger was being kept.

“Has he been prepped?” asked Rhodes.

“Just like you requested,” she replied. “We moved Skovajsa into the other room.”

“Hey,” said Vlcek. “I don’t want to end up being the creepy guy with a bunch of people tied up in his basement. Okay?”

“Too late,” stated Rhodes as she reached out and laid her hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “You did an awesome job tonight,” she told her teammate.

Cooper was uncomfortable with compliments. “Are you going to need any help in there?” she asked.

Rhodes shook her head and jabbed her thumb over her shoulder at Vlcek. “As long as he doesn’t faint on me, I think we’ll be okay.”

“All right then,” replied Cooper. “Gretch has got first watch upstairs, so I’m going to grab something to eat and then get a little sleep. Try to keep the screaming to a minimum.”

“A tall drink of water and a screamer,” said Vlcek as he shot Rhodes a look. “Apparently dreams do come true.”

“I wasn’t talking about her,” said Cooper.

“He knows that,” replied Rhodes. “He can’t help himself. Just ignore him.”

Alex shot Vlcek a look of her own and then headed up the stairs.

“There’s earplugs in the nightstand if you need them,” he called after her. “But I don’t mind if you want to listen. Everybody loves an audience.”

Rhodes looked at him. “Are you done now?”

“What’d I do?”

Ignoring him, she took a couple of deep breaths, got her head straight, and then opened the door.

Radek Heger had been tied down to one half of a set of bifold closet doors. The door and the prisoner had then been balanced on an ottoman Julie Ericsson had brought down from the living room.

Vlcek leaned in and whispered in Megan’s ear, “You’re going to waterboard the guy?”

She shook her head. “Just watch.”

Heger had a hood over his head and couldn’t see. When Cooper had reached his crumpled Range Rover he had indeed been wearing his seatbelt, but his air bag had deployed and he had suffered multiple injuries. One of the injuries was a shattered collarbone. Next to the femur, it was one of the most painful bones to break. When the patient was moved, the shards and fragments rubbed together, causing intense flames of pain to shoot throughout the body. Rhodes had decided to use that to their advantage.

With Julie Ericsson silently holding on near Heger’s feet so he couldn’t flip himself off the ottoman, Rhodes walked up to his head and bent down.

“Mr. Heger,” she said slowly. “You have sustained several very serious injuries. In addition to what you can probably gauge from self-assessment, we believe your back has been broken in three places and that you also have internal bleeding.”

Vlcek looked at Ericsson, who shook her head. Rhodes had planned to ramp everything up for maximum psychological impact. As the man carried nothing on his person to indicate that he had a wife, children, girlfriend, dog, or anything of any importance to him, she needed to leverage whatever else she could.

“It is important,” continued Megan, “that you cooperate with us. The sooner you do, the sooner we will be able to get you to an appropriate trauma facility.”

From beneath his hood, Heger rasped. “I’m going to kill you.”

Rhodes laughed. “I’ll make sure to send you a can of oil for your wheelchair so that you at least have a sporting chance of sneaking up on me.”

“I know who you are. All of you. I’m going to hunt you down and kill each of you.”

“Really?” said Megan. “That’s very interesting. Who are we?”

Heger didn’t answer.

“Yeah, I thought so,” she said to him. “You have no idea who we are and you have no idea where we’re from. But I’m going to assume you know what we want.”

“You’re Americans,” he rasped. “I know American accents.”

“To you, I sound American. To another, German,” she replied, changing her accent as she went. “To yet another I am Danish, Dutch, or South African. You see, who I am is unimportant, Mr. Heger. All that matters is what I want.

“We killed a lot of your men tonight. I want you to keep that at the forefront of your mind. The only reason you are alive is that I have let you live.

“We’re not very different, the two of us. You’re a businessman and I’m a businesswoman. I’m proposing a deal. You give me what I want and I will let you live.”

Under his hood, Heger laughed. “Of course you will. I can trust you.”

“Radek,” said Rhodes. “I am going to warn you once and only once. Do not play with me. I don’t like it.”

This made the man laugh even harder. It was nothing more than bluster, pure bravado. “The materials that were inside the bunker in Zbiroh. Where are they?” she asked.

“Go to hell,” the man hissed.

Megan looked at Julie Ericsson and said, “Okay, let him have it.”

Radek Heger screamed in pain as the weight of his body crushed down on his shattered collarbone. So far, Megan Rhodes had been true to her bet with Vlcek. Technically, she had not laid a hand on her prisoner.

Squatting so she could speak directly into his ear and be heard, Rhodes said, “They say the pain you are feeling is akin to being crucified, just upside down.”

Heger tried to choke back his screams.

“I can make it stop. Just tell me what I want to know.”

When Heger refused to answer, Rhodes took her thumb, jammed it down into his shoulder and dug it around. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for as the Czech’s body went rigid and he practically levitated off the board.

He screamed bloody murder as his head snapped to the side and he tried to bite Rhodes through his hood.

After a few more seconds of imposed agony, Megan nodded and Ericsson tilted him back up so he was lying flat.

Heger’s breathing came in rapid, short gasps. Rhodes allowed him a minute to catch his breath. She didn’t need to remove his hood to know that his face was wet with tears. She took no pleasure in aggravating the man’s pain, but he held the keys to his own deliverance.

“Radek,” she said when she thought he had calmed down enough to listen to her. “We’re going to keep doing this until you cooperate.”

“You are dead,” he mumbled from beneath his hood. “All of you will die.”

“Listen to me, Radek. Remember when I told you about the damage done to your back? Remember what I said about internal bleeding? What do you think happens to those injuries every time we tip you upside down like that?”

Heger didn’t respond.

“Sooner or later, you are going to tell me what I want to know. The only question is whether you decide it’s worth allowing yourself to become paralyzed, or worse, in the process.”

She gave him a moment to think about what she was offering. “It’s up to you, Radek. Why don’t you just tell me what I want to know?”

“Go to hell,” he spat again.

Rhodes signaled for Ericsson to tip him over again and she did, hard. The board bounced against the floor, his head bounced against the board, and he cried out again in agony.

She asked him once more what had happened to the contents of the bunker and when he refused to answer, she dug her thumb back into his pulverized collarbone and watched his body tense and then begin writhing as white-hot bolts of pain shot up and down his spine.

Several times, she offered him a chance to make it all stop, but he told her what she could do with her offers. Radek Heger was one tough SOB.