by Blake Banner
On the far side of the turquoise pool there was a large, elaborate chair, and sitting in it was Gabriel Yushbaev. He was scowling at me. He stood and his voice resonated like thunder across the dome of the underground sky.
“Make no mistake, Harry Bauer! I hate you! You have hurt me, Harry Bauer! You have hurt me a lot! And I want to kill you and eat your heart!” He pointed at me and his face went crimson. “I hate you and I will eat your heart and drink your blood!”
I saw the blood leach from his face and his eyes bulged, and suddenly I was huge. So huge that I wondered how that cavern could contain my vast size. And when I spoke my voice was immense and crowded out everything else in the cavern, making the naked women wince and cower away, and making Yushbaev shrink to the size of an ant.
“I will kill you, Yushbaev,” I said it slowly and deliberately and with huge, heavy words, “and I will eat your heart and your liver and I will drink your blood, and I will have all of your women and your riches, because I am the god of death and destruction.”
He turned and glared at Marianne. He pointed at her. “You have him for tonight. But tomorrow, he is mine!”
He watched us cross the chamber, past the pool and through an arched door. One by one, as we passed them, the naked women turned and followed us. We followed a dogleg passage with marble floors and walls of living rock that breathed and pulsed as we went, and eventually we came to a large, arched wooden doorway. Marianne unlocked the door and we went inside.
There was a table piled high with caviar, oysters, hams and cheeses and fruit of all descriptions. There was wine and ale and spirits, a bucket of ice and champagne. There was a huge, wooden four-poster bed and to one side a pool that was large enough for thirteen naked women and me. The door closed and the girls began to close around me. Marianne started stroking my face and unbuttoning my shirt. Other hands stroked my hair and began to unlace my boots.
“Poor Harry,” Marianne whispered in my ear. “Life has been so hard for you, you deserve to rest. You deserve some pleasure. Allow us to give you pleasure, Harry. Please allow us to do this for you.” Her lips found mine, and then my ear again. “Tomorrow you can fight, but tonight is for pleasure.”
My whole world was soft, silky skin, soft hair scented with jasmine, exquisite curves under my hands. I was guided to the pool where I was enveloped by women. I didn’t know which was which. Identity didn’t matter. They all stroked me, they all kissed me and they all gave themselves to me among crazy wild images and a seemingly endless ocean of pure pleasure. At some point they moved me to the bed, and at some point, hours later, I sank into black oblivion.
Twenty-One
My mouth was so dry and swollen I thought I was going to suffocate. There was a weight on me that was oppressive, and as I tried to push it off I found I was smothered by it on all sides. I panicked and struggled and realized that the weight was human bodies that had me pinned under a sheet. I pushed, heaved and scrambled all at the same time and found suddenly that I was sitting up in a bed.
There was a faint, pale blue light emanating from across the room. In its glow I could see not twelve but three women on my bed, one on my right, two spooning on my left. None of them was Marianne.
I had a sickening ache in my head. I slid to the foot of the bed and stood. The room rocked and spun, but then settled. A door over to the left was open and I could see it was a bathroom. I staggered to it, washed out my mouth at the tap and drank about a pint of water from my cupped hands. There was a shower there and I stepped in and stood under the hot water for five minutes while I lathered myself and shampooed my hair, then switched it to cold as I rinsed off. That made me feel better.
I stepped out of the shower cubicle, found a towel and dried myself off, then returned to the bedroom. The three girls were still sleeping. I took in the walls; they were uneven and the color of stone, like the place was a cave that had been hollowed out under the house. There was a table with drinks and food. It was not a vast banquet, but it was enough to feed a hungry man. Vague memories started to creep back into my mind, like timid rodents.
And that comparison made me pause. I had been given some kind of hallucinogen, and I wasn’t absolutely sure the effects had worn off yet. It might have been my surroundings, but everything seemed, not so much surreal, as unreal.
I pulled on my clothes and went to the door. It was unlocked. I opened it and stepped out into the tiled corridor I had followed the night before. I retraced my steps and came to the area where I had emerged from the elevator. It looked different this morning, smaller, less imposing. The large pool was still there, and the high, domed ceiling. There was also a heavy, elaborately carved table in the center of a mosaic floor with six heavy chairs set around it. The artificial light mimicked sunlight, and there was jasmine growing up the walls, and garden areas with roses and other flowering bushes and vines. A passage disappeared on the far side of the cavern, and I could hear female voices coming from that direction, laughing.
Beside the elevator doors there were two men in black uniform holding assault rifles. They observed me without much interest. Over beside the pool was Yushbaev sitting in a large, comfortable armchair. There was a white, wrought-iron table in front of him, strewn with newspapers and magazines. I saw the Economist, Time and various others. He glanced at me and didn’t look happy.
He picked up the Washington Post and spoke as he scanned the front page.
“You owe your life to Marianne. I was ready to kill you last night, but she convinced me to spare you.”
“Yeah? Something tells me she didn’t do that for my benefit. What did you give me?”
“A concentrated distillation of salvia divinorum, a mild, naturally occurring hallucinogen related to mint.” He glanced at me. “Did you enjoy your evening?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t remember much.”
“That is a shame. Marianne said you were spectacular.”
I scowled at the word. “Are you going to tell me what the hell this is all about, and why you didn’t kill me last night when you had the chance?”
He sighed, dropped the paper and gestured to a chair across the table from him.
“Sit, are you hungry? You probably want breakfast after all your exertions yesterday.” He fished a small brass bell from under the papers and rang it. “That is a good question, Harry. And I have no doubt nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand men in a million would have killed you,”
“Or tried at least.”
“Or tried, as you say. But I have a very different way of doing things. I am dyslexic, you know? We tend to think differently.”
“Really?”
He ignored the irony in my voice and plowed on. “The problem is, as you yourself have observed, people throughout the ages have relied on pain, brute force and violence to get what they want. But, you know, pleasure can have a far more detrimental effect on a person than pain. Constant, sustained, unrelenting pleasure twenty-four hours a day, day after day, becomes debilitating and corrupting. It can destroy a person.”
I laughed out loud. “You’re going to kill me with pleasure? Boy, you’re the best enemy I ever had, Yushbaev!”
“Not exclusively. We will feed you drugs which you will enjoy immensely. We will be nice to you, you will be waited on by beautiful women who will do your every bidding. There will be nobody for you to fight with, and nothing to fight against. And one day you will realize you belong to me. Just like everybody else here. You will be unable to live without me. You will need me.”
“Yushbaev—”
“Yes, Harry—”
“They’ll be making snowmen in hell before I need you for anything but target practice.”
He shrugged. “Bravado, but it changes nothing. If you want to eat, if you want to drink, you will have to consume a steady intake of cannabis in various forms, as well as salvia and some other, stronger, more addictive substances.”
I squinted and shook my head. “But why? Why this elaborate setup, the expense
—isn’t it easier just to shoot somebody?”
“Certainly, and if you are a Neanderthal, why do anything else? But the whole point of investment, Harry, is to get returns. And if you invest in people, the returns can be tremendous.” He gestured toward the room where I had slept. “Those girls cost me practically nothing. I kidnapped them from their homes, from their jobs, universities... For the first day or two they wept and fought and screamed. Within less than a week they were sullen but submissive, within two weeks they were responding, beginning to smile and be happy. By the end of a month they were devoted to me.”
He gestured around him with both hands. “This place was a mine, then adapted by the Soviet Union as a nuclear bunker. It is very large. If you go down that way, where you hear the girls playing, there are caverns which we have converted to every kind of pleasure. There are dormitories for the guards and for the girls,” his face darkened, “though usually we are upstairs. Induction and storage take place down here; life takes place upstairs!”
“Induction and storage?”
He grunted. “When the girls first arrive they are brought down here to be inducted. When they are adjusted and happy they move upstairs for training.”
“In assassination, espionage…” I shook my head and laughed. “You are modeling yourself on Hassan i-Sabbah! The Persian founder of the Nizari Assassins. The words assassin and hashish both derive from his name. His killers were called the Hashishim.”
“Very good.”
“And you’re doing the same, but using women. What will they be called, the Gabrielites?”
He ignored the joke. “Not all of them become assassins and spies. Some just get shipped to various high-class clubs around the world to be used as whores. Others have more potential and they become escorts, companions…”
“Spies.”
“And assassins. This is one of my many products, Harry, and it has served me very well. When you get inside somebody’s intimate life, it gives you a lot of control over them. I can influence government policy on four continents.”
“Well I am glad I screwed that up for you a little bit last night, Yushbaev.”
His face darkened again and for a moment he was the stereotypical Russian whose mood changes on a single word. One minute he is laughing, the next he’s weeping, and the next he’s wiping out the entire German army. He scowled and the lights seemed to dim.
“Screwed it up a little? You did more than that, Harry. You have hurt me and my operation very badly. You have killed almost all my men. I have a handful left down here. You destroyed my electronic security system, you have cost me millions of dollars in damage and lost business over the last twenty-four hours. And right now I have a very serious problem with the local police who want to come and investigate what happened last night. My lawyers in Moscow are fending them off, but you tell me, how do I clean up the mess you made last night?”
“I don’t really give a damn, Yushbaev. I’ll tell you something else, before long you’re going to have an even bigger mess down here.”
He leaned forward, like he hadn’t heard me, narrowing his eyes. “It was carnage! How can you live with yourself? What you perpetrated on us last night was a massacre!”
“You’re asking me how I can live with myself?”
He nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“You kidnap free women and use narcotics to convert them into slaves, spies and assassins…”
He was roaring with laughter before I had finished.
“The melodrama! Free women! You make it sound so sinister and evil. But I do not cause them pain, or maim them, or amputate their limbs! I introduce them to a new life, to a new way of seeing life. They live in luxury and when the time comes for them to move to a club, or an assignment, they do not want to leave!”
“Because you have turned them into cabbages, Yushbaev! Because you have robbed them of their humanity! Of their free will!”
“But they are happy cabbages! What do they want free will for? They haven’t the intelligence to use it! I have free will for them! It has always been that way, Harry! Open your eyes! A small minority of shepherds lead, and the sheep follow.”
“You’re full of shit. You live in a fantasy to justify the monstrous things you do. What about the children who have died cruel deaths because of the armaments you’ve sold? How do you justify that?”
“I did not create the wars.”
“But you fueled them, and you exploited them, and you provided weapons you knew would be used against peaceful villagers, women and children.”
“You think if I had not sold phosVX to the Taliban, they would not have massacred that village? They were going to massacre them anyway. You can lay that at the door of religion, Harry, not Gabriel Yushbaev.”
“Bullshit! You rode the bandwagon so you could test your chemical weapons!”
“Not my chemical weapons. I don’t make them.”
“You can wash your hands all you want, Yushbaev, but you can’t change reality. Every time you look at your hands, you will see the blood of children. And one day, soon, the blood you see will be your own!”
He gave a humorless laugh and shook his head. “That I should have to receive lectures on morality, murder and massacres from you!”
There was a movement behind me and one of Yushbaev’s half-naked women approached carrying a tray of coffee, croissants, toast, eggs, bacon and sausages. She set it in front of me and withdrew. The smell of the coffee and the bacon was intoxicating and I realized I was very hungry. I looked at Yushbaev. He was smiling.
“The world is changing, Harry. You belong to a dead age, the age of Pisces. This is the age of Aquarius, science and order. You deified the individual and his freedoms, but you know as well as I do that there is no such thing as freedom. Society works on the basis that people are not free. For society to work, people must obey. And even if man did not live in society, a man living alone in the wilds is no more free than a man in prison. We are bound by the laws of physics, chained by the laws of nature and ultimately subjugated by the laws of society. Where is your freedom? What I have understood, and you have failed to understand, is that there are only two options: obey the rules, or make the rules. And I chose to make the rules. Eat.”
This last he said jerking his chin at my tray.
“It’s drugged?”
He nodded. “But you will enjoy it. It will stimulate your dopamine production, act as an aphrodisiac and make the next seven or eight hours extremely pleasurable.”
“So if you are doing this to me instead of killing me, that means you have a plan for me.”
“Marianne believes you can be useful. I think she is wrong. I don’t think you can ever be controlled. We’ll see.”
I thought about it for a moment. “What about upstairs?”
“What about it?”
“The mess. There are a dozen bodies up there, maybe more. How are you going to explain that to the cops? Those bodies are going to start rotting and attracting wild animals. You can’t hide down here indefinitely. What are you going to do?”
“Why should you care?”
“I’m curious. Humor me.”
He sighed. “I am arranging a team to come and clean up.”
“That must be hard.”
“You haven’t made my life any easier by what you have done. As I said, I wanted you put to death.”
“Who is Marianne? How come she carries so much weight with you?”
“I found her in Paris a couple of years ago. She is highly intelligent, brilliant, she is what psychologists call a sociopath but I call an enlightened person—”
“She is incapable of empathy or compassion.”
“And she is, as you know, sensational in the sack. Since I discovered her she has become invaluable to me.”
“Tell me something.” I said it looking down at my tray. “What’s to stop me shoving this tray up your ass, breaking your neck and walking out of here?”
He glanced at the two guys by the
elevator. “Them, ten more of them down that passage where the girls are bathing, the fact that the elevator uses biometrics and you would never get out alive, plus the fact that if you don’t eat that food, you will be force-fed intravenously.”
I nodded once, upward. “Oh.”
“Face it, Harry, you are beat. You have finally met your match. You have given me a hard time and caused me a lot of pain, you can be proud of that, but this was only ever going to end one way. I represent…,” he sighed, shrugged and spread his hands, “I represent a higher level of evolution. You are a troglodyte, I am a man of the future.” He gestured at my tray again. “Eat, enjoy it.”
“Where is Marianne?”
“Up above.”
“Why?”
“Why so many questions, Harry?”
“Well, I guess I am feeling insecure and I want to understand the situation I am in. Give me a hand here and I might even eat your damned eggs and bacon.”
“She is contacting with friends and allies to come and help clear the mess upstairs.”
“Why can’t she do that from here?”
“Enough.”
That was the answer I had expected, and it confirmed what I had deduced. I sighed and watched his face carefully. “So she went to the yacht? Where is the yacht moored?”
“In Gelendzhik Bay. Now, enough, Harry! Eat!”
“OK.” I sighed, picked up the plastic knife and fork and looked down at the eggs and bacon, the sausages, toast and croissants, and I smelled the coffee. I was starving and I wanted really badly to eat it all and have the girls drag me back to the bedroom. Maybe I could kill him tomorrow. I smiled at Yushbaev. “I mean,” I said with a laugh, “what the hell am I complaining about, right?”
He spread his hands and shrugged, and smiled.
Twenty-Two
I set down the plastic knife and fork and stood. I placed my left hand beside the tray and vaulted onto the table, landing, half crouching, on top of Yushbaev’s papers and magazines. For a moment he stared at me in astonishment, but it was only for a second. Because as I stood erect I smashed the heel of my boot into his face, crushing his nose and sending his chair flying and him sprawling on his back. It was unexpected and it took the guards a couple of seconds to react, but by the time they were shouting and running toward me I was down beside Yushbaev, dragging him to his feet.