Page 21 of Emerald

“Tell me how they’ll try to get you,” he said, his frantic eyes boring into mine.

I was thirteen years old. Skinny, needing braces, but moving cities too often to see an orthodontist regularly.

I listed off the techniques, counting them off on my fingers. “Sleep deprivation. Torture. Mind-altering substances. Diet manipulation. Sensory deprivation.”

My father nodded, his head jerking with each one.

“And the psychological techniques?”

“Suggestibility. Deception. Humiliation. Pride and ego. False friendship.”

While we spoke, I was trembling slightly. Because we were down in the basement of the house we were renting, and behind my father I could see a bench. A cloth. And three gallon-jugs of water.

“You can’t withstand it,” my father kept repeating. “All you can do is resist as long as possible, until your information is no longer useful.”

He’d made me practice withstanding pain before.

But I knew that waterboarding was nothing like holding my hand in a bucket of ice water.

As he became more and more agitated, I kept looking over his shoulder. I was so scared of those jugs of water. I was so scared of what I knew was coming next.

Even though it humiliated me, even though I knew it might only make him angrier, I started to cry.

That time, and that time alone, my tears seemed to snap him out of his manic state. He looked at me. He seemed to actually see me for once—a frightened teenager, snot-nosed and red-eyed. His face softened.

“It’s alright, Sloane,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “That’s enough for today.”

The next time we went down to the basement, the jugs of water were gone.

Now I’m down in the basement again. But not at my father’s house. I’m in the catacombs of Ivan Petrov’s compound. He carried me down himself, slinging me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Then he set me down on a chair in the middle of this tiny room, my wrists bound behind me and my ankles tied together.

He used several more zip ties to secure my arms to the backrest of the chair and my feet to the legs. Then he disappeared upstairs, leaving me alone in this small, barren room, lit by a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.

Other than the chair I’m sitting on, there’s one other equally uncomfortable wooden chair, a stripped mattress in the corner, a sink, a toilet, and four blank walls. The floor is made of hard-packed dirt, and the walls look like plastered stone.

There’s a camera in the far corner of the room, nestled up against the ceiling. I’m tempted to make a face at it, but I resist.

Fear always brings out the most obnoxious side of me.

Rudeness is my coping mechanism.

It’s not a very good coping mechanism.

As soon as I’m alone, I try twisting my wrists and hands, seeing if there’s the slightest slack that might allow me to slip my hands free. But this isn’t the first time Petrov’s used a zip tie. I’m trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and I’m not getting free.

The anticipation is awful. I try not to let myself imagine what’s going to happen when Petrov returns. My father always said this was the most effective thing of all: letting the captive wait. Letting them drive themselves mad with fear.

But it doesn’t matter if I understand the techniques Petrov might use, or if I can prepare myself for the pain of torture.

Because the problem is, I don’t have the information he wants.

I already know what he’s going to ask me.

He wants to know who hired me to kill him.

I honestly don’t know the answer.

That’s why the contract comes through a broker: so the client doesn’t know me, and I don’t know them. It protects the client, so I can’t spill their secrets. And it protects me, so they’re not tempted to cover their tracks by getting rid of me once the job is done.

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