She thought of something she had learned about the captain during a conversation with her mother, a month after his death. Psychological warfare, interrogation-resistance techniques…
Nancy had been estranged from her father for both justifiable and petty reasons. During his four-plus years in the apartment above the garage, the valley between them had been bridged; Nancy’s real father-inflicted wounds had healed, and she had come to recognize those that were imaginary. After his death, she had been struck hard by grief, and over the weeks following his burial, she had talked about him at greater length and in more depth than ever before.
He had remained a combat soldier and officer far past the age when other men needed to switch to desk work. A stint as a trainer of recruits did not give him satisfaction. For the last decade of his career, he’d become an intelligence officer, in part supervising the gathering and analysis of information about the nation’s enemies, but primarily committed to development of defenses against psychological warfare and to formulating interrogation-resistance techniques that soldiers, when captured and held as prisoners of war, could employ to deny crucial information to the enemy.
That detail hadn’t seemed relevant when Bibi was ten and first heard it from her mother. Of the thousands of things, both important and trivial, Nancy told her about her grandfather, that was one of the least interesting. But now she realized that one way to resist interrogation would be to have a memory trick, a way of forgetting those facts the enemy might most need to know.
Surely the other presence in the vacant bungalow must have made small noises as he worked his way toward her. She must have been too lost in memories to separate the telltale sounds of a stalker from the ticks and creaks of an old house easing toward the ruin that was wanted of it.
Her flashlight was a beacon that made of her an easy target, and it revealed her attacker only in the penultimate moment, when abruptly he abandoned stealth and rushed her from the doorway.
In the instant before impact, the ice-white flashlight beam stuttered across his looming face. Broad and blunt, cleft-chinned and beetle-browed, it was a countenance familiar to victims through thousands of years, seen on marauders and plunderers, on those who tortured with hot irons and exquisitely sharp skewers, on those who lynched and beheaded and those who wielded the clubs in the gulags.
He crashed into her with devastating force, he the bull and she the china shop, so that she thought something essential inside her broke on that first contact. As he collided with her, he seized her and lifted her, his momentum barely diminished, and carried her with furious intent, slamming her into a wall. Pain flashed down her spine and through her hips, around her ribs, up her spine and across her shoulders and down her arms, her breath bursting from her with such violence that with it went the ability to inhale.
The flashlight had flown from her hand and now lay in a far corner of the room, washing the juncture of two walls. The backflow of light was too dim for Bibi to make out the details of the face immediately before her, only the shape of the skull, like the head of some demented and hornless minotaur in a nightmare. That terrible moment was only prelude to worse.
As she gaped in shock and in a failed attempt to draw breath, his mouth found hers, and he thrust his tongue between her lips in a loathsome imitation of a kiss, his breath hot and spittle foaming. She wanted to bite his tongue all the way through, bite it off, but she couldn’t get her breath or work her jaws, the impact having paralyzed her. Pinned, arms useless, she wasn’t able to reach for the pistol in her shoulder rig. Pressing obscenely against her, the attacker realized that she was armed, eased up on her just enough to thrust a hand under her blazer, tore the Sig Sauer from the holster, and threw it across the room. He yanked the T-shirt out of her jeans and got his hands under it and groped her breasts, as she at last inhaled, drawing into her mouth his exhalation scented with onions and bacon grease.