of the light and yet close enough to make the man nervous—but probably not nearly as nervous as he should be.
“Who was in the Mercedes with you?” Dylan asked his next question.
“Fuck you.”
“Randolph Lancaster?”
“Fuck you.”
“How many men did Lancaster bring to Denver?”
The only answer he got was another sneer.
Fine. The guy could have it his way.
Dylan signaled Quinn and Kid, and his two operators stepped forward and picked up Sam and his chair. Without a word, they moved him to the deep end of the pool and set the back legs of the chair precisely on the edge of the deck so that the man was facing Dylan with the water behind him.
There were a lot of reasons to push a captive taped to a chair into six feet of water, none of them good.
Dylan reached up and angled the ceiling light to hit Sam squarely in the face, blinding him to the rest of the room.
“I don’t think you’re a federal officer, Sam,” he said. “I think you’re a traitor to your country, and I think you’re here in Denver on a terrorist mission. What the hell happened to your leg?” The deep, gouged scar running the length of his thigh was a real butcher job. The shriveled mess of the rest of it, Dylan could only guess at, but it was a pretty damn good guess.
“Combat, sweetheart.”
“Where were you born?”
“In a cross-fire hurricane.”
Two brilliant answers in a row. One more brilliant answer would get the guy tipped bass-ackward into the pool.
With luck, Dylan would have him pulled back out, but deep down in his heart, where the truth mattered, he didn’t really think this was one of Sam Walls’s lucky days.
“How many missions have you been on for Lancaster?”
“Fuck you.” Succinct, but not brilliant.
“How long can you hold your breath?”
“Longer than you think.”
“Have you ever been to Coveñas, Colombia?”
“You don’t know shit about where I’ve been.”
Torture was an ugly word and even uglier in practice. Dylan knew. He’d been tortured. In some ways, it made him more sympathetic to Walls’s situation, but in most ways, it didn’t, especially when he needed real answers and not misplaced bravado and insults.
“You may turn out to be a lucky guy, after all, Sam,” he said. “I’m going to give you one more chance before I get serious.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stainless steel case. The sequence of impending events was very clear in his mind. Yes, he remembered exactly how Souk had tortured him: first by injecting the drugs, an agonizing procedure, and second by half drowning him. The combination had been specifically calibrated to intensify the primordial terror of the hallucinations associated with Souk’s chemical concoctions. It was as close to death, or praying for death, as Dylan had ever been.
Sam Walls didn’t look impressed with the small stainless steel case.
But Dylan hadn’t opened it yet.
“After I show you what’s in here, I’m going to ask my questions again, and if I don’t get your best answers, your very best, Sam, I’m going to … well, you’ll understand everything in a minute.”
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” Walls said.
“Maybe not,” Dylan agreed. “But then again, maybe I do.”
He opened the case and showed Sam Walls the beautiful array of colorful Syrettes inside, each one safely nested in a square of foam rubber. He literally had a rainbow of the drugs, the whole spectrum compliments of Dr. William F. Brandt’s research lab at Walter Reed Medical Center.
“Have you ever heard of a Thai syringe?” he asked.
And by the blood-draining look of horror on Sam’s face, Dylan knew that he had.
Poor bastard.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I really should stay with the car,” Jane said, because “stay with the car” was a helluva lot easier for her to say than “stay with you.”
He let his gaze drift over her, shaking his head, like he couldn’t believe what she’d decided, then went back to watching the street.
She let out a short breath and tried to look like she knew what she was doing.
“Your name isn’t Con,” she said, because, by God, she did know that.
“That’s not exactly a news flash, honey.” He slanted her a long gaze from over on his side of the car.
“So you know you have amnesia?”
A short laugh escaped him. “Yeah, I figured it out pretty quick the day I woke up strapped to a gurney and couldn’t remember my own name.”
Oh, God, she’d been right about the amnesia, and that meant the odds were good