Текст книги "Adrenaline"
Автор книги: Jeff Abbott
Соавторы: Jeff Abbott
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
4
I HAD BEEN IN THE COLD DANK PRISON for over a week when a new man sat across from me in the cell. Fresh talent to try and break me. Fine. I was bored with the last guy.
“My name is Howell. I have a question to ask you, Mr. Capra. Are you a traitor or a fool?”
“Asked and answered,” I mumbled through the desert of my mouth.
“I need an explanation, Mr. Capra.” The new interrogator leaned back in the chair. He crossed his legs, but first he gave his perfectly creased pants the slightest yank. So they wouldn’t wrinkle. I hated that little yank; it was like a razor against my skin. It told me who had all the power in the room.
I had had no real sleep for three days. I reeked of sweat. If grief has a stench, that was what I smelled like. The new interrogator was fortyish, African American, with gray spiraling in his goatee and stylish steel-framed glasses. I told him what I told interrogator one and interrogator two. I told the truth.
“I am not a traitor. I don’t believe my wife is a traitor, either.”
Howell took off his glasses. He reminded me of one of my old history professors back at Harvard. A calm coolness surrounded him. “I think I believe you.”
Was this a trick? “No one else does.”
Howell rested the end of the glasses’ earpiece against his lip. He studied me for a long, uncomfortable silence. I liked the silences. No one called me names or accused me of treason. He opened a file and he started the old litany again, as if any of my answers might change. He would keep asking me the same questions to wear me down, to wait for my mistake.
“Your full name is Samuel Clemens Capra.”
“Yes.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain.”
“He’s my dad’s favorite author, and my mother vetoed Huckleberry and Tom Sawyer as choices.” Normally that story would make me laugh, but nothing was normal anymore.
“I want to call my father before I answer your questions,” I said. I hadn’t asked for this in the past three days of questioning. What would I say to him? But now I wanted to hear the tobacco-flecked warmth of my dad’s voice. I wanted to find my wife. I wanted to be out of this awful, dark, stone room that had no windows. It was stupid to ask. But it felt like fighting back after the endless questions, making my own modest stand.
“I didn’t think you got along at all well with your parents.”
I said nothing. The Company knew everything about me, as they should.
“Your parents didn’t even know you and Lucy were expecting, did they?”
“No.” It seemed a shameful admission. Family strains should stay private.
“You haven’t spoken to your parents for three years, except for a brief phone call at Christmas. None of the calls lasted more than two minutes.”
“That’s correct.”
“Three years. Some have suggested that’s how long you’ve been working against us. You cut off your parents so they wouldn’t be suspicious of your activities, would not be involved in your treason.”
“You just said you believed I wasn’t a traitor.”
“I’m telling you what others in the Company are saying about you.” He leaned forward. “A classic sign of treason is emotional distance from extended family and friends.”
“I didn’t cut my family off. My parents stopped talking to me. It wasn’t my choice. And I wasn’t going to use my own child to get back in their good graces. Can I call my father? Will you let me do that?”
“No, Sam.” Howell tapped the earpiece against his bottom lip and considered my file, as though mining it for further pain. I wondered what else was inside those few sheets of paper. “Your wife called you and warned you to get out of the office before the bomb exploded.”
“She was being kidnapped. I saw her struck by a man.”
“And why would her kidnapper allow her to call you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t in the car then, maybe she had a phone.”
“But she didn’t say she was being kidnapped.”
“She was trying to save me. To get me out.”
“But not the rest of the office. She didn’t say, ‘Evacuate, Sam,’ did she?”
I closed my eyes; the stone of the cell floor chilled my bare feet. “No.” I was sure I was no longer in the United Kingdom. Back in London the Company—the term used for the CIA by me and my colleagues—and British intelligence had heard my story and questioned me for three days. I was given no advocate or lawyer. Then four thick-necked men came with a syringe, held me still, and I woke up on a plane. I was in a Company prison, I guessed, in eastern Europe, most likely Poland. These secret prisons were supposedly closed ages ago.
“She got you, and only you, to safety. You see, that’s our problem. You walked out alone and then the office was destroyed.”
“Maybe Lucy didn’t know about the bomb then. The scarred man must have told her to call, to get me out.” I had described the scarred man in detail, but no one had brought me photos to look at, a suspect to identify. That scared me more than their questions and their needles.
“Why spare you?” Howell asked.
“I don’t know.”
Then he surprised me. The next question should have been about the briefing on the man with no name that I’d been giving Brandon and the suits. That had been the pattern of the first two interrogators. “Tell me about the money.”
5
WHAT MONEY?”
He slid paper toward me. An account number at a bank in England where Lucy and I didn’t have an account. I studied the transaction history. It included transfers to a bank in Grand Cayman. A quarter-million dollars.
“This is not our money.”
“This Cayman account was used in a Company operation last year. Lucy was the operations tech; she was supposed to close the account when the job was over. She didn’t. Money was parked in this supposedly dead Company account and then moved into this UK account with both your names on it, and then moved out to a numbered account in Switzerland where it was transferred to private bonds. Now we don’t know where it is. This is why people are having a hard time believing you, Sam.”
“I have no idea about this money!” This was bad. Very bad. “I didn’t have access to or knowledge of these accounts.”
“Conventional wisdom says the spouse always knows when the other is a traitor, Sam. Always,” Howell said quietly. He sounded like a teacher, one with patience to burn, no need to raise his voice. The last two interrogators screamed at me. Howell’s calm was scarier, like a still blade held an inch above the throat. You don’t know when the cut will be made. “Always. Usually it’s the husband who turns traitor and the wife learns about it and then keeps her mouth shut. Either because she likes the money or because she doesn’t want to see her husband go to jail. Was Lucy recruited first? Or you? Or did they hook you together?”
“Neither. Neither of us is a traitor.” I couldn’t believe this of Lucy. I couldn’t. Not my wife. I didn’t care what evidence they showed me, it could not be real. To believe it was to commit treason against the woman I loved. My brain pounded with exhaustion; my chest felt thick. Air in my lungs felt coarse as sand.
“Beyond hope. Do you know that term, Sam?”
“No.”
“It’s what’s used to describe the state of being a traitor’s spouse. We want to hope that the spouse is innocent, that they don’t know that their loved one has betrayed their country. But we know, realistically, that they probably know about the treason. They are therefore beyond hope. Right now, Sam, that is you. Only I can help you. Tell me the truth.”
“I did nothing wrong. I knew nothing about this money.”
“I’ve made it easy, Sam.” He held up a slip of paper. “A confession, short and to the point. You only need to fill in who you worked for. Sign it and we’re done.”
“I won’t. Ever.”
He lowered the paper. “One of you is a traitor, Sam. Either her or you. Tell me about this money, Sam. The money.”
“I don’t know.” The coldness spread to my skin.
“You and Lucy are both alive and everyone in your office is dead and she warned you out.”
“The scarred man hit her. She hadn’t gone willingly. I could tell.”
“Who’s the money from? The Chinese or the Russians? A crime network like the ones you were investigating? Did you get turned while you were undercover? Who are you working for?”
“No one. No one.”
“You were giving a presentation to a team from Langley on the work you were doing.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
I tried not to laugh. My notes for my talk were still vivid in my mind because of the terrible thought that maybe my work had gotten our office targeted. “We’re looking for a Russian criminal I call the Money Czar. He cleans funds for various networks. I worked undercover for a few months last year, making contacts in these networks, mostly posing as an ex–Canadian soldier based in Prague who could provide smuggling routes for everything from knockoff cigarettes to guns bound for warlords in Africa. An informant in our employ in Budapest got the job to courier cash and gold from the Money Czar to a Russian scientist. Five million equivalent.”
“What was the scientist being paid for?”
“We don’t know. This scientist was kicked out of the Russian military’s research programs because of his heroin addiction; he set up shop as a brain for hire in Budapest, doing contract work. The informant was the one who told us that this Money Czar had a Russian accent.” I paused. “The informant and the scientist were both found dead a week later.”
“What kind of scientist was this man?”
“He used to work on nanotechnology.”
“Nanotechnology?”
“Yes. The study of the control of matter on an atomic or molecular level. Most of the research today has beneficial commercial applications—such as more effective means of delivering medicines into the body, or to specific organs. It could have huge implications, for instance, in the fight against breast cancer or brain tumors. Or we could create medicines geared to specific people’s DNA, or much more sophisticated sensors to detect serious illnesses in our bodies, or we could vastly expand the number of hours a computer battery can be charged.”
“And there are military and weapons applications to this?”
“Absolutely,” I answered. “Nanotech builds machines or materials on an incredibly small level and makes them powerful. Theoretically. Creating new kinds of armor to repel bullets, or much stronger tanks, or much more efficient guns. Creating bullets that could self-correct on a course once fired. Smaller nuclear weapons that have incredible guidance systems and produce virtually no fallout. Or imagine a bomb that releases a swarm of miniaturized robots that aim for human flesh or body temperature and inject a fatal toxin into every person in a two-mile radius.”
Howell swallowed and his throat made a dry click. “So this Money Czar could have been financing weapons research?”
“Yes.”
“And maybe whoever killed the scientist and the informant to protect your Money Czar came after you.”
“Yes.”
“Or, more likely, you got turned by the people you were chasing. You’re good at your job, Sam. You could have found this Money Czar. And maybe he offered you and Lucy all that cash in this Caymans account.”
“No.”
“They didn’t want you and Lucy talking and they’ve taken her and you decided to keep your mouth shut, maybe to protect her. I can see the thoughts going across your tired, beat-ass face, Sam.”
“No.” I wanted to drive Howell and his insane theories through the stone wall.
“Your only hope, Sam, is to deal with me. Tell me everything.” Howell leaned in close to me and he put a large hand on my shoulder. “Think how easy it will be. All the weight will be gone, Sam. And then we can work on finding your wife. Your child. You want to be there when your child is born, don’t you? Lucy’s due date is in six weeks’ time. Tell me where we can find the people you work for and we’ll find Lucy. You can see your wife, hold your child.”
He leaned back. “We checked with her doctor. You and Lucy didn’t want to know what you’re having but I know. It’s a boy, Sam. Don’t you want to see your son?”
My son. I was going to have a son, if Lucy was still alive. Howell was laying brutal trumps on the table, one after another: this unknown money, my child. Maybe Lucy… No. I could not believe it of her.
Each word felt like a pebble in my mouth, spit out one by one. “I can’t tell you anything because I am not a traitor.”
Howell studied me in the long silence. “Then you’re a fool, because your wife is the traitor and she’s left you to take the blame.”
“No. No. She wouldn’t. She loves me.” The words sounded weak in my throat but I remembered that last morning with my Lucy, her shuddering atop me, my hands on the curve on her bottom, her breath warm against my throat. Talking to me about not taking chances running parkour, and telling me she loved me, and reminding me of dinner with the nice couples. Calling me monkey, to soften her criticism of my running. That was not a woman preparing to vanish from her own life.
He looked at me as though he were a teacher disappointed with his student’s performance. “She doesn’t love you. She left you holding the bag. Happy Thanksgiving.” Howell got up and left, the lights went out, and I sat in total blackness.
6
TIME, UNMEASURED, PASSED. My throat was molten, parched, like I’d reached in and raked the flesh with my own fingernails. A knot of hunger tangled my stomach and I felt like I had fever. I slid from the chair and lay on the cold floor. I ate bread and water when it was brought to me. I slept and I awoke, unsure if minutes or hours had passed, shivered against the stone. I dreamed I was running parkour, vaulting over walls, flying between buildings, every muscle afire with glory, my mind clear and clean and precise. Then the wall where I was to land was gone, and I plummeted toward a pavement covered with burning wreckage, helpless, out of control.
The lights snapped back on and Howell was sitting in his chair, as though he’d been there the entire time in the dark. But the suit was different. I looked to see if he had any water for me to drink. He didn’t.
“Help me, Sam.”
I looked at him. “How?”
“Help me understand this most interesting information I’ve come across,” he said.
“Did you find Lucy?” Confusion clogged my brain; my head felt thick with sleep. “The baby. Lucy is due soon. You have to find her.” My voice grated like rock against sand.
“The bomb,” Howell said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “I have the forensic analysis of the blast pattern, Sam.” He pulled out a photo of the London office, after the explosion. The desk arrangement had our names on it. S. Capra. Brandon. Gomez. McGill. The conference room, with the names of the three suits. In the computer room, a desk labeled L. Capra. Lucy’s desk. My dead friends. The photo painted a horror: the smears of gore, viscera blasted and cooked on the walls, the blackened, gaping holes in the floor, in the center.
The smallest circle, painted in red, marked my desk, in the center of the office.
“The bomb was planted right under your desk. It was disguised to look like a small external hard drive, plugged into your system.”
I stared at the map of destruction.
“Lucy handled all the hard drive installs in the office.”
“No.”
“How easy it must have been for her. Did she set up the bomb right under your boss’s nose, James’s nose, Victoria’s nose? Your nose?”
Each word felt like a knife sliding under my skin.
“The bomb is placed where Lucy can most easily hide it without anyone noticing. Did she feel some guilt, sentencing her husband, the father of her child, to death? So she warns you. You walk out right before the explosion.” In case I didn’t understand the implication.
“Shut up,” I said. I had not snapped or growled at anyone. I had focused and kept my calm while pleading my innocence. But this. Now. I couldn’t take it. “Shut up, shut up, shut the hell up.”
“Help me prove this woman a traitor. Think. Think of what you must have known. Try to remember.” This woman. Not calling her Lucy, not calling her my wife. Trying to establish an otherness for her, a separation between us. No.
“Lucy is innocent.” My voice wasn’t calm. The bomb being planted under my desk unnerved me.
“Then maybe you’re the one who’s the bad guy,” he said. “Maybe you’re framing her. Maybe you planted the bomb. Did you have someone take her away? Kill her and your own child?”
The rage, buried in me, surged like a killing fever. I wanted to strangle the lies out of his throat. I am starting to crack. I saw my hands start to shake. I felt heat rise in my eyes. But I couldn’t break. He wanted me to surrender control. I wouldn’t. “There has to be another explanation,” I said.
“That explanation is Lucy. The money. The bomb. It points to Lucy. She had the access to the account. She could have smuggled in the bomb.” His voice slid, low and soft. Howell had the barest Southern accent. “I am your only friend left, Sam. The rest of the Company and our British friends want to see you burn. I will help you but not unless you help me.” I saw how damned I was in their narrow gaze. The evidence of the financial account. The bomb, hidden in a way that Lucy or I could have done it. That was all they needed. I was screwed, even being innocent.
“You will never see the outside of this prison again if you don’t tell me what you know. Stop protecting Lucy, or stop protecting what you thought she was.”
He wanted me to call Lucy a traitor. To agree with him, to accept this impossible possibility. “No. She’s innocent. That man took her.”
“She got you out of there and then she left you behind. She betrayed her country and then she betrayed you.”
“No.”
Howell slapped me. Hard. I didn’t expect it because he looked like a professor, and professors don’t slap. “That’s reality, coming and waking you up, Sam. Tell me what you know.”
“Don’t be an idiot. If I wanted to bomb the building I wouldn’t have been there. I would have been long gone. You know I’m innocent, and you’re just going through the motions because it’s easier to lean on me than to go find the real bad guys. I have no deal to make because I have nothing to give.”
“Then you are a prize fool.” He left and then he came back five minutes later with a cold bottle of water. Beads crowned the plastic. And I wanted it so badly. He set it down in front of me but I didn’t reach for it.
“I want you,” he said, “to entertain the possibility that nothing you knew about Lucy Capra was true.”
Tears welled at the back of my eyes. I won’t let him see, I thought. But cameras were pointed at me, all the time. He would see me weep on tape. I kept my face still; kept the tears inside. For now. I would wait for the darkness, for the safety of the crook of my elbow. I would not let them see me hurt.
He watched me, like he’d trumped my hand. “I know you’re thirsty. You haven’t had water in three days. Did you know it had been that long? Drink up, Sam. I want your throat working. You have things to tell me.”
I took the water. I drank it. And as I finished, he pulled out the earphones, the eye covers. Two women wheeled in the cart with the meds.
Sodium thiopental, scopolamine, experimentals. Say hello to my blood. Maybe they gave me all of them—I felt more than one needle slide under my skin. Howell asked his soft questions again, and this time I heard other voices asking me the same, and I told them the bone-marrow truth: I do not know. I am not a traitor. I never did anything wrong. I babbled answers to every question about my life with Lucy. I told them about our lovemaking, our friends in London, our trips back home, any times she went to the Continent to explore on her own. I didn’t know what she did in those weeks I was undercover, playing a role in Prague, pretending to be a smuggler looking for illicit goods to ship. I told them whatever was in my brain. I became an oil spill of words.
But there was the bomb, and there was the Caymans account, and that was enough. I must have known more, they decided. I must have had suspicions. Howell kept saying he wanted to believe me, like that belief topped his Christmas list. I said I knew nothing.
So they moved on past the chemicals.
The eye covers—which completely cut off my vision—made me feel like I’d been dropped into a hole that never ended. The earphones blasted music into my head: a hell’s jukebox of saccharine ballads, brain-crushing psychedelic rock I didn’t recognize, teeth-rattling rap. The rest of the time the sound was this high-pitched noise that made every nerve feel like it was sparking, like a broken cable. I lost all track of time, of place, of any sense that I remained tethered to the world.
The cure for that was pain. Howell wasn’t there when guards came in and they beat me for a solid ten minutes. Fists and feet. It was an expert ass-kicking. They didn’t mar my face but the rest of me purpled into a bruise. I curled into a ball. They gave me water, let me spit out a gob of blood. They looked at the gob as though gauging how much more I could take before passing a limit. Then they beat me again, kicking me harder. My spine and my legs felt on the verge of breaking. They were delightfully precise, careful not to break my ribs or my chin or my spine.
They asked the same questions. I gave the same answers.
I don’t know how long I resisted the sensory deprivation treatments. Minutes under the noise and the blackness can feel like endless hours.
Lucy. The Bundle that was a boy. That was the thread I seized, the scant hope that I would be believed. They had to be searching for her, desperately. They would find her, and when they did, they would find the answers. The explanation as to why Lucy and I were framed, why they took Lucy, why they destroyed the Holborn office. Find the line, just like on the parkour runs. There was a line to the truth. I just had to find it.
They left me alone with my pain for a few hours and then they returned and they dragged me into another room. They strapped me to a flat piece of wood. It moved. I felt my feet rise. My head descended toward the stone floor.
No, no, no. I fought against the straps. The sensory deprivation was allowed. It remained legal. This, no.
It wasn’t Howell standing above me, a cloth in one hand, a bucket in the other. The man wore a hood. I didn’t know his voice. I screamed for Howell.
“Mr. Howell isn’t here,” the hooded man said.
“Please don’t. Please.” I’d been through this before, in training. I knew what horror was coming and I struggled against the bonds, panic exploding in my chest like a mine. Because with the water on your face, you say what you have to. And if you know nothing, you truly know nothing, you will babble any torrent of words to get it to stop. You will tell any lie.
The truth of my life was about to die in this room.
“We’ve reached a moment of true unpleasantness, Sam.”
He waited for me to answer. All I could say, in a broken voice I didn’t recognize, was “Please don’t do this. Please. For your sake.”
I didn’t know where the last words came from. Like I cared about this stupid, heartless bastard who was nothing but a tool. I didn’t care. If I could have got off that board I’d have strangled him with my own hands.
“Tell us. Who did you and Lucy work for?”
“The Company. No one else.”
He shifted the words: “Who gave you the money that Lucy moved through the accounts?”
“I didn’t know about the money.”
“Why did you bomb the office? Who was threatened by the office’s work?”
I thought of all the networks we tried to study, the Money Czar who had no name, his face displayed on the presentation screen in the final moments before the office was destroyed. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t!”
“Where is your wife? Start with any of those questions and we don’t have to dance this dance.”
“I don’t know. Please.” I hated myself for that please.
“Why was the Holborn office a threat to your employers?”
“I have no employers! Jesus, please believe me. Please!”
My voice told him he was so close to breaking me. So close.
He draped the cloth over my face. “You’re not going to make it out of here to see your kid, Capra.”
“No!” I yelled. “No!”
He gushed the water over my face. I felt the water closing in on my lungs. I writhed against the straps, trying to move away from the awful, steady flow. The gush surged into what felt like a river.
I was drowning.
I started to babble. Nonsense. Random words. Lucy. The Bundle. God, no. The scarred man. Innocent. Innocent. I knocked myself nearly unconscious, slamming my head against the waterboard. He hadn’t secured me correctly. He slowly dragged the wet fabric off my face. I begged for air. Then he put the soaked shroud back over my nose and mouth.
And then he started again. I resumed screaming and babbling.
I was glad, when they kicked me to the cold embrace of the cell floor, that I could not hear or remember what I said. Some things are best lost to memory.
