Barry Eisler - Requiem for an Assassin

Demeere took the towel from Pancho. Pancho looked at Dox and said, “You’re lucky, pendejo. This time.”

Dox smiled and said something in Spanish again. Pancho’s nostrils twitched and he strained forward like a Doberman on a leash.

“Outside,” Hilger said.

Pancho shook his head. “No, I’m okay. If you’re not going to let me do it, at least let me watch. I want to hear him blubbering with his voice as high as a little girl’s.”

“Out,” Hilger said again.

Pancho shot one more glance at Dox, then nodded and started to head for the door. Dox said, “I’m going to miss you, Uncle Fester. Y’all come back and visit, you hear?”

Then Demeere was lifting Dox’s head, wrapping the towel around it with clinical ease. Dox tried to twist away, but the reflex was useless. Guthrie stood astride him on the table and turned on the hose. He looked at Hilger. Hilger nodded.

Guthrie aimed the hose onto Dox’s chest. The cold water hit the towel and immediately soaked through it. Dox twisted his head left and right, but Guthrie kept the water flowing onto the towel. A minute passed, during which Hilger knew Dox was holding his breath. Then suddenly the big man was choking and coughing, his body bucking against the table and the restraints around his wrists and ankles. Guthrie kept the water flowing for a few more seconds, then diverted it to the side.

The advantage of the towel was that it modulated the amount of water the subject could actually swallow, while still causing suffocation and thus the sensation of drowning. The sensation was what you wanted because that was enough to produce the panic response. Actual drowning was counterproductive because when you’re unconscious, you’re no longer panicking, and being revived from drowning can sometimes produce euphoria-not exactly the goal of a hostile interrogation. Actual drowning was also risky: if the subject died, you sure as hell couldn’t interrogate him. Besides, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save Abdul the terrorist suspect you were torturing a minute earlier wasn’t considered good form in the community.

“Anything you want to tell me?” Hilger said, no more loudly than was necessary to get Dox’s attention. “Or do you want to do it again?”

The coughing subsided, but Dox didn’t answer. Hilger nodded to Guthrie, who turned the hose onto Dox’s face again.

They repeated the process twice more, then again. On the fifth time, when Guthrie diverted the hose, they saw vomit flowing from under the towel. Hilger judged this the right moment. If they went on much longer, panic would be replaced by exhaustion, and Hilger would have to change to more brutal tactics, which he preferred not to do-more, he recognized, for his own sake than for Dox’s.

Hilger nodded to Demeere, who stepped in and peeled the towel away. Guthrie hosed the mess off Dox’s face. Dox jerked back and forth, blindly trying to avoid the spray. Guthrie turned aside the hose. Dox wheezed and gagged, then threw up again with a choking, strangled scream.

“Nothing funny to say?” Hilger asked, and was immediately ashamed of himself.

But Dox was past humor now. His chest heaved in the cadences of barely controlled panic. His teeth were chattering and his hands shook in their manacles. His breath whistled in and out in whimpers, and Hilger realized the man was crying.

Hilger pushed aside his shame and disgust. He leaned forward and said, “I don’t want to know where he is, just how to contact him.”

Dox shook his head.

Hilger said, “You’ve already held out longer than Khaled Sheikh fucking Mohammed, you know that? And he held out as long as anyone I’ve ever seen. But no one can hold out against this forever. No one. Why don’t you tell me what I need to know. Otherwise we’re going to do it again. And again.”

Hilger waited a long moment, then nodded to Demeere. The Belgian stepped forward with the towel. He lifted Dox’s head, but Dox shook free.

“All right!” Dox shouted, his voice hoarse. “All right.” He let out a stream of foul words that Hilger had never heard strung together quite so inventively, not even during his time with the linguistically creative men of Third Special Forces in the first Gulf War.

They waited. When the invective had subsided, Dox said, “It’s a secure bulletin board.” He told them the URL, and Demeere wrote it down.

“How often does he check it?” Hilger asked.

“I don’t know. We’re not in touch that often. I’d guess once a day, if that.”

“Good. That means we’ve got twenty-four hours.”

“For what?”

“For Rain to get back to us. If I haven’t heard from him by then, I’ll assume what you’ve given me is inaccurate. In which case, I’ll have to ask you again. And probably not as nicely as I did just now.”

Dox turned his head and spat. “Yeah? What are you going to do, behead me and sell the videotape to Al Jazeera?”

Hilger looked at him. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

“Really? Why don’t you tell me the difference? Because I can’t see it.”

Hilger waited a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was cold.

“The ends,” he said. He was still looking at Dox, but it was Rain he was thinking of. “It’s all about the ends.”

ALTHOUGH THE martial arts world is vastly bigger today than it was when I got started in judo in the seventies, I still had to be careful. My face was known not only at the Kodokan in Tokyo, but also at Carlinhos Gracie’s jiu-jitsu academy, where I’d trained obsessively for the year I’d lived in Rio. No one at either club knew my name, but if someone from either happened to be training in Paris, I didn’t want to deal with questions about what I was doing here or where I was living.

There’s a cost/benefit equation in all decisions, though, and my need to train was strong enough to outweigh the risks involved. It wasn’t just a question of keeping my skills sharp, although that was part of it. Like my nocturnal excursions, training soothed an anxious part of me. So I worked out five afternoons a week at a place called the RD Sporting Club, on the boulevard Saint-Denis near the Saint-Martin canal. The club had a variety of equipment-mats, gloves, bags-and plenty of tough partners to train with. And I was glad for the opportunity to use my French, too.

Every day, usually after a workout, I would stop by an Internet café, always a different one, to check the bulletin board I used with Dox. We weren’t in touch that often, but I liked the routine. I’d done something similar for a long time with Midori before our rupture, at which point I’d shut that board down. I realized afterward that I missed the possibility of a message, that I had grown used to living with the pleasure of a small quotidian hope.

I almost hated to admit it, because Dox’s boisterousness, wise-cracking, and willingness to wing it on tradecraft drove me crazy, but he was now as close a friend as I’d ever had. I hadn’t much cared for him when we’d first met, in Afghanistan. He was damn capable in the field, but his constant antics and outsized personality grated on me. Then, a few years ago, some elements in the CIA had tried to draw on the Afghan connection in sending Dox after me in Rio. Instead, the two of us wound up working together. The partnership was of necessity at first, and I distrusted him. But at Kwai Chung harbor in Hong Kong, he’d walked away from a bag with five million dollars in it to save my life. With that one remarkable act, he’d blasted through my defenses and altered my whole worldview. I still struggled with the aftermath. Would I have done the same for him? Today I wouldn’t hesitate, but at the time…no, I had to admit, at the time I wouldn’t have. I didn’t trust anyone back then, didn’t think anyone was worthy of trust. I believed in preemptive betrayal. There was a line I heard in a movie once: “Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight…or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight.” That was me. There was nothing wrong with betrayal, just with letting the other guy beat you to it. But Dox had changed my view. The only person I could think of who had affected me as profoundly was Delilah.