by Linda Ladd
A few minutes later, Max came back out, not looking particularly chipper. “Go on in,” he told Claire. “But if you try anything, if you get smart with my father, I will kill you in the worst way I can think of.”
Yeah, and he could probably think of some pretty awful stuff, too. He had definitely ratcheted up the threat now, from locked up in a metal trunk to outright loss of life and limb. The expression on his tanned and utterly somber visage said she had better believe him, too. And she did, at least she would until she got a chance to flee for her life after she got inside that room. Then she was going to take it. Hell, yeah.
So the heavy door was pulled opened for her, and she was shoved unceremoniously inside. The portal closed behind her with a click of finality. She stood right there in the threshold and scoped out the long, narrow room. All four walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. No books. Must not be Max’s favorite place. No windows, either, and no other doors. Max didn’t have to worry about her escaping. There was not a chance in hell she could get out of that room.
There was, however, sitting at the very far end, which was probably a good forty feet away, a long desk made out of heavy dark wood. A man sat there, waiting for her, no doubt. Two extra tall gold lamps were lit, positioned an equal distance on each side of him. The illumination they threw out was the only light inside the big room. Shadows hugged the walls and made everything look downright forebidding and creepy. Like in a horror movie or in a penny dreadful. She was in a horror movie all right; it just hadn’t been filmed yet.
“Please, Ms. Morgan, come along now. I don’t bite.”
Yeah, I bet, Claire thought. She’d been literally bitten before by homicidal maniacs. And he was definitely one of the highest calibers of nutzoid. Especially if he had sired that crazy psycho bitch with the pink sap and her brother of minus zero empathy and/or humanity. She recognized him right off, of course. He looked exactly like his photo. Marcel Soquet himself, the monster father of monster children. She stared down the room at him and then glanced around, wondering about trapdoors in the floor under the rug that plunged one down into shark pools or spiked pits. The whole scene reminded her of the early James Bond movies that Black loved so much, with maybe that guy, Goldfinger, sitting down there waiting while he stroked his fluffy white cat who looked so bored. But this wasn’t a Bond villain, this was real. This was Marcel Soquet, more villainous than all of them combined, and Claire was pretty damn sure he was much worse than anybody 007 had ever had to face. He probably wasn’t delighted to have her as a guest, either, unless she was a soon-to-be-dead guest.
“Come now, don’t be ridiculous. My problem isn’t with you, Ms. Morgan. It’s with Nicholas Black and him alone.”
“A problem with Nicholas Black makes it a problem with me,” Claire said angrily.
“So I’ve heard.” The man smiled and creaked back and forth a bit in his old leather chair. “Truly I have no wish to harm you. Come sit down, here in front of me, so that I may see you better. I won’t touch you or molest you. I just want to talk to you.”
Right, thought Claire. Sure he did. As he tied her to a stake on top of a pile of straw and lit the match. But she would have to play his game. Maybe he was weaker from heart problems than she had envisioned. Maybe he was a polite criminal who minded his Ps and Qs. Maybe he was so gentlemanly and off his game that she could subdue him without a weapon. Maybe she could talk him out of killing Black. She knew none of that was anywhere close to the realm of possibility, but she wished it was.
So she walked slowly down the long rug centered on the floor, another very ancient-looking red and gold Persian carpet. She glanced from side to side as she moved along. Yes, she expected a trick. But he was the one who was going to get ambushed, and not too long from now, if Black’s team was as good as purported and ever had the decency to show up.
“Please sit down, my dear. Would you like a drink? I’m having brandy. It’s very good.”
Claire stared at him and the brandy snifter he was holding in his open palm with his fingers cupping the bowl. He kept swirling the brandy. Mr. Suave and Polite Country Gent impressing his new prisoner, schmoozing and shooting the bull before all the inhuman torture techniques commenced. Up close, he looked a lot like Max. Once big but now shrunken down some with age. His hair had been white, but was gone now. The heavy white beard made him look like a skinny, bald Santa Claus. But he was dressed in a black cardigan sweater and blue dress shirt. He was still swirling his booze. The remnant of a cigar lay smoking in a brass ashtray. She sat down right in front of him. Said nothing.
“Don’t look so wary. You are my guest here. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Better tell that to that girl with the pink sap. She’s your daughter, right?”
“Oh, yes, Jacinda is quite high strung. But she will do as she is told. Not to worry.”
“Right. Has she been told to abuse a helpless little boy? You okay with that?”
“She likes him. Treats him like you treat your little Jules Verne, I’d wager.”
Jules Verne was Claire’s white toy poodle, the one Black had given her for Christmas once upon a time, not long after they’d met. If Soquet knew about their beloved little dog, he knew a helluva lot about them and their life together. Oh, yeah, he’d been planning this for years all right, and that was for damn sure. His obsession with Black had driven his life for the last ten years, and it was finally coming to fruition. That was not a good thing. Nothing she’d seen thus far had been a good thing.
“So you are Mr. Soquet the Elder, I take it?”
“I am he, but please, call me Marcel.”
“No thanks. Hey, but I know what—why don’t you take me down to your dungeon and let me see how much you’ve tortured Black? Then even better, let Black and I go along our merry way. You know, alive and well.”
“Alas, my dear, he is only getting what he deserves.”
“And he deserves to be kidnapped and tortured? So tell me. Why is that?”
Marcel took a sip of his very swirled-up brandy. “I believe you know the reason. He corrupted my beautiful Lorraine, and she was murdered because of it. Murdered in the most horrible way imaginable.”
“Yeah, I heard about your doctored version of her death. I also heard the truth, which is that you supply weapons to terrorists and she didn’t want to look the other way. Black didn’t kill her. You drove her away with your criminal dealings with terrorists and then you finished her off with your very own homemade bomb. You killed your wife, not Black.”
Okay, now that made Soquet hot under the collar, no doubt about it. His paler-than-the-moon face grew ruddier, blood red to be exact, and his breathing heated up to labored. He had heart trouble. Maybe he was having a coronary. That would solve some serious problems of the moment. He took a long drink of the brandy and took a moment to calm himself considerably before he spoke again. “I hope you’ll be comfortable during your stay here. It won’t last long. You may go now. Max will show you to your room. You should try to get some sleep.”
“I want to know where Black is and if he’s all right. You wanted me here, and here I am. Tell me if he’s okay. You promised to show me that he was still alive.”
Behind them a door opened and Max appeared and strode quickly toward them. Apparently, Soquet had a button under his desk. Or some very strong familial ESP. “Take her to her room, Max. She tires me.”
“Yes, sir.”
So off she was taken again, but she began to feel more comfortable with the situation. They were being rather gracious in a here-darlin’-enjoy-your-last-meal sort of way. She had been introduced to the entire family now, and knew who to shoot when she got the first chance. But getting out of their clutches and finding Black was now at the top of her priority list.
They walked up a very serious amount of steps, three flights of them, in fact. Wide, stone, cold-under-your-feet stairs, despite the sultry night and her high-top Nikes. On the third floor, they turned down a rabbit w
arren of dim corridors and ended up at a room with a very prominent door with two guards standing outside. Max didn’t say a word, just opened the door, put his palm in the middle of her back and shoved her inside. She heard the key rattle in the lock behind her.
The room before her lay in total darkness, and she was a little afraid to see what was inside. She listened, didn’t hear any feral growling, a.k.a Zeus the devil dog ready to attack, so she felt along the wall for the light switch. Her fingers finally touched one, and she flipped it on. The overhead brass chandelier flared, but the three lamps did not. The room was cool, and it felt like the air-conditioning was turned on full blast, but it might be the thick stone walls insulating it from the outside summer heat. Comfortably furnished, it had a large white four-poster bed sitting against one wall with pale blue coverlets and carved newel posts but no canopy, a small red velvet settee at the foot of the bed, a two-drawer bedside table in the same white French provincial as the bedstead, and another matching table beside the door.
Ornate wood panels decorated the stone walls and there were more empty bookcases similar to the ones in Marcel Soquet’s study, or his murder lair, or whatever the hell he did in there. Max probably had all the good books and best-sellers in his room. She immediately searched for cameras and found one in the corner opposite the big white bed. It was blinking red so she moved up close and gave it a smart-ass wave, and then she sauntered her way around the room looking for a way out. There was another door and she went inside, but it was only a tiny bathroom with a sink, toilet, and small recessed mirror. It looked as if it had once been a closet or storeroom.
Claire headed to the window next. It was draped with heavy blue blackout drapes, so she thrust them back, tried the handles on the tall French window, and got a jolt of hope when she found it unlatched. She opened it quickly and discovered a Juliet balcony of sorts, one with an iron rail that reached to her waist. The fresh sea winds blasted her in the face and sent the curtains billowing inward around her, but it was a way out. The sea sounded very close, loud and ferocious. She leaned against the railing and looked down, straight down a vertical stone wall to the sheer cliff on which the castle or chateau, or whatever the hell it was, was perched, and then down, down farther into a boiling, crashing, maelstrom of waves roaring in and attacking the rocky coast below. Claire’s heart fell because then she knew for sure that there was no other way out of that room. She was as much their prisoner now as Black was.
Killing Black
Black’s head was pounding mercilessly, booming from the inside out, vibrating like he was inside a kettledrum. It had been a while since Jaxy had fed him the drug, and he felt as if he had come down a little from the initial and overpowering effects of the lysergic acid diethylamide. Now he was so thirsty that he couldn’t even force down a swallow. He heard the television set come on and opened his eyes and was thankful that he was alone inside the room. It was dark except from the flashing lights on the TV screens. A picture came up in front of him, all the screens lit up with the huge image, and he tried to focus his eyes. They were showing him a bedroom. The camera was set fairly high, but he could see the white four-poster bed and the red love seat beside the footboard. It was all very elaborate, like a bedchamber in a plush Victorian mansion. He couldn’t see the rest of the room, but on the other side of the bed, he could see an opening that looked as if it led into an adjoining bath or something. The room was empty.
Black shut his eyes again. He was so damn tired of trying to control his mind, his thoughts now so whacked out and scattered all over the place, but he had to try to keep pulling it together. He had to. He dug deeply into his subconscious, stayed there as long as he could, trying to come to terms with the mental anguish he was feeling. The total lack of control over himself. It was a terrible feeling. The feeling of sliding slowly, slowly down into a morass of dark confusion.
Then he heard a sound from the television screen, and he looked at it again. There was a man in the picture now, and he had a suitcase with him. He laid it on one end of the canopy bed and opened the lid, and then he stepped back and looked up at the camera, apparently so Black could see what was inside it. Black knew at once that it was a bomb. He could tell that much. He also could tell that it was a small pipe bomb, designed to destroy a small area, and one forceful enough to demolish that entire bedroom, no doubt about it.
The man made a big show of setting the timer. He held up a cell phone, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, which Black knew was probably going to act as the detonator. Then the bomber set the clock on the explosive device to start ticking down, opened a deep drawer in the bedside table, carefully placed the bomb inside, and then locked the drawer. After that, he walked out of camera range and the room was empty again. Up in the corner of the big screen in front of Black, however, a digital clock had appeared, ticking down the minutes to detonation in large and blinking yellow lights. Four hours and counting.
Black knew that was just another form of torture, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it meant. Maybe they were going to take him there. Strap him down on the bed and blow him up. That sounded like something Marcel would do. He kept trying to clear his head, think straight, and it finally began to work. He began to remember everything, and he struggled hard against the leather straps but wasn’t strong enough to pull them loose. The clock kept ticking, on and on, every second on display, and it worked just as Marcel had intended. Black grew nervous, not knowing what was going to happen. But that’s what they wanted and why they’d done it. To make him worried and stressed out. More psychological tactics to drive him crazy.
When he heard somebody outside the door, he tensed up again. He watched the door open, and then Jaxy walked in. There was a man with her this time, the same bearded guy who Black had watched set up the bomb. He stood by the door with a shotgun trained on Black. Jaxy walked over to Black, and the first thing she did was lean down and give him a long, disgusting, wet kiss on his mouth. He tried to turn his face away, but she held his jaw very tightly between her palms. She was strong for a woman, and he was tired, exhausted with tension and sleep deprivation and weakened from no food or water.
“Hello again, sweetie. I might just fall in love with you if I didn’t hate your guts so much.” She grinned down at him, and Black stared back at her, not even trying to hide the hatred in his eyes. He said nothing, because he knew she wanted him to talk, to beg, to give in to despair when confronted by whatever depravity she had in store for him this time.
“Guess what, honey lamb? It’s time for some more sugar. You had so much fun last time that we’re gonna give you some every day. A lot of it. Don’t thank me now, wait until later. No, I insist.”
Black watched her take several more sugar cubes out of her pocket. She held them up so he could see. This time there were four, colored an even deeper shade of pink, almost a coral hue. She kept smiling, smiling, and smiling. Evil emanated from her pores like rank perspiration.
“Okay, here we go. All ready now?”
Jaxy forced the drugs into his mouth again. The sugar dissolved quickly. “This little trip is going to be lots of fun. You are going to get really, really happy. We’ve got to get you used to LSD, darlin’. And then we’ll have fun with the other stuff. One of these days, we’ll give you shot after shot until you climb so damn high that you won’t even know your own name. But no worries, we know when to stop. We wouldn’t want you to overdose and ruin our future fun. No, we cannot have that.”
Black struggled to jerk away, to free himself, but he couldn’t move his arms. Couldn’t move anything. He had treated patients for all kinds of drug addiction, and he knew that these heavy amounts of LSD would not addict him, but it would distort his reality in ways he could not even imagine. He was already half-confused about the time and the truth, groggy and dizzy, and LSD would linger in his system for a long time. He would get very high and see things in a twisted way and become completely incoherent and then he would ride out a long and harrowing
bad acid trip from hell. He couldn’t fight it, no matter how hard he tried. The colors began to change first, appearing to flow in toward him like an ocean wave, but brighter and more colorful, glowing and warm and shimmering, moving in all around him like a current around a rock, tossing him up and down and streaming past. Beautiful auras pulsated around the woman standing in front of him after a while and around everything else in the room.
It was Jaxy Soquet, he realized blearily, and she was glowing and shimmering and pulsating. All the different colors melted together, up in the air around him, swirling in and out and over and under, and he watched the magnificent visual show, awestruck, thinking it was the most beautiful thing that he’d ever seen. He was mesmerized, haunted with the need to get up and blend himself into the different hues, to melt into the swirling shades and dance and dip and bob with the bright lights inside his head.
Then he caught sight of the flat screen again, the big one that stretched the length of the wall in front of him, and somehow through his daze of lilting dreams and dazzling lights and colors, he knew that it still showed the room with the white four-poster bed. Now, the bed was quivering and jumping and melting down until it ran down off the screen and onto the floor in front of him like soft candle wax sliding off a burning taper. He shut his eyes, very disoriented, the dancing lights making his head spin, the room careening around him and inundating with the vivid colors that were alive and breathing and coming for him.
When he tried again to focus, he saw a girl standing in that quavering room with the canopy bed, walking around in the midst of all those melting colors, looking at everything, as if she were searching, and then she seemed to see the camera up high, and she walked up close to it and waved at him. Her face was contorted, jerking around inside red jagged currents, and the yellow chevrons, and the purples and the oranges, swimming with wavy motions, but then he frowned, trying to make the woman’s image stand still.