Adrenaline Read Online Free PDF

smuggler looking for illicit goods to ship. I told them whatever was in my brain. I became an oil spill of words.
    But there was the bomb, and there was the Caymans account, and that was enough. I must have known more, they decided. I must have had suspicions. Howell kept saying he wanted to believe me, like that belief topped his Christmas list. I said I knew nothing.
    So they moved on past the chemicals.
    The eye covers—which completely cut off my vision—made me feel like I’d been dropped into a hole that never ended. The earphones blasted music into my head: a hell’s jukebox of saccharine ballads, brain-crushing psychedelic rock I didn’t recognize, teeth-rattling rap. The rest of the time the sound was this high-pitched noise that made every nerve feel like it was sparking, like a broken cable. I lost all track of time, of place, of any sense that I remained tethered to the world.
    The cure for that was pain. Howell wasn’t there whenguards came in and they beat me for a solid ten minutes. Fists and feet. It was an expert ass-kicking. They didn’t mar my face but the rest of me purpled into a bruise. I curled into a ball. They gave me water, let me spit out a gob of blood. They looked at the gob as though gauging how much more I could take before passing a limit. Then they beat me again, kicking me harder. My spine and my legs felt on the verge of breaking. They were delightfully precise, careful not to break my ribs or my chin or my spine.
    They asked the same questions. I gave the same answers.
    I don’t know how long I resisted the sensory deprivation treatments. Minutes under the noise and the blackness can feel like endless hours.
    Lucy. The Bundle that was a boy. That was the thread I seized, the scant hope that I would be believed. They had to be searching for her, desperately. They would find her, and when they did, they would find the answers. The explanation as to why Lucy and I were framed, why they took Lucy, why they destroyed the Holborn office. Find the line, just like on the parkour runs. There was a line to the truth. I just had to find it.
    They left me alone with my pain for a few hours and then they returned and they dragged me into another room. They strapped me to a flat piece of wood. It moved. I felt my feet rise. My head descended toward the stone floor.
    No, no, no. I fought against the straps. The sensory deprivation was allowed. It remained legal. This, no.
    It wasn’t Howell standing above me, a cloth in one hand, a bucket in the other. The man wore a hood. I didn’t know his voice. I screamed for Howell.
    “Mr. Howell isn’t here,” the hooded man said.
    “Please don’t. Please.” I’d been through this before, in training. I knew what horror was coming and I struggled against the bonds, panic exploding in my chest like a mine. Because with the water on your face, you say what you have to. And if you know nothing, you truly know nothing, you will babble any torrent of words to get it to stop. You will tell any lie.
    The truth of my life was about to die in this room.
    “We’ve reached a moment of true unpleasantness, Sam.”
    He waited for me to answer. All I could say, in a broken voice I didn’t recognize, was “Please don’t do this. Please. For your sake.”
    I didn’t know where the last words came from. Like I cared about this stupid, heartless bastard who was nothing but a tool. I didn’t care. If I could have got off that board I’d have strangled him with my own hands.
    “Tell us. Who did you and Lucy work for?”
    “The Company. No one else.”
    He shifted the words: “Who gave you the money that Lucy moved through the accounts?”
    “I didn’t know about the money.”
    “Why did you bomb the office? Who was threatened by the office’s work?”
    I thought of all the networks we tried to study, the Money Czar who had no name, his face displayed on the presentation screen in the final moments before the office was destroyed. “I didn’t do it! I