“Very well, then that’s decided, Flynn. You see, here in Persia we are very civilized, not like you Westerners. The West buries its savagery in a flood of procedures and technicalities. Here, we are plain about sin and retribution.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Ah, you disappoint me. Spies lie, but not soldiers. I thought you a soldier.”
One of the guards hustled the family out a side door, through which Flynn glimpsed a courtyard filled with yet more flowers, and heard birdsong. Then the door slammed and there was a flash behind his eyes, the result of a terrific blow to the head.
He knew that he was falling, and that was all he knew.
CHAPTER NINE
THE PAIN started in his groin, pulsing upward into his gut, bringing with it waves of nausea, while also burning down along his legs, as if his skin were being sanded.
“What an embarrassment, Flynn. You’ve been weeping like a baby. And here I thought you such a wonder. Brilliance, courage, and strength. That’s what I thought, yes.”
Hands turned his head roughly to one side, and he found himself looking at a TV screen. On it was an image of a naked man. His mouth lolled open. A nurse in a white uniform was placing electrodes on his penis and scrotum, her fingers working with practiced dexterity, her face reflecting the concentration of a professional doing a familiar job.
She stood aside, and a man in a black uniform picked up an old-fashioned rheostatic control, which was wired to the electrodes. He turned the control knob, and the man on the table writhed and shrieked. Flynn had never heard himself sound like that, so abject. In his unconscious state, he had reacted like a terrified child.
They were really very skilled, to think to undermine a victim’s will in such a diabolical way.
The screen went blank and the man in the black uniform approached the table. “You may call me Ishmael,” he said. “And now we try again, just to adjust and test the current.”
“I’ll answer your questions.”
“You will indeed, and not with lies. But not just now.”
As he twisted the controller, Flynn’s genitals seemed to catch fire. He forced his screams deep into his throat. Straps too thick even for him to snap bound him.
The pain rose until it was a seething, red-hot wave surging up and down his body.
Then it was gone. Flynn gagged, gasped, tried to fight down vomit, failed. He lay there choking in his own sour bile.
Ghorbani moved into his field of vision. “So embarrassing, Flynn. I’m really disappointed.”
“You and me both.”
“Oh, a quip, just like James Bond.” He clapped his hands. “Not a very good one, though. In fact, Flynn, quite lame. Now, let’s get started with our questions.” He picked up an iPad, a rarity in Iran. “My goodness, so many questions we have! Every house on our intelligence street has added a few. We are so very curious about you, you may be flattered.”
“Go to hell.”
“As indeed I may. But you certainly will, you devil.” The words were full of hate, but the voice still contained not a trace of anger. This man expressed his anger through his work.
It had taken Flynn far too long to understand that he wasn’t in the hands of the foreign ministry or even the Iranian intelligence service. These people were Revolutionary Guard, and when it came to torture, he could expect the worst from them. His life was also over; he understood that. Unless he could find some tiny sliver of inattention or miscalculation, he was going to die here.
In other words, he was going to lose this thing, and with it maybe a great deal more would be lost, maybe all the freedom in this world, and maybe the world itself.
He needed time, so he decided to cooperate. If he wasn’t under torture, he would have a better chance of finding that one microscopic chink in their armor that he needed. He would answer every question they had.
“Oh, incidentally, throughout our time together, I’ll be waiting to hear you tell me why you came here, given that the Josefi assassination had already succeeded.” He sat down on the table and laid a soft hand on Flynn’s forehead. “Such nice skin. When we cut through it—we will be inserting electrodes into your brain—we’ll have to leave a scar.” Stroking Flynn’s hair, he added, “It’s so unfortunate. But then again, that poor Mrs. Josefi and those two lovely children. Also unfortunate.”
“Who is this person?”
“No, Flynn, it’s not you who ask the questions.”
Red, flaming haze, from his groin in flooding pain, the sense of fire within. Somebody screaming from far away, a memory of the ocean—a flash of peace—then back and plunging into greater pain.
It stopped. Flynn found himself gagging and gasping, his body heaving against the straps.
Silence fell. Extended. Sunlight crossed the room, lazy gold with the smoke of the nurse’s cigarette curling through it. She got up from her chair, came and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. She put a blood pressure cuff on his arm and pumped it up. After a moment, it sighed and she nodded curtly to the torturers. She returned to her chair and continued watching, her young face as impassive as a sculpture. Iranian culture supposedly reverenced and protected women. But not this one, apparently. She obviously saw a lot of this, otherwise there would be some expression there, some emotion, but he saw only the mild indifference of somebody waiting for her coffee break.
“What do you know of Dr. Ibrahim’s project?”
Flynn understood that he was in the worst possible situation. He was being tortured to extract information he genuinely did not know. He couldn’t just deny, not if he expected to live through this, and he couldn’t tell them anything useful about something they knew more about than he did.
Nevertheless, if he was to buy even a little time, he had to try. He took a flier. “He was run by Albert Doxy.”
“Run? How run?”
“Doxy was his controller.”
Ghorbani smiled. He came to the edge of the table and gazed down at Flynn. “Don’t you understand how practiced we are at this? What we can do?”
“Doxy was his controller!”
He shook his head. “Flynn, Flynn, Flynn. There are worse ways to die than even you know.” He spoke in Farsi, and the nurse, sighing like a child forced to do a chore, came over and began loosening his straps.
His heart soared. Surely there would be a chance here. She was weak, inattentive. She would give him an opening.
“Now,” Ghorbani said, “turn onto your side.”
The barrel of a pistol was once again thrust into the small of his back.
He felt something very unpleasant being done to him, and knew that an electrode had been inserted into his anus.
“Flynn, please be reasonable. That thing will burn you from inside. The pain is so great, Flynn, that you will tell us everything to make it stop. We will remove it, for we are honorable that way, but you will die in any case, burned like that. It is a lingering death, too awful to tempt.” He lowered his voice. “We put them in a cell and return when the screaming stops.”
“I’ll tell you everything right now!”
“Very well, then let’s shift our approach a little. What is the name of your operation? Its code name, Flynn?”
“Oilman. It’s Oilman.” He’d made that up, too.
“Is it?”
His rectum began to sting. He thrust and struggled, but he could not make the penetrator move. “Yes! For the love of God!” Always express more suffering than you’re feeling. That’s the key to surviving torture.
“What does the implant in Albert Doxy’s head do?”
“It’s a tracking device. Everybody in sensitive positions has one.”
The pain rose. “Too deep in the brain for that. Who knew the truth about what he was doing? You, Flynn, did you know? Were you observing him?”
“I don’t know how to answer.”
The room swept away until it was a dot of light. The nurse made a sharp statement in Farsi and Ghorb
ani laughed. The others in the room—and there were now quite a few—followed suit.
“Oh, Flynn,” he said, “please face that you’re a soldier, not a spy. You should give up this charade and just tell us what we want to know. You can’t hide anything anyway.” He then spoke in Farsi and there was a murmur of chuckles. “I am telling them what I said to you.” He and the nurse then conversed in Farsi for a moment. “I am asking her if the next phase will kill you. It’s Mrs. Josefi’s right to carry out the actual execution, and I would be embarrassed if I deprived her of her right. Now Nurse Dilara wishes to practice her English.”
She said, “I explain we now cause angina attack.”
“No, no, my dear. Remember your verbs. English verbs are very exact. ‘I will explain.’”
“Thank you, sir. I will explain this. It will be great agony and it is dangerous. It will continue for some time. If we must keep repeating this procedure, it will damage your heart, transforming you into a ghost of yourself who can never get a breath.”
“Yes, ‘will.’ Very good, Dilara.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
Flynn hardly heard them. They had now revealed a second fact to him. Not only were they interested in the president, they’d had an agent on the inside. It must have been Doxy. Who had killed him, though? The mystery was still very deep.
Nurse Dilara placed electrodes on his chest, circling his heart. Then she slid a metal plate under his back. She nodded to Ghorbani.
“Now we talk about Aeon.”
“Which is?”
“Don’t be a child. We have your file.”
“Then you know everything.”
“We know enough to ask more.”
If they weren’t already in an alliance with Aeon, Flynn now believed, they soon would be. At any cost, he had to get this information back to Washington, but that meant doing the impossible. Escaping. Surviving.
Once such an alliance was in force, Iran would be the most powerful country in the world.
He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A year ago, a police officer from Aeon was detailed to your unit.”
“No idea about that.”
Flynn’s chest exploded, his throat seemed to collapse as if a wire were being twisted around it, and the world sank away into a vague and terrifying gray.
The agony went on.
At last, silence came, broken only by the sound of his raw, gagging breath.
“Please understand that I can use all of these implements at once, Flynn. As you know, you’re not like most men. Such extraordinary pain will not render you unconscious. You’ll suffer and suffer and suffer, Flynn.”
Flynn did not respond. He fixed his mind on a happy moment from long ago, riding out with Abby, their horses’ hooves thundering across the Llano Estacado.
Agony swarmed him from every direction, the heat of it, the searing, ripping torment of it, the burning of his guts, the fire in his genitals, the cruel squeezing of his heart.
Then it stopped.
“That was a taste, Flynn. I know for certain who you are and what you do. Understand this. We have all Aeon’s records about you and Delta 242. Al got them for us as his last act of courage, and we were able to remove them from his office before he, unfortunately, had to give his life for the revolution. That’s why we lured you here. We were taught just how to handle you psychologically. We set our trap just as Aeon’s intelligence service instructed us and, soon enough, here you came.”
They had killed Doxy. The Alliance with Aeon was, therefore, active. But they hadn’t broken the encrypted parts of the core file or he would not be here and this would not be happening. Aeon must certainly have broken it, which meant that, while they might indeed be in touch, the alliance wasn’t yet deep.
They might have a Wire, though, the same sort of direct connection to Aeon that Flynn’s unit had once had. It would have been over such a device that they would have received instructions about how to capture Flynn.
Ghorbani moved away from the table. Across the room, he quietly consulted with a colleague. Flynn took the moment to go deep into himself, to embrace his pain as tenderly as his mother would have, and to wait empty, without thought or expectation. This, he knew, was the only way to endure torture, with a surrendered body and a mind emptied of hope.
As slow sunlight crossed the floor, the nurse methodically smoked, her face turned away from him. There was shame in her somewhere, or she would have watched.
He could now see that she despised her work, and so began to think that she might be a key to freedom.
He had more than once escaped from horrendous alien captivities, and so had come to trust his skills. What concerned him was that the torture was eroding those skills fast. The longer it went on, the more likely he was to miss whatever tiny chance might present itself.
The nurse would never consciously betray her masters, but an unconscious expression of her hatred for them was possible, and it was this he had to watch for.
“Flynn, I want to warn you, the next round is going to do some permanent damage to your heart. Understand this.”
“I understand.”
“Gail—you remember Gail—is she still here on Earth?”
“She went home.”
“No, she did not. Where is she, Flynn?”
She was the lone police officer Aeon had sent to give them support after the death of Oltisis, their previous representative. They called her “Gail” because her real name was unpronounceable.
“I haven’t seen her since the night she left.”
“You know that it’s impossible to hide on Aeon.”
“I’m sure.” Given what the NSA could do on Earth, he could well imagine how total the invasion of privacy must be on Aeon.
“Then she must be here. It follows, no?”
“Maybe her ship blew up on the way home. All I know is, I saw her leave.”
The torture resumed. From some distant, heavenly place, he heard through his agony Ghorbani saying, “Let’s get a tea.”
Everyone except the nurse left the room. Flynn was left with electricity burning in his genitals and a cloth over his face that made it necessary to relax completely in order not to smother. If he was going to live, he had to let the pain possess him. He had to accept it. Only then could he relax enough to take sufficient breath.
His beloved first horse Twenty-Kay was standing across by the fence. His dad had her reins in his hand. He said, ‘Come on, Errol, she’s yours now.” Dad and Mom had called him by his real name. He’d come up with Flynn in high school. It beat Erroll Carroll all to hell.
It was his ninth birthday. A Texas kid’s best birthday was his horse birthday. Twenty-Kay was blindingly quick in the quarter mile. Within a day, they were deeply in love, horse and boy, and that love lasted.
They were crossing the prairie in the springtime, the air sweet with flowers and new grass.
But then why this agony? He had to get this off him! Why this agony?
Mom said, “Just relax, honey, open yourself to it, relax into it.”
The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the stink of shit. His shit.
The end of the pain was like falling into infinity. He was left gulping air, his heart thrusting like a pile driver, his breath hardly working.
The world blurred, but breathing became easier.
The nurse had removed the cloth and covered his face with an oxygen mask.
They knew about Aeon, Oltisis, Gail, him, Abby—the whole sordid tale.
Aeon had changed sides, and with that act, had changed the balance of power on Earth. Iran, not the United States, was now the most powerful nation in the world.
He had to find out all he could, then get out of here. Except for one problem: Escape appeared to be a pipe dream.
She was gazing down into his face, her brown eyes ridged with concern. She removed the mask. “Breathe,” she said in her heavily accented English.
“The ch
est strap—it’s too tight.”
Using her long, delicate hands, the hands of an artist or a surgeon, she loosened it a little. In that moment, he could have snapped it, but it would only have been an act of bravado. The wrist and ankle straps would have prevented him from escaping.
He said no more. This was not the moment to attempt to get her to release one of his wrists. But that was all he needed, just one hand, and he’d be off this table in four seconds flat.
A barking, spitting fusillade of Farsi invective caused the nurse to at first widen her eyes, then spit back like a cornered wildcat. Davood Ghorbani had returned and, Flynn guessed, been outraged that she had turned off the torture devices on her own.
He strode over to the table. “You’re lucky—that one has a soft heart. We’d hoped that the nurses wouldn’t be as soft as the damn doctors. Women usually aren’t. Plus this is a double-pay posting for them. But it doesn’t matter—they’re all soft and they all hate it.” He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and blew smoke out of his nostrils. Flynn saw a dragon breathing fire. Ghorbani smiled. “Hallucinating, Flynn? Good, we’re getting somewhere, despite the foolishness of Miss Softy. Where is Gail?”
Torment blasted through him from all directions at once.
It stopped.
“Where, Flynn?”
“Texas! She’s in Texas. A ranch north of Marfa. The Bar K Bar, ranch of MacAdoo Terrell.”
“That one; yes, he’s interesting, too. So the creature is there, protected by his gun collection and his radar fence.” He smiled a boy’s cruel smile. “That won’t do, Flynn.”
“Aeon must know where she is.”
“Then why did they ask us?”
“To get you to torture me to answer a question I can’t.”
“Why would they do that?”
Aeon wanted him dead and had failed time and again to kill him, but he chose not to say that. “Ask them.”
Ghorbani’s crew had now also returned, some of them carrying paper cups of tea and coffee, and the smell of it was wonderful to Flynn.
“Yes, the closeness of death intensifies all smells and tastes. I suppose it’s why the condemned so relish their final meals. But whether you have that opportunity will be Mrs. Josefi’s decision—and perhaps she will relent. They so often do, the Persians. We are such a kind people.”