Off the Edge (The Associates)

by Crane, Carolyn

  “That’s why I’m going back in,” Macmillan said. “I can review the files and make copies. All these dealers’ faces and voices—it’s a gold mine. Send me in with one of those thumbdrives,” Macmillan said. “One of your thumbdrives with that Linux compression program.”

  Fedor was already at his laptop. He tapped a few keys. “Got it. I’ve made some tweaks—I think you’ll be pleased. It’ll still take time.”

  “Do we still have an Associate in the kitchen?” Macmillan asked.

  “Dishwasher,” Douglas said. “But she’s only on at night.”

  “The night guards drink coffee,” Macmillan said. “It comes from the kitchen. We need her to dope it up enough to put them to sleep. You think she can do that?”

  “Count on it,” Douglas inspected Macmillan’s ankle. “The guards will be out cold tomorrow night. We’ll see about the day guards. What’s all this goop?”

  “Anti-bacterial hand lotion.”

  Douglas sniffed. “The Shinsurins rough you up and put lotion on your ankles? What the hell is that?”

  “It was Laney who put it on.”

  Rio raised his eyebrows. “So you got past the emotionally manipulative songs.”

  Macmillan gave him a warning look.

  Rio smiled. “How far past?”

  “None of your business,” Macmillan said.

  “But Macmillan, you always kiss and tell.” Rio rolled up the cuff of his silky lavender shirt. “We live for your escapades.”

  It was true. Macmillan usually made wry little stories out of his sexual encounters. Not so with Laney.

  “Did she show you her cookbook full of wishes?” Rio asked.

  “That’s enough,” Macmillan growled.

  Rio raised his hands. “Sorry. You haven’t bothered to keep the details to yourself for ten years.”

  “I’m bothering now.”

  Rio grabbed the rubbing alcohol and some cotton.

  “Not too much,” Douglas said. “He can’t go back down there smelling like a pharmacy.”

  Rio’s eye darkened with concern. “He shouldn’t go back in there at all. We have a way in and out now. Let’s use it.”

  “We can’t,” Douglas said. “If Macmillan escapes, it could spook Jazzman and the Shinsurins. They could shut down the recording or even move the auction. They don’t know what he is right now—let’s keep it that way.” Douglas stuck a needle in Macmillan’s arm. “You’ll feel like hell for a while. At least you’ll be resting down there. Somebody get water. You’d better be up to date with tetanus.”

  Fedor the rogue smiled one of his rare, blue-eyed smiles that seemed to cancel all the scariness in him. Most Associates preferred to work with him in jungle warfare circumstances only.

  “What?” Macmillan asked.

  “I have news,” Fedor said. “I’ve identified the biometric security package on the TZ. They’re using voiceprinting.”

  “What? Voice is a joke.”

  “It’s next generation voiceprinting,” Fedor said. “I’ll send you the docs. It works on ratios of frequencies and ratios of the voice’s volume—something like that. Over time spans of milliseconds.”

  Macmillan smiled. “So they worked out the kinks.”

  “Can you beat it?”

  “With the right tools and the right sample.” He let himself relax for the first time in what felt like days as Fedor ran down the details. If Macmillan could get a decent recording of Jazzman’s voice, he could override the weapon’s controls. Surely he could get Jazzman’s voice from the hotel recordings.

  It was all coming together.

  Fedor gave him the thumb drive. “You have somewhere to hide this?”

  “Yup.” Macmillan pocketed it. “I have 12 minutes to get back. Anything else?”

  “A nerve center for recordings. In the basement,” Rio said. “It is convenient.”

  Douglas dabbed something onto Macmillan’s eyebrow, frowning. “Your Maxwell persona would get stitches for this. He would have the best of medical care. A scar here could erode your cover.”

  Macmillan thought about his Peter Maxwell cover eroding. What if it was blown completely? He’d have to rest. He imagined himself in a little cabin somewhere, fussing with phonemes on a sunny porch. Putzing around in a garden. But no, that’s not how it would go. If his Maxwell cover was blown, he’d have to stop playing him.

  The thought saddened him.

  “You go cool your heels,” Douglas said. “Tomorrow night the guards will be drugged. We’ll send word if you have a window sooner than that. I need to call Dax.” He stuffed in his earpiece.

  Fedor pulled a long, thin blade out of his boot. “I’m not here.” He tossed it across the room and it stuck onto a dart board that bristled with thin blades, like a cactus with all the needles clustered at the center.

  Macmillan stood. “One last thing. Laney has an ex named Rolly. Short for Roland, I’d imagine. Sounds like he’s doing time in a Federal Correctional Complex in Arkansas. I want his file. I have to go.”

  “I’ll check him out,” Rio said. “We got your back on this.” Macmillan nodded. Rio always had his back.

  Fedor threw another knife. “Jazzman is going down.”

  Seven minutes later, Macmillan was back in his lonely cage. It was five in the morning. The guard shift would likely switch around six.

  He curled up on his side with one cheek cooling on the concrete floor, wondering what Laney was doing. Packing, hopefully. If she thought Rolly’s men were coming, she needed to trust that. It was good that she was leaving.

  What’s more, the Jazzman affair could get bloody.

  He’d get some sleep over the daylight hours. Once things quieted down, maybe after midnight, he’d get to the recording console and figure out if Jazzman had arrived. He’d endure anything to identify Jazzman and stop the auction. To save people from dying senseless, fiery deaths. To stop the pain.

  His sleep was full of tortured dreams of trying to save his mom and dad and sister and Gwen. She’d lit up his world with her green eyes and red hightops and somber paintings. He’d loved her with a passion that sometimes bewildered him.

  He was back in that dark, smoky jungle, holding that clump of scalp and hair with the barrette still attached. Finding the stripes pattern of his mother’s polyester slacks melted onto skin. He’d recognized them all by bits.

  Suddenly he was back pulling the hand from the wreckage, thinking it was attached to a body, but it came too easily. It was burnt near the thumb, wrist stained with dried blood, tendons hanging down like wet yarn. He’d had the impulse to throw it in horror, but he couldn’t. It weighed as much as a tennis shoe. He couldn’t get over that, somehow.

  Another man tried to take the hand from him. “Señor,” the man had whispered, easing the hand from Macmillan’s grip. “Señor. Por favor.”

  It was too late; the hand had seared into his soul.

  Later, he dreamed of a smooth weight on his cheekbone, crushing his skull.

  He tried to shake it off, but the weight only pressed harder. It was as if he was trapped under something. He dreamt he was under the twisted metal of the train car, and there were hands everywhere.

  He tried again to move his head. The weight moved with him, alive. It rolled his head under it.

  That’s when he awoke. He kept his eyes closed but he was awake.

  The sensation was real. It was a boot. On his head.

  He hoped he hadn’t been struggling too much; it didn’t do to betray fear or confusion. Slowly he opened his eyes.

  Dok removed his boot, smiling. He held a briefcase Macmillan didn’t like the looks of.

  “Good morning,” Macmillan said jovially, because Dok would want him scared. Dok was that kind of man.

  Dok said nothing in reply. That was protocol; take all the control away. He simply set the case in the corner, well beyond Macmillan’s reach, and opened it. Lots of metal in there. Knives. Syringes.

  “I’m afraid you’ve gotten my
room service order mixed up, my good fellow,” Macmillan said. “I ordered the stir fry with prawns.”

  Three daytime guards entered the cell, one bearing a chair, the other ropes. They set the chair near him and muscled him in roughly, even though Macmillan didn’t put up a fight. Macmillan just let it happen. Dok had the physical control, but Macmillan had the psychological control. He had language.

  Still, it was hardly fortuitous that the crazy brother had shown up. Where were Niwat and Jao Shinsurin? Dok had been the most violent when they’d first put him down there; if Niwat and Jao hadn’t intervened, Dok would’ve injured him quite gravely.

  So why send Dok? Unless they hadn’t sent him.

  “Not to insult the chef,” Macmillan continued, eyeing the case, “But this doesn’t look half as delicious.”

  The guards tightened the knots and slipped nervously away.

  Dok put on a set of brass knuckles. Then, quite unceremoniously, he bashed Macmillan on the side of the head. Pain cracked through Macmillan’s skull and lights danced in his line of vision.

  “Why did you want the recording of the show?” Dok demanded. “Why are you really here?”

  And so it began.

  One of Macmillan’s tricks with torture and pain was to tell himself that it had already happened, that it was already reality, that nothing could be done that hadn’t already happened. It made things easier.

  And in truth, everything had happened to Macmillan already. He’d died back on that train in every way that mattered.

  Dok pulled off Macmillan’s shoes, then grabbed one of the small toes. He had pliers. Unceremoniously, Dok ripped off the toenail. Pain flared hot from his foot to his brain. Macmillan kept his face neutral all through it. Sometimes pain was his friend because it shoved something new into his mind, blotting out the image of the hand. The ubiquitous hand, connected to nothing.

  Dok worked a thin blade under Macmillan’s other large toenail. Too much pain now. Things were getting bloody.

  Dok watched his eyes.

  Macmillan employed the yogic breathing he’d learned during the wilderness training Dax had sent him to after the bombing. Those months of training in martial arts, weapons, and mental control had been painful and punishing and so wildly irresponsible, it had nearly destroyed him.

  And it had saved his life. Dax and the Association had saved his life.

  “Did somebody send you?” Dok demanded.

  “No, I happened on your establishment myself, though I must say, I hope you’re sterilizing your instruments. I’ve heard of too many pedicure and manicure places with unsafe practices.”

  An angry tendon jumped on Dok’s neck.

  “And I can’t say I’m sold on the red. Haven’t you heard? Pastels are back in this season.”

  Dok kept on. Question after question. Macmillan concentrated on the words, and when that stopped working, he focused on the sounds, the way Dok manipulated air flow and air pressure and resonance to produce different sounds, larynx to lips.

  Macmillan felt his resistance thinning, though. He could give Dok a story for temporary relief, but it was a bad precedent to set. The questioning continued. Macmillan reminded himself that sounds were nothing but physics and biology. Pain was messages in the brain. Nothing meant anything.

  And deep down, Macmillan was with Laney.

  He relived the way she had come to him in the night like a kind of angel. Oh, she definitely was the type of girl Peter would’ve fallen for; Peter had always been such a sucker for a poet with a rebel streak. He pictured the care in her eyes as she touched his wounds. He felt back to the way she’d pressed against him as they’d made love. All those years of empty sex, and there she was, a defiant miracle. She’d accused him of being a dragon guarding his own damn pile of rubble. You’re so full of shit, Devilwell.

  She’d be aware of both possible meanings for the nickname she’d given him—they didn’t even have to discuss it for him to know that. Devil as a verb, a truncation of bedevil, as in, he devils a person rather well. Or devil and well as nouns forming a compound word: Devilwell, a deep reservoir of darkness best hidden. And then there was the way she’d exploited that come ‘ere once she got a sense of its effect on him. Her up on that bed. Come ‘ere. Comere.

  He groaned aloud when he realized what he was doing—going to a happy place. Such an amateur method of enduring pain.

  So embarrassing.

  “You ready to talk?” Dok demanded.

  “Oh, no, that groan wasn’t for you. I was thinking about something else.”

  Pain bit into his toe as Dok shoved in the blade.

  More yogic breathing. More words.

  Happy places and sunshine and love and all that made you vulnerable; they gave your opponents something to take away. Good Lord, Laney was more dangerous to him than Dok Shinsurin himself. He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Dok growled. He stood over him, holding the blade to Macmillan’s ear now. Macmillan experienced a rush of fear. His ears were his stock in trade. But he couldn’t show it. He wouldn’t.

  “It’s not a matter of funny so much as absurdity.”

  Dok scowled. His English was good, but Macmillan guessed he didn’t have much use for a word like absurd.

  “Never mind, Dok. Funny will do.”

  Dok hit him in the ribs with the metal knuckles. Macmillan realized here that the injuries Dok was giving him wouldn’t be visible beneath clothes.

  So the brothers didn’t know Dok was there. Not a good sign.

  Another blow to the ribs.

  Macmillan went again and again to the feel of her hair against his fingers. He couldn’t stop it now that he’d started. He went back to the way her lips tasted, and how it felt to be cared for by her, to make love to her. Those beautiful eyes, and her gentle touch, like a flower of pain.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Washington, D.C.

  Rolly held his mobile phone so tightly, the tips of his fingers turned white as frost. “Imagine my surprise when your brother told me about the naked man. In Emmaline’s room.” He kept his voice calm. “Were you planning on informing me? Because it seems to me that I may never have found out if it wasn’t for Dok’s email.”

  My brothers could not make him talk. But I will make him sing, Dok had emailed. He will be sorry for being in her room.

  “Of course you would have found out,” Niwat said simply. “We’re holding him for you.”

  “You and your sister were supposed to keep men away from her,” Rolly said. “Yet a man was in her room, naked, so…” He paused there. It was good to let your people fill in the blanks—it strengthened your messages.

  The Shinsurins wouldn’t say what the man was doing there. Emmaline wouldn’t tell, Niwat had informed him. No doubt because they hadn’t asked.

  He’d be relieved not to have to depend on the Shinsurins and their lax Thai attitudes.

  Niwat speculated that the man was possibly a fan. Wanting her music.

  A fan.

  “Do I seem like a fool to you?” Rolly asked. “With this timing? The man was investigating the auction.”

  Niwat protested—worried, no doubt, that Rolly might change venues. Rolly wouldn’t be changing venues, though.

  “Emmaline probably caught something incidental on one of her recordings,” Rolly said. “Or observed something key that she typed into her journal. She’s quite the little observer, as you may have noticed.”

  Niwat had noticed. Well, that was something.

  Rolly had learned only too late that Emmaline had been using her observation skills on him, collecting information for the FBI. He’d rescued her from abject poverty and that was his thanks. Two years he’d sat in that cell because of her. Whenever he thought of her spying on him, fingers of anger would crawl through him and he’d want to thrash something, but he never did. You didn’t want the other prisoners to see you losing control. So he’d just sit there with that cold energy crawling through him.

  “Dok
told me Emmaline was talking about leaving,” Rolly said to Niwat. “I don’t have to tell you how I’ll feel if she’s not there for me when I arrive.”

  Niwat assured him that Emmaline didn’t have a valid passport, and she wouldn’t be able to empty her bank account until Monday. She would not be leaving.

  Good. Rolly arrived late Sunday. Less than two days.

  “Make sure of it.” He hung up. They’d managed to keep her there for two years. He could trust them to keep her until Sunday night.

  Harken had suggested having her killed back when her betrayal with the FBI had come to light. Harken didn’t understand—Emmaline belonged to Rolly. He was the one who found her and polished her up; he needed to be the one to punish her. It had to be him she begged. Every look of fear and every instance of collapse would be for him alone. He needed to personally and thoroughly break her until she would accept anything and everything with gratitude—the kiss, the cock, the fist. He would permeate her every pore, her every breath, her every word. He would possess her so thoroughly this time, there would be no running.

  She might resist him at first, but he’d have a zero-tolerance attitude for that. He’d been too lax the first time; that had been his mistake.

  This time around, he’d start off with shock and awe; at the first sign of resistance, he’d simply grab the hammer, pin her down, and smash out her upper and lower front teeth. Then he’d clamp her jaw shut and fuck her throat.

  A little trick he learned in prison. Nothing broke a person faster than getting their mouth transformed into a 24-hour-a-day-access fuckhole. A psychologist could probably explain why that was, but Rolly just knew it worked, and it would work on Emmaline.

  Later, when Emmaline accepted that compliance was her only option, he’d buy her dental implants. The TZ-5 money could buy her the best in the world. Beautiful new dental implants would be a carrot for her. The carrot and the hammer. Shock and jaw.

  His body clenched as he imagined her spreading her legs for another man. He was glad the man had turned out to be a liar. It was important for her to see that other men would only use her.