by James Lear
“Peter Logan. Greg, Craig, nice to meet you.” He had a damp, flabby handshake. “Welcome to the conference.”
“Okay. Where do we get changed?”
“We’ll get to that later.”
“Is the other guy here yet?”
“So, if you just want to come through for some refreshments, we’re having a break at the moment . . .”
“I need a timetable, and I need to see the venue.”
“That’s all in your welcome pack, Greg. Now, why don’t you come through? Everyone’s looking forward to meeting you, Craig.”
Lukas looked like a rabbit in headlights, and followed Logan down the dingy corridor towards the function room. What the hell was this? A boxing match? A sex party? Nothing made sense. The room was big enough for a fight, but the chairs were set out in rows, and on the platform at the front—a raised dais, about twelve feet by six—there were three chairs, a lectern with a microphone, a low coffee table with carafes and glasses, and, behind it all, a screen for presentations.
Not an ideal boxing venue.
“What the fuck,” I muttered to Lukas, as we were led towards a table at the back, where coffee and tea were laid out. “This is weird.”
“Maybe it’ll happen in another room or something.” He stepped towards a crowd of eager, smiling faces and outstretched hands. “Time to do the meet-and-greet.”
I guess Lukas was more used to this than I was; he’d been on the boxing circuit for a few years, he’d tasted success, and you don’t get that without smiling at idiots, talking crap, and kissing ass. Maybe this really was the Investors in Sport Annual Conference. Perhaps all that was required of Lukas was a bit of sparring as window dressing for the fat cats in suits who were putting up the money for his December fight. Vaughan could have arranged this little junket precisely for the reasons he claimed—to raise his boy’s profile with US investors and media before the main event.
Lukas certainly seemed relaxed, chatting with strangers, talking the talk. I was the one on the edge of the group, scowling and ill at ease—but no one was looking at me. It was Lukas they were interested in, the fresh meat from across the ocean.
So why was I armed? And why had there been no security? We’d walked straight into the conference without so much as a patdown. If it was such an innocent event, why had Vaughan felt it necessary to provide me with a weapon and give those instructions about being “responsible for your own security”? What kind of trouble was he expecting?
There must be some clue, if only I could see it. Some false note that would betray the real purpose of this event. But it all looked right: a group of thirty-five, maybe forty middle-aged white men, most of them overweight and badly dressed, speaking in loud voices about money and sport and media access. And they were straight. They weren’t even checking out Lukas’s ass, which was looking particularly round and fuckable in a pair of tight black pants.
Okay, if they’re not queer, they must be members of this extreme right-wing organization that I’ve been hearing so much about. That was more plausible; I always think that being fat, ugly, and straight predisposes you to being a right-wing asshole. Idiots on the left tend to be grungy dickheads with beards, but at least you could fuck ‘em if necessary. This lot wouldn’t provoke a hard-on in a roomful of teenagers. I studied their lapels for badges and insignia; Nazis can’t help flaunting it, even if it’s just some crappy button with a lightning bolt or a cross that looks a tiny bit like a swastika. But there was nothing. It was only their blandness and lack of diversity that made me suspicious.
There was nothing on my phone, nobody approached me, and every time I tried to catch Lukas’s eye he was deep in conversation with another shiny-faced jerk, nodding and smiling like a true pro. He seemed to be basking in the attention. I guess it made a pleasant change to be treated as a talented boxer rather than a piece of meat. I was expecting another phony weigh-in, a forest of sweaty hands groping the front of his shorts, but for once things were exactly as they appeared to be.
I looked around for Peter Logan, our designated contact at the conference, but he was nowhere to be seen. I opened up the welcome pack, assuming that there would at the very least be a timetable of events in there, some clue to what was expected of us, but all it contained was glossy brochures about HomeWay Investments, some flyers for future events, and a pocket-sized guide to sports fixtures in the New York area, fall/ winter edition, already half out of date.
No mention of Craig Lukas, Alan Vaughan, or today’s event.
I glanced through the boxing section of the guide, looking for Lukas’s name in December. Nothing. The whole affair took on an air of unreality. Did everyone know something that I didn’t? What was I doing here? It was like one of those stupid dreams when you’re meant to be going on stage and you haven’t learned your lines. I’ve gone into combat situations with inadequate briefing, but at least there I could rely on firearms and my own two deadly hands. Here I was lost. I had a gun in my pocket, sure, but there was nothing to shoot at. No target, no enemy.
“Okay, gents.” An amplified voice made me jump. Peter Logan was up on the platform, speaking into the microphone. “If we could take our seats, I think we’re ready to resume.”
There was a general rush for seats. Lukas was led straight up to the platform. He seemed to know what was going on. I just had to hang around and make sure no one tried to murder him, I guess. I took a seat at the back. It would have been nice to know what the threat was, if indeed there was one. I might be bored to death by Peter Logan’s endless, drivelling welcome speech. That was the only danger I was in.
Perhaps armed men would swing down from the ceiling and pluck us out of the room into a secret network of tunnels. . .
Perhaps there was a bomb somewhere in the building, and we would be among the victims pulled from the debris. . .
Fuck this, I was falling asleep. The beer I had with Oliver was catching up with me. It didn’t matter. Even if Lukas and I were abducted by aliens, we had tracking devices in our assholes. I thought about how smoothly my finger slid inside him, the hot, wet walls of his pussy . . .
I woke with a start, jolting my head backwards. Logan was still talking. Jesus, it was stuffy in the room. I could hardly breathe. If I slipped out for some air, nobody would notice, would they? Lukas was in no danger.
I slipped out of the room and strolled along the corridor for a while; there was no one around except a chambermaid, not even a cute bellboy that I could push into a broom cupboard for ten minutes.
Better get back to the main event: for all I knew, one of the fat men in suits could have whipped an automatic weapon out of his briefcase and be threatening Alan Vaughan’s Great White Hope. I went back in. No: they were still enjoying the sound of their own voices. We seemed to be on some kind of question and answer session, with most of the questions being directed to Craig. What was the boxing world like in the UK? How did he feel his style of fighting would go down in the US? What were his ambitions, and how far did he think he could go? He gave the usual boxer-type answers, bragging enough to sound confident, talking crap about technique and the psychology of boxing. As far as I’m concerned, the only psychology that matters is terrorizing your opponent with the sheer force of your fists. Everything else is show business.
I remembered some of the guys I’d trained over the years—the marines and other forces who came to learn the art of unarmed combat. I remembered young bodies, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, pinned to the mat with my elbow on their throat, I remembered the smell of sweat, the slippery, smooth skin, the look on their face when they realized that Dan Stagg, the killer, the tough guy, wanted to stick his cock up their tight little asses . . .
I was drifting off again, staring at the ceiling, when I heard something. A noise that instantly set all my senses on high alert. Quite close, perhaps not in this room but nearby. The click of a safety catch being removed.
I stood up quickly, pushing my chair back. People in the seats in front of
me looked around in surprise, whispering to each other, frowning at me as if I was crazy. Someone actually shushed me—as if I was talking at a movie theatre. But I wasn’t imagining this. I knew what I’d heard.
“Is there a problem, sir?” asked Logan from the stage.
I said nothing, just walked quickly up the aisle to be close to Lukas. From the raised platform I scanned the room. Nothing. The sound must have come from beyond the doors. Could I have been mistaken? Could it have been one of the housemaid’s trolleys, or the sound of a distant door clicking shut?
No. You don’t spend twenty years in and out of combat zones without developing a sixth sense about these things. Someone had a gun.
“Greg, what the . . .”
“We’re leaving.”
“Sir, I would ask you to sit down.”
“Shut the fuck up, Logan.” He gaped like a goldfish, and gripped the sides of the lectern. “Lukas. Now.”
I took him by the upper arm and started leading him away, but just as I stepped down there was a weird, strangled scream from behind me. I turned to see Logan, his face red and distorted, grabbing Lukas from behind, his forearm around his throat. Lukas was caught off guard, and staggered back, knocking Logan over. Three or four guys in the front row jumped up on to the stage, pushing me, kicking Lukas, even stamping on his hands. Madness had broken loose. What was this? A sabotage mission by a rival promoter? Lure Lukas in and then render him unable to fight?
“Stand back,” I shouted, and drew my gun. They froze. And as I pulled Lukas to his feet, the doors at the back of the room burst open. Three police officers in bulletproof vests, with weapons pointed towards me. I let go of Lukas’s hand. He ran to the side of the room with Logan and a couple of others—they were not attacking him now, they just stood and watched.
“Drop your weapon,” said one of the officers.
There were three of them, and only one of me, and I had no desire to spend the rest of my life in prison for shooting a cop, and so I lowered my gun. I was about to throw it on to the floor when I heard a hiss behind me, and was just in the act of turning when something hit me very hard on the back of the head.
I remember falling to my knees, and that was all.
I woke up in a prison cell. A small, square room, about eight feet by eight feet, with a single bed, a basin, and a bucket. White walls and ceiling, gray floor, one fluorescent tube overhead. A metal door with a small barred opening.
I was dressed in the clothes I was wearing before, but my pockets were empty. No wallet, no ID, no cell phone.
I felt the back of my head. There was an egg-sized lump there, and a thick clump of dried blood. I’ve been knocked cold plenty of times. I know what it feels like. This was something different. The pain was there, the nausea, but there was something else, a sense of detachment, numbness, floating.
I’d felt it before. Most recently, when I came around from surgery at the Navy Med.
I’d been under anesthetic.
Shit! What have they done to me? I stuck my hands down my pants and checked. Yes, it was all still there, thank God. Nothing had been removed. I felt my limbs, my stomach, my face. All normal. My asshole didn’t hurt. Nothing had been stuck up there.
I remembered, with relief, that I’d inserted a tracking device inside myself just before setting off for the Hammond Hotel. Whatever happened since then, no matter how long I’d been unconscious, someone would have followed my movements, at least in the hours directly after the attack. For all I knew, my rectum was still sending out signals.
I yelled “hey!” It sounded loud in my tiny cell. Nobody responded.
I had no idea if it was day or night, or how much time had elapsed. I had no idea where I was. Jesus, I could be in Thailand or Russia or Manchester for all I knew. In those first moments of waking, I was able to believe five different things at once. I never left the UK. I’m in barracks in Afghanistan. I’m in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I’m in the hospital. I’m dead.
As my head cleared it became obvious that I was in prison. The faucets on the basin said “hot” and “cold”: an English-speaking country, at least. And somewhere in the distance I heard a siren—a good old American police siren.
“Hey! Anyone there?”
I needed to shit and piss, and while I have no problems about doing it in a bucket, I thought this was a good excuse to get some attention.
“I need the fucking bathroom. Come on! Somebody? Hey! Hey!”
I picked up the empty bucket and started banging it against the bars; the clang would travel down empty corridors far more effectively than my voice.
It took a while, but eventually someone got pissed off enough to shut me up. I heard the clang of keys and doors.
“What the fuck is all the noise about?”
“I need the bathroom.”
“Use the bucket.”
“Where am I?”
“I said, use the fucking bucket and shut the fuck up.”
Yeah, sounded like I was still in New York, or at least on the eastern seaboard; you don’t get those vowels anywhere else.
“I want to see my lawyer.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Pipe down, pal. Everything’s under control. Use your bucket. Food’s coming soon.”
“I can’t eat in here with a bucket full of shit.”
“Aww, little baby.” He was going to die. “Better get used to it.”
“Tell me where I am.”
“Well you ain’t in the Holiday Inn, I’ll tell you that much.”
I heard his laughter receding down the hall.
Fuck: I really did need the bathroom. The bucket served its purpose. I washed myself in the sink. There was no toilet tissue, nothing to dry myself on. No matter: I stank anyway. My armpits were ripe, like I hadn’t washed for three, four days. Is that how long I’d been out? My belly felt empty too, but I wasn’t hungry. Maybe that would come. I remembered to drink from the faucet, cupping the water in my hands; dehydration would make me weak and crazy.
The smell from the bucket was foul. I pulled off my T-shirt, and covered it. And then, with nothing else to do, I lay down on the bed, put an arm across my eyes to block out the light, and tried to sleep off the anesthetic.
I was woken by a key in the lock. The door opened, and a hand pushed a tray across the floor. Before I could even stand, the door was closed again.
“Bon appetit, motherfucker.”
I was hungry now. I’ve had worse food, I guess. I can’t quite remember where, or when, but I must have. Stale bread, an apple, a lump of cheap sausage, possibly from a pet food store, and, weirdly, some Ritz crackers. They tasted good. I needed the salt. I ate slowly, knowing from experience that if you eat too fast after a period of starvation you can easily throw it straight up. So I took my time, chewing each mouthful, feeling the sugar reaching my bloodstream. It was only when I started eating that I realized how hungry I’d been. How had they fed me—if at all?
How many human rights laws had been breached in the last few days?
Where was the legal representation to which I was entitled?
Where, for that matter, was the fucking CIA, or the FBI, or Major General Wallace Hamilton? Had it been operationally necessary to throw me to the wolves? Was I going to die in here, the mad bastard in solitary confinement who keeps yelling about how he was forced to change his identity and had a tracking device implanted in his anus?
It was all a bit too Twilight Zone for my liking.
I am Dan Stagg, I said to myself. I will survive this. I don’t know who my friends are, I don’t know where the fuck I am, but I will get out. The metal door seemed to argue against that, but I’ve never really listened to reason.
For the next few hours I slept, paced the cell, did some push-ups, shit and pissed in the bucket, ate another plate of food that was pushed across the floor, and tried to get a glimpse of the person on the other end of the arm when I was fed a
nd slopped out. All I could see was a blue polyester shirtsleeve, a hairy hand with a wrist-watch, the gleam of a black leather boot. My attempts at conversation (“I want to see my fucking lawyer!” and so on) were met with silence, or snorts of laughter.
Wherever I was, it was not a regular correctional facility—or, if it was, someone was doing some very private freelance work. You read about these things: detention facilities in the New York area have come under intense media scrutiny in recent years for just this. You hear about illegal immigrants or suspected terrorists being thrown in these places and forgotten.
How convenient if that happened to me.
As the haze of anesthetic wore off, one fact was becoming crystal clear.
I had been set up.
The trip to New York, the conference at the Hammond Hotel, Peter Logan and all those other fat cats in suits, the armed police—possibly Craig Lukas himself—were part of a conspiracy in which I was the pawn, the patsy, the punch line.
Alan Vaughan must be behind it—Alan Vaughan and his American confederates. Something had gone catastrophically wrong with the CIA’s intelligence. We were never destined for New Hampshire. Whatever we’d been sent to New York for had happened in that dreary conference venue in a hotel near Times Square. I was the fall guy in an intelligence operation that had gone badly wrong. Maybe it was in the CIA’s interests to leave me where I was, to remove a witness to something they should never have been doing in the first place. Maybe it was the CIA that had put me here in the first place. Agent Ethan Oliver would always put the Agency first.
All I could do now was conserve my energy, look after myself, and wait. For how long? Days? Months? Years?
I didn’t even jack off. That shows you how bad things were.
Time passed. Two days? Three? It’s hard to tell with no variation of light, no variation of meals, just the exact same ingredients shoved through the door every few hours. My body clock was fucked, I was sleeping and waking in no discernible pattern. The only chronometer I had was beard growth. I’d shaved on the morning of the conference; this felt like a four-day growth. Four days since I was in the bathroom on Third Avenue, showering and shaving after fucking Lukas up his hairy ass for the thousandth time.