Silent Killer

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Silent Killer Page 7

by George C. Chesbro


  Without a word, the broken man and woman picked up the pitchers and tray and left the cell. As soon as they had disappeared from sight, Chant heard the machinery behind the wall begin to rumble. He barely had time to straighten out his limbs before he was dragged across the floor, lifted up, and pinned on the wall. Instantly, his heart began to hammer, his lungs to hurt. The fact that his belly was full and distended made him even more uncomfortable.

  He was going to have to go on a diet if he stayed in this place much longer, Chant thought, and he allowed himself the luxury of a small smile.

  His smile vanished when yet another man appeared in the open doorway. This man’s hair was white like the others, but he walked upright and without the aid of braces. He was dressed all in white, from a tunic buttoned to the neck down to sneakers, and looked something like a hospital orderly.

  The man appeared normal—except for his eyes, which were out of focus and glassy, as if the man were staring inward at some terrible nightmare from which he could not escape. His jaws were slightly slack, and a thin stream of saliva glistened in the fluorescent light as it ran down over his chin.

  Chant sensed danger, and he instinctively tested his shackles; there was no play in them whatsoever.

  “Uh, top of the morning,” Chant said to the man. “What do you do here?”

  The man in white smacked his lips, then stepped into the cell. Like some kind of insect fearing the light, he sidled around the wall, back pressed against the stone, unfocused black eyes directed toward Chant’s belly. He came down the length of the cell, paused for almost a minute in the corner, then abruptly walked forward and stopped in front of Chant. Suddenly, without a sound, the man in white lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Chant’s waist, locking his wrists at the base of Chant’s spine.

  Chant screwed his eyes shut, shook his head from side to side, and groaned loudly in revulsion and pain as he felt the man’s teeth sinking into the flesh of his stomach, just to the left of his navel. Chant bucked back and forth, trying to shake the man off him but the wristlock—and teeth—held him tight. The man bit deeper, working his teeth back and forth, gouging skin and muscle. White-hot pain flashed through Chant’s stomach.

  Then the man released his grip around Chant’s waist and snapped his head back, tearing loose a bloody chunk of Chant’s stomach. Chant’s vision blurred, then came into focus again. He watched in horror that momentarily transcended his pain as the man gripped the ragged flesh with both hands, shoved it into his mouth and began to chew hungrily. With blood covering his white clothes, smeared over his mouth, chin, and the tip of his nose, the man slumped down in a corner, hunched his shoulders like some beast, and proceeded to enjoy the flesh.

  Chant looked down at the wound in his stomach, which was bleeding profusely, sending rivulets of warm blood down into his groin and onto his legs to drip off his toes onto the stone below his suspended feet. The bleeding would be good if it did not last too long, Chant thought, for it would cleanse the wound. On the other hand, such thoughts might well be irrelevant.

  The man in white had chewed and swallowed the flesh, and was hungrily eyeing Chant’s stomach once again. He slowly rose to his feet and came forward, mouth open showing bloody teeth, arms outstretched to grab and grip.…

  Like Harry, Chant thought as he bucked helplessly on the wall, he was going to be eaten alive.

  Suddenly, from somewhere out in the corridor, a shrill whistle blew. The man in white stopped as suddenly as if he had suddenly come up against an invisible wall. His strange, unfocused eyes rolled in fear, then he wheeled and sprinted from the cell, turning right and immediately disappearing from sight.

  A few moments later a tall, rangy man with carefully cut, shoulder-length yellow hair strode purposefully into the cell, the heels of his polished black shoes clicking on the stone. He wore a white coat over a white shirt and tie, black slacks. A stethoscope hung around his neck. The man stopped a few feet away from Chant, studied the crucified body with eyes that were a very pale green, almost white. Then he averted his gaze and made a few notes on a clipboard he carried with him.

  A sizable retinue trailed into the cell after him, stopped, and crowded together at the opposite end, a respectable distance away from the new man in white who stood below Chant. Chant counted a dozen men, some in different types of uniforms and others in ill-fitting civilian clothes, who he assumed were the facility’s current crop of “guest torturers.” He recognized one of the faces, and the close-set, beady eyes of this slight man glared at Chant with open hatred. Although it was not warm in the cell, sweat poured off the man’s face.

  There were also five men dressed in brown slacks and brown T-shirts, wearing revolvers in holsters hanging at their hips. The man below Chant stopped writing on his clipboard and, without looking around, casually snapped his fingers. One of the brown-uniformed guards, a heavy-set man who nonetheless moved with an easy grace, stepped forward. The man carried a black leather satchel, which he set down at the other man’s feet. All the while, his gaze remained on Chant—defiant, challenging. When Chant did nothing but casually return his gaze, the burly man stiffened, took a step back, and clenched his fists at his sides. He wore his hair in a crewcut, and the fluorescent light made his scalp beneath the sandy hair glow pink.

  The man with the stethoscope handed his clipboard to the burly guard, then opened the satchel and removed sponges, gauze pads, and what appeared to be a bottle of antiseptic.

  “Dr. Richard Krowl, I presume,” Chant said easily as the white-coated man began to work on the bite wound, stanching the flow of blood, cleansing it.

  “How do you like it here, Mr. Sinclair?” the man replied without looking up from the wound, his conversational tone matching Chant’s.

  “It’s not Club Med.”

  “Did you expect to wake up in Club Med?”

  “On the other hand, there’s never a dull moment. You never know what’s going to happen next.”

  “Mmmm.” The man with the pale green eyes and long yellow hair finished cleansing the wound, then quickly and expertly closed the wound with four stainless steel butterfly clips. Only then did he look up. “I suppose you find this whole experience upsetting.”

  “I try to keep an open mind. After all, I’d had my dinner, so I suppose your resident cannibal had to have his. Have you considered putting him on a vegetarian diet?”

  “Ah, you should have suggested that to his former captors,” Krowl said as he again dipped into his bag and removed a shiny syringe filled with clear liquid. “In the course of the rather lengthy and inefficient interrogations this man and his comrades underwent, human flesh—each other’s—was all there was to eat. It drove him quite mad, and I’m afraid he developed a rather exclusive taste for it. After I found out what they wanted to know, I found it useful to keep him around.”

  “He certainly does add local color.”

  Krowl smiled faintly. He carefully balanced the syringe over the open edges of the satchel top, then proceeded to probe and explore Chant’s musculature with his fingers, tapping, thumbing, probing, occasionally stopping to listen to Chant’s heart and lungs with the stethoscope.

  He was good, Chant thought, with an expert—even gentle—touch. It was precisely the skill betrayed by the gentle touch that could cause exquisite, prolonged agony. Chant had seen one example of Richard Krowl’s skills—keeping Harry Gray alive for weeks while his body was destroyed in the most brutal manner imaginable. But, as Gerard Patreaux had pointed out, Krowl had been sending a message. Chant suspected that the torture doctor was quite capable of delivering as much agony in ways that were more … creative.

  Chant looked up and stared impassively back at the faces that were staring at him. Chester Norham, slight and sickly-looking even in his American Nazi uniform, was the only one Chant recognized, although he suspected he had crossed the paths of many of the men in the room. Norham was also the only one who looked either slight or sickly; the others fit a pattern Chant had
come to recognize, despite their different nationalities—some, like the Greek, were brutish, while the Korean and the South Americans were more slender. But all had the same rather glazed eyes of men with low intelligence whose only real pleasure in life, pleasure inextricably linked in their minds with sex, was the domination of others and the inflicting of pain. The brown-uniformed guards were the same.

  Chant wondered what Chester Norham was doing on Torture Island, how this joke of an American Nazi from Chicago had even heard of the place, much less arranged an invitation and the necessary financing to make the trip. He also wondered if the pimply-faced man had dared to pack his collection of women’s underwear in his suitcases.

  Chant also wondered about Richard Krowl. The man displayed much more than the rudimentary skills possessed by most torture doctors. He appeared to be highly intelligent, and even displayed some wit, macabre though it might be. Krowl was not exactly what Chant had expected.

  Krowl finished his physical examination, picked up the syringe and shot a fine stream of fluid into the air. “I’m giving you a tetanus shot. We certainly wouldn’t want you to get an infection.”

  “Thanks,” Chant said dryly. “I was really worried about that.”

  “What is this nonsense the CIA wants to know about a cooked goose?” Krowl asked as he slid the needle directly into the wound and pressed the plunger.

  “Cooked who?”

  A deep, rumbling voice, speaking English with a heavy Greek accent, suddenly came from the back, grating in the relatively still, almost eerily normal conversational atmosphere in which Chant and Krowl had been engaging in their initial test of courage, wits, and will.

  “I would not give this smear of scum a shot; I would crush his fucking balls until he told me what I wanted to know.”

  Krowl’s reaction was immediate and explosive. He yanked the syringe from Chant’s side and threw it against the wall, smashing the glass tube. His face crimson with rage, he wheeled and, long yellow hair flowing back, strode quickly down the length of the cell, pushing his way through the startled group members until he was face-to-face with the offending man—a swarthy Greek with sloped shoulders and a pot belly. Without hesitation, the tall torture doctor reared back and slapped the man across the face with such force that the sound of the blow reverberated in the stone cell. Blood spurted from the Greek’s split lip. His eyes went wide with shock, which quickly turned to rage. His face mottled with blood, he started to reach for Krowl’s throat.

  Instantly, the five brown-uniformed guards leapt forward to surround the Greek. The burly, quick man with the crewcut reached out and gripped the Greek’s wrist in the air, effortlessly held it there while the flesh beneath his fingers went white. Now fear moved in the man’s dark eyes, and he began to sweat.

  “Never speak to a prisoner without my permission, Colonel,” Krowl said, his voice quivering with cold fury. “Not to, and not in front of. Never! Do you understand?!”

  “You go too far, Krowl!” the Greek snapped back. “Tell this man to release my wrist!”

  “Bernard will break your wrist if I tell him to, Colonel. You came here to learn, you fool. This facility is staffed by a score of men and women with broken bodies that fools like you produced, and then had to be sent to me when your methods didn’t produce results. You fools don’t understand anything. Now, Colonel, the helicopter will be here in a week. If you ever interfere again like this with a prisoner, I’ll have you locked up in your room until the helicopter comes. I’ll tell your employers that you’re too stupid to learn anything. Who knows? They might send you back to me as a test subject. Would you like that, Colonel?”

  The swarthy colonel averted his eyes, shook his head. “No, Dr. Krowl. I wouldn’t like that.”

  “Release him, Bernard.”

  The burly American with the crewcut released the Greek’s wrist. The colonel rubbed his wrist, stepped back against the wall, and stared sullenly at the floor. Krowl looked around at the other faces, took a deep breath, then slowly walked back toward Chant. He stopped a few paces away, once again turned around to face the others.

  “All of you are here for one specific purpose,” the torture doctor continued evenly. “You are here to learn how to extract information from unwilling subjects who may well be tougher, cleverer, and more devious than you are. You must begin to look upon pain as one of many tools, not as an end in itself. You didn’t need to come here to learn to torture for punishment or vengeance—all of you certainly have enough experience at that. While you’re here as my guests, you will follow my instructions to the letter.” Krowl paused, sighed, and rested his hands on his hips. “Are there any comments or questions on this policy?”

  Krowl waited. When he was met by nothing but silence, he turned around to face Chant, a small smile of satisfaction on his face.

  “Good classroom control, Doctor,” Chant said. His lungs hurt and the muscles around his rib cage were beginning to cramp, but he managed to keep his voice steady.

  Krowl grunted. “What terrifies you most, Mr. Sinclair? Castration? Blinding? Having your tongue cut out? How would it be if I cut off your arms and legs and made you into the ultimate basket case? I could hang you up as a decoration.”

  Chant pretended to think about it, sniffed. “I can’t say any of those choices really appeal to me. I hope that’s not your only list.”

  “Lesson number one,” Krowl said in the same even tone, turning back to face the guards and torturers. “Terror is what makes a subject talk, and terror is a function of the mind, not the body. Pain, of course, feeds terror, but the human nervous system can be overloaded with pain much easier and quicker than any of you in this room think. It is the anticipation of pain that eats away at the soul and breaks the will. Whatever is done to the subject, it is most important that the subject believe that there are worse things that can happen. Terror, not the heated tong, is your most important ally when it comes to extracting accurate information from men or women who are very strong, perhaps trained to resist torture, and who fully expect to die. They want to die. Remember that. Certainly, in many of these cases, they prefer death to revealing secrets that will cost the lives of mothers, fathers, their children. You begin breaking a body that is thirsting for the peace of death, and that body can die very quickly. I’m sure all of you have had that experience.”

  There were a few murmurs of assent. Krowl nodded, pointing back at Chant.

  “Take the man hanging on this wall as a case in point,” Krowl continued. “He displays extraordinary emotional control, is defiant, and even makes jokes about his situation. However, what he says and how he seems to react to pain, threats, and graphic suggestions as to what may be done to him isn’t important. It’s his mind that must be worked on; his mind, his terror, is your ally, and this man’s mind is now beginning to work against him. Remember that your prisoner is under your absolute control, so there’s no need to be impatient. Think of the human mind and body as making up one complex musical instrument. Learn to play it skillfully, and you will almost always, eventually, hear the music you want.

  “Taking care to make certain that your behavior is unpredictable is of utmost importance. The nervous system is like a taut bowstring that will lose its resilience if it is constantly mistreated; the subject will feel pain, for sure, but his experience of that pain will not be maximized unless the nervous system is operating at full capacity. For example, when the subject is tortured to the point of unconsciousness, the bowstring may be said to have gone slack. The string must be kept taut. You do this by occasionally interrupting pain with pleasure—warmth instead of heat, food, water, cigarettes; occasionally no more than a kind word or expression of sympathy can break a man where nothing else had seemed to work. The subject must never be able to predict which he will get at any given moment—pain or pleasure. The pleasure restores resiliency to the string you wish to pluck, and the unpredictability feeds terror.”

  A hand was raised. Like a patient schoolmaster, Krowl, ha
nds clasped behind his back, walked up to the man, bent forward as the questioner whispered in his ear. He nodded, then returned to the spot where he had originally been standing.

  “The question has been raised as to why I tip my hand, so to speak, in front of the prisoner. The answer is that there is nothing I can say to you that John Sinclair does not already know. He is fully aware of what I’m doing, of the techniques I have used, and will use on him. It doesn’t make any difference; despite the demeanor he presents to you, I can assure you that he’s terrified. The face he presents to you is an illusion; reality will be reflected in the fact that his pulse rate will be well over a hundred and ten.”

  Krowl beckoned to the man he had called Bernard, who came forward and picked up the clipboard. As Bernard waited with a pencil poised over the paper on the board, Krowl put the plugs of his stethoscope into his ears, stepped forward and placed the steel listening plate against Chant’s chest. He listened for a few moments, moved the stethoscope a few inches and listened again. Then he abruptly stepped back, snatched the plugs from his ears and glanced up at Chant. Uncertainty and consternation flickered briefly across the surface of his pale green eyes, but was quickly masked from Chant’s inquiring and vaguely bemused gaze.

  “What’s the prognosis, Doctor?” Chant asked, raising his eyebrows slightly.

  Bernard started to say something, but Krowl cut him off with a curt gesture. He snatched the clipboard out of the other man’s hand, scribbled something over the top sheet, then dropped the board into his satchel. A questioning murmur arose from the group of onlookers.

  He wasn’t the only one on this island with a problem, Chant thought as he looked out at the torturers, many of whom now appeared openly disdainful and skeptical. Krowl had humiliated one of their number, and now Krowl found himself with a problem of credibility before an audience he had chosen to alienate and make hostile. The result was that two camps had been created—the body crushers against the soul crusher—and Chant immediately began to consider ways in which he might exploit this division.

 

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