The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (12 page)

“I'll tell you everything right now!”

“Very well, then let's shift our approach a little. What is the name of your operation? Its code name, Flynn?”

“Oilman. It's Oilman.” He'd made that up, too.

“Is it?”

His rectum began to sting. He thrust and struggled, but he could not make the penetrator move. “Yes! For the love of God!” Always express more suffering than you're feeling. That's the key to surviving torture.

“What does the implant in Albert Doxy's head do?”

“It's a tracking device. Everybody in sensitive positions has one.”

The pain rose. “Too deep in the brain for that. Who knew the truth about what he was doing? You, Flynn, did you know? Were you observing him?”

“I don't know how to answer.”

The room swept away until it was a dot of light. The nurse made a sharp statement in Farsi and Ghorbani laughed. The others in the room—and there were now quite a few—followed suit.

“Oh, Flynn,” he said, “please face that you're a soldier, not a spy. You should give up this charade and just tell us what we want to know. You can't hide anything anyway.” He then spoke in Farsi and there was a murmur of chuckles. “I am telling them what I said to you.” He and the nurse then conversed in Farsi for a moment. “I am asking her if the next phase will kill you. It's Mrs. Josefi's right to carry out the actual execution, and I would be embarrassed if I deprived her of her right. Now Nurse Dilara wishes to practice her English.”

She said, “I explain we now cause angina attack.”

“No, no, my dear. Remember your verbs. English verbs are very exact. ‘I
will
explain.'”

“Thank you, sir. I
will
explain this. It
will
be great agony and it
is
dangerous. It
will
continue for some time. If we must keep repeating this procedure, it
will
damage your heart, transforming you into a ghost of yourself who can never get a breath.”

“Yes, ‘will.' Very good, Dilara.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

Flynn hardly heard them. They had now revealed a second fact to him. Not only were they interested in the president, they'd had an agent on the inside. It must have been Doxy. Who had killed him, though? The mystery was still very deep.

Nurse Dilara placed electrodes on his chest, circling his heart. Then she slid a metal plate under his back. She nodded to Ghorbani.

“Now we talk about Aeon.”

“Which is?”

“Don't be a child. We have your file.”

“Then you know everything.”

“We know enough to ask more.”

If they weren't already in an alliance with Aeon, Flynn now believed, they soon would be. At any cost, he had to get this information back to Washington, but that meant doing the impossible. Escaping. Surviving.

Once such an alliance was in force, Iran would be the most powerful country in the world.

He said, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“A year ago, a police officer from Aeon was detailed to your unit.”

“No idea about that.”

Flynn's chest exploded, his throat seemed to collapse as if a wire were being twisted around it, and the world sank away into a vague and terrifying gray.

The agony went on.

At last, silence came, broken only by the sound of his raw, gagging breath.

“Please understand that I can use all of these implements at once, Flynn. As you know, you're not like most men. Such extraordinary pain will not render you unconscious. You'll suffer and suffer and suffer, Flynn.”

Flynn did not respond. He fixed his mind on a happy moment from long ago, riding out with Abby, their horses' hooves thundering across the Llano Estacado.

Agony swarmed him from every direction, the heat of it, the searing, ripping torment of it, the burning of his guts, the fire in his genitals, the cruel squeezing of his heart.

Then it stopped.

“That was a taste, Flynn. I know for certain who you are and what you do. Understand this. We have all Aeon's records about you and Delta 242. Al got them for us as his last act of courage, and we were able to remove them from his office before he, unfortunately, had to give his life for the revolution. That's why we lured you here. We were taught just how to handle you psychologically. We set our trap just as Aeon's intelligence service instructed us and, soon enough, here you came.”

They had killed Doxy. The Alliance with Aeon was, therefore, active. But they hadn't broken the encrypted parts of the core file or he would not be here and this would not be happening. Aeon must certainly have broken it, which meant that, while they might indeed be in touch, the alliance wasn't yet deep.

They might have a Wire, though, the same sort of direct connection to Aeon that Flynn's unit had once had. It would have been over such a device that they would have received instructions about how to capture Flynn.

Ghorbani moved away from the table. Across the room, he quietly consulted with a colleague. Flynn took the moment to go deep into himself, to embrace his pain as tenderly as his mother would have, and to wait empty, without thought or expectation. This, he knew, was the only way to endure torture, with a surrendered body and a mind emptied of hope.

As slow sunlight crossed the floor, the nurse methodically smoked, her face turned away from him. There was shame in her somewhere, or she would have watched.

He could now see that she despised her work, and so began to think that she might be a key to freedom.

He had more than once escaped from horrendous alien captivities, and so had come to trust his skills. What concerned him was that the torture was eroding those skills fast. The longer it went on, the more likely he was to miss whatever tiny chance might present itself.

The nurse would never consciously betray her masters, but an unconscious expression of her hatred for them was possible, and it was this he had to watch for.

“Flynn, I want to warn you, the next round is going to do some permanent damage to your heart. Understand this.”

“I understand.”

“Gail—you remember Gail—is she still here on Earth?”

“She went home.”

“No, she did not. Where is she, Flynn?”

She was the lone police officer Aeon had sent to give them support after the death of Oltisis, their previous representative. They called her “Gail” because her real name was unpronounceable.

“I haven't seen her since the night she left.”

“You know that it's impossible to hide on Aeon.”

“I'm sure.” Given what the NSA could do on Earth, he could well imagine how total the invasion of privacy must be on Aeon.

“Then she must be here. It follows, no?”

“Maybe her ship blew up on the way home. All I know is, I saw her leave.”

The torture resumed. From some distant, heavenly place, he heard through his agony Ghorbani saying, “Let's get a tea.”

Everyone except the nurse left the room. Flynn was left with electricity burning in his genitals and a cloth over his face that made it necessary to relax completely in order not to smother. If he was going to live, he had to let the pain possess him. He had to accept it. Only then could he relax enough to take sufficient breath.

His beloved first horse Twenty-Kay was standing across by the fence. His dad had her reins in his hand. He said, ‘Come on, Errol, she's yours now.” Dad and Mom had called him by his real name. He'd come up with Flynn in high school. It beat Erroll Carroll all to hell.

It was his ninth birthday. A Texas kid's best birthday was his horse birthday. Twenty-Kay was blindingly quick in the quarter mile. Within a day, they were deeply in love, horse and boy, and that love lasted.

They were crossing the prairie in the springtime, the air sweet with flowers and new grass.

But then why this agony? He had to get this off him! Why this agony?

Mom said, “Just relax, honey, open yourself to it, relax into it.”

The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the stink of shit. His shit.

The end of the pain was like falling into infinity. He was left gulping air, his heart thrusting like a pile driver, his breath hardly working.

The world blurred, but breathing became easier.

The nurse had removed the cloth and covered his face with an oxygen mask.

They knew about Aeon, Oltisis, Gail, him, Abby—the whole sordid tale.

Aeon had changed sides, and with that act, had changed the balance of power on Earth. Iran, not the United States, was now the most powerful nation in the world.

He had to find out all he could, then get out of here. Except for one problem: Escape appeared to be a pipe dream.

She was gazing down into his face, her brown eyes ridged with concern. She removed the mask. “Breathe,” she said in her heavily accented English.

“The chest strap—it's too tight.”

Using her long, delicate hands, the hands of an artist or a surgeon, she loosened it a little. In that moment, he could have snapped it, but it would only have been an act of bravado. The wrist and ankle straps would have prevented him from escaping.

He said no more. This was not the moment to attempt to get her to release one of his wrists. But that was all he needed, just one hand, and he'd be off this table in four seconds flat.

A barking, spitting fusillade of Farsi invective caused the nurse to at first widen her eyes, then spit back like a cornered wildcat. Davood Ghorbani had returned and, Flynn guessed, been outraged that she had turned off the torture devices on her own.

He strode over to the table. “You're lucky—that one has a soft heart. We'd hoped that the nurses wouldn't be as soft as the damn doctors. Women usually aren't. Plus this is a double-pay posting for them. But it doesn't matter—they're all soft and they all hate it.” He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and blew smoke out of his nostrils. Flynn saw a dragon breathing fire. Ghorbani smiled. “Hallucinating, Flynn? Good, we're getting somewhere, despite the foolishness of Miss Softy. Where is Gail?”

Torment blasted through him from all directions at once.

It stopped.

“Where, Flynn?”

“Texas! She's in Texas. A ranch north of Marfa. The Bar K Bar, ranch of MacAdoo Terrell.”

“That one; yes, he's interesting, too. So the creature is there, protected by his gun collection and his radar fence.” He smiled a boy's cruel smile. “That won't do, Flynn.”

“Aeon must know where she is.”

“Then why did they ask us?”

“To get you to torture me to answer a question I can't.”

“Why would they do that?”

Aeon wanted him dead and had failed time and again to kill him, but he chose not to say that. “Ask them.”

Ghorbani's crew had now also returned, some of them carrying paper cups of tea and coffee, and the smell of it was wonderful to Flynn.

“Yes, the closeness of death intensifies all smells and tastes. I suppose it's why the condemned so relish their final meals. But whether you have that opportunity will be Mrs. Josefi's decision—and perhaps she will relent. They so often do, the Persians. We are such a kind people.”

This caused Flynn to laugh.

“You're the strong one, I'll grant you that. But do you know that you have been answering my questions truthfully from the beginning? Here, let me show you what I mean.” He turned to the assembly of officers. “Please bring the tape.”

A young man came up with an iPad.

“Human beings cannot lie, Flynn.” He did something that Flynn could not see. Then he heard his own agonized shrieking. “Now—this is interesting—we slow it down.” The shriek dropped to a lower register. “Again.” The iPad now emitted a low, long growl. “And compress.”

A ghostly, hollow voice, clipped and tight, said, “Mind control.”

“You see, that was when we were asking you about the implant. Your conscious mind informed me that it was a tracking device. Believable enough, but it was not the truth. Your unconscious wanted so badly for the pain to end that it inserted the truth into your scream. So Al Doxy was under mind control. Why was that, Flynn?”

Flynn stiffened, waiting.

“Another jolt to your heart could kill you, so listen carefully. What did Doxy's implant give you?”

Flynn knew his body well, and now sensed that it had come to the end of its ability to resist. But he also didn't know the answer to the question. He decided to take another wild flier; there was nothing to lose. “We knew he was turned, that he belonged to somebody, but we didn't know who.” A lie, of course, but one, based on what he had heard so far, that they might believe.

“Did you build that implant, or was it stolen from Aeon?”

He couldn't reveal that the U.S. had this capability. He tried to change the rules. “What do you know about Aeon?”

“You and I both know what'll happen if we have to repeat the treatment. Best never to ask me another question.” He raised his eyebrows. “It's not your place, really.”

“We didn't know exactly what it was, just that it was there. We found a fragment. Whoever killed him took the rest.”

“You are not capable of making such things? Back-engineering?”

“We cannot.”

Ghorbani once again laid a hand on his forehead. He stroked it gently. A soft, very slight smile flitted across his face. “You know, I'm actually fascinated by how profoundly I despise you. I try not to enjoy hurting you. It's not healthy. But I do, Flynn, very much.”

The whisper of his touch made Flynn's stomach churn with acid.

“You must understand that I have some other tricks up my sleeve. Do you know anything about the past of this place? Persia? Probably not—you're an American. They're ignorant; they can afford to be. We Persians cannot afford to disrespect history.” He patted Flynn's cheek. “Let me show you a picture.”