him for another four minutes or so,” the doc reported.
“What did he go through?”
“You never want to find that out. We gave him the equivalent of a massive heart attack. The pain would have been intense—I mean, really miserable. For him, maybe that’s just too damned bad, but it would have been pretty fucking awful. We’ll see how he responds to it in a couple of minutes, guys, but he’s been through something that nobody will ever want to repeat. He probably thinks he’s just seen the bottom floor of hell. I guess we’ll see what that does—did to him—in a few minutes.”
It took four minutes and thirty seconds before the legs moved. Dr. Pasternak looked at the EKG readout on the resuscitator and relaxed. The Emir was out of the influence of the succinylcholine, and his muscles were now under the control of his nerves, the way they were supposed to be.
“He’ll be unconscious for a few minutes, until his brain is fully suffused with oxygenated blood,” the anesthesiologist explained. “We’ll let him awaken normally, and then we can talk with him.”
“What’s his mental state going to be?” This was Clark asking the question. He’d never seen anything even remotely like this before.
“That depends. I suppose it’s possible that he might remain strong and resistive, but I would not expect that. He’s been through a singular and very, very adverse experience. He will not want to repeat it. He’s been through pain that makes childbirth seem like a picnic in Central Park. I can only speculate how dreadful it’s been for him. I don’t know anyone who’s been through this—well, maybe some people who’ve been through massive coronaries, but they don’t usually remember the intensity of the pain. The brain doesn’t work that way. It erases great pain as a defense mechanism. Not this time. He will remember the experience of it, if not the pain itself. If that experience doesn’t frighten him beyond anything he’s ever experienced, well, then we’re talking about John Wayne on amphetamines. People like that do not exist in the real world. There’s the complication of his religious beliefs. Those can be pretty strong. How strong, well, we’ll have to see, but if he resists us from this point on, I will be surprised.”
“If he does, can we repeat the experience?” Clark asked.
Pasternak turned. “Yes, we can—almost indefinitely. I’ve heard around the shop at Columbia that the East German Stasi used this technique to interrogate political and espionage prisoners, and that it was uniformly successful. They stopped using it—I don’t know why. Maybe it was too evil even for them. As I said yesterday, this is off the syllabus from the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. The guy who ran the Stasi was Jewish, as I recall—Marcus Wolf, I think his name was—and maybe it affected him on that basis.”
“How are you feeling, Rich?” Hendley asked.
“I’m fine. But he isn’t.” The doc paused. “Will they still execute this guy?”
“Depends on who ends up getting him,” Hendley replied. “If the FBI gets him, he’ll go through the federal court system, and if he does, then eventually he goes night-night at Terre Haute, Indiana, after due process of law. That’s not our concern, really.”
Because what he’s just been through was quite a lot worse than that, Pasternak didn’t say. His conscience was under control, but it was making noise. This really was out of Josef Mengele’s play-book, and that wasn’t something calculated to make a New York Jew happy. But his brother’s body had never been recovered, squashed to atoms by the collapsing WTC tower. He didn’t even have a grave that he could visit with Mike’s kids. And this bastard had made that happen, and so Rich Pasternak told his conscience to be quiet. He was doing if not God’s work, then his family’s work, and that was fine with him. His conscience would have to be quiet about it.
“What’s this guy’s name exactly?” Pasternak asked.
Clark handled the answer: “Saif Rahman Yasin. He’s child number fifty-plus of his father, a man of commendable vigor, his dad was, also tight with the Saudi Royal Family.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that.”
“He hates the Saudi Royals more than he hates Israel,” Clark explained. “They tried to whack him about six years ago, but they blew the mission. He hates them because of corruption, so he says. I guess they have some—I mean, a huge amount of—money controlled by a relatively small number of people, and you’re going to get