Jed followed Eli around to the back of the Expedition, where they opened the tailgate and dragged out their hooded captive, whose wrists were still bound in plasticuffs. Bex had given the dark warrior three separate sedative injections over the past nine hours, as the drug’s potency and longevity seemed to be greatly diminished compared to in a regular person. Each taking an arm, Jed and Eli followed José into the facility, herding their uncooperative captive this way and that to a windowless room that smelled of bleach and paint. The room looked like a typical sterile interrogation suite, with a table and two chairs—all bolted to the floor—and nothing else. A video camera was mounted in each of the room’s four corners and a single duct blew stale air down from overhead. Jed noticed that a piece of orange string had been tied to the duct grate cover and was oscillating in the airstream like a wriggling worm on a fishhook.

“Put him in that seat,” José said, gesturing to the far chair. “I’ll be right back.”

Jed and Eli forced their captive into the seat and held him down while they waited for José, who returned a moment later with handcuffs and leg irons that they used to chain him securely to eye hooks bolted into the floor.

“Hood off?” Jed asked.

Their host nodded. “And the gag can come off.”

Jed removed the hood and Eli undid the gag, taking obvious care so as not to get bitten in the process. Squinting and red-faced, their guest worked his jaw side to side, then lambasted them with insults and curses in Spanish.

“Do you need anything else?” Eli asked José.

“No thank you, my friends,” the former Army officer said, exuding a palpable calm and confidence as he took a seat across from the Dark One.

Jed followed Eli out of the interrogation room, shut the door behind him, and then joined Bex and Nisha in the monitoring suite, where the video and audio feeds from the four cameras were streaming on four large flat-screen televisions. A young woman, black hair pulled up and back on her head, sat at a workstation overseeing the session. She didn’t turn to greet Eli and Jed, nor did they interrupt her from her work. He noticed on her computer monitor that she’d already used facial rec to find the man’s identity and begin to populate data on him.

“Welcome. You can call me Mr. J. While you’re here, I’ll be your sole point of contact,” José said in English to the Dark One. “Can I offer you some water?”

The man glared at him for a long moment, then nodded.