“But I’m not with any of those authorities, so you’re fucked. No nice prison cell for you where you can shout your hate to the guards, spit at them, throw your shit at them, and laugh at how soft the Americans are with all their rules.
“You get none of that because this isn’t about you being a terrorist. This is personal. You raped me. You hung me up by a rope around my neck. You thought I was going to die.
“But I didn’t die.
“You are my captive now—not the American authorities’—and unlike them, I don’t give a fuck about rules. There is no one here to keep me from doing whatever I want with you. And believe me, I have lots of things that I want to do to you—things I dreamed about when I was in the hospital.
“You long for nothing more than to be a killer of innocent women and children in the name of your cause or your god of whatever fucking lunatic gibberish you people thought up while wiping your asses with rocks. You live in filth because you are filth.
“You hunger to kill people who can’t fight back because you are murderers. That’s all you are, murderers. Nothing more. Nothing noble. Just common killers.
“For that, you are going to suffer at my hands. No rules. No law. No salvation. Just you and me.”
“I will give you nothing,” he managed to say in a pant, spittle bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth, defiance in his voice. “You are nothing but an American whore. You are dirt to me. I welcome death. I tell you nothing! I am prepared to die!”
That was it. Jack knew that whatever else she did to him, he was prepared to take it. He was prepared for the pain. Typical of terrorists, he worshipped death, so he welcomed death.
“Die? Who said anything about dying?”
“We will strike you all down. You will get nothing from me. Never! I will die—as a martyr!”
Angela looked up over her shoulder and smiled at Jack. He had absolutely no idea why.
She turned the smile back down at the man bleeding under her. “That’s okay, Miguel.” She patted his cheek. “That’s okay. You really don’t need to tell me.”
“Because you will get nothing! Allah will reward me. New York City is going to vanish under a mushroom cloud far bigger than the bomb at Hiroshima!”
Angela laughed. She actually laughed.
Jack was getting worried. The clock was ticking on a nuclear weapon. He knew these kinds of terrorists. They really were happy to die for their cause. They believed they would live beyond death to look down on the destruction of their Great Satan.
“I don’t think so,” she said, still smiling like she thought he was a funny little man.
“Yes, you will—because I will tell you nothing.”
“You don’t have to, Miguel. You don’t need to tell me anything.” She patted his cheek again. “It’s okay, Miguel.”
He panted for a moment, wincing from the pain. His curiosity finally got the better of him. “What do you mean?”
Angela shrugged. “We’ll simply bring in the dogs.”
He stopped breathing for a second. “Dogs?”
FIFTY-TWO
Dogs? Jack didn’t know what she was talking about, either.
“That’s right,” she told Miguel. “Didn’t you ever see tracking dogs in that shithole where you lived and practiced killing innocent people?
“How long has it been since you took a bath? Huh, Miguel? A week? Two weeks? When you raped me and I had a chance to smell your filthy body up close and personal, I guessed it had been a month.
“Tracking dogs, you see, can track lost kids, lost people, abducted people, all kinds of people, and I’d bet all of those people had bathed within a day or two. So I don’t imagine that tracking dogs would have the slightest trouble tracking your stink back to the place where you and your goat-fucking friends are building that bomb.
“So, you see?” She patted his cheek again. “It’s okay. We don’t really need you to talk. We’ll just let the dogs come get a sniff of your stinking ass and they’ll lead us right back to your friends.
“After that—” She cut the side of his left arm, making him flinch. “—I’m going to cut off this arm, right about here. It’s useless, now, anyway. Then I’ll put a tourniquet around the stump so you don’t bleed to death.” She grinned down at him. “Do you know what I’m going to do with you, then?”
Miguel, his one eye wide, shook his head.
“Then, I’m going to take you back over to that building where you strung me up by that rope and left me hanging by my neck to choke to death.”
He let out a whine.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to hang you like you hanged me.” She swept a hand before him. “Put that thought right out of your mind. It seemed like an eternity to me as I was hanging there, unable to get a breath, choking to death, but I imagine that in reality it wouldn’t have taken long to die that way. It would have soon been over.”
“You see …” he said in defense, “we wanted you to die quickly. We had mercy on you to give you a quick death—so you would not suffer.”
“That’s nice,” she said, smiling down at him again, “but you haven’t earned the right to die quickly. What I’m going to do with you, my little rapist killer zealot, is strip you naked like I was, but rather than hang you by your neck, I’m going to hang you by that stump of a left arm.
“You know what I’m going to do then?” He was too transfixed by her to answer. “Then I’m going to let those dogs that tracked your scent back to your friends come in and have at you as you hang there, helpless.”
“Dogs … ?” he whined.
“A pack of big dogs like that will go all crazy wild over fresh meat. They will strip your leg muscles right off the bone and eat it while you watch, unable to do anything to stop it.
“Since you’ll be naked, the dominant dog will likely go for your genitals, first. Do you know what the English word ‘genitals’ means, Miguel?” When he didn’t answer, she jostled them with the tip of her knife. “It means these little boys here. Dogs like these tender parts. It’s a prized treat.”
Her voice was so calm, so soft, so sexy, that she was even frightening Jack.
The man under her cried out in realization of his ignoble fate. She let him weep and tremble for a moment; then she leaned in again.
“Do you want to know what else I’m going to do to you when you’re hanging there in that lonely building, much like you did to me? Hmm, Miguel?”
Terrified, he could only shake his head.
She poked his abdomen with her knife—not enough to stab him, but enough for him to feel it and flinch and for it to bleed. “I’m going to stick my knife into you, right down here, just enough for me to be able to reach in with a finger and hook your intestine, then I’ll pull out a few feet of it. Kind of like I did with your eyeball, ya know?
“I’m going to let that few feet of your gut dangle out of you while you hang there, helpless. Do you know why I’m going to do that? Because dogs love entrails. They’ll grab hold of that bit of your intestine and they’ll pull and pull, tugging more out, fighting over it, yanking, tossing their heads from side to side to get it free, pulling more and more of it out of you while some of the other dogs start to fight over your genitals, tearing at them from either side.
“Every agonizing day you hang there, still alive, the meat hanging off your bones, every horrifying hour, every terrifying, torturous second that will seem like it lasts forever, you will wish for nothing more from your god than to die a quick death. But your god will not come to grant you that quick death. The dogs, though, when they get hungry, will wake from their nap to rip some more meat from your bones.”
She grabbed his right wrist and twisted it. “And bones can hurt a lot, Miguel.” Jack could hear the bone in his broken forearm crunch and grind together as she twisted his wrist back and forth.
Miguel shrieked in pain, his cries turning to sobs at what awaited him. Jack could see that the man was starting to go into shock. She didn’t
have much time left to get him to confess what he knew. He thought she knew it as well.
“So, Miguel, I’m going to give you this one last chance to spare yourself that very, very long, agonizing, humiliating death for nothing. One last chance to answer before we bring in the dogs. One last chance to tell me where your friends are—to tell me where they are building that bomb. One last chance to earn yourself a quick death so you can go be with Allah.
“But if you don’t want to tell me,” she said as she patted his cheek again, “that’s all right. We will simply go get the dogs and they will track your stink back to them in no time.”
She leaned in and looked into his eye. “Time’s up.”
Miguel shook and cried as he muttered prayers in Spanish.
Finally, he lifted his broken right arm over his chest and pointed the best he could to his left.
“I need more than that,” she said, sounding totally unimpressed.
“That way,” Miguel said, “the way you saw us coming from. Go that way until you get to the yard with all the train axles. Turn left. Go maybe three hundred meters until you see an alleyway to your right. If you look down that alleyway, you will see the end of a big brick building with an arched roof. You will see a rolling door on the end. That is where the others are.”
Angela looked back up at Jack. He nodded that he believed the man. Thinking they had tracking dogs meant they would quickly find where he had come from anyway. Tracking dogs meant he would suffer for nothing. That ruse had taken all the fight out of him. Resistance had become pointless in his mind.
“Do you remember my promise to all of you when you were beating me nearly to death?”
“No, señorita,” he whined.
She put the tip of her knife on his chest, just off to the left side of his breastbone. “I promised to kill all of you. Remember?”
He nodded reluctantly.
“You should have believed me. I’ve killed your three buddies—this one tonight and the other two when you drove up to my house. Remember? Only you are left. All your training, all that planning, and all that work you’ve all done is going to mean nothing now that you have betrayed all your friends.”
Angela rose up enough to put both hands on the end of the knife handle as she stiffened her arms. “Oh, and Miguel? I want you to know. We don’t have any dogs.”
He cried out at realizing he had been tricked.
She dropped her full weight onto the knife. It sliced his heart in half and he was dead in seconds.
Jack wiped sweat from his face. That was the most brutal interrogation he had ever witnessed. And he had witnessed a number of them in other countries. It was also the most efficient and effective.
This woman was utterly ruthless.
He could have stopped it at any time, and might have, except that he was now sure that these terrorists had a nuclear weapon, it was viable, and they were on the brink of using it. If that happened, New York City would become a radioactive wasteland. The electromagnetic pulse from that bomb would likely knock out all electronic and electrical devices for a large part of the East Coast.
The consequences for the country were unimaginable. The world would be forever changed.
At that moment, in this place, in a situation this incredibly dangerous, he doubted anyone but this girl with her knife could have gotten the information any faster. He didn’t really know anything about her life, but everything in her life had led her to being the right person in the right place at the right time.
In the end, it wasn’t really the torture; it was the trick she had played on him, the word picture she had painted in his mind about the dogs. The things she had already done gave her the credibility to make that trick work.
She had blood on her hands and arms almost up to her elbows. Her bare legs were smeared with blood.
“I know that what you just did was far from easy or pleasant. But I hope you will take comfort in knowing that you may just have saved the lives of countless people.”
“Are you kidding?” She swiped some hair off her cheek with the back of her wrist. The blood on her matched her lipstick. “I haven’t felt this alive for a long time.”
Jack again wondered who the hell he was dealing with.
Angela pointed off into a weedy area. “Help me drag these two over there.”
Jack peered off into the moonlit weeds. “Why?”
“We can’t afford to have any lookouts patrolling the area discover them and send up an alarm. There’s a cistern over there. We can dump them down inside.”
That actually made sense.
“How do you know there’s a cistern over there?” Jack asked as they each grabbed one of Miguel’s legs.
“Because,” she said as they dragged him close and dropped his legs, “I met a man once who dumped the body of a girl with red hair down there. I recognize the place from seeing it in his mind.”
Jack slid the heavy lid aside as he shot her a suspicious look. “What happened to him?”
“He went down a different hole.”
Jack was having a hard time keeping up with everything he was learning about her. It was obvious that her “interrogation” technique wasn’t something she’d thought up on the spot. Not many people would have had the stomach to do that to another human being, regardless of what they were guilty of.
She seemed to relish it. Of course, after what they had done to her, he supposed he couldn’t blame her.
Once they had dumped both men down into the cistern, Angela went back for the eyeball she had cut out and tossed it in. Jack slid the lid back on.
They needed to hurry and find the place where the men were building an atom bomb.
Jack hoped they weren’t already on the road with it.
“We had better get going,” he said. “We may not have much time to stop them.”
FIFTY-THREE
“Wait back here,” Jack whispered.
He was thankful that Angela didn’t argue. He left her in the alleyway behind a partially crumbled brick wall and then moved on alone into the moon’s shadow cast by the large building with the arched roof.
As far as he could see, the only windows in the long building were up high, mainly for ventilation and to let daylight in. He moved quietly along the entire length of the building, looking for a way to see inside. The building was brick, and had stood the test of time. Around the back there were steel doors, but they were all locked. He might have been able to break into them, but not without making enough noise to send up an alarm. For all he knew, they could even be booby-trapped. There was a rolling door at the back of the building, but it, too, was locked.
When he reached the far side of the building, he found a shed of some sort. It had been built right up next to the main building. He climbed on a heap of discarded diesel engine blocks and gears stacked beside the shed and then used the gutter to help him climb up onto the roof. Standing on the roof of the shed, he found a place where the brick was broken up around a jagged vertical crack in the outer wall of the main building.
Jack pushed on the bricks around the broken area, looking for any that were loose. He found several. After jiggling them a little to see how easily he would be able to pull them out, he found one that was looser than the others. He carefully wiggled it out, inch by inch, being careful to make sure none of the other bricks would come tumbling down.
He was armed only with a couple of small knives. He knew how to use them, and they were often better in close quarters, but they were no match for guns at a distance. He had learned that lesson the last time he had brought a knife to a gunfight. It did not end well. He had spent months in a coma and then recovering in the hospital. If that experience taught him anything, it was that he didn’t want to get shot again.
It had also lost him Kate. She believed he was dead and so she had gone off the grid to keep any super-predators from finding her. Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t find her, either. It was discouraging to try so hard and not even be able to get an
y leads on her whereabouts. At the same time, he was in a way happy about it because she was keeping herself safe from any killers who might also be trying to find her.
After he had finally managed to wiggle the brick out of its place in the wall, he carefully set it down against a ledge so it wouldn’t fall off the roof and possibly alert the men inside.
He leaned down and squinted through the hole to see what he could of what was inside.
The first thing he saw almost made him fall off the roof.
There, in the middle of the room, was a spherical device about three feet in diameter. Several men were holding half of a metal outer shell up to it as another group of men were feeding a mass of wires through an opening in the shell.
A cargo van sat not far away, both of its back doors wide open. A bundle of electrical cables hung out the back.
The bomb didn’t look like some of the more sophisticated devices he’d seen, but with all the clues finally making sense, he didn’t doubt that at a minimum he was looking at a crude nuclear weapon. Except it wasn’t nearly as crude as he would have hoped. This was a relatively sophisticated device, and he would bet that its yield was enough to take out much of a big city like New York.
He could see machined brass sleeves for the exploding bridgewire already placed in the Semtex. The way the explosive was precisely shaped into geometric pieces that were being assembled into a sphere looked to have been done with care and precision.
The plutonium-239 the Mossad had found in the tread of José’s boot was bomb-grade plutonium, which told him that it surely had a plutonium pit. He could see the lead shielding of the tamper beneath where the Semtex was still being placed.
For the moment, where the plutonium for the bomb had come from was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that it was here, now.