Chapter 3

Just before dawn, a group of people were gathering in a meeting room inside the main building of this military base. Most of them only knew that it was for a very urgent job.

There was one long table in the room, three people were sitting on one side of it while another person was sitting to the left and at the head of the table. This last person was the team leader. They were all facing a wall with four big television screens on it. Each screen showed a side of the area around their compound. Their assistants were standing behind their chairs and awaited orders.

The four people sitting at the table were all trained in interrogating people. They all could use a polygraph device, but they also knew everything about other techniques they could use to make people talk. From simple persuasion to all kinds of torture techniques. They even had invented some new ways to make people talk. However, the technique used was always decided by the interrogator in question and all of them had their own specialization. The end result was of course the only thing that counted. The head of the base had called in these four today, because they all had a flawless record when it came to making people talk and time was of the essence.

Even when these people knew that ordinary people wouldn't understand the things they did. They did it anyway, because they also knew that by doing it, they had saved many lives all over the world many times over.

All of them had been surprised that they had been awakened so early this morning. Until now, they always had had some extra information before they needed to come in for their job. A whole day of preparation was the normal thing to do, so they could already have a nice picture of the person they would find in their interrogation room.

For security reasons, nobody knew their real names. When they had arrived here on the first day, they had been given a number. Normally always the highest number in sequence, but how lower the number, how more authority they would have and those numbers were always visible on their jackets. Today, agent 1, 4, 7 and 8 had been called in. They also had the letter 'I' in front of the number, so people knew that they were members of the interrogation team.

Agent 1, was the most experienced interrogator on base, even when he was only 37 years old, he had already the most solved cases in history and had jumped over the heads of some guys that had been here longer than him.

He was also very impressive with his 1m93 of length and his broad shoulders. His hair was cut in the short 2mm military cut, and he had a scar reaching down from his left eye over his cheek and ending at his chin. He looked very threatening to most people who saw him. Even with his suit on, it was obvious that he trained his body all the time. However, the thing that all the other interrogators didn't know about him, was that he was also an active member of another group on base. He was the team leader of the second rescue team. Over the years, he had been trained in the use of all kinds of weapons, and he was also one of the best snipers in the world.

His talent for interrogation was discovered during one of his old missions as a Navy Seal. He had to get some information out of an enemy combatant in the field, so they could complete their mission. They had called in an interrogator that would assist him through radio contact, but before that guy could arrive on base, he had already found a way to make this man talk without even hurting him. A few days later, he went working for this black ops group as an interrogator and within a 2-year window, he went from newbie to team leader of the interrogation department. His job was now mostly supervision of all cases, but for the next four days, he would take an active role again. And he was planning to find the information they needed, on time again.

Agent 4, was less impressive in build, only 1m75 tall, but his face demanded obedience. He had thick eyebrows and a hawk's nose. His very dark eyes could pierce through anybodies skull and find places in their minds they even didn't know existed. His technique was more about psychology than anything else. But if needed, he could also use physical methods to make his suspects talk. He wasn't the most cruel of interrogators, but he always would find the thing that scared his suspects the most. Physically, they would always heal completely, but mentally, they were often scared for life. At 54 years old, he was also the oldest member of the team.

Agent 7, had always been a desk jockey until he became an interrogator. On his last job, he had done a psychology tests, because his employers wanted to see if he was ready for a promotion. Those tests were also being shared with the government, and it showed he was the perfect person for a job as an interrogator.

They also decided to ask him for this job, because it would be safer for the general public to keep him away from them. The tests had shown that he would do anything to accomplish his job, even use extreme solutions to get to his objective. This was, because he had completely no remorse about the things he did. He just did them when needed and for his own gain.

That's also why he makes use of torture as a means to get to the preferred outcome. And people begging him to stop, will only push him on, to intensify the torture until they tell him what he wants to hear. Some of his suspects are still not completely recovered from what he had done to them.

He was 41 years old, 1m79 tall and a little overweight. When he started losing his hair at a young age, he just decided to shave it off, and he has kept it shaved from then on. The trouble with him, is that everyone who looks at his face would think they have a very nice person in front of them. This is due to his light blue eyes that always look like they are smiling, but behind those eyes, you would probably find a demon. However, they always let him do his job like he wants, because his results have always let to the group they were after. For some reason, he knows when a person is guilty or not, and he has never done anything too cruel with those people that really didn't know anything.

Agent 8, is the newest recruit to their group and the first female interrogator they have accepted to join. Her specialty is profiling people and thanks to this, she quickly finds the weak spots in a persons defense. It doesn't matter if it is a mental or physical weakness, if it is there, she will find it. She only makes use of torture if there is no other option. However, watching her suspects being put through difficult situations often helps her to get a better understanding of the person she need to interrogate.

With her 1m72, she is the smallest member, but that's not all, because with her 33 years, she is also the youngest member. For an agent, she is rather attractive and that's something that could work against her.

Her other team members have some doubts about her, because it seemed that the last suspect of hers was made to talk by her having sex with him. She always defended this by saying that this was his weak spot, because, for some reason, she knew that he would talk once she had him in her bed. And she was right, because he even told her more than she needed to know, and this information helped to solve some other cases as well. Even so, it also showed the others that she would do anything to get the job done, but they also thought that threatening this suspect with torture would also have gotten him to talk. Maybe not as fast as her method, but having sex with a subject is the last thing you would suspect from an interrogator. And if you would have sex with a suspect, it wouldn't be done by making love with him or her, but would be done by threatening to rape them. But for now, they would keep a close eye on her, to see if she isn't too soft maybe.

Then you had the four female assistants. They were there to take notes behind the monitors and maybe to point out things they saw on those monitors. Because they were trained in body language and would report things that went unnoticed by the interrogator. They also came in handy when torture techniques would be used. 'Four hands can do more than two hands', was the joke among them.

"So," Agent 4 said. "What have you got for us today?"

"Something we don't get enough," Agent 1 said. "They have brought in four women this time."

"Women?" Agent 8 said. "That's a first."

"For you, it is," Agent 7 said with a smile. "But they can be as dangerous as men you know."

Agent 8 smiled back at him and said, "Well, you don't have to tell me how dangerous us women can be!"

"Umm, to the point now," Agent 1 said and everyone became serious. "I have been given some files from the security agencies from their respective countries, but it seems they stayed under the radar, because they have almost nothing about these women."

He then started to give them copies of those papers he had received, with some recent surveillance pictures taken in Brazil.

"Let's go over the files quickly," Agent 1 said. "It's not much, but it will give us some background information."

"Can we maybe see them on the monitors already?" Agent 8 asked.

This made Agent 1 smile, and he said, "Well, you can see them on the outside monitor. You know our soldiers, they have been chained to the flagpole again."

He pressed on a button and on the four monitor wall, they saw a huge picture of the girls lying on the dirty ground at the flagpole.

"Hmm, they look way too comfortable," Agent 7 said.

"That will change soon enough," Agent 1 said. "When the sun is up, I have ordered to get them cleaned and undergo a physical to unnerve them already. And because we don't have much time this time, they will already be given our special cocktail."

"Special cocktail?" Agent 8 asked surprised.

Agent 4 chuckled and said, "I think you will like what it does to these girls."

Agent 8 looked puzzled, but then Agent 1 said, "Let's go over the files now."

They first looked at the file of Sofia Renard, she was born on 13-02-1981 in Chamberry, France.

At first, they looked at the pictures. They were taken on a nude beach it seemed, and she was only wearing her bikini bottom and standing in the sea with her feet.

"Not bad," Agent 4 said when he was looking at the pictures.

They then looked at the file, and it seemed that not that much was known about her. Only that she had been an orphan from birth. She had been left behind on the staircase of a church in a little town called Chamberry in France. From there she was brought to an orphanage in Lyon.

She had been in and out of foster care during the following years. Some psychology reports were attached to those files, and it seemed that the parents couldn't handle her constant state of sadness. By the least of setbacks, she would start crying and this could take hours before she would calm down. After a while, those foster parents would throw the towel in the ring and bring her back to the orphanage. She never got adopted and when she turned 18, social services got her an apartment and helped her to get a job as a waitress. Strangely enough, during the next 4 years, she managed to earn a secretary degree through night school. It raised some eyebrows in the group, because you would suspect that a waitress wouldn't have the time to go to night school. They usually would need to work in the evenings. A note was attached to the file to check with the owners of that pub how she managed to do this. However, it seemed that thanks to her degree, she had found a job in a bank in Paris and up until today, she was still an employee there.