Prepared For Rage

Robert Shadura was an ex-Ranger who had seen action under fire from Panama to Beruit to Afghanistan. When he had to retire, he'd settled in New York and done consulting work with an international security agency that specialized in the return of kidnapped American businessmen, which subsidized his basement flat on the Upper West Side. He entertained no leftover angst from any of the wars he had fought in, had no drinking habit, no family, and his only sin was a lust for Harley hogs, three of which were parked in a rented garage off Canal Street and one of which was an antique, a 1912 8XE V-Twin Legend, lovingly restored, that was worth over a hundred grand. He wouldn't have taken a million for it.

He was also a gifted actor. In the South Side Players, the amateur theatrical group to which he belonged, he was famous for his portrayal of Macbeth in the Scots play, and he doubled as choreographer for all the fight scenes in all the plays the South Side Players produced. He looked thirty-five, was actually fifty-two, and dated an unending series of beautiful actresses. All such relationships ended amicably, and one so blessed had been known to say in an awed, grateful voice, "I never met a man with such control!"

On occasion, at the behest of his country, Bob left the Harleys and the actresses behind for short periods of time when he allowed himself to be called back into service as an interrogator, a skill he had perfected in Iraq.

"Before we were so rudely interrupted," Patrick said. "You were saying?"

Bob, one of those admirable underlings with no interest, prurient or otherwise, in the doings of his superiors, resumed his narrative without so much as a blink. "He says he was going to Mexico on vacation. He says he never heard of Isa. He says he's a German national, he is i

"How does he explain the forged Canadian passport in the name of Baghel Maysara?"

"He doesn't."

"He doesn't yet," Mary said, her voice as wispy as her appearance.

Mary Maria Santangelo weighed about a quarter of what Bob did, who was at least twice her age, and the closest she'd ever come to the armed services was an ROTC troop drilling on the Harvard quad when her date walked her home to her dorm on the Radcliffe campus. She looked like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Persephone stepped down from the frame, only rather less well-nourished. A massive quantity of black hair was bundled back in a ponytail so heavy it looked as if it should bend her slender neck backwards from the sheer weight of it all.

Mary was a history major, with a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. She had an eidetic memory and to the distinct disapprobation of his superiors Ahmed had made Mary free of the CIA files on terrorism. With her training in history she was able to digest massive quantities of data to place people into a proper context and events into a proper chronology. The result was an eerie ability to pull the one tiny nugget of information necessary to nudge an interrogatee over the edge from intransigence to cooperation. There were times when it seemed she could read people's minds. She'd been called a witch, and more than one detainee had made the sign to warn off evil in her presence.

She and Bob had two things in common: an unparalleled ability to elicit information from unwilling witnesses, and a long list of lovers.

Make that three. They both liked women.

Mary was also an intuitive chameleon, with the ability to become whatever the detainee wanted at the moment of his greatest need.

They worked extremely well together, bringing in results where other gator teams threw up their hands and walked away. When Ahmed had asked Patrick who he wanted for gators, Patrick's answer had been instantaneous. "Bob and Mary."

Ahmed had looked and felt doubtful. "They can be a little volatile."

"They can be spontaneously combustible," Patrick had said. "But we want results fast, and we want lethal information, right?

Intel that produced the death of a known terrorist. "Yes," Ahmed said, "we want lethal information."

"Bob and Mary are the best interrogators in the business. They trained half the people in Task Force 145. They'll get it done."

"You want him to get the full treatment?"

"Everything," Patrick said. "I want this guy scared. I want him thinking Abu Ghraib's still in business, and that he's got a front-row cell reserved just for him. I want him thinking we're sending him to Egypt or Romania for questioning if he doesn't talk to us in Gitmo. I want him scared shitless, Ahmed."

Looking at them now, Patrick saw nothing inherently terrifying in either Bob or Mary. Well, between the biceps and the tattoos, he might have been afraid of Bob if he'd bumped into him outside a biker bar. Mary, an ethereal waif with large, dark, tip-tilted eyes that looked always on the verge of tears, not to mention bony hips that looked always on the verge of slipping out of her inevitable low-rider jeans, didn't look strong enough to swat a fly, let alone scare the shit out of a hardened terrorist.

But they were the best. "We don't have a lot of time, folks," he said.

Bob and Mary exchanged an expressionless look. "How did you pick him up?"

"Idiot used his own name on an email. One of our guys was ru

"'Isa,"'Ahmed said.

"Yes, and 'Isa,' and this program can also trace them back to their originating server. Always supposing they aren't smart enough to route it through a couple of other servers to mess up the data trail."

"And he wasn't smart enough."

"He's been keeping his head down for six months. I think the serenity of his existence might have led him to believe that he was invisible."

"Ah," Bob said, "one of those." He smiled at Mary. "Ladies first?"

She looked at Patrick. "You want us to jack him up?"

Patrick shook his head. "There's nothing more worthless than information received through torture."

"Drugs, then?"

"I'm not crazy about drugs, either, you never know if you're going to get good intel or a regression to the time his father spanked him for picking on the girl next door."

"What, then?" Mary said.

"We've got people asking questions in Toronto, and we've got some intel from Germany. It all says Yaqub Sadiq likes women. No," he said, correcting himself. "Sadiq loves women. We think one of the reasons he may have joined up with Isa is that he'd been screwing somebody's wife and the husband found out. You can get killed for that if you're Islamic."

Mary's brow puckered, which was a pity, because it was a broad, alabaster brow. "What was his name? The husband's?"

Patrick called up the file on his Blackberry. "Rashid Nurzai."

Something that might have been a smile crossed her face and was gone. "Is Nurzai Afghani?"

"I don't know." Patrick hadn't seen any need to check. "The file doesn't say." Beneath her considering gaze, he felt the need to redeem himself. "Sadiq was born in Germany. Of Lebanese immigrants."

She nodded once, a crisp gesture that seemed somehow out of character. But, Patrick realized for the first time, she could have tailored her appearance deliberately to lull a detainee into a sense of false security. "Follow my lead," she told Bob.

She didn't wait for permission or agreement, she left the room. Patrick got up and walked to the pane of one-way glass set into the wall, and felt Bob and Ahmed come to stand behind him.

Sadiq was handcuffed to a metal chair in an otherwise bare room. A pool of urine under the chair gleamed wetly in the room's one bright ceiling light. "Those the same clothes he was wearing when we nabbed him?" Patrick said.