Raf still needed to work out if that translated as “Never ours,” or “Not ours now you’ve got them . . .”
All the same, the girl understood some English. Enough for her brain to ignite verbal-recognition patterns during a CAT scan. The two orderlies who’d chatted indiscreetly were plainclothes. The white-coated radiologist was actually a police doctor. That, of course, had happened late last night and in a different ward.
“We could always do this the simple way,” suggested Raf.
The blonde girl just scowled, anger creating mental defences as she prepared herself to sever her mind from the pain awaiting her body. The separation never lasted, but everyone knew that occasionally people got lucky and died before their wandering mind got dragged back to hell.
“Maybe not.” Raf pulled out a snub-nosed Colt, also borrowed from Eduardo, and extracted an extra pair of old-fashioned metal cuffs from his coat pocket, flipping free one end. The Colt he put to the girl’s head and the cuffs Raf flicked round the girl’s free wrist, the left one, with a satisfyingly smooth flip. As manoeuvres went it was extremely professional, which was lucky. She was meant to think he did this all the time.
Snapping the cuff’s other end to the bed’s frame, Raf unlocked her right wrist, stood the girl up and dragged her round to the mattress, his gun still at her head.
“On you go.”
With her left hand newly secured, the only way she could do that was lie facedown. Securing her right wrist to the right side of the bed, Raf stood back. Then he yanked her ankles into position and fixed these with plastic strip cuffs.
Somehow, she still looked too comfortable.
So he took the pillows and when that didn’t seem enough, pulled the sheet from under her, stripping the bed down to its striped mattress. After that, taking her hospital gown seemed obvious, so he ripped it in two from the bottom up and left himself with remnants still attached to her arms.
It was only when Raf pulled a gravity special and let drop the blade that he saw the girl tense. She was, he realized, watching him in a mirror across the room. Pretending not to notice, Raf slashed away the arms of her gown, leaving her naked except for two lightweight leg casts that looked disconcertingly like ankle warmers.
“Want to do this the easy way?”
Not a flicker of response.
With a sigh, Raf dipped into his pocket and pulled out a metal bar the size of a small torch. It was slightly pointed at one end, while at the other, a sheath of slightly sticky clear plastic formed an easy-to-grip handle.
“You know what this is?”
She did. Every combat troop in the so-called civilized world could recognize a shock baton. They were the negotiators of choice for police forces across the world, not to mention for criminal elements from Seattle to Tokyo, combining all the advantages of maximum pain with minimal tissue damage. Batons didn’t leave the kind of scarring that ended up on Amnesty posters, which was one undoubted reason for their popularity.
“I’m sorry,” said Raf, folding his fingers into a half fist, “but there’s something I need you to tell me. And I need you to tell me it now.” His rabbit punch caught her in the kidney and urine darkened the bare mattress as her bladder emptied. “It’s kind of urgent.”
Walking to the head of the bed, Raf crouched down until he could see her face. Furious eyes challenged him, then he was wiping spittle from his cheek.
“Fuck it.” Raf stood up and wiped his face.
Instead of using the baton, Raf took his gravity knife and scratched a cross potent into her naked back, slicing just deep enough to draw blood. Then he stuffed a tissue into her mouth, gagged her with the cord from her gown and put the small recorder down on the windowsill. The time had come for Raf to go next door.
“Gregori,” said Raf.
Now, the small man stripped naked in the corner had been treated on a field of battle. At Fort Archambanlt to be precise, fifteen years before, on the Shari river in the southern wastelands of Tripoli. The name he’d given was Captain Gregori the Profligate, and a footnote still solemnly recorded a triage nurse’s expert opinion that this was false.
What was much more interesting for Raf was that Gregori’s DNA showed significant points of similarity to the blonde girl. Not enough points for him to be her father, but quite enough for him to be an uncle or cousin. Which fitted neatly with the Soviet habit of conscripting whole families, then keeping them together because the bonds that tied them were already imprinted.
The other interesting fact was that Gregori had surrendered voluntarily, not because he’d been wounded and unable to continue or brought to a halt by lack of ammunition. He’d taken one look at Avatar and put down his own gun seconds ahead of putting up both hands. Since Spetsnaz rangers didn’t surrender, there was a meaning here that Raf wanted unravelled.
“You,” said Raf, “on your feet.”
The naked man did what Raf expected him to do, which was stay slumped where he was.
“Up,” Raf insisted, producing Eduardo’s gun. When Gregori still didn’t move, Raf grabbed a handful of hair and yanked the man to his feet. A hood was needed and Raf had forgotten to bring one, so he stripped the case from a hospital pillow and used that instead, knotting its bottom tight round the man’s throat.
Outside in the corridor, Raf spun Gregori in a circle, bounced him off a peeling wall, then spun him in the opposite direction. The man was still staggering when Raf pushed him through the door of the blonde girl’s cell and untied the hood.
His partner lay naked and gagged on the bed, facedown on a urine-blackened mattress, with blood running from a cross potent cut into her back. On the floor lay a discarded shock baton. If Raf had been Gregori, he’d have tried to attack Raf too.
A kick to the knee took Gregori to the floor, his fall unbroken because his arms were cuffed. Raf kicked him again for good measure, but Raf’s snarl was not matched by the severity of the kick. He wanted Gregori scared, not injured.
“Who paid you?”
The man didn’t even turn his head. Just lay on the floor, curled into a tight ball, not the action of a Spetsnaz officer with Gregori’s experience.
“Look,” said Raf, kicking him slightly, “we already know you weren’t acting on orders. So what we need is information on who instigated this attack.” He bent down and dragged the man to his knees. “And it’s information we intend to get.”
Raf walked over to the discarded baton and picked it up; Gregori’s anxiety only really kicked in when Raf kept going towards the bed.
“Who,” said Raf, “was behind the attack?”
He switched on the baton.
Gregori said nothing so Raf turned to the girl and put the live baton to her spine. The gag blocked her scream, but she still bucked in agony as muscles in her back locked solid. In the quivering aftershock, she pissed herself again. The baton had touched her spine for less than a second.
Raf breathed out, opened his eyes and turned back to the man.
“That’s just a taste,” he told Gregori. “Now we bring in the expert.” Toggling his watch to visual, Raf put a call through to Eduardo. “Dr. Lee? We’re ready for you . . .”
The white coat came from a medical supply shop, as did the stethoscope Raf had given him earlier. And Eduardo extracted the coat from its carrier bag and hung the stethoscope round his neck only when he’d reached the corridor and was certain no one else could see him. He’d been assured by Raf that all CCTV cameras were still faulty, courtesy of Hakim’s earlier word with the Imperial Free’s security manager. Eduardo just hoped this was true. In case it wasn’t, and because it looked cool, he was wearing shades. Copies of the pair usually worn by Raf.