Nic said nothing.

“Your friends escaped out of here with evidence and shot one of my men in the process.”

“What? They wouldn’t—”

“Your friend, Dr. Burke, shot him in the thigh. He’s going to be fine, but it could have been much worse. I understand what you lost today, and I understand that you want to keep fighting, but your part is over. The best way you can help now is to tell me everything you know. What did Burke and Carter remove from this room, and where are they taking it?”

“I have no idea.”

Yoshida hit him again, harder this time, full body rotation. The blow rocked him back on his heels and nearly toppled him back into the pool of blood.

Nic spit red onto the floor. “You can hit me all you want, but the answer’s going to be the same. If they took something, it must have been on their way out. I don’t know what it could have been.”

Yoshida pulled over another chair, the legs scraping against the tile and sending chills down Nic’s spine.

“My father was six years old in 1942 when Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. He was an American citizen, born on US soil,” Yoshida said. “But like more than 110,000 others of Japanese descent, he was taken from his home in California and shipped off to an internment camp in Arkansas. Now, the American camps didn’t have gas chambers or mass graves, but they were prisons nonetheless. My family lost everything and had to start from scratch once they were finally released from the camp. Point is that my father never trusted the government after that. He raised me to be the same way. He always said that the idea of America being the land of the free is a great thing, but there’s one flaw … It’s run by people. And people are flawed, power hungry, selfish, and full of prejudice.”

Nic said nothing.

Yoshida continued, “I joined the CIA to change some of that. To help this country know who the real enemies are. Because the funny thing about the internment camps was that during the entire war, only ten people were convicted of spying for Japan, and they were all Caucasian. My team, the ones lying in pools of their own blood and feces all around you, were helping America to know the real enemy and keep this nation great. But now, the technology they developed could end up in the hands of our enemies. I’ll be damned if I let that happen.”

“Then you shouldn’t be wasting your time here with me,” Nic said. “You should be out chasing the real enemy.”

“This could get much more unpleasant for you. Have you ever been waterboarded, Officer Juliano?”

“No, but it’s definitely on my bucket list.”

“People who haven’t experienced it don’t think it’s that bad. Just a towel and a little water, right? But there’s a primitive instinct of panic that kicks in when that water is sucked up your nose and you know that you’re drowning. Your lungs are on fire. Even though you may know that the interrogator isn’t trying to kill you, it feels like you’re going to die. Your mind throws out all rational thought until all that remains is the panic and the need for air.”