As the younger man retreated with his tremulous smiles to a shadowy corner, the sensualist sat on the foot of the bed, opposite Barbara. Their knees were no more than a few inches apart.
Putting his pistol aside on the rumpled sheets, he took a knife from a jacket pocket. A switchblade. He flicked it open.
Her fear soaring again, Barbara could manage to draw only quick, shallow breaths. The resultant whistling in her nose amused the man sitting with her.
From another jacket pocket, he withdrew a snack-size round of Gouda cheese. Using the knife, he removed the cellophane wrapper and then peeled off the red wax skin that prevented the Gouda from developing mold.
Carefully eating thin slivers of cheese off the wickedly sharp blade, he told Barbara that he knew where her son, Denny, lived and worked. He recited the addresses.
He also knew that Denny had been married to Rebekah for thirteen months, nine days, and — he consulted his watch, calculated — fifteen hours. He knew that Rebekah was six months pregnant with their first child, a girl, whom they were going to name Felicia.
To prevent harm from befalling Denny and his bride, Barbara was expected to accept the official story about what had happened to the tape from the cockpit-voice recorder on Flight 353—a story that she had rejected in discussions with her colleagues and that she had set out to disprove. She was also expected to forget what she had heard on the enhanced version of that tape.
If she continued to seek the truth of the situation or attempted to express her concerns to either the press or the public, Denny and Rebekah would disappear. In the deep basement of a private redoubt soundproofed and equipped for prolonged and difficult interrogations, the sensualist and his associates would shackle Denny, tape open his eyes, and force him to watch while they killed Rebekah and the unborn child.
Then they would surgically remove one of his fingers every day for ten days — taking elaborate measures to control bleeding, shock, and infection. They would keep him alive and alert, though steadily less whole. On the eleventh and twelfth days, they would remove his ears.
They had a full month of imaginative surgery planned.
Every day, as they took another piece of him, they would tell Denny that they would release him to his mother without further harm if she would only agree to cooperate with them in a conspiracy of silence that was, after all, in the national interest. Vitally important defense matters were involved here.
This would not be entirely true. The part about the national interest was true, from their point of view, at least, even though they could not, of course, explain to Barbara how the knowledge she possessed was a threat to her country. The part about her being able to earn Denny’s release by cooperation would not be true, however, because once she failed to honor a pledge of silence, she would not be given a second chance, and her son would be forever lost to her. They would deceive Denny solely to ensure that he would spend the last month of his life desperately wondering why his mother had so stubbornly condemned him to such excruciating pain and horrible disfigurement. By the end, half mad or worse, in deep spiritual misery, he would curse her vehemently and beg God to let her rot in Hell.
As he continued to carve the tiny wheel of Gouda and serve himself off the dangerous point of the blade, the sensualist assured Barbara that no one — not the police, not the admittedly clever FBI, not the mighty United States Army — could keep Denny and Rebekah safe forever. He claimed to be employed by an organization with such bottomless resources and extensive connections that it was capable of compromising and subverting any institution or agency of the federal or state governments.
He asked her to nod if she believed him.
She did believe him. Implicitly. Without reservation. His seductive voice, which seemed to lick each of his hideous threats to savor the texture and astringency of it, was filled with the quiet confidence and smug superiority of a megalomaniac who carries the badge of a secret authority, receives a comfortable salary with numerous fringe benefits, and knows that in his old age he will be able to rely upon the cushion of a generous civil-service pension.
He then asked her if she intended to cooperate.
With guilt and humiliation but also with utter sincerity, she nodded again. Yes. She would cooperate. Yes.
Studying a pale oval of cheese like a tiny filleted fish on the point of the blade, he said that he wanted her to be deeply impressed with his determination to ensure her cooperation, so impressed that she would be in no danger of forsaking the pledge she had just made to him. Therefore, on their way out of the hotel, he and his partner would select, at random, an employee or perhaps a guest — someone who just happened to cross their path — and would kill that person on the spot. Three shots: two in the chest, one in the head.
Stunned, Barbara protested from behind the gag, contorting her face in an effort to twist the tape and free her mouth. But it was pulled cruelly tight, and her lips were stuck firmly to the adhesive, and the only argument that she could get out was a pained, muffled, wordless pleading. She didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. She was going to cooperate. There was no reason to impress her with their seriousness. No reason. She already believed in their seriousness.
Never taking his great sad eyes from her, without saying another word, he slowly finished his cheese.
His unwavering stare seemed to cause a power backflow, draining her of energy. Yet she could not look away.
When he had consumed the final morsel, he wiped the blade of his knife on the sheets. Then he folded it into the handle and returned the weapon to his pocket.
Sucking on his teeth and rolling his tongue slowly around his mouth, he gathered up the shredded cellophane and the peels of red wax. He rose from the bed and deposited the trash in the waste basket beside the desk.
The younger man stepped out of the shadowy corner. His thin but eager smile no longer fluttered uncertainly; it was fixed.
From behind the strapping tape, Barbara was still attempting to protest the murder of an innocent person when the older man returned to her and, with the edge of his right hand, chopped hard at the side of her neck.
As a scintillant darkness sprayed across her field of vision, she started to slump forward. She felt the chair tipping sideways. She was unconscious before her head hit the carpet.
For perhaps twenty minutes she dreamed of severed fingers in preserving sheaths of red wax. In shrimp-pink faces, fragile smiles broke like strings of pearls, the bright teeth bouncing and rolling across the floor, but in the black crescent between the curved pink lips, new pearls formed, and a choirboy eye blinked blue. There were hound-dog eyes too, as black and shiny as leeches, in which she saw not her reflection but images of Denny’s screaming, earless face.
When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.
Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.
She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.
Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.