The Short Drop (17 page)

Tinsley looked at the dirty magazines that Vaughn had picked up, but whatever they had whispered to Vaughn, Tinsley could not hear it. He frowned. Why had Vaughn come back at all? He didn’t like that he couldn’t see it. No matter. If Kirby Tate was the man who had evaded him a decade ago, that meant Tinsley’s work was almost done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jenn watched Kirby Tate on a bank of monitors. It was dark in his cell, Tate a ghostly green on the screen. From bound wrists he hung, arms outstretched. She watched Tate dance on his toes, trying to keep his feet under him. When he slipped, his shoulders took the full weight of his body until he could get his feet back under him. It was exhausting. It was intended to be.

Through the walls she could feel the bass from music bombarding Tate. Some speed-metal band that believed anything less than 250 beats a minute was elevator music. It amazed her what some people listened to voluntarily. She only knew it as the playlist of CIA black-site detention facilities around the world.

She wiped sweat out of her eyes. Even with the rollaway door open, the heat of the sun baked the units like ovens. It was much worse for Tate. How far was she willing to take this if Kirby didn’t fold as readily as predicted? She pushed the question away. He would break. They might have to tiptoe up to the edge, but she was sure he would break before things crossed the line. He had to.

In her time at the Agency, Jenn had sat in on more enhanced interrogations than she cared to remember. No matter how hard you thought you were, you carried each one with you. That she had believed in their necessity did nothing to help her sleep at night. The subjects had been men of principle and faith. Principles she despised. Principles that had led to unforgivable crimes. But principles nonetheless, and on some base level she could respect their devotion. Interrogating such men took time. It took time to break a devout man of his beliefs, and it was a terrible thing to witness. Worse still to be the one responsible.

Kirby Tate, on the other hand, believed only in his need. No principles other than his own ghoulish desires. A man like this was already broken. She did not expect to be here long. How much steel could there be in a man so weak he preyed on children?

She yawned and stretched. It had been a long night. She looked enviously toward Hendricks, asleep on the cot in the corner. She’d wake him in another two hours, and they’d go back to work on Tate.

Tate was a career criminal. In addition to the botched Trish Casper abduction, he had a lengthy record and had been in and out of lockup since he was fifteen. A child of the system, he would think he knew how it worked. Its rules. She’d known he would be confident about his ability to play it to his advantage. So after they had grabbed Tate at his house, they’d built the illusion in his mind that he was no longer in the United States. Leading him to believe that he was far, far from home and that no one was coming to rescue him. He had to learn early on that his concept of legality didn’t apply here—no lawyers, no Miranda rights, no bargains to be struck. Only answers or pain. Answers or pain.

Creating the illusion had involved driving Tate to a little-used airstrip, boarding him onto a plane, and strapping him into a seat. Of course, the plane never left the hangar, but in Tate’s mind they had flown halfway around the world.

Hendricks was a remarkably accomplished audio technician. He’d conjured an entire cockpit crew running through a preflight checklist. She and Hendricks had staged a prisoner transfer, manhandling Tate and barking instructions at him. Tate struggled and moaned under his hood but couldn’t speak through the gag. Hendricks had rapped him across the head and told him to be a good boy.

Right before “takeoff,” they’d gassed him. Nothing too potent. Just enough to knock him out for five minutes, and when he’d woken the plane was in the “air.” It was an impressive effect, the cockpit humming like a plane in flight. Hendricks had defeated the plane’s squat switch (a weight-sensitive trigger in the landing gear that told the plane it was on the ground) and pressurized the interior; Jenn had actually felt her ears pop. A “pilot” came over the speakers and gave the cabin a status update: airspeed, altitude, flight time. Hendricks had placed a large subwoofer beneath the plane, which produced a constant low-frequency tone to simulate the engines. They’d kept up a constant chatter: Jenn playing the part of the veteran, Hendricks the rookie. During the “flight,” Hendricks had peppered her with questions about their destination, and Jenn painted a grim picture for Tate’s benefit.

They’d let Tate soak up the performance for thirty minutes and then gassed him again. A little more this time. So that when he’d woken, groggy and disoriented, he was easily convinced that he was back on terra firma and being loaded into a car. The same car, as it happened, but with the sounds of foreign voices chattering in the background, there’d been no way for him to know that. Tate had whimpered under his hood.

By the time they had arrived at Grafton Storage, Tate
believed
. Jenn had heard it in his voice. Somewhere along the line, he’d wet himself too.

While Gibson had been occupied writing his program at the motel back in Somerset, Hendricks had converted one of the abandoned storage units into a rudimentary command center. They had cots, a hot plate, food, and water. A portable generator ran the monitors they used to watch their captive.

Kirby Tate’s cell was a neighboring ten-by-thirty-foot storage unit, which Hendricks had adapted into a holding cell and interrogation room. He’d installed chain-link fencing and a padlocked door across one half of the room. A coil of barbed wire ran along the base. A straw pallet in the event Tate earned the right to sleep. A bucket for waste.

It was primitive and intended that way.

They’d hustled him out of the car and into his cell. Strung him up while he’d made hysterical clucking sounds through his gag. Went on making them while they’d changed into black jumpsuits and pulled on ski masks. By concealing their identities, they gave Tate a glimmer of hope that if he confessed, they would let him go. Even Tate was smart enough to know that if he saw their faces, he was a dead man.

Jenn had yanked off Tate’s hood, and Tate’s eyes bulged as he frantically looked in all directions. Hendricks did all the talking. She felt Tate would respond better to a male authority figure. Who knew what kind of humiliating relationship Tate had with adult women.

She’d been a little worried about Hendricks. He had decades of experience with traditional interrogations and possessed tremendous instincts. But this was something else entirely. She’d been coaching him for a couple weeks now, and while he got it in the abstract, it was very different in reality. She needn’t have worried; Hendricks was a natural.

“You’ve done it now, boy,” Hendricks had begun.

Tate tried to speak through the gag, but it came out as futile, clownish gurgles.

“You really thought you could get away with it? That we wouldn’t find you? Bad news there, son. This is the end of the line for you. Should have gotten off this train a long time ago, and now you’re a long way from home.”

Jenn had yanked the gag out of his mouth.

“I want a lawyer,” Tate had demanded.

Hendricks had laughed. “There are no lawyers in hell, son.”

“This is illegal. I want my lawyer!”

“I am your lawyer. What do you need?”

“You can’t do this,” Tate had cried. “I know my rights.”

“There are no rights out here, boy. Where do you think you are?”

Tate’s eyes had been wide, filled with an animal panic. His mouth had worked silently like he still had the gag in it.

“Listen to me good. We know who you are. We know what you did. We all know it. We just want to hear you say it. You messed with the wrong man’s child, and there’s no coming back from that. You have any idea how powerful he is? How far he can reach? I suppose not, or you would have messed with some other kid, am I right? Well you’re in it now, boy. What’s done is done. There’s only here and now left to think about. How it’s going to go for you from here on out. Is it going to go long or is it going to go short? That’s what you need to decide. How do I make it go short? Because, believe you me, you don’t want this to go long.”

“I swear to Christ, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Hendricks had slapped him. Not hard, but the effect had been powerful. Tate had shut his mouth and stared up with sullen fear.

“That kind of talk right there,” Hendricks had said. “That kind of talk is what makes a short thing go long.”

“I swear,” Tate had whined, eyes darting back and forth between them. There were no good cops here.

Hendricks had put a finger to his lips. “We’re going to leave you to think about it. Long or short. It will be up to you. Tell the truth, this will be short and painless. Lie to us and you will hurt for a long, long time. Understand?”

Tate had said nothing.

“Understand?” Hendricks had bellowed.

Tate had nodded, his head lolling weakly to the side.

“Good,” Hendricks had said. “So, we’re going to leave you to think about it. In the meantime, my partner and I are going to go have dinner. Rest up for you. When we come back, you’re going to tell us all about Suzanne Lombard. Or I’m going to make a mess of you.” Hendricks had said it flatly. Matter-of-factly, like he was choosing between two light beers.

Hendricks had nodded to Jenn, and they’d left Tate dangling in his cell. Tate had yelled after them and kept yelling long after they had slammed shut the locker’s rollaway door.

“Who?” he’d cried repeatedly. “I don’t know no Suzanne! I don’t. Who the fuck is Suzanne Lombard, man? I don’t know her.”

And on and on.

Jenn actually preferred the speed metal to the sound of Tate’s voice. He was so compelling. So sincere and blameless. It would have made her heart ache if she hadn’t seen this act many times before. An interrogation room was the greatest acting school ever devised. They clung to the lie like a life jacket. So convincing that she wondered sometimes if they actually convinced themselves of their own innocence. In the long run, it never made any difference. The only variable was how long it would take him to realize the same thing. She checked her watch and hit a button on her console. Tate’s cell was engulfed in searing white light. His body recoiled, and his mouth stretched into a scream as if the light itself burned.

The music played on.

Jenn and Hendricks stepped out of Tate’s cell and into the sunshine. Jenn pulled the rollaway door down. They stripped out of their jumpsuits and ski masks. It was foul in there, and they were both bathed in sweat. She watched Hendricks walk away in his boxers and Doc Martens to light a cigarette. In her shorts and sports bra, she was in no position to complain. They were way past social niceties.

She went back to their command post and fished four bottles of water out of a cooler. She found a spot in the shade, put her back against a wall, and slid down to the ground. When Hendricks came back, she handed him a bottle.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Fuck the time, what day is it?”

He fished his phone out of his gear and held it up to her face.

“When did it get to be Thursday?” she asked.

They’d been working on Tate for four days now. It had been slow going, and they weren’t in complete agreement about how much progress they were making. Hendricks thought it was going well. Jenn was a little surprised at how long it was taking. She’d expected Tate to cave before now. The pathetic child molester had more backbone than she’d expected. What was certain was that Tate had accepted the fact that his situation was hopeless. He had come to see Jenn and Hendricks as the gods of his life. At this point, his game was admitting to just enough to make them happy without incriminating himself—a standard intermediary step. He talked in circles, but the circle was getting smaller every day.

For the first two days, he had clung to the fairy tale that he’d never even heard of Suzanne Lombard or her abduction. It was a stupid lie, and Hendricks had leaned on Tate hard enough to get him to give it up on Tuesday. They’d made Tate tell them the whole story. Tate was, if anything, an aficionado of the Suzanne Lombard case and knew it backward and forward. But so far Tate hadn’t told them anything that wasn’t in the public record and swore up and down that he didn’t know anything about hacking ACG.

“How much more do you want to push him today?” Hendricks asked. “He needs to eat. Sleep. Boy’s borderline incoherent at this point.”

Jenn nodded. Hendricks was right. They were in danger of breaking Tate, but not in a productive way. She would need to update George. He wasn’t going to like it. Calista was on his back to produce results, and every day they were here increased their chances of detection. That would not be good, to put it mildly. It didn’t matter one bit what Tate had done. If she and Hendricks got caught with Tate, they were all going away for a long, long time.

Hendricks’s phone buzzed in his hand. He looked at it, puzzled at first, but then confused and worried.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s Vaughn’s virus.”

“What about it?”

“It just went off.”