Act of Terror by Marc Cameron

gas-powered welding generator on a folding table a few feet away. The dead man’s fingertips were raw and bloody from clawing at the rough concrete floor. His head-down position had caused his belly to distend horribly. His face was puffed and unrecognizable. Pooling fluids leaked from his nose and gaping mouth to the bare concrete below. A closer inspection revealed circular electric burns to his groin and wrists as well as his ankles. The wires around each big toe sunk deeply into charred, blackened flesh.
    Quinn had seen this sort of thing before. A colonel in the Afghan KHED had suspected a teenage goatherd of involvement with the Taliban. The evidence against the kid had been overwhelming, but many Afghans like him had been pressed into service. Few possessed the zeal of their Saudi and Chechen compatriots and gave up information easily.
    Quinn had arrived too late to stop the interrogation. The colonel had hung the nude boy from a rafter by his feet, run copper wires to his big toes and increased the voltage until he twitched like a marionette. “The Dance of Death,” the colonel had called it.
    The colonel had been from Hazara—a tribe particularly mistreated by the primarily Pashtun Taliban. The boy was Pashtun—and that had been enough to kill him, no matter what he’d known or hadn’t known.
    Quinn studied the man hanging from the hook in front of him. Like the KHED colonel, whoever had done this had had an agenda beyond interrogation. The depth of human cruelty never ceased to amaze him, even though he himself had caused the death of more than a few enemies of his country—and even a certain amount of pain.
    This was not an interrogation. This was someone’s entertainment.
    Quinn stepped closer to the hanging body, studying the scorched flesh behind the dead man’s knees. There came a point in any “enhanced” interrogation when the subject would say anything to stop the pain. That point had come and gone with this one long before the torture had stopped. Anyone trained by an American intelligence agency would know that—if they even cared.
    â€œWe know who he was?” Quinn said.
    â€œOne of ours,” Virginia Ross said, eyes darting nervously around the room. She took a tentative step closer to the body. Her eyes suddenly locked on the congealing pool of fluids under the dead man’s yawning mouth, she seemed not to know where to put her feet. Her words came in short spurts with a hard swallow in between each phrase. “Tom Haddad ... he was an analyst. . . assigned to the Middle East desk.”
    â€œIs his name on Congressman Drake’s list?” Quinn asked, knowing the answer before it came.
    â€œIt is,” Ross said, swallowing again. “He transferred back to Langley from Cairo three months ago.”
    Quinn turned to look at Bodington, but said nothing.
    The FBI director returned his glare for a long moment before shaking his head. “We weren’t looking at him for anything, if that’s what you were thinking.”
    Quinn didn’t know whether to believe either director. It wasn’t unheard of for the Bureau to watch Agency assets without informing their bosses—or vice versa, though the CIA wasn’t supposed to conduct operations on American soil. Quinn did a lot of things he wasn’t “supposed” to do, so he naturally assumed the CIA did what was necessary to get the job done.
    â€œIf he’s not on anyone’s radar, how’d he get on the list?” Thibodaux asked. “Maybe he really was a mole.”
    â€œWe’ve yet to figure that one out,” Palmer said grimly, nodding toward an empty chair with shreds of duct tape at the arms and legs. “There’s one more.”
    Someone had been tied there, likely made to watch.
    â€œWorse than this?” Thibodaux moaned. He turned to Quinn. “I’m gonna need one of my grandmama’s good-luck gris-gris bags