House Rules (3 of 4 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
House Rules by Mike Lawson. Copyright 2008 by Mike Lawson.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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PROLOGUE (CONT'D)

Myron Clark was good at his job because he was smart and because he was patient, but most of all because he was tireless. He was absolutely indefatigable.

He always looked fresh whenever he conducted an interrogation: his shirt wrinkle-free, his tie in place, face clean-shaven, hair carefully combed. He looked as if he'd just stepped from a shower after a full eight hours of peaceful sleep. The truth was that he was surviving on catnaps, but he would never allow the prisoners to see this. They had to think that Clark could go forever, that he'd never stop. And he wouldn't.

Clark was interrogating the two men captured in the garage in Baltimore. He'd been interrogating them for twenty-six straight hours, and he could tell that the one named Omar al-Assad was going to break first. In fact, he was going to break the next time Clark talked to him.

Clark was an ordinary-looking man in his forties, five-nine, receding hairline, carrying twenty pounds he ought to lose. He wasn't physically intimidating and he knew it--that's why he had Warren Knox for an assistant. Knox was six-four, heavily muscled, and kept his hair cut close to his big knobby skull. He had a particularly brutal face, the kind you'd expect to see on a tattooed felon, and he always looked like he was just barely suppressing an incredible amount of rage. The truth was that Warren Knox was hardly violent at all; Clark had killed more men than Knox.

Omar had asked for a lawyer when the interrogation first began, and Clark had nodded to Knox and Knox had grabbed Omar by the throat and slammed him up against the wall of the interrogation room. As Omar was pinned against the wall, choking, his feet no longer touching the floor, Knox said, "If you say lawyer one more time I'm gonna kick your teeth out."

That's when Omar began to fully appreciate his situation. This wasn't like TV. It wasn't like all those Law and Order shows where the cops yelled at the prisoners but never touched them--and stopped yelling as soon as they asked for a mouthpiece. No, Clark and Knox had made it clear to Omar that he had no rights. He wasn't going to be allowed to see anyone. Not a lawyer, not his partner, not his mother. He was completely alone.

If they took these clowns to trial, the fact that they'd trampled all over their rights as citizens could be a problem. The government's lawyers would spout legal gibberish to minimize the damage, but convicting these guys wasn't a priority, not at this point. In London, in Spain, in India, the subway attacks hadn't involved just a single bomb; the terrorists had set off four or five bombs simultaneously. Clark needed to know if Omar and his pal had accomplices, and if he had to cause Omar a little discomfort to find this out...well, too bad for Omar.

So for twenty-six hours Omar wasn't allowed to sleep. He'd be allowed to almost fall asleep, but just as his head would hit his chest, Knox would slam open the door to the interrogation room, cuff him on the back of the head, and tell him to go stand in the corner as if he were a truculent five-year-old.

And Omar was given no food and a lot of coffee. The coffee not only kept him awake but the caffeine in his empty stomach compounded the condition of his already jangling nerves. Yes, Omar was ready. Omar's partner--who was just a bit dumber than Omar and didn't have Omar's imagination--would last a bit longer, but not much.

Clark checked his appearance in the mirror near the interrogation room door and entered the room. He took a seat across the table from the prisoner and looked for a moment into his bloodshot eyes, his terrified young face. "Well, you've beaten me, Omar," he said, shaking his head in mock disappointment. "My boss says we gotta send you someplace else, to see if some other guys can do better than me. We used to send people like you to Gitmo, Guantánamo Bay, down there in Cuba. But Gitmo became a fishbowl, Omar. Too many pussy liberals always watchin' over our shoulders, always tryin' to make us play by the rules. Well, my friend, we've gotten a lot smarter since Gitmo. Now we use an island off the coast of Maine."

Clark smiled sadly at Omar, as if he truly pitied him.

"The army used to use the island for testing biological weapons. They have a facility there, and they have cages in the facility. The cages don't have a lot of headroom because they used to keep monkeys in them--you know, the monkeys they used for the experiments. The monkeys are all dead now, but the cages are still there. But the best part isn't the cages, Omar. The best part is that nobody knows about the island. And nobody knows what happens there."

Omar al-Assad stared at Clark for a moment, maybe looking for mercy, but knowing by now that there was nothing merciful about Myron Clark.

"We were going to explode the bomb in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel," Omar said.

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