Angela didn’t believe there was any bed to sleep on. She’d often been in the federal building delivering and picking up courier packages for lawyers. She had been in most of the rooms, or at least walked by them and seen inside.
These men were holding her down in the basement. She’d never been in the basement before. It looked like nothing more than a utility room of some sort. The walls and concrete floor were painted gray. Folding chairs and tables were stacked against the wall behind her. The lighting was two humming fluorescent fixtures.
They had opened one of those tables and sat her down on one side of it. They handcuffed her arms behind her back and her legs to the chair. Agents Goddard, Holgado, and Lumley usually faced her from the other side of the long table. Sometimes, though, one of them would circle around behind her and grab her by her hair to tip her face up to look at the one yelling at her nonstop.
They all had long since shed their coats and ties and opened the collars of their white shirts. They all had sidearms but no badges on their belts. They had never said what agency they were with and she never asked, because, as far as Angela was concerned, they were all basically the same people. She had always known it was best to avoid any kind of authority, like the police, but she had no way to avoid these men.
Angela had, at one point, figured them out, and figured out what they were doing. They had come in here first in response to the bomb she and Jack had found. Since they were here first, they wanted to be the ones to break her and then take her back, like a pig tied to a pole.
They wanted to be the heroes bringing her in. If they took her back to Washington before they got what they wanted out of her, then someone else would snatch her away and get to be the hero. Someone else would have a chance to get the credit for getting her to confess to being a terrorist.
She knew from the outset that it was pointless to answer their questions or talk to them. This whole thing was absurd. These men didn’t care about the truth. They only cared about getting a confession out of her so they could play the hero and advance their own stock within their agency.
Angela was, for the most part, no longer listening to them. They had nothing important or truthful to say. She had dealt with abusive men before who only wanted what they wanted from a woman who was weaker than they were. She did what she had learned to do when she was little. She let her mind go to another place. Her body was there in that basement room while the three men questioned her, accused her, yelled at her, threatened her, smacked her. It didn’t matter. She was gone.
She might as well have been on the moon.
Every once in a while, one of them, or occasionally two of them, would leave the room to take a phone call. She could hear their voices out in the stairwell, but she couldn’t tell what they were saying.
Agent Lumley returned to the other side of the table and slammed the confession down in front of her again.
“What do you say, Constantine? If you sign this confession, you can have a nice drink of water and finally get some rest. Most of all, you’ll be doing the right thing for a change.”
Angela came back from that faraway place to look up at him.
“Go fuck yourself.”
He straightened, his jaw clenching.
“How many people would have died, Constantine?” Agent Goddard asked for about the thousandth time.
She wanted to say that she was the one who had prevented those deaths, but she didn’t. They didn’t want to hear it. They had their own plan. That plan was to get her to confess to being a terrorist so they could be heroes.
“You should be thankful we stopped you when we did,” Agent Goddard said. “You would have been a murderer. What does that say about you? You should be grateful we stopped you from becoming that kind of person.”
“If you sign the confession,” Agent Holgado said, somewhat more gently, “it’s kind of like going to confession at the church and confessing your sins to the priest, who then asks God to absolve you of those sins. It cleanses your soul. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re like priests, helping you to cleanse your soul.
“Are you Catholic, Constantine? Your name is Italian, so I think maybe you are, so you know what we’re talking about. You know we’re only trying to help you. Confessing your sins is your only way to salvation.”
Angela was already back in her distant place. These men were nothing but meaningless voices mumbling in the distance.
Agent Lumley’s phone rang. He pulled it off the clip on his belt and glanced at the caller ID.
“I gotta take this,” he told the other two.
He went out of the room, but had been gone for only a short time when he stuck his head back in the door.
“Both of you, get out here.”
Angela was suddenly alone for the first time since they’d thrown her in the back of that black SUV. It was the first time that at least one of them wasn’t in the room hammering away at her. Sometimes one or two of them left for quite a while. She figured that they had gone out to snatch a little sleep while one of the others took a shift working on her, keeping her awake. But they never left her completely alone.
They were gone for so long that Angela’s eyes closed and she nodded off. Because they had her handcuffed to the chair she couldn’t fall, so when her eyes closed her head sagged forward as she dozed off.
She didn’t know how long she had been asleep when they came back in, but it seemed like it was at least a couple of hours—not nearly as much sleep as she needed, but welcomed, nonetheless.
When Agent Holgado unlocked her handcuffs and leg-irons, she didn’t know what was going on. She wouldn’t put it past them to beat her to death down in that basement and say she tried to escape.
Agent Lumley put a full bottle of water down in front of her. Angela rubbed her wrists as she looked up at him. She suspected the water was a trick, or more likely drugged.
He opened it and gulped down nearly half of it, then set it down in front of her again. “There. It’s not poisoned. Go ahead and have a drink.”
His voice sounded different. He sounded defeated. The other two looked rather sheepish as well.
Angela didn’t trust any of them, and she was not about to take the water no matter how thirsty she was.
“Some new information has come to light.” Agent Goddard ran his hand back over his buzz-cut hair. “We’ve just learned that you had absolutely nothing to do with those terrorists. This was all a big mistake due to … an abundance of caution.”
Angela was still rubbing her bruised wrists. She didn’t say anything.
Four more men in dark suits and ties came into the room and approached the other side of the table to face Angela.
“You’re free to go,” one of them said in an official tone. “You have been cleared of any wrongdoing.”
“It seems that you have friends in very high places,” Agent Goddard said. “A guardian angel.”
Angela didn’t trust any of them. She didn’t get up. She didn’t say anything.
One of the four new men pulled something from the breast pocket of his dark suit coat. It was about the size of a credit card. When he set it down it sounded like plastic, too. He slid it across the table to her.
She glanced down just long enough to see her photo on it. Holographic seals partially covered her face and signatures she couldn’t read. She saw the word “Federal” but couldn’t read the rest of it.
Another of the four men in suits, a big black guy with a shaved head, laid her Walther P22 down on the table beside the card with her photo. Her gun still had the suppressor on it.
“Here is your weapon back, Ms. Constantine,” he said. “Nice choice, by the way. You don’t have to worry about overpenetration, yet lethal if you know what you’re doing, and with the subsonic rounds it’s loaded with, I would guess you do.”