Chapter 47: Chapter forty-six

Present day

 

The man who had worn black was now in just his underwear, tied to a chair in a dark, cramped room inside a Program facility. And a man in body armour was beating him.

No questions, no breaks. Just hard punches to the face. After a time, the man in armour grew tired of punching and switched to a knotted cord.

Eventually, after some considerable time, the man in armour stopped beating the man tied to the chair and a third man entered the room. This man held a gun, and he spoke.

“We already know everything. You need to understand that. You and I are going to have a talk and you are going to take me through everything you did since leaving the Program so I can put it all in a report to the boss. But there’s nothing you can hide from us because we already know—”

“If you knew, I’d be dead.” said the man in the chair through split lips. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Ethan,” Ethan said, surprised. “And we all know who you are.”

“You have no idea who I am,” the man said. “If you did, you would be a lot more scared.”

“Because you’re a superhero? Give me a break. You’re a puppet who started to believe his own hype. Now, let’s start with what you did with the doctor?”

“Are you new at this Ethan?” the man in the chair asked. “You don’t seem very good at it.”

Ethan gave a nod and man in armour drove a punch into the man in the chair’s head.

“Every time you don’t answer a question, you get hurt,” Ethan said. “We can keep doing this as long as you want, getting more and more creatively horrible until you talk, or you can save yourself the pain and cooperate now.”

“You don’t really have that long though, do you? It won’t be long before Smythe sends someone more competent to deal with me. And for me, that means Reaper. If you have something actionable to present to him, you might get whatever reward you’re looking for. But if you don’t, Reaper will cut off your head and forget your face before it hits the floor.”

Ethan looked shaken by this, likely because he knew it was true. “That doesn’t leave you any better off though. He’ll just pick up where I left off and you’ll break eventually.”

The man in the chair shrugged. “Maybe I will, but you’ll be just as dead. Only way this works out for you is if you offer me something in return.”

“You’re trying to get intel out of me? Do you think I’m a complete amateur?”

“Comparatively.”

Another punch to the face.

The man in the chair spat blood. “What have you got to lose? The only way this comes back to bite you is if I escape. And if I escape, Smythe will have you killed anyway. Come on Ethan, a question for a question. What do you say?”

Ethan thought this over for a moment and then told the man in armour to leave.

“Okay, but I go first.”

The man in the chair gave a nonchalant shrug. “Ask away.”

“What did you do with the doctor? Is she still alive?”

“That’s really two questions. But yes, she’s alive as far as I know. Last I saw of her was when I left her in the custody of the police, though it’s possible she is away from them by now and back at a safehouse in Washington. My turn. Have you ever spoken with Kessington Smythe?”

Ethan looked taken aback by this. Whatever question he had been preparing for, that hadn’t been it. “Yes,” he said. “Twice. Both times on the phone. How did you find Doctor Clark in the first place?”

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“I followed the money Lance Bryson was moving for the Program. That was why I killed him. The investigation into his death meant that government resources could be put into tracking down the money. From there, all I had to do was get that information from the taskforce with some well-placed surveillance. How did Smythe sound when you most recently spoke to him?”

Ethan suppressed a shudder, though the man still noticed. “Terrifying.” Ethan thought for a moment and then spoke again in a quieter voice, as though afraid to be heard. “And, old.”

The man nodded as he absorbed this information. Sounding ‘old’ likely meant that Smythe was having trouble breathing. For another man, this might be simply a sign of his advancing years and his ever-advancing stomach. But Smythe was a creature of astonishing will. He could control his breathing as well as anyone alive. If he ever let a subordinate hear him sound weak, it was because his health had deteriorated to such a point that he physically couldn’t hide it anymore.

“Who have you been working with?” Ethan asked.

“I obtained information from several sources,” the man said. “But the only one I’ve been working with is a hacker who goes by The Wraith.”

One corner of Ethan’s mouth twitched up at that, though only for a piece of a second.

“What’s your professional history?” the man asked.

Again, Ethan was surprised. He had clearly been worried that he would be asked about sensitive information, and he hadn’t known if he could lie convincingly enough to satisfy the man in the chair. But these questions didn’t require him to reveal anything important. He rattled off his résumé, from his time in special forces to his work for the government that, officially, had never happened, all the way up to his work for the Program for the past few years.

The man in the chair nodded. A relative amateur then. Interesting that this is who the Program sent after him.

“Where have you stored the information that you gathered?”

The man in the chair listed several addresses. One for an apartment he had been living in, another for Gwen’s apartment, two more that were safety deposit boxes and a one that was just a spot in a field where he had buried a strongbox. All of it was true, because he wasn’t sure how much the Program knew already. He couldn’t afford to be caught in a lie. Not yet.

 He nodded and asked his last question. “Aside from White Knight, how many candidates passed the Program’s graduation exams?”

Ethan was surprised again, and this time not pleasantly. He didn’t realize he had given away his role in the exams, though he had. Ethan’s experience was sparse compared to some of the Program’s other operators, but the trap he had used to catch the man was clever. Given how long he had been working for the Program, and his affinity for traps, he could only have been hired for one reason. And that reason was to be a part of the graduation exams. The man in the chair could see when Ethan considered lying, but the man had been subtly guiding the conversation to keep Ethan from asking where Liz was being kept. Until he had that information, he couldn’t risk lying any more than the man could.

“One,” Ethan said. “There was White Knight, and one other.”

The man in the chair nodded.

“Where, specifically, is doctor Elizabeth Clark?”

The man in the chair smiled. “Somewhere you won’t find her.”

Ethan’s mind seemed to stumble on that. He was used to the man being forthcoming now. So his first response, rather than simply calling for the man in the armour to come back, was to say, “That’s not an answer.”

The man in the chair shrugged. “You’re not asking the right question.”

“What’s the right question then?”

The man in the chair smiled. “Why did I let you catch me in the first place?”

The man could see the fear creep into Ethan. But when nothing happened, he seemed to get his nerve back. “You didn’t. I caught you because you’re not nearly as clever as you think you are.”

“Aren’t I?”

“No. You didn’t even realize that your little girlfriend Gwen was working for us the whole time. Feeding you just enough information so we could keep an eye on you and who you were working with. We know you called in the police too, so your little detective friend will be dead soon if she isn’t already. That’s the problem with you ‘heroes’, you get built up so much that you start to believe it yourself. You don’t realize that you’re just people, same as the rest of us.”

The man stared up at Ethan, his expression unreadable. “No. I’m not the same as you.”

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