It turned out to be unnecessary. Instead of screaming, Auma started to blubber. It made Rapp want to cut his throat even more. How many lengthy, savage torture sessions had this man presided over in his lifetime? How many women and children had he put to death over the course of days—maybe even weeks—while he fed off their pain? And all it took to get him to sobbing like a lost toddler was a dessert torch?

“How do you set up meetings with this Saudi, Gideon? How do you coordinate bank transfers and the delivery of the weapons they give you?” Rapp moved the torch toward the man’s stomach again.

“I have a phone!”

“Tell me more,” Rapp said, pulling back but leaving the torch lit. How long would the tiny canister last? Claudia made crème brûlée but he’d always been more interested in eating it than the vagaries of how it was made. Having it sputter out during an interrogation would be a little like losing your hard-on during sex. Not good for the mood.

“It’s a burner phone. He gave it to me. It’s my only way of contacting him.”

“Where is it?”

“At my camp.”

Sadly, that was probably true, too. They’d searched him, his car, and all his men before burying the whole lot of them in a mass grave behind the hangar. There would be no reason for Auma to carry a phone like that on an operation.

Rapp found himself left with few options. In fact, only one.

Go to Auma’s camp and get it.

31

GIDEON Auma looked more dead-eyed than normal, but other than that not too bad. He’d been hosed off and put back in his fatigues. The flex-cuff wounds on his wrists had been tended to and the cuffs of his shirt had been glued down to hide the bandages. He seemed reasonably steady on his feet as he stood in a clearing bathed in natural light. If this took longer than expected and his knees started to buckle, they could probably find a way to prop him up. It was amazing what camera angles could hide.

It appeared that Auma’s time dangling from a tree branch and the subsequent swipes with the crème brûlée torch had completely broken him. Stripped of his minions and surrounded with people unimpressed by his carefully crafted image as the instrument of God’s wrath, he was surprisingly pathetic. No attempts at escape, no more dramatic calls for divine retribution. Just quiet obedience. Exactly the way Rapp liked it.

Scott Coleman had found a folding cloth chair somewhere and someone had scrawled “DIRECTOR” on the back in marker. He was settled into it, holding his hands out in front of him, thumbs together, framing the shot. Joe Maslick stood obediently at his side trying to figure out the video app on his iPhone.