by Ted Dekker
Kalman sat in a brown leather chair with wooden arms, smoking a cigar, watching him. Next to him was a large metal chair with buckled straps on the arm and leg rests. A round leather bowl was suspended above the chair, and from this headpiece extended several large electrical cords.
It was an electric chair.
Three guards stood to the left of the electric chair.
“Hello, Carl.”
Carl stared at the chair, at a loss. He’d been told that to fail meant execution, but he’d always imagined a bullet to the brain. The chair didn’t make him afraid—he had no intention of failing.
“Today you will either become the third assassin, or you will die,” Kalman said. “I’ve decided that I will electrocute you when you fail. I think you have some considerable strength and should put on a good show, but not even a bull could withstand the electricity that will boil your blood when you fail us today. Do you understand this?”
“Yes.”
Kalman shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, then stood. He ran a finger over the leather headpiece, removing dust, which he smelled and then wiped on his pants.
“If you execute your mission successfully, you won’t have to face the chair, but I don’t expect it. Tell me, what is your primary objective?”
“To survive.”
“To survive why?”
“So that I can execute my mission.”
“Good. Your first assassination was to be in five days, but I’ve decided to make it today. Today you will find and kill your handler. If you fail, I will kill you.”
“My handler . . .” Carl wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. He had to be sure that he had the right target.
“Kelly Larine,” Kalman said. “The one who has ordered you around for ten months. She knows too much and is too valuable to you. It’s good to cleanse the system now and then. You know where she is?”
“Yes.”
“You have one hour to kill her and bring her body to the hospital.” Kalman pulled out a stopwatch and thumbed the knob on top.
Carl could not focus. He knew his mission, but he wasn’t sure how to execute it.
“You may kill her however you wish,” Agotha said.
“You may go,” Kalman said.
“Thank you, sir.” Carl dipped his head and ran down the hall. Up the stairs, out into the sunshine.
“LEAVE US,” Agotha ordered.
The three guards left the room. The only thing more reliable than the assassins they sent into the field was one of their personnel. They were paid significant sums of money for their cooperation and threat-ened with significant consequence for any failure. Mostly thugs, but not stupid ones.
The door swung shut. “I want to voice my final objection to this,” Agotha said. “Both are too valuable.”
“She cares for him too much.”
“Which only ensures that she will keep him safe. She knows that if he ever betrays us, we’ll kill him with the implant. You’re stripping away everything I’ve worked for!”
Kalman did not reply. He knew what he was taking from her and took pleasure from it. This was his twisted way.
“You think she’s weak?” she demanded. “What would you know about a woman’s weakness for a man? And this is no ordinary man whose life you’re toying with. His shooting scores have improved all week. He’s manipulating the field, for heaven’s sake! You would kill a man like that?”
“Then perhaps he’s too dangerous.”
“Not if you leave his loyalty to me. We’ve led him to believe that she’s his savior. Our manipulation has been extensive and effective. Last week he gave up a knife to save her in a test I designed for Kelly. He’s dangerous, but not to us, not as long as we have his loyalty. But today you may compromise that.”
“One of them has to go. I don’t care which.”
“Are you listening to me? Their emotional bond is a good thing. I’ll leave the killing to you, but you will leave the manipulation to me.” Kalman drilled her with a dark stare.
“He’s been carefully programmed both to survive and to love Kelly,” she said. “This scenario presents no solutions for him. We are fighting ourselves with this mad game of yours.”
“Then we will kill both of them.”
“And accomplish what?”
Kalman rose, impatient. “If he is what you say he is, then let him prove it, and he will live according to the terms.”
“He’s a gold mine.”
“You favor this one too much. We both know that Englishman is the better man. It takes more than good marksmanship to make a good assassin.”
Agotha walked to the door and pulled it open. “Englishman could kill Saint easily enough now, but in a year or two?”
“If he survives today, we’ll give him his year or two. If he dies, he wasn’t meant to live.”
12
Carl walked toward the bunker on legs filled with lead. His head swam in dizzy circles. He couldn’t seem to make sense of the mission that lay ahead of him, much less form a tunnel of security from which to execute it.
So he just walked. He didn’t feel the urgency to run. He didn’t feel the need to use stealth. He just walked.
Birds chirped from the nearby forest. He wondered if Englishman had been faced with a challenge similar to this one. Or Jenine. They had both passed their final tests and been deployed. Soon he would join them.
But without Kelly?
Kelly was his life as much as the blood that coursed through his veins. Killing her was the same as killing himself. He couldn’t kill himself. So he just walked.
But he had to kill her. If draining his blood was the only way to complete his mission, he would drain his blood.
Why would he agree to kill Kelly? Why did he long for an assassin’s life? The answers, clear on some days, eluded him now. But he knew with more certainty than he knew anything else that his role in this operation was far more important than the dilemma immediately before him. His failure to execute the task would end badly for every-one, including Kelly.
If killing Kelly was the only way to become the assassin he was meant to be, he simply had to kill her, no matter how much he cared for her. She herself would insist.
The truth of the notion suddenly struck him as insane.
She was standing in the corner when he entered the bunkhouse. “You’re finished?” She hurried over to him. “What’s going on?”
Carl closed the door, heard it clank shut, surprised by how loud it sounded. He looked into her wide blue eyes and knew then that he couldn’t kill her—not here in the light where he could see her eyes.
When he spoke he could barely hear his own voice. “Can we go to my pit?”
“Sure. What is it? Are you finished?”
“Maybe we should go to my pit,” he said.
Her eyes searched his, concerned. “Sure, Carl.”
He let her lead. They descended the stairs, walked down the long hall with its single caged incandescent light, down the concrete steps that led to his pit.
Kelly paused at the entrance, then entered the dark room lit only by the open doorway. She turned around by his chair and waited for him to follow her in.
But even here, in the safest place he knew, Carl felt powerless to kill her. He needed to go deeper.
“Do you have the key to the tunnel?”
She glanced at the locked door behind her. “Yes.”
“Could we go inside?”
“Tell me what’s happening, Carl. You’re scaring me.”
“I will tell you. But we have to go inside the tunnel where it’s dark.”
She found the key on a ring that she withdrew from her pocket, opened the door, and stepped aside to let him pass first.
He walked into the inky blackness a full fifty yards before stopping and turning back. She’d left the door open, but only a pale beam of gray followed them in. She reached for his arm and stared into his face. He couldn’t see her eyes.
“I’ve
never seen you like this. Whatever it is, you can do it, Carl. I believe in you. You have to believe in yourself.”
“My final test is to kill you.”
They were surrounded by silence and darkness, and ordinarily Carl would have found comfort in both. But he could feel the heat drain from her fingers around his arm, and the sensation terrified him.
“They want you to kill me?” she asked.
“If I don’t kill you, they will kill me,” he said.
They stood still for a full minute. When she has the solution, she will give it to me, he thought. But he knew that there was no solution. He would have to choose between killing her or being killed. If it was Agotha or Kalman or anyone else, the choice would be simple.
But his need for Kelly was as great as his need for his own life.
She placed her free hand on his chest. “How long did they give you?”
“One hour.”
Kelly lowered both hands and swore in a whisper. “You can’t let them kill you!”
She might as well have screamed the words, because in his mind they were deafening.
Her voice trembled. “You know very well that I’m expendable. What am I, just a slave girl that came to Agotha off the streets of Budapest—”
“Did you really shoot Englishman?”
He still couldn’t see her eyes. “No. We used special effects to make it look like I shot him. The test was ordered by Agotha to test your loyalty to me.”
“And is this a test too?”
“No! Kalman will kill you with pleasure. No doubt, we’ve destroyed your mind, I’m so sorry, but you have to listen to me. This is it—you have no choice. You have to kill me. It will be my penance.”
“But you said yourself, you only deceived me to save me. It’s why you hurt me. And when you did hurt me, you hurt yourself, not just me. We’re linked, see? If I kill you, I’ll be killing myself. I can’t do that.”
She looked at him without speaking. Then she lowered her head so that her forehead rested against his shoulder. “Dear Lord, what have I done?”
“I’ll go to the hospital and see what they do.”
“No.”
“I’ve survived electrical currents running through—”
“No!” She slammed her fist against his chest. “No, no, no! You will not let them kill you!”
Then what? What could he do? She loved him; he believed it now. Whatever lingering doubts he’d had were denied. He could not kill her. He would not.
Either way, he would die. But there was a way for her to live.
Carl broke away from her and began to pace. “Time is running out.” He still had forty-five minutes, but it seemed like only a second. “I have to do something. I can’t . . .”
Desperation was an enemy he’d beat long ago. But this time there was no light at the end of this tunnel. It was black to the bottom, no solution, no objective that could be achieved in this place where he no longer knew who he was.
“It’s the end this time, Carl,” Kelly said softly. “There’s no way out. No tunnel that will lead both of us to safety. I won’t let you go to your death. Use the drugs on me. They’re the kindest.”
Something moved in Carl’s mind. Something Kelly had said. He stopped pacing and peered into the darkness. “What did you say?”
“Drugs. They’re—”
“No! You said there’s no tunnel.”
“Is there?”
He began to pace again as the idea blossomed.
Carl grabbed her arm and ran past her, jerking her after him. “Is the tank full?”
“The isolation tank? Yes, why?”
“I have to go in. We have to hurry!”
She ran behind to stay up with him. “What about the mission?”
“I can’t kill you.”
13
His plan was simple, but it made no sense, and Kelly told him that a dozen times before he lowered himself into the huge cast-iron ball they called the isolation tank.
It contained warm, salted water, heated to 98.6 degrees. In this water the body felt nothing. Carl would wear a modified deep-sea diving mask that effectively cut off all sensory input to the ears, the eyes, the mouth, and the nose, leaving him completely sense-free.
The isolation tank provided the simplest, easiest, and quickest way for most subjects to enter stasis. They rarely used it anymore because Carl had advanced beyond the need for such an unwieldy tool, but with it he could move most quickly, and time was now an issue.
He was going deep, he said. Very deep. Deep enough so that he would remain in partial stasis for some time after he came out.
As agreed, Kelly left him in the tank for thirty minutes before pulling him out, dripping wet. Despite an almost uncontrollable urge to ask him how successful his trip had been, she worked quietly. She dried his body and dressed him in a dry pair of pants. She did all with the ring of insanity in her ears. In many ways she felt as if she were performing last rites on an animal to be sacrificed in a sick ritual.
He had no more than ten minutes to complete his mission when he followed her back into the tunnel, shirtless and shoeless.
Kelly led him toward the hospital, groping through the darkness with her free hand. She could hear his breathing, a full fifteen seconds between each breath, and she knew that he was still deep in the safety of his world.
She, on the other hand, was in a world of more peril than she could remember ever experiencing. She could no longer deny the fact that she felt deeply for him. She was meant to earn his love, and she had, but in the process, he had found a way to earn something from her. It made everything she was doing feel like a betrayal.
Leading him in silence now, she couldn’t hold back quiet tears.
He was going to die. She had tried to tell him as much, but he was adamant. Even angry. Now any attempt on her part to change his mind would only compromise his concentration.
She unlocked the door at the end of the tunnel and led him up the stairs into the hospital basement, still vacated of personnel. The door to the execution chamber was open. His breathing now came once every twelve seconds. He was normalizing!
Moving as fast as she could, Kelly strapped him in as Kalman had shown her several months earlier when he was in an especially cheerful mood. Each contact had to be coated with gel to ensure conductivity. Normally they would shave the head, but there was no time. She attached the electrodes to his forehead and to the back of his neck.
THE PLACE was as black as any Carl could remember.
He had formed his tunnel within seconds of entering the tank. He knew that he had a limited amount of time, but time ceased in here, so he didn’t think of himself as in a race against the clock.
He was here to protect the tunnel. A terrible force would come to destroy it, he knew. An enemy far greater than any he’d ever faced.
He would have to do something new. He couldn’t rely on the wall to protect him.
This time he would have to go outside the wall in a new tunnel, as he had recently, but with far more focus. His one advantage was that he knew how the attack would come. The force would come through his hands and skull.
If he could lower the heat in a room; if the pH balance of water could be altered so easily; if the faithful could walk into the fiery furnace and not be burned by flames or walk on water without drowning, then his mission wasn’t impossible.
It had been done before.
Carl swam outside the tunnel, sending wave after wave of the sea to his extremities, to the place where the enemy would attack. It was all in his mind, of course, but the mind was his greatest weapon.
He remembered being led down the underground tunnel and being strapped into the chair, but these were noises and sensations of another world.
Then voices. Urgent. Arguing, perhaps. Excited, perhaps.
He smiled. Did they know that he was outside the tunnel? Agotha would be proud!
The voices ceased, and he knew that the attack was going to come. And then
it did, in a red-hot wave that took his breath away and flooded his eyes with blinding light.
“TEN, ELEVEN . . .” Agotha stared at the jerking body through the picture window. There was no way he could possibly survive!
Inside Kalman continued his count. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” He nodded at the operator inside. “As agreed.”
A loud clank signaled the break. The hall lights brightened, then one sputtered and winked out. Kalman stood beside the chair, wearing a look of fascination. At times like these Agotha hated him.
She pulled the door open and stopped short. The smell of burned hair was strong. He was surely dead. If not physically, then mentally. A vegetable. They’d found no record of a man surviving fifteen seconds at this voltage, the only reason Kalman had agreed to the terms. “Carl?”
He was slumped against his straps, headpiece firmly in place.
“He’s dead,” Kalman said on her left.
The hall door crashed open, and Kelly pulled up by the large window. She rushed into the room and brushed past Agotha, not caring that her face was still wet with tears.
“Carl? Carl, please tell me you can hear me.” She frantically un-buckled the leather mask and flung it from his head. She ripped the blindfold off his face. Then she went to work on the attachments on his arms and legs, practically tearing them free.
Agotha blinked. Carl’s cheeks and lips were dry, not wet from tears or saliva. Surely his eyes would be gone, she thought. Surely his—His left hand twitched. Residual current.
“Carl?” Kelly’s voice was filled with desperation. She had deeper feelings for the man than even Agotha had guessed.
“He’s not breathing!” Kelly cried. She dropped her head against his chest and listened for a heartbeat. But if he wasn’t breathing now, a full minute since they’d turned off the electricity, he was dead.
As if in response to her thought, Carl’s left hand lifted an inch from the armrest. Stopped. Then it twisted, and his forearm slowly rose.