To make her point, she moved back, stabbed her knife into his leg, making him gasp, and then pulled the double-edged blade up the length of his pants. The blade was so sharp it cut through his pants, underwear, and leather belt. With the tip of the blade, she flopped the front of his pants and underwear to the side.
“There’s your disgusting little balls now.” She leaned closer. “Why Miguel, this little dick of yours is all shriveled up. Not so much fun like the last time you showed it to me, right Miguel?”
The man was trembling in agony and fright. Tears streamed from his good eye. Blood ran from the empty socket as well as his broken nose.
As afraid as Miguel was, in as much pain as he was, he rolled his head from side to side to let her know he wasn’t going to talk. He looked prepared to let her do her worst, to die for his beliefs, but he was not going to reveal any information.
His willingness to die before revealing anything was where interrogations usually hit a wall. This was already well beyond the bounds of civilized men.
But Jack believed these terrorists were assembling a nuclear bomb. If this man didn’t talk, Jack was going to have to call in help. It could easily be too late by the time they searched the entire complex. Or worse, for all Jack knew, they could have already loaded that bomb into a truck and be driving into a major city. There was simply no time to waste.
Jack would normally have stopped her long ago from what she was doing to this man, but this was that hypothetical situation come to life of what you would be willing to do to get information out of a terrorist if you knew hundreds of thousands of people would die if you didn’t get him to talk.
This was no longer about what was proper or right, but about the survival of untold numbers of innocent people.
Jack contemplated having Angela move aside to let him try, but she was locked on to this man in a way that was profoundly frightening. Something told him to stay out of it.
Angela scooted back up to again sit on his abdomen to hold him down—not that he was going anywhere. She placed the tip of her knife under his right eye. “I think that by now you know I don’t believe you and you also know that I’m not playing games.
“Maybe you had some grand vision of dying a glorious death striking a blow for your idiotic cause. Maybe you even thought that if you got caught, you would be put in prison and that no one would hurt you because Americans always treat terrorists with respect and they don’t believe in behaving in the same barbaric way you do.
“Well, Miguel, here’s your problem. If you would have been caught by the authorities it’s true that they would likely take you to some nice, cozy prison cell in Guantánamo where you would be given prayer rugs and time to pray to Allah every day, food to keep away the pain of hunger, medical care, and outside playtime in the sunshine with the other killers being held there so as not to offend your dignity.
“But I’m not with any of those authorities, so you’re fucked. No nice prison cell for you where you can shout your hate to the guards, spit at them, throw your shit at them, and laugh at how soft the Americans are with all their rules.
“You get none of that because this isn’t about you being a terrorist. This is personal. You raped me. You hung me up by a rope around my neck. You thought I was going to die.
“But I didn’t die.
“You are my captive now—not the American authorities’—and unlike them, I don’t give a fuck about rules. There is no one here to keep me from doing whatever I want with you. And believe me, I have lots of things that I want to do to you—things I dreamed about when I was in the hospital.
“You long for nothing more than to be a killer of innocent women and children in the name of your cause or your god of whatever fucking lunatic gibberish you people thought up while wiping your asses with rocks. You live in filth because you are filth.
“You hunger to kill people who can’t fight back because you are murderers. That’s all you are, murderers. Nothing more. Nothing noble. Just common killers.
“For that, you are going to suffer at my hands. No rules. No law. No salvation. Just you and me.”
“I will give you nothing,” he managed to say in a pant, spittle bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth, defiance in his voice. “You are nothing but an American whore. You are dirt to me. I welcome death. I tell you nothing! I am prepared to die!”
That was it. Jack knew that whatever else she did to him, he was prepared to take it. He was prepared for the pain. Typical of terrorists, he worshipped death, so he welcomed death.
“Die? Who said anything about dying?”
“We will strike you all down. You will get nothing from me. Never! I will die—as a martyr!”
Angela looked up over her shoulder and smiled at Jack. He had absolutely no idea why.
She turned the smile back down at the man bleeding under her. “That’s okay, Miguel.” She patted his cheek. “That’s okay. You really don’t need to tell me.”
“Because you will get nothing! Allah will reward me. New York City is going to vanish under a mushroom cloud far bigger than the bomb at Hiroshima!”
Angela laughed. She actually laughed.
Jack was getting worried. The clock was ticking on a nuclear weapon. He knew these kinds of terrorists. They really were happy to die for their cause. They believed they would live beyond death to look down on the destruction of their Great Satan.
“I don’t think so,” she said, still smiling like she thought he was a funny little man.
“Yes, you will—because I will tell you nothing.”
“You don’t have to, Miguel. You don’t need to tell me anything.” She patted his cheek again. “It’s okay, Miguel.”
He panted for a moment, wincing from the pain. His curiosity finally got the better of him. “What do you mean?”
Angela shrugged. “We’ll simply bring in the dogs.”
He stopped breathing for a second. “Dogs?”
FIFTY-TWO
Dogs? Jack didn’t know what she was talking about, either.
“That’s right,” she told Miguel. “Didn’t you ever see tracking dogs in that shithole where you lived and practiced killing innocent people?
“How long has it been since you took a bath? Huh, Miguel? A week? Two weeks? When you raped me and I had a chance to smell your filthy body up close and personal, I guessed it had been a month.
“Tracking dogs, you see, can track lost kids, lost people, abducted people, all kinds of people, and I’d bet all of those people had bathed within a day or two. So I don’t imagine that tracking dogs would have the slightest trouble tracking your stink back to the place where you and your goat-fucking friends are building that bomb.
“So, you see?” She patted his cheek again. “It’s okay. We don’t really need you to talk. We’ll just let the dogs come get a sniff of your stinking ass and they’ll lead us right back to your friends.
“After that—” She cut the side of his left arm, making him flinch. “—I’m going to cut off this arm, right about here. It’s useless, now, anyway. Then I’ll put a tourniquet around the stump so you don’t bleed to death.” She grinned down at him. “Do you know what I’m going to do with you, then?”
Miguel, his one eye wide, shook his head.
“Then, I’m going to take you back over to that building where you strung me up by that rope and left me hanging by my neck to choke to death.”
He let out a whine.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to hang you like you hanged me.” She swept a hand before him. “Put that thought right out of your mind. It seemed like an eternity to me as I was hanging there, unable to get a breath, choking to death, but I imagine that in reality it wouldn’t have taken long to die that way. It would have soon been over.”
“You see …” he said in defense, “we wanted you to die quickly. We had mercy on you to give you a quick death—so you would not suffer.”