Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  He sensed very strongly that she would not welcome it.

  The key rattled in the heavy metal door, jolting Imre out of his deep contemplation. He had been mentally walking through the rooms of the Uffizi Gallery, looking at all the pictures he could call to mind. Which was to say, all of them, though his favorites were the clearest.

  The mental construct disintegrated. Waves of faintness and dread washed over him.

  Another visit. It pleased Gabor Novak to check upon Imre’s progress, or degeneration, to put it more clearly. The man liked to prod and pry for weaknesses, to inflict all the psychological torment that he was able. He was fiendishly talented at it.

  Imre’s defenses were limited to silence, but it was a poor defense. Already, he was cringing as if he was to be beaten or burned.

  The metal door swung wide, clanging with an ear-bruising bang against the concrete blocks. Two large men walked in, one training an automatic pistol at Imre, the other carrying a folding chair.

  Novak shuffled into the room and seated himself. Beaming.

  Imre focused somewhere beyond the man’s shoulder, clasping and unclasping his hands and fighting the urge to sit upon them to hide his frightened fingers.

  He’d told himself not to be afraid. He was dying anyway, no? Soon he would lose everything he had to lose. If some parts, like fingers, for instance, died sooner, what of it? The pain would soon be behind him.

  His efforts were futile. He could not talk himself out of the fear.

  Imre was grateful, at least, that he was not wearing his spectacles. Only one lens was still intact. The other had been shattered in the second beating. Having one corrected eye and the other blurred gave him a blinding headache. Since the last thing he needed was more pain from any quarter, he had given up on the glasses altogether, and hidden them under his mattress. Thus, he could not see the hideous details of Novak’s face, the feverish glow of those jaundiced, bulbous eyes, only a malevolent blur.

  Although he smelled the stench of the man’s breath all too well.

  “I have been thinking about you a great deal, Imre.” Novak had the air of a man conferring an honor. “I believe you and I have something in common.” The man’s voice was pleasant, chatty.

  God forbid, Imre thought, dropping his gaze to his twitching fingers. He willed them to lie still, to not draw attention to themselves.

  “I can see by your color, your thinness, that you are being consumed by some wasting disease,” Novak said. “Cancer?”

  Surprise betrayed Imre into looking up and meeting Novak’s eyes.

  He dropped his gaze just as quickly, but Novak chuckled, pleased.

  “I thought so. Liver, stomach, brain? Not long for you now, is it? I can feel it on you, Imre. How ironic for Vajda, is it not? Working so valiantly to save the life of a dying man. How long did they give you?”

  Imre tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He began to cough, and once he started, he could not stop.

  “Not long, no?” Novak laughed again. “Three months? They like to say three months. It’s their standard phrase. That’s what they told me seven months ago, but I live on, see? Rotting from within, true, but here I am. The pleasure I will take in this woman’s death will grant me another month, at least. These punishments charge me like a battery. Would you like to participate? It might have the same effect upon you.”

  Imre looked up at him once again. “No,” he said hoarsely.

  Novak blinked and smiled, pleased to have dragged another response out of him. “Then you can be a spectator when the time comes. It won’t be long. Vajda works fast. He has always been efficient.”

  Imre grasped the edge of the bed. Horror darkened his vision. Faintness threatened. He teetered, on the brink of that long, dark fall.

  “Poor man,” Novak crooned. “I feel for you, being old and infirm myself. The pain is terrible, no?” He dug in his pocket and took out a vial of capsules. He rattled them, then opened the bottle and shook one of them out into his hand. “Powerful slow-release opiates. Shall I give you one? I won’t leave you the whole bottle, because you would gobble them all at once, naughty fellow. But I will give you this pill, if you would just explain one thing that continues to puzzle me.”

  He waited for Imre to reach for the pill, to beg, to ask what the one thing that puzzled him was. But Imre could not have spoken if he wanted to. He was frozen. Fear had turned him into a pillar of salt.

  Novak’s eyes squinted to bright, wrinkled slits. “I wish to know how your catamite remained so devoted to you. When I was young, a man made me his pet in exchange for food and shelter, just as you did for Vajda. Do you know what I did to him when I was older?”

  Please. No. Do not tell me. Imre closed his eyes, summoned up a deafening mental rendition of Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto to drown the words out.

  Novak’s voice cut through the music like a hot knife through butter. “I removed his skin strip by strip,” he said, almost tenderly. “Perhaps I shall do that to the woman. Let us make a tally, Imre. From now on, for every question that you disdain to answer, I tear off a shred of her skin. While you watch.”

  He laid the pill on the blanket that covered Imre’s cot and stood.

  “Take it,” he said magnanimously. “I can be reasonable, if you are reasonable with me. I am alone, as you are. We could have such interesting conversations if you would lower yourself to speak to me. We are just two old men, after all, facing the same ultimate fate. I am so curious about you. Vajda got his culture and sophistication from you, no? In fact, thanks to you, he became too good to work for the likes of me.” He laughed and patted Imre’s shoulder.

  Imre flinched.

  “I do hope that Vajda succeeds in bringing the woman to me,” Novak mused. “I will conduct the punishment upon you, if I must, but to be quite truthful . . . torturing a wretched old man who is already wracked with pain is much less satisfying. Pain is so familiar to you already, you see. The experience falls a bit flat. But do not fear. I am sure my András could wring a lively response, even out of a dying wreck like you. He is so talented. You will see, you will see.”

  Imre squeezed his eyes shut. Tears slipped down against his will.

  One of Novak’s men opened the door, the other folded up the chair. They waited until the boss shuffled out.

  “Enjoy the pill, Imre.” Novak’s taunting voice floated through the door as he retreated down the hall.

  The door clanged shut, the lock rattled. He was alone again.

  The rictus melted. A long, violent palsy of terror shook him.

  When the worst of it had passed, he took the pill and slipped it under the mattress. He might well need it more later than he needed it now.

  His fingers brushed against the metal frame of the broken eyeglasses.

  He pulled them out. Then he loosened the largest unbroken shard of the shattered lens, and pried it carefully from the frame. The glasses were old, made of real glass, not plastic, and the shard was thick, a rough triangle that came to a jagged, sharp point. He pressed it to the pad of his thumb.

  A dark drop of blood welled up.

  Imre sat motionless for hours, staring fixedly at that shard of glass until the lights snapped off, leaving him in inky darkness.

  Chapter 14

  Tam sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the blank wall, eyes frozen wide. It made no difference if they were open or closed. She could not block out the images from inside her head. Nor the sounds. She had tried, but rifle fire kept cracking endlessly in the distance. Harrowing screams kept floating up from the dreaded basement cells of Sremska Mitrovica. The cells where the torturers did their work.

  She wanted to clap her hands over her ears, but that was problematic, since the sound issued from inside her own head. She kept her hands wound tight, white-knuckled, into the bed covers. Hanging on to her present reality. This expensive, clean, safe hotel room. She was at the Huxley, with her daughter, surrounded by friends. She was not jammed in a moaning c
rowd of sweating bodies. The misery, the stench, the lice. Packed together too tightly even to lie down on the floor.

  Rachel slept, finally, in the bed behind her. Coaxing the overstimulated little girl to go down after she’d played with Sveti and the other little kids all evening and then overdosed on the chocolate wedding cake had been the usual three-ring circus. Even so, tonight, Tam was not grateful to be left alone with the contents of her own mind.

  Amazingly, tonight she would have gladly traded the quiet for noise and distraction. Even a howling tantrum. Just to block it out.

  Tough shit for her. Rachel needed the sleep, and Tam was on her own, eyes burning, stomach cramping. Watching the shovelfuls of dirt showering down on Mamma and Irina’s wide open eyes.

  The memories gave her a crazy sense of double vision. Two realities, superimposed upon each other, one hardly more or less real than the other. The room was warm, but goosebumps prickled over her skin from the cold of that other room, in Titograd, sixteen years ago.

  She’d sat on the sagging bed, the faded brocade counterpane cold against her bottom. Wearing only a whorish red silk chemise. All she needed, for his purposes, Stengl had said. She had nothing else to wear. No shoes, no coat. Her breath misted before her rhythmically. The frigid air froze the inside of her nose with each breath.

  She wished she knew how to stop breathing. She had tried.

  The window of the hotel room was wide open. She’d opened it herself. Snow blew in.

  Seconds ticked by on the gold-plated travel clock by the bed. The room was locked, the windows covered by wrought iron bars she could not dislodge. Her fingertips were raw from trying. Snowflakes fluttered and swirled down onto the carpet. They did not melt. Tick, tick, tick.

  She sat, and shuddered, waiting for Stengl to come back and want . . . what he always wanted.

  Wondering if she’d have time to freeze to death first.

  Tam pulled herself forcibly back into awareness of her present surroundings, shaking with remembered cold. Vaguely angry at herself for falling so deep into the bottomless pit of memory. Irresponsible and stupid, whether it was involuntary or not. She got up, padded over to the thermostat and turned it up. Fuck the cold.

  Tam lay down and pulled the blanket over herself. She laid her hand on Rachel’s bony little back, feeling the soft rise and fall of breathing.

  Comforted by the heat, the life vibrating from the little girl.

  She was not looking forward to explaining to Rachel that she had to go away for a few days. Thank God for Erin, who had agreed to look after her, and Sveti, too, who had offered to stick around and help, bless her. But it was going to be a bad scene no matter what.

  She was exhausted, but still buzzing. Probably the fallout from that drug.

  Janos’s final offer had rattled her. How did he pull it off? Her most closely guarded, painful secrets, and hey, presto—he just plucked them right out of her head and dangled them in her face. So casually.

  Scenes from the past had been playing in her head ever since Janos had pronounced Stengl’s name. Complete with full sensory detail.

  She was fifteen again, a grief-stricken victim. A helpless toy for anyone who wanted to play with her. And they had. Oh, they had, back in the bad old days. Before she’d learned to turn the tables on them.

  She’d had feelers out over the globe, searching for Stengl, that sociopathic son of a bitch, for years. She wanted to snag him before he reached the relative safe haven of the war crimes tribunal.

  Oh, yes. She wanted to kill him herself, by hand, at close range. One last attempt to appease the restless ghosts that haunted her sleep.

  Revenge. The one lure she absolutely could not resist.

  She wondered where Janos was. She’d deliberately refrained from looking to the right or left as she left the ballroom. She didn’t want to risk catching his eye and start blushing like an idiot. Or worse yet, sobbing, or screaming. The messed-up hair, the wild stare, the smeared makeup, that was enough fuel for gossip among her friends as it was.

  He had not left. Of that, she was sure. He was near, watching her.

  On impulse, she slid out of bed and padded barefoot over to the door. She left her hand on the handle for minutes, trying to identify this bright, buzzing feeling. Fear . . . or anticipation.

  She opened the door, and was unsurprised to see him there. A sorcerer like him could see right through the walls. He’d seen through the ones in her mind, after all. And they were thicker.

  They stared at each other. She was incapable of speech.

  He broke the silence. “It’s cold,” he said, glancing past her to the tiny lump Rachel made on the king sized bed. “Let me come in. You can close the door, to keep the room warm for the child. We must talk.”

  Tam suppressed the impulse to say something cutting. She let him in, closed the door after him and positioned herself with her back to the narrow blade of light that came out the bathroom door to study his face and still remain an enigmatic silhouette herself.

  The attempt was useless. She couldn’t read him. His face was a hard, chiseled mask highlighted by sharp-cut shadows.

  She gestured for him to follow her into the bathroom. “Keep your voice down,” she whispered. “Rachel’s a light sleeper. She’s exhausted from staying up hours past her bedtime, but she’s capable of screaming for an hour if she wakes up. And I just can’t face it right now.”

  He nodded, and followed her into the small, luxurious black marble bathroom. They stared at each other, immobile, but the energy between them was dynamic, swirling. Like the wary circling of duelers.

  She could smell his scent. Feel his heat.

  “You’ll go with me,” he said. It was not a question.

  She shut her eyes, swallowed. “Congratulations, Janos,” she said. “You found the right string to yank. I’ll go on one condition, though.”

  “Name it.”

  “We take care of Stengl first,” she said.

  She saw the no in his eyes, and shook her head. “This point is not negotiable, Janos. We do Stengl first, or you can try hauling me in to Novak to do the trade directly. I promise I’ll put up a good fight.”

  He shook his head grimly. “No. We can hunt down Stengl at any time, but the timing is crucial for Imre. I am already desperate. Novak established a schedule for when he cuts off—”

  “I’m very sorry for Imre, and for you, but that is not my problem.” Tam cut through him. Her voice was not loud, but crystal sharp. “My chances of dying in your crazy scheme are too high. I can face that if Stengl is dead. But I do not intend to leave this world before he does. No fucking way, and that is final. Understand?”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. His nostrils flared as he let out a long, audible sigh. He muttered what sounded like an obscenity, in a language she didn’t know, and nodded. “Done.”

  She turned and stared into the mirror, into his eyes. It was easier to meet their reflection than look into them directly. One tiny level of removal from his charisma. Just enough so she could breathe.

  She thought of what had happened in the kitchen. The searing pleasure. He was powerful enough, intense enough to anchor her in the here and now, at least while he was fucking her. She could lose herself in him. She wouldn’t see that decaying hotel room, the shabby red chemise. Or Stengl leering down at her. Licking his lips.

  Her stomach did a nasty, squirming roll. She squeezed her eyes shut, leaned on the sink. Splashed her face with icy water.

  When she came up for air, her face numb with cold, he held out one of the fluffy hand towels for her. She patted her face dry, still leaving smears of mascara, despite how often she’d wiped the stuff off.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was ashen but for that hot blush branded across both cheekbones. He loomed behind her, unsmiling. Anger, frustration, desire pulsing off him in great waves.

  He wanted her. The intensity of his dark gaze scorched her skin. She could feel the heat, the burn, the pull. That par
t, at least, was not feigned, no matter what else he wanted from her. The lust was real.

  She was used to that vibe from men, but not from a man so completely in command of himself—and so unafraid of her.

  His inner power was vast, unfathomable. It pulled, lured her.

  He had abandoned the seductive, teasing charm. It was irrelevant. The time for banter was past. She dragged in a shaky breath, listening to the thudding of her own heart in her ears and her own shrill internal monologue. You can’t afford it. You couldn’t before. You still can’t, idiot.

  But something hungry and jazzed inside her wanted to just grab him. Shove him around. Provoke him, fight with him, kick him, hit him. Engage with him in a very specific, heated way.

  The sex in the air between them had gotten so heavy and hot, she could feel it pressing against her skin, like a palpable force. She felt breathless, panicky at its inexorable rise.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” she flung at him. “The drug’s worn off.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I am glad.”

  “Are you? But I imagine you had the duration of its effects calculated down to a fraction of a second,” she said.

  “No, not that precisely,” he admitted. “There were too many variables. I had more like a fifteen-minute window. But you ate more food than I expected. That flattened out the effect.”

  “That’s probably why it took me so long to figure it out,” she said.

  “Probably.”

  His easy agreement pissed her off. Was he trying to make her feel better about having been so easily managed? Condescending bastard.

  She looked down at her fisted hands. “You’re here because you want some more, right? You think you’ve won? You’ve found my weak point, and that entitles you to fuck me into submission?”

  His expression did not change. “I’m here because you want me here,” he said. “Even though you hate yourself for it. Otherwise you would never let me near you.”

  That blunt, uninflected statement said both too much and too little. Her face heated with humiliation. “You flatter yourself.”