She stared across the blurry diner and inhaled the coffee's rich aroma, letting it blanket the sour lingering tang of her vomit. There was something he had said...
She knew where to head, but she had no idea what she'd do when she got there.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Goran's mansion on Lake Drive was a long, half-Germanic, half-Italianate gabled monstrosity almost hidden behind an eight-foot wall and tall hedges lining the inner perimeter. Tucked beside the main house was an elaborate four-car garage that mirrored it architecturally. Just visible to the opposite side was the roof of what was probably a pool-house overlooking the bluff. The gate was remote-controlled, and the gatehouse probably housed a pair of overfed armed goons.
Goran had obviously imported a raft full of them, probably all ex-Serbian military with blood on their hands from the ethnic cleansing of the mid to late Nineties. Brant had no trouble visualizing them in camouflage garb gunning down innocents and burying them in mass graves. He'd spent one week in that special hell, and it came back to him like images from the Holocaust, except these people were still visible on his television in color, recent history, and his efforts had probably doomed some of them. The Serbian conflict was the best kind of training ground for a private army, and Goran was likely to have at least twenty such thugs on his fat payroll, all blindly loyal to the man who had saved them from an international court and assuredly a hangman's noose. And all probably sadistic killers who engaged in their work with relish.
Brant drove past twice, keeping an eye out for a tail, then left his car in an empty university lot a couple blocks away. The campus cops would ticket him, since classes weren't in session and he didn't have a sticker, but he wasn't going to pay the fine anyway. By next week, if he was still alive, he would have different plates. There was a limit to his resources, but he hadn't hit it yet. By the end of the night, or tomorrow, however, he might well be close. Right now, he was nearly sure he hadn't been followed by Colgrave, and that was important because he had work to do. Heavy duty work here. The time for feinting was past. Now it was all thrusting.
He strolled briskly back to the bright Christmas-lit Lake Drive and waited for the sightseers and last-minute holiday shoppers to drift past, then crossed the busy upscale north-south street and slid directly into the shadows beside the mansion's wall, out of sight of the gatehouse. He could see a flickering inside, where a television played either a Christmas special or some porn, not that he gave a damn.
Pulling his collar up to the cold drizzle, Brant crept along the brick wall noting the evenly spaced relay boxes. A motion or beam alarm to complicate things.
He shook his head, wishing the pain away. As usual, it made thinking more difficult. He blinked and saw Kit, holding out her bloody hands to him like an offering. Her body was ruined by torture, her eyes bleeding tears. He blinked again and she was gone. But the pain remained.
The mansion was a scaled-down palace, only its upper floor visible from below the wall's top edge. Brant reached one side of the property and followed a gentle incline where the lot fell away into the bluff overlooking the dark, animated lake. Late winter waves washed up audibly on a beach that hovered below, a gentle roar in the night. Brant noted that the wall had been extended around all four edges of the property, but at the bluff's lowest point it wasn't as tall. Rows of pines and firs inside the perimeter masked much of the house, but through the evergreen needles he saw twinkling lights in some windows.
Kit could well be held prisoner in there.
He felt the need for sleep, but refused to give in to it. The insight he sometimes gained from the sleep state might or might not be worth the time it would take. He just didn't want to go to sleep in the hopes of dreaming about Kit, hoping some mixed-up flashback nightmare might carry with it some clue. There wasn't any time. It was as if a clock had begun counting down in his head. Maybe that was the clue. Either way, it was past time for action.
Forces beyond his control had led him to Goran. Now he only had one road open to him, and if he was wrong, then she was dead anyway.
He stopped where a bare maple tree on the outside of the wall hadn't been pruned back as much as the others. Combined with the lower height of the wall, it was his way in. He was certain the relays were a beam alarm, but a poorly installed one, and he avoided them easily as he clambered up the low-hanging branches. He hoped they'd hold his weight. They creaked but held and he cautiously stepped over the wall noting the embedded glass shards. A careful leap over the sharp obstacle, a soft landing in the sodden grass, and then he was ducking under the nearest row of firs.
A cigarette flame had flared red for a second, and he'd almost run into him. An armed guard, standing just on the other side of the firs, apparently facing the bluff and looking up. Not expecting a visitor from below the property, he held some kind of short weapon aimed at the ground. The sound of the breaking waves twenty feet below masked Brant's approach. He couldn't see the lake, but he was thankful for the darkness over the water. Had it been snowing, it would have been too light.
The guard muffled a short coughing fit.
He could have been Serb paramilitary or a local thug. But he was no match for someone who had graduated from the bloody tunnels of Cu Chi.
Brant ignored the niggling feeling he was outnumbered. Any group can be decimated one by one. Goran had Kit, and maybe she was being held in this building. Megalomaniacal paramilitaries always think they're above the rules.
Now there were no rules.
He stood two feet behind the oblivious guard and shot him twice in mid-cough. The silenced Woodsman made hardly a sound except for the slide's mechanical rattle, which dissolved into the muted drone of the nearby waves.
After easing the corpse down to the wet needle-covered ground and rolling him into the shadows, Brant began his zigzag climb up the bluff.
Mud and wet leaves clinging to his boots, he struggled briefly with the steep portion of the hill. The slick grass hampered his progress, but soon he reached a flat concrete patio crowned by an outdoor kitchen that had been tarp-covered against the winter. French doors opened onto the concrete and faced the lake. Brant crouched in the low bushes that circled the patio until he spotted the guard, seated on a brick parapet ten feet from him, facing away. This one suckled at a flask pulled from under his parka, then burped. Brant's two bullets took him high in the head and he disappeared in a heap, conveniently behind the parapet.
The house was alarmed, but the French doors had been left open a crack so the guard could "check" outside and have at his sauce on the sly.
Brant examined as much of the room as he could through the narrow opening, then slid into the shadows of a large space decked out as a game room with billiards and video game consoles connected to multiple flat screen televisions. He closed the French doors behind him so nothing would be amiss if someone peered into the room. He crossed the room to the inner door and listened, his ear brushing the wood. Silence. Then he slipped into an empty hallway that seemed to stretch from one end of the house to the other. Well-lit sconces revealed paintings and sculpted porcelain spaced evenly on both sides of the hall.
Brant found the basement stairs by accident when a muscular guard in desert-pattern camouflage opened a door in front of him. The guard's eyes widened upon seeing the intruder and he went for the gun holstered at his side.
Two .22-caliber slugs silenced him, shattering his temple and destroying his right eye socket. He went down with a crash, and Brant waited for someone else to show up and investigate. There was no response, at least not yet.
Brant pulled the body into the staircase with him. It was also well-lit, and carpeted all the way down to a door. He popped the magazine and replaced it, listening for signs of a response or alarm. Still nothing.
Brant's head throbbed. Momentarily, the staircase resembled a tunnel, though a luxurious one. He almost expected a half-naked tunnel fighter to attack him with a spear or a chopped-down AK. Or a grenade. He rubbed his temple with o
ne hand, waiting for the blurred vision to clear. Instead, a series of jabs into the back of his head sent him reeling. He caught his balance only barely before he might have gone tumbling down the stairs.
For a valuable second, he saw Kit holding out her hands again, but now she was wearing bloodied jungle camouflage.
As in the nightmare he'd had earlier.
Steadying himself, he blinked until he could see again.
It was as if Kit's image had become superimposed on his retinas.
Or perhaps Kit was calling out for him.
He shook off the jabs and the blur, stepped over the dead guard, and stalked downstairs to the door below. It had been painted to resemble wood, but it was solidly armored and had a tiny inset window made of reinforced glass up high. He tried it, expecting resistance, but it was unlocked. Surprised, Brant slipped through, handgun up and ready, but there was no one lying in wait.
Jesus.
The smell.
It brought him back to the tunnels again. The stink of sweat, urine, body odor, and something else.
Fear. And desperation.
And…
Another long hallway stretched out ahead of him, with a series of doors set on both sides. They might have been bedroom doors, except for the deadbolts mounted on the exterior. And the overpowering stench.
He smelled worse now, the reek of dead bodies. He'd smelled mass graves before, holes in which bodies had been stacked like firewood and set ablaze, or covered in lime. This was like that, but with the tang of freshly spilled blood floating above it.
Brant bit his own tongue. A trick he had learned somewhere between the tunnels, the jungle and its myriad booby-traps festooned with rotting human entrails, and the Saigon back alleys that became his territory afterwards. He bit again, fighting back tears. Just sufficient to focus, not enough to bleed.
Gun in hand, he moved from door to door, throwing bolts and swinging them open to peer inside each prison cell. He could see easily that was what they were – stainless steel toilets, metal rings set in the floors and chains draped over empty bunks and occasional personal possessions, now abandoned. He saw a ragged teddy bear left sitting in one corner. Each of the cells may have been empty of people, but the stench seemed to have permeated the entire complex. Brant wondered fleetingly who had done the work for Goran, and what had happened to him after he was finished. No building permit had been filed for this basement alteration, of that he was damned sure. He also wondered whether Kit had been here recently, or whether this was just one of many secure little harems the bastard Serb had set up to feed his flesh machine.
The dozen rooms outfitted as cells gave way to several others, larger, which Brant also found to be unused at the moment. One was similar to a dentist's office, but the chair had tripod-held cameras trained on it. A stained king-size bed behind that, several carpeted areas covered with pillows, and a small grove of photographers' light-poles gave him the basic idea of the room's function. It was a bare-bones studio. Open-shelf cabinets contained ranks of video and still cameras, discs, memory cards, and other peripherals. The next room housed a small home-theater set-up aimed at another low scattering of bedroom furniture, and a set of folding tables at one side held a half-dozen computers, flat monitors, printers, and scanners, all seemingly set up on a cable modem with wireless router.
For a moment, Brant stopped to consider Goran's operation. He could kidnap, break, train or brainwash – or coerce – young women and girls, then use them for homemade porn, and then apparently offer them up for sale to bidders either in person or on the Web. It was ingenious, really, if it hadn't all been so disgusting and perverted. Brant gripped the Woodsman and hoped – no, he fervently wished – that he'd run into another guard or worse, perhaps one of the men who must certainly spend his time here helping to run the place either behind or in front of the cameras. He wanted nothing more than to punish someone, anyone, for what had happened here who knew how long.
There was one more room, its door standing silent sentinel at the end of the hall, bearing a red and white NO ADMITTANCE store-bought sign. Suddenly he felt the jabs in his head worsen as if an invisible boxer had begun to rain sharp, pointed blows onto the side of his head. For a second the walls closed in and he was in the tunnels again, squeezed like a piece of food in an intestine, held in place and unable to see an invisible enemy crawling up behind him with a dark-smeared blade ready to zip through the muscle and tendons of his throat. He sagged for a moment, wondering if he'd see Kit now, in image or in the flesh, and somehow he knew he did not want to open this last door. He recovered enough to reach for it, and in fact he found that it was the only locked door on this level.
Shooting off locks only works in movies, and his Woodsman was too light a caliber to even attempt. His other pistol wasn't silenced and could bring down a squad of guards who might be in the mansion's upper floors. He waited for his head to stop spinning and the jabs to lessen a bit, then stalked back to where he'd left the guard who'd caught him at the basement door. He rifled the pockets and found a set of keys, the fourth of which he was able to turn in the lock of the door before him. With one last fervent but nonreligious prayer, he pushed it open and let the stench of death and decay wash over him. This was like the cemetery he'd found one day. The VC had tunneled through it, a zig-zag pattern of rabbit warrens enough to spin one's mind around. Their dead were not encased in coffins or crypts, but loosely wrapped, if at all, and the damp soil had made short work of their skin and flesh, but their soft arm and leg bones protruded from all sides of the tunnel, nudging him with ragged bits of skin and flesh the scavengers hadn't yet gotten to, the stench so blinding that he'd wondered whether he would go mad before finding the vertical air tunnel that took him above ground, where at least he could avoid the graves. For a moment, it was like that tunnel, the one he'd tried for decades to forget.
But then it was infinitely worse.
Because when he flicked on the light, he saw in photographer's flashes: a stained autopsy table, a rack of meat hooks, and a workbench covered with cutting, sawing, drilling, and poking tools of all types. It was a workshop of torture and death. Brant swallowed his rising gorge and entered, wary of the room's corners, but the room was empty. A bucket below the autopsy table was half-filled with rotting bloody fingers, toes, ears. He felt his head spinning again, so he turned away toward the walk-in freezer in the corner. It was like any found in liquor stores or meat markets, stainless steel walls with a failsafe inside lock. The room must have been built around the freezer, because it would have been impossible to transport such a unit down the stairs and through the hall. This huge freezer unit had come from an excavation into the building's rear, perhaps, through the gentle slope of the hillside. Unless the mansion itself was of recent construction, in which case this horrific lower level could have been planned from the beginning and executed to order for its owner.
Brant swallowed hard and pulled open the thick freezer door. He couldn't postpone the inevitable any more. If Kit was – if Kit had ended up here, he needed to know. Cold air and more of the tang of recent death escaped and washed over him. A weak light came on overhead. He entered and came face to face with the body of a teenage girl hanging by her hands.
It wasn't Kit.
He released his breath, hardly aware he'd stopped breathing.
This girl had been tortured. Puckered scars had frozen now, but apparently someone had drilled holes into various parts of her body. Several fingers had been clipped off, and her eye sockets were black holes.
Brant knew that if he hadn't survived the tunnels in Cu Chi, he would have been on the floor spewing up his guts.
But there was more in the freezer. The next body was headless, but tattoos told him it wasn't Kit. On shelving near the back were stacked several body parts, and two heads, which looked at him with ill-concealed loathing and disgust frozen forever on their features. Neither was Kit, but Brant wondered about the missing body. He found the torso on a lower shelf. The
re was room for several more bodies, but thankfully there were no more occupants.
For a second he struggled with the inner lock, which seemed stuck, until he realized that he needed to push it rather than pull on it, as he'd been doing. The thought of being trapped there with the mutilated was almost as horrifying as the tunnels.
Brant closed the freezer but the chill had settled into his bones.
This grotesque storage of victims posed a logic problem. If Goran made his money with porn, prostitution, and even slavery, it was a foregone conclusion that he needed live girls. Even the old urban legend of snuff films had never been proven real and the market couldn't be so vast as to require such a facility – it just seemed too far-fetched and ill-conceived. Porn and slavery, there was a sustainable market presence and a continuing revenue stream. Snuff films would require endless marketing to a narrow niche, not to mention requiring too many accomplices. The guard had had a key to this room, but perhaps there weren't many others. Brant let his mind flash through the possibilities. Perhaps Goran himself was a necrophiliac and he enjoyed getting his hands dirty this way as a hobby, aside from the main industry. There were signs that this wasn't the main product – for instance the way it was locked when the other "production" facilities weren't, the sign that kept out casual intruders, and the way it had been kept fairly clean, considering its intended purpose. It was almost an afterthought, an accommodation, a compromise. Either Goran moonlighted as a crazed serial killer, or someone in his employ did. The little Brant had seen of Goran, he seemed to like his girls alive and preferably pliant to his demands. That kind of predator is not into death, for issuing orders that must be obeyed is the key. A dead girl may be posed, but takes no orders.
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