Requiem for an Assassin

SERE was one thing, having the bad guys do it to you with real intent was something else entirely. That vice president who’d called it “a dunking” ought to have his head pulled out of his ass.
    They’d left him in his cold, wet, soiled clothes for about a day and hadn’t fed him at first, either. That meant they were still checking on the information he’d given them, wanting to keep him uncomfortable and mindful of his recent ordeal so they could break him again more easily if it turned out he’d been bullshitting them. When they hosed him off, changed him into a clean, dry track suit, and left him food and water, he knew something had been worked out. And whatever it was, his life was part of the bargain.
    They’d pretty much left him alone after that, except when they’d put him on the phone with Rain. That conversation had been hard. Rain was his buddy, and he knew the man wouldn’t quit until he’d gotten him free or died himself in the process. He was ashamed his carelessness had put his partner in this position, and it was awful knowing Rain was out there doing God knows what, while he was here, chained up and helpless to change the odds even a little.
    They were even feeding him well enough, he supposed, with two hot meals a day in styrofoam containers that he ate hunched over with a plastic spoon. Sometimes the food was Chinese, sometimes Malay, sometimes Indian. Which didn’t mean much, because you could get all three at pretty much any food stall in Southeast Asia, and it all froze and microwaved just fine. They could be anywhere. There was no porthole in his room, and his only sense of place was the rise and fall of the swells beneath them and the sound of the engine when they were moving. He didn’t even know what time of day it was, or night, for that matter.
    His worst immediate problem, aside from shame, boredom, and the feeling that his tongue was cultivating lichens, was the Mexican, whom Dox thought of as Uncle Fester for both his bald head and his crazy eyes. The man had a touch of the sadist in him—more than a touch, in fact. Every now and then he liked to pop into the cabin and get in a cheap shot. The first time it had been in the gut, but Dox had seen it coming and even though the fuckwit knew how to punch, the damage hadn’t been too bad. But there were other places to hit. He’d kneed Dox in the coccyx once and the spot still hurt like hell and made sitting in his chains even less pleasant than it otherwise would have been. The man was picking his targets, Dox realized early on, so as not to leave marks. He figured Hilger, who while clearly being a four-alarm psycho in his own special way also seemed to be guided by some sort of professional ethos, would have taken a dim view of gratuitous treatment of a prisoner, and the bald guy was being careful because of it.
    The last two days had been particularly bad. The only people he saw were the bald guy and the boyish-looking one, who Dox knew goddamn well at this point was anything but boyish, and he figured Hilger and the blond dude had gone somewhere. With fewer people around, Uncle Fester seemed to be emboldened.
    The punishment hadn’t stopped him from provoking the dude with insults, though. On the contrary, more than ever his dignity required that he prove he was unbowed. There wasn’t much he could be proud of at the moment, but standing up to that piece of shit, insulting him grievously enough to make him an enemy, that was something. His body was paying for it, but it was helping keep his spirit alive.
    He shifted on the cot and winced at the pain in his lower back. Yeah, he liked putting that fucker down, and he didn’t mind suffering for it, either. ’Cause when this was over, he was going to make Uncle Fester pay for all of it, and with more interest than the man could ever hope to come up with.
    He just had to live through it first.

11
    I WENT OUT the back of the hotel and made a variety of aggressive moves until satisfied I was clean. Then I found an Internet café where, after the usual examination for spyware, I checked the bulletin board I used with my contact in the CIA, a young Japanese-American in Tokyo Station named Tomohisa “Tom” Kanezaki. Kanezaki and I had first run into each other a few years earlier, when he’d been a green, idealistic Agency recruit newly posted to Tokyo. He’d quickly figured out the way his superiors were using him, though, and was a sufficiently quick study to turn the