Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(65)

Dr. Krause picked up the telephone and punched in a five-digit extension. Hearing the response on the other end, he began issuing instructions. It would take some fancy video work in the green room, but Sam Halvert could handle that.

Setting the phone back in its cradle, Dr. Krause turned his attention back to the video monitor. If Mark Smythe was in love with Heather McFarland, they’d know it as soon as the video was ready.





Mark had been handcuffed to a chain belt around his waist and led from his cell down a series of nearly identical hallways to a room that could have been an upper-middle-class media room. The projection screen built into the far wall was twelve feet wide and eight feet tall, and currently showed a test pattern from the ceiling-mounted overhead projector. The seats were standard theater seats arranged in multilevel tiers, four rows of four seats with a tiered walkway down the left side. Jennifer would have approved of this arrangement. A perfect hexadecimal ten.

As one of the guards shoved Mark roughly into the front center seat, he noted one significant difference in this media room. Each seat was equipped with a pair of short silver chains. As soon as he sat down, the guard snapped one of the chains to each of his handcuffs, securing him to his seat. The arrangement didn’t give him much confidence in the entertainment value of whatever movie they were about to show him.

Besides his two guards, the only other person in his room was Dr. Krause, the blond Nazi bastard in charge of his interrogation. Krause made a point of sitting down in the chair immediately to Mark’s right, while the burly guard who had chained him settled in on his left. Out of the corner of his eye, Mark could see the other guard stationed at the exit, fifteen feet up the walkway to his left.

Apparently the price of admission didn’t include popcorn. Oh well. In these handcuffs, it would’ve been a challenge getting it out of the box and to his mouth anyway. The vision of his fingers clawing out puffy white, butter-dripping kernels and flicking them up to his mouth almost brought a smile to Mark’s lips. It’d probably been a good idea not to provide it. He was pretty sure he could flick a kernel hard enough to transform one of Dr. Krause’s blue eyes into a dripping wad of slime.

Dr. Krause leaned toward him, a tight little grin warping his beak. “You ever seen a prison gang rape, Mark?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Just asking if you’ve ever seen what the animals do when they slip the leash.”

“I’ve seen some animals try it.”

“And?”

“They didn’t have as much fun as they thought.”

Krause’s smile widened, transforming his face into a good approximation of the Joker’s. “Now that’s what I like about you, Mark, your optimistic attitude. But in this case, I’m really the only one in a position to deliver on a threat, which makes yours nothing but hot air.”

Krause signaled to the guard on Mark’s left and the man leaned over to fasten a wireless heart-rate monitor to Mark’s wrist and two more sticky Wi-Fi electrodes to his temples. Finished with that, he slipped back into his seat and leaned back, a move Dr. Krause echoed.

The test pattern was replaced with a video feed from Heather’s padded cell. Mark caught his breath as he saw her in a hospital gown, hands and legs strapped to her bed, her milky white eyes seeming to stare right through him. Feeling his heart rate begin to spike, Mark pulled forward the memory of one of his meditations. It worked, but he could feel something building inside him, something hammering to get past his mental blockade.

“I believe you know Ms. McFarland.”

Mark said nothing.

“As you can see, she’s been somewhat traumatized. I’m afraid that in her fragile state, another severe shock could push her over the edge into a permanent catatonic state.”

Mark almost laughed in his face. Heather had them completely fooled into thinking she was psychotic, showing them exactly what they expected.

Dr. Krause picked up an Android phone, pressed an app button, then spoke three words. “Bring them in.”

The electronic lock on Heather’s door clicked open and three big, tattooed white guys shuffled into the room, coupled together on a chain, escorted by four guards, two of which covered their movements with a pair of MK-5s.

Dr. Krause held the phone in front of Mark. “You’re probably wondering why I get to have a phone inside a secure facility. It’s a toy that stays on the inside, a push-to-talk Voice over IP app, riding on our secure Wi-Fi network.”

“Couldn’t care less.”

“Unless you agree to start fully cooperating, in ten seconds I’m going to push this button and tell the guards to take off the chains and lock three of the meanest serial rapists in our federal prison system inside that cell with Heather McFarland. Lucky you. You’ve got a front-row seat.”

Mark looked at the screen and knew that Heather could handle those three Aryan Brotherhood *s with no more effort than it took him to shave. But that would wreck everything. That would alert the NSA to the fact that the girls were a major threat. He couldn’t allow that. Not now.

Deep within Mark’s mind, a spiderweb of cracks spread across the tranquil meditative scene, rapidly widening into fissures through which the blackness poured.

“Ten...”

Mark felt the vibrations pulse through the muscles in his arms, up into his shoulders, and across his back.