“Lois, get your ass over here.” James’s command had my attention instantly, though I was reluctant to obey it. It would mean displaying my naked body to Sharkey, and office meetings were going to be a little bit strained after this encounter, to say the least. Actually, strike that comment. Everyone here was ninety-nine percent sure I was going to die, so maybe it didn’t really matter after all. Besides, my boss was rather preoccupied at the minute. A herd of pink elephants could storm through the kitchen and she probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
Getting down on my hands and knees, I slowly crawled over to the pair who were now busily getting naked right in front of my eyes. What new form of torture was this? And why did I suspect this would be the least of my woes this evening?
James pulled his head up for air in order to address me once more. I tried to keep my expression bland, but it wasn’t easy.
“You need to see a demonstration of what Dumortier is likely to try whilst you’re under his roof. So you need to watch and take this all in. If you’re still here at the end of the session, all of this and more will be happening to you, because I’ll need to prep you for it. Whilst I realise that this will be an uncomfortable experience as a voyeur, there were no other female agents available that were prepared to go through this with an audience, and that should tell you something. If you want to walk out at any time, feel free, but that’s where it will all end. You either stay the duration or you go home. Do I make myself clear?”
I nodded. James was scaring me a little, but I guess that had been his plan all along. Sharkey obviously thought I could handle it, else she wouldn’t be here, so whatever it was, it couldn’t be that bad.
“Be a good girl and run to the bathroom, Lois. In the bathroom cabinet you’ll find a black container. Bring it straight back here, and don’t open it. Think you can do that?” James was panting heavily as he said it, and I could see that he was as aroused as she was. It might have been a dark thought, but the need to claw Sharkey’s eyes out was strong. I nodded my head, my eyes purposely glazing over the both of them, although the moans still penetrated my consciousness with the finesse of claw hammers. As long as I didn’t see their faces, I’d be okay. As far as new and inventive forms of torture went, this one was quite impressive, and we’d barely started by all accounts.
“Lois, get moving.” James voice was now ragged and breathless, and Sharkey’s hand was inside his pants. Oh God. Scurrying forward on my hands and knees, I couldn’t get out of the room quickly enough. The walls around me began closing in, and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach.
“You can walk, Lois. You’ll need to be on your feet to reach the cabinet.”
Although I caught his last sentence clearly, I didn’t pay it any heed. My body had turned to jelly, and it would take a moment or two to get it back under control. The bathroom, Lois. You can do this.
Reaching the bathroom cabinet took no more than thirty seconds. I needed more time, but conversely, I didn’t think I could bear to leave them alone for more than a couple of minutes. Would it be worse watching or being left in the dark? Besides, I didn’t have a choice. It was either watch or go home.
Reaching for the bathroom cabinet door with shaking fingers, I located the black plastic container easily. Bar a couple of toothbrushes and some floss, it was all that was in there. Now, did I obey orders, or did I open the box? The temptation to disobey was great. It was probably better to be prepared for what was going to come next, or was it? There was a good chance that even if I opened the box, I’d have no idea of its contents. Hovering with indecision for a moment, in the end I decided to err on the side of caution. If James did have this place rigged out with cameras everywhere, I was going to pay at some point in the near future, and I could take a surprise. Hopefully.
Back on two legs, I raced back through the corridor to make up for my earlier dithering. I needn’t have bothered. When I entered the kitchen once again, the two of them were rolling about on the floor in a state of impressive dishabille. My first thought was to deliver a swift kick into any ribcage I could find, but I contained the impulse. There were bigger things at stake here than a little bout of jealousy.
Moving forward reluctantly, I had to cough several times before I made my presence known.
“Thank you, Lois,” James said, plucking the case out of my hands. His lips were swollen and there was a glazed look in his eyes. If that wasn’t bad enough, Sharkey’s hair was all over the place, and a bright rosy flush crept from her neck upwards. “Sit on the floor over by the dining table, and don’t say a word, no matter what. You might want to remember that anything that happens here in this room will be tame by CB standards, so we’ll have to see if you have the stomach for it.”
“Yes, Sir.” My voice was a whisper. It was all I could manage. I knew something bad was about to happen and I was mentally preparing myself for it. Stumbling backwards, my butt hit the floor in a less than graceful move, but I barely noticed. My eyes were glued to the pair in front of me.
“You needn’t worry about Lois, James. She’s one of the toughest girls we have.”
In response, James wrapped his very large hand around Sharkey’s neck and caressed the hollow of her throat.
“How many times has she been caught and interrogated?”
Sharkey’s hands reached up and fanned her blonde hair out in halo around her head. She appeared to consider his question, but I knew better. She was already trying to work out where this conversation was going in order to be one step ahead. The woman knew exactly how many times I’d been captured, and it wasn’t a hard number to remember.
“Three times was it, Lois?” Sharkey turned her head slowly to look at me, which was probably wise with James’s hands all over her throat. He looked like he wanted to squeeze the life out of her at the moment, and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
In response to her question, I nodded. Three times. It had been three times too many, in my opinion, but you couldn’t win them all.
“And how many times has she been fucked up?” James looked over towards me as he said it, and I realised he wanted both of us to answer the question.
“Just once,” Sharkey said, her eyes flickering back to mine, making sure I hadn’t been telling her fibs all these years in the many debriefings we’d shared.
“Just the once,” I lied, without a blink, tremor, or even the slightest inflection on any of those small three words. Looking straight at James, I almost dared him to challenge me. Thankfully, he didn’t.
“What happened?”
“Oh, I think she got…” Sharkey was cut off before she’d barely begun.
“Shut up. I want Lois to answer.” James pressed against the hollow of her throat in case she was in any doubt as to his seriousness.
Loath to answer, I did so anyway, because I knew this was something James would already have read in my file. “They didn’t feed me, didn’t let me sleep, left me handcuffed to a chair for the whole time, and played about with some waterboarding.”
James nodded, as if satisfied with my response. “Did they drug you?”
“Not to my knowledge, but the last couple of days were hazy.”
“I’ll bet. Well, I have bad news for you. Dumortier likes drugs. If you’re not exceptionally lucky, he’s going to shoot you up with all sorts of things for his own personal amusement, and I’m going to give you a heads up on what you might expect if you decide to play naughty.
“Oh, I fully intend to do everything he tells me to.”
James pressed his lips together and shook his head, then gave Sharkey a filthy look. “You haven’t told her anything.”
Sharkey shrugged. “We need her. There isn’t anyone else, and what’s the point of scaring her off before she has an idea of what she’s in for?”
“Always looking out for your best interests, aren’t you, Elizabeth?”
Flicking the latches of the little black case open, he then raised the lid, and I had to crane my neck in order to see what was
inside it. Swallowing tightly when I saw a box full of vials and needles, I sat back on my heels in shock. It was nothing less than I’d expected, but the thought of witnessing a real life torture session right before my eyes was not a pleasant one.
“You’re going to pump her full of drugs?” My voice was small and far, far away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this.
“Yes. I’m going to pump her full of drugs and then humiliate the shit out of her. You have a problem with that?” James looked at me very carefully.
“Am I allowed to have a problem with that?” It was a rhetorical question.
“You already know the answer to that. Feel free to stop this before it begins, Lois. I’m sure Sharkey will thank you for your kindness later.”
“She won’t, and stop stalling, James.” Sharkey tried to raise her head up, but James pushed her back down again, putting pressure upon her windpipe.
“Shut the fuck up. You’re here for decoration from this moment forth, and you know exactly what you signed up for.” James’s head snapped back to mine, and his eyes bored into my head. “Well?”
“No. I don’t have a problem with that, Sir.” I had to force myself to look at him. This was a side of James that I was not going to like, but I guess that was the point. He was trying to show me what Carte Blanche might have in store for me. It was a valid training session, and I was going to have to sit back, shut up, and take it.
“You will soon enough.” He ran his finger over the selection of glass bottles in front of him, as if deciding what to use first.
“Did you know Dumortier’s nickname is ‘The Chemist?’” James didn’t wait for my reply, because he already knew the answer. Sharkey had deliberately kept me out of the loop. Scrap that. She’d kept me in the dark, down the bottom of a very deep cellar, with a blindfold, earplugs, and my hands tied behind my back for good measure. Elite Encounters was beginning to look like child’s play compared to what CB had in store for me.
“Alain likes to play with minds as much as he plays with bodies, Lois. He’ll knock away all your inhibitions with a single shot, and then manipulate you in any way he sees fit, generally with an entourage in tow. He likes to play to an audience. Can you tolerate being humiliated on a regular basis?” Plucking a syringe from the case, James then chose a vial and carefully pulled it free from its plastic casing before setting it down on the floor. He then grabbed a ziplock bag out of another compartment and took out a sterile wipe. I stared at him in sick fascination. What the hell was he going to do next?
Using the wipe to stroke a wet line across Sharkey’s wrist, he looked at me. “Interrogators, also known as torturers for the purpose of this exercise, have used a wide variety of drugs to get their subjects to sing over the decades. Have you had any experience with them, Lois?”
“No.” It was loud and firm. I was quite proud of myself, considering.
“Then you’ve been pretty lucky so far.” He threw away the wipe and picked up the vial.
“I’m good at what I do, James. There is no ‘luck’ involved.” How this man had the power to annoy me to the point of fury, and in no more than ten words, was almost impressive. I kept a lid on my temper, though. There wasn’t enough space to lose it in this room.
“You can tell me all about luck after you’ve finished your next assignment, Lois, because you’ll need to be the luckiest woman alive in order to do what you’re planning and get out alive.” Removing the soft metal cap of the vial, he fished out another wipe to clean the top of the bottle. He then grabbed the syringe and tugged the cap of the needle away with his teeth. Punching the tip of the needle into the top of the vial, he depressed the plunger completely before slowly extracting a few cc’s of clear liquid.
“Well, I guess I’d better give you the whistle-stop tour,” he said, slowly withdrawing the needle from the vial. Unable to tear my gaze away, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear this, but that didn’t concern him in the least.
“There’s Sodium Pentothal, which is a barbiturate, and in light doses it can be used as a truth serum. You’ve got to be careful with that one, though, because if you give your subject too much, you’ll send them to sleep.”
If only , I thought.
“Alain will use that if he feels you’re a bit uptight during ‘play’ sessions. He’s also fond of Sodium Amytal, which will have you squawking out your life history in no time at all, and the particularly nasty Scopolamine. That’s the one you have to watch, by the way. As far as truth serums go, it’s about as good as it gets. One slip of the tongue is all it will take for Dumortier to find out why you’re really under his roof, and when that happens, we might as well forget you ever existed. If that doesn’t scare you, it will also rob you of your own free will, so you will be helpless beneath his hands. You will do anything he says without a moment’s thought. Oh, and one other thing: whatever you do, don’t let any of Alain’s goons administer the drugs. Some are less careful than others, and a relatively tiny overdose of Scopolamine will kill you. So whatever you do, try not to make any enemies in that place.”
James paused after his verbal tirade, as if expecting me to run. I have to say that whilst the idea was tempting, I was made of sterner stuff.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park when I signed up for this, Sir. I’m prepared to take some risks in order to eliminate him.”
At the moment, Dumortier’s death was only thing driving me, and it was a constant fire burning deep within my gut. I would not rest until that man was eliminated from the face of the earth. If he wanted to take me with him, I was prepared for that, too.
“Then you’re an idiot.”
Sharkey decided to pipe up at that point. “James, whose side are you on? You’ve wanted to take out Alain for years. No one to this date has been able to get closer to him than you, and even you couldn’t manage to wrap your hands around his neck. Now that we have a valid chance of ending his life, and a willing participant to do so, can we stop trying to scare her off?” She gave him an indignant look, but he paid her little heed.
“I’m extremely reluctant for anyone to go in there because I have first-hand knowledge of how hard the man is to kill.” James pointed the needle towards the ceiling, tapping the syringe a couple of times to move any air bubbles to the top. He then squirted a tiny arc of liquid out in order to remove them. “I also don’t want her to go in there because he’s a complete and utter conscienceless bastard.”
“That’s the reason I am going in there,” I whispered quietly to myself, but as the room was silent, everyone heard me.
“No, that’s the reason you think you’re going in there. Sharkey’s reasons for sending you in are quite different from what she’s told you. Trust me.”
Sharkey grabbed James’s cheek, stroked it a couple of times, and let his eyes focus on hers. “James, can we get with the plan? Whatever the reasons, Dumortier needs to be put down. Let’s concentrate on that.” She gave him a quick pinch to let him know she meant business.
“Fine.” Though by the tone of his voice, James was anything but fine. “You ready?”
“Yes,” Sharkey said in a very calm tone. There was a sparkle in her eye that made me wonder if she was almost looking forward to what was to come. Surely not? When it was my turn to go under the needle, I didn’t think I’d be wearing a smile upon my face. I had far too many secrets to hide.
Gently pressing the plunger of the syringe, James delivered the drug into Sharkey’s wrist. He then removed the used needle and placed it into a plastic sharps box ready for disposal. At least the man was a professional, if nothing else.
Turning to me once more, James said, “Whilst we’re waiting for that to take effect, I might as well fill you in on a few other drugs that you might have the pleasure of experiencing over at CB.”
I nodded. I’d rather go in forewarned and forearmed. It sounded like I was going to need all the help I could get, so I might as well hear all the gory details.
“I’m listeni
ng,” I whispered.
“Good. Right, the first piece of advice I’m going to give you is never try to escape. Alain feeds off that kind of fear. He’ll also use your disobedience against you. You try to flee, he’ll get you hooked on some kind of recreational drug so you’re virtually beholden to him. If you don’t want to get high on LSD or something even worse, make sure that your loyalty is never in question. After he’s bought you, and he’ll cough up an awful lot of money to do so, he will consider you his ‘property.’ Your free will, for all intents and purposes, disappears the moment you walk through his door. Remember that. You will not be in control, you will be in for one hell of a bumpy ride, and if there’s any chance of getting yourself out alive, you’ll need to be able to think on your feet. If you’re high, that’s going to make things a little more difficult than they need to be, you feel me?”
Oh, I felt him all right. My eyes widened in shock. This was something I hadn’t taken into consideration. Shit, could I deal with this on top of everything else?
“Are you telling me there’s a very real possibility I could be a junkie when I get out of CB?” My jaw hung open yet again, and this time I didn’t even care.
“Not if you keep your wits about you, Lois. Just remember what I’ve said. Right, where was I?”
“LSD,” I said, whilst thinking that my life had gotten particularly surreal these last couple of days. It would be nothing compared to what it was shortly going to get, so I guessed I’d better buckle up and settle in for the ride.
“Ahh, yes, LSD. Well, next I’d better give Amphetamines a quick mention. An encounter with those beasties will have you spilling your guts out, whilst your heart tries to escape out of your chest. You’d confess to death penalty execution without a second thought with some of that shit in your system. You’ll be dealing with twitching limbs, severe restlessness, inability to sleep, blurred vision, and perhaps the odd tic. They’re just the nice side effects, by the way. Alain’s also been known to give traitors the ‘Twilight Zone’ treatment. That’s when one of your arms is full of amphetamines, and the other has been shot up with barbiturates. You’re stuck in a constant dream world and there is no escape. Take it from me, that one’s not at all pleasant.” Looking down at Sharkey, he raised her eyelids fully and examined her right, and then her left eye. “Pupils are dilating. This is good. Okay, the other two worth mentioning are Versed, which will give no relief from pain during a torture session, but it will wipe all your memories of the encounter afterwards. The obvious risk is that if you do spill the beans, you won’t remember. You cannot dance with that one and expect to live, so be a good girl and do what you’re told. Chlorpromazine is another one you should know about, because if you’ve been naughty, he’ll threaten to pump you full of the stuff. Side effects range greatly from the mild to the severe, but you might experience bouts of fainting, seizures, nausea, mental confusion, and anxiety. Have I scared you enough this evening?”
Sparks (A Special Agent Novel Book 1) Page 23