She walked slowly to her desk chair while his muffled shrieks were absorbed into the double layer of foam, sat down, and crossed her legs. She looked at the monitors—everything elevated but nothing in the danger zone. A healthy body could experience a lot more pain than most people would think before its important organs were really in any serious peril. She brushed the touch pad on her computer, keeping the screen brightly lit. Then she pulled her wristwatch out of her pocket and laid it across her knee. This was mostly for theatrics; she could have watched the clock on her computer or the monitors just as easily.
She faced him while she waited, her face composed and the silver watch bright against her black clothing. Subjects tended to find this disconcerting—that she could watch her handiwork so dispassionately. So she stared at him, expression polite, an audience member at a mediocre play, while his body thrashed and distorted on the table and his screams choked past the gag. Sometimes his eyes were on her, pleading and agonized, and other times they whirled crazily around the room.
Ten minutes could be a very long time. His muscles started to spasm independently of each other, some locking into knots and others seeming to want to jerk themselves off the bone. Sweat ran off his face, darkening his hair. The skin over his cheekbones looked ready to split. The screams lowered in pitch, turned hoarse, sounding more like an animal’s than a man’s.
Six more minutes.
And these weren’t even the good drugs.
Anyone who was sick enough to want to could duplicate the pain she was inflicting now. The acid she was using wasn’t a controlled substance; it was fairly easy to acquire online, even if one happened to be on the run from the dark underbelly of the U.S. government. Back in her interrogating prime, when she had her beautiful lab and her beautiful budget, her sequencer and her reactor, she’d been able to create some truly unique and ultra-specific preparations.
The Chemist really wasn’t the proper code name for her at all. However, the Molecular Biologist was probably too big a mouthful. Barnaby had been the chemistry expert, and the things he’d taught her had kept her alive after she’d lost her lab; she had become her code name in the end. But in the beginning, it had been her theoretical research with monoclonal antibodies that had brought her to the department’s attention. It was a shame she couldn’t risk taking Daniel to the lab. This operation would have produced results much more quickly.
And she’d been so close to actually removing pain from the equation. That had been her Holy Grail, though no one else seemed eager for it. She was sure that if she’d been working in the lab for the past three years instead of running for her life, by now she would have created the key that would unlock whatever one needed from the human mind. No torture, no horror. Just quick answers, given pleasantly, and then an equally pleasant trip to either a cell or the execution wall.
They should have let her work.
Still four minutes to go.
She and Barnaby had discussed different strategies for dealing with these periods of the interrogation. Barnaby had told himself stories. He would remember the fairy tales from his childhood and think of modern versions or alternative endings or what would happen if the characters switched places. He’d said some of the ideas he came up with were pretty good, and when he had time he was going to write them down. She, however, felt like she was wasting time if she wasn’t doing something practical. She would plan things. In the beginning, she planned new versions of the monoclonal antibody that would control brain response and block neural receptors. Later, she planned her life on the run, thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong, every worst-case scenario, and what she could do to keep herself from falling into each trap. Then how to escape the trap halfway in. Then after it was sprung. She tried to envision every possibility.
Barnaby said she needed to take a mental break now and then. Have some fun, or what was the point of living?
Just living, she had decided. Just living was all she asked. And so she put in the mental effort needed to make that possible.
Today she thought about the next step. Tonight, tomorrow night, or, heaven help him, the night after that, Daniel was going to tell her everything. Everyone broke. It was just a simple fact that a human being could resist pain for only so long. Some people could deal better with one kind or another, but that meant she would just switch to another type of pain. At some point, if he didn’t talk, she would roll Daniel onto his stomach—so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit—and administer what she called the green needle, though the serum was actually clear, just like all the others. If that didn’t work, she’d try one of the hallucinogens. There was always a new way to feel pain. The body had so many different ways to experience stimuli.