The beatings went on for a long time, until Umar had slowly and carefully worked over every part of me — except my head. Abu Adil had instructed him to spare my head, because he didn’t want anything to interfere with the quality of the recording. When the old man decided that I’d had enough, he told Umar to stop. “Connect him,” he said.

I lifted my head and watched. It was almost like being in someone else, far away. My muscles jumped in anguished spasms, and my wounds sent sharp signals of torment through every part of me. Yet the pain had become a barrier between my mind and body. I knew that I still hurt terribly, but I’d taken enough punishment to send my body into shock. I muttered curses and pleas to my two captors, threatening and begging them to give me back the pain-blocking daddy.

Umar only laughed. He went over to the cart and did something with the equipment there. Then he carried a large, shiny moddy link over to me. It looked a lot like the one we used with the Transpex game. Umar knelt beside me and showed it to me. “I’m going to chip this in for you,” he said. “It will allow us to record exactly what you’re feeling.”

I was having a difficult time breathing. “Motherfuckers,” I said, my voice a shallow wheeze.

Umar snapped the chrome-steel moddy link onto my anterior corymbic plug. “Now, this is a completely painless procedure,” he said.

“You’re gonna die,” I muttered. “You’re gonna fuckin’ die.”

Abu Adil was still holding the needle gun on me, but I couldn’t have done anything heroic anyway. Umar knelt down and fastened my hands behind me with the handcuffs. I felt like I was going to pass out, and I kept shaking my head to stay conscious. I didn’t want to black out and be completely at their mercy, though that was probably already true.

After he got my wrists bound, Umar caught the handcuffs with the hook and pulled on the rope until I staggered to my feet. Then he threw the end of the rope over a bar mounted on the wall high over my head. I saw what he was going to do. “Yallah,” I cried. He pulled on the rope until I was hoisted up on tiptoes with my arms raised behind my back. Then he pulled some more until my feet no longer touched the floor. I was hanging from the rope, the full weight of my body slowly pulling my arms from their sockets.

It was so excruciating, I could only take panting little breaths. I tried to shut out the horrible pain; I prayed first for mercy, then for death.

“Put the moddy in now,” said Abu Adil. His voice seemed to come from another world, from high on a mountaintop or far below the ocean.

“I take refuge with the Lord of the Dawn,” I murmured. I kept repeating that phrase like a magic charm.

Umar stood on the chair with the gray moddy in his hand, the D Syndrome moddy I’d brought. He chipped it onto my posterior plug.

He was hanging from the ceiling, but he couldn’t remember why. He was in terrible agony. “In the name of Allah, help me!” he cried. He realized that shouting just made the pain worse. Why was he here? He couldn’t remember. Who had done this to him?

He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything.

Time went by, and he might have been unconscious. He had the same feeling one has on waking from a particularly vivid dream, when the waking world and the dream are superimposed for a moment, when aspects of one distort images of the other, and one must make an effort to sort them and decide which shall have precedence.

How could he explain being alone and bound like this? He wasn’t afraid of the hurting, but he was afraid he wasn’t equal to the task of understanding his situation. There was the low hum of a fan above his head, and a faint spicy smell in the air. His body twisted a little on the rope, and he felt another slash of pain. He was bothered more by the notion that he appeared to be involved in a terrible drama and had no sense at all of its significance. “Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,” he whispered, “the Beneficent, the Merciful. Owner of the Day of Judgment. Thee alone we worship. Thee alone we ask for help”

Time passed. The suffering grew. Finally, he did not remember enough even to wince or writhe. Sights and sounds played through his numbed senses upon his drowsing mind. He was beyond evaluating or reacting, but he was not yet quite dead. Someone spoke to him, but he did not respond.

“How’s that?”

Let me tell you, it was horrible. All of a sudden, understanding poured back into my consciousness. Every bit of pain that had been held at bay suddenly returned with a vengeance. I must have whimpered, because he kept saying “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

I looked up. It was Saied. “Hey,” I said. It was all I could manage.

“It’s all right,” he told me again. I didn’t know if I could believe him. He looked pretty worried.

I was lying in an alley between some rundown, abandoned tenement buildings. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. At the moment, I didn’t care.

“These yours?” he said. He was folding a small handful of daddies and three moddies.

One of them was Rex and one was the gray D Syndrome moddy. I almost wept when I recognized the pain-blocker daddy. “Gimme,” I said. My hands shook as I reached up and chipped it in. Almost instantly I felt great again, although I knew I still had terrible lacerations and at least a broken collarbone. The daddy worked faster than even a ton of Sonneine. “You got to tell me what you’re doing here,” I said. I sat up, filled with the illusion of health and well-being.

“I came after you. Wanted to make sure you didn’t get into any trouble or anything. The guard at the gate knows me, and so does Kamal. I went into the house and saw what they were doing to you, then I waited till they dragged you out. They must’ve thought you were dead, or else they don’t care if you recover or not. I grabbed up the hardware and followed. They dumped you in this stinking alley, and I hid around the corner till they left.”

I put my hand on his shoulders. “Thanks,” I said.

“Hey,” said the Half-Hajj with a loopy grin, “no thanks are needed. Muslim brothers and all that, right?”

I didn’t want to argue with him. I picked up the third moddy he’d found. “What’s this?” I asked.

“You don’t know? It’s not one of yours?”

I shook my head. Saied took the moddy from me, reached up, and chipped it in. A moment later his expression changed. He looked awed. “May my father’s balls burn in Hell!” he said. “It’s Abu Adil.”

The Half-Hajj insisted on going with me to find the building where Paul Jawarski was hiding out. “You’re a wreck,” he told me, shaking his head. “You pop that daddy, you’ll realize what bad shape you’re in. You should go to the hospital.”

“I just got out of the hospital,” I said.

“Well, obviously it didn’t take. You got to go back again.”

“Fine, I’ll go when this business with Jawarski’s all over. I’ll keep the daddy in till then. And I’ll probably need Rex.”

Saied squinted at me. “You need a lot more than Rex. You need half a dozen of your cop buddies.”

I laughed bitterly. “I don’t think they’d show up. I don’t think Hajjar would even send them.”

We were making our way slowly along Hamidiyya’s main north-south avenue. “What do you mean?” asked Saied. “You think Hajjar wants to pull off Jawarski’s capture himself? Get himself a commendation and a medal?”

We turned down a narrow trash-choked alley and found the rear of the building we were looking for. “Shaknahyi had the idea that he’d been set up,” I said. “He thought maybe Jawarski was working for Hajjar.”

“I thought Jawarski was working for Shaykh Reda.”

I shrugged. Without the pain-blocker, that would have been excruciatingly painful. “Everybody we know moonlights. Why should Jawarski be any different?”