“Literally,” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled. “I’ll do better tonight. How about another fortune cookie?”

I unfolded the paper I’d purchased from Brandy. The page was divided into perforated strips, each strip printed with a sentence. I tore one off. It said, “You will be taking a long trip.”

Ollie popped it in her mouth. Bobby nodded at the toolbox and said, “So…?”

Ollie opened the box and began lifting out items: a black velvet bandolier loaded with picks, wrenches, shims, and thin-bladed knives; a top tray full of plastic cases containing electronic components; a lower tray of molded slots for pliers, wire cutters, tiny flashlights, and screwdrivers. Bobby said, “Is that a gun?”

“This?” She picked up a hunk of dark gray plastic with a pistol grip, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. “This is a drill,” she said. “Which reminds me, I need to charge this thing before our assault on the house of God.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Reverend Rudy Gallo Velez, naked except for his undershorts, crouched atop a chair in the center of the room in one of the classic stress positions: thighs parallel to the floor, arms tied behind his back, head bowed. A plastic garbage bag, loose at the bottom, covered his head. A figure eight of nylon cord, one loop around his neck, the other around his knees, kept his body in the proper attitude. He’d been in the position, on and off (mostly on), for three hours. He was a strong man, very fit, but sweat gleamed on his skin, and his legs trembled.

The Vincent sat about twenty feet away, his feet propped on the chemjet printer, his hat low across his eyes. A Zane Grey novel was open on his pen. He remained silent, giving Rudy time to think.

The pastor grunted, very quietly. He flexed his bare feet against the seat of the chair. His muscles had to be burning constantly now. Shooting pains would be knifing up his thighs, across his lower back. The discomfort caused by a stress position was psychologically different from that caused directly by the interrogator—say, a punch to the face, or a snapping of a finger bone, both of which the Vincent had inflicted upon Rudy within the first thirty seconds of meeting him—because positional pain seemed to come from within. This predisposed the victim to solicit the torturer’s help to end the suffering.

But a predisposition only. The Vincent could tell, even with the hood obscuring the pastor’s face, that he was not yet sufficiently distressed. Was he resilient because he was a man of the cloth, a gangbanger, or both? A black hand tattoo covered his left shoulder, and an elaborate “13” decorated the side of his neck, both of which marked him as La eMe—Mexican Mafia. If Pastor Rudy had found religion, it was only after a long allegiance with another hierarchical organization.

A novice interrogator might grow impatient at this point, start beating the man to break him down. That would be a mistake. As the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual made clear: Pain was useless. Psychology was everything.

Pain was a tool to get a subject—especially an alpha male like Rudy—into the proper state of mind. Which was why, when the Vincent had surprised the man in the back room of the church, the Vincent had immediately dropped him to the floor with the punch, then bent his finger the wrong way toward his wrist. Swift, unexpected pain hinted at the parameters of the interaction to come, and notified the subject of his change of status, from captain of his fate to passenger on the USS I Am Fucked.

For the young man who’d been in the room with Rudy—a gangly African-American who resembled the adopted younger brother of Uncle Sam—that ship had sailed. The black man had tried to run, and the Vincent had collared him like a rodeo calf and slammed him to the cement. The boy was stunned, teetering on unconsciousness, and the Vincent had helped him over that edge.

Despite all the violence and, let’s face it, an impressive display of physical prowess, the pastor refused to answer the Vincent’s questions. What did you give the red-haired woman, Lyda Rose? Where did you get the chemjet printer? Who gave you the ingredients? The pastor only smiled and said, “She took our communion wafers.”

Enhanced coercive interrogation techniques were required. To do the job right, the Vincent needed a private, soundproofed location, preferably one underground with a few metal doors to slam, all the better to convince the victim that he was isolated, helpless, and beyond rescue. Instead he had to improvise with what was available: a plastic bag, a chair, and a windowless warehouse with a cement floor. He’d done more with less.

A few minutes later, Rudy’s legs gave out and he tipped sideways. The chair shot out from under him and smacked the floor. The pastor lay on his side, the noose still enforcing a curled position.

The Vincent tipped back his hat but remained seated. “Are you ready to answer my questions, Rudy?” He thought it intellectually honest to call his victims by their names. He would not turn what he did, and who he did it to, into abstractions. That was for people with no control of their emotions.

The pastor breathed hard under his hood, the plastic hugging his mouth, then inflating. The Vincent flicked to a new page on the pen. “My employer would like you to fill out a brief questionnaire. I can read you the questions and record your answers. Ready?”

The hood moved slightly. The Vincent took that as a nod.

“One. ‘Are you a user of the drug that you’ve been distributing?’”

The Vincent waited for several seconds. “All righty, then. I’m going to put that down as a yes. Two. ‘How long have you been taking the drug and in what dosages?’”

Nothing.

“These aren’t hard questions, Rudy. For research purposes only, not personal at all. Help me out here.”

The Vincent got to his feet. “Three. ‘Would you say you’ve been taking the drug for less than a week, a week to one month, or longer than a month?’”

The pastor said, “Are you happy?” His voice was muffled by the hood, but he sounded genuinely curious.

The question surprised the Vincent. Usually at this point, the questions were more along the line of “Why are you doing this?” or “What do you want?” or “Why won’t you tell me what to say?”

The Vincent said, “I’m doing well, thanks.” It was sometimes a mistake to let the victim drive the interaction, but at least he was talking. And this was the most interesting conversation the Vincent had had in a while.

“I mean happy with your life,” Rudy said. “With what you’re doing.”

Ah. An appeal to his conscience. Talk about a rhetorical cul-de-sac. The Vincent tucked the pen into his jacket pocket.

“I’m happier than anyone else I know,” he said. “I’m…” What was the word? “Free” was close. “Liberated”? “Unfettered”? “I’m unencumbered.” He moved behind Rudy and pulled him into a sitting position. “I’m like a Goddamn free-range buffalo. Sorry—bison.

“See, you have a god to answer to,” the Vincent said, warming to the topic. “Others have society, or Mom, or the gang. Some voice in your head shaming you when you’ve broken the code. But in my head it’s quiet. Peaceful. Up you go.”

He helped blind Rudy climb back onto the chair, an awkward series of moves.

“You know in your heart what’s right or wrong,” the pastor said.

“I know in my head,” the Vincent said. “And what I’ve learned is that it’s not knowing what’s right or wrong, it’s caring. Feeling the wrongness. See, Rudy, when you see someone you love being hurt, you feel an echo of the pain yourself. You only got to imagine it. I can say, ‘I kicked your grandfather in the balls,’ and you will feel a twinge in your groin. Your morality is not rational, or handed down to you on stone tablets by some divine cop, it’s wired into your nervous system.” He patted the man on his sweat-slick back. “Fortunately, there’s a treatment for it.”