Hefei, China Thursday 6:00AM

The rising sun was just beginning to peak over the horizon. The darkness of night was about to give way to the light of day. The sleeping city would soon be bustling with activity completely unaware of what had occurred while it slept.

Zhao Kai stood outside a small warehouse looking building. For all of the modernization that had been occurring in China this building had been skipped. At least on the outside. It appeared old and nearly abandoned but the inside told a different story. Before Kai entered the building he glanced at the rising sun. This was his favorite moment of the day. The blinding light of the sun was a weapon that he used literally.

On numerous occasions he would take a prisoner to a spot where there was an unobstructed view of the rising sun. Then he would bind them in such a way that they had to stare directly into the sun. If he did his job right they would not be able to close their eyes and would return to their prison cells blinded for life. If he didn’t just kill them. That punishment would not be on the table today but perhaps tomorrow. He liked to watch people squirm as their eyesight was stripped away from them. Kai entered the building and walked to his destination.

He straightened his uniform and glanced at the mirror before approaching the locked room. His night of hunting had been very successful and now it was time to punctuate his shift. The old warehouse belonged to the Ministry of Public Security on the north side of the Dongpu Reservoir in Hefei and it was Kai’s personal torture chamber or more accurately a temporary holding facility for enemies of the state.

The prisoner had tried to run when his grab team busted down the door to his first floor apartment two hours earlier. In fact he had managed to slip through a bedroom window and get one last early morning run in before he had been apprehended hiding inside a chicken coop. Surprisingly the rest of the apartment had been empty. Kai didn’t care about the other family members but they were always nice to grab because they often helped crack a prisoner. Very few people could watch a loved ones bones being shattered without confessing to their crimes.

It was just after 6:00am which meant he would have about two hours to loosen his prisoner’s tongue. The inference of a watery grave usually helped coerce confessions as well. But Kai would never lead with that. He would want to get his pound of flesh first. He also didn’t mind if this interrogation carried over until his next shift. A full 12 hours to work on his prisoner would be a luxury.

Kai took every case personally but this case was even more personal than most. He had hunted this prey for 15 years and he finally caught him. Kai liked operating in Hefei because he had greater autonomy to run his interrogations how he wanted to. In Beijing or Shanghai he would have drawn more oversight and what he had done and was about to do would never have been permitted.

Kai unlocked the door and stepped into interrogation room number three. His personal favorite because it was the easiest to wipe dried blood up from. Shackled to a desk with a hood over his head sat the prisoner.

Hearing the door open the prisoner raised his head slightly. Not that it changed anything. He still couldn’t see anything because of the hood. But perhaps he was about to get some answers. He had done nothing wrong.

“Hello, is someone there?” He asked timidly.

Kai walked straight up to him and punched him in the face. The man grunted in pain as he was caught completely off guard. His restraints prevented him from getting knocked over by the blow.

Kai screamed at him. “Do you know who I am?” Do you know who I am?”

Fearing another unseen assault the prisoner replied “I am blind folded.”

“Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“No.”

Kai punched him more viciously, but this time it was to his shoulder, so the pain was more tolerable. Then he ripped the mask off his prisoner.

“Now do you recognize me?”

The prisoner looked up at his abductor and expected to see a familiar face. Shockingly he saw a face that he had never seen before. “I don’t know you.”

“Are you a spy?”

“I am a member of the party. This has to be a mistake.”

“The mistake you made was fifteen years ago on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.” Kai replied

“Fifteen? Fifteen years ago” the prisoner was mentally calculating where he had been and what he was doing fifteen years ago. There was nothing. “You have the wrong guy.”

“No, you are exactly who I am looking for professor.”

Kai walked behind him and slammed his head down onto the desk. Blood flowed freely from the prisoner’s nose.

“Please, please what do you want?”

The prisoner was disoriented and trying to think was getting harder. Everything was clouded. He had been ripped from his sleep in the middle of the night, tried to run and hide, before he was hog tied, and had a bag thrown over his head. If one of his captors had not identified himself as a member of the Ministry of Public Security, the prisoner would have thought he had been kidnapped by a local criminal. However this might be a worse fate. You could always negotiate with a gang. Probably not with the state.

“Acknowledge your wrongs!” Kai shouted at him.

Dazed and confused the prisoner didn’t know how to respond. “Wrongs?” He finally whispered.

“You know the offenses you have committed against me.”

The prisoner stared at Kai and could not recognize him. How could he have ever wronged a man he never remembered meeting?

“I don’t know you.”

“Rrrr, why so stubborn?” Kai yelled. He then unleashed a volley of punches into the man’s chest. “Surely you remember me.”

Wheezing the prisoner struggled to say “where did we meet?”

“The train station 15 years ago.”

This brought no clarity to the prisoner but he also realized that if he didn’t acknowledge this he was going to receive another beating.

“Ah, yes the train station, of course.”

“So you do remember,” Kai said pleased. “Now apologize for what you did.”

“I am sorry for what I did to you.”

“Now tell me what it was.”

The prisoner was in a bind now. He still had no recollection of this man. “I treated you poorly.”

“Yes, but how?”

“I don’t remember,” the man sobbed as he said it.

“You humiliated me didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It was very hot that day wasn’t it?”

“It must have been.”

“And what did you do?”

“I don’t know.”

The fire behind Kai’s eyes frightened the prisoner even more than the beatings had. “Shall I tell you then?”

“Please.”

Kai punched him in both eyes before he said “you don’t deserve to look at me.”

The swelling began almost immediately and the prisoner began to wish for a quick death. Anything would be better than this torture.

Kai continued “you cut in front of me in the train line.”

For an instant time froze. The prisoner could not believe what he was hearing. All of this pain and suffering for a minor inconvenience 15 years forgotten. He would probably never see his wife and young son again because he cut in line as a college student. It defied belief.

“Cut in line?” He whispered.

Kai smiled, now it was time to savor the slow pain he would inflict on his prisoner for the next hour and a half.

“Yes, you got the last seat and I had to stand for 17 minutes until the next train arrived. You see…”

Kai stopped talking as the door opened. One of his subordinates rushed into the room.

“Sir I was ordered to give this to you immediately,” he said as he handed him a letter.

As Kai took it the first thing that stood out was how old the paper looked and felt. It was almost more like parchment than paper. He opened the paper and read the words Inimicitia Aeterna.

He crumbled the paper immediately and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he unleashed a volley of punches on his prisoner rendering him unconscious.

“If he doesn’t wake up toss him in the Reservoir. If he does toss him in the Reservoir anyway.” Kai snapped angrily as he stormed out of the room.