by David Archer
“Almost midnight, here. We’re going to hit the beds and get some sleep, then get up in the morning and try to plan this out.”
“All right, good. You get some rest, and I’ll rattle the trees. I’ll call you again in six hours, to let you know what I find out.”
The phone was dead. Noah dug out his charger and plugged it in, then stripped quickly to his underwear and crawled into one of the three queen-size beds. Neil was already asleep, lying atop the covers on his bed, and Marco was sitting on the third one taking off his boots and socks. By the time he peeled off his shirt, Noah was sound asleep.
Noah awoke three minutes before his phone rang and snatched it up on the first. He saw the icon indicating the encrypted line, and said, “Camelot.”
“It’s me,” Allison said. “Okay, according to Alex Kuiper, the Tung Li Estate is considered to be one of the weakest safe houses in China. You’re right about the Army, but it turns out CIA has been inside the place on three separate occasions. I’m going to email you a simple layout of the inside, but he warned me that it’s three years old. There may have been a few changes, so take that into consideration.”
“No problem,” Noah said. “What else?”
“There isn’t much else. The place is almost completely hidden from any vantage point, so you have to get into the forest in order to even get a good look at it. Have you talked to Peter McDermott yet?”
“Yes, he picked us up at the airport and brought us to the hotel. He supplied us with some electric motorcycles that we used to get out to the place, along with weapons and night vision gear. He also offered to lend us some backup, a squad or so of former special forces that work for him. I’m planning to take him up on that.”
“Good. I want Sarah back, but I don’t want to lose you in the process. McDermott’s no fool, he’ll know to put them under your command.”
“That’s going to be the plan, then,” Noah said. “We’ll go in tonight, probably around ten. It’ll be plenty dark enough, and we should be able to hit them hard and fast.”
“All right. I’ll be in the office, that’s tomorrow for me. I want your report as soon as you’ve got her and gotten safely away from that place.”
“You’ll get it,” he said, and then the line went dead. Noah looked around at the other two men, saw that they were still sleeping and pulled the covers back up over himself. He had learned long ago to always take the opportunity to rest whenever it was available.
TWENTY
Sarah hadn’t expected to be able to sleep, but between her depression and the knowledge that whatever was coming was inevitable, she had finally drifted off around two in the morning. Her sleep was fitful, as she dreamed over and over about being tied down to a table while an ugly man cut pieces of her away.
Suddenly, the dream seemed even more vivid, as hands grabbed her arms and legs, but then her eyes came open and she realized that she wasn’t dreaming anymore. Three soldiers had hold of her, and she was being carried out of her room.
“Hey! Hey, put me down, I can freaking walk!” Her protests did no good, as the men continued carrying her along, taking her down the stairs to the main floor, then further down into the basement. She was carried into the same room Chung had removed her from and thrown onto the mat.
The soldiers filed out and the door was shut behind them. She sat up on the mat, tucked her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. Her heart was racing, partly from the nightmare and partly from the shock of being dragged physically out of bed, and it was all she could do to force herself to relax.
The room had only one dim light, and she hadn’t noticed whether the sun was up yet. There was no way to know if it was morning or still nighttime, but she decided it didn’t matter. The point of dragging her there that way was probably to disorient her, and she wasn’t going to give Xiao the satisfaction of realizing that it worked.
She lay down on the mat and curled up, putting an arm under her head for a pillow, and tried to go back to sleep, but it wouldn’t come. She tried counting seconds to estimate how long she was there, but she kept losing track. After what seemed like a couple of hours, she sat up again and just leaned back against the wall.
She been sitting there for quite some time, trying to imagine what she would be doing if she were back home, when she heard the bolts slide back on the door and it opened. Xiao stood there looking at her, and then he stepped into the room.
“I thought perhaps you could think better down here,” he said, “with fewer distractions. Have you considered the wisdom of cooperation?”
“Screw you,” Sarah said. “I told you, I’m not going to give you anything.”
“Oh, but you certainly will. Your friend Mr. Chung had tried to prevent you from suffering my particular ministrations, but when he was unable to get the answers we want, our superiors decided it was time to let me take over. You see, little Sarah, I have never failed to extract information from the subject. There were some few who held out longer than I expected, but none have ever been able to withstand my talents for long. You simply do not have the pain tolerance capability that you would need, so I do not expect it to be long before you willingly tell me anything I want to know.”
Sarah looked up at him, and tried desperately to force herself to stop trembling. For the first time, she admitted to herself that she was terrified, but she was determined not to let this monster see it.
“I guess we’ll see,” she said, and she mentally cursed herself when she heard her voice crack. Oh, give yourself a break, she thought. After all, they didn’t train you in how to resist torture. They probably never figured a driver would ever be in this position. “Of course, you didn’t think I could manage to kill one of your guards with my bare hands, steal his gun and take out a couple more of them, either, did you? I’ll guarantee you, I have a lot more surprises in store for you than that.”
“Yes, we shall see,” Xiao said. He turned and stepped out the door, motioning to someone who was out of sight. Two soldiers came in and took hold of her by the arms, lifted her to her feet and walked her out the door. They turned her to the right and followed Xiao down the hallway to another room. He opened the door, and they marched her inside.
Sarah had heard of torture chambers before, but she had never imagined she would ever see one. There was a table in its center, very much like the one in her dream, and it only took a couple of moments for the soldiers to lift her onto it and begin strapping her down. She tried to fight, but they were simply too strong.
Her wrists were strapped down at her sides, her ankles to the end of the table, and then another strap went around her waist while one more went around her forehead. She could manage to wiggle just the tiniest bit, but other than that she was completely immobile. Xiao stepped up beside the table and looked down at her, and it almost looked like he had an expression of pity on his face.
“I will give you one more chance,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about Camelot, and I will release you from these restraints.”
“Go to hell,” Sarah said through clenched teeth. “I’m not telling you shit!”
“If there is one, I most certainly will.” He leaned over her, looking closely into her eyes, then straightened again and turned away for a moment. When he faced her again, he was holding what looked like a scalpel in his hand, and Sarah’s nightmare came back in full force. Her eyes flew wide open and her mouth opened for a scream, but her sheer terror kept her from even making a sound.
Xiao reached toward her with the blade and she closed her eyes, waiting for the pain to begin, but all she felt was a tugging sensation. The cotton nightgown she had put on after regaining consciousness the night before was all she was wearing, but it was the work of only a few seconds with the scalpel for him to slice it down the center. He had to pull it up a bit through the strap around her belly, but then he pulled it back down to complete the cut. Two more quick slices at her shoulders, and he was able to pull it completely out from under her.
Sarah lay naked, except for the straps. Xiao looked her over appraisingly, then reached toward her once more. His fingers probed her belly, the way a doctor might do when searching for a mass, and then he suddenly pressed two fingers into her lower abdomen as hard as he could.
Sarah’s eyes flew open, and she felt as if he had stabbed her. The pressure of those two fingers at that point on her abdomen felt like—it felt for all the world like when she had ruptured her appendix as a child. The pain was unbearable, and she couldn’t keep herself from screaming. It went on and on, and he kept twisting the fingers, digging in deeper and deeper, until she began to sob and retch.
Suddenly it stopped, though the pain went on for several minutes more. Sarah was crying harder than she could ever remember having cried, and it took everything within her to try to get it under control. Even so, she was still trembling with suppressed sobs several minutes later.
“Tell me everything you know about Camelot,” Xiao said. Sarah looked at him briefly, then closed her eyes and tried once more to slow her breathing.
She waited, knowing that more pain was coming, but all she felt was his fingers gently stroking her. There was nothing sensual in his touch, even when he let his fingers slide down and over her breast, and they continued down her belly, across the strap and then down the outside of her thigh to her knee.
Then suddenly she was on fire, as he dug his thumb into the tendons just above her kneecap. Somehow, he had struck a nerve so perfectly that it was telling her brain that her lower leg was being ripped away, and the sensation was so intense that she felt a massive wave of nausea. She began to retch again, and he yanked his hand back, but the pain continued. It took almost two minutes for it to subside to the point that she could breathe again, and a part of her mind began trying to tell her that she simply couldn’t take anymore.
“Tell me all that you know about Camelot,” he said again, and part of her wanted to speak, wanted to tell him that the most important thing he could know about Camelot was that he was Death incarnate. Her mouth tried to open, but she clamped it shut and closed her eyes, refusing to speak.
Once more she felt the fingers trailing along her body, this time moving upward. He was dragging them up her inner thigh, and she expected him to touch her most private place, but he pulled his fingers away and ran them along her side again. They came up onto her belly and up between her breasts, and then one finger was thrust into the hollow of her throat.
This time, it wasn’t so much the pain as the fear. The pressure on her windpipe was so great that she began to fear it would collapse, and she had heard stories about people dying in agony with a crushed larynx. The pressure grew, intensified, and she suddenly heard herself begging him to stop.
He released the pressure instantly then gently touched her face. She opened her eyes, blinking furiously to get rid of the tears that had built up behind the lids, and then looked into his face. “Please,” she croaked out, “please stop…”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “I will stop, and all you have to do is tell me about Camelot.”
Sarah’s mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. A part of her wanted to answer him, tell him anything he wanted to know if it would make this ordeal come to an end, but another part of her thought of Noah. The Chinese, she had read, could be ruthless. If they ever learned who he was for sure, they would undoubtedly send their own assassins after him. They were afraid of him, that was obvious, and people who would torture like this would do anything to get rid of something they feared.
She clamped her mouth shut and closed her eyes again.
There was no gentle caress, this time. She felt his fingers close on her nipples, and he dug his thumbnails into them until she screamed again. He squeezed and squeezed and continued to squeeze, letting minutes pass by as she screamed and wept, but finally he let go. Ironically, the blood rushing back into them hurt even worse than what he had been doing, and she screamed anew.
He waited, then, until the sobbing died down and she started to get her breath under control, and then he peeled back her eyelids and looked into her eyes. “If you tell me now about Camelot, I can stop. If you do not, you should be aware that it is only ten o’clock in the morning. We have many, many hours left in the day, and I will continue until it is time for me to sleep.”
She looked up at him and started to cry again, trying to shake her head from side to side but unable to do so because it was strapped down. “Please…”
“The choice is yours,” he said. She closed her eyes again and sobbed, waiting for whatever he would do next. She heard him turn away and couldn’t resist peeking, but then she wished she had kept her eyes closed. When he turned back to her, he held what looked like bottle caps in his hand, and he laid a dozen or more of them onto her belly. He held one up for her to see, and she realized that they were small candles, not even a quarter of an inch high inside the metal caps, and then he pulled out a lighter. He lit the first candle, the one he had showed her, and set it on her breastbone. She couldn’t see it, but she could smell the burning wick and the wax, as he lit all of the others and set them back onto her skin.
She could guess what was coming. The flame on the wick would melt the wax, and it would get hot. The little metal caps would also grow hot, and that heat would make it to her skin.
She was right. It was only a few minutes later that it began to feel like the flame was directly on her flesh, though she knew it wasn’t. She wanted to try to shake them off, but the thought of the hot, molten wax splashing onto her skin forced her to hold still. The heat built up and built up until it was unbearable, and then she screamed again. It wasn’t as loud as before, because her voice was giving out.
It took nearly 20 minutes for the little candles to burn out, and she could imagine the burns and blisters on her skin. She had never felt such pain in her life, and even wondered how she had managed not to die of shock while they burned. When they finally went out, she watched him as he picked them up, one at a time, and dropped them into a metal cup.
He looked into her eyes once again. “Tell me everything you know about Camelot,” he said.
Sarah closed her eyes and waited for the next agony to come. She didn’t wait long; each time he asked the question, an entirely new kind of pain would assault her only moments later.
He picked up something from the shelf behind him, and held it up for her to see. It was a plastic envelope, and it was full of large needles that appeared to be several inches long. Each one had a small pearlescent knob on one end, and she watched as he pulled one out and lowered it toward her body. She couldn’t see where he was going with it, but suddenly she felt it. The tip of the needle touched her skin just over her solar plexus, and he began applying pressure slowly. It was just a sting, she thought, not that bad, but then she felt a pop as it broke through the skin and the underlying tissue. The needle’s tip touched the nerves of her solar plexus, and her body went into what could only be considered a seizure.
Sarah couldn’t feel anything for a moment or two, but then all the sensations came back. He had another needle in his hand, and he jabbed it suddenly into the center of her left nipple. Another went into the right nipple, and then she felt needles being driven into her belly, between her ribs, everywhere he could think to put one. There were at least two dozen of them, and if she rolled her eyes downward she could see many of the little pearl heads. She could feel each and every one, a stinging agony that was multiplied over and over, but then he reached out his hand and brushed along the tops of them all, and it felt like she had 100 tiny chainsaws cutting away just under her skin.
She blacked out, then, and when she regained consciousness, he had removed all of the needles. He was simply standing there, looking down at her face, and then he saw that her eyes were open.
“Tell me all that you know about the man known as Camelot,” he said.
“I will,” she managed to whisper. “I will…”
Xiao smiled at he
r and leaned closer to her face. “Tell me about him,” he said again.
Sarah tried to nod, but her head was still strapped down. She looked up into his eyes and said, “Camelot—Camelot—he’s the most dangerous man alive…”
Xiao scowled at her. “Tell me who he is,” he said, “or I will continue.”
“Okay, okay,” she whispered. “I’ll—I’ll tell you—he’s—he’s the man who is going to kill you…” Her voice began to grow louder, more shrill, as all the pain and rage she had felt so far boiled up out of her into the most devastating curse she could imagine. “Camelot—you want to know about Camelot—Camelot is Death, he is Death incarnate, and he—is—coming—for—you!”
Xiao’s face contorted for a moment, and she actually hoped that she had pushed him over the edge, that he would simply kill her now and be done with it, but she saw him force himself back under control. He leaned back away from her and looked her over again, then turned around and picked something up. She couldn’t see what it was, but he moved down the table toward her feet, and it was all she could do to wait. Her breath was ragged, her heart was racing, and then suddenly there was a white hot fire across the souls of both feet. A second later it came again, and then again, and then it was coming so fast that it seemed like they were being beaten by a machine. The thin metal rod he was using was thick enough not to cut the skin, and stiff enough to bruise the muscles underneath.
Sarah screamed.
TWENTY-ONE
Noah awoke again at just after nine, and looked out the window. The sky was heavily overcast, and there was a heavy feeling in the air. He didn’t normally pay a lot of attention to the weather, but something about the darkness, almost like night trying to encroach upon the day, made him want to get up and do something.
“Hey,” he said loudly, “wake up. It’s morning, though you might not believe it.”