by Tom Wood
“You had some good moves in the car,” Eadrich said when he was ready. “You’re fast. You knew what you were doing.” He paused, then asked, “How does a commodities trader from Canada know how to fight? Really fight, I mean.”
Victor didn’t answer.
“And why does that same commodities trader end up in Miguel Diaz’s suite?”
Victor was silent.
“That’s an answer I’d really like to be able to provide Señor Diaz with.”
Victor just stared.
“I’ve provided Señor Diaz with false information once today. He won’t be happy about that when he finds out, so before he finds out I need to have the truth ready for him. The sooner I have that answer, the happier I’ll be. And you want me happy. You want me really happy. As long as I’m smiling, you’re not screaming.”
Victor wanted to comply. His mind was consumed by the need to speak the truth, and every ounce of will had to be utilized against the relentless compulsion to be honest. Just remaining silent was an exhaustion he had never known before.
He said, “I heard a commotion from the suite. I heard crying. I wanted to make sure she was okay.”
He swallowed, mouth and throat dry from the effort of such a simple lie.
“You’re a guest at the hotel?”
He nodded. It was easier than trying to say yes.
“Huh.” Eadrich exhaled. “Because you’re not on the register. How do you explain that? You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you?”
Victor didn’t answer.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.” It was a relief to speak the truth.
“Thirsty?”
“Yes.” Victor felt a glorious release of tension, of stress.
“Tough,” the guy said, “because there’s nothing to eat and drink.”
Victor didn’t react. He understood power games. The show of dominance was unnecessary—he understood his predicament too—but the guy with the gut had a routine and it would have been pointless to tell him it was pointless.
Eadrich continued the performance by taking a stun gun from a pocket of his trousers. Victor didn’t know if it was the same device that shocked him or if they all carried them. He hadn’t seen the one used against him in the car. This one was the size of an old mobile phone. A compact, expensive device. These guys took their equipment seriously. Victor didn’t recognize the exact model—stun guns were not his area of expertise—but it would have a voltage range of around three to four million. Victor knew how stun guns worked in the same way he knew how all weapons worked, but he had never used one in a professional capacity. He knew enough ways to incapacitate a person without needing one, and if he needed a weapon it would be to kill the person, not stun them. But he understood the appeal. That he was lying on a cement floor, bound at the wrists and ankles, was proof they worked, after all.
“I love these things,” Eadrich said. “I feel like a wizard.”
He depressed the activation button and a crackling lightning bolt of blue electrical current leaped between the two metal prongs.
“You have to be careful, though,” Eadrich continued. “Some people can’t take the shock. If they’re old, if they’re weak, they can die. I’ve seen it happen.”
Not just the old or weak, Victor knew. Otherwise healthy individuals could go into cardiac arrest if they were susceptible to arrhythmia, and even those without heart conditions could succumb if they were subjected to prolonged shocks. The body could take only so much abuse.
“They’re a useful tool for encouraging cooperation too,” the guy continued. “Hurts like a bitch, doesn’t it? Someone doesn’t want to talk, well, a few blasts to the balls and . . . You can imagine, I’m sure.”
Victor could, although he would never elect to torture someone via their genitalia. When there were so many other ways to inflict a perfectly adequate degree of agony, it seemed uncouth.
Eadrich said, “Have you ever taken a man’s life?”
Victor kept his lips closed. Silence was easier than lying, and no small lie could cover such an extent of truth.
Eadrich nodded. “That’s what I thought. You cannot imagine the strength of will it requires. You cannot imagine the weight it bears on your soul.” Eadrich stepped closer. “I’ve done it, I’ve done it plenty, and I’m prepared to do so again. But I’ll tell you, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t want to. There are three types of men, I’ve learned. Firstly, most commonly, there are those who only want to get home to their wives. Then there are those men who are cruel. Who like causing pain. They enjoy suffering and death. Then there is the third type who can do unspeakable things without hesitation because that man feels nothing. Such men are machines. Such men give me nightmares because I am the first kind. But know this: men like me who just want to get home to their wives will do whatever they need to do to get there. So I’m warning you—don’t force my hand.”
“I don’t intend to,” Victor said, again feeling the relief of speaking honestly.
Eadrich put the stun gun away. “Good, because you need to be aware that this isn’t the first time we’ve been in this situation. I’ve lost count, in fact. We’re good at asking questions and even better at getting answers from the most defiant of men. Do you want to know something about those men?” He squatted down before Victor and motioned with his hand as he spoke. “They all start with faces like yours right now, defiant faces, and those very same faces are covered in tears and snot by the end of it. Every. Single. Time.”
Victor just stared.
Eadrich stood again, his shadow over Victor. “We’re going to be a little while, Ryan Mathus.” He tapped the wallet. “Once we’ve checked out a few things, we’ll continue this conversation.” He stepped back through the door but held it open because he wasn’t finished yet. “I’m going to leave you to think about your situation. I’m going to give you the chance to think of an elaborate story to explain away what you were doing. You’re going to have all the time you need to come up with the perfect lie, but it won’t work. We do this for a living, and we’re very good at it. We’ll find out everything there is to know about you, and we will extract every last truth from your lips, however hard you try to hold them in. So do yourself a favor, and make this as easy as it can be. I told you before that we’re the nice guys, and it’s true. But that’s only while you cooperate. Lie to me, and things will get very ugly very fast. Use this time to understand you have no choice. Use this time to help yourself.”
He stepped out of the room, closed the door, and applied the catch.
“Consider this the last act of mercy you shall receive.”
• Chapter 36 •
Victor didn’t relish capture, but he had been in worse positions. He was still alive, which always gave him the chance to turn a situation around, and uninjured. His side hurt and his jaw ached, but he could handle pain. Pain was just a message, but he couldn’t afford to drag this out any longer than necessary. Even if he wasn’t injured now, how long would that stay the case? Despite the hunger and dry throat caused by the drug, he was hydrated and fed, but in a few hours his blood sugar would be low, and dehydration would start affecting his thought process and motor functions. He couldn’t afford to be even a split second slower than he was already. When his chance to escape came, whether through process or opportunity, he had to be ready. He had to be able to take it.
The duct tape held his ankles together so tightly he was beginning to feel a tingle in his feet from the impeded circulation. There was no such feeling in his hands, because they had made a critical error in how they had restrained him.
Victor had been interested in escapology long before he had required such skills in his professional life. When he was a boy, the first book he had stolen had been about Houdini. That young boy had been fascinated. Enchanted, even. He had believed Houdini’s death had been staged in the ultima
te act of escapology: escaping life’s final curtain call. Victor still wasn’t sure Houdini had died of peritonitis. He wanted to believe Houdini had disappeared to a solitary retirement, unbothered and untethered by the life he left behind.
Or did Victor need to believe that?
He pushed the question from his mind. His captors had made a mistake, but he still had a lot to do. They had used duct tape because it was readily available and there was nothing suspicious about owning it. The tape itself wasn’t their mistake. Handcuffs wouldn’t have made any difference. Victor knew how to make improvised picks or shims and had escaped from them more than once. Cable ties were no better than duct tape, and held Victor only for as long as he wished to be held. Plasticuffs were perhaps the only restraints that couldn’t be forced open, wriggled out, of or picked. Still, he had escaped those as well.
If they had bound his hands in front of him, the tape could be burst open if the arms were first raised above his head and then brought down fast against his abdomen, elbows flaring out past his flanks, to direct force straight at the tape. The same principle applied to cable ties too, but with tape it could be avoided by applying it farther up the arms as well.
Their mistake had been to tie his wrists behind his back. On the surface, it made sense to do so, as not only were the hands restrained but the arms were too. When the arms were stretched behind the back, the wrists could not be brought together anywhere near as tightly as they could in front. The shoulder joints saw to that. Moreover, his wrists were crossed, making what came next even easier. An amateur error, which seemed to contradict their competence in other areas, but they might have bound him like this as a special consideration, given what happened in the car. Knowing he was dangerous could have meant they had mistakenly sought greater security by keeping his hands behind him, not in front where they might be utilized.
If his wrists had been tied in front of him, he would be free within seconds. Behind would take longer, but required no skill, no strength, just patience. Anyone could do it, but most people didn’t realize they could. Trying to beat the tape with aggression or panicked energy was never going to work; the tensile strength was just too high. But the tape was malleable.
Victor wriggled, twisted, and pulled, but in a slow, relaxed manner. Small, controlled movements were essential. The friction rubbed at the glue, and the tiny stretches loosened the tape’s hold. He used no speed. He implemented no strength. He trusted to inevitability.
They had used lots of tape, wrapped tight, so it took a little longer than it might have, but after about two minutes Victor had loosened the bonds enough to slip out one hand, and the loop of tape was on the floor a second later. He pulled the tape from his ankles next.
They had taken his shoes. What they thought he might do with them, he didn’t know—although a shoelace made for an effective garrote—but he would have slipped them off anyway. On a hard floor, his shoeless feet were as good as silent.
He stood and shook the stiffness from his joints. He must have been out for a while, contorted and lying on a hard floor. He cupped his hand at the door to listen, hearing nothing. There was no handle on the inside of the door, and peering into the crack between the door and the frame, he could see the catch on the other side as a thin silhouette.
His pockets had been emptied, so he retrieved one of the loops of duct tape from the floor and tore off a strip that he folded lengthwise, flattening the folded edge down by running it between the fingernails of his thumb and index finger. The fold gave the tape enough rigidity to slide through the gap and lift up the catch.
The door swung open a little way under its own weight. A storage room then, built with a door not meant to accidentally swing shut and trap someone inside. A thoughtful design, now used to secure a prisoner instead of supplies. The room Victor stepped into was lit with a dull orange gloom. Light found its way into the room through a line of semitransparent bricks high on one wall. That light was orange, but not from sodium bulbs. Natural light from a setting sun. He had been out for an hour perhaps. Not long, but long enough.
The room was a kitchen, but not a domestic one. All the cabinets and work surfaces were bare stainless steel. The floor was lined with white tiles, which were colder underfoot than the cement had been. Cement was a pretty good surface to be forced to lie on. It was porous enough to trap and hold body heat. Fluorescent strip lights ran in lines across the ceiling. Although the kitchen seemed almost bare, he saw where the chopping boards were stacked and checked the drawers nearby, where he found many knives. He ignored the larger blades and anything serrated and took a filleting knife. He wanted something that he could slip between ribs. He wanted something that he could fight with, should it come to it.
The kitchen smelled of chemicals, mostly chlorine. It had been cleaned recently, or else it always smelled this way. Victor realized he had smelled it in the storage room too, although he hadn’t registered it at the time. There was only one way out of the kitchen. A set of double swing doors led to . . . He wasn’t sure, but there could be people on the other side. Close to the doors, Victor heard a television. A quiet sound, so the set was far away. There was no reason to keep the volume down otherwise. It was still daytime, and he doubted they would have been concerned about waking him from his forced slumber.
Victor pictured an out-of-town building; a nondescript unit in an industrial park, with no through traffic, no pedestrians, plenty of space in between businesses, fences, and lots of ambient noise. No one noticing who came and went and who came and never left.
This was the canteen kitchen, then. So a sizable unit. Maybe a warehouse, maybe a distribution center, now owned by a cartel. If the cartel used it for more than just a base for this private crew, if they used it to pack or ship product, then he had a serious problem. As well as the four guys in suits, there could be dozens of workers farther into the plant; AK-armed sicarios standing guard to make sure no one stole product and no rivals turned up. TV aside, it was quiet. Even if he were too far away to hear those workers, he would hear vehicles at least. Traffickers had to traffic.
That the sound from the television was quiet told him the room was large, or that there were adjoining corridors or hallways without doors. The kitchen was substantial, but no bigger than what he would expect to find in a typical restaurant, so he didn’t anticipate finding a huge room on the other side of the doors. It was more likely the television was on loud in another room and the noise he heard was bouncing along hallways to reach him. That was good. That helped. A TV wouldn’t be turned up loud if no one was watching it. They were spread out, but he didn’t yet know how. If all four were on the other side of the door, then it wouldn’t matter that one was a little farther away. It would still be four guns versus none.
A knife was good, but not ideal against guys with guns. In some ways, at very close range, a knife could be better. A gun was dangerous only at one end. Any part of a blade could do damage, and the twenty-one-foot rule—the minimum distance needed to draw, aim, and fire a handgun when faced with an opponent armed with a knife—meant that if he surprised one of them, the knife would be enough. He couldn’t guarantee he would encounter them one at a time, however, and even if he did, even if he had the strength to overcome them, with every kill the chances of the remaining guys becoming alerted rose at an exponential rate.
He needed something else to even the odds.
• Chapter 37 •
Eadrich would be back sooner or later. If he returned alone, Victor would have the best chance. Armed with a knife and aided by surprise, Victor might handle him without alerting the others. By the time Eadrich realized Victor wasn’t where he was supposed to be, it would be too late. Victor knew how to kill with a minimum of noise. Over in seconds, attacking from behind before Eadrich knew what was happening. Then, with Eadrich dead and the others unaware, he could take his time and kill the remaining three in the most efficient manner. The only problem, the
main and serious problem, was that Victor wasn’t as strong, wasn’t as fast as he needed to be. Worse, though, was a fog in his mind. He couldn’t trust his technique. A mistimed attack hold would be ineffectual. He needed something else. He had to compensate for his weaknesses.
There was a lingering numbness in his hands, which had to be from the shock or the drugs. The duct tape hadn’t been tight enough, and only his feet had felt the telltale tingle. He found his fingers were slow to close. Making a fist took considerable effort, and it hurt. Perhaps the devices had been modified, aftermarket improvements to increase the voltage delivered. These men weren’t police; they didn’t care if the people they shocked suffered neurological damage.
He looked around the kitchen a second time. Swinging doors were no good for hiding behind. The storeroom was too small and enclosed to be useful. He thought about his enemies. They weren’t looking to kill him, at least yet. They wanted answers first. That was their priority. That was his solution.
Once the questioning started in earnest, it was over. He had to make sure things never reached that stage. With no way of knowing whether Eadrich would return alone or with the others, Victor had to be ready for both contingencies—killing Eadrich without alerting the rest, or killing them all. In either case, surprise was essential. He couldn’t pick the terrain, so he had to make the terrain work to his advantage.
In the cupboards he found no food but plenty of cleaning products. He found gallon bottles of bleach and alcohol, industrial solvents. He found large waterproof trash bags, and lots of duct tape. He found sawdust and sand in great sacks. There were boxes filled with little pine-scented air fresheners for cars. There were butcher’s aprons, galoshes, and surgeon’s masks. He found hacksaws with blades made of high-tensile steel. He found wood-chopping axes. In one corner sat a pressure hose, neatly looped around an aluminum housing attached to a compressor. Another hose linked to the water supply at the wall. Plastic containers nearby were marked with hazard symbols. They weren’t labeled, so perhaps they were homemade concoctions. Bleach alone was not enough to remove traces of blood and DNA invisible to the naked eye. They had everything they could need in one place. Contained. Private