The Blacklist--The Beekeeper No. 159

by Steven Piziks

  “You will like it here,” Pug said.

  Keen blinked, then abruptly realized that the Beekeeper thought that she and the others worked for Reddington, he didn’t know they were FBI agents. Ressler must have kept up the fiction and Stuart Ivy had either gone along with it or still didn’t know the truth himself. Since no one had FBI badges on them, the Hive would have no way to know the truth. Yet.

  “Mr. Reddington won’t like what you’ve done,” she said. “He’s mad. He’ll come after you.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Griffin said. “And I’m counting on you and your friends telling me all about him and his organization. Come along, now. Orderly, please.”

  He led Keen with the guards past the working drones and down a side cavern. Electric light in wall sconces flooded the tunnels and caves, keeping the place well lit, and the floor was mostly packed sand. The smells of food were driving Keen to distraction now, and her mouth was dry as a raisin. She tried to watch Dr. Griffin for clues about his personality and his thinking, but it was difficult when she was light-headed from a lack of food and water. Still, she forced herself to think. Griffin walked with a straight, confident air; a man who genuinely expected obedience from those around him. He had an active man’s build, but was putting on weight, which told Keen he was letting himself slow down. No doubt he believed it when people told him he looked good. There was a definite strut in his walk, and his eyes flicked toward Keen now and again. He was showing off the caverns and wanted to see if she was impressed. A vain man who needed his ego stroked. She filed that thought away.

  And still, he had an air of power about him. The presence she had noted before. He was a stone in a river. Water flowed around him, moved because he was there. It wouldn’t occur to him that anyone would want to disobey him, and most people would indeed do as they were told.

  “Where is Mr. Reddington?” Dr. Griffin asked casually. “It isn’t safe for him to be out in these woods at night. Bears and wolves and coyotes wander everywhere.”

  “Bears and coyotes are scary,” Pug said.

  “I have no idea,” Keen said. “We got separated after the fight. Why did… why did you kill everyone?”

  “Too many of you to keep,” Dr. Griffin said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Mr. Reddington had clearly uncovered our location, and at an awkward moment, too. We couldn’t afford to let you go, but we also don’t have the resources to assimilate all your compatriots. We had to cull a few, as it were. But that’s all right. They’re being buried as we speak, and everything is nearly finished.”

  “Culling is okay as long as the Beekeeper tells you to,” Pug said in a happy voice that sent a chill down Keen’s back. She thought about little Bethany, who would never hear her father swear again, and had to force her hands to remain still, and not lunge for the Beekeeper’s soft neck.

  “Here we are,” Dr. Griffin said.

  They had arrived in another large room, though whether it was artificial or natural, Keen couldn’t tell. It was unrelieved stone, undecorated and harshly lit by wall lights. Sand gritted on the floor. Lining the walls were a series of human-sized cages that reminded Keen of dog kennels. Her heart leaped. Inside two of them were Donald Ressler and Stuart Ivy.

  “Keen!” Ressler grasped the bars of his pen. “Jesus! Are you all right? Where’s—?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she interrupted pointedly. “They haven’t hurt me.”

  “I’m glad to see you, my dear,” Stuart said from his own pen. “But not under these circumstances.”

  Standing next to the cages was an utterly nondescript man in dark gray sweats. He had a bland face, colorless hair, gray eyes, and an average build. Keen couldn’t put a finger on his age. It could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. He was the kind of man you met at a party and completely forgot about the moment you started talking to someone else. A bell rang in Keen’s head.

  “You’re the Bodysnatcher,” she said.

  The man didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to Dr. Griffin.

  “You do owe me for the last batch,” he said in a soft voice. “I brought Reddington into the park, as promised, putting myself at considerable risk.”

  “I don’t have Reddington,” Dr. Griffin pointed out. “I wanted him in my Hive. Imagine the possibilities! Now I don’t have him.”

  The Bodysnatcher shrugged. “You didn’t ask me to snatch Reddington, just to get him here. I did. I’ll be on my way now, and if you need more people, let me know through the usual channels.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  Dr. Griffin gestured at Pug, who grabbed the Bodysnatcher by the arms. He yelled in surprise as Pug lifted him bodily and tossed him into one of the open pens. Another guard slammed the door shut. The lock clicked.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the Bodysnatcher demanded.

  “You are going to stay with us,” Pug said. “It will be fun.”

  “We’re at a delicate phase in the operation,” Dr. Griffin said mildly. “The final phase. No one leaves. Welcome to the Hive. You, too, Elizabeth.”

  Hard hands shoved her into a pen of her own. Keen went to hands and knees within the bars, and her own lock clicked behind her.

  “You son of a bitch,” Ressler snarled.

  Dr. Griffin strolled over to Ressler’s pen, and peered at him, his expression as serene as a stone Buddha’s.

  “You think you’ll be difficult. You think it’ll take a long time to bring you around to the way of the Hive. But I see you, Donald Ressler. Inside you is a little boy who fears chaos, a little boy who sucked his thumb in terror when his mother left him alone to run to the corner store for milk, a little boy who always told the substitute teacher what the classroom rules were, a little boy who performed every humiliating task his fraternity brothers set for him during hazing season because it was in the rules. Here, Donald, we keep absolute order. There are no exceptions and no gray areas. You’ll fit right in, my son. Right in.”

  Ressler spat a series of words at him that startled even Keen. The Beekeeper seemed unfazed.

  “We need to teach you, Donald,” was all he said. “You need to learn the rules. In an orderly way.”

  “Orderly,” echoed Pug.

  The Beekeeper nodded to the drones. From the wall one of them took a Y-shaped device designed to trap a person against a wall, a man-catcher. The other drone whipped Ressler’s cage open and with lightning speed, the first then caught Ressler under the arms in the rubbery prongs of the Y and slammed him against the stone wall at the back of his pen. Pug giggled.

  “What are you doing?” Keen grasped the bars of her own cage, her heart pounding.

  The Beekeeper drew a taser from his belt.

  “Rule Number Two: Drones speak with respect, Donald. Drones who disobey are stung. We keep order here.”

  “Back off. Don’t!” Ressler fought against the man-catcher, but he had no leverage. The Beekeeper calmly pressed the taser against his flailing arm. There was a snap.

  “Ressler!” Keen cried.

  Ressler convulsed, his face a mask of pain. He went limp. The drone holding the man-catcher withdrew it, and Ressler dropped to the ground. The Beekeeper, his face a picture of calm, kicked him in the stomach. Ressler grunted but his muscles didn’t respond.

  “You will address me as ‘Dr. Griffin’ or as ‘Beekeeper,’” the Beekeeper said. “And you will follow our rules. Do you understand?”

  Ressler pushed himself up to hands and knees. Like all agents, Keen had been hit with a taser as part of her FBI training, and she knew exactly how he felt—a burning pain at the spot where the taser hit, an awful jolt of electricity, loss of muscle control even though you were wide awake, weakness afterward. If the user cranked the power high enough, it could knock you out, or even kill.

  “Do you understand, drone?” the Beekeeper repeated.

  Ressler remained silent.

  Keen silently willed him to answer. She knew what w
as coming.

  The Beekeeper moved as if to taser Ressler again, then backed out of the cage. “Very well,” he said. “The old man, then. Go ahead, Pug.”

  “What?” Stuart said.

  Pug didn’t bother with the man-catcher. He hauled Stuart out of his cage and brought him to the Beekeeper.

  “I broke no rules!” Stuart protested. “We can talk about this, sir. I am perfectly—”

  “A slight against one member of the Hive is a slight against all,” Dr. Griffin said. “And to punish one member of the Hive is to punish all. Your pain will become his pain.”

  “But—”

  “Wait!” Ressler said, and pushed himself upright again. “I’m sorry. Sir. I… didn’t mean disrespect. I apologize. I understand the rules.”

  Dr. Griffin gave him a beatific smile that made Keen’s skin crawl.

  “Very good, new drone. That’s very good. Here you go. Some nectar.”

  From a nearby cooler on the floor, he produced a bottle of soda and set it in Ressler’s cage. Cold water droplets and bits of crushed ice glistened on the bottle’s rounded contours. Keen’s gaze was riveted, and her thirst burned. The thought of the cold, quenching nectar washing down her throat was almost unbearable.

  “Oooo,” said Pug. “Nectar! What do you say now?”

  “Thank you?” Ressler said. He cracked open the bottle and drank. His troubled expression became one of relief.

  Keen recognized what was happening. The group leader created distress, blamed it on the new member to create feelings of guilt, then offered both a solution to the distress and a physical reward when the member applied the solution. The sugar and caffeine in the soda would give Ressler a temporary kick that would make him feel good for a short time, and Ressler would associate following the rules with the sugar high from the soda. Classic conditioning. But the sugar rush would wear off soon, and bring a crash afterward, allowing the Beekeeper to create more distress and offer more solutions. All this Keen saw in an instant, but she couldn’t say anything without revealing who she was and why she was here.

  “Good drone,” the Beekeeper said. Then he touched the taser to Stuart’s arm as Pug let go. Stuart gave a cry of pain and dropped to the floor. Keen gave a cry of her own. The guards dragged the moaning, gasping Stuart back into his pen.

  “Did you feel his pain, Donald?” Dr. Griffin said. “I’m sure you won’t make a mistake again. Soon you’ll be ready to join us in full. In the morning, we begin.”

  “It won’t hurt long,” Pug said with a reassuring nod. “And you’ll feel better. Really! It’ll be okay.”

  “Come along, Pug,” said Dr. Griffin.

  “Okay, Beekeeper.”

  When he and the guards had left, Keen turned to Stuart. She couldn’t reach him through the narrow gaps in the bars, but she could see him. He was an old man. What if the taser had stopped his heart?

  “Stuart!” she whispered. “Are you all right? Stuart!”

  Stuart slowly sat up on the stone floor. He blinked blearily. “That was not an experience I care to repeat.”

  Ressler set the empty soda bottle with its cap in the corner of his cell. Keen knew he didn’t want to throw it away in case it became useful somehow. He might find a way to carve a tool out of the plastic, or even fill the bottle with his own urine to make it heavy and therefore useful as a weapon.

  “What happened to you?” he said to Keen. Stuart’s cell was between them, so they talked past the older man’s head. “The last I saw, you made it to the woods. Did you get hold of… anyone?”

  “No cell signals anywhere,” Keen said. “Reddington and I found a place to hide, but I got caught. What happened to you two?”

  “They stopped shooting and grabbed me,” Ressler said. “A group of them flanked Reddington’s car, and that was the end of it. I thought they’d kill me, but they just hauled me in here. I still don’t know why.”

  “They want us to join, of course,” Stuart said calmly. “Don’t you see? They always need people. If we stay long enough, we’ll be members of the Beekeeper’s Hive.”

  “The hell with that,” said the Bodysnatcher from his own cell. Keen jumped a little. She had all but forgotten he was there. “The Beekeeper was one of my best clients. Now this? I’m not joining anything, and screw his Hive. I’m getting out of here.”

  The thirst continued to burn at the back of Keen’s throat, but her investigative instincts took over anyway.

  “I’m Elizabeth Keen. This is Donald Ressler and Stuart Ivy. What’s your name?”

  “BS,” he said dryly.

  “Reddington called you the Bodysnatcher,” Ressler said. “Is that who you are?”

  The man shrugged. “Some people call me that.”

  “Did you take a woman named Mala Rudenko?” Keen asked.

  The Bodysnatcher looked at her.

  “I don’t talk about clients, either to confirm or deny.”

  “Look,” Ressler said reasonably, “we need to work together if we want to get out of this.”

  “Sure, sure.” The Bodysnatcher paced his cell. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to be best friends and make s’mores, okay? I just want to get as far away from here as possible.”

  “Hmm,” Stuart said.

  “What do we do?” Ressler said.

  “I’m thirsty,” Keen said. “And starving.”

  “As am I,” Stuart put in. “We all are. Except for him. Ressler.”

  “Me?” Ressler looked taken aback.

  “He gave you an extra favor. A bottle of pop,” the Bodysnatcher said.

  Pop. Not soda. That was Great Lakes dialect. Keen filed that away.

  “He likes you,” Stuart continued. “He favors you, the pretty boy. The chosen one.”

  Ressler flushed a little. “Now look—”

  “Don’t do that,” Keen interrupted. “That’s what the Beekeeper wants. He’s going to use rewards and treats, and give them out unevenly. It’s prison psychology. We get mad at the person who gets the extra food instead of getting mad at the person who’s giving out the pain and the rewards. Don’t fall for it.”

  “It’s hard when you’re half dehydrated,” Stuart growled.

  “Just follow along with what he says and look for an opening,” Ressler said. “They’ll make a mistake eventually. Our biggest weapon is that they want us alive. And we have people who will come looking for us.”

  “In this place?” the Bodysnatcher scoffed. “No one finds anything in this place. People vanish all the time. How do you think the Beekeeper has managed to keep his location a secret for so long?”

  “Where do they get the food from?” Keen countered. “They have to get that soda from somewhere.”

  “Don’t know, don’t care.” The Bodysnatcher slumped down in his cell. “Wake me up when room service gets here with morning coffee.”

  Keen exchanged looks with Ressler. He shrugged. She took a quick inventory of her cell. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet. Close-set steel bars made up the front and sides, and the stone of the cave created the back wall. A camp toilet squatted in the corner, and Keen cringed at the thought of using it, especially in front of Ressler. On the floor was a thin foam camp mattress topped with a flimsy blanket. Already her earlier sweatiness had turned into a chill—the cave was probably in the fifties—and she was glad of her suit jacket and high-necked blouse. Nothing else in the cell—no sink, no tap, no water supply, no window. God, she was thirsty. The Beekeeper was deliberately keeping her that way.

  Keen sat cross-legged on the mattress to think. She couldn’t plan aloud with Ressler, not with the others in earshot. And it was damned hard to form coherent thoughts with her tongue as heavy and dry as sand.

  Cult leaders like the Beekeeper were narcissists. They thrived on the worship and control of their followers. Flattery, utter obedience, and total belief in everything they said—even the stuff that made no sense—paved the fastest paths to their hearts. Many of them were also motivated by sexual
demands and used their followers as harems. Keen shivered, hoping it wouldn’t come to that. Most of them didn’t believe the twaddle they flung at the faithful, but a scary handful actually did. These were the most dangerous—they would choose belief over self-preservation. David Koresh and Jim Jones had been true believers. Both had died and taken most of their followers along with them. It would be easier if the Beekeeper was motivated by greed, power, or both.

  A drone, unmasked, entered the room. “Lights out.”

  The little cavern was plunged into blackness so absolute, Keen couldn’t see her own fingers when she waggled them in front of her eyes.

  “Keen?” Ressler said from the dark.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re going to get out of here.”

  She heard the nervousness in his voice. “Listen to me, Ressler. You, too, Stuart. And Bodysnatcher guy, whatever your name is. No matter what they tell you to do, do it. Go along. Don’t give Griffin an excuse. Got it?”

  “Yes, understood,” Stuart said. “It’s cold in here. It’s hard to believe it’s a hot summer night up there.”

  “Fold your mattress in half for better insulation and curl up on it,” Ressler said. “We have friends who’ll come for us.”

  “John,” said the Bodysnatcher suddenly.

  “What?” Keen said.

  “Call me John,” replied the Bodysnatcher.

  “Is that your real name?” Keen said.

  “It’s either that or the Bodysnatcher.”

  “Let’s sleep, please,” Stuart put in. “I have the feeling we’ll have precious little of it.”

  Working in the absolute darkness, Keen folded her mattress in half as Ressler advised and curled up under her blanket, trying not to think about her itchy skin or her dry throat or the chill that was settling over her. Maybe Reddington had been right. Maybe this hadn’t been the best course of action.

  Lights blasted into eyes and snapped her awake. A terrible noise crashed through the cell.

  “Wake up!” said a drone. He was banging on the bars with a billy club. “Up!”