Colonel Aaron Carter did not look at Daniel.
He did not blink.
He reached inside his uniform blouse, withdrew a heavy, brass-framed tactical pen with an un-capped carbide stylus, and without a single word of procedural preamble, drove the blunt end directly into the nail bed of my right thumb:
*PRESS.*
My nervous system—dead, leaden, submerged ten fathoms deep in grey mud—screamed.
My spine arched off the marble in a violent, spastic, un-coordinated decerebrate reflex. My heels drummed against the floorboards: *tack-tack-tack.* A wet, whistling rattle tore through my windpipe, spraying a fine mist of blood-flecked foam against the polished toe of Carter’s jump boot.
“No pain withdrawal,” Carter said, his face hardening into that terrifying, forty-year-old line of polar ice that precedes an un-appealable court-martial decree.
He released my thumb.
He turned his head forty-five degrees, locking his eyes onto Daniel Whitaker with the cold, unblinking judgment of an artillery observation post:
