Conway started forward.
“That’s all right,” Haines told him. “I’ll get it.”
Mike immediately balled his hands into fists, aware that the dislocated finger was still sticking out vulnerably…but instead Haines reached toward Mike’s head, with something in his hand. Instinctively Mike turned away from it. Agony exploded in the top of his left ear and kept on getting worse.
“That’s about number five in the Top Ten Worst Places to Use a Stapler,” Haines said conversationally, “so you can see that you got maybe two more screwups max before things start getting really ugly. Ration them carefully. What’s her name?”
“Annie,” Mike cried, and felt a shame-bomb go off in his mind.
“Christ,” Conway muttered. “Little chickenshit gave up his own mother.”
They still thought he was Annie’s son. Mike didn’t correct the mistake; when you thought about it, Conway wasn’t that far wrong. Annie was more to him than his mother had ever been. And he had just given her up.
“See how easy that was?” Haines said. “Now all you have to do is tell me where to find her and what the deal is with all the extra Trolls, and we’re done here.”
Like every young boy, Mike had wondered how he would behave under torture, if burdened with a secret more important than his life. This was turning out worse than even his most pessimistic fantasies. He had broken in less than a minute.
This was worse than awful. This was utter disaster. In about another half dozen questions, everything was going to be blown…and there was nothing Mike could do about it. In his childhood fantasies about a moment like this, there had always been an ultimate escape hatch, one he had read about in one of his favorite books and stored away. If you found you couldn’t endure torture, you could always preserve honor by biting off your own tongue. Even if you didn’t manage to drown in blood, you couldn’t give away the Precious Secret to the Bad Guys if they couldn’t understand what you were saying. He set his teeth tentatively on his tongue…and knew with a burst of sorrow that there was absolutely no chance he could make himself do it. Maybe later, when the pain got so bad his mind went, but certainly not until then.
For days now, off and on, Mike had been pretending to be an adult—confident, resourceful, and independent—and had succeeded so well in the impersonation that he had almost begun to fool himself. Even Annie had shown him respect due another adult. Now his new self-image imploded, and he knew he was a little kid and a coward. Probably the cowardly little kid who had doomed the universe, as if that made it any worse. He became aware of cool dampness at his crotch, remembered that he had pissed himself when they gassed him. He began to cry, and didn’t even try to make himself stop. Why not add crybaby to the list?
They let him cry for some time, both seeming to enjoy it. Haines even chuckled aloud a few times. Mike had made them both very angry, over the last few days: this was the part they had been looking forward to most. The actual interrogation to come was merely business; no hurry. Mike’s understanding of this fueled his sobs—and they knew that, too, and savored it—and he knew that, but still couldn’t help himself. At least it delayed things.
As he bawled, it slowly came to him that this was all he could do: delay the interrogation. There was no point to it—there was no cavalry to come to the rescue. Even if by some miracle she knew he was missing, Annie never left Dreamworld—and even if she made a once-in-thirteen-years exception for him, Mike knew she could hardly have the means to track a creature like Conway to his lair. Stalling was utterly futile.
But it was a thing he could do…and absolutely the only other things he could do were betray his trust or be tortured.
So he didn’t stop crying when he could have, dragged it out until he was afraid that Haines, with his eerie instinct for lies, was beginning to suspect. He tapered off at once, wiped his nose as best he could on the shoulder of his T-shirt, and spoke before either Haines or Conway could resume grilling him. “How did you guys ever catch me?”
As he’d suspected, they were delighted to pause and discuss their own cleverness; it was the digression most adults were a sucker for. Even cowardly little kids weren’t completely helpless. Haines giggled delightedly, and even stone-faced Conway snickered.
“I knew you’d be wondering about that,” he said. “You and Annie think you’re smart little bastards. That was a cute stunt you two pulled on me. But you see, the definition of a smart little bastard is one who never tries to take on a pro. Take a good look, sonny—” He came in close and suddenly thrust a finger so close to Mike’s left eye that for a terrifying moment Mike thought Conway meant to put his eye out. But the fingertip stopped a few centimeters away and stayed there, rock steady. He blinked, stared, blinked, refocused…and saw it. A circular patch of flesh that was a slightly different color from the skin around it, like a tiny flesh-colored Band-Aid.
Mike understood at once, but the idea was to drag this out as long as possible, so he played dumb. “What’s that?”
Conway snickered again. “Never saw one of those, did you? It’s a locator flea. A traveling bug. Press it to anything with the temperature of a human body, and it jumps ship.”
“Jesus,” Mike said, and squirmed away from the fingertip.
“It starts transmitting right away, powered by your own body heat, tells us exactly where you are.”
“Eww,” Mike blurted, “is it still on me?” He writhed in his bonds, straining to see his right wrist.
Conway smirked. “What for? We know where you are now. It’s not the kind of technology you leave lying around on some smart-ass kid.”
“Got that right,” Haines grunted. “Expensive shit.”
“I had one on each fingertip of my left hand, back there in the Lounge today,” Conway continued. “The idea was to tag five of the dwarfs, to identify them for the snatch teams out in the parking lot, and follow the sixth one out myself. You two clowns bitched that up…but you shouldn’t have let me get my hand on you.”
Mike remembered, now, the faint grasp of Conway’s fingers at his wrist, the triumph he had felt as they loosened altogether and fell away.
“You made it easy for us by going for a midnight stroll up near the surface, giving us a stronger signal, but sooner or later we’d have nailed you even if you’d stayed down underground.”
“I don’t understand,” Mike said. “How can you possibly get guys into Dreamworld at night? And get out again carrying…me?”
Conway smiled. It was the first time Mike had seen him smile, and he didn’t like it. “There’s an old expression: ‘I could tell you…but if I do, I’ll have to kill you.’ You really want to know?”
Letting himself think that far ahead for the first time, Mike knew they were going to kill him. They had to. He had seen Haines’s face, and Conway’s. Conway was trying to give him a smidgen of false hope, out of sheer sadism. A wave of sorrow suffused his entire body, like a fever chill but warm.
“But it doesn’t make sense,” he blurted, still stalling for time for no reason he could think of. “Look, I know you hate Dreamworld, Mr. Haines—but if you can put mercenaries in there anytime you want, and you got stuff like that flea thing…I mean, Jesus, you could destroy the place anytime you wanted. You could have done it years ago.”
“I thought you said this little bastard was smart,” Haines said to Conway; then to Mike, “Hey, retard, I do that and the possible suspects are, like three governments, maybe five multinationals, Bill Gates, and me. I don’t want people to see Dreamworld destroyed. I want them to see it self-destruct. It has a little quiet help, behind the scenes maybe; the public don’t need to know all the details.”
Mike was running out of questions. When he did, the interrogation would resume. And there would certainly be pain, because even Haines with his internal lie detector would not believe the truth the first time he heard it. Mike knew he ought to be feeling panic because of that, but for some reason he wasn’t. He remembered one of his favorite authors s
aying something to the effect that a boy became a man on the day he understood, deep down, that he was going to die, and took that knowledge into account in making his plans. Mike knew he was going to die now, and roughly when, and there was a weird kind of comfort in it. “And what do you do then, after you wreck Dreamworld? Take on Disneyland?”
Haines snorted. “Disney? Forget Disney: the Rat is history. I’m already as big as the Rat; they blew it a long time ago. Once Avery goes down, and I get all his secrets, I’ll pick up all his market share and the Rat can eat my garbage.”
His voice changed subtly in the midst of the last sentence, and Mike knew the subject of secrets had reminded him what he was here for. The stalling time was almost over now. He closed his eyes tightly, and time came to a stop.
Okay, he had broken, minutes before. Awakened from drugged stupor to sudden bright pain, he had surrendered his will, failed the test of bravery. Okay, pain hurt more than he had ever imagined it could; his throbbing pinky and burning ear testified to that. Bogart had told Sydney Greenstreet that torture didn’t work unless it had the threat of death behind it, and Bogey was wrong—Mike knew now that when the pain exceeded a certain level, the body took over and told the mind what to do.
That didn’t mean he was beaten. He was still smarter than Haines.
“It won’t help, Pigface,” he said.
Haines had just started to speak, to end all this conversation and get back to finding out what he wanted to know, but this diverted him. “What did you say?”
“You can’t win.”
Haines sat up straight. “I can’t? Hell I can’t. What do you mean, I can’t win?”
“Just what I said. You’ll never be rich enough. You can’t be.”
Haines leaned back in, grabbed Mike by the top of his T-shirt, and yanked until their faces were centimeters apart. “What the hell are you talking about, you little punk?”
Mike smiled at him. “Say Conway’s goons are good enough to keep staying one step ahead of Dreamworld Security. Say you’re even smart enough to beat Annie, which is a joke. Say all your dreams come true: Dreamworld dies, and then you knock off all the other parks one by one, Disney, Six Flags, all of them. You still lose.”
Haines’s pudgy fingers took Mike by the hair. “What do you mean lose? Lose how?” he snarled.
Mike looked him square in the eye. “Because even if you can get Phillip Avery framed for embezzlement and child molesting, there’ll be millions of people all over the world who still love him, and always will. And no matter how rich you get, you’ll still be a fat ugly old Pigface with a raisin for a heart until the day you die.” Haines’s face went utterly slack. “Even Conway is a better man than you, and he knows it. He hurt me to get what he wants and because he’s mad at me—you did it because it’s fun for you. That’s who you are, Pigface: somebody who likes hurting kids. Nothing can change that. There isn’t enough money on the planet to get anyone to like you, and even your mother didn’t love you.”
Haines snapped. Roaring incoherently, he shifted his grip from Mike’s hair to his ears, and began slamming his head up and down on the leather bench as hard as he could.
“Even if you win,” Mike cried, “up in Heaven Thomas Immega will look down on you and laugh at how pathetic you are. Thirteen years it took you—and you still had to cheat.”
Haines howled, released him, and produced a knife. Mike felt a brief thrill of triumph. It would end quickly, now.
And then Conway caught his employer’s wrist.
Haines struggled ferociously, but even with his enormous mass he could not break free of Conway’s grip. In useless rage he beat at Conway’s forearm with his other hand…until he regained enough wit to realize who he was assaulting, and ceased struggling. The two men locked eyes.
“Not…until…he…talks,” Conway said.
Finally Haines nodded, and Conway released his wrist, and Mike knew he had failed.
Okay. He had tried. It had almost worked.
Haines tore his eyes away from Conway’s and turned back to Mike, shaking his knife hand to restore the circulation. “Fine,” he said. “First he talks. No problem. I want to hear him talk in soprano.” He slid the blade of the knife under the waistband of Mike’s shorts, and lifted. The damp fabric parted almost without resistance. The knife was very sharp.
Mike’s mind melted. “Wait!” he shrieked. “WaitI’lltellyoueverythingI’lltellyouanythingyouwanttoknow—”
Haines showed his teeth. “Yeah, I know.” He leaned forward.
Mike looked away—as far away as he could, until he was staring over his head at the wall behind him—and to distract himself, thought how odd it was that utter horror could cause visual hallucinations. It looked as though the wall were starting to glow…as if a circular section of it about half a meter in diameter, a meter and a half up from the floor, had suddenly become a heating element…no, an overheating element, turning a cheery red, then white, then almost blue-white. The color transformation seemed to Mike to take place in dreamy slow motion, but it could not have, for that circle of wall had completely ceased to exist an instant before he felt the cold blade touch his bare flesh.
Through the new hole in the wall a face was now visible: Even upside-down, even stripped of the Troll makeup they’d worn the last time Mike had seen them, the features of Hormat were unmistakable.
MIKE SIMPLY COULDN’T help gasping Hormat’s name, but that was all right: Haines and Conway naturally mistook it for a babble of terror. Hormat held a finger to his lips for silence, then inverted that hand, pinched his nose shut with it, and puffed out his cheeks. The effect was ludicrous in the extreme, but Mike got it, and held his breath, puffing out his own cheeks to show that he was doing so. He felt Haines’s damp hand on him, felt the cold blade on his belly. Hormat nodded grimly and held something up to the hole. Haines let go of Mike, left the knife on his belly, and lay down with a wet sigh. Conway started to say “Goddamn it,” got as far as the second d, and fell down, too, landing hard on his knees and pitching onto his face. Hormat signaled wait, mimed holding his breath again, and disappeared from view.
Mike held his breath. At the age of eight he had discovered that you could endure Social Studies without losing your sanity if you spent the time secretly practicing holding your breath. His record that year had been a full two minutes ten seconds, and to this day underwater distance swimming was one of his best things.
A rectangular portion of the wall began to glow now, as silently and rapidly as had the circular piece enclosed within it. The result was a Hormat-sized door. Hormat stepped through it, signing again for silence. Mike nodded. It was weird to see Hormat without his Troll costume, dressed in civilian clothes, but the dwarf’s protruding lower lip, massive eyebrows, and I’m-too-tired-to-limp walk were still unmistakable.
Hormat consulted his fingertip watch, then he caught Mike’s eye and mimed exhaling. The gas, or whatever it was, had dissipated by now. Mike nodded a second time and resumed breathing. There was no unusual smell in the air that he could detect. Apparently whatever had destroyed the wallboard did it so thoroughly that not even enough survived for a burning smell, and Hormat’s knockout gas was as odorless as the grease he’d given Annie to use on Conway back in the Employees’ Lounge.
That had to be the wall-destroying widget in Hormat’s left hand: a small black thing that looked kind of like an electric razor. Mike’s guess was confirmed when Hormat used it to release him. It sliced through the metal links that secured his cuffs to the table with no fuss at all, no squeals of metal or sprays of filings. It also took the wings off the staple in his ear without cutting flesh; the staple fell off at once. Then Hormat put the tool away and signed for silence again. He put his lumpy fingers on Mike’s left hand, gave the boy time to see what he was going to do and get braced for it, and popped Mike’s pinky back into the socket. Mike managed to keep the scream behind his teeth…and almost at once the pain began to abate to so
mething that could be lived with.
He had the wit not to try to get up right away. He worked his arms and legs first, restoring circulation and relaxing cramped muscles. Then he tucked himself away in his ruined shorts, swiveled his legs around and over the side of the bench, and tried sitting up. Hormat helped him.
He decided he was ready to try standing. But he didn’t want his shorts to fall down when he did, and he needed both hands free in case he fell. He got Hormat’s attention, pointed down at the floor, gesticulated until he managed to get Hormat to roll Haines over. The man was a tub, but with considerable effort the dwarf managed to shift him. Beneath him lay the stapler he’d used on Mike’s ear. Hormat handed it to Mike with a quizzical look. Mike used five staples to repair his shorts: three at the waistband and two down the length of the slice. It hurt his damaged pinky to use the stapler, but not intolerably. The result was ugly but serviceable. He set down the stapler and stood up carefully.
His knees felt a little weak at first, but the sensation passed quickly. He took a few experimental steps…then met Hormat’s eyes and made a little bowing gesture toward the hole in the wall, as if to say After you, Alphonse. Hormat returned it with the complementary No, after you, Gaston. Mike nodded, took one last look around the room—his first real look at it; it was like something out of a porn video—and stepped through the hole in the wall.
HE FOUND HIMSELF in a luxurious basement room that appeared to be a kind of…well, den, or rec room, or grown-ups’ playroom. Well-stocked bar along one wall, comfortable furniture everywhere, large flat-screen TV monitor hanging on a wall, excellent stereo system visible, plushly carpeted stairway leading upstairs. The effect was surreal. On the way through the wall he had noticed just how thick it was: soundproofed. There had been no access from here to the torture room behind him until Hormat had created one. Mike wondered if people had ever partied out here, unaware that a few meters away, someone else was screaming…
The Free Lunch Page 17