The facility was not a pleasant place, but it was a necessary evil in a world chock full of sadistic deeds and misguided, brutal men. This was something that Mitch Rapp was more than aware of. That didn't mean that he had to like it. He was neither delicate nor squeamish. Rapp had killed more men than he could even attempt to count, and he had employed his craft in a variety of imaginative ways that spoke of the sheer depth of his skill. He was a modern day assassin who lived in a civilized country where such a term could never be used openly. His was a nation that loved to distinguish itself from the less refined nations of the world. A democracy that celebrated individual rights and freedom, a state that would never tolerate the open recruiting, training, and use of one of its own citizens for the specific purpose of covertly killing the citizens of another country, but that's exactly who Rapp was.
He was a modern day assassin who was conveniently called an operative so as not to offend the sensibilities of the cultured people who occupied the centers of power in Washington. If those very people knew of the existence of the facility they would fly into an indignant rage that would result in the partial or complete destruction of the CIA. These haters of America's capitalistic muscle wanted to analyze what we had done to evoke such hatred from the terrorists, all the while missing the point that they were using the logic of a seedy attorney defending a rapist. 'The woman had on a short skirt, sexy top and high heels, maybe she was looking for it?' America was a rude and arrogant country, they thought, run by selfish colonialist men who were out to exploit the resources of lesser countries. Maybe we were asking for this terrorist attack.
Under their narrow definition, the Washington elite would call this place a torture chamber. Rapp, however, knew what real torture was. And it wasn't this. This was coercion, this was sensory deprivation, it was interrogation, but it wasn't real torture. Real torture is causing a person so much unthinkable pain that he or she begged to be killed. It was hooking alligator clips to a man's privates and sending jolts of searing electricity through his body. It was gang raping a woman day after day until she slipped into a coma. It was forcing a man to watch as his wife and kids were sodomized by a bunch of thugs. It was making a man eat his own excrement. Torture was monstrous. It was barbaric. It could also be wildly ineffective. It was monstrous, it was barbaric. Time and time again such methods proved that most prisoners would say or do almost anything to stop the pain, sign any confession, create terrorist plots that didn't exist, even turn on their own parents.
Now, Mitch Rapp was a practical man, however, and the prisoners sitting cuffed to the chair on the other side of the glass knew firsthand what real torture was. The organization he worked for was notorious for its treatment of political prisoners. If anyone was deserving of a good beating, it was this vile bastard, but still there were other things to consider. Rapp didn't like torture, not only because of its effect on the person being brutalized, but for what it did to the person whose sanctioning carried it out. He had no desire to sink to those depths unless it was a last resort, but unfortunately they were quickly approaching that point. Lives were at stake. Two CIA operatives were already dead thanks to the duplicitous scum in the other room and many more lives were in the balance. Something was in the works, and if Rapp didn't find out what it was, hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent people would die.
