hour 12...
Twelve hours since we captured the hit team. Alicia Li sits down across from the shooter.
it's the same questions, phrased a little differently. water is offered. He doesn't respond, she continues. It's nonstop pressure, part one of the interrogation process.
In four hours, I'll be back in there, reading his body language, asking the same questions, showing him his file, showing him pictures of the scene. It's the theater, usually with interrogations you're trying to get a perp to slip up, throw a tell, deviate from his alibi.
we're not looking for an alibi. Conspiracy cases are usually a little easier, because people who work in conspiracies are suspicious of each other, you can use the prisoner's dilemma to trip them up, most of the time. Even the educated ones.
but these guys are a team, they got orders from higher, so they know to keep their mouths shut, trained on how to block body-language reading by professionals.
She'll sweat him, while I'm catching a nap. one thing we're not doing, is giving him the chance to take a nap, eventually, the body's needs override the will, he'll want that water.
and one of us will give it to him. and then, maybe after another twelve hours, or twenty four, he'll be dog-ass tired and loopy as ******. and one of us, will let him have a nap.
and then, the other one will wake his ass up. start it over again.
Then, one of two things will happen; someone will show up with a release order for real, and we'll know who else is involved. or two; we'll fabricate a release order, and he'll do what good agents do-he'll go to his on-world contact, to get swept for the bug, and from there, he'll make his report.
because he's a good agent, and if we didn't have the weird shit going on at the National Lab, Her Grace would, in fact, be a corpse right now, rather than being maybe-a-corpse if the experiments fail.
We both will make a point of insisting she survived, then describing why she didn't, letting that 'slip' as if we were amatuers or local county-mounties trying to sweat a suspect.
You can tell it in his eyes; he doesn't respect us, doesn't respect our professional training. why should he? He's one of the elite, Loki, the Commonwealth's super-commandos, unbreakable.
One thing you learn at ground school, though: Nobody is unbreakable. Nobody. You just have to figure the angles, what they expect. show 'em what they expect to see, let them see what they believe is real.
Somewhere on another site, Coast Guard Radiomen are working with corporate espionage guys, sifting through data on supposedly secure servers. It's how we got his file, the one without the redactions, that he doesn't see when I'm in there with his edited file, the one from LIC's records division, the one we got with a Subpoena and the Archon-Prince's order.
I have my own theory. someone was financing big things with the money they were siphoning, the stuff the Audits were uncovering, the people we were bringing in, it scared somebody, or pissed them off, so they didn't start with the cheap ones, the mercs, they went straight for the well-regarded professionals, and tried to make it LOOK like a cheap hit.
One way or another, Sonny here is going to give up the info. It's just a matter of time, and method.