FIFTY-ONE
Zach never considered himself a tough
guy—he would complain if a restaurant overcooked his eggs—but he’d
always held a secret belief that he could hold up well under
torture. He’d spent days on his feet, working with no sleep, eating
practically nothing. In that place in his mind where he starred in
his own action movies, Zach thought he could handle it, at least
for a little while.
He was wrong.
Ken made a phone call. Reyes arrived in a few
minutes. Together, they stripped Zach naked, barely looking at
him.
Zach made a joke about how this was further than he
usually went on a first date.
Reyes, with the same bored look on his face,
punched him hard enough to make his nose bleed.
They went back to tearing his clothes off.
They found the duct tape Cade had wrapped over
Zach’s ribs and cut that away, slicing skin.
When Zach was naked, Ken cuffed his hands behind
him and pulled them up to the level of Zach’s shoulders. Zach
doubled over from the pain. Ken yanked him over to the wall and
hooked the cuffs over a peg. Reyes put a hood over Zach’s
head.
He stood there, his knees bent, his ass hanging
out, his arms behind him and higher than his head.
He waited for another punch, or something
worse.
He heard the door slam. They were gone.
He didn’t know how long they left him like that.
His legs began cramping immediately. His fingers went numb. His
knees wobbled, but every time he started to lean forward, the pain
in his shoulders brought him back up.
He tried not to make a sound. He really did. But
after a while, he heard something. A low-pitched noise, almost like
a growl of an animal in pain. For an instant, he wondered if they
had put someone else in the cell with him.
Of course, it was him. He was singing out in
pain.
The door opened, and light flooded back into his
eyes as the hood was snatched away.
Zach blinked and looked up at Ken. Ken smiled
back.
“That didn’t take long,” Ken said. He pulled the
cuffs off the peg—Zach thought his shoulders would separate
completely—and then dropped them. Zach collapsed on the concrete
floor.
Tears of relief welled up in his eyes.
Ken gave him a full ten seconds of lying like
that—the blood rushing back into his limbs, the nerves waking up
with urgent messages of pain—before dragging him back to his
feet.
Ken looked into his eyes. Zach blinked away the
tears.
“I’m not going to talk,” Zach said.
Ken laughed. “Who cares?”
He knocked Zach flat on his back with a hard
slap.
“Let’s get to work,” he said, as he kicked Zach in
the side of the head.
KEN NEVER asked him a question. Not once.
Not when he went to work with the Taser, shocking
Zach over and over again on his bare skin.
Not when he beat Zach with the baton. Or when he
poured a Diet Coke—a frigging Diet Coke—down Zach’s nose,
causing more pain than Zach thought possible, nearly drowning him
in the process.
Or when he brought the dog in. Or when he just
punched him.
He never asked a single question.
Zach offered. He offered whatever he could think
of. Which wasn’t too much, actually. But he thought, maybe if I can
get him talking . . . And then he thought, Jesus Christ, only make
it fucking stop.
It didn’t matter. Zach didn’t have anything Ken
wanted to know.
So he just kept working, not saying a word.
He did whistle occasionally, however.
THE BOY TRIED to raise his head. Ken punched him
hard, breaking the skin on his knuckles.
He put his hand in his mouth and tasted blood. The
bleeding stopped. Ken hit the boy again.
Ken didn’t think the kid had any info, but even if
he did it wouldn’t matter. He knew Helen wanted the boy to die in
the interrogation room. She did the big lovey-dovey act just to get
him in the mood. He wasn’t that stupid.
He knew Helen was using him. He didn’t mind. His
whole life, he’d done what other people said, and it was boring.
Sure, he was successful, but he’d always stayed within the proper
boundaries.
When Helen recruited him, he thought it would be
more or less the same. Then he learned that following her orders,
he could do all kinds of things that had previously been forbidden.
It opened new vistas for him. It changed the rules. He was free to
be just as evil an SOB as he wanted, and he could consider it part
of his duty to his country.
He felt Helen understood that, on a level too deep
to talk about. He was sure they would end up together someday, and
they would look back on these early years fondly. Like an extended
courtship.
In the meantime, even without Helen in his bed, Ken
was happy enough. He enjoyed the job.
He took his time with Zach. He wanted to make it
last.