Rex Dalton Thrillers: Books 1-3 (The Rex Dalton Series Boxset Book 1)

by JC Ryan

  “I’m sorry,” she said in Arabic, “but I couldn’t help overhearing what you were talking about. Do you really know an undercover policeman?”

  The man looked offended. “It is not proper for you to speak to me. Tell your husband to come over here and ask me. I will not talk to you.”

  Marissa smiled. They’d chosen the right cover, though the only reason the man had for assuming Josh was her husband would have been that they were out in public together.

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to offend you. My husband does not speak Arabic. Would it be okay if I translate for him?”

  The man though about it for a moment and nodded.

  Marissa asked Josh to join them and told him how it should be done. He’d need to ask her the questions while looking at this man, and she would translate the conversation. But it was imperative that he must always have the conversation with this man, not with her. She was just a sideshow.

  Josh nodded his agreement and fired the first question.

  “We are journalists, and if you could tell me what you know about that policeman, it would help our story.”

  “But I don’t know much about him.”

  “Can you tell us what he looks like? How tall is he? What is the color of his eyes, his hair? Any marks and features on his face or body?”

  Their informant shrugged. “Hair almost black, dark brown eyes. I noticed no blemishes on his face, and of course I did not see anything else except his hands. He has large hands, working man’s hands. And his nose, now that I think of it.”

  “What about his nose?”

  The man turned his profile to them, and then looked directly at them again, displaying a nose shaped rather like an arrowhead when viewed from the front, and a hawk’s bill from the side. “His nose looked like a youth’s.” He took the fleshy part of the end of his own and wiggled it. “This part was thinner. Like a European’s nose.”

  “Is that unusual?” Marissa forgot to let Josh ask the question first, and the man became offended again.

  “Tell your husband what you asked me. If he wants to know, I will answer.”

  Marissa, angry with herself for the mistake, told Josh what had happened. “I think that may be our answer, but I’m not certain it’s all that unusual. Pretend to be angry with me, and then ask him.”

  Josh put a bit too much authenticity into it for Marissa’s taste. Her eyes told him there would be consequences when he yelled, “How dare you address another man! You belong to me, and you’d better get that into your head.”

  Then he turned and asked the informant the same question Marissa had. Marissa translated after explaining that her husband was very angry with her for her mistake and apologizing.

  Mollified, the Afghani graciously accepted her apology. “It is not unusual among our youth. But this man is older. Perhaps my age.”

  Marissa’s guess was that the man was between thirty-five and forty, so if he was describing Rex, he was about right on the age estimate.

  She translated the answer for Josh and then asked, “Is there anything more to be gained from this man?”

  “I can’t think of anything. He’s just described fifty or a hundred million men of Arabic ethnicity. Rex was passing for native, so it could have been him, but I’d say best case scenario would be about fifty-million-to-one.”

  Marissa sighed, and her shoulders slumped a little. “Well, at least the food and coffee here were good. Tell him thank you, and let’s get out of here.”

  Josh addressed the man with a smile and nod of thanks, Marissa translated, and they paid for his meal as a gesture of good will. The upside of their effort was, if either of them ever had to come back here on a mission, they’d have a friendly native to start with.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  REX HAD BARELY begun to consider the room, his situation, and the possible use of items in the former to help with the latter, when Iskandar returned. The tall Saudi strode straight from the door to Rex’s chair and backhanded him with such force that the chair turned over and Rex banged his head on the stone floor.

  So that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s going to beat me to a pulp while his boss is making atonement to Allah for doing so.

  He was relieved in a way. Being forced to watch the women being beaten had been far worse torture to him than anything this pig could do to him. Even if that included killing him.

  Rex wasn’t afraid of dying, he just didn’t have in mind doing so now.

  But it wasn’t enough for Rex to endure the beatings. Sooner or later, Mutaib would get tired of playing with him and kill him. Worse, when they killed him, they’d do the same to the women but probably rape and torture them before doing so.

  I got them into this – it’s my obligation to survive and get them out.

  He was going to have one hell of a headache, but he hadn’t lost consciousness. That meant no concussion, he thought. Then he started thinking about how he could turn the tables and stop Iskandar. He was on his own for now. He didn’t know where Digger was, if he was in range of the comms unit with his head phones or not. All he could do was try, but not with Iskandar in the room.

  Should have thought of that while I was alone.

  Rex was already in bad shape. He barely noticed when Iskandar summoned someone to help set his chair upright again, with him still trussed to it. He forced his mind to ignore the pain and concentrate on what he was going to do when he got out. He never allowed himself to even think that he might not get out. He was thinking about what he could say to Digger when he had the chance, and how he could say it, to have the dog lead the women out of the compound.

  He only paid more attention to what was happening in his immediate presence when the door opened and Mutaib returned. Silently, the prince walked close to him to examine his bruises and contusions. He stepped all the way around Rex’s chair and then backed up toward the wall with the door.

  “Continue,” he said.

  Iskandar had dismissed his helper. “Gladly, Your Highness,” he said. He stepped forward and punched Rex square in the nose. More blood started streaming from it.

  Rex smiled, allowing the blood to spill into his mouth, where he knew it would line his teeth and present a gruesome sight to anyone watching. “Is that all you’ve got?”

  Iskandar looked at Mutaib with an unspoken question in his eyes. The prince nodded. Iskandar squatted to release the bindings from Rex’s legs and his handcuffs just long enough to release the chair’s arms from them. He yanked Rex up and shoved him against the wall, where he swiftly attached a handcuff to each hand and clipped them onto two rings in the wall above his head. With his torso exposed and unable to bend over to defend it, Rex felt the first blow to his liver.

  He no longer had the ability to even try to tense his muscles to absorb such a blow. But Iskandar had made the mistake of leaving Rex’s legs unshackled. When he approached again, Rex flexed with his core and drew both legs up. Hanging from the handcuffs, he shot his legs out and caught Iskandar in the solar plexus. The force of the kick lifted him off the ground and sent him flying backwards, his heels and the back of his head hit the floor at the same time. Lights out.

  Despite his pain, Rex laughed out loud when Mutaib let out a girlish shriek and fled from the room. A moment later, two men came in and dragged Iskandar’s limp form out. The door slammed, an electronic click told Rex he’d been locked in, and he was alone.

  Time to return to his escape plan again.

  ***

  WITH HIS ARMS extended far above his head and shackled, Rex could stand for hours, but there would be a toll on him. First his hands would go to sleep as the blood drained from them and couldn’t return. They’d be useless if someone unshackled him. Permanent damage would occur if it went on for long. Furthermore, all his options for escape required the use of his hands.

  Rex supposed someone would be in eventually to beat him some more or kill him. In the meanwhile, he was hungry and thirsty, his hands were beginning to tingle
, and to make matters worse, he needed to take a leak.

  It would have been laughable if he hadn’t been so desperate, but he was not going to give them the satisfaction of pissing in his pants.

  He took his mind off the urgency and searched the room with his eyes, taking note of everything in it, though there wasn’t much. He did it methodically, starting with the door, its lock, and its latch handle. It was a lever-type opener. He visually took the measure of the distance from him. Could he lift himself like he’d done to disable Iskandar and jostle the door open? That would force someone to come sooner.

  The chair he’d been sitting in was wood. If he could get loose, breaking one of its legs in just the right way would provide him with a fine weapon. He’d gladly skewer Mutaib. Iskandar’s discarded quirt lay in the corner. Rex could see no use for it as an escape tool, maybe as a weapon once he was out of the restraints. His fists, legs, and head, his Krav Maga instruments of destruction, would be much better weapons, if they weren’t useless blobs of tingling flesh by the time he had the chance to use them.

  There was nothing else in the room. The chair, the quirt, the rings he was half-suspended from, which he couldn’t see but knew were there. But the rings were not going to come out of the wall — he had already tried. And there was a lone lightbulb without a cover dangling from a wire stretching from the ceiling.

  Go figure. They didn’t put me in quarters reserved for honored guests. How many have gone through here before me? I’m willing to bet very few, if any, ever left here alive. But Rex Dalton will be going out on his own two feet.

  Rex tried bellowing for help, on the chance that Digger could hear him, or annoy any guards outside into coming in to check on him. After a while he realized the yelling was only making him thirsty. So, now, he was thirsty, and he needed to take a piss.

  “Not too bright, Einstein. Shut up and think,” he chastised himself aloud.

  Just when he thought there was nothing left to consider, the door opened. An impossibly old woman, Saudi he guessed, came in with a bowl of water and a crust of what looked like moldy bread. Her face was not covered by anything but ten thousand wrinkles. She was so stooped it was a miracle she didn’t topple over on her face, and she moved with the arthritic stiffness of a nonagenarian.

  He greeted her in Arabic, saying, “Thank you for the water, grandmother. Can you let my hands loose, so I can lift the bowl?”

  She ignored him, refused to even look at him, as she went about her business. She set the bowl on the ground, and the bread beside it. She picked up the quirt and tucked it into the folds of her garment.

  There goes one of my weapons. Do you mind? I wanted to strangle some asshole with that.

  When she left again without acknowledging him, he started laughing.

  “Hey! How the hell am I supposed to drink that?” he yelled.

  To his surprise and gratitude, the door opened, and a man came in, much younger than his last visitor. Rex didn’t wait to see what he would do. He spoke in rapid Arabic but deliberately mumbled and slurred his words to create the illusion that he was weak and crushed. “I must relieve myself. Can you let my hands loose, please? They have brought me water and bread, but I need my hands also to drink and eat.”

  The young man was short, but bulky. Rex estimated the man would outweigh him by fifty pounds or more, and it appeared to be all muscle.

  I can take him even with my hands asleep. If I can just get them loose. But this is not the time to put up a fight, not yet.

  Without speaking, the man reached to release Rex’s left hand, staying as far away from it as he could while doing so. He kept one end of the handcuff around Rex’s wrist and used the other to control Rex’s movements and keep his swing short. Rex could have made a move to hit him in the throat with an elbow but controlled the urge to go into action.

  The young man wrestled Rex into the chair and cuffed his hands together in the back with zipties but didn’t tie them to any part of the chair.

  “When I have gone, you may do as you wish. Drink from the bowl like a filthy dog if you want. Piss in your pants, I don’t care. The prince wants to keep you alive for a long time while he tortures you, but the rest of us would gladly kill you. Enjoy your life while you can. What’s left of it is going to be full of pain and suffering. I wish the prince would allow me to give you the deathblow, but I think he is keeping that privilege for himself.”

  Rex didn’t respond, just sat there, limp in the chair, keeping up the ruse that he was spent.

  The man stepped through the door, and Rex heard the distinct electronic click that told him the lock was engaged. He was in far better shape to make an escape now. His hands were as good as free, he had water, sustenance in the form of bread, and he could finally take a piss. And the guard had just given him the opportunity he was waiting for. The zipties.

  Life was good.

  Rex had been trained to defeat handcuffs, duct tape, ropes, and zipties. There were three or four ways to get out of handcuffs provided one had some sort of metallic pin or a double-jointed thumb. But he didn’t have to worry about that now.

  Contrary to popular belief, zipties are not invincible. There are many ways to defeat them. The first, of course, is to cut them, but Rex could see no rough edges in the room. He could break the chair but cutting the zipties with a rough edge of wood would likely be a good way to make a bloody mess of his wrists before he got the ties cut.

  Another of the methods is to break the ties with brute force by raising one’s arms above one’s head and bringing them down with speed and force against the pelvis or stomach while pulling the elbows back sharply in the same move. Rex had enough cuts and bruises for one day, and he also didn’t feel strong enough to try that. He decided to use a less violent and painful method — cut the ties with his shoelaces.

  He dropped off the chair, climbed through his arms, and went to work.

  Rex’s CRC training had included survival skills, and he had taken it to heart. Every pair of casual shoes, boots, hiking footwear – basically, anything he wore on his feet except dress shoes and boat shoes – required shoelaces. And he replaced every pair of shoelaces in new shoes with 550-paracord laces. Paracord shoelaces were a miracle of modern engineering. They were incredibly strong. They were also incredibly versatile. They were typically made with a seven-cord core, each cord made of three strands of nylon parachute cord. The entire bundle was wrapped in lightweight kermantile rope, making a smooth rope surface.

  Rex had never had a shoelace break at an inopportune time, but that wasn’t the point. In an emergency, he could create a lengthy string for a snare, a support for a hanging shelter, and quite a few other handy uses, just by pulling the steel tip off the end (nice for creating a spark when needed) and accessing the inner cords. But he didn’t need any of that today.

  The laces would serve nicely as a friction saw to break the zipties holding his wrists together. Now that he had his arms in front, he sat on the floor and took out his shoelaces. He tied them together with a sheet bend knot, consisting of a loop in one end of one shoelace, into which he looped one end of the other shoelace and pulled tightly together.

  His movements were a bit restricted by the ziptie around his wrists, but as soon as he’d seen that the guard was going to use a ziptie, he’d flexed his wrists to create a bit of slack. His fingers were strong enough to make quick work of the untying and removing the laces from his low-rise trail boots – his go-to footwear for surveillance missions. Along with a pair of khaki-colored cargo pants and a loose white shirt from India, they had been what he was wearing when he’d been ambushed hours before.

  Rex’s mind was working overtime on what he’d do once his arms were free while his hands tied a bowline at each end of the rope he’d created from his shoelaces. He’d learned to tie that knot as a kid out on camping trips with his family, long before the training that reinforced how useful it was. His CRC training taught him to tie it one-handed. He measured the cord around his shoe, a
nd then set the measured end with the closed end of the loop facing away from him. With the short end, he formed another open loop. He held the long or standing end down with his knuckles and used his thumb to hook it and loop it around his hand.

  The short end he was still holding in the same hand needed to go under the standing end and come back up and over the loop in the standing end, then back down through the hole. All that he accomplished without even thinking about it. He cinched the knot tight with the loop just large enough to slip over his right shoe and up to a secure position, He slipped the other end of the cord through his wrists and inside the ziptie. He repeated the knot-tying on the left end of the rope and slipped it over his shoe on that side.

  Now all he had to do was lean back on his tailbone and pretend to ride a bicycle. Only a few rotations of each foot were enough to snap the zipline, weakened from the friction of the nylon cord against the nylon tie. His hands were free in less than twenty seconds.

  With both hands free to pick it up, he drained the bowl of the water, gulping as if he had been about to die of thirst. He looked at the bread and decided it wasn’t worth bothering with. Finally, he unzipped his pants and filled the bowl again.

  Pissing in my pants. You must be joking.

  Before he did anything else, he examined his shoelaces. The covering was a bit frayed, but they were still serviceable. He untied all the knots and threaded them back into his shoes, then put the shoes back on and tied them securely.

  Now to unlock that door.

  Even if he had a lock-pick it would’ve been useless. It was an electronic lock. His cell phone had been taken, but they hadn’t done more than a cursory search for weapons. He could still feel the slight raised bump in his collar that was the mic for Digger’s earbuds, and he had something in his pants pockets. He stuck his hands in them, knowing he’d had nothing, not even a pocketknife, that would help much.

  In one pocket, he found a stick of gum, and in the other, a few coins. Not enough to buy his way out of this place. Unless… Something was niggling at his brain. Something from his earlier perusal of the room. What… Oh!