Chapter 3
590 Words
"But this..."
"Mother." Evelyn cut her off impatiently. "Do you have any idea how important this research is? Forty-seven billion dollars isn't just money, it's the future of this country. If Victor succeeds, our whole family will be..."
"Evelyn!" Her mother's eyes brimmed with tears as she stopped her. "Look at that boy. He loves you. After everything he's done for you over the years, couldn't you have found some way that didn't tear him apart?"
*****
Before Evelyn could answer, the woman in the interrogation room had already swapped her tool for a saw.
Two men stepped up, one heavyset and one lean. One pinned my left hand, the other pressed his boot down on my right.
I lay on the floor shaking, as helpless as game waiting for s*******r.
The saw worked through my ring finger inch by inch. I bit down on my lower lip and refused to make a sound.
"Mother," Evelyn's voice came through, "I have nowhere to go back to now. I can't let Victor hate me. As for Alan, I'll make it up to him, no matter what he becomes..."
I ground a tooth to pieces between my jaws. The shards drove into my gums, and the heavy taste of rust flooded my mouth. I wouldn't let a sound escape me. I would not let Evelyn see me whimper like a beaten dog.
The heavyset man let go of my left hand. The ring finger hung from a strip of skin, swinging against the back of my hand in a smear of blood.
"Well now, you can take it. Cracked your teeth too? Saves us the trouble of pulling them."
*****
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Evelyn. Her mother's face was streaming with tears. Hers was unnaturally calm.
"Evelyn, that's enough. He's an engineer, a researcher. Without his fingers, his life is over."
"Mother, I'm so close. Lily is waking up. Take her outside."
Then Evelyn was alone in the bedroom, watching the screen, murmuring over and over, "You'll forgive me, won't you? You will..."
By the time the interrogation ended, my hands had nothing left intact but my two thumbs, kept whole for signing confessions and unlocking fingerprint-protected devices. Four molars had been wrenched out, blood pouring from the empty sockets. The pain stabbed straight into my brain and made sleep impossible.
"Mr. Whitmore, this is only the beginning. Winnie does have a soft spot for stubborn types like you. The last researcher who refused to confess endured hours of pepper-spray torture. Then they peeled the bones out of his thighs and calves while he was still alive and kept him alive on machines. The one before that, let me think... we cut off all four limbs and gave him a drug so the wounds would never close. He's still alive in a sterile chamber, breathing through an oxygen tube. Don't doubt Winnie, Mr. Whitmore. Or do you prefer something more exciting?"
I knew he wasn't lying. To confess was a clean death. To refuse was a slow descent into hell.
*****
When the interrogation room emptied and the guards changed shifts, I used the backup chip buried in my waist to send an encrypted message to my old colleague Nathan Harris. Decoded, it read:
The cipher key is in three parts. The first is in Lab Safe #3. The password is your daughter's birthday. The second is in The Wealth of Nations, page 198, in the library at my parents' house. The third is in...
- Writer
