He didn't understand much Spanish, but it didn't matter. Her deep, guttural tone told him all he needed to know. Sophia was very close to o.r.g.a.s.m.

As she shut her eyes, lifted her chin, and began to scream in ecstasy, Sterling hurled her onto her back on the blanket in the jungle, reentered her quickly, and began to thrust harder and harder. She gazed up at him and smiled devilishly, then shut her eyes again and once more began to scream her pleasure. He'd delayed her o.r.g.a.s.m, but only momentarily.

As she shouted in ecstasy, he brought his hands to her slender neck even as he continued to thrust relentlessly. He closed his fingers around her like a vise and pushed his thumbs violently into her throat, snapping her windpipe just as she climaxed.

Her eyes flashed open as violent and simultaneous tremors of pleasure and pain shook her body. She gazed up at him with sadness as the realization struck her, he saw-which only drove him to his own pleasure harder.

Panic and the will to survive overwhelmed her, and she tried to fight him. She grabbed and clawed at his fingers as he began to come, but she quickly succ.u.mbed and closed her eyes as his o.r.g.a.s.m exploded inside her.

When it was over he tumbled down onto the blanket beside her corpse, barely able to breathe. It had been the most intense o.r.g.a.s.m of his life.

He'd been foolish to think he'd finally found someone he wanted to care for. He was a natural born killer, not a knight in shining armor.

His eyes narrowed as he gazed up through the darkness at the jungle canopy. It was time to get back to civilization and see what was on that flash drive.

CHAPTER 15.

TROY HATED this part of it. He always had, ever since that night six years ago when he'd watched Shane Maddux interrogate a confirmed al-Qaeda agent.

That had been his first brush with the use of torture to gain information. He hadn't taken part in the session in any way, other than being a witness. But it had made a lasting impression. He'd suffered nightmares for weeks afterward, despite knowing what the man had done.

That session had taken place in the middle of a ten-thousand-acre ranch fifteen miles outside the tiny town of Ennis, Montana, which was set in the wide, beautiful Madison River Valley southwest of Bozeman. Maddux had whipped the man's back and legs into b.l.o.o.d.y pulps over the course of the early-morning hours.

But there was no other option if you wanted quick answers out of horrible people like that man-and the p.r.i.c.k strung up before Troy now. You had to use the prospect and use of imminent and excruciating pain, and ultimately, death, as your tools of the trade. After almost a decade inside RC7, Troy was absolutely convinced of that. Even terrorists with no discernible heart or soul at some point reacted obediently to intense pain that was skillfully applied by a trained expert over an extended period of time.

Protecting the United States in the loneliest, darkest shadows where the worst of all evil hatched was a dirty, dirty business. But if you wanted to be successful and you wanted to protect a vulnerable and freedom-loving population from horrific episodes like 9/11 or the Holiday Mall Attacks, that was where you operated. And you had to fight fire with fire while you were in there.

The short, squat man with scraggly gray whiskers who was standing before Troy had personally arranged and executed b.l.o.o.d.y restaurant bombings in Madrid and Manila that had killed and wounded more than three hundred innocent civilians-including seventeen children and two pregnant women. There was no doubt whatsoever that this was the man behind the bombings, either. His ident.i.ty was certain, and his crimes were not in question. He was a murderer and a coward, and he deserved what he was getting tonight.

"What are you doing in my country?" Troy demanded as he moved in front of the blindfolded man, who was naked from the waist up. Troy grimaced as the stench of body odor invaded his nostrils once again. "Come on, Hamid, out with it."

Official U.S. intel a.s.sets had been tracking Hamid for months, hoping he would head to the United States, where he could be taken quietly without incident. They'd gotten their wish yesterday when he'd boarded a flight from Athens to New York, and they'd picked him up moments after he'd eased behind the steering wheel of his rental car at JFK. Then they'd brought him to Troy because legally they couldn't do what Troy could. They could detain him, but they couldn't use all necessary force without risking a congressional inquiry and criminal prosecution. So they let Troy do the dirty work.

"Tell me now, Hamid, and I'll go easier on you. Otherwise . . . well, I think you know what's going to happen."

"f.u.c.k you."

"I can do anything I want to you," Troy explained calmly, ignoring the defiant response. "And I do mean anything. I'm not like the people you've had contact with before. I have no constraints on me, like the people who arrested you at JFK. Do you understand that?"

"f.u.c.k you again! Harder!"

Hamid's hands were cuffed together above his head and then strung with a stout rope to a steel beam that spanned the top of the cell. The rope was pulled so taut that the b.a.l.l.s of Hamid's feet barely grazed the cell's cement floor as he swung. He'd been secured like this for hours, and his growing discomfort was obvious. He was sweating profusely in the hot room, moaning loudly every few seconds, and constantly shifting his weight as much as possible to try and relieve the intense pressure grinding at his shoulders.

"Come on," Troy coaxed in a faux-friendly tone, "talk to me. I don't want to hurt you, my friend."

"You'll get nothing out of me," Hamid gasped. "And you're not my friend."

"Well, I guess you got me on that one." It was time for progress-which meant a more direct approach to this session. "You murdered those people in Spain and the Philippines. Women and children who had their arms and legs ripped off and were in agony until they bled out. I think you and your a.s.sociates are planning something like that for my people here in the United States now. I think you've got lots to tell me, Hamid. So get to it."

"I tell you nothing, you f.u.c.king pig. You know you have to let me go when I don't-"

Troy laid the braided whip down hard on Hamid's bare, sweaty back, and the short, fat man yelped loudly and then whined in horrible pain as he struggled wildly though vainly at the cuffs securing his wrists together above his head. But he wasn't going anywhere-and the cell was soundproof. Bill Jensen had made certain of that long ago. No one in the rest of the mansion could hear anything of this.

"Tell me," Troy demanded, conjuring up an image in his mind of one of the kids who'd died in Madrid. "Now!"

She was eleven, a beautiful dark-haired Spanish girl who had both arms blown off when the bomb exploded but lived for ten tortuous minutes afterward, asking over and over in a fading whisper if her mom and little brother were all right-which they weren't. Troy had seen pictures of the girl and spoken to a first responder who'd stayed with her until she'd finally and thankfully closed her eyes for the last time. Remembering those pictures and the emotional words of that responder helped him justify tonight.

"Now!" he shouted again, laying the whip on even more brutally this time.

Hamid screamed in what Troy knew was almost unimaginable pain. The whip braids were laced with an acid that seeped quickly through the wounds and into the bloodstream and made the subject feel as if his skin was on fire. But Hamid wouldn't pa.s.s out. He would remain conscious, because the acid also contained a stimulant that entered the bloodstream directly from the braids as well, and kept the subject as awake and alert as if he were ingesting crack cocaine.

"Tell me what I want to know, Hamid, or I'll-"

Too late Troy recognized what was coming. He dodged most of the liquid missile, but some of Hamid's saliva still caught him in the face.

Troy wiped the thick drops away with the back of his hand. A little of the spit had landed on his lips, and now he could actually taste the other man, not just see and smell him. He spat out the invasive saliva just in case there was something deadly inside it, but not at Hamid, as most would have. His cruelty had its limits. There had to be some measure of civility inside this insanity.

Troy stalked to a table beside the door to the small cell, which was located in a far corner of the mansion's large bas.e.m.e.nt. As kids, Troy and Jack had tried many times to find out what was behind the triple-locked steel door. Only after Troy was initiated into RC7 had his father brought him down here and shown him.

He dropped the whip on the table, picked up a cattle prod, and moved back to where Hamid was hanging from the beam. Troy held the prod up to Hamid's anxious eyes after he'd lifted the blindfold slightly off the terrorist's nose. "Eight thousand volts, my friend, and this is just the second tool in a long line of things I have to make your night very uncomfortable." He hesitated, to let the message sink in. "Tell me what you're doing in my country, and tell me right now. Otherwise, it'll be a very long evening for one of us."

Hamid took several short, quick breaths, looked as if he might say something, but then turned his head away.

"What are you doing in my country?" Troy demanded harshly as he held the device closer and closer to Hamid's neck. "Tell me now or-"

Troy whipped around when there was a sharp knock on the door, then hurried to it, opened it a crack, and peered out. Jack was standing there looking mad as h.e.l.l.

"We need to talk."

"Get out of here."

"We need to talk," Jack repeated angrily.

"Wait." Troy hurried back to Hamid, pulled the blindfold down, and then hustled back to the door. "What are you doing down here?" he demanded as he moved out of the cell and pulled the steel door shut behind them.

"You know I know about this place."

"So?"

"I told you not to use this place to torture anyone again. I don't want people like this anywhere near Mom. You got me?"

"I don't have time for this, Jack. Get the h.e.l.l out of here and don't come back. Go to Paris and enjoy your vacation. Enjoy it knowing people like me are keeping you safe."

Jack brought his hands up as Troy stepped toward him. "f.u.c.k you, brother."

CHAPTER 16.

"h.e.l.lO, DREXEL." Bill Jensen leaned down to pat the golden retriever. It was a big, handsome male with a light blond, perfectly brushed coat. "Good boy," he said before extending his hand to the man the dog had come with. "That's a great-looking animal, John."

"Thank you, Mr. Jensen."

"Call me Bill, John. We've known each other too long and been through too much together."

"Yes, sir."

Bill chuckled wryly as he pointed at a chair. "Sit down, son." There would be no breaking Ward's formality tonight.

Ward was one of Red Cell Seven's nineteen field leaders. Blond like his dog and slightly shy of six feet tall, Ward was in his late thirties. He'd been inside RC7 for sixteen years, and he was as loyal as a man could be, just like all the others inside the cell, Bill thought to himself. At this point the unit had 209 agents, the most in its history. And they were all as committed to the cause as any group of men had ever been.

"What can I do for you tonight?" Bill asked as he and Ward sat down on opposite sides of a small table.

"This is a little difficult." As Ward eased into his chair, he nodded for the golden retriever to lie down beside him on the floor. It did so obediently, putting its huge head on its paws while it gazed up at Ward with big brown eyes. "Sorry in advance for what I'm about to ask. I don't want to irritate you, Mr. Jensen."

Bill winced. He felt old enough these days without a man who was almost forty addressing him as "mister," especially on his birthday.

Unfortunately, Bill understood. He was in his sixties, but he'd always felt like he looked younger than his age-until recently. In the last nine months his hair had gone completely silver and gray, and the creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth had dug deep. That quickly he was looking older than his age instead of younger.

That had struck him squarely between the eyes this morning as he'd stared long and hard into the bathroom mirror of this cabin in western New York State that he and Shane Maddux were using. The face staring back looked old, very old. Perhaps the pressure involved in all this was finally getting to him. And being away from Cheryl for so long was making that pressure seem twice as bad. But he had to keep running Red Cell Seven. No one else could, at this critical stage in the cell's history. They were under attack from too many directions.

"You won't irritate me, John," Bill said rea.s.suringly. "What's the problem?"

"I need to understand how we justify ourselves," Ward replied candidly.

Bill hadn't been expecting a philosophical question, because John Ward wasn't one to get lost in those weeds. "Well, I-"

"No, no," Ward interrupted. "I didn't mean it that way, sir. I meant pragmatically," he explained. "What gives us the authority to act as we do?"

"Okay."

"We've got rumors in the ranks, sir. Some of the men are worried about facing serious criminal charges, given the way we operate. They keep reading about all these congressional inquiries going on all the time, and after a while it hits home. And then we get all these p.r.o.nouncements from President Dorn about how the interrogation techniques we use will not be tolerated and that those who use them will be prosecuted." Ward shook his head. "Dorn isn't doing this country any favors."

"I know it," Bill muttered as he glanced at the mirror hanging on the wall above the fireplace. Maddux was watching from the other side of the wall. "This'll help," he said confidently, withdrawing a single piece of faded paper from a large envelope lying on the table in front of him. He'd antic.i.p.ated the reason for Ward's visit tonight, with Maddux's help, of course. "Take a look."

Ward leaned forward to get a better look at the doc.u.ment Bill had just slid across the table.

"Read it," Bill ordered, motioning. Ward couldn't possibly have finished it that quickly. "Take your time. Go on."

When he'd read the doc.u.ment thoroughly, Ward nodded. "It's the Executive Order from Richard Nixon. I've heard about it, and I appreciate what it says here about us being immune from prosecution. But how exactly does that-"

"Hold it up to the light," Bill instructed. "Now focus on the lower left-hand corner," he said after Ward picked it up.

"I don't see anything."

"Look through the page, like you're looking at one of those 3-D pictures."

Ward chuckled. "I can't do that thing, sir. I've tried before."

"You can do anything you put your mind to, John. Focus."

Ward was silent for nearly thirty seconds as he held the paper up and stared. "My G.o.d," he finally murmured, "I see it. It's a seven. Tiny, but it's clearly a seven."

"That's right. Roger Carlson had it attached to the doc.u.ment back in the nineties."

Bill thought back to the day twenty years ago that he and Carlson had labored up Gannett Peak to retrieve that original Order from the cave. And then a week later they'd scaled the mountain again to put the doc.u.ment back after the imprint had been affixed to it. Roger had never let the Order out of his sight the entire time it was away from the cave-except when he slept, and then he kept it in a locked briefcase that was handcuffed to his wrist.

"Only a few individuals in the world know that doc.u.ment exists," Bill continued. "Nine of them are the Supreme Court justices." He took the paper back and replaced it in the envelope as he glanced again at the mirror. "The justices know about Red Cell Seven, they know about the doc.u.ment, and they know what to look for on the doc.u.ment. If anyone ever tried to prosecute us for anything, this doc.u.ment would be presented to the justices in a private session of the court, and whoever had brought the charges would be arrested immediately. And I do mean whoever, and I do mean immediately." The obvious implication was that "whoever" included anyone in the executive branch, and Bill could actually see the confidence working its way back into Ward's expression. "Believe me, John, as long as we have this doc.u.ment, we are absolutely immune from prosecution of any kind."

Ward nodded. "Thank you for explaining all that."

"What is it, son?" Bill asked. A nostalgic look had crept into Ward's face.

"I was just thinking about Mr. Carlson. He was a great man. I miss him."

"We all do. And you're right, John, Roger was a great man."

CHAPTER 17.

"TELL ME, d.a.m.n it!" Troy gritted his teeth. This p.r.i.c.k was proving far more difficult to break than he'd antic.i.p.ated. "You know something. Tell me."

"f.u.c.k you," Hamid gasped. "You'll never get anything out of me."

Hamid was hanging upside down, suspended by his ankles, with his wrists now cuffed behind his back. The top of his head was only inches above a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with freezing water. Several strands of the terrorist's gray hair grazed the water's surface as he dangled above the drum. Troy ripped the blindfold from Hamid's eyes so he could see what was coming.

"Tell me," Troy demanded when he was certain Hamid fully grasped the imminently dire nature of his predicament. "Now!"

"I tell you nothing."

But Hamid's tone was not nearly as determined as it had been seconds ago. And terror suddenly filled his expression. For the first time, death was in play. Shane Maddux had taught him well, Troy realized. The crack in the armor had finally appeared. Now it was just a matter of time. But seconds always mattered. Maddux had taught him that, too. They'd been very close at one time, and despite all that had happened and Jack's hatred of Maddux, Troy still respected the h.e.l.l out of the man. Maddux had many personal faults. There could be no doubt. But there was no man more committed to the safety and security of a nation.

"Tell me!"