Krowl cleared his throat. “Always there is terror,” he said to no one in particular, then turned and looked up at Chant. His lips formed a tight smile. “Well, Mr. Sinclair,” the torture doctor continued in a lighter tone, “it seems you’re a celebrity. I’d never heard of you, but it seems that almost all of my distinguished guests have. You’ve enjoyed quite a career; you’ve moved around a great deal, and have caused considerable distress to a great many people.”
“I’m afraid I only recognize one friendly face,” Chant replied, looking out over the torturers and guards. “Hey, Chester, how’s your mother?”
The slight man in the Nazi uniform shuffled his feet nervously, and his face reddened. The others moved a few steps away, leaving him isolated. Chester Norham stood glaring at Chant, his face blood red, his hands trembling.
“Go,” Krowl said quietly to Chester Norham, who abruptly turned and walked stiffly from the cell.
“Where the hell did you find him, Krowl?” Chant said dryly. “You give scholarships?”
“Pay attention, please,” Krowl said as angry murmurs arose from the torturers. “For those of you who don’t know, that man is here at the behest of one of your countries. Your political affiliations and affections don’t interest me; financing a cretin like that represents a mistake in judgment on your part, not mine. What is of interest here is the fact that Mr. Sinclair was able to play off his knowledge of that man to distract, divide, and disrupt. Already, some of you are beginning to question my methods and my handling of this particular subject. In effect, you have been given a most artful demonstration of precisely why the secrets locked up in John Sinclair’s mind would remain a mystery to all of you right up to the moment when you squashed the last life out of him. Ponder that point, gentlemen.”
Richard Krowl abruptly wheeled around, stepped up to Chant, and again began probing his body with his fingers. This time his deft, expert touch sought and found sensitive nerve bundles. Chant willed himself to be still, and silent, under the torture doctor’s knifelike stabs.
“However,” Krowl continued evenly as he stepped back and motioned for Bernard to step forward, “there are times when the simple application of brute force as punishment is appropriate. This is such a time. Bernard, please give Mr. Sinclair a demonstration of your skills.”
Chant went deep into himself, focusing his concentration and kai in the center of his body as the man with the sandy hair and gleaming scalp bounced a few times on the balls of his feet, then went down into a karate fighting stance. One of his feet shot out in a side kick, landing on Chant’s stomach a few inches to the right of the bite wound. Chant used his kai to absorb the blow, diffuse its force. Despite the tremendous shock of the blow absorbed by his body, his face revealed nothing. Even as the thud of flesh against flesh echoed in the chamber, Chant gazed impassively back at Bernard.
The American blinked in disbelief, took a step backward. His face darkened with blood and his eyes clouded with rage. He uttered a sharp cry, leapt forward, and slammed his fist against Chant’s ribs.
That was the last blow his kai could absorb, Chant thought. The American did more than strike many poses. He knew his karate, and he was good; the foot and hand blows had been focused and powerful. At the next one, his bones would begin to break.
Still, Chant’s face revealed nothing.
“Enough, Bernard!” Krowl snapped as the other man, enraged, began to wind up for a roundhouse kick that might have crushed Chant’s thigh, chest, or skull.
For a moment Chant thought Bernard might ignore the command and fire his kick. But he didn’t. Still trembling with rage, his dark brown eyes smoldering with hate and humiliation, he relaxed his body and stepped back.
“You are quite a remarkable man, Mr. Sinclair,” Krowl said easily, staring up at Chant. Now there was a new element in his voice and eyes. There was respect—and quickening interest. “Often, the reputations of subjects who come under my care are overblown, magnified by the emotions of the authorities who have failed to deal with them successfully. You may be an exception. Perhaps many of the things these gentlemen say and believe about you are true. I must say that I’ve read your dossier with minimal attention, and listened to the stories with half an ear. That will no longer be the case. It’s beginning to appear that you will make a most interesting subject. There may be much I can learn from you.”
Chant wanted to say something, but he was no longer certain of his control so he remained silent. His face, however, remained impassive, revealing nothing of his terrible exhaustion and suffering.
At a signal from Krowl, the torturers and guards began to file out of the cell. The Greek colonel was the last to leave. The heavyset man with the dark, swarthy complexion stopped in the doorway, turned back to face Chant, and mouthed the words: I would crush your balls.
Chant blew him a kiss.
TEN
A half hour later the chains came out from the wall, allowing him to lie on the floor, breathe normally, and rest his severely cramping muscles.
He must wait.
The respite lasted less than fifteen minutes. Then the machinery rumbled, the chains retracted, and Chant was pulled back up to be crucified on the stone wall.
Although there were no windows in the cell, and the fluorescent lights were always on, he found that he was able to tell day from night by the relative brightness in the corridor outside the small porthole in the heavy wooden door. It was night.
A key rattled in the lock. The door abruptly swung open, and a figure in a flowing, cowled green robe glided almost silently into the cell. The figure, face hidden in the deep folds of the cowl, stopped before Chant and stared up at him for some time.
“Is it Halloween?” Chant asked.
Delicate hands with long fingers emerged from the heavy sleeves of the robe, reaching up and pulling back the cowl. Chant found himself looking down into the face of one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He put her age at around thirty, and her almost translucent olive skin and rich, black hair made him think that she was South American, perhaps Brazilian or Colombian. Her black eyes were large and beautiful, yet oddly blank—as if they were one-way mirrors behind which she was hiding and watching him; although her face was beautiful, and her hair was dark black and flowing, the eyes were like those of the broken people who had come to Chant.
The woman undid the sash around her waist and shrugged. The robe slid off her shoulders to the floor, and she stepped out of it to stand a short distance away from him, the firm nipples of her bare breasts just touching the flesh above the hair of his genitals. His skin fluttered from the touch of the nipples, and Chant heaved a sigh as he stared down into the vacant face.
“All appearances to the contrary,” he said wryly, “I’m betting that you are definitely not an angel of mercy.”
The woman stepped back a pace, reached into the back pocket of her skintight leather pants and drew out a large, snow-white feather that was more than a foot long. Holding the end of the thick, colorless shaft with her right hand, she used the long fingers of her left to smooth the feather. Her face remained blank as she continued to stare vacantly at a spot just above Chant’s navel.
‘Who are you?” Chant asked, feeling increasingly uneasy.
The woman’s response was to reach out and begin to lightly stroke Chant’s body with the tip of the feather, concentrating on the lower belly and the swollen flesh around the clamped bite wound. Chills ran up and down Chant’s body, making his stomach and thigh muscles flutter spasmodically, giving him both pain from the increased cramping, and pleasure; her use of the feather had a curiously anesthetic effect, and the sharp, stinging sensation in the bite wound had disappeared.
Without warning, the woman reversed the feather in her hand and jabbed the hard, thick end of the shaft into his lower belly, just above the diaphragm where the stomach muscles are weakest. She kept pressing with the feather until it felt as if the shaft would pierce the skin, and he could no longer breath
e. Pain burned in the spot where she pressed, radiating up into his heart and lungs. His vision blurred.
Just when Chant thought he would pass out, the woman suddenly released the pressure. His breath exploded from his lungs, and he gulped air. She again reversed the feather and began to stroke the spot on which she had been pressing. The pain disappeared.
Then she started on his face, brushing the feather across his eyes, around his nostrils and ears, under his chin, up and down his throat. The stroking continued with almost monotonous, hypnotic regularity until he was suddenly jabbed with the shaft end in the jugular. A lump of fire filled his throat and exploded into slivers of pain that shot through his head and down his spine.
Then the gentle stroking was resumed, easing his pain, making it possible for him to once again swallow.
The woman knew what she was doing, Chant thought, and she was very good. He considered her more dangerous, in her way, than the torturers who had been in his cell earlier. There was no doubt in his mind that the woman knew the human body extremely well, and was a master of the strange weapon she wielded; she was a woman who could literally, over a period of time that for him would be a hellish eternity, crush him with a feather.
Using the feather to stroke his buttocks, the backs of his knees and the base of his spine, the woman pressed her cheek against the inside of his thigh and licked his stiff penis while at the same time gently running her fingertips up and down its length and beneath his testicles.
Chant burned with desire under the controlled caresses of the feather, tongue, and fingertips, the warm touch of her lips, on his flesh. The woman with the feather was his most dangerous tormentor, Chant thought; she was systematically eroding, wearing away, his inner controls. He understood what was happening, knew that every second of pleasure would be paid for with many seconds of agony. Yet he did not want her to stop. The creation of this ambivalence, Chant knew, was an important step in a process that could break him.
The woman ran the feather up and down the insides of his thighs, and around the tip of his penis. Then she took him into her mouth.
Chant knew he should seek a way to resist, to at least kill his sexual desire, but he could not. He could feel his passion growing like a beast with a mind of its own. Pressure continued to build in his groin as her mouth moved up and down on his stiff shaft. Even as he felt himself getting ready to ejaculate, he knew that agony would be his very soon; he simply did not know what form it would take.
Suddenly the woman drew her head back and wrapped her thumb and forefinger tightly around the base of his penis, trapping the blood in the engorged erectile tissue; he would not lose his erection until she released her grip.
Then she unhurriedly went to work on the sensitive tip with the shaft of her feather. Chant screamed, and kept screaming until finally he passed out.
He regained consciousness to find the woman standing before him, mute and vacant-eyed as before, patiently waiting. Seeing that Chant was awake, she began all over again.
The session lasted through the night; it was the longest night of Chant’s life, a seemingly endless tapestry of alternating agony and ecstacy. The woman never allowed him to release sexual tension through ejaculation, but always seemed to know the split second when he was ready. This, when his nervous system had been stimulated to its peak, was when the agony would begin. On this night Chant, who had been shot, burned, and electrocuted, experienced the worst pain he had ever known.
As dawn was seeping into the corridor outside the cell, he screamed and passed out once again.
ELEVEN
This time he awoke to find himself dressed in a blue, loose-fitting jumpsuit and strapped into a wheelchair, his wrists and ankles held firmly in place by rigid steel cuffs. He looked around the cell, found that he was alone. His body, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, throbbed with pain, and there was a constant burning, bruised sensation in his groin. He was exhausted and, he knew, near the end of his resources, both mental and physical.
Still, he must wait. In any case, he did not seem to have a choice at the moment.
He tensed the muscles in his arms and legs in order to test the strength of the steel cuffs, and immediately felt electricity course through his body. He stiffened and jerked in the chair under the onslaught of the electricity. After a few seconds there was a clicking sound from beneath the chair, and the electricity stopped. Chant slumped in the chair and waited, at the same time trying to take a mental inventory of how much damage had been done to him by the woman with the feather. He decided that there was indeed damage, but not permanent injury. He closed his eyes and concentrated on marshaling his resources, focusing his strength and banishing his anxiety over what might be waiting for him at the end of the journey he appeared about to take in the wired wheelchair.
He opened his eyes when he heard a key rattle in the lock. The heavy door swung open and Bernard, carrying a tray, sauntered into the cell, leaving the door open behind him. Once again, Chant was impressed by the lithe, easy way the big man with the bullet head moved.
Bernard sat down on the floor, his back against the wall. With the tray resting in his lap, he began to eat. The redolent aroma of bacon, eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee drifted into Chant’s nostrils, momentarily making him dizzy with hunger.
“How’d you like your session with Feather, tough guy?” Bernard rasped around a mouthful of food. Egg yolk dripped down his chin, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “She do a job on your pecker?”
Chant licked his cracked lips, then swallowed to work up some saliva. “Actually,” he said in a voice that was firm, “I found her a bit kinky. Not quite to my taste.”
“Man,” Bernard said absently as he shoveled more food into his mouth, “I’d like to fuck the brains out of that spooky broad. That’d fix her good. Problem is, there ain’t nothing left down there to fuck. I wouldn’t trust her with my prick in her mouth; she might bite it off.”
Chant frowned at the words, studied the other man. “My goodness, Bernard,” he said at last, his light tone belying the unease he had felt at the man’s description of the woman he’d called “Feather,” “how can you call that lovely young lady ‘spooky’? Now, you I call spooky.”
Bernard looked up sharply, and his brown eyes glinted. “Watch your mouth, Sinclair. Try to get smart with me, and I’ll—!”
“Uh-uh, Bernard. Control your temper. If you’d been sent over to beat up on me, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this wheelchair in my Sunday finest, and you wouldn’t be slouched over there feeding your fat face. My guess is that the good Dr. Krowl wants you to do nothing more than wheel me to him. You know how upset he gets when his flunkies don’t obey his orders.”
“Fuck you, Sinclair!” the big man shouted, leaping to his feet and kicking over the tray, spilling the rest of his food over the floor.
“Dear me,” Chant said, “I’ve ruined your breakfast. Sorry if I seem a bit cranky, but I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I can’t stand to see someone in a good mood when I’m not.”
There was some truth in what he said, inasmuch as Bernard had seemed too comfortable and self-confident. Although he knew there was considerable risk in goading Bernard while he himself was helpless, strapped in the wheelchair, it was a calculated risk he felt he must take. He wanted his enemies upset, at each other’s throats if he could manage it, enraged at him if that was the only alternative. An enraged enemy was a less-than-attentive, weakened enemy. At the moment, his mind and his mouth were his only weapons.
Bernard kicked the wheelchair, causing the contacts beneath Chant’s wrists and ankles to close, jolting him with electricity from the battery mounted beneath the seat.
“Thanks, you chickenshit bastard,” Chant said when the automatic cutoff had stopped the electrical current and he was able to speak again. “I needed that.”
Bernard glared, bared his teeth. “I ain’t chickenshit, Sinclair, and I ain’t Richard’s flunky. If I had
my way, I’d have beat the truth out of you the minute you arrived. My brother ain’t as goddam smart as him and everybody else thinks he is, and I ain’t as stupid.”
“Krowl is your brother?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. I don’t know which one of you I feel more sorry for.”
Bernard’s voice grew oddly hushed, and Chant sensed that the man was struggling with old wounds and resentments. “My brother’s got his own way of doing things; that makes him stupid, and it makes you lucky. He’s still trying to prove something to those bastards who threw his ass out of med school. I ain’t got nothing to prove to anybody. I know I’m a better man than he is, and I’m a better man than you are. I don’t give a shit about your reputation.”
Chant cocked his head and studied the other man, whom he judged to be in his late twenties or early thirties, a few years younger than Richard Krowl. “My reputation really bothers you, doesn’t it, Bernard?”
“You know, I didn’t hit you as hard as I could have. You ain’t as tough as all these people think you are, and you ain’t as tough as you think you are.”
“How tough do all of us think I am?”
“Like I said, you got the reputation. But nobody can do all the things you’re supposed to be able to do. All these dumb fucks my brother brought here are afraid of you, but I ain’t. Some of them say you’re the best martial arts expert in the world, and I say that’s bullshit.”
“Of course it’s bullshit,” Chant replied mildly, intrigued by the huge man’s almost childlike need to bluff and boast. “The best are never heard of.”
“Damn right it’s bullshit,” the child-man said, thumping his chest. “I’m the best, I was world PKA champion. I still would be if the candy-ass pricks who run things hadn’t barred me from fighting after I killed a guy in the ring.”
“Oh, my.”
Bernard grinned. “They said I was too wild.”
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