The Truth of the Matter by Andrew Klavan

just as fast as I possibly could?
    I know, I know. The smart answer was obvious. I should never have gone out there in the first place. There could be no good reason to follow a mysterious voice into the darkness. There could be no good reason to stay here now that I’d come to my senses. I felt as if my heart were hammering in my throat—and that meant my body was trying to tell me something. It was trying to tell me: Hey! Don’t be an idiot! Go home where you belong!
    But I couldn’t. What can I say? It was a guy thing. I knew I should never have come, but now that I was here—well, no way I was going to run for it. I didn’t want to feel like a coward. I didn’t want to let my dead friend Alex down. I wanted to finish what I’d started and find out who his killer was and be a hero, even if it got me killed. A guy thing, like I said. So no matter what the consequences, running away was just not an option.
    Before I even came to a conscious decision, I was already moving along the road toward the place where I’d seen the headlights. With every step, my heart beat even faster. My body tensed as I tried to prepare myself mentally for any surprise attack. Soon, I could make out the shape of the car on the road ahead of me. It was a long black car of some kind: a limousine. Now I was close enough to see the silhouette of the man sitting behind the wheel. Was that him? I wondered. Was that the man who had killed Alex?
    But as I took another step, the back door of the limousine came open. The light inside went on. I could see the driver was not alone. There was someone else sitting in the backseat.
    I came around the side of the limo, closing the final distance to the rear door. The light inside was very dim. It didn’t illuminate much. The driver’s face was still in shadow—though I could make out a deadpan expression and cold, lidded eyes. And the man in the backseat was obscured by the top of the door frame. From where I was, I could only see him from the neck down, the suit and tie beneath his open overcoat.
    I took another step toward the open door. Then I stopped. I bent down to get a look at the man’s face. I didn’t know him. He was older, fifty or something. A serious sort of person, a businessman or something like that.
    “Get in, Charlie,” he said. It was the voice I had heard over my cell phone.
    I hesitated. Hadn’t my mother been telling me since I was a child that I should never get in a car with a strange man?
    The strange man in the car took out a wallet and flipped it open. I saw the government identification inside. I recognized the name of the agency. “Come on,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to talk.”
    Well, my mother always was a worrier. And I was a black belt, not a child anymore.
    I took a breath and slipped into the limo’s backseat. I pulled the door shut and turned to the man beside me.
    “It’s nice to meet you, Charlie,” he said quietly. “My name is Waterman.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Out of the Past
    Then I woke up. I was lying on the floor of the Panic Room. I was curled up on my side. The cot was right above me, as if I’d been lying on it and had fallen off. My clothes were damp with sweat. I smelled. And the room stank of puke.
    I felt as though I had been lying there unconscious for a long time. I looked at my watch. I couldn’t believe it. Almost ten hours had passed! It must be nearly morning now.
    I started to uncurl. Bad idea. I was hit with a sharp cramp in the stomach. I gave a growl and clutched at myself, curling up again, until the pain passed. Then, again—more slowly, more cautiously this time—I started to unwind my body. I rolled over.
    The first thing I saw was the chair—the metal chair in the middle of the room. It stood above me, looming, threatening, frightening, the handcuffs dangling from the chair-arms, where they’d held my wrists.
    I groaned and turned onto my back. The light from the fluorescents on the ceiling