27
Thornton preceded Flattop and his flashlight through the dark corridors, the journey culminating in an unlit ten-by-eight-foot concrete cell coated in grime, the ceiling too low for an adult to stand without stooping. The furnishings consisted of a wooden pallet topped by a mattress not much thicker than a magazine and a pillow of similar proportions. The adjacent wall sprouted a stainless steel toilet bowl, its seatback rising into a tiny cold-water-only spigot and basin.
Flattop swept the flashlight beam over the floor, pausing when the light centered on a large brown scorpion in the corner opposite the toilet.
“Watch out for that guy,” he said, backing out of the cell.
The door swung shut and a heavy bolt snapped into the steel jamb, leaving Thornton in a blackness that seemed solid. Eyes shut, eyes open, there was no difference. Once the echoes of the closing door faded, the silence was complete.
He hurried to get to the cot, away from the scorpion. His progress was limited to small increments, a hand extended to avoid smacking face-first into a wall. The sticky cement floor sent a chill from the soles of his feet all the way to his kneecaps. Finding the wall, he lowered himself to the slick, rubber-coated mattress, which compressed to the point that it felt like he was sitting directly on the wooden pallet. He placed his back against the wall, drawing his knees toward his chest both to keep warm and so that his feet were three or four inches above the floor. While following the Pentagon-funded cancer treatment initiative to use the chlorotoxin from the venom of the Deathstalker scorpion—Leuiurus quinquestriatus—he learned that of the 1,000 species of scorpion, just twenty-five posed a mortal threat. He doubted his cell mate was one of them, if only because his captors needed him alive. But he couldn’t be certain. Also 1,000 of the 1,000 species of scorpions stung without provocation. If his captors sought to keep him up at night, this would do the trick.
He held the thin pillow as a shield, sweeping it from side to side to fend off the scorpion should his scent lure the nocturnal hunter to the cot. Unfortunately, he still couldn’t see. Not even his hand in front of his face.
He heard the scorpion clicking toward him, or he imagined he heard it; then he felt a tickle on the back of his scalp. He jumped up to shake off the bug but found no trace of it.
And this was only the beginning. He thought it ironic that, before today, he’d considered it torture to be left alone for more than ten minutes with nothing to read.
The fifty-seat ExpressJet bound for Montgomery, Alabama, was too small to plug into the Jetways at any of LaGuardia’s departure gates, so Musseridge and his fellow passengers had to go down two flights of service stairwell, exiting onto the tarmac. The FBI agent didn’t bother standing on line to borrow an umbrella from the gate agents, deciding the walk to the plane would take less time. The umbrellas were almost useless anyway; the jet engines shot the freezing rain sideways.
During the flight, Musseridge forked over seven bucks for a can of Bud. Ridiculous, but worth it. When the hell else did he get a chance to sit down for more than twenty seconds without someone wanting something from him?
He immersed himself in figuring out what the fuck Thornton and the billionairess, Beryl Mallery, were up to. Amtrak had had no record of either of them purchasing tickets to Alabama — or to anywhere. But they could have used cash. He’d seen Penn Station’s security video of a couple paying cash for tickets to Mobile, Alabama — Mallery owned a beach house nearby. Could have been Thornton and Mallery; the video was shot from so far away that no one could really tell shit. But an agent from the Bureau’s Mobile field office interviewed a cabbie who said, yeah, he’d had a fare who looked just like the lady in the photograph. He took her to the nearby beach town, Point Clear, Alabama. And with her was a guy who looked like Thornton. Meanwhile Mallery sent an e-mail to her assistant saying she’d met someone and needed some time alone with him. The only trace of Thornton since his disappearance was also an e-mail, to RealStory’s managing editor. He’d met someone, he wrote, and was taking a vacation for the first time this millennium. Love was blind and stupid, Musseridge knew well, but that didn’t explain Thornton shirking his duty to give a deposition, and in this case the victim had been a close friend of his, Kevin O’Clair. What’s more, the seven-year-old who’d survived O’Clair was Thornton’s godson.
From Montgomery, Musseridge took a wobbly eight-passenger puddle jumper to Mobile. The rental place at the airport stuck him with a too-small car that smelled of cigarette smoke and the flowery spray meant to mask cigarette smoke. Thing rode like it was put together from Legos. He took it around the horseshoe-shaped Mobile Bay to Point Clear, which surprised him. Who the hell knew Alabama had a picture-perfect waterside village catering to superrich people?
Mallery’s sixty-two-foot catamaran, worth what Musseridge could earn in his career if the Bureau let him stay on past age 100, was gone from the marina. Left its slip sometime during the night, the harbormaster said. Mobile Bay led to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf led to the rest of the world.
Alabama private vessel license decals were fitted with transponders, but the Coast Guard couldn’t raise a signal from the catamaran. There were any number of legitimate explanations for transponder failure, Musseridge heard from a lieutenant at the Coast Guard’s District Eight headquarters in downtown Mobile. But Musseridge had long since ruled out legitimate explanations.
He set to work on the paperwork for an Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution warrant and a global BOLO — be on the lookout — with instructions to all Interpol members to capture Thornton and Mallery.
28
With a series of hisses and pings, the cell door opened. Flattop stepped in, his beam sweeping the floor until finding the scorpion, in the middle of the cell.
“Batter up,” Flattop said to Thornton.
Using the wall, Thornton pulled himself up, one hand over the other. Heavy lifting for him, a function of undernourishment and an electrolyte balance at dangerously low levels. He managed to circumvent the scorpion on the way out.
Now, he believed, the worst was over. He could gorge on a Souper Meal and drink water until he burst. Nothing he might say under narcosis would dispel the doubt he’d planted in his captors; the drugs wouldn’t be trusted. As for Bow Tie, going through the same questions over and over again was an interrogator’s most effective tool to trip up a liar. All Thornton needed to do was stick to his story, which was true, other than the name Meade. Easy enough, he thought. As long his memory remained operational, he would survive.
He realized the error in his thinking as soon as he entered the interview room. The chairs had been replaced by a simple metal twin-bed frame, the kind you might see in a college dorm. Its support was six horizontal metal slats and the same number of thin coils stretched lengthwise. Beneath this grid was a red electrical cord, clamped onto of one of the metal slats and running along the floor to a retrofitted car battery.
The interrogator stood by the battery. He wore a fresh-pressed shirt, another crisp lab coat, and another brightly colored bow tie — and he seemed in spirits to match. He waved at the bed frame the way a game show hostess might at a fabulous prize. “This is a parilla.” He rolled the r in the Spanish fashion and pronounced the l’s as y’s. “The term derives from the cooking grill of the same name used in South America. General Pinochet liked to call this version the Chilean Polygraph.”