Once she had what she needed, she would stop his pain, put him under, and then e-mail Carston from this IP address and tell him everything she’d learned. Then she would drive away and keep going for a very long time. Maybe Carston and company wouldn’t come after her. Maybe they would. And she might never know, because she would most likely keep hiding until she died—hopefully of natural causes.
Before nine minutes were over, the dose started to wear off. It was different for everyone, and Daniel was on the larger side. His screams turned to groans as his body slowly melted into a pile of exhausted flesh on the table, and then he was quiet. She removed the gag and he gasped for air. He stared at her with awed horror for one long moment, and then he started to cry.
“I’ll give you a few minutes,” she said. “Collect your thoughts.”
She left through the exit he couldn’t see, then sat quietly on the cot and listened to him choke back his sobs.
Crying was normal, and usually it boded well. But it was obvious that this crying was Daniel the Teacher. There was still no sign of Dark Daniel, not one knowing glance or defensive tic. What would reach him? If this was truly dissociative identity disorder, could she force an appearance of the personality she wanted? She needed an actual shrink on her team today. If she’d gone docilely into the lab as they’d wanted, they probably would have been able to find her one almost the moment she asked. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now.
She quietly ate a soft breakfast bar while she waited for his breathing to even out, and then she ate a second. She washed it down with a box of apple juice out of the minifridge.
When she reentered the tent, Daniel was gazing despairingly at the egg-foam ceiling. She walked quietly to the computer and touched a key.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that, Daniel.”
He hadn’t heard her enter. He cringed as far away from the sound of her voice as he could.
“Let’s not do it again, okay?” she said. She settled back into her chair. “I want to go home, too.” Kind of a lie, but also mostly true, if impossible. “And, though you might not believe me, I’m not actually a sadist. I don’t enjoy watching you suffer. I just don’t have another choice. I’m not going to let all those people die.”
His voice was raw. “I don’t… know what… you’re talking about.”
“You’d be surprised how many people say that—and keep saying it for round after round of what you just went through, and worse! And then on the tenth round for one, on the seventeenth for another, suddenly the truth comes pouring out. And I get to tell the good guys where to find the warhead or the chemical bomb or the disease agent. And people stay alive, Daniel.”
“I haven’t killed anyone,” he rasped.
“But you’re planning to, and I’m going to change your mind.”
“I would never do that.”
She sighed. “This is going to take a long time, isn’t it?”
“I can’t tell you anything I don’t know. You’ve got the wrong person.”
“I’ve heard that one a lot, too,” she said lightly, but it touched a nerve. If she couldn’t get the other Daniel to appear, then wasn’t she truly torturing the wrong person?
She made a snap decision to go off script again, though she was out of her depth when it came to mental illness.
“Daniel, do you ever have blackouts?”
A long pause. “What?”
“Have you, for example, woken up somewhere and not known how you got there? Has anyone ever told you that you did or said something that you can’t remember doing or saying?”
“Um. No. Well, today. I mean, that’s what you’re saying, right? That I’m planning to do something awful, but I don’t know what it is?”
“Have you ever been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder?”
“No! Alex, I’m not the crazy person in this room.”
That didn’t help at all.
“Tell me about Egypt.”
He turned his head toward her. His expression made the words he was thinking as clear as if he’d spoken them out loud: Are you kidding me, lady?
She just waited.
He sighed a pained little gasp. “Well, Egypt has one of the longest histories of any modern civilization. There is evidence that Egyptians were living along the Nile as early as the tenth millennium BC. By about 6000 BC—”
“That’s hilarious, Daniel. Can we be serious now?”
“I don’t know what you want! Are you testing to see if I’m really a history teacher? I can’t even tell!”
She could hear the strength coming back into his voice. The nice thing about her drugs was that they wore off quickly. She could have a focused conversation between rounds. And she’d found that the subjects had a greater fear of pain when they weren’t feeling any. The high-ups and deep-downs seemed to speed things along.
She touched a key on her computer.
“Tell me about your trip to Egypt.”
“I have never been to Egypt.”
“You didn’t go there with Habitat for Humanity two years ago?”
“No. I’ve been in Mexico for the past three summers.”
“You do know people keep track of these things, right? That your passport number is logged into a computer and there’s a record of where you’ve gone?”
“Which is why you should know I was in Mexico!”
“Where you met Enrique de la Fuentes.”