Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  "Yes, sir." She looked terrified. "I understand." She hurried to pack up her things. She started the shutdown process on her laptop.

  "I hope so," he said. "Because I'm not going to tell you again."

  "I'll be sure to remember." She moved quickly. She had seen the marks on Jane and was eager to get away from the people who had made them. She closed the laptop even though it had not fully shut down, slid it into her bag, and hurried out the door.

  Jane stared after her. She could not quite guess what the girl would do next. Jane had carefully nudged the girl's mind, inch by inch, until she was cornered, unable to think of a reason not to let Jane call the police. She had been ready to give in. But this had been a terrible, frightening experience for her, and Jane had seen people react to danger in many different ways-some had a first impulse to be heroic that carried them only through the initial moments and got them killed. Some people ran not only from the danger but even from the memory of the danger.

  It was possible that the girl would get out of here, think about getting her boyfriend and herself into legal trouble or about bringing on them the hatred of an unknown number of violent criminals-six and counting-and pretend that she had never seen Jane. She would tell herself that Jane would talk and be released, or if Jane didn't talk, the consequences would be her own fault. And the girl would stop thinking about her. In a month Jane would seem like a dream. In a year the experience would be so far back in her memory that she would never revisit it.

  Jane lay on the bed and studied the man. She hadn't had as much time to observe him as the others, but had no desire to be around him a second longer than she was forced to be. Clearly he was in charge. He was taller than the others, and spoke louder. When he was gone, the others all waited for him to come back and tell them what to do. When he was here, they all watched him and unconsciously mirrored his movements and expressions. But there was something else, and listening to him talk to the nurse helped her identify it: people were instinctively wary of him. There was a volatile, vindictive quality to him that was so strong that people timidly observed his moods for signs of change, and humored him.

  He came closer and sat beside her on the bed. Jane was acutely conscious of the restraints on her arms. "Now we're alone for a few minutes, and we can talk." His voice and expression were friendly, almost conspiratorial. "If you'll give me some help and say where Shelby is likely to be now, we can avoid bringing everybody in here to spend the night thinking of new ways to make you tell us. We can avoid wear and tear and loss of limb." Jane decided to play him for time. If the girl did call the police, it would do no good if they didn't have time to get here. She had to keep him talking.

  "So what you're saying is that if I give you Shelby, then you will let me go. Is that right"

  He nodded, his face earnest, but then began to modify his expression. "After a reasonable interval. I'd have to send someone after Shelby to be sure you told me the truth, of course. And we would have to be able to get some distance away before you were loose. Probably we'd get on an airplane and fly somewhere, and then make a call from there to let a person of your choice know exactly where to find you. Sound fair"

  "It sounds like a plan that would give you unlimited chances to change your mind and kill me, or just leave me here to die."

  "Of course you have to remember that you're my prisoner. I'm not your prisoner."

  "That's hard to forget."

  "But aside from my leaving myself some wiggle room, do we have a deal"

  "No," she said. "I don't know where Shelby is."

  "I'm sure you do."

  "I got him a car and a change of clothes and some cash. If he doesn't make any mistakes and drives somewhere that's reasonably free of cops and people who hunt fugitives for a living, he can be invisible for months. He didn't tell me what his destination was, and I didn't suggest any."

  "Did you get him credit cards"

  Jane saw the trap. "No."

  "How about false ID A driver's license"

  "No."

  "Why not"

  "I didn't want to know what his new name would be," she said. "If people had his new name, they could eventually get his new address."

  He looked at her closely. His blue eyes had probably looked innocent to many people over the years, and that was why he was trying to use them again on her. But to Jane his eyes looked cold and opaque, like flat metal disks. He manufactured a half smile. "I don't think I understand you yet. Is this about the money Is somebody paying you a bonus for each day Shelby stays hidden"

  "No. Nobody's paying me anything."

  Suddenly, she understood what he was doing. After the captured warrior had been brought into camp, he would sometimes be bathed and his wounds would be bandaged, and he would be allowed to rest. That evening he would be brought to an important man's dwelling, fed, and treated as an honored guest. Some enemy peoples would even formally adopt him, so he would become a relative. In doing these things the captors were trying to make his body stronger and his will weaker, to force him to live through the cruelest treatment, all the time feeling the terrible contrast between the feast and the torture. Almost the minute after the feast was over, the captured man would face the first of the major torments that would end only in his death.

  The tall man looked at her with a friendly, concerned expression, as though he genuinely cared about her. "If you're not getting paid, then why would you put up with the kind of treatment you've been getting, and what's about to happen to you"

  "As you've said, you've got me. I don't have you." His hand shot out suddenly and slapped her face. She had watched for it and decided in advance to take the blow. If she did anything to deflect it or counter it, she would reveal how strong she really was, and this was a secret that might be important to her later. Her face felt hot and sore, and she knew it was probably turning red.

  His smile returned. "You just reminded me that I can do whatever I want."

  Jane heard cars pulling up outside the building, and her heart began to beat harder. The young nurse must have gathered enough nerve to call the police and say she had been hired to care for a kidnapped woman. Jane lay there, her eyes on the tall man. She knew that when the police came through the door he would either try to use her as a shield, or kill her. She would have to roll off the bed and stay low. Maybe she could deliver a kick to distract him for the police. She bent her strong left leg so she would be ready to push herself off the edge of the bed.

  She heard the door swing open, and after a second he called out, "It's about time you guys got here."

  The man who had driven the car when she was caught walked in carrying three bags against his chest. He said, "It took us a while to find all this stuff."

  The man who had shot her said, "You wanted to talk to her alone. Should we wait"

  "She's buying time and bullshitting. We might as well get ready."

  The men brought in a folding table, opened it, placed it about six feet from Jane's bed, and then began to take things out of the bags and lay them out on the surface. Jane considered not looking, because the fear would only weaken her, but she reminded herself that she needed to see what implements were going to be lying where she might be able to reach them later.

  There were assorted knives, some of them serrated and some smooth, a package of steel skewers for barbecuing meat, a small handheld blowtorch. So this stage of her ordeal was going to be what she had expected-cutting and fire. There was a car battery, and a set of insulated wires with alligator clips. Just another kind of fire.

  The tall man disconnected the IV needle from the back of her left hand and wrapped the tube around the steel stand. "Here. Roll her over on her stomach and use the restraints to secure her wrists to the bed."

  The two men turned her over roughly, and tightened the Velcro restraints on the bed frame around her wrists. She heard a cigarette lighter, and then a hiss. She turned her head toward the sound and watched the tall man holding the lighted torch, adjusting the f
eed valve until the flame was a small blue point.

  The tall man used the torch to heat up a set of four steel skewers while the driver held them with a pair of long-handled pliers. Jane pictured the warrior, tied to a stake by now, watching the embers being heated, the torturers' eyes glowing like cats' eyes in the reflected firelight. The proper response was complete indifference. The warrior would pretend to be unafraid, would show calm when the pain came, would pretend that he felt no despair.

  Jane could see that the skewers were red and glowing. The driver pulled the oversize man's shirt she was wearing up to her shoulders, and the tall man simply laid the skewers, one by one, across her back. Her muscles tensed, and her vision narrowed, with a red halo at the edges. Her eyes were wet, the tears spontaneously running as the hot steel seared her back. She believed she smelled her own flesh cooking, but she pictured the warrior's eyes staring into hers, silently urging her to endure the pain and the horror, and remained still.

  The tall man picked the skewers up with the pliers. "Hot enough, you think" She couldn't tell who he was talking to, and it no longer mattered. "You know, that was a shame. You really did have a beautiful back. I hated to ruin it with those burn lines. Well, guys What should we try next"

  Another voice said, "We should have just killed her when we got her here."

  "You shot her. You could have fired again or just aimed higher and said it was an accident." He was enjoying her ordeal, but it seemed to be making his friends uncomfortable. "She has a lot of determination, doesn't she"

  The driver said, "Maybe she told us the truth. Maybe she doesn't know where he went."

  "Then she's really stupid. You should always have -something-one precious thing-that you can use to keep this kind of shit from happening to you." He was heating the skewers again, and this time, he dropped all of them on her back at once. Jane's vision clouded red again, with only a small point of light in the center. The muscles in her arms and legs tightened in a spasm, but she held back the scream, kept the air moving in and out through her nostrils so it wouldn't pass her vocal cords and make a sound.

  The burns on her back were now throbbing from the first attack, the air sweeping across them and making the pain flare again. She felt the bruises from the beating under her, and the burned flesh on her back, and together they seemed to overwhelm her nervous system until she was barely aware of the men and their movements.

  "You know how to make this stop. All you have to do is give us back what's ours."

  It was getting harder to keep silent. The bullet wound in her leg hurt again. Her body was a raw, throbbing, aching set of nerve endings, all sending hot, screaming alarms to her brain at once, and she couldn't soothe herself, couldn't turn away, couldn't even move. Inside her closed eyes she had a vision of her husband, Carey-not wishing he could save her, not wishing him into this horror at all, just feeling the loss of him.

  What the tall man did next came with no warning, no sound that reached her ears, but brought an explosion of pain, and then the red cloud in front of her vision closed the point of light in the middle, and went black.

  At first the darkness was like being in a pocket, but then she sensed that it was big, like a starless, infinite space. She wondered for a moment if she was dead. Moving was impossible, and she couldn't feel her body touching anything. And then, without warning, she felt all of it. The skin of her back was on fire. Her eyes opened like a camera shutter, and closed again at the glare of the lights.

  She tried to look at the men again, and saw that they had gone. She couldn't see them or their shadows or hear their voices. She was cold, and she suddenly realized she was wet. She looked around at the table, and saw that someone had attached the two insulated wires to the car battery. That was it. They must have given her a shock, and she had passed out. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. She tried to run an inventory of pains, but she didn't detect any she hadn't felt before. They had let her alone after she passed out. They wanted her to feel every single sensation. There was no point in hurting a person who couldn't feel.

  She had lost track of time. She had heard from people who had been broken in interrogations that losing track of time had weakened them. A person had to feel that there was a whole world outside his prison where time proceeded in an orderly, uniform way, where the sun rose and set as it always had. She realized that this was part of the distress she had felt when she had first been dragged in. The high windows that had been blacked out had scared her a little, and the single dim desk lamp had been worse. It was always gray twilight in the big room.

  Jane took a deep breath, asked herself how long she could hold out against the pain, and realized that she was still willing to die. As long as she didn't reveal where Jim Shelby was, she could buy him time, and keep these men occupied with her instead of searching for him. Shelby and every one of her earlier runners would have another day of safety, another day for their identities to mature and be more solid, another day to make a friend who might help them. And another day would give Jane's captors a chance to get impatient and careless.

  She thought about her runners. Over the years she had taken dozens and dozens of them away. Shelby was only the most recent. They had almost all come to her in the last days of wasted, ruined lives, sometimes just hours before their troubles would have changed from dangerous to fatal. She would obliterate the person's old identity and turn him into a runner, a fugitive she would guide to a place far away, where nobody knew him, and certainly nobody would ever think of killing him. She would give him a new identity and teach him how to be that new person for the rest of his life. By now there were people all over North America and Europe who bore names that she had made up.

  She thought about her husband, Carey, the surgeon who spent every day of his life fixing and curing people. He had been her reward, the part of the world that she had taken for herself for no better reason than that she wanted him and he kept pestering her to take him. She loved him so much she could picture every centimeter of him with such clarity that she could feel him against her skin. She had lived a good life, but now she had to be ready to die to preserve the other people, the ones who had trusted her with their lives.

  Jane let go of Carey's image and prepared herself for the next phase. The pain of torture was almost unbearable, but she had discovered it had other qualities, too. It set her apart from the rest of humanity. Each time the pain didn't destroy her was a failure for the enemy, a wall that had held against an attack. The cuts and burns were decorations of valor and at the same time proof of the torturers' unworthiness. The pain was the means of consecration, the welcome fire that proved the victim's nobility.

  She would wait for the next torment, and if she got the chance she would use their implements as weapons. And when she couldn't do that anymore, she would use one of them on herself.

  4.

  Jane waited several hours lying facedown on the bed. The young nurse had not scraped up the courage to call the police. Jane had made a number of excuses for her during the past few hours. Maybe she had not known the way here. No, she had come along with the doctor once, and she had come alone and left alone last night. Maybe she had felt she needed to wait for her boyfriend the doctor to return home so she could explain to him in private what she had seen and why they had to call the authorities. She had said something last night about wanting to talk to him.

  The girl had said he was smart. That didn't mean he was smart; it meant only that he had persuaded her of his intelligence, and that he wouldn't have much trouble talking her out of helping Jane. That was the smart choice, the one that would probably keep them both out of trouble, preserve his freedom and his license to practice medicine, and let them forget they had ever seen her.

  The easiest thing for them to do was to separate themselves from this unpleasantness. He had treated her bullet wound, and what had happened to Jane after that was not his business. He would use the girl's belief in his authority and her faith in his wisdom to smo
ther her conscience.

  Jane heard an engine, and then footsteps, and she lifted her face off the bed, straining to see. Even though she knew better, she couldn't help holding her breath, hoping the police had arrived. But a key unlocked the door. The door swung open and she could see the blinding yellow-white light of the morning sun slice into the room and illuminate it for a second. When the door closed, the same three men were standing in the room.

  Jane could see there had been a change. They seemed to know something she didn't, and it had lightened their mood, as though they'd been excused from a big, unpleasant job. She felt a sick fear for Shelby. The man who had driven her here said, "Hey, Wylie. You going to tell her now"

  The tall man turned his head and glared at the driver. He said, "Yes, I am, Gorman."

  "Sorry," the driver said. He looked at his feet.

  Jane silently repeated the names to herself a dozen times. Wylie was the tall one, and Gorman was the fake cop who had served as the driver. She had an irrational fear that she would forget their names, even though she knew that this would be impossible. She would still remember them if she lived to be a hundred and the fresh burn scars on her back healed to invisibility. Wylie and Gorman.

  Wylie stood over Jane with his arms folded on his chest. "Normally I'd kill Mr. Gorman for that, but it doesn't matter, because I've learned something I didn't know before. Want to know what it is"

  "No," Jane said. She was still in restraints and lying facedown on the bed. She turned her face away from him.

  "I'll bet you don't." He undid the Velcro strips that held her wrists, and grabbed her hair so she had to turn toward him onto her side. He grinned, and she noticed how his mouth was twisted to make a smile that was really a snarl. It was as though the meanness behind his eyes distorted his expressions. "I started to get curious about you the first time I heard about you. A lot of people go through the jails and courts every day, but the only ones who ever get away seem to be the ones where some clerk screws up the paperwork or something. Nobody breaks out. So I started asking around. And you'd be amazed at all the people who are interested in you."