Choke Point

“Kiss ass,” Schwarz replied.

* * *

AFTER VERIFYING Congressman Thomas Acres was in fact dead, Able Team got the hell away from the scene before police arrived.

They needed a chance to question their prisoner before turning him over to local authorities and it wouldn’t do their timetable a lot of good to hang around and wait for the cops to arrive. And as Lyons had pointed out, he didn’t want to have to explain the situation to the boys in blue any more than he wanted to involve Stony Man to clear them if they could avoid it. Instead, it made more sense to take their prize and run.

They took the money with them, as well, intent on making sure it was returned to the Acres family—it probably wouldn’t save the life of Acres’s son at this point anyway.

Able Team returned to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and proceeded straight to a safe house the Farm kept in the area for just such occasions. En route to the place, Lyons placed a hurried call to Stony Man and requested Calvin James meet them there.

James had been the successor to Keio Ohara, one of Phoenix Force’s original members, and had become a critical part of the field units. A former Navy SEAL and medical corpsman, James had grown up on the mean streets of Chicago and studied police science. He’d been working as a SWAT officer when chosen to join Phoenix Force. He was an expert in underwater operations, and as someone with advanced medical training, he’d become proficient with the chemical interrogation of prisoners.

Many liberals would have considered such techniques inhumane, but Calvin James felt the opposite for a number of reasons. He’d never administered the drug to anyone without a fundamental knowledge of their anatomy—it was critical to ensure the viability of a subject’s cardiac and respiratory systems before proceeding with the tactics. Moreover, James considered chemical interrogation significantly more humane than some of those methods employed by CIA and others on the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, for example. That boiled down to torture even in the most abject sense, but what James did—while most would fault him for it—could be implemented in a controlled environment.

“What are you going to use?” Blancanales asked with interest as he watched James draw five cc’s into a syringe followed by ten from a different vial filled with something milky.

“It’s a mixture of amobarbital and temazepam,” James replied as he pushed the excess air from the syringe. “Either drug by itself isn’t really effective in making a patient talk but the two together can be quite persuasive.”

“I’ve heard most people can resist it,” Schwarz said.

James smiled. “Introduction of barbiturates into the bloodstream is only part of the interrogation technique. The other two parts are psychological. In essence, you make the subject believe that they will not be able to lie under influence of the drug. Most people, even thugs like this, don’t have the first clue about truth serum...other than what they see in the movies.”

“You said there was a third part?” Lyons asked.

“Why, yes,” James said, setting the syringe down and reaching into his bag of tricks to withdraw an electronic box with a digital display and a nylon cuff attached to it. “We make them think they’re also hooked up to this.”

“A polygraph?”

James shook his head. “No, actually this is just an automatic blood-pressure machine but we make the subject think it’s a polygraph.”

“Ah,” Schwarz said with a nod. “Very crafty.”

“I am, aren’t I?” James quipped.

He retrieved the syringe, wheeled and went through the door into the adjoining room, where Able Team had secured their prisoner to a chair with plastic riot cuffs. They had also blindfolded him and put gun muffs over his ears to provide a disorienting effect. No point in the guy hearing or seeing anything going on around him. Night had now settled on the city, its lights twinkling in the distance through the one-way windows installed in the safe house that had the added feature of being bullet resistant.

James applied the cuff to the man’s arm before ripping away the ear protection and blindfold. He sat on the edge of the table just in front of the chair and assumed the sternest expression he could muster. Actually, these kinds of head games were somewhat amusing and James didn’t mind playing whatever role he had to in order to get the intelligence they needed.

“Good evening,” he began. “That device attached to your arm is a highly specialized lie detector. In a moment, I’m going to turn it on and begin asking you questions. In addition to the polygraph, I’m also going to administer a drug designed to force you to answer my questions honestly. You would call this truth serum, but I would call it good insurance. You will not be able to resist and you will be forced to comply.”

The prisoner had first worn a mask of hatred and defiance, but as James talked the man’s expression changed to something much less confrontational. James could tell that he wouldn’t have any trouble extracting the truth from the guy even if he didn’t end up having to administer the drug. Of course, he’d loaded a very small dosage and he wouldn’t administer more unless he perceived the subject wasn’t telling the truth.

“Do you have any questions before we begin?”

“I... You mean you ain’t going to torture me?”

“We could go that way, if you’d like,” Lyons interjected.

James looked like he wanted to counter Lyons but then thought better of it. This was Able Team’s show and he’d only been brought in to assist and observe. Lyons was still in charge and James wouldn’t contradict his friend and colleague on any point unless it crossed the boundaries of his expertise.

“There’s no need to torture you,” James replied. “As I’ve already explained, this device and the pharmacological agents I’m about to administer are the only things required. That is, unless you’d like to skip that altogether and answer my questions without that intervention.”

“I’m no squeal, blackie.”

“Blackie?” Schwarz said. He looked at Blancanales. “What is this, the 1850s?”

Blancanales shrugged in way of reply.

“Okay,” James said as he administered the injection in the man’s vein. “Have it your way, asshole.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Casablanca, Morocco

As soon as Abbas el Khalidi finished reading the secure message on his computer, he picked a massive paperweight off his desk and heaved it across the room with a disgusted sigh.

The tumult brought two guards and a secretary into the room, all three of whom he ordered to get out. They backed out of the room with conciliatory bows, diligent to close the doors after them. They had worked for Khalidi long enough to know that he wasn’t to be meddled with in such a mood as this and would rue the day they ever departed from protocol. Khalidi had never been known as a lenient master—he was even less so when he discovered the Americans were screwing up his plans.

Again! he thought. Those sons of dogs are always trying to interfere!

Khalidi didn’t need the money, but that was hardly the point. He’d grown up a poor man on the streets of this very city, earning his way from a part-time paper route to the head of a news agency that had become one of the most powerful and influential of its kind throughout the world. Syndicated in nearly seventy countries with more than one billion subscribers, Khalidi had made his mark on the international media.

His notoriety as a newsman who knew no equal—a status that had earned him his “Prince Story” title—had also been the thing that allowed him to operate in relative privacy and seclusion. These were things Khalidi prized above all else, the power to determine his own destiny and control what information he would release to people while withholding the juiciest tidbits for himself.

Juicy and profitable, he reminded himself.

Still, it had not been about the money as much as the power. This was why his slaving operation in America had grown to such massive proportions, an operation so large that it defied conventional belief. Khalidi had his hand in a very big pie. The teen children of the American dogs were ripe for the harvest and brought a most handsome price on the international trafficking market. None of the so-called white slaves moved in or out of the country without Khalidi knowing about it. Sure, there were a few operations here and there, but they were mostly run by hoodlums and two-bit thugs. These individuals didn’t believe in quality of their work while Khalidi staked his personal reputation on it. And what had it yielded him in return? Greedy underlings who were so incompetent it bordered on pulp fiction cliché. That kind of mishandling could also expose his newspaper corporation, Abd-el-Aziz, to inquiry by the local government as well as international law-enforcement scrutiny.

The half-million-dollar ransom he’d lost, thanks to the pair of bunglers he’d now ordered his American contacts to find and terminate, wasn’t any issue. They still had the young girl and boy in question and his network could get them out of the country in the next twenty-four hours. Barring any other foul-ups, Khalidi figured this would blow over in a short time.

And what was the death of a congressman and a senator? The Americans didn’t generally like their elected officials anyway, conspiring to assassinate or expose them to public ridicule at every turn.

No, Khalidi figured he shouldn’t let this bother him in the least.

He decided to cheer up by having a long lunch at his favorite local establishment, a restaurant that served a fabulous array of traditional Arabic dishes, before taking the remainder of the afternoon off in favor of a long drive along the Moroccan coastline. Khalidi navigated the A5 out of Casablanca, top down on his Mercedes Benz SL-Class convertible, and drove south. He’d decided to change his usual northern route—one that often ended with a trip by ferry into the coastal Spanish city of Tarifa—in favor of a trip to the Doukkala-Abda region capital city of Safi. While most had a problem entering Spain from Morocco due to the intense narcotics trafficking out of his country, the real enterprise behind Khalidi’s empire, the newspaper mogul moved with autonomy.

Any customs officials on either side who didn’t want to play ball, and they were few indeed, were usually dealt with in swift and direct fashion.

Among the pottery markets in Safi, Khalidi would seek out one of his regular women and lavish her with an evening of new clothes and fine dining. This did wonders in warming up the young lady lucky enough to be chosen and then Khalidi would satisfy all of his natural urges. Unlike some of his less staid brothers, Khalidi maintained his dedication to the pure faith and neither drank alcohol, nor participated in the perversion of homosexuality. He stuck to females and all of them seemed to understand the relationship was one of convenience.

Abbas el Khalidi never let a woman get too close to him. He had only ever heard from one woman again. She had tried to set him up by claiming she was pregnant with his child. Khalidi had only needed to make a phone call and the girl disappeared, never to be seen again. Khalidi smiled when he thought about that fact. Of course, he had verified with certainty that she was lying before he had disposed of her, since he never would have permitted harm to come to any of his children. However, this girl had been the only one to make such claims and whether by reputation or merely plain good fortune, Khalidi had never been extorted by another. It wasn’t really all that surprising since rumors of such things at least got around in close-knit communities like those in Safi.

Lights came visible, twinkling as he rounded the road of the coastline heading into the city. Safi had a population of less than 300,000 people, while the surrounding communities brought the aggregate total to about a million, all told. Khalidi enjoyed this city above so many others in his country because most of it was sparsely populated, thereby setting the stage for a generally poor community that made most of its money from tourism and sales of handcrafted pottery. In fact, Moroccan pottery and rugs from this region were world-famous, although most of the citizens hardly made a dime from their sales.

Mostly, it was the exporters who took the majority of the profits, and they paid a significant kickback to Khalidi. Not only did pottery cross the transnational boundaries, but drugs did, as well. Yes, Khalidi had built his entire fortune on this type of trade. He had a mind for it, he happened to be very good at it, in fact, and he tended to hire others with a mind for it, as well.

It was dark by the time Khalidi reached the downtown area but still early enough that most shops in the marketplace were open, and people coming home from work crammed the streets shopping for food or other items. Tomorrow was Saturday—while most everyone would go to work it tended to be later in the day because of morning prayers and meetings at mosques throughout the entire Doukkala-Abda region. Khalidi roamed the streets for a while until he found a nicer shop filled with a variety of jewelry.