Six Seconds

35

Romania-Ukraine border

“Again.”

The prisoner’s head was thrust into a steel tub of ice water and held there.

He was naked, on his knees on the cold hard floor.

At eight seconds without oxygen he struggled against his bindings, leather straps used to restrain the criminally insane.

At twelve seconds he bucked.

His interrogator was seated comfortably nearby, waiting. She was known only as “the Colonel.” A woman in her forties, who spoke six languages and was expert in interrogation techniques used by the Stasi, the CIA, Mossad and the SS.

Was her background Israeli, or German? Some guessed her as a Pole.

At sixteen seconds, she nodded to the handlers, who were contractors, and the prisoner’s head was pulled from the bucket. He gorged on air, his limp body trem bling. He had not been allowed sleep in four days. He’d been forced to stand naked in a cell while being drenched periodically with frigid water.

His condition was failing fast. He could not stand without being supported. As a military doctor checked his vital signs, the Colonel stood and drew her face near to the prisoner’s.

“Is there an operation underway?”

He was known as Issa al-Issa, a key operative, in visible in the world. Issa was an alias he had employed for longer than he should have. He may have been a former police official from the U.A.E. It was never de termined. Months of intelligence work led to his clan destine midnight abduction from an apartment for immigrant workers in Kuwait City. He’d been hand cuffed, and a sack was tied over his head before he was deposited into a private Gulfstream jet.

He was first flown to Jordan, then Nicosia. Then he was flown to a region established by Byzan tines where the Danube flowed in the Black Sea. Then he was driven in the trunk of a car to Building #S-9846.

A building once used by the KGB to harvest infor mation.

A building that did not exist.

In fact, for official purposes, neither did Issa al-Issa.

He was a ghost prisoner.

“Is there an operation underway, Issa?”

The doctor turned to the Colonel and shook his head. Issa’s condition had deteriorated, reaching a critical point. The Colonel nodded to the handlers to release him.

He crumbled to the floor, able to rest for the first time in one hundred hours.

As he lay there trembling, she bent over him. “What more can you tell me before you die, Issa?”

She waited with the full knowledge she would not receive an answer.

With an animallike groan the prisoner expelled a massive breath.

Then he was still.

The doctor knelt beside him and checked his heart, his eyes, waiting, listening, rechecking before pro nouncing the man deceased.

“Take care of it,” she told the handlers.

Swiftly and efficiently they moved Issa al-Issa’s corpse into a body bag. Then they carried it outside the building and deep into the dense forest, to the grave the prisoner had been forced to dig on the first day of his arrival.

As the handlers buried Issa al-Issa, the Colonel remained in Building #S-9846 and flipped through her logged notes. Issa had been one of the hardest inter views she’d ever conducted. She’d failed to extract as much as she’d hoped from him.

But what she had was vital.

She reached for her satellite phone.

She dialed the number for her contact at the embassy.

Issa’s information could prove valuable to some gov ernments, perhaps enough to warrant a significant amount of cash.