Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t.”

“Well,” I said, and I cleared my throat, “I wish I could believe that. But you’ve lost all credibility. If you ever had any to begin with. Is this some kind of a scam that you’re helping him pull off?”

“Nick, will you listen to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d love to hear your explanation. And while you’re at it, maybe you can tell me how you justify putting Gabe through the hell you’ve put him through.”

“Nick,” she said. “I didn’t know what happened to Roger until last night. I didn’t know anything more than you did. Yes, I admit it – I’ve been concealing a few things from you – but if you’d just hear me out–”

“Last night,” I interrupted. “That was the first time you heard from him?”

“Check my phone records.”

“He called you? E-mailed you?”

“He sent me a text message. With a number to call.” She lifted her purse from the floor, began rummaging through it. “Here, you can check my phone’s text-message in-box if you don’t believe me.”

“So where is he?”

“He said he’s being held somewhere in Georgia.”

Paladin’s training facility and headquarters were in Georgia, I realized. “Yet he was able to call you?”

“Yes.”

“And he was able to receive a call from my father. What kind of imprisonment is that?”

“He didn’t say he was in any kind of prison. Or even that he was a hostage.”

“He said he was ‘being held,’ isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s what he said. He kept saying he had to make it fast, that he only had a minute to talk – I had the feeling that wherever he was they didn’t know he had a phone. But listen – the main thing is, he said they were going to release him.”

“ ‘Release’ him.”

“That they were going to let him go free, finally. They were going to make a deal.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask – there wasn’t time, and I didn’t know how freely he could talk.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“I don’t know, Nick. He just said that I should be careful, I shouldn’t do anything or make any phone calls or screw things up in any way, and they were going to let him go free. I mean, we talked for maybe a minute before he hung up.”

“You must be relieved to hear from him.”

“Of course I’m relieved. This has been a nightmare.”

“You’re getting your husband back,” I said.

For a long time she was quiet. “The truth is that our marriage has been over for a while now.”

I felt something cold begin to coil in the pit of my stomach. “I see.” That didn’t surprise me. But it did surprise me to hear her say it.

“I mean, ever since I found out about that affair he had – I haven’t been able to forgive him. We haven’t had a romantic life. He’s still a great dad to Gabe, though, and–”

I stood up. “You know what, Lauren? I don’t really care anymore.”

The Surgeon unfolded his black canvas surgical instrument kit and removed his favorite scalpel, a Miltex MeisterHand #3. He carefully inserted a blade made of the finest carbon steel.

Marjorie Ogonowski was crying, the sound muffled by the duct tape over her mouth. Her hands and feet were bound to the bedposts by means of duct tape, too.

He’d left her glasses on so that she could see him clearly.

She’d stopped struggling a few minutes ago, but when she saw him put on the latex gloves, her writhing grew frenzied, her screams agonized. Seeing the scalpel escalated her terror considerably. But that was to be expected. One of the maxims of what was often euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” was that the fear of pain was always far more effective than the pain itself.

Of course, he wasn’t actually a surgeon – he’d been expelled from medical school after an unpleasantness he didn’t like to think about – but he’d gotten the nickname at Bagram, in Afghanistan. The CIA had needed to hire outside contractors to conduct interrogations in their secret prisons, in order to insulate the Agency politically. He’d so impressed his employers that they later sent him to Abu Ghraib. But when that whole mess became public, he’d been hung out to dry. There wasn’t much call for his talents in the private sector. He was fortunate to have been hired by one of the few buyers out there, Paladin Worldwide.

Torture – to call it by its true name – was a greatly misunderstood art. It had become politically correct in recent years, during the backlash to the war in Iraq, to claim that torture didn’t work. But if torture didn’t work, why had mankind been using it for thousands of years? Why had all those members of the French Resistance given up the names of their comrades, even their own family members, under Nazi torture? Torture was only ineffective if it wasn’t done right. This wasn’t just a matter of creative techniques. You needed people skills. You had to know how to read people and how to establish your authority.

He spoke softly, calmly, as he always did. To raise your voice was to lose control. “Let’s try this again. Mr. Heller was out of town, and you needed to reach him urgently, isn’t that right? I believe you were working on a big acquisition. A power plant in São Paolo. Yes? Nod if I’m correct.”

Her eyes were wide, and tears spilled down her face. She gave an exaggerated nod, up down, up down.

“Something had come up suddenly. You needed to reach him right away. But he was out of the office on a personal day. Correct?”

She nodded.

“There was a big mergers-and-acquisitions committee meeting first thing the next morning, and the slide deck had already been prepared, but you found something in the due-diligence process that you were afraid might derail the acquisition. A showstopper, you thought. Am I right?”

She nodded slowly. He could tell that she was puzzled as to how he knew this. Let alone who he was.

There is nothing we fear so much as the unknown, and the Surgeon was not going to enlighten her.

“But you had no way to reach him. You needed to reach him immediately, but he didn’t have his cell phone with him. You couldn’t e-mail him on his BlackBerry, because he didn’t have that with him either. Am I right?”

She hesitated a few seconds before nodding.

“Strange, isn’t it? A hardworking man like Mr. Heller didn’t have his cell phone or his BlackBerry with him while he was traveling at such a very busy time, when he needed to be reachable at all times?”

Her eyes slid to one side. Her deception flashed like a neon sign.

“Yet somehow you reached him. You talked to him. How so?”

She looked away.

“I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth,” he said. “But first I want you to see this scalpel up close. I want you to feel how sharp it is.”

Her eyes widened, filled with tears. She began to shake her head – as if to say, No, please don’t – but then she stopped. She didn’t want him to misinterpret the gesture as an unwillingness to cooperate.

He came in close, the scalpel in his right hand, and he moved it very close to her right eyeball.

She closed her eyes, shook her head violently.

“No sudden moves, please,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself badly.”

Her eyes remained scrunched closed.

“Open your eyes, please, or you’ll be hurt much worse.”

He waited a few seconds until her eyes came open. She squinted, blinked.

“The skin of the eyelid is less than one millimeter thick. This scalpel will slice through it quite easily. And then the sclera, beneath. The aqueous fluid will leak right out. The damage to your eye will not be reparable.”