Out of Range: A Novel by Hank Steinberg

Author:Hank Steinberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction, Suspense, General
ISBN: 9780062080530
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-21T05:26:13+00:00

Chapter Thirty-two

Julie sat in a heavy wooden chair, soaking wet and shivering uncontrollably—so exhausted and wrung out that if she had not been duct-taped to the arms and legs of the chair, she would have simply collapsed and fallen to the floor.

“So let’s go over that first meeting again,” Quinn said for at least the hundredth time. His voice was patient, measured, maybe a little bored. “Where was it again?”

“Santa Monica. The promenade. I told you. His name was . . .” For a moment, her mind skittered out of the room. Why couldn’t she just go home and be with her children? Ollie and Meagan needed her. Charlie needed her. Why didn’t Quinn understand that?

“The name,” Quinn said.

“Hopkins. Frank Hopkins.” Each syllable seemed an overwhelming effort. “He’s an officer. With MI6.”

Quinn had been asking the same questions over and over in different ways for what seemed like days. Of course, the tactics that accompanied these questions kept changing. After using the combination of red and green drugs, Quinn had switched gears and played the father confessor for a while. But he soon tired of that tactic and turned to what seemed like his natural home: waterboarding. Which turned out to be even worse than the drugs.

The chair was attached to the floor with hinged rear legs so that it could be tipped backward. Then one of Quinn’s henchmen held a towel firmly over her mouth while a second man poured water over the towel until it was so soaked that breathing became impossible. And then, inexorably, as she kicked and thrashed, the water began leaking into her nose and mouth and she began to drown.

Uncannily, Quinn seemed to know precisely the moment at which she would lose consciousness and just before that moment, he would let her breathe again. As the drowning continued, with brief pauses to let her cough out the water in her lungs or occasionally to vomit, the sensation grew more and more hideous. By now, she felt as though she were falling down a dark path that could end only with her own death and her mind was starting to play tricks on her, as though it were slipping through the cracks of time and space, wending its way back to Los Angeles . . .

She had been warming up for her daily run when a short rumpled man wearing an unambiguously English bespoke suit had risen from a bench, folded the pink sheets of his Financial Times under his arm and approached her, saying, “Mrs. Davis, my name is Hopkins. I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

Ten minutes later, she was walking down the promenade overlooking a broad sweep of the Pacific Ocean while Frank Hopkins spun a story that had at first seemed ridiculous and surreal.

He had said that her old friend, and lover, Alisher Byko was involved—somewhat tangentially—in a political conspiracy which had the potential to have a major negative impact on the entire Western world. MI6 knew she

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