Brad Thor - Foreign Influence

Nicholas lunged for his wrench and struck the woman again. This time he tore open a wound along her forehead.

Harvath tallied his fourth hash mark. Nicholas would be allowed only one more swipe at her before he stepped in.

The Troll set the wrench down, quietly this time. “Do you know that man across from you?”

The woman didn’t reply.

“Of course you do. That’s Michael Lee,” Nicholas continued. “He’s the man you set up to take the fall as Tony Tsui if the heat ever got too close to you.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Do I need to pick the wrench back up, Adda? Or perhaps you would like to meet my dogs?” Nicholas snapped his fingers and the dogs began growling. “In fact, I’m going to even go so far as to suggest that the untimely demise of Lars Jagland wasn’t an accident, but that he somehow stumbled on to what you were up to and you killed him.”

To frighten the woman, Lee had been bound to the other column facing her. And in order to make him look like a real hostage, which in part he was, and also to make sure he didn’t say anything he shouldn’t, Harvath had placed a piece of duct tape across his mouth. The man now struggled against it. His eyes bulged as he cursed her and yelled from behind the tape.

“I agree with you. I think Lars was probably murdered, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I don’t believe you,” said the Troll. “I think he discovered what you were up to and you killed him. Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I have to hand it to you. The Tsui persona was exceptional. You not only had me fooled, but you covered your tracks quite well. And the icing on the cake was positioning Michael Lee to take the fall if things ever got bad. Brava.”

“I didn’t kill Lars,” Sterk insisted.

“But you’re not denying you set up Michael, are you?”

Sterk said nothing.

“I have no reason to believe anything you say. You tried to have me killed. What’s one more?”

Sterk remained silent.

“You always have a fallback, don’t you?” said Nicholas. “When the assassin you sent after me failed, you implicated me in the bombings in Rome. What about Paris? Are my fingerprints going to surface there too?”

At that moment, something in the woman’s face shifted.

Nicholas motioned his dogs over. “You really have been a very, very bad girl.”

“What are you going to do to me?” Sterk demanded.

“That depends on how you answer my questions.”

Is there another assassin looking for me?” asked Nicholas.

Sterk didn’t respond, and Nicholas bent down and picked up the wrench again.

“No,” she responded.

“None at all?”

“I’m sure you have plenty of enemies, but when Leveque’s woman in Spain failed to return, I assumed you had killed her and had gone deeper to ground.”

“So you moved to plan B: implicating me.”

The woman shook her head. “Alive or dead, you were always going to be implicated.”

“Why? Why implicate me?”

“My employers wanted a diversion.”

“Who hired you?”

“Someone I fear much more than you.”

Nicholas tapped the head of the wrench in his tiny palm. “I’ll give you one more chance.”

Sterk shook her head.

Nicholas brought back his tiny arm and swung.

The wrench met its target and blood began to pour from a tear behind the woman’s ear.

Harvath tallied his fifth and final hash mark on the column and stepped out from behind her. It was time for him to take over. Producing a roll of duct tape, he tore off a piece and placed it across her mouth. He then put the bag back over her head as Nicholas said to Sterk, “Oh my. Things are about to get very bad for you indeed.”

Harvath cut the rope binding her wrists to the support column, stripped the sheet from her naked body, and carried her back to the van. He had no idea what had triggered the asthma attack the first time. He suspected it was stress, though it could have been something else. Either way, he was determined to re-create the circumstances as closely as possible to bring about another one.

He tied her back down in the vehicle exactly as he had before and closed the door. From the front seat, he grabbed two water bottles and then searched the warehouse until he found a suitable length of hose.

The good thing about gasoline was that it was so pungent Harvath wouldn’t need much for what he had planned.

He made a big deal of banging around the rear of the van. He opened one of the water bottles and poured out some of the water. He then carefully siphoned a small amount of gasoline out of the van and into the bottle.

With Nicholas in tow, he stepped back around to the other side and opened the sliding door. He studied Sterk. Her breathing was rapid, as it should be for anyone in her situation. She was frightened. She wasn’t yet, though, suffering from another attack.

“You can’t do this,” said the Troll as Harvath stepped into the van. “What if you don’t just burn her, but you end up killing her?”

There was a long list of harsh interrogation techniques he could have tried on Sterk-sleep deprivation, stress postures, sensory bombardment, or even extreme cold-but he didn’t have the time. Frankly, after the beating the woman had taken from Nicholas, he was surprised she hadn’t already broken. She was a much tougher character than he had expected. He had no idea if she had undergone training to resist hostile interrogation or if she was just one tough woman. It didn’t matter. Everyone broke eventually, the key lay in discovering exactly how to break them and if time was of the essence, as it was here, how to do it as quickly as possible. Whether Adda Sterk was left physically or psychologically wounded by the ordeal was of no concern to Harvath. She held all the cards and could end the experience at any point she wanted.

The more one knew about one’s subject, the better equipped one was to carry out a successful interrogation. Considering the fact that up until several hours ago they had believed Adda Sterk was a young male hacker of Asian descent by the name of Tony Tsui, it was plain they didn’t have much to go on. But they did have one thing.

On the scale of harsh interrogation methods, one of the stronger tactics that can be employed is the exploitation of a prisoner’s phobias. The fact that Sterk was asthmatic left no question in Harvath’s mind that she harbored a fear that most asthmatics shared, asphyxia.

Opening the bottle filled with the gas-water mixture, he poured the contents over the woman’s hood. Panic quickly overtook her as she began writhing and struggling against her restraints.

He followed by pouring the second bottle of water over the rest of her body. Her nostrils were so filled with the scent of gasoline, she would assume that she was now covered with it from head to toe. The gas seeping into her hood had probably found its way into the open wounds around her face and head.

Harvath didn’t have to wait long. Whether there was some trigger like dog hair on the floor of the van, or if it was the stress of believing she was about to be set ablaze, Sterk was soon consumed by another intense asthma attack.

Lifting her from the van, he carried her several feet away and set her on the warehouse floor. He pulled the hood from her head and tore the tape from her mouth. He pulled out her inhaler and showed it to her. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

Gasping for air, Sterk nodded feverishly.

Harvath shook the inhaler, placed it in her mouth, and administered the medication.