“I was an officer with the OKK, or the Maroon Berets, if you prefer,” the man continued, taking a quick sip from the same water bottle. “I attended level-C SERE training in the United States.”
Henican knew a few Turkish Maroon Berets from his time with Delta. They were a special operations unit made up of volunteers selected from all the branches of the Turkish armed forces. They were hard core. Their training regimen was as intense as any he had seen in the United States. In fact, the Maroon Berets were one of the remaining special ops teams in the world to still perform the trust shot—an exercise in which one candidate fired at a target near another candidate from fifty feet away.
“You’ll talk, Mr. Henican. You know it. I know it,” the man said. “Seriously, I don’t know why you’re being so difficult.”
“Can I have a bit more?” Henican asked.
“Water? Yes, why not.”
Henican took a few swallows of lukewarm water before the man pulled the bottle away.
God, the water feels good, Henican thought. But the act of drinking had made him realize that his chest and ribs were on fire, possibly with a broken rib or two. Pins and needles bit into his arms and hands. He was in no shape to make a flashy getaway. He wasn’t even sure he would survive another beating.
“How come you know so much about me?” Henican asked.
“Who hired you to kill our president?”
Henican decided to go out on a limb. “Your president wasn’t my target.”
The man’s face froze in an expressionless mask. “I gave you water, and you thank me by lying? You’re dumber than you look, Mr. Henican.”
The former Maroon Beret officer once again walked out of sight.
Before Henican could protest, a plastic bag came down over his head and locked around his neck. Henican gasped for air. The plastic bag formed a concave hollow around his mouth, which popped out and then in again with each pump of his lungs. He felt his temples swell with the pressure. There was no escape, no breath he could take. He tried to stay conscious, but he was losing the battle. He hung his mouth open, desperate for one more breath. Just before he choked to death, there was a small release around his neck, and some oxygen slipped in. Not much, but enough to keep him conscious.
“Like you’ve probably guessed, my friend, this isn’t my first time at this,” the man said. “I know exactly how tight to pull for suffering, and how tight to pull for a quick and merciful death.”
Suddenly, there was no more air coming through. The horrible feeling of suffocation consumed Henican as his lungs demanded oxygen that he couldn’t get. His head was burning, and for several panic-filled seconds, he really thought this was it. Then, as swiftly as it had come on, the bag was pulled off his head. He coughed several times. His entire body was shaking.
“Would you like me to repeat the question?” the man asked, walking back in front of Henican.
Henican was terrified to answer the question. His heart was racing. Never in his life had he been so thoroughly frightened. Never before had he felt his legs tremble so much.
Another punch landed between his shoulder blades, in exactly the same spot as the first one. This time, a stab of pain so sharp that it brought tears to his eyes stripped him of his ability to speak. Something inside him was burning up, as if he had drunk an entire bottle of peroxide.
“We can do this all day,” the man spat. “How much suffering you endure before I put a bullet in your head is entirely up to you.”
But Henican was only half listening. He coughed a few times, blood spattering from the back of his throat to the floor. He gasped a few more times, struggling for each breath, and then total blackness enveloped him.
CHAPTER TEN
CIA headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Dorothy Triggs ignored the burning ache in her shoulder as she strode down the hall to the seventh-floor briefing room. The trauma surgeon who had treated her had insisted that she keep her arm immobile for at least four weeks if she wanted to give her shoulder the chance to heal properly. So far, she had completely ignored the professional opinions of her physicians and had worked nonstop since her release from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier that morning.
Triggs refused to believe Max was dead. Whoever had ambushed them would have had no reason to take his corpse away from the site. Which meant they’d taken him alive.
The FBI had been charged with investigating her son’s disappearance. The legal attaché from the FBI office in Barbados was already on his way to Nassau to meet with the two FBI special agents assigned to the American embassy. The three of them were to assist the Royal Bahamas Police Force with their investigation. As much as Triggs wanted to send her own officers to conduct an independent investigation, she’d been warned by the director of the CIA not to do it.
“Let the bureau handle it, Dorothy,” Walter Helms had told her. “You need to understand the situation in the Bahamas.”
Her boss had gone on to say that the Royal Bahamas Police Force had lost four of its officers trying to protect her. The Bahamians had made an official request of assistance to the FBI, not to the CIA.
“I don’t want to hear that you’ve sent CIA personnel to the Bahamas,” Helms had warned her. “Am I making myself perfectly clear?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. I know how hard it must be for you. The minute I hear something, I’ll let you know,” Helms had promised.
If it had been any other situation, she would have agreed that the CIA had no business in the Bahamas and that the FBI was more than capable of conducting a swift and thorough investigation. But this wasn’t any other situation. This was her son.
As she got closer to the briefing room, an idea popped into her head. If she’d hired Pierce Hunt to find Charlie Henican, why couldn’t she offer a contract to Simon Carter to sniff around in the Bahamas? She was confident Carter could get her the answer she was looking for much quicker than the FBI ever could. And hadn’t Hunt mentioned that Carter was already on his way to Nassau?
She made a mental note to call him after the briefing.
Triggs entered the briefing room through a secure glass sliding door. The door slid shut behind her, and everyone sitting at the long conference table stopped talking. She sat at the head of the table. Pierce Hunt was directly to her right and Paramilitary Operations Officer Harriet Jacobs to her left. As one of the few female members of the CIA Special Activities Center—the division responsible for the agency’s overseas paramilitary operations—Jacobs was a rare commodity. For the last two years, she had worked with Charlie Henican on many long deployments and assisted Hunt in Venezuela. She was well suited for what Triggs had in mind, and so was Hunt. Also present at the meeting were intelligence research specialists Colleen Crawford and Barry Pike, both of whom had formerly worked for the DEA and were now independent consultants.
Triggs cleared her throat. “Thank you for being here. It’s greatly appreciated. I know some of you have traveled quite a bit to make it this morning.”
She proceeded to pass folders around the table.
“Please take a few minutes to go through the file. It will give you a general idea of what’s going on. These files were updated minutes before I walked in.”