CHAPTER 45

It could have been most of the night that they worked him over. It could have been days for all he knew. All sense of time had left him while he was still out there on the road.

The questioning had started in one place, and at some point they’d satisfied themselves that the worst they could do wasn’t going to be good enough. There’d been a dark ride in a car, and then a flight somewhere. At the new place they’d started in on him again.

They knew a lot already. They knew that calls had been made from Noah’s apartment to a long list of accomplices of a known agitator who’d conspired to destroy an American city or two. They knew that Noah helped one of the central figures in this conspiracy gain access to classified files and information. They knew that he’d helped her evade security and fly across the country to play her part in the failed attack. They knew that two nuclear weapons had fallen into the hands of these terrorists, and that one of them had detonated but the other was still unaccounted for.

This second group of interrogators was more organized and clinical in their methods, and far more creative. It wasn’t only pain they inflicted, but terror; the most effective torture happens in the mind. After many hours and methods they’d eventually settled on using a reliable old standby that seemed to have the most immediate and positive effect for their purposes.

Strapped flat to a cold metal table, head immobilized and inclined to be lower than the feet, a wet cloth over the face to restrict his breathing‑ and then just a slight dripping of water, maybe half a glass, just enough to begin to run down the nostrils and into the throat. Some primitive part of the mind simply comes unhinged when it knows it’s drowning and knows it can’t get away. Try to be as strong as you want; it doesn’t matter. If he’d actually known anything at all that they wanted to learn, before ten seconds had passed he would have told them, and they would have known he was telling the truth.

In the course of their work they told him a lot of things to encourage him to break his silence. They told him that Molly’s mother, under similar questioning, had revealed the entire plot, including the depth of Noah’s involvement. They said that Molly herself had been apprehended and they described in excruciating detail the particular techniques they had employed on her. She’d given him up almost immediately, they’d claimed, along with all of her co‑ conspirators.

After all they’d put him through, Noah would have gladly believed almost anything they’d said, but even to his clouded, brutalized mind these last two assertions didn’t ring true‑ those two would never betray their cause. If Molly was going down, she would go down swinging and silent. Knowing that gave Noah the first bit of hope that he’d had in a long time.

It went on that way, though, again and again, as if they had nothing but time and nothing to lose by confirming over and over that he didn’t know anything that could help them. They seemed to take his complete lack of useful knowledge as a sign of stubborn resistance to their questioning. And, after all, you never know when a valuable little nugget of intel might surface.

And then they stopped.

They spent a few minutes cleaning him up as well as they could, unstrapped one of his hands, adjusted the table to a more natural recline, and even slipped a couple of flat pillows beneath his head. They never addressed him directly, but Noah was able to gather from what they said that a special visitor was coming, someone special enough to put a hold on the most critical interrogation since they’d captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed two years after 9/11.

As they prepared to leave, they put their things in order, like a team of seasoned mechanics might tend to the tools of their trade. These actions made it clear that they’d be back if necessary after this brief interlude, to take up their work right where they’d left it off.

A number of dark plastic surveillance domes were distributed across the ceiling. The chief interrogator looked up at one of the cameras and made a gesture to those watching to indicate that the subject was now ready to receive his guest. On that cue, the tiny red lights of the surveillance cameras winked out in sequence.

A few seconds later, a figure appeared in the open doorway.

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