The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

  Okay. He was not going to shoot her right at that moment, it seemed. Her heart still thudded, her pulse still raced, she was still wired to the max—but she was powering those reactions down.

  Keep your game face on.

  “Look at me.” Yang stopped in front of her. He’d switched to English for her benefit, she realized.

  Lifting her head, she looked at him. All terrified, traumatized Lynette.

  “You will be taken back to the cell. You will try to remember everything you read, everything you heard, everything you saw while you were typing in these documents. We will do a comparison, you and I, between what you remember and what is actually on the flash drive you so kindly brought us, just to make sure there are no inaccuracies. And you will select one of your fellow prisoners. In an hour you will be brought back here, and if I am satisfied with what you have remembered, all will be well. If I am not—” He smiled. It was an expression of such cruelty that Bianca felt a chill. “The person of your choice will be executed. Then we will try again. You will have another hour, make another choice. This can go on all day, until the only one left is you.” He gave a small shrug. “It is time to clean out the filth in the basement anyway. Who knows when inspectors will request to visit?” He clapped his hands, a sudden sharp sound that made her jump and the guards look around. He pointed at two of them. “You. And you. Get her out of here.”

  The guards moved with alacrity, grabbing her painfully by the arms, lifting her shivering, shrinking Lynette self from the floor and taking her away.

  28

  So. She had always wanted to fight a death-defying battle against impossible odds.

  Not.

  But here she was. In the process of having the shackles on her wrists chained to an iron ring in a stone-walled, windowless torture chamber she shared with four weakened, despairing and captive strangers, one of whom she was supposed to single out for death.

  Outside the metal door, twenty armed soldiers lined the hall. One floor above, between her and the only door to the outside that she had seen, lurked an armed, murderous monster and four more armed soldiers. It could be that there were even more armed people on the premises, so the possibility for an unpleasant surprise was there.

  Beyond the building were enough armed guards to keep 20,000 prisoners in check. Plus she knew not how many ten-foot-tall, electrified, barbed wire fences, checkpoints, guard towers, locked gates.

  And the whole of North Korea.

  Her available weapons? The switchblade in her garter belt. Her martial arts skills. Anything she could steal or jury-rig.

  Hmm.

  She was hungry, hurt, increasingly homesick. She couldn’t even begin to allow herself to think about Colin, because there was so much conflicting emotion there that it just took up space inside her that she needed to use for something more immediately productive, like survival. She didn’t have the same close family ties that most people did—she was pretty sure Mason didn’t count—but Evie, Hay, Doc, even Guardian Consulting, all mattered to her. Her life mattered to her. There were so many loose ends, so many things to look forward to, so much she had yet to do.

  The thought of leaving it all behind was unbearable.

  The thought of what might happen to her if she died was even worse. Did genetically enhanced supersoldiers have a shot at the hereafter just like everybody else? She didn’t know, but she did know that she wasn’t yet ready to find out.

  But if she didn’t figure something out, fast, everything could end right here. She could end right here.

  Panic was useless, so she didn’t. Instead, while Lynette, now chained to the wall, huddled shivering on the cold stone floor and the guards left with much noise—stomping feet, groaning door, lock banging into place—Bianca set herself to problem solving.

  And came up with a plan.

  That thing they said about necessity being the mother of invention? Mortal terror apparently worked, too.

  Hashtag: Never say die.

  “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” Irene, having kept to her fetal position against the wall until the guards were gone, scuttled over to touch her shoulder with a tentative hand.

  “I’m fine.” Abandoning her Lynette persona as being of no further use, Bianca sat up. “A man named General Yang is here. He’s the head of the RGB, and he told me to pick out one of you to die. If I don’t remember something well enough to suit him, which I’m betting I won’t, he’ll kill whoever I choose. He also said that it’s time they got rid of the filth in the basement. I’m fairly certain he means to kill us all. Today. And the guards will be back to get started in less than an hour.”

  Irene gasped. “Oh no! No—” She broke off to watch with a combination of fascination and horror as Bianca pulled the guard’s key ring from her pocket. “Where did you get those? What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to escape.” There were other methods she could have used to get out of the shackles—if all else failed, she’d been trained to dislocate her left thumb so she could pull her hand free, and she had her lock pick in her garter belt—but she really was pain averse unless pain was absolutely necessary, and time was of the essence here. Anyway, her pickpocketing skills had allowed her to lift the keys from the guard with a minimum of risk, and the keys would, she hoped, enable her to free not just herself, but Irene and the others, too.

  No man left behind and all that.

  “We—we can’t. No one has ever escaped from Hwasong. They shoot you if you try. And—and—it’s not possible.” Irene’s increasingly agitated whisper faltered as Bianca unlocked her own shackles with two quick twists of one of the keys. Catching the chain so that the metal wouldn’t clang as it hit the stone floor, Bianca set the discarded shackles down and held the key up in front of Irene’s now saucer-sized eyes.

  “They’re going to kill you anyway. Do you want to at least try to get home to your mother or not?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” Irene’s agreement was fervent. As Bianca unlocked the chain that tethered her to the wall, the girl was visibly trembling. “But how? There are many more obstacles than just these chains. We cannot even get out of this room. There are guards. They have guns.”

  At this point, her plan was strictly need to know. And Irene didn’t. None of them did.

  “You’re going to have to trust me. And do exactly what I tell you.”

  Gently, Bianca pulled the choke chain away from Irene’s neck and set it down. Then, as Irene clutched at her raw and bruised flesh, she stood up.

  Irene looked up at her. “But what can you do about the guards?”

  Bianca was already on her way to the wooden cage. “I have a plan, okay? Help me get the others.”

  “What about Stevens?” Irene scrambled to her feet and hurried after her. “Do we just leave him?”

  “He’s dead. Yang had him executed by firing squad. While he and I watched through a window.”

  “Oh no!”

  Suspended from the ceiling, the cage was about three feet off the floor. The kid folded inside was conscious; he looked at her with quick fear as she unlocked and opened the door.

  “I’m here to help you,” she said. “Do you think you can get out of there on your own?”

  “I’m—not sure.” His voice was barely audible, more a breath than a whisper. He had a black eye and a swollen lip and a bruise on his cheek—and that was just the damage she could see. Clearly he’d been beaten, and he was wedged in that cage like a sausage in a casing.

  Irene said, “Tim, we’re going to escape.”

  Tim—that was the kid’s name. The other one, the one watching wide-eyed from the tank of water, was David.

  “How?” Tim asked.

  “I don’t know,” Irene said.

  “Hold it steady,” Bianca instructed Irene, and when the girl grabbed hold of the cage and braced herself, she reached in to catch Tim by the arms and help him wrest himself out.

  The moment he tried to stand, he collapsed.

 
“My legs,” he groaned. Irene made a distressed sound and crouched beside him. Both of them rubbed his legs. Watching them, Bianca was reminded that they’d been in this hellhole for some time together. It looked like they’d gotten close.

  Bianca frowned. “Are they injured? Broken?”

  Tim wasn’t tall—maybe five-nine—and he was emaciated. His clothes—the shredded remains of jeans and a sweatshirt—hung on him. His hair was a dark blond shoulder-length bird’s nest of tangles. He looked to be maybe twenty, twenty-one. His features were sharp, pinched, and where he wasn’t bruised he was pale. She judged that when he wasn’t being brutalized he was a good-looking kid.

  She was really, really hoping they weren’t going to have to carry him.

  “I think they’re asleep,” he said, referring to his legs.

  “Work on that,” Bianca told the pair of them. “And be very quiet.” To Tim she added, “You need to be able to walk.” To Irene she repeated, “He needs to be able to walk. Soon. The guards could come earlier than they said.”

  Her internal clock told her they had about forty minutes left. If the murderous monster stuck to the schedule. It was possible that he wouldn’t.

  Irene looked scared, but nodded. Tim said something to Irene, and as Bianca left them Irene replied. The murmur of their low-voiced conversation—from what she could tell, it pretty much consisted of Irene recounting what Bianca had just told her and Tim exclaiming—followed her as she hurried toward the kid in the water. Getting him out was potentially trickier, depending on how he was secured. One problem was that the tank held a huge amount of water and was relatively close to the door. What she wanted to be careful about was letting any water escape that might creep out into the hall and alert the guards that something was up.

  She turned to take a good look at the door. It was less than three feet wide. Metal, probably iron. Opened outward into the hall. Locked, if she remembered correctly, by an iron bar on the outside.

  The good news was, opening it took some effort and made a lot of noise. The guards weren’t going to sneak up on them.

  The bad news was, the guards didn’t have to. They weren’t going anywhere.

  They were trapped.

  Grabbing the towels from the waterboard platform, Bianca was relieved to see that Tim was up and walking, although he leaned heavily on Irene. Working with careful speed, Bianca stuffed the towels under the thankfully narrow crack at the bottom of the door. Then she reinforced the towels with a tarp that was kept rolled up beside the platform, spreading it out on top of the towels. Presumably it was used to shield someone or something from getting wet during torture. She only hoped that it plus the towels formed enough of a seal.

  “I’m coming,” she reassured David, whose eyes were bright with alarm as he watched the goings-on around him. Well, he had reason. If the guards came before they were ready, the pitched battle that would result might well end in a slaughter—theirs. And situated as he was, he could neither fight nor hide. But water leakage was a concern, and she wanted to delay any chance of it for as long as possible, so David was stuck until she was ready.

  She held up a “one minute” finger to David and crossed to the grate over the manhole in the floor. Unlocking the chain that secured it in place, she lifted the heavy iron cover and looked down at the individual inside.

  He was looking back up at her.

  He’d been huddled on the floor of what proved to be a shallow, concrete-lined pit. Black hair, black eyes, as ragged and skinny as the others and maybe even younger, Bianca saw at a glance. Never taking his eyes off her, he slowly, warily straightened to his full height, which was maybe five-four. That brought him head and shoulders out of the pit.

  Lee, if she remembered his name correctly.

  “What is this?” he asked Irene, who had walked Tim over to the pit. He spoke in what she guessed was his native Korean, although his accent belonged to the North rather than the South.

  Irene replied in Korean. “We are going to escape. Are you coming with us?”

  “Escape is impossible,” he said. To Bianca’s relief he managed to clamber out of the pit on his own. He was dressed in a black shirt and brown trousers, both of which were dirty and torn. He tottered a little as he stood upright, and she understood his legs were wobbly from his ordeal.

  “Why is he here?” Bianca asked Irene in English as she carefully replaced the pit cover, because there was no point in letting anyone know that she was conversant in Korean unless she had to.

  “He is the nephew of Tran An-Kor, one of the Supreme Leader’s top advisers. Lee is being used for leverage over his father, so that his father, who is the brother of Tran An-Kor, is sure to tell everything he knows.”

  Bianca nodded. “See if you two can help Tim climb up onto the pipes, and then get up there yourselves. We all need to be on the pipes, as close to the ceiling as possible.”

  “Why?” Irene and Tim asked in mystified unison, while Lee demanded a translation from Irene.

  “Just do it. I’ll explain in a minute.” Already moving back toward David as she spoke, Bianca listened as Irene, for Lee, translated what had just been said and told him about Stevens, and then as the two of them continued to talk in Korean.

  “Who is she?” Lee asked. “Why should we listen to anything she says?”

  “An American. Her name is Lynette. She came last night. She says she has a plan.”

  “She is a woman.”

  Irene shrugged. “She stole the guard’s keys and freed us all. That is more than any of us could do.”

  “They killed my uncle yesterday, and my cousin,” Lee said. “The guards told me. Today they will kill my father. They will come for me at any time. If this escape does not work, I am dead anyway. So I will take a chance.”

  “I am taking a chance, too,” Irene said, and Lee nodded.

  “What are you two talking about?” Tim demanded of Irene. He was still whispering, but his whisper sounded stronger now.

  Irene translated as she and Lee boosted Tim up onto one of the pipes that crisscrossed the ceiling. Glad to see that it was sturdy enough to bear his weight, Bianca turned her attention to David at last.

  She was acutely aware of the ticking clock.

  As she’d feared, getting him out of the tank involved a lot of water spillage. His hands were cuffed to a ring inside the tank, and despite rolling up her sleeves, she got wet herself getting to them. Once the cuffs were unlocked it was easier. He was able to use his hands and arms and, with her help, managed to pull himself out.

  After he dropped to the ground, David steadied himself against the tank and stood for a moment sucking in air. Water poured off him. Now that he was on his feet she saw that he was about five-eight, bone-thin, and, like Tim, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Both garments were soaked, and he was shivering.

  “None of us even has a gun” was the first thing he said, through chattering teeth.

  “Outside in the hall are twenty armed soldiers.” Bianca crouched to examine the plug at the bottom of the tank. “And that’s just a start. You really think you can shoot your way out of here?”

  He grimaced by way of an answer. “Then what are we going to do?”

  “You’re going to strip down to your underwear and climb up on the pipes.” Pulling the plug out would be easy. The question was “What happens to the water when the guards drain the tank?”

  “It floods the floor. They let us sit in it. Eventually it goes away.” David was stripping off without argument, she was glad to see. Probably he was glad to get out of his sopping, freezing clothes.

  “How long does it take?” She pulled the plug. Water shot out.

  “A couple of days before it’s all gone. Why are you doing that?”

  Good—that meant there wasn’t a drain somewhere she didn’t know about.

  The puddle around the tank started spreading across the floor.

  “I’ll tell you when we’re all up on the pipes.” Straightening, she saw tha
t the other three perched above them like birds on branches. They watched the firehose-worthy stream of water with apparent fascination. She looked at David. “You need a boost?” she asked, and offered her linked hands.

  He looked at her, clearly considering. Then he stepped into her hands and from there managed to jockey himself up beside the others.

  The floor was already awash. Quickly she rolled up her pants, knotted them above the knee to keep them there. Rushing now, splashing through cold, ankle-deep water, Bianca unhooked the cage and set it down because she didn’t want anything besides them attached to the pipes. Then she leaped, grabbed hold and pulled herself up to straddle the large water pipe that fed the tank. Detaching the hose from the faucet, she turned the water on full force.

  The gushing sound alarmed her—the last thing she wanted was for one of the guards to come investigate the sound—but there was nothing she could do about it besides hope that it couldn’t be heard through stone walls and an iron door, or that it wouldn’t be investigated if it was.

  The pipes were sturdy PVC, and formed enough of a canopy to keep them all up near the ceiling. The seal she’d created from the towels and tarp seemed to be working. Between the emptying tank and the pouring faucet, the water reached a depth of about two feet in minutes and was rising fast.

  “What is her plan?” Lee asked in Korean. He sounded alarmed.

  “Lee is asking what is the plan,” Irene said. She, too, sounded uneasy.

  “You going to try to drown them?” David looked down at the swirling, murky water. “Or us?”

  Tim said, “Filling the room up with water isn’t going to keep the guards out, just so you’re aware. The door opens outward, so when they pull it open it will just gush out.”

  “I’m counting on it.” Bianca was busy removing the last of three nails from the ceiling. She looked around at them, Irene and Tim close together, David sitting cross-legged on a pair of pipes, Lee crouched in an elbow section like he was prepared to jump at any minute. It hit her: they were kids. And she was all that stood between them and a horrible death. “All right, here’s the plan. We—”