Silent Killer

by George C. Chesbro

  Feather hadn’t seen his face; Krowl wouldn’t know it had been him.

  But Krowl would report the incidents to the Russians, warn them to stay away.

  No. This had to be Krowl’s most important assignment, and—perhaps—his greatest opportunity. He would, right up to the last moment, cover up and try to solve the problem himself.

  He did not believe he could work up the courage and will to go back.

  How had the Petroffs worked up the will and courage to speak out as they had done, and to persist …?

  There were so many imponderables, so many unknowns.

  As things now stood, there were no imponderables or unknowns as far as Viktor and Olga Petroff were concerned. Two of the most courageous human beings on the face of the earth would have their minds erased, be destroyed.

  He was their only hope.

  What would his father have advised?

  There would have been no advice. As when he had been offered the ultimate trial of Black Flame, his father would have said only that he must find his own way.

  What would his sensei say?

  They’d say he was out of his fucking mind, Chant thought, and he chuckled softly to himself as he pushed out through the swinging doors into the night.

  SIXTEEN

  Chant snapped the neck of a second guard, who was apparently searching for his companion, and dropped that corpse into the drainage ditch alongside the first. Then he hurried across the cleared area into the brush and trees just beyond the helicopter landing pad. Using a stick, he scooped out two shallow holes in the sandy soil. He put the slipcovers containing the pearls and Krowl’s records into the holes, then covered them with soil and brush. When he was finished, there was no sign that the area had been disturbed.

  The guns he had taken from the guards were carefully placed in the hearts of two thick, thorny bushes at the very edge of the cleared area, parallel to the helicopter landing pad, fifteen yards apart.

  Next he went back to the drainage ditch, hoisted both dead guards by their belts, then dragged them back the way he had come, taking a route close to the high brush in order not to create a silhouette against the sky. When he reached the edge of the cliff overlooking the shark lagoon, he effortlessly lifted each corpse above his head, tossed it out to fall down toward the dark water and the even darker shapes relentlessly cruising beneath its surface.

  What was done couldn’t be undone, Chant thought with a grim smile as he once again headed up the slope toward the complex of buildings—and so he might as well do some more. Indeed, the more confusion and terror he created, the better it might be for him; it would give Krowl and the others something to think about other than John Sinclair.

  If he was not going to leave Torture Island alive, Chant thought, at least he was going to make sure he had plenty of company on the way to hell.

  Chant had not expected to find any more guards awake, and there weren’t any. He circled the three-story dormitory building, found two unlocked entrances, and a fire escape at the rear. There were two lights—one in a room on the third floor, and one on the first.

  Chant climbed the fire escape, tested a window on the second floor and found it open. He eased the window open, slipped silently into the room.

  He found a husky Latin asleep in an adjoining bedroom. Chant took the strips of cloth he had cut from his mattress off his wrist, wrapped them around the palms of both hands. Then he uncoiled the piano wire and wrapped the ends around his hands, leaving a length of about two feet.

  “Rise and shine,” Chant said, and kicked the foot of the bed.

  “Huh-?” The husky man groaned, opened his eyes, then sat bolt upright and started to shout when he saw Chant.

  Chant poked his heel in the man’s solar plexus, doubling the man over. Then he tore the blanket off the bed to cover his clothes, looped the piano wire around the man’s neck and yanked.

  The wire cut through the flesh, cartilage and vertebrae of the man’s neck like a razor going through cheese. The severed head dropped to the floor, bounced, rolled a few feet, and came to rest on its bloody stump, the eyes still open and the mouth moving as blood from the top of his torso spurted and sprayed over the ceiling, walls, and floor of the bedroom.

  Chant tossed the bloody blanket covering him aside, then crossed the hall and dispatched his second torturer in the same manner.

  He decided to choose his third victim from a different area. He left the room, went to the end of the corridor, and climbed the stairway there to the third floor. He stalked along the corridor, stopped on impulse when he came to a room with light shining under the door.

  The two guards had died instantly, Chant thought, and the two torturers had been barely awake when he’d lopped their heads off. It would give him pleasure to have at least one victim fully conscious, aware of who it was taking his life.

  Chant put his ear to the wood of the door and listened, but heard no sound of radio, conversation, or moving about. If the layout of this room was the same as the other two, the door off the corridor opened into a small sitting room, which was adjoined to a bedroom with a door at the far end of the sitting room, on the right. There was a bathroom off the bedroom, and Chant suspected that was where this particular tenant was, if he wasn’t reading in bed.

  Chant slowly tried the doorknob; it turned. He opened the door a crack and waited; he still heard no sound. Then he pushed open the door and crouched, ready to spring.

  The sitting room was empty.

  Chant moved into the room, closing the door silently behind him Then he moved along the right-hand wall to the open bedroom door, peered through the crack at the jamb. Through this narrow space he could not see the bed, but he did not have to; the light was on in the bathroom, the door was open, and there were now distinct sounds of gastric distress coming from inside.

  Chant removed the strips of cloth from his hands, put them back around his wrist. He rewrapped the piano wire around his other wrist, then slipped silently into the bedroom. He stopped, smiling with pleasure when he saw the wooden valet at the foot of the bed. Draped neatly on the valet was a familiar-looking uniform, and at the base of the valet was a pair of black shoes polished to a high gloss.

  “Having some problems with the tummy, Colonel?” Chant asked as he stepped into the open doorway of the bathroom.

  The pockmarked, swarthy face of the Greek colonel, already pale, went even paler when he looked up from where he was sitting on the toilet and saw the man with the iron-colored eyes and hair standing before him. His mouth dropped open and he started to scream, but Chant pivoted on the ball of his left foot and his right foot swung in an arc through the air, the instep catching the Greek on the side of the head, stifling his scream and knocking him off the toilet seat to the floor.

  Instantly, Chant was on the other man. The colonel, his pajama bottoms tangled around his ankles, was desperately trying to scramble to his feet while animal-like moans of terror escaped from his throat. Chant punched him hard in the right kidney, dropping the man to the floor and knocking the wind out of him. Then Chant wrapped his fingers in the man’s hair and yanked him up to his knees. He turned the man’s face toward the toilet, then used his right hand to violently push the Greek’s head into the bowl, down into the foul water. The man struggled desperately, his arms flailing about and his tangled legs scrambling, but Chant easily held him in his firm grip.

  Gradually, the man’s struggles grew weaker—and then stopped altogether. More waste evacuated from the colonel’s bowels, and then the body slumped and went limp. Chant released his grip.

  He drew water in the tub, then sat on the edge and carefully washed the blood from his hands and forearms, and the grass stains and dirt from his bare feet. Within ten minutes, he had erased any evidence of his night’s work from his body and clothes.

  The first rays of dawn were beginning to glow when he climbed out of the room onto the fire escape. There was still no one about, and Chant raced the approach of day back to the ce
llblock.

  He was almost certain that his escape had gone undetected, for otherwise there would surely be guards and torturers running around looking for him. Still, he paused at the top of the ramp, just behind the swinging doors, and listened; there was no sound from inside the building.

  Chant pushed through the swinging doors and walked down the long corridor. The door to his cell was ajar, just as he had left it. He had already made his decision, and he did not hesitate now to step into the cell, close the door behind him, and relock it with his pick.

  He removed the strips of cloth from his wrist, stuffed them into the mattress. Then he used the piano wire to secure his lock pick to a chain, near the shackle for his right hand, in such a way that the wire and pick would be virtually invisible, except under close inspection. This done, he drank the rest of the coffee in the thermos and ate the remaining cold cuts.

  It could be some time, he thought, before he ate and drank again—if ever.

  Then he clicked the shackles shut on his wrists and ankles, lay down on the mattress.

  And waited.

  SEVENTEEN

  They came an hour later.

  A key rattled in the lock, and the door swung open. Bernard and the two remaining guards burst in, stopped, and stared at him. The faces of all three men were ashen, their eyes wide and bright with shock, fear, and disbelief. They seemed at once relieved and disappointed to find him there.

  Chant sat up and blinked sleepily. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Bernard cursed, hurried across the cell and perfunctorily rattled Chant’s chains and tested the locks on the shackles. Then he nodded to the two other men, and they hurried out of the cell, with Bernard slamming the door shut behind him.

  Chant waited another hour. Satisfied that Krowl and his people were going to be otherwise occupied for some time, he freed himself from the shackles, opened the cell door, and went to the end of the corridor, where he opened the swinging doors a crack and looked out.

  Krowl and his people were, indeed, otherwise occupied. The nine remaining torturers, some still in pajamas or bathrobes, had been rousted out of the dormitory and gathered together on the helicopter pad. Richard and Bernard Krowl stood off to one side, machine pistols in their hands. The two guards and a number of broken people appeared to be conducting a search of the dormitory and the adjacent grounds.

  Chant smiled grimly, then returned to his cell and locked the door, replaced the manacles on his wrists and ankles.

  He could appreciate Richard Krowl’s dilemma. Chant now strongly suspected that, except for the prisoners awaiting execution in the shacks by the shark lagoon, he was the only “subject” on the island. The two or three men in the shacks were undoubtedly broken and starved, incapable of the acts that had been perpetrated during the night. And, besides, those men were still locked in the shacks. Having found him still shackled in a locked cell, Richard Krowl would have to conclude that it was one of his guests who was responsible for the three murders, the disappearance of two guards, and a large sampling of his records. Krowl would not be amused; every room, every possession, would be turned inside out in the search for the records and the fortune in pearls.

  Eventually, of course, the search would have to turn to the surrounding island, but Chant was not concerned that the bulging slip covers or guns would be found; it would take an army to search the island, and Krowl knew it. He would focus his attention on finding the culprit.

  As would the other torturers. They had to believe the same thing—that one of their number was responsible. They would be cut off from one another, intensely suspicious, each man looking over his shoulder at the others, fearful that he could be the next victim.

  The confusion, fear, and suspicion he had sown was all well and good, Chant thought—as long as it did not lead to Krowl’s cancellation of his appointment with Viktor and Olga Petroff. But Chant was fairly confident that would not happen. If he read Krowl correctly, the torture doctor would, in the end, simply lock up the nine men and let them rot before he would forfeit what had to be for him his most important and challenging assignment.

  Or so Chant hoped. In any case, there was nothing more to be done now but wait and see what happened—and try to survive for at least three more days.

  No one came to see him for the rest of the day. Some time in what he judged to be late afternoon he heard the unmistakable thwop-thwop-thwop of helicopter rotors pass low overhead. The helicopter landed, but its engine was not shut off, and it took off again within minutes.

  Reinforcements, Chant thought, perhaps specialists, or even—and the idea caused him to smile—torturers to torture the torturers. Of one thing he was certain, and that was that nobody would be leaving the island until one Krowl had found his records and the other had found his pearls.

  He resisted the impulse to leave his cell again for another look outside, for he knew that whatever he saw wouldn’t really matter. The new men Krowl had undoubtedly brought in changed the equation somewhat, but the problem—and his solution to it—remained the same. He was not foolish enough to think that Krowl would completely ignore him for three or four more days, and so he would find out what he needed to know eventually. And so he waited, resting with deep meditation, and occasionally slaking his thirst by licking condensation off the stone walls of the cell.

  Finally he slept.

  He was awakened by the rumble of the machinery behind the wall, the rattle of his chains. The chains retracted, inexorably pulling his body up on the wall, crucifying him.

  Bernard came in a few minutes later. He was pushing the wheelchair with one hand, carrying a hypodermic needle in the other. He stopped in front of Chant, looked up, and drew his lips back from his teeth. Suddenly, without warning, he plunged the needle directly into the center of Chant’s partially open bite wound. Chant bit off a scream and turned away as Bernard pressed the plunger on the hypodermic. Within moments, the drug had reached his brain and he passed out.

  He awakened to find himself still in his cell, but strapped into the wheelchair. He was very thirsty. His tongue felt thick and furry, filling the back of his throat, and the wounds on his shoulder and stomach burned with a steady, searing heat. Bernard was leering in his face.

  “You awake, Sinclair?”

  “Would you believe me if I said no?”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “There are no words to express it.”

  “I guess that needle kind of hurt, huh?”

  “You know, Bernard, you and I should fight some time. It isn’t every day that one gets to spar with the world’s champion professional karate fighter.”

  Bernard’s smile vanished, and he straightened up. “You may get your wish yet, Sinclair.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “I guarantee you’ll regret it.”

  “Will you let me out of this wheelchair for the occasion?”

  Bernard flushed angrily. “If my brother ever gave me permission to go one on one with you, you’d end up in a wheelchair permanently—if I didn’t kill you. I’d tear your ass off, Sinclair. Then I’d have your rep.”

  “There’s no one on earth I’d rather bequeath it to, Bernard. When can I look forward to this match?”

  “My brother doesn’t want you busted up—not yet.”

  “Doesn’t he? You could have fooled me.”

  “You’ve got a smart mouth, Sinclair,” Bernard said, abruptly stepping behind the wheelchair and pushing Chant forward, toward the open cell door. “That won’t last much longer.”

  Chant was wheeled down the long corridor, through the swinging door to the outside. Then he was wheeled at a brisk pace up the incline toward the helicopter pad and the complex of buildings beyond.

  On the lawn outside the dormitory, a number of trunks and suitcases had been gathered together and torn apart in an apparent search for false bottoms.

  A number of broken people wandered listlessly through the brush, poking at the ground with sticks. One brown-uni
formed guard stood at one of the entrances to the dormitory, and Chant assumed the second guard was standing by the other entrance.

  Chant counted five new men, all dressed in black fatigues, and all carrying Uzis. One, a tall Japanese with piercing, intelligent black eyes, looked at Chant, then glanced quickly away.

  “What’s happening around here, Bernard?” Chant asked easily. “It seems a little early for spring cleaning.”

  “Shut up, Sinclair.” There was a pause, then: “You hear anything the other night?”

  “What other night?”

  “Last night.”

  “Nope. Slept like a baby. It must be the salt air. You have some kind of problem here, Bernard?”

  “You’re the one with the problem, Sinclair. And I told you to shut up.”

  Chant was wheeled into the windowless building, parked in front of Richard Krowl’s desk. Krowl was uncharacteristically dressed in casual clothes—jeans and a heavy, white, cable-knit sweater that looked a size too big for him. He was unshaven, his pale eyes bloodshot and red-rimmed, with dark pouches beneath them.

  Feather was also in the office, seated on the divan. She wore a large, hooded sweatshirt, with the hood over her head, covering her face, which was turned away.

  “You don’t look too good, Krowl,” Chant said to the torture doctor. “The screaming around this place keeping you awake at night?”

  “Why should you ask a question like that?” Krowl didn’t smile, and his lids narrowed slightly.

  Chant laughed. “I think you’ve been working yourself too hard in that torture chamber of yours. Too much research. I sit around for hours in my cell working up my best material, and it goes right over your head.”

  “Unhook the battery,” Krowl said curtly to his brother, “and then get out.”

  Chant waited, but Bernard remained behind him, unmoving. “Let me work on this son of a bitch,” Bernard said at last.

  “Bernard …?”

  “You’ve got enough to worry about, Richard,” Bernard continued, a note of obstinacy and resentment ringing clearly in his voice. “You’ve been fucking around with this wiseass long enough. When I finish beating the shit out of him, he’ll be happy to tell you what you want to know. That’ll be one less thing you have to worry about.”