Gone Black

by Linda Ladd

  Neither man answered her, but they did get busy. They started pulling open drawers and opening cabinets to reveal a cache of high-powered weapons, the likes of which Claire couldn’t believe, meaning scoped rifles, handguns with silencers, even grenades, and lots of other deadly munitions. “My God, who are you guys? Who do you work for?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Holliday told her, not looking at her as he pulled out a black nylon backpack and started loading it with. 40 caliber rounds. Booker came back to her with some kind of injection gun and told her to lift up her hair. “We’ll insert one behind your right ear and one behind your knee. They’ll probably scan you for bugs, but they probably won’t find the one in your scalp since they didn’t find Nick’s.”

  “Just do it. Hurry up.”

  So he got down to business, but Claire barely felt the jabs of pain. “Tell me what else to expect.”

  The two men sat down across from her and told her what else she could expect, and none of it was good. None of it was less than horrible. And Black was probably experiencing it as they sat around and talked. She set her jaw so tight that her head ached and started checking over her own weapons.

  “One thing for sure, Claire, you’ve got to remember, they don’t respect weakness, none of them. They respect guts and people who show courage, especially Max and Marcel. The girl’s too sick in the head, too far gone to reason with, but her brother can purportedly keep her craziness in check. So do not cower or cringe or beg. Show gutsiness as much as you can without getting killed. That’s gonna keep you alive more than crumbling. You want them to respect you. The men are doing this for revenge. Jaxy is doing it for pleasure and for her mother.”

  After a moment, Holliday came over and sat down beside her. “I’ve got my plane equipped with the same technology that Nick has in this room. That’s how we transition to our target areas. We can see where you are all the time, from the plane and from handheld devices after we disembark. If you do go in, and I don’t want you to, Claire, I’m still begging you not to. But if you do, please, please listen to me and don’t go in there all alone. But I know you aren’t going to listen to me or Booker or anybody else, not with Black in there. You’ve got good instincts, you’re well-trained, but it is imperative that you don’t show weakness to them. Don’t get in their faces unnecessarily. Don’t risk that. But do stand up to them whenever you can. These people stop at nothing. They kill indiscriminately. If you piss them off a little too much, they’ll shoot you and Nick. That’s the best advice I can give you. You might want to read over Nick’s psych evaluations while we wait for that call to come in.”

  “I doubt if they’ll shoot me until they get me down to their hellhole so they can torture me in front of Black. Soquet won’t want to miss all the fun of making Black watch me die. And I do want to read those reports. Black always told me to know your enemy, and that’s what’s gonna get us out of this thing alive.”

  Booker and Holliday said nothing else. They knew she didn’t have a choice. Neither did they.

  “Nick wouldn’t want this,” Booker repeated, yet again. “He would not want you to put yourself in danger. You know that, Claire. You know how he feels about that.”

  “Enough already. He does not have long to live unless I do it. It seems that I am the only reason that he’s still alive right now, that and Marcel’s little plan of C-4 retribution. They aren’t gonna kill him, not until I get there, and you will be right behind me. Right, Holliday? You will come in right behind me.”

  “Yes, we can track you, however they get you there.”

  “Okay, that is very good to know.” Claire took another deep breath, more shaky about it than she wanted Black’s friends to believe. It was a terrible plan, and that was the truth. God-awful, in fact, and she knew it was going to fail unless they got very lucky. Problem with that was, they weren’t lucky, especially her. So they all prepared for battle and then sat and waited for Claire’s phone to ring.

  Killing Black

  The next time Black fought his way up out of the deep dark morass of his muddled mind, he found himself sopping wet and shivering with cold. Jaxy Soquet had knocked him unconscious the last time she’d hit him with the sap. He didn’t know how long he’d been out of it. She was well-practiced with her weapon of pain, knowing just where she could hit him and with the exact force and precision that wouldn’t kill him unless she wanted him dead. He had no doubt that she had rehearsed her evil arts, often and happily, on no telling how many other victims, tightly bound and at her mercy.

  Vaguely, somehow, in the foggiest corners of his brain, he remembered being dragged to the drain in front of his chair and sprayed down with a hard stream of ice-cold water, which helped him revive some from that last brutal blow. Then they had dragged him back to the chair and injected him with something that knocked him all the way out again, quickly and efficiently. Probably a strong sedative, the kind they’d used out on that dark, deserted road. God only knew what they were giving him. He knew what they were doing. They were trying to cloud his mind and cause him so much confusion that he couldn’t think straight and could not react to their assaults with any kind of legitimate planning or forethought. Unfortunately, it was beginning to work. He was no longer sure what time it was or what day it was or how long they’d had him at their mercy. He did know that he hadn’t eaten, hadn’t had any water, except for what he could swallow down when they were hosing him. He hadn’t stood up and walked on his own, either, except for a few minutes at a time. They had taken him back to the toilet, he thought he remembered vaguely, but with two guards holding his arms. But maybe that could be an opportunity to escape. That was the only time when he wasn’t tied down.

  Despite all the mental fuzziness and the way his head pounded from Jaxy’s blows, Black remained calm. He remembered talking to Claire, remembered seeing her on the smartphone, and he remembered feeling relief that she was far away and not involved and safe from these savages. He also knew that she would contact Booker and Holliday and they would come and get him. Until then, he had to use his training, figure out what he could do to make the situation work for him. He knew these people well, had studied every detail of their lives religiously, because he had always been pretty sure that they would get him one day. Now they had him. Now he was in Phase One of their torture regimen. Psychological. Their MO was pretty much set in stone. They’d used it over and over with innocent victims, at least on the ones Black knew about, the ones who Soquet left for dead but who had somehow managed to stay alive, either by luck or because Marcel wanted them alive.

  At the moment, however, he realized that his leather wrist and ankle restraints were off, so he had to go for it. He pushed himself up to his feet and felt unsteady, shivering uncontrollably in the icy air. The room temperature had to be close to freezing. His head pounded like crazy, and he felt extremely sick to his stomach. He sucked up some grit from somewhere deep inside, shook away the cobwebs inside his head, and looked around the room. Once he felt stable enough to take a step, he moved over to the wall beside the door and took a lot of time examining every inch of it for a way out. He didn’t find anything, but he wasn’t surprised. They had used this room before, no doubt about it. It was secure for their prisoners. They would’ve made sure of that before they put him inside. He was pretty damn sure nobody had ever escaped from this hellhole.

  Black’s main hope at this point was that Claire had already contacted Booker, and Black’s team was already on their way to extract him. They would know what to do and how to do it. And they would do it well. They would get him out. But that was it. They were his only hope. His friends would come for him, he had no doubt about that, and they’d done it before with other hostages. He had done it before, and their extractions had always been successful operations. That was one thing that he could be absolutely certain about. He was also confident that neither Booker nor Holliday would allow Claire to take part in any of it. They would never allow her to walk into a trap, as Black had s
o foolishly done. He had made his wishes explicit on that point, over and over again, each time the Soquets and their hatred had cropped up again in his life. If he was ever captured by the enemy, she was not to be involved. No matter how much she argued or coerced or threatened, she was to remain behind and let them do the job for which they had been trained so well. He had no reason to believe they wouldn’t do exactly what he’d told them to do.

  When he heard the clomp of several pairs of heavy boots outside the door, he felt his muscles all go tense with dread, but then he immediately forced himself to relax. He stood very still, waiting, just out of the range of the camera, still surprised they’d let him wander around this soon. That was a little bit off their habit. Then the door was thrust open, and a bunch of guys came in at him, lined up with police precision, wearing black clothing and black ski masks as they had done when he was first captured. The first one grabbed the hose and turned it on him again, full blast, and the immense force was so great that Black staggered backward a few steps until he was knocked to the floor and pushed into a corner by the hard thrusting water. He turned around, blocking the beating barrage with his back, trying to protect his injured face, but the water was cold and it felt like a liquid battering ram forcing itself slowly through his spine. They held him under the brutal deluge for what seemed like hours, but then the water went off, and two men rushed forward and jerked him to his feet. They dragged him back to the chair and strapped him down.

  Black watched them move back out of the room, and then all the lights went off again. It was black as night. He couldn’t see anything, just frigid black nothing. He waited for whatever was going to happen next, trying to control his shivering, preparing himself for whatever terrible thing they planned to do to him next. They weren’t going to stop, not for a long time, if ever. Not until he was either dead or rescued. So he would have to pull himself together, hang tight, and survive. His team was the best in the business, as far as he was concerned. They had done similar things before, and done it well, and they could do it again. He just had to be patient.

  So he sat very still in the dark room and attempted to numb his mind to the cold and pain, just deaden all his thoughts and inclinations to panic, thinking only of pure survival. But it wasn’t long before he realized what the new tactic was going to be. The temperature was dropping quickly now, the room growing extremely cold, and very fast. He already felt chilled to the bone, but they were pumping icy air in on him from right above his head. It was blowing straight down onto him. Freezing him. They were using cold air and cold water to break him. But that was better than most of their techniques. He could stand this. His body could stand it.

  Black realized that he needed to move his body as much as he could, do any little movement to warm himself, but his wrists and ankles were fastened down so tight that his fingers were growing numb. Then again, and with no warning, his prison lit up like day, so bright and glaring that he couldn’t open his eyes for several seconds. Then it went black again, and then came on again, almost immediately, a bizarre kind of strobe effect meant to disorient him further. He shut his eyes so he wouldn’t see it, and began to take deep breaths, meditate, and concentrate on his breathing techniques and nothing else.

  After a while, he began to feel a little panicky, as if he might be ready to go to pieces. He set his jaw and forcibly pulled himself together. He could not do that. That’s what they were waiting for. What they wanted. Once Black broke mentally, they’d move into Phase Two and he’d suffer Max’s domain of whips and chains and every other kind of indignity that devil could think up.

  So he sat very still for a while and forced his mind to go blank. He was shaking so hard now that he had begun to worry about how cold his body really was, how low a temperature he could maintain before his internal organs began to shut down. He wondered if he could actually freeze to death, sitting there motionlessly in the plunging temperatures. If this would be the way he would die. The human body could only take extremely low temperatures so long, especially with bare skin exposed, before hypothermia set in. He would last until his core temperature reached ninety-five degrees or lower. After that, he would be in very big trouble. Right now, though, he was shivering, which was a good sign that his body’s heat regulation systems were still working. He just hoped it lasted a while.

  The thought was disconcerting, just as they meant for it to be, so he began to meditate again, a technique he’d been taught long ago when he was a Ranger, retreating deeper and deeper, burrowing down into the hidden corners of his consciousness, until he could visualize himself somewhere else. Somewhere pleasant, a good memory. Then the picture came, a place and time when he was the most content and happy. He was lying on that nice warm golden beach in Tahiti, still wet from salt water and surfing, and Claire was there beside him, smiling at him, touching his face with her hand, her body soft and smooth and sun-browned in the yellow string bikini he bought for her. Her flesh had been glistening with tanning lotion that smelled like coconut. She had turned on her side and pressed herself up against his naked chest, and he had begun to kiss her, both his fists tangled in her silky blond hair.

  Blaring, discordant music jerked him out of his warm South Pacific fantasy, and his eyes opened blearily to the dark cold surroundings and back to the shaking and vibrating effects of the strobe. The “Wedding March” was playing again, but at a deafening volume that stabbed into his bruised temples like dozens of steel needles forced through his cranium. The camera had come on again, the red light flashing. Somebody was watching, enjoying his suffering. Probably Marcel. Black had heard he had suffered a severe heart attack that had slowed him down and almost put him out of commission. Too bad it hadn’t. The world would be a better place, except for his defective offspring and their cruelties.

  The song played on, over and over and over. They wanted him to think about Claire, worry about her, worry about missing their wedding. But that wouldn’t work. He knew Claire was back home and she was going to survive, no matter what happened to him. She was strong of mind and will and about as smart as anybody he’d ever met. She no longer thought he was dead. She would know that his team could get to him in time and bring him home. No doubt about that. He didn’t have to worry about her right now, thank God. He just had to keep on surviving everything they threw at him.

  All of this was designed specifically for him, and him alone, to make him mourn her loss and for the wedding he had missed. Marcel Soquet had probably planned every step of it, and was now in ecstatic throes of exacting his final and ultimate revenge. And in time, it did work to a degree, despite his determination not to let it. They had found his major weakness all right, his own psychological trigger, as he had done so many times when evaluating his own patients. This was pure and unadulterated revenge for what he’d been accused of doing to Lorraine Soquet, and nothing else. Black was innocent of that crime, and Marcel knew it. Marcel had killed his wife himself for betraying him. Black had nothing to do with her death. But it didn’t matter now. His children didn’t know that.

  Lorraine Soquet had been Marcel’s life, his trophy, his treasure. She was a lot younger than him and very beautiful. Dark auburn red hair, intelligent, but not intelligent enough not to marry a monster. Black had heard Marcel had inadvertently maimed his ten-year-old daughter in the blast that killed her mother, and Jaxy had never been the same again. Now he knew that was true. He’d seen the result of the injury. No wonder she hated Black so much. She believed her father’s lies and blamed Black for everything that had gone wrong in her life. That’s why she wanted him to suffer.

  Jaxy and her severe psychological problems were his major obstacles at the moment. He had already ascertained that she was most likely a full-blown, very dangerous psychopath, as stone cold and volatile as any he had ever met, and a young woman who enjoyed tormenting helpless victims, and a lot more than she enjoyed their eventual demise at her father’s hands. The sap had become her symbol of power. Dyed pink in her favorite color. That
and that poor little kid’s shock collar. She had decorated both her weapons of torture in pink sequins and ribbons as if that were the signature of her womanhood. She kept the sap dangling from her wrist like the queen of mean. And that was exactly what she was. She hurt others with a sense of personal pride, with the pure love of watching others suffer pain and degradation.

  If Black was correct in his diagnosis, she no doubt received sexual gratification, possibly even orgasm, every time she brought down that sap on some bound and helpless human being and heard their groans of agony. She was the first and biggest threat to his survival, and she was completely in charge of this phase of captivity. He had seen other psychopaths similar to her in the past, treated them in prison, and he knew without a doubt that she would most likely lose control at some point, either on purpose or in her prurient excitement at killing him inch by inch.

  Yes, Jaxy would murder him if she could get away with it, and never think twice about ending his life. Never regret it. Never consider him again. To her, he was only her current plaything to be hurt and humiliated, and once he was dead, she would move on to the next hapless victim. His hope was that she was not in complete charge of his fate, that she was following orders from someone who still had an ounce of humanity. Because he was pretty sure she did not and had not for a very long time, probably since the day she watched her mother blown to bits. Max and Marcel were not completely crazy, just cruel and calculating. If one of them kept Jaxy under control, Black would likely survive. Maybe even last until Booker and Holliday showed up. If she followed her own instincts, her own easily triggered dark desires, he was already a dead man, just waiting for the final blow to fall.

  Black thought about the detailed psychological profiles that he’d done on the Soquet family, after he realized they were the ones out to get him. He had researched them in every possible way, from every possible angle and every possible diagnosis, and that knowledge was going to help him survive. Their own three-prong approach to breaking down a man. Or a woman. Even little children, that usually done in front of the parents. The three of them working together, tormenting and torturing, mentally and physically. Marcel had trained his children well, now that they were adults and so eager to earn his respect. He had chosen Jaxy to perform the psychological torment. The first act in their triumvirate of horror. She was hard at it right now. Trying to break down his mind and all rational thought processes, very slowly and thoroughly, with all sorts of horrendous techniques, meant to terrify and degrade. Sometimes to lessen her monotony, she would get to come in and use her sap and the sexual pleasure that brought to her.