Page 148 of Maddy's Justice

“Go to hell, Zane or Cal or whatever you’re calling yourself.”

“Welcome back,” he replied.

Zane turned to Odessa and asked, “When can we get started?”

“Anytime. She’s fine. The electric shock won’t affect her,” Odessa answered.

During her time with the Russians, Odessa had been trained in interrogations. Not the usual type of physical torture the gangsters employed and enjoyed. The more subtle, chemically induced forms of information extraction.

Wearing surgical gloves and holding a hypodermic syringe, Odessa looked down at Maddy.

“I’m going to give you something to make you relax. We have your heart and breathing monitored.”

Next to the surgical table Maddy was strapped to, was a metal cart. On it were several more syringes filled with various drugs. Odessa picked one up and showed it to Maddy.

“I have been trained by some excellent doctors,” she said.

“KGB, Gestapo, Al Qaeda?” Maddy sarcastically asked.

“Close,” Odessa smiled. “FSB, essentially the equivalent of your FBI.”

“Except the FBI doesn’t torture people,” Maddy said.

“Oh, they don’t? It depends on how you define the word torture. Anyway, I will closely monitor you and keep you alive. You’ll be as good as new when we are done. No damage at all, you’ll see.”

Odessa pushed up the short sleeve of Maddy’s shirt exposing her shoulder. While Odessa swabbed it with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball, Maddy made a fist to tighten the muscle.

“Don’t do that,” Odessa said. “This is going to happen. Don’t make the needle break off in your arm. If you do, I will leave it there. Now relax.”

With that, Odessa gently stabbed the needle into her shoulder and injected the sodium amytal. Within a minute, Maddy was becoming giddy. Giggling and acting mildly intoxicated. She also became totally relaxed. After another couple of minutes, she was close to a state of drunkenness.

“How is she?” Zane asked.

Odessa was watching the monitors. Maddy’s heart rate and breathing had slowed down to a calm, acceptable level.

“She’s good. You may begin.”

Two hours later, satisfied that the interrogation had elicited all that it could, Maddy was wheeled back to her cell. While Zane stood in the doorway watching, Evan and two other guards removed the restraints and gently placed her on the bed still unconscious.

“So, what do you think?” Zane asked Evan and Odessa.

The three of them were back in the lower level, soundproof room seated on the round couch.

“I don’t know. I’m not as experienced with this type of interrogation. The only other ones I ever witnessed were those two women lawyers,” Evan said. “She seemed to be truthful. Hard to see how she could think fast enough to lie.”

“I agree,” Odessa said. “You did well, asking a series of simple, related questions then surprising her with something totally unrelated. It is hard for someone sober to think that quickly let alone someone who has been drugged.”

“You agree they don’t really know much more than Labelle may be involved in something illegal, but they don’t know what?” Zane asked.

“Yes,” Odessa said, and Evan nodded his agreement.

“Of course, that raises another problem,” Zane said. “What to do about the Labelle brothers?”

FORTY-EIGHT

Henri Founier was a fraud, but he hid it well. At age nineteen, Henri raped and murdered a bar maid. He fled the city of his birth, Lyon, and made his way to Morocco. There he used a false name and the papers of a man he had found drunk in an alley. Believing it would be a grand adventure, he had joined the French Foreign Legion. It was not a grand adventure. In fact, it brought out the coward in him.

Two years in and he deserted. Still, by bluff and bragging, he had provided for himself making a living by hanging around the fringe of the mercenary community. Eventually, that had led to his current job, a guard at a hidden compound in Northern Wisconsin. He was also a serial rapist and murderer.

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