Answering God's Call - Chapter 24

Unaware that he had been dragged back from the brink of death, Samuel Gilmore glared at Tatyana. His eyes narrowed into sharp triangles, but neither Tatyana nor Ruslan gave him any reaction, to the point it became awkward for him.

All Tatyana did was stare absently at Gilmore’s wrist, which had been exposed as he toppled to the side, then glance at Ruslan. Bringing over two chairs, Ruslan seated Tatyana first, then grabbed Gilmore by the hair and hauled him up.

“Ah, ah! My head, my head!”

“Do we look like we came to rescue you?”

“…Didn’t you?”

Startled by the low question, Samuel Gilmore flinched. Ignoring the question, Ruslan began to search his body. He raked through his hair and scalp as if checking for a wig, then ran his hands over his shoulders and arms, chest, abdomen, waist, hips, thighs, calves, and ankles, feeling for any hidden items without hesitation.

Each time Ruslan’s hands touched him, Gilmore jerked, until he finally snapped.

“W-What are you doing! I told you the film isn’t with me! West, that woman took it all—how far are you going to touch!”

“I’m not enjoying this either, so keep your mouth shut.”

Unbothered by the fierce resistance, Ruslan finished the search and, confirming that there really was no film or anything else on him, pulled out a folding knife and casually cut the rope binding Gilmore’s wrists. As Gilmore rubbed his wrists, where the marks were clear, Ruslan continued his earlier line of questioning.

“Do we look like police officers dispatched from headquarters after a report?”

“Wh-What kind of nonsense is that….”

Gilmore’s eyes flickered as he looked over the priest, the nun, and the pistol at the waist in turn, as if to say there was no way they were police. Leaving his ankles bound, Ruslan sat in a chair and slowly crossed his legs. Following him, Tatyana crossed her legs as well and muttered as if she were starting to get annoyed.

“So when did you ever see us to start saying this isn’t the time, or that we need to chase after a woman….”

“Exactly.”

Ruslan agreed as he held out a cigarette case to Tatyana. She placed a cigarette between her lips and asked, “What about Jennifer Fleming?”

“A moment ago… you said she disappeared and they’re looking for her….”

Ruslan lit Tatyana’s cigarette, then took one out for himself, but before he could even put it to his lips, Tatyana snatched it away.

“A patient doesn’t smoke. No smoking.”

“…?”

Ignoring Ruslan’s baffled look, Tatyana tilted her head. Even as she exhaled smoke carefully so it wouldn’t drift toward him, her eyes stayed on Gilmore’s now free hands.

“I couldn’t hear because of the priest. What did you say?”

“…You said she disappeared and you’re looking for her, you—ah! Ah!”

Tatyana suddenly reached out and gripped Gilmore’s shoulder hard, lifting his hand with her free hand while the cigarette hung from the corner of her lips.

“You’ve got a lot of wounds on your hands. Do you keep a cat?”

“Ah! My shoulder—ah! Y-Yes!”

“Not ‘yes.’ That’s the wrong answer.”

There were many large and small wounds on the backs of Gilmore’s hands, his wrists, and his forearms. They weren’t abrasions from being bound with rope. They were scratches, clawed out with fingernails using all one’s strength.

Tatyana showed Ruslan the long gash across his forearm, like a river splitting into branches. As if he had already seen it earlier, he gave a small nod, then took the cigarette from Tatyana’s lips and placed it between his own. At that completely natural gesture, she let out a short, incredulous laugh and tightened her grip on Gilmore’s shoulder.

“Let’s try using our heads before we speak.”

“W-Wait, ah, ahh! Agh!”

“I didn’t learn anything else in Lubyanka, so I’m still not very good at calm conversations in situations like this without raising my voice. In Lubyanka’s basement, conversations that resemble actual dialogue are rare.”

“L-Lubyanka, you, that hurts, ah, ah!”

“If you want to defect to Lubyanka, want to try it out once?”

Tatyana suggested in a low voice, telling him to just speak if he wanted, that she could arrange it as much as he liked. She wasn’t exaggerating. Since entering the training institute, everything she had consistently learned, carried out, witnessed, and endured had been this kind of thing. Regardless of the fact that she didn’t particularly enjoy torture itself, she knew the methods better than anyone.

Where to stab and how to prod to inflict the worst pain without drawing a single drop of blood, how to go beyond pain and instill fear, how to summon nightmarish terror and carve it into the bones….

In truth, whether it was water torture or electric torture, as long as basic equipment was provided, the methods themselves weren’t difficult. Torture was generally carried out after completely subduing the opponent first. So in theory, there was nothing particularly hard about it.

But there was one thing that made torture difficult.

Hesitation.

Or the aversion one ought to have as a human being.

Those unpredictable, inconvenient emotions humans possess, unlike machines, made torture difficult. If it were an assassination where the target opposed the organization’s interests and needed to be cleanly eliminated, that was different. But torture for the sake of extracting a few pieces of information, she didn’t like it. She truly hated it.

Those who had never endured torture didn’t know how far people would fabricate things just to escape it, or what they wouldn’t do to get out of it. So applying an appropriate level of psychological pressure befitting the words interrogation or questioning was fine, but she didn’t want to carry out torture without purpose.

But Gilmore didn’t need to know that.

When Tatyana extended her free hand toward Ruslan, he took something out of his briefcase and handed it to her. Two photographs taken from the mouth of the deceased Jennifer Fleming. Tatyana released Gilmore’s shoulder as if tossing it aside and held the photos close to his face.

“You know what these are, right?”

Ruslan also held out the film and developed photos so Gilmore could see them. Under the reddish safety lamp, Samuel Gilmore’s face turned deathly pale.

“…Th-that, that’s….”

“Don’t think about dragging this out with long excuses for no reason.”

“I-I didn’t think she’d die! She said she’d report me, said she’d formally report it to Internal Affairs, so I just tried to stop that, that’s all! I didn’t even push her that hard, but she suddenly fell and hit her head—”

“That’s not it. You tortured her.”

“….”

“In the bathroom. You tied her to a chair.”

“….”

“You even strangled her. Then when Fleming fought back, you got those wounds on your hands. And it wasn’t just once or twice you slammed her head. Do you think I wouldn’t have checked the condition of the body when I pulled these photos out of her mouth?”

It was the moment Tatyana began laying out the situation point by point. As if his face had never been twisted with panic, as if his complexion had never turned pale, Samuel Gilmore’s expression gradually settled.

…Wow, what is that face?

Under the dim red safety lamp, his face became not just calm but eerily so, and Tatyana’s eyes widened with interest. His expression and complexion changed in an instant, as if he had been wearing a mask and then taken it off. Ruslan, who had been watching beside her, exhaled smoke and let out a quiet chuckle.

“…I almost fell for it.”

“Me too. This is interesting.”

I wondered how that clumsy bastard managed to leak classified information, but he was putting on a face. It’s quite something, the way he draws out people’s guard like that, but in that case, we….

As if reading Tatyana’s thoughts, Ruslan muttered, “How much of this should we believe?”

“Is there any need to pick out what’s worth believing?”

Taking the half-smoked cigarette from Ruslan’s lips, Tatyana grabbed Samuel Gilmore’s hand as if she didn’t want to bother thinking about it. Pressing the cigarette down into his palm without avoiding his gaze, she extinguished it, and the smell of burning flesh spread through the small darkroom.

Gilmore’s face twisted sharply, and his shoulder jerked. The force was fairly strong, but Tatyana, as if it were nothing, gripped his hand harder, the round burn mark clear against his skin.

“…Bringing him back alive wasn’t a requirement, was it?”

Tatyana’s eyes glinted indifferently as she carefully observed everything about Samuel Gilmore without missing a single detail, his gaze, his breathing, the subtle movements of his facial muscles, his heartbeat. The hand gripping his tightened slowly.

This is the hand that killed Jennifer Fleming, isn’t it? As she said earlier, it was true she didn’t like torture, but like everything in the world, there were always exceptions.

“Looks like whatever film or materials we need aren’t with him, and this doesn’t seem like bait either. Judging by how he’s acting, it looks like things went wrong between him and Rebecca West midway, so now that he’s been cut loose, he’s trying to latch onto us again….”