“Not a hair on your head will be touched. As promised. In fact, you’re free to go.” René rested a hand on Despi’s forearm. “Dex will drop you at an airport of your choice with a full wallet. By helping my guest, you’ve earned your freedom. I hope it was worth it.”
Despi straightened back up. Her face was flushed, streaked with tears, but her gaze was fierce, unbroken.
René said, “I’ll even let you say good-bye to your friend before you depart.” He gestured toward the wrestling mat.
Despi’s stare skewered René. For a moment he even seemed unsettled.
Then she started over to Evan. She looked broken from within, her limbs held at the wrong angles, her gait and carriage different, as if she were learning to walk inside a new body. René indicated for his men to give them some space.
Evan wasn’t sure if she was going to strike him. If she wanted to, he would let her. Instead she embraced him, squeezing him hard, her face mashed to his chest.
He stroked her thick, thick hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her. “I tried to warn you.”
He was shocked at the note of anger that had found its way into his voice. Fire crawled across his skin, matting his shirt to his back. Everything felt jumbled together inside him, trespasses past and present. He pictured Jack clutching at the ball of his shoulder, his hand gloved in blood. A little more pressure, a little more time and he might have lived. If Evan hadn’t asked him to meet. If they’d chosen a different day, a different hour, a different parking structure. If Evan had been quicker on the draw. If he hadn’t taken the car jack. If he’d thrown Despi out of his room.
The photographs René had shown Despi of her slain family would live inside her as surely as Evan’s memories of Parking Level 3 lived inside him. He couldn’t undo it for her. Not just her present anguish but the years of pain to come, dividends paid out over the decades.
She looked up at him with the same fierceness she’d shown minutes before. “You think my family would’ve been safe if I hadn’t helped you? Don’t be naïve.”
He hadn’t thought anything could shock him right now, but there it was. “Naïve?”
“You think you’re at the controls just like René. But you couldn’t control this.”
He felt his face loosening with emotion.
She said, “Accepting that you need help like everyone else — it doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. Nothing does.”
He had a hard time swallowing. “Then why do it?”
She kissed him. Her tears, wet against his cheeks. She pulled away, held his face, her breath hot. “I don’t know how to live with this. With what I saw.”
“I know. I know that’s how it feels.”
“How would you kill me? Right now?” Her voice held a note of pleading.
He looked at her brimming eyes. The wisp of hair caught in the corner of her mouth. Felt the warmth of her pressed against him, her fragile, human form.
For the first time, he had no answer.
Dex snapped a black hood over her head and yanked her out of Evan’s arms. He dragged her to the Rolls-Royce, her legs stumbling to keep up. After cinching the hood and knotting it off, he opened the rear door, depositing her inside. He reversed out of the barn, the back of the majestic car kissing a snowbank outside, and drove off.
Evan felt a sting in his palms and unclenched his fists to see that his fingernails had indented the skin. He looked over at René. “At one point the tables will be turned—”
“And … let me guess,” René said. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Worse.”
René must have read something in Evan’s voice, because he blinked a few times. Regained his composure. Forced a smile.
Outside, a band of gold rode the horizon, tinting the caps of the snowbanks blue. René checked his watch. “The markets are almost open. Are you ready to wire the money?”
Evan cleared his throat, spit a gob of blood on the pristine blue mat. “No,” he said.
René gave a little nod and then breezed out, passing two of his men. “Search him and bring him to the lab.”
42
Corners of His Mind
Straps bit into Evan’s chest, stomach, and thighs, adhering him to the gurney. Hard leather restraints bound his ankles and wrists to the side rails. He fought to find a place inside himself that would protect him from what would come. SERE training had taught him to deal with stress, disorientation, torture. To this end he’d been maced, electrocuted, and drownproofed, his reactions observed and critiqued. He’d learned to find corners of his mind to retreat into. It never made the pain go away, but it allowed an extra layer between him and it, let him observe the agony from a slight remove. As with meditation, it was essential not to take his thoughts or sensations literally. He had to find the space around them. In the space there was relief.
From whatever René was readying over by the vault, Evan would be requiring a good deal of relief. Dex stood at René’s side, but facing Evan. He held up his grinning hand, wore it over his mouth.
“I’ve tried to be reasonable,” René said, “but I’ve never come across anyone as stubborn as you.” His back remained turned, his bowed shoulders rippling with some movement of his unseen hands. Daylight and frigid air streamed through the shattered basement window. “I wanted this to be civilized but you refused and refused and refused. And so now.” He turned to face Evan, a syringe in hand. “This.”
In the course of his training, Evan had been injected with sodium pentothal and other “truth serums.” He wondered if that was what René was up to here. A psychoactive medication would make him more pliable, more likely to be manipulated into sending the wire transfer and unleashing whatever came with it. But even as a kid, he’d found the drugs not to live up to their reputations.
Judging by Dex’s tattooed grin and René’s very real one, whatever that syringe held was something much worse.
“I can promise,” René said, as if reading Evan’s mind, “it’s like nothing you’ve ever encountered.”
A fly buzzed over and landed on Evan’s knuckles. He wiggled his fingers to scare it off. “More sadistic research out of Cornell?”
“Out of Oxford, actually. You wouldn’t believe what it cost for me to procure a few tiny vials of this.” Taking his time, René ambled closer to Evan. “Like most experiments, it started with a simple question: What if you could make prison sentences for heinous crimes last longer?”
Evan’s heart rate ticked up, pulsing in the side of his neck. “Longer?”
“Longer than a lifetime.” René regarded the syringe with something like affection. “There was a couple who kidnapped a four-year-old boy. They kept him in a closet, tortured and starved him for weeks, then beat him to death. Given the UK’s disdain for capital punishment, the husband and wife were given a thirty-year sentence. Which seems woefully inadequate.”
Evan thought of the Horizon Express, plowing along at twenty-three knots, a white furrow in the deep blue sea, and Alison Siegler somewhere aboard in one of thirty-five hundred containers, closing the distance to a fate nobody deserved.
And he thought of the boy’s voice over the phone line: You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.
“Yes,” he said. “It does seem inadequate.”
“What if you could make someone serve a thousand-year sentence in eight hours? Ten lifetimes of purgatory crammed into the span of a single workday?”
The tip of the needle neared. Evan’s fear mounted, threatened to overtake him.
“Can you imagine the horror?” René said, leaning in.