Page 45 of The Last Kingdom

DERRICK ENTERED THE FORMER ROYAL RESIDENZ.

He’d walked over from the Charles Hotel, a fifteen-minute stroll in the late-night cold, keeping a close watch on the few people moving along the broad sweeps of pavement. More snow was coming and the flurries had begun to fall in earnest during his trek. The call from Trinity Dorner still bothered him. Somebody on the team had ratted him out. Somebody obviously currying favor. Ass-kissers. He hated ’em. Call him what they will. Difficult. Tough. Single-minded. But nobody had ever accused him of kissin’ up to the brass.

Quite the contrary.

He’d fallen on his sword during the whole waterboarding/torture debacle. What had TOO taunted?Remember what happened the last time.Like he’d ever forget. His loyalty had cost him everything.Don’t make it end sooner than it needs to.An ominous threat. But reality. He did not want to lose his job. Not yet anyway. He appreciated Trinity’s understanding.

And knew why.

She’d been there. All those years ago when he was raked over the coals. He’d taken the heat, but he’d also changed things. Sure, for years he and others had tortured people thinking it the right thing to do.Bad guys deserve bad things.

But the more he did it, the less he liked it.

So he’d engaged in a little show-and-tell.

He’d called in the brass—an assortment of senior intelligence officials, mostly political appointees and career CIA who each brought a sense of duty, urgency, and long-windedness to the job—all of whom loved torture. Of course not a one of them had ever actually seen it done, except in reenactments. Which, like books made into movies, were nothing like the original. So a prisoner was selected. An Afghani terrorist who’d been waterboarded over sixty times. Incredible. Sixty times. He’d been in jail for years, the effects of the dim grainy light, stark corridors, stinky air, and noise wearing on him. They’d hauled him into a hot smelly cell, strapped him to an inclined bench, then elevated his feet. He’d told those watching that having the head below the legs prolonged the agony. A porous cloth was draped across the forehead and eyes. Water was then poured onto the cloth. Then the saturated cloth was lowered until it covered both the nose and mouth, restricting air flow.

More water was added.

In two varying doses.

Twenty seconds or forty seconds, depending on how bad you wanted to make it.

The wet cloth prevented nearly all air from getting to the lungs, and during that time of induced suffocation more water was applied. So much that the effect was the same as drowning, only you were on dry land. Finally, the cloth was lifted away and the prisoner was allowed to breathe.

Two, maybe three breaths.

That’s all.

Then it started all over again.

The technique came from the friggin’ Spanish Inquisition. They’d favored it since it left no marks on the body. Intelligence officers who’d subjected themselves to it lasted an average of fourteen seconds before capitulating. His audience that day watched for a half hour. A few started to cry. Two turned their heads, but he told them that was not an option.If this is what you want done, then have the guts to watch.Trinity Dorner had stood impassionate, her eyes never wavering. She’d been merely an assistant deputy director then. A person low in the chain of command. There because her boss had wanted her to come. But he saw that she agreed with what he already knew.

Torture was bad.

He’d done it so much he’d come to feel sorry for the prisoners, though some of them were really bad people. Many times he had to tell himself that punishment and revenge was not the objective. Ascertaining useful intel was the goal. But most of what you learned from torture was unreliable. “They’ll say anything,” he told the onlookers when it was over. “It’s like they’re being killed in a mock execution. Last I looked, that was illegal under international law.”

A whole host of notables had loved waterboarding. The Pinochet regime in Chile. The Khmer Rouge. The British army in Northern Ireland. The South African police during apartheid.

Add the United States government to the list.

Finally, it was banned in 2009. But it still lingered. Quietly. In the background. Popping up every once in a while. He was proud that he’d had a small part in at least curbing its use. Unfortunately, all those political appointees and career intelligence officers whom he’d tried to intimidate never forgave him. No promotions came his way. No meaningful advancements. Nothing but a career stalled in neutral. Trinity Dorner went on to climb the ladder at Langley, eventually settling into a position where she could change things. And she had. Then, just after his inauguration, Warner Fox had brought her to the White House as a deputy to the national security adviser. Now she would head the counter-terrorism force. Definitely high up in the pecking order now.

And with a personal interest in what he was doing.

He could not decide if that was good or bad.

The Residenz sat just off the pedestrian-only zone, on a street that accommodated Munich’s high-end shopping. Chanel. Louis Vuitton. Prada. Hermès. Prior to 1918 the Residenz had served as the seat of government and home to the Bavarian dukes. But it had been over a hundred years since the last vestige of royalty had walked its halls. He knew that much of the building had been destroyed during the Second World War. But it had been rebuilt into one of the largest museum complexes in all of Bavaria.

A massive tourist attraction.

The call he’d received a short while ago was a request for a meeting and he’d not refused. The caller had been the one to involve him in the first place, alerting him to the Chinese presence and the threat that the United States could face. He’d reported all that through proper channels with a recommendation that the CIA intervene, but, as TOO had so astutely noted, he’d been ordered to stand down. He’d lied to the attorney general in order to obtain the services of Luke Daniels, saying it would be for an operation in the Czech Republic. He certainly could not use any CIA regulars. That misrepresentation had clearly been discovered. He’d wondered how long it would be before the assholes at Langley found out about Cotton Malone. That move would definitely get him into even more trouble. The three operatives he’d used tonight were all freelance, not on the company payroll, but one of them was clearly a snitch.

He stepped inside to a warm foyer and was escorted through a series of dimly lit corridors. Room after room opened to his left and right, many of them dark to the night. A few of the cleaning crew could be seen and heard as they worked.

He entered the Hall of Antiquities. A magnificent barrel-vaulted rectangle, every square inch ornately decorated, the walls lined with Roman busts. An older man sat at the far end on a raised dais. Not a throne, which had once surely been there. Just a mock representation. He walked the two hundred feet from one end to the other, down a checkerboard tile floor, past all of the sculpted busts, stopping short of the dais at a gilded wooded railing.

An exotic, musky scent hung in the air.

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