The Fourth Option

by Matt Hilton

  I moved on, alert to other doors that might open. None did. Behind me Rink had returned. He stepped around the sleeping partygoer, and paused momentarily at the door he’d exited. From within there was no hint his partner had heard anything untoward. Rink looked at the guy, then at me, and his mouth curled up at one corner.

  Earlier we’d both expressed our concern that things were going too easy, and they were. We both got ready for the shit to hit the fan as I reached for the door handle to the master bedroom, and shoved the door wide. Immediately I followed the door, lunging in, my eyes going everywhere, and my pistol with them. I’d cleared the room of immediate threats before the two figures cavorting on the bed realised I was there. The middle-aged man was naked but for his socks. The woman sitting astride him still wore her dress, but it was pulled down below her breasts and up above her knees: evidently she wasn’t wearing underwear.

  As I advanced on the huge bed, the man’s face lit up in alarm, and he grabbed the woman by the waist and literally heaved her aside. She bounced once on the edge of the mattress, then rolled off it to the floor with a yowl. The guy scrambled to get off the bed, reaching for a bedside cabinet. He got a drawer partly open, his hand digging inside as I stepped up and stamped the drawer shut on his wrist. He gave a sharp curse, but then my suppressor was pressed to the base of his skull. ‘Drop it or die,’ I warned him.

  The woman was vocal, her ire at once aimed at her partner, then at us, before Rink swept across the room and grabbed her by the nape of her neck. He gave her a shake to get her attention. ‘You won’t be harmed, girl, unless you given me reason to hurt you. Now hush.’

  Rink was bluffing. He wouldn’t hurt an innocent for any reason, but she didn’t know it, and her compliance was important. He more or less lifted her to her feet by way of the pressure on her neck then took her into the corner and made her sit. He touched the suppressor of his gun to his lips in a command she fully understood. She was young, barely out of her teens, and I briefly wondered what crap she’d endured during her young life to end up serving the needs of a piece of shit like my captive. I’d grabbed his trapped wrist and drew his hand clear of the drawer. Inside there was a shiny semi-automatic pistol with a mother of pearl handle that looked more about show than shoot. I shoved the guy back on to the bed, even as I dipped in the drawer and retrieved his gun. For safety’s sake, I pushed it down the back of my belt.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  I pressed my lips tight at the man’s questions.

  He was sweating like a pig, and not from the exertion. He was splayed, starfish-like on the divan. Not a pretty picture. I grabbed his discarded trousers off the floor. Threw them at him. ‘Put those on, and not another fucking word,’ I growled.

  He did as instructed, at least the former part. As he struggled to coordinate his legs with those of the trousers, he babbled in outrage. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you intend doing, but you won’t get away with it. Do you realise the trouble you’re in? Do you know who you’re messing with? Do you?’

  ‘Of course we do, otherwise why would we be here?’ I said. ‘Now stand up and put your arms behind your back.’

  He stood, but still couldn’t keep his lips zipped. ‘What are you doing?’

  It was pretty obvious. I snapped a set of prepared plasti-cuffs on his wrists, then grabbed him by his elbow.

  His eyes were huge, almost protruding from their sockets, and his mouth hung awry. He glanced once at his girlfriend, but without an iota of care for her predicament, then back at me. ‘Wh-what is going to happen to me?’

  ‘That depends on whether or not you play nice,’ I warned him. ‘Now move.’

  Rink again hushed the girl with the pistol to his lips, then left the bedroom ahead of my captive and me. It was unlikely we’d exit the house before she raised the alarm, but we could live with that probability. Rink had already keyed his walkie-talkie. ‘Bring up the van,’ he said as Mercer responded.

  I propelled my prisoner along the walkway. We passed the drunkard I’d choked-out, and noted that he was beginning to rouse. He’d also urinated through his shorts: evidence that he was on the hunt for a toilet when we’d bumped into each other. We made it back to the head of the stairs before the caterwauling began behind us. It wasn’t the girl Rink had warned but the partner of the drunken guy. She stood in the walkway, staring down at her dopey paramour, her nakedness barely concealed by a silk sheet wrapped around her middle. She squawked and hollered, demanding answers she didn’t receive. Other voices than ours were raised in reply though, and from inside the ground floor cloakroom, I heard the puzzle-player yelling for help. Rink hurtled downstairs first, and I sent my prisoner down after him with my pistol jammed between his bare shoulders. We ignored the doors we’d entered via next to the swimming pool, going across the palatial living room for the main door. Up on the walkway, people were beginning to converge, but thankfully none of them armed guards.

  As we left the house, Mercer came screeching to a halt in the panel van, the tires kicking up rooster tails of grit.

  Shouts came from over by the pond, and before I’d pushed my captive all the way to the van, I spotted the duo that’d sloped off for a while come pounding over the rise. Neither guard had a prior clue what was happening, but the squealing arrival of Mercer in the van and the shrieks of alarm ringing from within the house told them enough. They drew their guns and came at a run. Rink used the front of the van for cover as he fired a couple of rounds at them. One man stumbled and fell, clutching his thigh, and then the second one thought better of being a hero and swan-dived at the earth. The horses stampeded wildly around the paddocks. I yanked open the van’s side door and threw my captive inside, then clambered inside to force him to sit on the bench, out of grabbing range of any of the weapons or tools in the canvas bags. Rink piled in the front alongside Mercer and told him to hit the gas.

  Our tires again tore up the ground as Mercer swung the van around and sent it hurtling back the way he’d just come from. I couldn’t see what worried him, but Rink snapped a warning for Mercer to keep going, then hung out of the window to pop off a few shots at — I later learned — some other guards spilling out of the bunkhouse. I fully expected return fire, for the back of the van to be filled with holes like a sieve, but our prisoner was evidently too important to risk hitting.

  I checked on him.

  He was outraged at his mistreatment, a little terrified, but also relieved to have survived. Exactly how we wanted him to be.

  35

  Pursuit was minimal. It amounted to a couple of guards chasing us on foot towards the exit gate, but it was a token gesture, as they’d no hope of catching the van as we sped away. If they returned to their vehicles to give chase, they never turned up in our rearview mirrors. I’d half expected the security detail to put to the sky in the Airbus H145 to hunt us down, but the helicopter must have stayed grounded: maybe the pilot was one of the drunken partygoers. Mercer did a sterling job as a getaway driver, handling the van like a pro, and Rink was comfortable in the shotgun seat. In the rear I was tossed around a little as the van took sharp corners or vaulted off mounds in the road, but I took no harm from it. Our prisoner wasn’t as stable with his hands bound behind his back. He fell off the bench on a couple of occasions and was shoved back into place. After a third tumble, I decided to leave him where he fell, at my feet. I refused to answer any of his questions, my silence doing more to unnerve him than any threats or dire promises I could make.

  Mercer took us through various small settlements and townships en route towards the Naval supply base. Back at the airstrip we boarded a private jet, crewed by a shady bunch of individuals that I suspected were either criminals or spooks, and perhaps both. We didn’t ask, and they returned the favour, ignoring the fact with studied indifference that we shoved a restrained half-naked captive on board and secured him in a seat. The flight south over the state line was short and sharp and we disembarked on a private airstrip somewher
e near Alligator River in North Carolina. There was little to be made sense of our surroundings other than ploughed fields and a wilderness of tidal coastland. We weren’t too far from Roanoke Island, where the first attempts at building an English settlement in North America saw all the settlers mysteriously disappear. Many theories had flourished over the centuries surrounding the “Lost Colony”, but none had fully explained the disappearance of more than a hundred and twenty men, women and even the first Colonial baby born in America. The nearby location was apt in its way, as we were going to a place from where others had gone missing, never to be found again. The CIA, despite what they would admit to, once had a number of black sites dotted around the country, some of them secret locations to which rendered detainees were taken for enhanced interrogation. We boarded a covered Jeep with our prisoner and with Rink back at the wheel we headed out into the boonies.

  We arrived twenty minutes later at a clearing near the coast. A swamp encroached on three sides of a field cleared of the short, tough little trees that dominated the landscape. To an outside observer they might have thought they’d stumbled upon some kind of electrical substation or pumping facility, as the only structure in sight was a square concrete building with a flat roof, on which a tall metal pylon reared thirty feet tall. There were thick pipes and several steel boxes disappearing inside or mounted on the exterior walls, and little else definable. The building was protected from trespassers by way of a mesh fence standing at least twelve feet tall: there were other hidden security and monitoring devices I guessed, but all invisible to the naked eye. Other than a steel vent positioned low on the front wall, the only other egress or entry points to the building was a scuffed red steel door. On the door “High Voltage” warning signs, and one claiming that entrance posed a “Danger of Death”, told me that our spook friends had a wickedly dark sense of humour.

  Rink pulled the Jeep alongside the only other vehicle that’d been apparent for miles. It was a black SUV with tinted windows: it kind of spoiled the hick subterfuge, but still, it was unlikely anyone would be out this way in the wee small hours. We got out of the Jeep, and I ushered our captive towards the fence with his own mother-of-pearl handled pistol. He walked gingerly on the rough ground in his socks. The gate had been left unsecured for us. Rink drew it open, then stepped aside as I prodded our prisoner forward, and then Mercer followed me through. As Rink entered and pulled the gate shut the door opened in the building with a swish of pneumatics. My prisoner halted, rearing back on his heels. He personally didn’t know about this site’s location, but he’d guessed at its exact purpose. I was about to prod him forward when a figure presented in the open doorway.

  Walter eyed the man spuriously through the lenses of his spectacles, and it was a few seconds before he allowed a smile of triumph to paint his lips. He held out his arms, both palms up, like a magnanimous host. To our prisoner he said, ‘Welcome to my humble abode, Wyatt.’

  It was the first time any of us had used his name since snatching him from his playboy pad, and the shock of hearing it made Wyatt Carling shudder. His knees almost gave out, and I had to grasp his cuffed wrists to hold him up. He groaned in abject dismay as I hauled him towards the door.

  ‘No,’ he cried, ‘you can’t do this to me! You can’t!’

  ‘So you keep on saying,’ I said snarkily.

  Wyatt Carling was so wealthy it was disgusting. He had so much money that he didn’t conceive of the notion of price tags, so therefore had no comprehension of value. Whatever he wanted he got, and it didn’t matter how outlandish or depraved his requests he was never told no, or can’t. He was a man used to getting his way, so when he was refused he couldn’t handle it. He began blubbering. He stank of sweat, alcohol and faeces as I manhandled him inside the concrete structure.

  We encircled our captive. Beneath our feet the floor was steel. Walter stood at a podium, pressing buttons on a console. Behind us the door closed, again assisted by pneumatic servers. Walter pressed another button and the floor began a slow, steady descent, taking us deep underground. To Carling it must have felt as if all of his sins had caught up to him and he was on the final approach to hell.

  36

  It was never any of our intentions to physically torture Wyatt Carling. We only wanted him to believe that it was. We took lengths to deliver him to a subterranean cell where a bucket of filthy water was upended over him, then he was left in the cold and dark for a while, allowing him to contemplate his dilemma. Once we were certain he was ready, we dragged him from the cell, Rink on one side, and me on the other with our faces set sternly. He’d barely been in the cell for two hours but was already a broken wreck. Being dragged forth, he must have been filled with conflicting emotions, relief that he was out but also yearning to return, as the alternative filled him with more dread. We force-marched him through dank corridors smelling of stagnant water. This site had been decommissioned more than a decade ago, and the swamp was beginning to reclaim it. We deposited him in an archaic wooden chair reminiscent of something Torquemada might have recognised. Leather straps secured his wrists, ankles and throat, so there was no escape.

  Walter and Mercer were already in the room. Mercer was grim and silent, and took an observer’s role, leaning against a mildewed wall with his arms folded. Walter had discarded his jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, so he looked ready for business. Beside him there was a small, wheeled trolley on which sat a large leather folder. As we strapped Carling down, Walter made a show of opening the folder to display its contents: there were all manner of tools, ranging from pliers to scalpels to steel contraptions I couldn’t identify. Carling eyed the torture implements, and in his mind he must have been conjuring the torment each could inflict. He shook, only partly from the cold. Rink stepped away, and I followed his lead: this was Walter’s gig, and we were only supporting players. We posted up either side of the exit door.

  Walter kept to a sedate pace. He mulled over the tools, then chose a set of pliers. He turned to our captive, tapping the end of the pliers gently against his chin as he assessed various points to twist or crush on Carling’s body.

  Carling wailed.

  Walter continued his calm perusal.

  Carling cried like a baby.

  I’m all about fighting my enemies tooth and claw. But I was not at ease with cruelty like this, and my stomach was soured by the thought that Walter could inflict excruciating injuries to a helpless human being, and only the fact that this was currently an act stopped me from intervening.

  Walter said, ‘Dry your eyes, Wyatt.’

  Carling had no comprehension of the command.

  ‘Apparently,’ Walter went on, ‘you’re not ready to bargain yet. Take him back to his cell, boys.’

  Immediately Rink and I obeyed, pulling free the restraining straps, and hauling Carling up out of the chair. In our hands he felt insubstantial. He didn’t possess the strength or will to walk unassisted, let alone fight back. We didn’t drag him back to the dank cell, we allowed him to fall at Walter’s feet and curl up in abject dismay.

  Walter grunted. ‘You really aren’t cut out for this are you?’

  Carling didn’t respond.

  Walter toed him, a nudge to his ribs. Carling contracted further.

  ‘Look at him,’ Walter said, this time for our ears. ‘This is one of the men who’d choose to fund violence, when really he doesn’t possess the stomach for it.’ Walter directed his next words at Carling. ‘Look at me, Wyatt.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ Wyatt whined.

  ‘What? It will hurt for you to look at me? Open your goddamn eyes you snivelling coward.’

  Carling forced open his eyelids, as if doing so was a great strain. He turned his head so he could see Walter out the corner of his eye. He flinched at the sight of the pliers still in Walter’s hand.

  ‘You know who I am?’ Walter asked.

  Carling’s head shook almost imperceptibly.

  ‘What about these other f
ine fellas?’ Walter swept an arm to encompass us all.

  Carling’s head shook harder this time.

  ‘Sit up and take a better look.’

  It wasn’t as if Carling hadn’t gotten a good look at all our faces since we’d grabbed him from his boudoir. But he did as commanded, making a meal of seating himself on the concrete floor. He kept his arms wrapped around his bared torso, as if they could save him from a brutal beating.

  ‘Let me introduce my boys,’ said Walter. He aimed the pliers at each of us in turn. ‘The Brit is Joe Hunter. The hulking fella is Jared Rington. And this guy here is Jason Mercer. Tell me if any of those names ring a bell with you.’

  Shaking his head, Carling took fleeting glimpses at us.

  ‘None of those names means anything to you?’ asked Walter. He clucked his tongue. ‘Not even the latter?’

  ‘I…I swear to you, I d-don’t know any of them, or wh-why I’m here.’

  ‘Ordinarily I wouldn’t believe you. But I’m prepared to give you the benefit of doubt, and accept your word. Their names probably won’t mean anything to you, because I understand how things work, and how layers of separation are put in place for the purposes of plausible deniability. So, allow me to enlighten you. These are the men whose deaths you have paid for.’