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SIXTY-SEVEN

NICK

I try to protest when Julien duct-tapes my hands and then wraps the duct tape around my body, pinning my arms to my sides. But I can’t move, paralyzed by the zapper that the fucker used on me.

He slaps duct tape over my mouth, then hauls me to my feet.

“Walk,” he orders, pushing me and holding me by the neck, his fingers digging into my flesh so hard that I wince and howl. But the sound that comes out of my mouth is a muffled moan.

Panting through my nose, I stumble forward.

Where’s Phil? I can’t turn to see what’s happening, though I hear several pairs of footsteps behind me. If he gave me up, I’ll kill the asshole. Especially this one, Julien. I should’ve known something was up with him—he always seemed too stiff for a house manager.

And it looks like he’s leading me to my place, the guest house.

Fuck!

Natalie is there, in the closet, bound and gagged. Hopefully, she’s quiet enough. If they find her, I’m in more trouble than I already am.

A sudden thought strikes me—she’s in on this. She was hanging out with that scumbag blackmailer I got rid of. It dawns on me what they all want—probably the passkeys to the accounts. Maybe my crypto. They won’t get it, no way.

My mind reels like an out-of-whack Energizer Bunny from the commercial. I can’t have them poking around my computers.

I need to run. I can access my work from any computer. I just have to get away from here.

It’s already dark outside, and I feverishly scan the garden in the back—this could be my escape. When we approach the guest house, I jerk out of Julien’s grip and dart toward the garden.

Before I make it ten feet, a sudden, brutal force knocks me down. My face smashes into the ground, making me go blind with pain.

“Get up!” Julien barks. The weight on top of me lifts—he must’ve tackled me—and he jerks me to my feet.

I hear a subtle ding—my keys fall to the ground, but Julien doesn’t notice, and I don’t care right now. It’s better this way.

“Move it.” Julien’s fingers dig into my neck again as he pushes me toward the open door of my guest house.

I sniffle, wincing in pain—I think I broke my nose. Anger blinds me. I swear, when I get out of here, I will find this guy and ruin his life, destroy every person dear to him, and turn his life into a hell. Granted, this won’t be the first time. There are plenty of worthless cockroaches in the world who don’t deserve to breathe.

Inside the guest house, I see the gardener, who stands next to the couch like a bodyguard, dressed all in black like some sort of special ops guy. If this is the CIA, I’m screwed, but they still won’t get what they came for.

On the couch, Phil sits like a saggy bag of potatoes, bound, gagged, his pathetic eyes on me. Maybe he isn’t the rat after all. If these guys are government, Phil is the only one who’ll come out of this lucky, considering that by now, he should’ve gotten a lethal dose of nerve agent.

Julien pushes me onto the couch, then walks to my work desk and starts up the computers. What I see next makes my blood boil—he’s entering the passwords to get into them.

How? Argh! I want to punch him in the face.

He opens the spreadsheets of all my bank accounts, then walks up to me and rips the duct tape off my mouth. My skin burns like hell, making me scream in pain.

But glaring at Julien doesn’t change his expression. There’s no cruelty in it, no arrogance, no gloating. Like I said, a robot.

“Who are you working for?” I ask, licking my lips to soothe the burn and tasting blood trickling from my nose. “I’ll pay you.”

Julien sets his hands on his hips. “Where are the passkeys?” he asks instead.

I turn to the gardener. “I’ll pay you both.”

The gardener stands with his arms crossed over his chest, the same indifferent expression on his face.

“We need the passkeys,” Julien repeats. “I know they must be on a thumb drive.”

Oh-ho-ho. Clever.

I smirk at him. “Who are you? FBI? CIA?”

“Passkeys, Nick. This will all go quicker and be less painful if you don’t play hard to get.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. Ask Rosenberg.”

“I would’ve, if you hadn’t killed him and buried him in the backyard of a Vermont cabin.”

Shit.

Phil next to me whimpers, his eyes widening at me in horror.

This is more serious than I thought. How does Julien know about the real Rosenberg? No one knows! It’s impossible!

Julien takes a step closer. “I would’ve, if this guy, Phil Crain”—he tilts his head toward Phil—“actually knew anything about IxResearch. Or Metrix Technologies. Or ErFi Crypto. But he doesn’t.”

Double shit. How does he know about me and Phil and my previous scam that I ran years ago?

“So I’m asking you , Nick. Or should I call you Eric Fisher? Or Jordan Ruff?”

No one— no one! —can possibly know so much about me or my previous aliases.

My mind is spinning fast as I try to wiggle my arms, testing the restraints, but they are tight, making me completely immobile.

Julien could be with the CIA. But then, there’d already be others here. He wouldn’t be interrogating me here. He wouldn’t be alone, with a gardener by his side, or whoever this guy is. So it’s just the two of them, then.

Julien’s gaze is cold, as always—this is astounding. I thought he was just a meticulous Tin Man. Turns out, he has a different background. Military, if I were to guess.

The gardener walks to the door, picks up what looks like a folding bench propped against the wall, and takes it to the bathroom.

My eyes follow—what in the hell is that?

Julien fists the front of my shirt and jerks me off the couch, onto my feet.

“Let’s go,” he says, dragging me toward the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” I hiss, trying to protest as he pushes me into the bathroom.

The portable bench is unfolded and set up in the middle of the bathroom. It’s almost full-body length, tilted to one side. I see a rope on the floor and a jug of water.

“Wh-what is that?” I ask as Julien forces me down onto the bench, into a lying position, face up.

“This could’ve gone easier,” he says, staring down at me, pushing the sleeves of his black shirt up. The gardener picks up the rope and ties me to the bench, my head tilted down. “But since we really need those passkeys, we will get them out of you in a different way.”

Julien retrieves a stopwatch out of his pocket and checks it. “We’ll do twenty-second intervals,” he says to the gardener. “Three breaths in between.”

The hell?

The gardener picks up a cloth, which turns out to be my old t-shirt, and spreads it over my face, blacking out the view.

“Wait!” I shout against the fabric, realizing where this is going. Bench, cloth, water—this is waterboarding, an interrogation technique. It’s torture. And they are about to use it on me.

“I hope you like water, Nick,” Julien says. A click of the stopwatch follows. “Start.”

I open my mouth to protest, but suddenly water starts pouring over my face, clogging my nose, eyes, and mouth, and cutting off my breathing.