Code Name: Ghost - Sawyer Bennett Page 0,13

Corinne Ellery.

She’s a nice woman who is sure as fuck easy on the eyes. My guess is she’s in her early thirties with thick chestnut hair she wears in a bun resting low on the back of her head. She wears glasses, which make her look smart, but seeing as she’s a doctor and all, I’m assuming she actually is.

I met with her and Kynan yesterday morning for my debriefing meeting. It was held in the large conference room on the north end of the second floor, which Kynan had set up with digital maps displayed on a large screen so we could go over the mission.

I didn’t spare any details, even the painful ones where I believe I fucked up. Based on other accounts Kynan has, I’m sure he learned nothing new on how the mission got ambushed and how we handled it all.

Jameson had been hired to work in conjunction with an international rescue team that was going into Syria to try to recover some relief workers who were taken hostage. The average person would probably be surprised to know how often governments—including our own—hire private security firms to help on a variety of covert missions. Jameson went in with a team of five—Jimmy Tate, Sal Mezzina, Merritt Gables, Tank Richardson, and me. We worked with Special Forces teams from the United Kingdom and Australia, as the hostages were predominantly from those two countries. While there were no American citizens taken prisoner, it didn’t really factor into whether Jameson took the job. If the pay is right and the risks are acceptable, we’ll help any citizens of the world.

The debriefing lasted about an hour. Dr. Ellery sat there quietly while Kynan went through a typed report he held, peppering me with questions. He had me clarify a few things, referencing the Syrian map a few times. He walked me through every step I took from the time we left the base camp until the moment I got captured.

Granted, it was a bit difficult to talk about the moments when Jimmy and Sal got hit, but I expect they were difficult for Kynan to hear again, too.

After, we moved on to my imprisonment. While I’m sure this was the part Dr. Ellery was interested in hearing about, she just listened casually without taking a single note. Kynan drilled me hard for all the nasty details.

“Where were you taken?”

“Not sure. I was hooded the entire time, but I estimate it was roughly two hours of driving distance.”

“Did they take you to a city or suburban structure?”

“Small village, I believe, based on the sounds of animals and the lack of traffic noises. I never got to see outside the windowless room they had me in.”

“Describe the decor in the room.”

“Wood floor, plaster walls with cracks, a table with two chairs in the middle. Table against one wall with a pitcher of water. They drank from it, but they never offered me any.”

And so it went before Kynan eased into the nitty-gritty.

“What methods of torture did they employ on you and how often?” Kynan had asked without any noticeable inflection in his voice. This was research, which it was obvious he hoped to learn from.

“Several times a day for roughly nine days as best I could tell,” I said. “Sleep deprivation the entire time, starvation, loud music, electrical shock, and physical beatings.”

Succinctly and without emotion, I rattled off the details. I had been trained to withstand torture—to a degree. Everyone cracked eventually. There was no shame in it. The key was to make them work for it, to give them the least harmful intel or die trying, and to learn all about the enemy while doing so. I know I succeeded on those fronts, mainly because I didn’t have a lot of good intel to give. Luckily, they believed me and stopped the torture, moving me across the desert to toss me into a hole until I could be useful in some other way.

Kynan then asked about communications, the times of day they rotated guards, and whether I was able to pick up any other intel. I told him everything I knew, not even getting annoyed when he sometimes asked the same question twice. It was a genuinely legit tactic to help check for veracity or to poke for additional memories.

At the end, he’d thanked me for my time and reiterated I was on desk duty until I completed my counseling with Dr. Ellery. She would be the one who would release