Brad Thor - The Athena Project

Ericsson grinned. “Then I’m glad it worked out the way it did.”

“Me too.”

“Eighth floor,” said Rhodes as the elevator slowed to a stop. “Golf clubs, pool supplies, ladies’ lingerie.”

Casey was just about to ask her if she could silence the chime, when the doors opened and the noise was conspicuously absent. “I should have silenced it for you upstairs,” said Rhodes. “My bad. Hallway all clear. Go get him.”

“Go to sterile comms,” replied Casey as she stepped off the elevator, her pistol up and ready. Immediately, the entire team fell silent. They would communicate via a language of predetermined clicks.

There were three apartments per floor. Branko Kojic’s was at the end of the hall.

“Are you able to do this?” Casey asked. “After what happened on the roof, if you’re not up for it, I understand. We can switch.”

“I’m good,” said Ericsson as she handed Gretchen her gun, took off her boots, and then unzipped and removed her jumpsuit. She was wearing black lace panties and a matching bra.

Running her fingers through her hair, she asked. “How do I look?”

Casey, who was no slouch in the looks department, couldn’t hold a candle to Ericsson’s body. “If I was a guy and you turned up on my doorstep looking like that,” said Casey. “I’d be buying whatever it was you were selling.”

Ericsson rolled her eyes. “Let’s just hope he’s not gay.”

Gretchen smiled as she stepped out of the way. “As long as he opens the door, that’s all we care about.”

Once Casey stepped off to the side with her boots and jumpsuit, Ericsson adjusted her lingerie, making sure her panties rode high on her hips and her bra put everything on perfect display. Then she rang Kojic’s doorbell and stood back just far enough to give him an eyeful.

Branko Kojic answered the door in a short, black silk bathrobe embroidered with a dragon. He had a potbelly, a hairy gray chest, and a receding hairline. The sound of a soccer game came from a TV somewhere inside his unit.

Julie Ericsson didn’t give him a chance to speak. “Do you speak English?” she asked, glancing nervously over her shoulder and then back at him. “I’m visiting and I got locked out. I can’t go downstairs like this. Can I use your phone?”

By the look on Kojic’s face, he definitely wasn’t gay. He liked what he saw, a lot. Had she been a man, even a man in his underwear, he would have told him to wait outside in the hall for security, but he wasn’t going to do that to this gorgeous woman. No way. Besides, she was in her underwear. She couldn’t possibly pose any harm to him. What’s more, this was going to be one hell of a story. No one was ever going to believe it. “Yes,” he stammered. “I speak English. Would you like to come in? You may use my phone and I’ll give you something to put on.”

Ericsson stood on her tiptoes, ostensibly to look over his shoulder and into his condo. The provocative move only accentuated the length of her legs and the tautness of her body. “It sounds like you have company,” she replied. “Maybe I should ask one of the other neighbors.”

“No, no, no,” Kojic insisted. “I’m all alone. That’s just the television.”

“Well, in that case,” she said, stepping inside.

The man tried to move out of her way to let her pass and they had an awkward moment as she brushed against him in the doorway.

She stepped back into the hall and said, “After you.”

Kojic smiled and retreated into his unit. As he did, Ericsson stepped in front of the door so he couldn’t slam it shut. That’s when Casey sprang.

“Not a word,” she ordered, her Glock leveled at Kojic’s head as she burst into his condo. “Down on the floor. Do it now!”

Kojic did as he was told.

Casey produced a set of FlexCuffs and handed Ericsson her weapon. When the Serbian was fully prone, she bound his hands behind his back. “If you make one single sound, I will kill you. Do you understand that?”

Kojic nodded.

“Good.”

Julie retrieved her clothes from the hall and stepped back inside. As she locked the door behind her and got dressed, she said over the radio, “We’re in.”

Casey cleared the expensive condo room by room to make sure that they were indeed alone.

When she came back to the entry hall, Ericsson asked, “Where do you want to do this?”

From their walkthrough with the realtor that day, they knew that most residents had panic buttons located throughout their units. The last thing they needed was for Kojic to get near one.

Casey looked around as she thought about it. “Let’s use the guest bathroom.”

Helping him to his feet, they led him down the hall to the bathroom. Pushing the door open with the toe of her boot, Casey turned on the light and then knocked the much larger Kojic to his knees in front of the bidet.

“What do you want from me?” he said. “Who are you?”

“I told you not to talk,” said Casey, as she kicked him in the ribs. She didn’t necessarily like to get violent, but she could when she had to. Interrogations were a power game, especially between men and women. She could be just as efficient as Megan when it came to interrogating suspects, but she could be a lot more physical, even brutal if the situation called for it. Megan was much more patient.

The thing she had learned early on was to assert her dominance right from the beginning and to answer any challenge to it in the harshest of terms. Some people were slower than others, but once they realized that they were going to get whacked for disobeying or challenging your authority, the challenges stopped pretty quickly. It was only the most hardened subjects who seemed to like it rougher. She didn’t want this to get too rough, but if it had to, she was willing to go there.

“Branko,” she said as the man looked up at her, “I’m going to ask you a series of questions.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” he offered.

“Shut up.”

Kojic closed his mouth.

“I know more about you than you realize. If you lie to me, I will be very upset. Do you understand me?”

Kojic nodded.

“Good. I want to talk to you about a man named Radek Heger.”

“I don’t know any man named Heger.”

Casey looked at Ericsson. “Lift his robe up.”

“My robe? Why do you want to-” his voice trailed off as Ericsson bent down and flipped the robe up, exposing his thong underwear.

“Lying makes me angry, Branko,” said Casey. “When I get angry, things get worse for you. You just lied to me, so now, as promised, things are going to get worse.”

Julie reached over and pulled so hard, she ripped the man’s thong off.

“What are you doing?” he implored.

“First, I want to hear you lie to me again. Tell me you don’t know Radek Heger.”

“I don’t. I don’t know him.”

Ericsson grabbed him by the back of the neck and pressed his cheek against the bidet.

Most stress postures worked across all cultural boundaries. Sexual humiliation, though, was different. It worked very well with more religiously oriented cultures, in particular with Muslim fundamentalists. But Western males weren’t turned off or threatened by female sexuality.

What they were doing with Kojic was a hybrid the Athena Team program had developed. They called it the prison posture. When men were naked and bent over, it had a profound psychological impact on 97 percent of them. It was an incredibly vulnerable position. The key was what the interrogator did next.