“Trying to save your own life now?” Eve asked, and hit him again, snapping his head back. “I think your pleading may be falling on the deafest ears you could have found in the Directorate, Fries.” She hit him again, and I saw his eyes unfocus, one of them starting to swell shut, the purpling on his cheek obvious and growing.
“Wait,” I said, only just louder than a whisper, but enough for Eve to hear me and halt before her next punch. “What do you think you could say that would convince Eve to stop?” I asked, and Fries turned his head, letting his neck hang slack, looking at me out of his one good eye.
“I’ll tell you...” His words came out slurred, his lip split open and bleeding down his neck, “who’s running...Operation Stanchion.”
“You’ll tell us who’s running it,” I said, taking the two steps to carry me to Fries’ side, and kneeling to get closer to him, “and what it’s all about, what’s happening.”
“Don’t know...what’s happening,” Fries said, his head lolling. “Don’t even know the objective...they...thought I was a high risk for Directorate capture so they didn’t...tell me.” His pupil was dilated, he was concussed, and he sounded like he was drunk.
“Give me a name,” Eve said, readying her fist. “Give me a name, or so help me, my next punch will sever your serial killing head and end your little perverted reign of impotence forever.”
Fries’ once-handsome face was twisted, an eye already swollen shut. The strong smell of iron filled the air, and he seemed to have no strength in his neck. Eve had him suspended by the front of his shirt, which she had torn while pounding him into hamburger. He was missing at least eight teeth by my count, and his lips were split in three places, his face swelling so rapidly it looked like he had fallen into a bees’ nest. “Okay,” he said, now barely audible. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. I just saw him the other day...Janus. It’s Janus. Janus is running Operation Stanchion.”
17.
“Who the hell is Janice?” Bastian asked as Eve and I re-entered the observation room to find him waiting with Ariadne and Parks.
“Janus,” I said, drawing every eye in the room to me. “Roman god of doorways and transitions. Had two faces, supposedly. Not really sure how that would translate in non-mythological terms.”
“He is a liar,” Old Man Winter said, squeezing into the room behind us, Clary following him, “so the colloquialism fits for him being two-faced.”
“Did no one else manage to return any further information?” Eve asked, slipping off my gloves and handing them casually back to me. They were slick with blood, and I held them at a distance from my body, as though I were too good for them.
“No one got quite as...persuasive,” Ariadne said, “as you did. At least not for as long, or as close to the...uh...edge.”
“No one else came as close to beating their subject to death is what she means,” Parks said with more than a little acrimony.
“My only regret was that I didn’t finish,” Eve said. “He’s slime. He rapes women and kills them with his power, and finishes with their corpses. I bet he couldn’t even get it up if a woman wasn’t screaming in pain for him. I have never encountered a more loathsome creature in my life, and I wish I could beat him to death over and over.”
“This is to the damned edge of the line, Director,” Parks said in a low growl that reminded me of the wolf within him. “We don’t do this sort of thing, sir. Beating people in interrogations? Freezing someone’s arm and breaking it off?” He drew himself up. “We’re better than that.”