“That’s right. Your mother helped build this place. Hell, it’s named after her. Mother’s Bunker.” He pauses. “I suppose you would need a little background to understand. Your mother was born in Macedonia, where Mother Teresa is, was, from. Your mother was so nice to the prisoners, well, when she wasn’t waterboarding them or electrocuting them or pulling out their fingernails, and one day someone called her Mother Teresa and it stuck.”

I know that he is goading me, trying to get me to give away my location. And I almost break. I almost scream, “My mother did not torture these men, she couldn’t have! The warm, loving woman I knew would never harm a soul!” But I hold back. If I learned anything the previous two weeks, it was that I didn’t know a single thing about my mother.

“Your mother was the one who trained me. But then again, she trained just about everyone,” states LeHigh. He is still at the center of the room, now to my almost immediate left.

I take three quick steps toward where I think the entrance is located.

“Your mother wrote the book on torture. Literally, she wrote a book, The Pain Game. There are only a handful of surviving copies, but for a while, at least during the Reagan administration, it was mandatory reading for all recruits. Did you know the Honduran government paid your mother nearly a hundred thousand dollars to train them how to torture their prisoners? A hundred thousand dollars. And this was 1986. That’s how good your mother was.”

The Director’s voice is moving toward the entrance. He knows what I’m up to and wants to head me off.

If I’m gonna get out of here alive, I have to do something, and now.

I try to think like him. He thinks that I will make a break for the entrance. And that was Plan A. But LeHigh is twice my size and he has a gun. And I have no doubt he knows exactly how many steps away from the entrance he is at all times. And what’s to say that he didn’t pull the door shut and lock it behind him or that there aren’t three agents waiting just outside the entrance?

My only hope is to get the gun away from him.

The camera is no use to me at this point, and I set it on the ground. I’m not far from the pop-up tables and the folding chairs. I put the flashlight in the waist of my pants and move slowly, my hands outstretched. I take two steps. My foot hits the chair. The scraping is soft, but in the chamber it is a full New York Symphony.

“What are you doing over there?” barks the Director.

He is fifteen feet from the entrance.