The Valkyrie Project (11 page)

It was an unfortunately long time before Mr. Guillermo showed up to finish my interrogation. Unfortunate because, while I had no information to give them, the waiting time was filled with slaps, punches, metal instruments of varying size and sharpness, and some electrocution. I think the psychology of the rusty nail through my hand played almost as large a role in the pain as the crushed, torn, and splintered nerve endings, but it was even more the case when the voltage began searing through my veins.

The tears, I suppose, were a result of the mental anguish, but that didn't mean they weren't covering my cheeks like a rainstorm on a window pane. I'm sure if my body had closed off the pain with shock, the tears would have come as a result of my helplessness anyway. So I felt the pain in hopes that it would help protect some part of my forgetful mind.

I was seriously considering telling them that I'd spill whatever secrets I had just to garner a brief reprieve. I was also wondering how much I could make up before they figured it out and resumed the physicality. The former probably would have brought me some short-lived comfort, the latter I simply had no way of pulling off; they knew what they wanted me to tell them, and you can't just start writing the answer to a question you don't know on a chalkboard at the front of a classroom and expect the teacher to give you high marks.

It was about the point where the bile had crept up my throat and threatened to make me vomit that the infamous Guillermo entered.

The moment was a glowing instant copped from a long-form thriller
. The door swung open in a dramatic arc, a powerful, dark outline of a man stood backlit in it, the light splaying over his shoulders in wide swaths, causing my eyes to cringe, but I didn't look away.

Then he came into the room, shr
ank a little—though just a little—and morphed into a young man playing spaceships and buggers. I almost laughed at the change, but despite the youth evident in his face, he had a commanding presence.

That was the second moment. In the third, I was almost jealous of him. How could such a young man be in charge of the much older interrogator? The thought passed as soon as he spoke.

"I will break you." The words were low and slow and I just about emptied my bowels when they came from the dark figure they called Captain Callif to his face. I figured he would do just as he said, but I wasn't sure if that meant mostly physical or mental. If a mental breakdown would have given them what they wanted, I would have suffered one long before the imposing figure of Captain Guillermo Callif stood before me. Once again, I tried to make myself clear.

"Sir
, Captain, sir," I stammered, "I don't know if these men apprised you of the situation, but I really, honestly, truly don't know the information you're asking for. And your gentle handlers here don't seem very disposed to giving me any sort of non-physical clue."

Guillermo exhaled violently, saying not another word while he raised his hand. He balled into a fist with the speed of a man who want
ed to make it clear what was coming, and I noticed that the man who had previously been roughing me up cringed more than I did. Captain Callif lowered his hand, still clenched in a fist, and spun on my interrogator.

"Did I not make it clear this man was a transient agent? You've been around long enough I didn't think I had to spell it out for you!"

"You don't really believe that, do you?"

The hammering of my pulse subsided slightly and my bowels were able to unclench just a tad. I was still concerned as to what would happen when the berating of the cowering inferior officer had concluded, but while they argued, I was safe.

It turned out to be a fairly lengthy argument as the Captain yelled while his subordinate proffered weaker and weaker excuses. Any man with half a wit would have accepted responsibility and tried to excuse themselves, but this man was either possessing of only a quarter of a wit or, more likely, had been taken into this group from another culture where saving face was a very different process.

As my reprieve drew to a close the man finally accepted defeat and resigned himself to the shadows.

Captain Guillermo Callif approached me again, his eyes still alight with passionate anger.

"So, if you don't know what these men were asking for, what do you know?"

"Honestly, sir? Not that much. I'm somewhat surprised I remember how to talk considering how little I remember of anything else."

"Perhaps you will be comforted to know that it doesn't surprise me."

I am still not sure how that was supposed to comfort me, but it didn't. I nodded anyway, and was rewarded with a curt laugh.

"What else?"

"What else do I remember?" I sat for a moment. There wasn't much. Then I wondered how I even knew where I was. How had I known what was happening before they'd even started interrogating me? How had I known there was a gun in my mouth before I'd opened my eyes?

"Steel," I blurted out
. "I knew he had a gun in my mouth."

This elicited another short laugh. "Yes, I bet you would. I'm sure this isn't your first time at the negotiating table."

"Yes," I started again, "I knew what was going on. I've done this before."

This time
, an actual round of laughter, the whole room. I stiffened, straightened up in my chair. I'd grown desperate and was giving them at least something they wanted.

My interrogator addressed him. "Captain
Callif, we've run him through brain scans, and we believe we have to do an internal intervention to extract the data we need."

–

"And that's how I ended up here with my head wrapped up like this."

Jasper Jonze gestured weakly to the bandages that wound their way into a kind of turban. It fit his ethnicity quite well.

His story drew to a close and Ana looked over his torture wounds. His hand was bandaged where the nail had gone in, his head was wrapped in gauze and she could see a thin red line seeping through on his forehead.

There were casts on both his legs. Odd. He hadn't mentioned that, even though it was probably the injury that needed hospital attention the most.

"When did they break your legs?" she asked.

"My what?" He looked confused and then looked down the bed, almost as if he were seeing his legs encased in white duroplast for the first time.

"Oh, that." He recovered. "I can't really say when that happened. Perhaps they broke them before they dropped me here."

"Wait," Ana said
. "They took you to the hospital after torturing you and drilling through your skull?"

"More than just drilling, I do say. The doctors here say part of my brain is missing. An actual part of my brain. Can you believe it?"

Ana could believe that part of the man's brain was missing sure enough. She wasn't sure she believed it had ever been there to be taken out, though.

"But yes, they tossed a hover stretcher from a vehicle with me attached to it."

Ana keyed her wrist comm.

"Aerin, can you pull up all the video feeds for the hospital around the time our patient was admitted. See if you can find a hover stretcher coming from a van." She looked at the man on the bed. "Let me guess, it was an unmarked black van?"

"Well, I was pretty well banged up and drugged up, but it was dark, yes. I can't be positive it was black."

"Yeah, Aerin, should be a dark van. Sound familiar?"

"Got it," Aerin said. "I mean, I've got the video now. Not the van. I'll let you know when I find that."

"Thanks."

"You're going to find them?"

Jasper Jonze looked expectant, even hopeful. Ana's internal security alarm had gone off. It was only a perimeter breach, but she feared the longer she talked to Mr. Jonze the more holes she would find in his story, ridiculous as it already was. She wanted to get out of there.

But then the figment of an angel appeared on her shoulder to say, "He knew your brother's name. How many times have you heard that in the last five, or even ten years?"

He had known, and she wanted to believe.

"Yes," she said, finally getting to his question, "I'm going to find them. Not for your sake, though, so don't expect to get any sort of revenge."

"Oh, I wouldn't think of it. I would like to have the peace of mind that they won't come after me again."

"Mr. Jonze, I doubt that you will ever have that kind of peace of mind."

Ana turned to leave, and then pitched her head back, giving the patient a big smile.

"Don't go anywhere, Mr. Jonze. I may need to talk to you again."

He pointed at the casts on his legs, smiling back, tilting his head to one side. Ana tilted her head as well and winked.

–

Ana was just coming down out of the expressway when her comm lit up with Aerin's face patiently waiting, though somewhat grimly, for her. She tapped the screen and his voice came through.

"So, I've still got another guy going over it at actual speed, but I scanned at double-speed and did some graphics filter double-checking and, well, I hate to say it, but there is no sign of a black van with a hover stretcher at any of the hospital entrances. I cross-checked the guy's records and I don't see him entering the hospital anywhere within a reasonable timeframe for when he was admitted. It's like he pulled a reverse Houdini, instead of getting out of the box filled with water while wearing a straitjacket, this guy got into the box with legs broken and a hole in his head without anyone seeing him."

Ana took a deep breath while considering turning around and going back to question the nurses, doctors, receptionists, and anyone else until she figured out how Mr. Jonze had managed to find his way into a public hospital without being captured on any of the video feeds. The rage that flared inside her almost gave her the energy to do it.

By now, though, the sound of internal alarms going off drowned out any such thoughts. Somehow the man lying in that hospital bed had known her brother's name. Jasper Jonze looked—although it was hard to tell due to the bandaged head—like he was probably the same age her brother would have been. Maybe this Mr. Jonze had been a classmate of the young Guillermo Callif. Her family had made enough noise in every place Guillermo had ever visited to drill the name into an impressionable mind. Then recently, the patient had suffered a psychotic break and started fabricating stories like the one she'd just heard. He'd probably told dozens of people dozens of different stories. Ana boiled inside at having been such a simp in holding out hope for such an obvious fabrication. She had been up for nearly twenty-four hours now and the frustration overtook her mounting exhaustion, snapping a few neural connections that would have been better left in place. She seethed as her hovercar descended into the parking structure adjacent to Agency headquarters.

–

The doors to the Valkyrie Project headquarters blew open on a backdraft of rage. Ana was the fire that stormed through them. Her hair billowed out in her wake as though blown by the blast of her anger—though it was probably just a gust from the force with which she had opened the doors.

It didn't matter that Aerin hadn't sent her out to chase a wild goose on purpose.
He'd thought he had a legitimate lead. But a few of her logical faculties were overridden by her mounting sleep debt, and right now, she needed to let him know he'd screwed up. She stayed in the Valkyrie Project to chase leads, but the deep water she had waded into led by Jasper Jonze had left her with nothing but a swim back to shore and away from the island inhabited by a lunatic.

As Ana pushed through the large glass doors of Aerin's office, she could already see him cowering. A constant jumble of nerves and intelligence, overthinking and overanalyzing everything every step of the way. And as he stammered through the three syllables of "Hey, Ana
," her resolve was obliterated like a target dummy in the face of an MP-11. How could she be angry with him for bringing her a lead? She was
here to chase leads. When it came to her brother, she would chase any lead she could find. She had to be willing to deal with lunacy much greater than even her own if she truly wanted to find Memo.

Aerin's hand was shaking. It was obvious because he was holding a vial of the black liquid that they'd brought back just a day earlier. Ana softened her posture, but he still withdrew a step, bumping a table littered with technical equipment behind him. The vial dropped from his hand, falling to the floor.

Ana lunged for it, but his retreat had taken it out of her reach, and it crashed on the dark cement, spilling the mysterious liquid at Aerin's feet.

"Oh shit," Ana said.

"Oh shit," Aerin said.

He spun with a previously absent nimbleness, around the table that had goaded him into the accident.

The lock on the door slammed home behind her. The sound made Ana spin to look. Then the vents overhead closed down.

"I'm sorry," Aerin said. Ana turned back to face him.

"It's okay," Ana said, holding her hand out. "I mean, that stuff isn't gaseous or anything, right?"