Preston shook his head. “It’s all documented in government files released under the Freedom of Information Act. These guys were reckless cowboys. They had no idea what they were fooling around with. They should have left this stuff to the universities, where we handled it cautiously and professionally.”
“By screwing your students?” asked Bruno.
Preston ignored him. “Did you know you can place a cold needle in the palm of someone’s hand and tell them it’s red-hot, and it will leave a burn mark?”
“You’ve done that?” asked Saul.
“Hundreds of times.”
“People actually leave your stage with burns?”
Preston nodded proudly.
“You guys are a bunch of rubes,” said Spider. “I don’t believe any of this hypnosis garbage!”
Preston whispered:
Spider’s eyelids snapped a couple times like he had just awoken from a long nap. He looked around the table. “What’s going on? Why are all of you staring at me like that?”
The others tried to keep straight faces, but when Andy cracked up, they all fell apart.
“Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?” Spider demanded.
Andy wiped tears of laughter. “Sorry, we’re really laughing
“With a complex,” added Saul.
“That’s ridiculous!” said Spider. He held out both his arms, like evidence.
They laughed even harder. “You should have seen yourself,” said Jeff. “Trying to pick fights with everyone, holding one arm behind your back.”
“You’re making this up! All of you! I’ve never been hypnotized in my life!”
That just made them laugh more.
“Who ever heard of a one-armed juggler? Fuck all of you!”
Spider stood up and marched away from the booth. Preston yelled
18
It was a dark and starry night down the long, straight road through the mangroves, miles from anything. A white Mercedes sat at the dead end.
Five men in tropical shirts got out of the Benz and went to the trunk. Ivan, Igor, Pavel, Nikita and Leonid, all former KGB now gone freelance, working for themselves in the land of opportunity, most recently running The Palm Reader bookstore in Miami Beach before landing a contract with Mr. Grande. South Florida was a natural fit for them. Lots of ex-spooks around, CIA, MI6, Mossad, and nobody held grudges. Couldn’t afford to. With constantly shifting political terrain, they depended on each other to network for gigs. Still, there was a loose hierarchy. The Russians were considered among the best. Most of them.
These five began their intelligence careers in different branches of the service, but soon distinguished themselves. Pavel accidentally sat on a plunger, blowing up an elite demolition team. Nikita was the helicopter pilot who misjudged crosswinds during a labor riot and sent a commando unit rappelling down the chimney of a Ukrainian steel foundry. Assigned to protect an emissary to Kazakhstan, Leonid offered him an after-dinner mint — no, wait! That’s my suicide pill! Igor was driving a specially equipped limo in the big May Day parade, past the VIP bleachers on the Kremlin Wall, trying to get something on the radio when he inadvertently flipped up the machine guns and took out the back two rows of a marching band. Their leader was Ivan, who had done something either less stupid or grossly more stupid than the rest. He slept with the wife of someone in the Politburo.
Only one thing to do with people of such intelligence: put them on the torture squad.
Ivan’s boys were well suited to their work, able to blithely perform tasks that made even the most veteran agents queasy. After all, someone had to work with the electric prods and pliers and train the sexual attack dogs. But there were the good times, too. They had been together a decade now, and when they started reminiscing — oh, the memories. Like how about the time Nikita drank too much vodka and passed out and got raped by one of the German shepherds? Whew! They laughed until they cried about that one!
Tonight would be another for the scrapbook. The Mercedes had made good time across the state and now sat at the end of Cockroach Bay Road on the southeast shore of Tampa Bay. The nearest house was four miles; the only reason the road went this far was to reach one of the most remote boat ramps in the state. There were no streetlights and rarely any traffic this far back except the occasional pickup with blood-spattered upholstery engulfed in flames. You stayed far away from here at night unless you were getting rid of human evidence, which faced accelerated swamp decomposition and what detectives liked to call “animal interference.”
On this particular evening, all was quiet except croaking frogs and the weeping coming from the trunk of the Mercedes. Ivan unlocked it.
“But I’m only an insurance adjuster! Please let me go!”
They carried him to the shore, which had that low-tide smell. They drove long stakes into the muck and began tying the man down.
“Please don’t kill me!”
