Foreign Influence_ A Thriller - Brad Thor [73]
“You are much more intelligent than I ever gave you credit for,” said the Troll as he came closer. “Here I thought Tsui was some little hacker operating out of his parents’ basement somewhere. I was obviously very wrong. I shouldn’t have let my prejudice get the better of me.”
Sterk turned her eyes away.
“Why so shy, my dear? Don’t you want to see what you have accomplished? Granted, as friends remind me, I wasn’t very pretty to begin with, but I’m downright hideous now, wouldn’t you agree?”
The woman who had built a burgeoning intelligence dynasty as Tony Tsui remained silent.
“Own it!” the Troll screamed. “Look at me and own what you have done!”
Sterk looked up at him and as she did a tear rolled down her left cheek.
“Oh that’s good,” said Nicholas. “That’s very, very good.”
With a calm and perfectly placid expression, he drew back his small arm and struck her across the side of the head with the wrench he had removed from the van’s emergency toolkit. Harvath, who was standing behind Sterk, looked at Nicholas and drew a hash mark on the dusty support column she was tethered to.
“My, what a horrible gash,” said Nicholas as he studied the wound he had inflicted upon her.
Sterk had never had any of the bones in her face broken, but she was fairly certain that her cheekbone had just been shattered. “You like to hit women. You’re pathetic.”
The Troll wound up and hit her again, this time on the other side. Sterk cried out from the intensity of the pain.
Harvath ticked off another hash mark on the column.
“You’ve been a very, very bad girl, Adda,” said Nicholas as he hit her again.
Harvath put yet another hash mark on the board and was fairly certain the little man was going to start popping stitches.
Blood was rolling freely down both sides of her face. “I hope the woman I sent was a good lay, because she was obviously a terrible assassin.”
Nicholas was about to hit Sterk again, but he stopped. Michael Lee had been right about her; about both her asthma and her pride.
He dropped the wrench, and without a hint of irony, smiled and said, “Now we can speak freely.”
“If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “get it over with.”
Nicholas got a considerably good laugh out of that. “Kill you? You’re worth much more to me alive than dead.”
Sterk looked at him.
“I have big plans for you. First I’m going to cut out your tongue and seal your rather bland face inside an iron mask. Then I’m going to sell you to an unusually perverse Saudi prince who will chain you outside his tent in the middle of the desert, naked. Between the Arabs and the camels, you’re going to be the belle of the Bedouin ball.”
“And the award for S&M fiction goes to the man with the world’s smallest penis,” said Sterk.
Nicholas lunged for his wrench and struck the woman again. This time he tore open a wound along her forehead.
Harvath tallied his fourth hash mark. Nicholas would be allowed only one more swipe at her before he stepped in.
The Troll set the wrench down, quietly this time. “Do you know that man across from you?”
The woman didn’t reply.
“Of course you do. That’s Michael Lee,” Nicholas continued. “He’s the man you set up to take the fall as Tony Tsui if the heat ever got too close to you.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Do I need to pick the wrench back up, Adda? Or perhaps you would like to meet my dogs?” Nicholas snapped his fingers and the dogs began growling. “In fact, I’m going to even go so far as to suggest that the untimely demise of Lars Jagland wasn’t an accident, but that he somehow stumbled on to what you were up to and you killed him.”
To frighten the woman, Lee had been bound to the other column facing her. And in order to make him look like a real hostage, which in part he was, and also to make sure he didn’t say anything he shouldn’t, Harvath had placed a piece of duct tape across his mouth. The man now struggled against it. His eyes bulged as