Andre held his camera up at shoulder level, watching his viewing screen and moving around to tightly frame the senator’s well-known face with the girls.
“Now the other one,” said Prechter, his face squirming with delight.
Cori’s thicker chestnut hair took longer. She hung her head a little forward, making it easier for Sanchez. Like Brooke, she wept while clumps of her hair fell to the ground. When the senator was done he was sweating profusely, his sky blue tank shirt dark around his arms and chest. Cori’s remaining hair, released of the weight of her long tresses, stuck out in unkempt thatches.
“There,” Sanchez whispered. His eyes were closed, his body swaying. Sweat was pouring off his face despite the sea breeze. “Now can we be done with this monstrous charade?”
“Not quite yet,” said Prechter, his excitement visibly increasing. “It seems a shame to keep all that pretty young girl-flesh covered up in such a beautiful tropical setting. But I suppose that under the circumstances we can’t ask them to remove their tops, now can we? No, I’m quite sure they’ll need some assistance. So, Pete—cut them off.”
Sanchez’s eyes slowly lidded open. “W-what?” The scissors were hanging at his side.
“You heard me.” Prechter pointed at Brooke. “Start with her again. The blond.”
“I can’t…”
“Sure you can. Why did you come on this cruise, anyway? You know why. For the girls, of course! Why else? Good God, man, you’ve been winking and nodding at me for months about going on a weekend boat trip without the wife. Oh, come on now! The swinging-est senator in the Senate isn’t going to turn shy on me all of a sudden, is he?”
“No…but…I just can’t. No.” Sanchez refused but without any conviction behind his words.
“You’ll cut their shirts off, or so help me, I’ll really hurt them. Come on, Petey-Pete, snip-snip! Right up the front.”
The senator looked at his host and whispered. “Richard, you’re insane. Insane…” His voice cracked. I was afraid he was going to keel over at any moment. Maybe that was Prechter’s intention all along. Andre kept moving and filming, occasionally dropping to a knee or even sitting on the ground to get a better angle, but consistently framing the girls with the senator.
“Insane? No, I’m just a man who isn’t afraid to do what he wants.” He reached into his daypack and produced a pair of orange-handled pruning shears with two-inch curved blades and force-multiplying hinges. He squeezed the big grips and the blades snapped open and shut several times, making a grinding metallic clack each time. I’d used shears like these; they could cut through inch-thick branches like butter. Or through fingers...
Prechter approached Cori, who pressed her back against the trunk. She recoiled from him, her face angled away and leaning against Brooke’s shoulder. Tears ran down her face in a continuous stream from her tightly closed eyes. Prechter ran his left hand through the thatchy chopped remains of her hair and placed the open blades on either side of her nose. She had moved her head away from him until her noose was stretched tightly around her neck. At some point she had urinated, turning the legs of her faded capri jeans dark.
My mind flashed back to Sister Katterina’s photos of Marian and the other tortured and mutilated Baghdad girls. This time I wasn’t only going to see pictures, though. I was going to watch it happen just twenty feet away. And then it would be my turn.
Prechter said, “Let’s get on with it, shall we? Snip, snip, Pete.” Behind me Ridley guffawed, while Andre filmed it all.
Sanchez started to do as he was ordered, but then began weeping, the scissor blades held at the bottom of Brooke’s T-shirt.
“Stop that! You stop that unmanly blubbering, or I swear I’ll cut her nose off, right now. Senator, do you really want to test me?”
“Please…,” Sanchez begged.
“No, you please! Right up the front. Snip-snip!”
Sanchez held the bottom of Brooke’s white T-shirt with his left hand and began to cut upward with the oversize scissors. Andre moved in with the camera for a close-up as her white brassiere and cleavage were exposed. The senator con-tinued to cut through the thin cotton fabric above the valley between her breasts, missing her bra.
Prechter yelled, “Oh, no! No-no! Back up and cut it off.”
The senator stared at him, pleading with his eyes. Prechter held his gardening shears just inches away from Cori’s nose and snapped them shut, chopping only air, and the senator flinched. With great care, almost delicacy, Sanchez placed the bottom blade along Brooke’s sternum and worked the scissors up between her breasts, between the white cups of her underwire bra. The blades parted the delicate fabric between the cups without effort. Sanchez lowered his head and closed his eyes.
Prechter said, “Finish the job! All the way up. Snip-snip, Senator!”
****
With a few more cuts Brooke’s T-shirt fell apart and open like an unzipped jacket. She rested her shorn head against Cori’s, her eyes closed, her chest heaving. It was impossible not to glance at her untanned breasts, which clearly was Prechter’s intention in having me tied facing the girls. Tears streamed from Brooke’s face onto her chest. With her hair shorn and her hands cuffed behind her, she could not cover herself in any way. She could not even lean forward, not with her neck tied to the tree.
Prechter stepped back from Cori and said, “Now the brunette. Snip-snip.” He again clacked his pruning shears open and closed for emphasis. I noticed that he was also breathing heavily, his eyes darting between Brooke’s chest and the senator’s scissors.
Cori was not wearing a brassiere beneath her tight turquoise top, and the senator completed his task with just a few clips as she leaned against the tree, her face blank and numb. Both girls were handcuffed behind their backs and held upright by their necks so that their naked breasts were thrust forward. This extreme cruelty was meant to be the last thing I ever saw. The man had indeed thought everything out.
Andre continued filming, ensuring that the senator always shared the viewfinder with the bound and now topless girls. This would be impossible to explain to his Texas constituents. A career-ender if the edited film were ever released onto the internet. No matter what else happened today, the senator would be implicated in something indescribably evil. His own aides would testify that he had deliberately and with obvious forethought eluded them to go on the fateful trip.
It became clear that this was the entire point of the weekend voyage. Blackmail of the very worst kind. This was why Prechter didn’t murder Cori the first night out. She was being saved for this moment, for this “scenario,” as he had termed it. And this was also why Brooke Tierstadt had been kidnapped in Miami Beach, to add to the “fun.” And add to the cinematic possibilities.
Richard Prechter had correctly sized up the senator as a late-middle-age horn dog who would jump at the chance to go on a weekend voyage on the promise of liaisons with beautiful young “research assistants.” No wives, no reporters and no paparazzi, indeed.
Now it was too late for him to extricate himself. No explanation could ever possibly be sufficient to restore his reputation once this got out. He had leapt into the honey trap with both feet, and he would never be able to escape its stain. Even if Senator Sanchez went to the FBI and told them the truth, he’d still be destroyed. The only way to retain his status as a political power broker would be to keep the events of this weekend a secret to his grave.
Which meant that Richard Prechter owned him. Senator Pete Sanchez would be his eager bitch for the rest of his life. And very likely Prechter had hosted this reality show before. The scissors, the pruning shears, the palm trees—hell, Topaz and the entire island—were made for special moments like these.
I wondered how many other politicians he owned. That was real power, having a stable of United States senators in your pocket. One of them might even become president one day. And when Richard Prechter told his captive politicians to jump, they would jump extra high. Unlimited government funding fo
r GORP and Tidal Power Solutions would never be a problem. Neither would legal protection for Richard Prechter, despite any crimes he might commit.
Surprising me, Sanchez spoke up, his voice raspy and on the edge of cracking. “Richard, Richard, I know this is some kind of joke, but it’s gone too far. Okay, you got me, you got me good. Now, let’s go back to the boat and have a few Bloody Marys. We’ll have a good laugh about this later.” His forced smile was a parody of happiness; he was still trembling, caught between fear and a last glimmer of hope. His downcast eyes darted up to Prechter’s face like a whipped dog groveling to his cruel master with pathetic hand licks.
But maybe the senator was right? Maybe it really was all just a colossal bluff, a gag gone much too far, but nothing more. Hope springs eternal for the condemned man as his final hour approaches! Other than the scrapes on Brooke’s face and the bad haircuts, no physical damage had been done. Time would cure the scrapes without leaving a mark; hair would grow out again. That was the slender reed the senator was clinging to.
I knew better. The three of us who were handcuffed and tied to trees by our necks would never be allowed to leave the island alive.
Prechter continued to toy with the senator, a cat releasing a maimed mouse and batting it between paws. He snuggled against Cori, pressing her slender, tanned body to the rough bark. His left hand wormed behind her back and around her waist like a lover’s while she shook with fear. When her face could move no further away, he placed the cutting arc of the pruning shears over her nose again. “You know, Pete, you could be right. Maybe it’s all just a great big joke. And Bloody Marys do sound like a fine idea.”
I gritted my teeth and braced for the sight of Cori’s delicate nose dropping onto the sand. I wondered if Prechter was sick enough to actually drink the blood fountaining from her mutilated face while she screamed in pain and horror. He delayed, prolonging his pleasure by looking at each of us to memorize our faces at that moment of breath-held terror. If Cori fainted or passed out, she would immediately begin to strangle to death. The same could be said of Brooke, her shoulder pressed against Cori’s.
****
Instead, after an agonizing half minute Prechter removed the shears, playfully tousled Cori’s remaining hair like an overly friendly uncle, kissed her tearstained cheek and said, “You’re right, Pete, it was all a joke. You’ve been punked! Got you good, old man—it was all an act. Ha!” Prechter’s glee was authentic; he was enjoying his mind games tremendously.
Sanchez brightened up, color returning to his drained white face in a rush as a broad smile of relief swept over it. “Really? Really? Thank God! But Richard, honestly, this went much too far.”
Andre moved in to film the suddenly joyful senator in front of the two girls, still tied to the tree, still naked from the waist up. The damning scissors were still clutched in his upraised hand. More film that would be impossible to explain. Not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand.
Prechter’s scenario was about more than producing a blackmail film, however. He and his crew were not afraid to capture their crimes on video. They wore no masks; they spoke freely and showed their faces brazenly. Indeed, they were proud of their work on Castigo Cay. They wanted to preserve it. I imagined the kinds of snuff films the Marquis de Sade would have created if he’d had access to modern video technology two centuries earlier.
But I didn’t need to imagine. Prechter and these men were the living heirs of the Marquis. Like de Sade, they were proud of their cruel deviancy. Satisfying their twisted cravings trumped every other human consideration. They were such manifestly evil narcissists that they happily filmed their most depraved adventures, to re-experience the sick pleasure for years to come.
Prechter must have considered these weekends to be the masterpieces of his “art.” If he was ever arrested or killed, the sadistic snuff films would doubtless be released automatically onto the internet, achieving for him a dark immortality that could never be erased.
The choreography of Prechter’s scenario was carefully staged. I could still turn my head just a little, and I looked for the other cast members. Ridley was standing somewhere behind me, unseen, armed with my Ka-bar knife. Andre was prancing around between us all, the gleeful videographer capturing this midsummer day’s nightmare for posterity. The Serb rifleman had wandered fifty yards to my right. I could see him on the higher ground to the south, back up toward Prechter’s under-construction dream house. His carbine was no longer barrel-down along his back, but had been swung up to level in front of him, both hands on it at the ready.
Eddie Medina was standing on the other side of our little palm grove, as far from the girls and me as he could get, near the cliffs plunging into the tidal race between the islands. The senator was standing in front of the girls, still smiling, a spark of optimism now growing to a flame, believing what he wanted to believe.
Prechter said, “You really think it went too far, Pete? Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right.”
“Yes, of course you went too far,” replied Sanchez, clearing his throat and trying to force his voice back into a memory of his senatorial authority. “For God’s sake untie them, Richard, and let’s head back to the boat and drink those Bloody Marys.”
He forced a laugh and it came out shrill and maniacal. Andre filmed him with the bare-breasted girls still bound to the tree behind him. The senator handed the scissors back to Prechter, who dropped them and his pruning shears into his daypack and zipped it closed. Both of the girls watched the disappearance of the cutting tools with wide eyes, their open mouths too dry to cry out. Something like new rays of hope flickered across their eyes.
Prechter said, “Back to the boat? Hmm…let me think about that.” After a long pause, while he looked around at each of his crew and each of his victims, absorbing the rapt attention of his audience, he said, “No, Pete, I don’t think so. Not quite yet.”
He then pointed a finger toward Eddie Medina, who was standing with his back to us, probably trying to block out the reality of what was happening, staying as far from it as possible. Medina’s submachine gun hung at his side from its strap, but his hands were in his pockets. Trying hard not to be there at all, staring across the channel at the north island. Wondering why in the hell he had ever left Brooklyn or the Bronx.
Then Richard Prechter nodded uphill toward my right, and changed the pointing hand into a thumbs-down gesture.
I strained at my neck bindings and saw Milan Vukojebina pulling his carbine up into his shoulder. In a moment a single shot rang out, dividing time into before and after. I looked back to my left where he was aiming and saw Eddie Medina collapse in a heap. A big chunk of the side of his head was gone. He kicked on the ground a few times, like a dog having a dream, and settled into the sand, diminishing like a cut air mattress.
Everyone stared at Medina’s body. Everyone knew at that moment that this was not an elaborate, cruel practical joke. The irrevocable line had been crossed. Blood had been drawn, a life taken in front of eight living witnesses. The senator fell to his knees and clutched his heart with both hands, hyperventilating, gasping like a landed fish.
Prechter said, “Andre, get his gun.”
The cameraman walked the dozen yards and stood over Medina’s corpse, still filming with the camera held near his shoulder. “But it’s all bloody.”
From behind me Ridley mocked him in a falsetto voice. “But it’s all bloody! What, afraid you’ll get a blood stain on your pretty white outfit?”
“You take it if you want it,” replied Andre. “I already have a gun. Anyway, my job is the camera.”
Ridley said, “You call that three-eighty a gun? Maybe for a little old lady it is. Or maybe a cook—a queer Belgian cook.” He laughed loudly. Trevor Ridley carried only a knife on him, obviously a point of pride to show that he didn’t need a firearm today. A little .380 caliber pocket pistol would fit anywhere in the Belgian’s vest. True, it wasn’t much of a gun, but against prisoners handcuffed and tied to palm
trees by their necks, a lot of gun wasn’t a requirement. Certainly not an MP-5 submachine gun.
“Oh, just leave the damn thing for now,” said Prechter. “We can get it later.” Blood soaked into the ground beneath Medina’s head. His weapon was hidden beneath his body.
The senator had curled into the fetal position on the sand between myself and the girls, his hands over his face. Prechter crouched and reached into his pack and pulled out a belt and holstered pistol. My tan nylon rigger’s belt, with my black Bladetech holster holding my Glock pistol. Like Ridley with my Ka-bar knife, Prechter was adding a touch of ironic insult to my already hapless situation. He stood and threaded the belt into his pants and then attached the holster and gun.
Prechter unbuttoned his safari shirt and stuffed it into his pack, then swung the pack over his bare shoulders. It had a camelback drinking tube clipped onto the right strap. The triathlete was ready for an arduous morning. Hydrate or die. He was wearing only khaki shorts and fancy running sandals. Prechter, the marathoner getting ready for the next phase of his scenario. The real show was about to begin. I ignored the sight of my Glock pistol on his waist, unwilling to please him by showing surprise, just as I’d ignored the fact that Ridley was wearing my knife. Of course they were taunting me, and I wouldn’t give them the pleasure of a predictable reaction. Such minuscule victories were all I had left.
Trevor Ridley just had to bring it up, though. “Richard, what are you doing with that piece-of-shit Glock?”
“Oh, this? It belonged to our boy Dan. You know, the famous Marine sniper. I figured I’d give him a chance to take it back. Like his knife. If he wants it, he knows where it is.”
Ridley walked around in front of me, into my view. He unsheathed my familiar knife, with its shaving-sharp seven-inch blade. “Oh, he’s not getting this back. Not until I stick it into him and drop his guts on the ground.”
Castigo Cay Page 47