Suddenly, Detlef's shadow fell over them.
When Nina looked up at the giant threat, her heart nearly stopped. Without a thought, she jumped up and stabbed him in the groin with the scissors. Purdue knocked the Glock from his hand and claimed it, but the slide was locked back, indicating an empty magazine. The big man had Nina in his grip, laughing at Purdue's failed attempt to shoot him. Nina pulled the scissors out and stabbed him again. Detlef’s eye burst as she shoved the closed blades into his eye socket.
“Come Nina!” Purdue shouted, discarding the useless weapon. “Before he gets up. He is still moving!”
“Yeah?” she sneered. “I can change that!”
But Purdue pulled her away, and they fled in the direction of town, leaving behind their belongings.
Chapter 25
Sam stumbled behind the tyrant with the scrawny frame. From a laceration right below his right eyebrow, blood was trickling down his face and stained his shirt. The thugs were holding him by his arms, dragging him along to the large boat that was bobbing on the Gdynia bay water.
“Mr. Cleave, I expect you to comply with our every command or else your friends will be blamed for the death of the German Chancellor,” his captor informed him.
“You’ve got nothing to pin on them!” Sam contested. “Besides, if they play into your hand we are all going to end up dead anyway. We know how sick the Order's objectives are.”
“And here I thought you knew the extent of the Order's genius and capabilities. How silly of me. Please, don't force me to make an example of your associates to show you how serious we are,” Klaus snapped snidely. He turned to his men. “Get him on board. We have to go.”
Sam decided to bide his time before trying to summon his new skills. He wanted to get some rest first to make sure it would not fail him again. They roughly dragged him over the jetty and pushed him onto the unsteady vessel.
“Bring him!” one of the men ordered.
“I shall see you when we reach the destination, Mr. Cleave,” Klaus said genially.
‘Oh God, here I am on a fucking Nazi ship again!’ Sam bemoaned his fate, but his mood was hardly docile. ‘This time, I am going to rip their brains apart and make them kill each other.' Oddly he felt stronger in his ability when his emotions were negative. The darker his thoughts became the more powerful the tingling in his brain felt. ‘It is still there,’ he smiled.
He had grown used to the sensation of the parasite. Knowing that it was nothing but an insect from the youthful days of earth made no difference to Sam. It gave him an immense power of mind, probably hotwiring some abilities long forgotten or yet to be developed in a distant future. Perhaps, he thought, it was an organism specifically conditioned to kill, much like the instincts of a predator. Maybe it diverted energy from certain lobes of the modern brain, rerouting it to primal psychic instincts; and since those instincts served survival, they were not out to torment but to subdue and kill.
Before shoving the battered journalist into the cabin, they had reserved for their captive, the two men who handled Sam stripped him naked. Unlike Dave Purdue, Sam did not struggle. Instead, he spent the time inside his mind, locking out everything they did. The two German gorillas stripping him was odd, and from what little German he understood, they were taking bets on how long it would take the Scottish runt to break.
“The silence is usually the denial portion of the descent,” the bald one smiled as he pulled Sam's briefs down to his ankles.
“My girlfriend does that just before she throws a fit,” the scrawny one remarked. “100 euros that he'll cry like a bitch by tomorrow.”
The bald thug gave Sam a stare of intense scrutiny, standing uncomfortably close to him. “You're on. I say he tries to escape before we make it to Latvia.”
The two men chuckled as they left their prisoner naked, tattered, and seething behind the mask of his straight face. When they closed the door, Sam remained motionless for a while longer. He did not know why. He simply did not feel like moving, although his mindset was not at all in chaos. Inside he felt strong, capable and powerful, but he stood still right there to just take in the situation. The first movement was that of his eyes alone, studying the room where they had left him.
Around him, the cabin was far from accommodating, as he would have expected from cold and calculating masters. Cream colored steel walls met in four bolted corners with the floor cold and bare under his feet. There was no bed, no toilet facilities, and no window. Only the door, bolted around its edges in a similar fashion as the walls. There was but one lonely bulb weakly illuminating the miserable room, leaving him with little sensory stimulus.
Sam did not mind the deliberate lack of distraction, because what was intended to be a torture method courtesy of Kemper was a welcome blankness for his hostage to engage into fully focusing on his mental abilities. The steel was frigid, lending Sam the choice of standing all night of getting his buttocks frozen. He sat down without much consideration for his quandary, hardly impressed by the sudden coldness.
“Fuck it,” he said to himself. “I'm Scottish, you imbeciles. What do you think we endure under our kilts on an average day?” The chill under his genitals was certainly not pleasant but it was bearable, and that was what was needed here. Sam wished there was a switch to turn off the light above him. The light was disturbing his meditation. As the boat rocked under him, he closed his eyes, trying to lock out the throbbing headache and the burn of his knuckles where the skin had ruptured during his fight against his kidnappers.
Gradually, one by one, Sam locked out small inconveniences such as pain and cold, slowly sinking into more hefty cycles of thought until he could feel the current in his skull escalate like a restless worm waking in the core of his skull. The familiar surge coursed through his brain, and some of it oozed into his spinal cord like trickles of adrenaline. He felt his eyeballs heat up as the mysterious lightning filled his head. Sam smiled.
The tether formed in his mind's eye as he tried to lock on to Klaus Kemper. He did not have to locate him on the ship as long as he spoke his name. After what seemed like an hour he still had not been able to latch his control onto the tyrant in his vicinity, leaving Sam weak and sweating profusely. Frustration threatened his control as well as his hope at the attempt, but he kept trying. Finally, he had exerted his mind so much that he lost consciousness.
When Sam came to it was dark in the room, leaving him uncertain of his state of being. No matter how he stretched his eyes, he could not see anything in the pitch dark. Eventually, Sam started to question his psyche.
‘Am I dreaming?’ he wondered as he reached out in front of him, his fingertips left unsatisfied. ‘Am I under the influence of that monstrous thing right now?’ But he could not be. After all, when the other took control, Sam usually witnessed what was happening through what felt like a thin veil. Resuming his previous endeavor, he extended his mind like a seeking tentacle into the darkness to find Klaus. Manipulation was an elusive pursuit, it appeared. Nothing came of it, apart from distant voices in a heated discussion and others in clamorous laughter.
Suddenly, like a lightning strike, his perception of his surroundings disappeared, making way for a vivid memory he had not been aware of before now. Sam frowned as he recalled lying on a table under dirty lamps shedding pitiful light in a workshop. He remembered the extreme heat he was subjected to in the small workplace filled with tools and containers. Before he could see more, his memory yielded another sensation his mind had chosen to forget.