The Inquisitor: A Novel Read Online Free

Geiger’s corollary to “Everything matters” was “A Jones is not the perfect sum of his or her parts.” So if a client wanted an asap—a rush job—Geiger would often decline. There was so much to take in: body language, verbal response, vocal tone, facial expressions, a constant stream of information that shaped his choices and decisions—and a miscalculation or an incorrect conclusion, no matter how minor, could blow up a session or even tear a hole in his private universe. Which is why Geiger preferred to work inside out and follow a game plan based on Harry’s research. Some pros, like Dalton, worked from the outside in and used a more single-minded, head-on application of brutality. But with this approach, the client couldn’t always be sure what shape the Jones would be in when the session was over—although in some cases, that wasn’t an issue.
    Geiger, like everyone in the IR business, had heard a number of stories about Dalton. The most famous one dated from Desert Storm, when Kuwaiti cops caught one of Saddam’s henchmen sneaking across the border. They worked on the Iraqi for a week and got nothing, so they brought Dalton over and gave him carte blanche. That kind of session was called a “norell,” short for “no release likely,” meaning that it would probably be unwise to allow the world to see the Jones again after the interrogation was completed. The first time Dalton asked a question, the Iraqi smiled and Dalton sliced off a lip with a rotary knife. Then he went to work with a pneumatic nail gun—and the Jones gave Dalton what he wanted. The story may have been apocryphal, but it made Dalton’s career. In IR it didn’t hurt to have that reputation—that you were capable of anything—because most clients saw the Jones as the enemy and, in truth, wanted more than recompense or enlightenment. They wanted their pound of flesh.
    The way Geiger saw it, politics, business, and religion were the three remaining fingers of a battle-scarred fist. Truth, meanwhile, was a weapon that even a damaged fist could still grasp and wield. It was a remarkably versatile commodity; it could be traded, or help serve an end, or produce a profit. But it was an unstable element with a short half-life, so it had to be used quickly, before it blew up in the client’s face. Early on, Geiger had learned that truth was no longer sacred—it was simply the hottest thing on the market, and anyone in IR who believed that they acted within the parameters of some righteous code was at the very least deluded.
    The cat jumped from Geiger’s shoulder to the porch railing and went on his nightly way. Without fail, he would be back around five A.M. ; the creature’s clock was a nearly perfect thing.
    The spider had finished its night’s work. A large, striped moth was already caught dead center in the web, struggling furiously, not knowing that the more it tried to free itself, the tighter its shackles grew. Moving without haste, the spider came down from the web’s upper right-hand corner. It demonstrated no sense of urgency, as if the ends were secondary to the means, the meal simply a by-product of the art that had snared it.
    Geiger lit another Lucky, and as the spider reached its prize Geiger put his lighter’s flame to an anchoring strand. The web, moth, and spider all went up in a puff of fire.
    Geiger decided not to think about his action just now, and headed back inside. He would talk about it with Corley tomorrow.

 
     
    2
     
    Dr. Martin Corley stood at the railing of his eighteenth-floor terrace, drew on his between-sessions Marlboro Light, and frowned. Since he’d switched from the regular brand, this ritual had become the latest in a series of unsatisfying acts of self-denial intended to ward off incursions of mortality. It hadn’t been the milestone of sixty that had whetted his focus and pushed him away from old habits but the aftermath of his divorce. The long marriage and its countless traditions,