When Jake woke up the first thing he noticed was he was not in his hotel room any more. How did he know this? Well, first of all, he was immersed up to his neck in acrid water that smelled more like a combination of jet fuel, human feces, urine, and rotting animals. In this case a dead rat, which floated just a few inches from his mouth.
He swiveled his head around as far as he could, considering his arms were lashed behind him and his feet were equally bound. He was in some sort of metal tank. The only light in the room came from emergency lights against a far wall, revealing high ceilings with rusted metal rafters. No windows. It was an old warehouse of some kind, Jake guessed.
Those who had taken him had strapped him to a chair, but he couldn’t tell how solid that was. As far as he could tell, the only item of clothing he still wore was his black jeans and hopefully his underwear. His chest was bare, as were his feet.
Suddenly a door opened and he could hear muffled voices approach the tank. Then a man’s head, covered by a rubber mask of a devilish creature, appeared above him.
“I see you didn’t drown, Mister Adams,” said a gruff voice from behind the mask.
A second mask popped over the edge. This one was a princess with blonde hair. But Jake guessed it was not a woman.
“Are you two with the chamber of commerce?” Jake asked. “If so, I’m not sure I like this city.” A small amount of water got into his mouth when he spoke, which he quickly spit out toward the rat.
“I heard you were a comedian,” the ghoul said. “And I must admit that I enjoyed your performance before the House committee. I must have watched it ten times today on the internet.” Just after his last words, his gloved hand smashed down onto Jake’s head and shoved his face under water.
Out of an implied respect for this potential interrogator, Jake pretended to struggle. In reality he could hold his breath for at least three to five minutes under water, a feat that he had learned again during his training with the Agency. He had first practiced this, though, in the lakes and rivers in Montana during his youth. He struggled more for effect, pretending to choke and on the way to drowning, which forced the man to let his head up.
Jake spit out some water and noticed the rat had slipped to the edge of the tank. He coughed and said, “You really should ask a question and wait for me to answer or not answer before you punish me. What do you want from me?”
“I’m just trying to set the parameters of my patience,” the ghoul said. This time an accent seeped out. What kind?
“Understand,” Jake said, coughing for real this time. Yeah, there was some kind of fuel mixed with this crappy water. Great.
This back and forth and up and down in the water went on for another hour. The entire time, mostly while Jake was pretending to struggle under the water, he was also working on the ropes that bound his hands and discovering that the chair he sat on was wooden and not very sturdy. The entire interrogation was like water-boarding, only this would actually be considered torture under the Geneva Conventions—something these thugs had no inclination to follow.
The questions had been equally illuminating for Jake. For some reason the interrogators asked many specific questions about his past, which gave Jake more information about who they could possibly be than revealing anything important that Jake knew. They were skirting the issue, working around the edges. Other than this blunder it was obvious that their training, disturbingly, had most likely come from American or other intelligence services. Yet, Jake was sure they were foreign nationals. Slavic. Russian or Czech or Bulgarian or Ukrainian. If he had more time in the tank, he could figure that out. But this was getting old and his hands, although shriveled and cold, were getting close to freedom.
“Hey, guys,” Jake said. “Could we take a little break? I really need the bathroom.” He hesitated with a serious look on his face. “Never mind. So, you know all kinds of good things about me.” Actually, they only knew the misinformation that the Agency’s counterintelligence operations wanted foreign sources to know about him, most of which was total nonsense. “We could be here all night.”
“Do you have a dinner date with your favorite congresswoman?” the ghoul asked him.
Finally, they had slipped up. They had seen him with Congresswoman Freeman. And, as suspected, that’s what they really wanted to know. What was a former Agency officer doing hanging out with a member of the subcommittee that had just finished grilling him on Capitol Hill? Damn it. That meant that his fellow Montanan had not covered her tracks entirely. It also meant that he had not watched his own back like he should have, either. Well, his current situation in a metal tub of water, fuel and dead rodents pretty much confirmed that. Even an old pro could slip up.
“Have you seen the congresswoman?” Jake asked. “They don’t get much hotter than that?”
The ghoul shoved Jake’s head under water again. This time Jake lowered himself further into the tub as he released his hands and quickly untied his feet, all the while struggling against the man’s firm hand. Just as he felt the man release him to rise, Jake thrust his feet against the bottom of the tank and raised himself out.
Water flew in all directions, but Jake was able to grasp the man with the ghoul mask behind the neck and shove his face into Jake’s knee, which knocked the guy out and gave Jake time to jump from the tub of filthy water.
The second man backed away and considered his options.
Jake didn’t give him a chance to run. With a flurry of punches and a final roundhouse kick to the head, the man also dropped to the cement floor.
Now Jake assessed his escape. Before leaving he saw a small table that contained his wallet, passport and cell phone. He scooped those up and hurried out the room as fast as his cold body would take him. But his synthetic left knee made him limp in pain.
He had to believe there were others involved with his capture and interrogation. As he got to an outer door, he could hear voices outside. He needed to hurry. Those two men he had knocked out wouldn’t stay down for long.
Then he saw a narrow stream of light off in the distance at the other end of the warehouse. He quietly ran toward that. It turned out to be a wide loading dock door lit by a street light in the distance. He skirted through that, barely glancing back at the two men down the street next to a dark van.
It wasn’t until he got safely away from the warehouse that the chill of winter started to set into his body. He needed to get somewhere warm in a hurry.