Jamie nods. Spinning his scotch glass around and around on the bar in front of him, he stares at the liquid inside, apparently trying to construct what he wants to tell me in his head before he allows himself to say it out loud. After a long, drawn out minute, his gaze returns to me.
“There was an English guy in Afghanistan. He was a member of the Royal Marines but the British government loaned him to us as an informant. He’d been taken prisoner by a group of rebels after his unit’s transport hit and IED and killed everyone but him. For nearly two years the rebels kept him hostage in a cave system, giving him just enough food and water so that he could survive. They would torture him every day. They wanted to know everything he knew. They would pull his fingers and his toenails out one by one. They would pull his teeth out too, whenever he wouldn’t give them information they wanted. This guy, Andrew, he held out for months. He took the pain and the torment, and he let them take his fingernails and his teeth, until the people who were holding him captive realized they weren’t going to get anything out of him.
“Now, that was a really bad position to be in for Andrew. The only reason they were keeping him alive was because he was worth something. If he wasn’t valuable to them alive in any way, he sure as hell would be valuable to them dead. See they don’t just kill people in the shadows. They want the world to see. They gather their friends. They gather the world’s media. They make us watch on television as they force their prisoners to tell lies about their countries, and then they make us watch as they cut off their heads and burn their bodies in cages.
“Andrew nearly died that way. They sat him down in front of a camera and they told him what they wanted him to say, otherwise they were going to have their friends in England track down his wife and two small kids, and they were gonna have them murdered in their beds. You always think you won’t cave, that nothing they can do or say to you will make you give in and repeat the hatred they want to spread, but when they threaten your loved ones…” Jamie looks pained. He flinches a little, small creases forming between his eyebrows. “So Andrew sat down and said what they wanted him to say, and they filmed it. The bastards restrained him while they tried to slit his throat from behind, so the camera could see. They almost finished the job. Andrew had a scar that ran from his left ear too his Adam’s apple, but that’s where it stopped. Miraculously one of our units launched an assault on the caves. We had no idea they were holding anyone captive there. We’d had intel that they were using the location as a munitions cache and we wanted to take it out.
“So they stormed the place and Andrew only got his throat half cut. He came and worked with Cade and me for a long time. He told us in graphic detail about the shit those guys did to him. The kinds of torture they were capable of. And he told us that it paled in comparison to the atrocities he saw committed by the cartels in Mexico. He cried like a baby when he told us about that. He’d gone in as part of a task force to rescue a British government official who had been taken right off the street in Juarez. They’d found this guy and his wife in an open grave under a bridge in the middle of the city. The bodies had been mutilated beyond recognition. When the marines attempted to recover the bodies, they’d realized that both the official and his wife were still alive. They were fucked up and bleeding, missing skin, missing fingers, both of them missing their tongues and their eyes. Their ears. Her breasts had been cut off. His dick. They were just raw pieces of meat, and they’d tossed their bodies into a hole while they were still bleeding.
“The cartels did that to them. Not even a hardened marine who’d been held captive in the desert and almost died at the hands of some of the most immoral men on this planet could talk about the shit he saw in Mexico without his hands shaking. And these are the people we’re dealing with right now, Sophia. This is the type of madness we’re involving ourselves in. Cade and I were deployed. A lot of the other Widow Makers are ex military, too. We’ve all had training. We’ve all been in combat situations. We’ve been to the dark places of this world and we’ve already puked our guts up. We’ve already seen enough to make it difficult to sleep at night.”
He stops talking for a second. Gives me a second to digest. I already know what he’s going to say next, and the gravity of his words really hit home. I grip hold of the counter, leaning into it, tired and terrified as Jamie continues.