Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  Furious, still hoping for some window for escape or counterattack that would allow him to help Haven, Hector moved cautiously to the chair, taking a last, hard look around at the three men guarding him, then he sat down.

  A strap was quickly pulled from the bottom of the chair—thrown over his thighs and then fastened soundly with a metal clasp.

  Hector took a closer look and saw his lap strap was a simply a repurposed seatbelt salvaged from a car. The thick nylon would resist cutting, even if Hector had a knife. The metal clasp, designed to hold its grasp even under the forces of high-speed collisions, would also hold tight under these far less taxing circumstances—it would do that at least until its chrome release button was pressed.

  Hector’s legs began to tremble.

  He’d found himself in chairs like this one a time or two, but he’d been younger then—under forty or still close enough to it to be much “tougher” than he felt now.

  Trussed up and guarded by not-so-long-ago enemies infamous for their pitiless treatment of captive allies, foes dreaded because of their facility for cold-hearted, meticulously implemented torture—and, of course, thinking of Haven in the next room, the poor darling stripped bare and subjected to God only knew what to motivate her unfortunate lover—Hector now felt anything but formidable.

  Two other men left then, opening the door and going into the adjoining room where the others had taken Haven.

  Hector thought he heard soft calls for help as the door opened, but it immediately closed after them, returning to near silence the larger, colder room in which he sat strapped to his chair.

  The man who still held Hector’s gun stood in front of the author, watching him while stealing covetous, admiring glances at the Walther. Evidently, it was the first one of those that the masked man had held; he was clearly confounded by the gun’s slide-mounted safety.

  But the fool was standing on the perfect side of his hostage’s chair—at least that was so from Hector’s perspective. As the man fiddled with the gun, trying to grasp its operation, Hector twisted and pulled at the surgical rubber hose binding his arms at the wrist.

  He simultaneously rubbed the hose against the rough edge of the stout wooden chair, sloughing off not just layers of skin, but of rubber, as well.

  The door to the other room where Haven was being held briefly opened and a strange figure—rather perversely barefoot on the cold concrete—padded into the room as the door once more closed behind.

  This time, there were no audible cries from Haven. Hector took that as a very bad sign.

  Hector said to the strange figure now standing in front of him—“If you hurt her—”

  “Hush!” A muffled, harsh voice said it in Japanese-inflected English.

  The figure before him was truly grotesque—draped in a shapeless black silk kimono that hung very loosely, for the moment obscuring any hint of a silhouette that might have given Hector at least a sense of gender or even simple physical size.

  The person in the kimono might have been very thin or quite fat.

  The tent-like kimono itself was emblazoned with a golden, writhing dragon.

  It was the mask the stranger wore, however, that was most striking thing about the calculated disguise.

  This wasn’t some simple surgical mask fashioned from fabric that hooked behind the ears such as their kidnappers had worn.

  This face-covering was a real Japanese Noh mask of the kind Hector had glimpsed in shop windows while play-acting gaijin tourist with Haven.

  The mustard-hued Japanese Noh mask was a horribly grinning Hannya, resembling a devil or demon’s face, replete with fangs and two long horns thrusting out of either side of the head.

  The muffled voice said, “You will talk only in answer to questions. Your answers, in turn, will have a direct bearing on the fate of your friend in the next room. If, that is, she is indeed of actual importance to you. It has been said true friends are best known in first hardships, and I sense this is just such a hardship for the two of you. It may be the first of many such trials. Almost assuredly that is so if you prove foolishly stubborn.”

  “She is my friend,” Hector said, “but I have nothing I can possibly say or do to—”

  A slight nod from the masked head drew Hector up short. The man who held Hector’s gun slid it back in his pocket, then turned and raised a stiffening hand. With the cutting edge of that hand, the man struck Hector hard across the back of the neck.

  Hector felt his body briefly go numb from the point of impact downward, then a terrible burning sensation exploded inside his head. He saw cascades of fireworks in the low light. Hector shook his head and blinked, struggling to clear his blurring vision.

  “Excuses and stalling efforts are not how this encounter will be permitted to proceed, Mr. Lassiter,” the stranger in the devil’s mask hissed in English. “This is how things are going to move forward.” There was a slight, sibilant emphasis on the ss in Hector’s surname that resulted in it coming across as something closer to Lasshiter.

  “There is a microphone hanging from the ceiling above you,” the masked stranger said. “I’m quite fond of devices like that and so have installed many of them in the various places in which you have been spending time since reaching Japan. I therefore have heard and already know many things. I have been a kind of fly on the wall for myriad conversations that you have had with your other friends, particularly with Mr. Fleming. So understand that I know very well why you are both here, and I of course know what your real quest is. It is one I share, obviously. And I will see my will done, at any bloody cost to you.

  “Now, as I have said about your woman friend in the next room,” the voice continued, “I mean to test the depth of your friendship toward her, this night. I mean to earn your loyalty and friendship—your obedience in fulfilling my aims—by assessing the actual depth of your commitment to your friend in the next room. You see, I believe that a true friend is known or found in adversity, rather like gold is proven in fire. Your friend will therefore suffer each time I put a question to you and find the answer unsatisfactory or untrustworthy. I need merely give a short order into that microphone above us, and the next in a series of already planned and very excruciating procedures involving cutting instruments will be inflicted upon Miss Haven Branch’s comely person. This process will continue to her ongoing disfigurement and even her eventual death if you do not cooperate. Now, do we understand each other, Mr. Lassiter? Are we most clear?”

  The rubber tying his hands was nearly chewed through as a result of frenzied friction with the chair back’s splintered, distressed edge. There was just enough give to his elastic bonds now that circulation was returning and with it, some useful control of Hector’s blood-starved fingers.

  Hector tried to stall for the precious few seconds he’d need to free his hands. He said thickly, pretending to be more groggy from the blow than was actually the case, “If you truly have Fleming’s hotel room bugged, then you know that we have no idea where the thing everyone seems to want is hidden. Ian has already tapped out once coming over here, looking. He did that just a couple of years ago, on the same so-called quest. There’s simply no reason to believe this attempt won’t prove any less fruitless.”

  A harsh laugh. “We haven’t heard everything, sadly. Your friends had a visitor, recently. Occasionally you have thwarted our eavesdropping, through luck or calculation. You and Fleming were paid a visit by someone called Burton. Who is that man? What was said when he took you all into the bathroom and turned up the faucet taps? Is he the one who gave you that German gun? What precisely was said in that little room, away from my many invisible ears, Mr. Lassiter?”

  Invisible ears? Christ, it was very much starting to feel like he’d staggered into some Fu Manchu potboiler.

  Blessedly, just at that moment, the rubber cord around his wrists at last parted. Hector managed to catch the severed rubber tubing in one numbed palm before it could hit the floor and so reveal he was no longer bound.

/>   Buying just a few more vital second to get his hands in useful working condition—they were throbbing painfully with the sudden, unimpeded return of blood at last flowing from wrist to fingertips—Hector thought about it, then decided to state the obvious:

  “Burton is some kind of British agent, I guess you’d say. Probably SIS but not of the field agent sort. You’re right about this much—he gave me the Walther. He’s a kind of quartermaster or guns supplier, that’s all. It was all hardware talk and that’s truly it. He’s not part of any of this beyond seeing we had a little firepower for protection.”

  Hector looked around the gloomy room and nodded at the masked man in front of him. “Not that it’s done us much good, obviously. Witness our sad current circumstances. Now, who the hell exactly are you?”

  Another headshake, this one more emphatic. Something was said in Japanese, then in translation: “Nō aru taka wa tsume wo kakusu. The talented hawk hides it claws, Mr. Lassiter.”

  Hector smiled and said, “Indeed.” As he spoke, he reached around suddenly and depressed the button on the seat belt binding him to his chair. Even as Hector lunged to his feet, the man with the surgical mask reached for Hector’s gun, fumbling with it again as he tried unsuccessfully to pull the trigger while the safety was still engaged. Once again frustrated by the gun’s mechanism, he quickly cast it aside, then assumed a judo or karate position.

  Hector thought, Jesus Christ, really?

  Remembering the paralyzing blow the man had dealt him with that single, modulated chop to the back of the neck, Hector decided not to risk further contact with the man if he could evade it. Instead, Hector calculatedly cocked a fist in an almost cartoonish telegraphing of an intended punch.

  As the man readied to parry Hector’s expected roundhouse, the writer instead kicked the man hard between the legs. It wasn’t a “cricket” move of course, but it was crudely and devastatingly effective against the smaller martial arts expert.

  There was a soft, spastic gasp as the man clutched at his groin and dropped to his knees, robbed of all wind, his overtaxed nervous system telegraphing a freight train of pain signals to his beleaguered brain.

  Hector quickly slid around behind the man and drew the slim cord of wire from his modified Rolex. He wrapped it twice around the man’s neck, then pulled it wickedly taut, strangling the stranger.

  A soft cry of fear and motion to his right: The robed figure in the devil’s mask was dashing toward the door of the room where Haven was being held. Hector didn’t wait to confirm the his more immediate foe’s death, instead slamming his perhaps already strangled opponent’s face hard against concrete floor twice, then kicking the man once in the temple. He was sure that abuse had almost certainly killed the man if the garrote hadn’t already done the job.

  Hector scooped up his Walther and got off a single shot into the closing metal door. There came the sound of a ricochet, first against metal and then pavement.

  When he reached that door, Hector found it was locked from the other side. He shot the knob twice, then kicked off what was left. Throwing open the door and rolling to one side in expectation of a returned shot, the author was instead met with frightening silence.

  Hector carefully leaned around the jamb once more, very quickly, and saw Haven was alone in the room, nude and sprawled on the cold and cracked floor. She was already bruising from what appeared to have been a savage series of blows or kicks.

  Even as he registered all that, Hector heard distant, retreating footsteps on concrete stairs. Tempted as he was to follow, he instead crouched down close to Haven and said carefully and urgently, fully expecting the worst, “Haven, honey—are you still with me?”

  She stirred and groaned. Hector cast his gaze around, saw her discarded clothes.

  Another groan. He reached for her overcoat and wrapped it carefully around her, warming her. He said, “Stay with me now, darlin’. Don’t you dare pass out! It’s all over now. I’ll see you get help. I swear I’ll see to that.”

  13 / Double Agent/Double Cross?

  Haven was groggy from the assault. Nude under her coat, she was already showing bruising to rival Hector’s equally nasty contusions from his own series of bumps and bruises resulting from the airport explosion.

  He tried again to talk Haven into a visit to a hospital, but she stood firm: “There’d be inquiries and they likely would assume you did it to me—some kind of stupid gaijin domestic row,” she said thickly. “Anyway, it’s not my first beating, and so you know, that’s all that was done to me back there. They shamed me by taking all my clothes, then they went to work on me with their fists and feet. Oh, they certainly threatened the other, and they might even have gotten around to raping me in due course, but thanks to you that didn’t happen.”

  She took his hand and squeezed it hard. “Thank you so much for saving me, Hector. There simply aren’t worthy words. Thank God for you.”

  Hector stubbornly persisted in his arguments for professional care as they sat at the back of a commuter bus, whispering urgently to one another. He said “Darlin’, please understand that if a rib should be broken, and if that splintered bone should then find an organ—”

  “No,” she insisted, cutting him off. “I’d know. It looks much worse than it is, though maybe not as bad as it feels just now. I just need some time to regroup, that’s all. I need a hot bath and some pain pills. Then, like you after the explosion and your injuries, I just need some rest.” She managed a little smile. “I need your TLC in return for what I gave you earlier.”

  Her face was remarkably undamaged, at least—her bruises confined to her torso and upper thighs that her overcoat quite fortunately covered. Her other clothes—some of them likely torn beyond possibility of mending, Hector had folded and was carrying under one arm.

  When the bus at last reached their hotel, he rose and helped Haven to unsteady feet. She leaned hard on him as they made their way through the lobby and into an elevator that left haven feeling quite queasy. Then, as Hector all but carried her, they at last meandered down the longish common corridor and into their room.

  There, Hector drew her a hot bath, then helped Haven off with her coat and held her hand as, naked, she gingerly lowered herself into the hot water.

  He handed Haven a glass of drinking water and three aspirins, then excused himself for a moment. Haven called out to his back, “You’re not actually leaving me?”

  “Just using the phone to call upstairs,” he said. “Have to make sure Ian and the others aren’t trussed up in some damned underground bunker themselves.”

  ***

  Ian answered on the second ring. He said angrily, “My God, where have you two been, Hector? Your literary lunch stretched into dinner and then some. You’ve left me fretting terribly, frankly. Even Dikko was getting worried.”

  Hector gave a brief, near breathless run down of their kidnapping to an increasingly horrified Ian. He ended with, “Let’s plan on all meeting up for a nightcap and strategy session in the bar. It’s harder to bug every square inch of that place at least, but we need to be sure we pick the table and don’t let some conniving bastard window dress the thing with a nice tapped candle or dainty flower arrangement or the like, yes? Oh, and Ian, on that further, cautionary note, it’s probably best to figure your room is wired ten ways from Tuesday. Probably best to assume that our rooms’ phones are tapped, too.”

  ***

  It was still two hours until their scheduled rendezvous over drinks. They were lying in bed, Hector dressed and Haven stretched out naked under the sheets, but holding comfortingly to one another, watching all those crazy lights coming on again, one-by-one outside their room’s panoramic picture window that opened onto downtown Tokyo.

  “They did to me only what you saw—what you see—that’s really all, darling,” she said again quite unnecessarily from Hector’s perspective. Yet it seemed important to Haven to reiterate to him nothing sexual had been done to her.

  She paused, then said with a
little tone of anger creeping into her otherwise tired voice, “You really should have told me about your gun. And about that deadly watch. At least they might have given me a little more piece of mind going into that horrid room with those men. I thought we were unarmed goners.” A beat. “I fully expected to die, you know.”

  Hector sighed. “For all the good the first of those gadgets really did, perhaps I should have told you. But there was just never enough time for any of that. Or, rather, the subject just hadn’t come up yet. I’m sure it would have, and quite likely sooner rather than later. Living in close quarters as we’ve been, you were going to see me dressing or undressing eventually. You would have seen the holster and gun.”

  She smiled and kissed his throat. “Or at very least I’d perhaps have felt it during the next passionate hug.” She paused, then said, “The person in the devil’s mask who ran past me—who do you think that was?”

  “No damned clue,” Hector said. “Certainly not government, not dressed like some Shiwan Khan knock-off or Saturday matinee villain. Even the voice is a hard call for me. Could have been male or female. No, that person—man or woman, because again, there was simply no telling what truly lay under that big old robe—that person,” he resumed, “is something not official. They are clearly something else. Only that much I’m sure about.”

  Haven gave a little shiver.

  He said, “I can turn up the heat or get another blanket. After a beating like that, I’m afraid it’s not unusual to run a fever. Your body is in shock—sending out an all hands-on-deck signal to all your innards.”

  She shook her head and held him tighter. “Please, don’t move, because this is very nice, just like this. Quite comforting. And fever? You’re like my doctor. Come to think of it, your file said you were a medic between the wars. I’m right about that, aren’t I?”

  “Just after the so-called Great War,” he confirmed. “So, yeah, I’ve got some modest skills in that direction.”