Then the corners of the room folded in neatly over my head, and I went under.
The first things that struck me, when I came round, was the nagging ache in my shoulders and wrists, and the nasty tingling in my fingers. I’d been sleeping, but something was very wrong with the angle. My head was lolling forwards into space, overextending my neck muscles.
They had strung me up, I realized belatedly, with all my weight hanging from restraints round my wrists. Padded restraints, by the feel of it, so they didn’t mark me. How kind.
I lifted my head, miscalculated how heavy it had suddenly become and had to right myself with a jerk that did nothing for the pain everywhere else. I wondered how long I’d been left like that. Not long, I reckoned, or I would have suffocated like a crucifixion victim.
“Back with us, huh?” said a woman’s voice I couldn’t immediately place. There was something familiar about the words, though. I waded sluggishly through my memory, sifting. My father. That was it. He’d said the same thing when I came round in hospital after I was shot. Shot. My father. My mother. New York. Boston. Parker. Texas. Storax. Terry. Vondie.
Reality arrived like a subway train, bringing with it a wheezing rush of information. On reflection, I think I preferred things when they were more fuzzy.
I opened my eyes. Somebody had brought in an easy chair and Vondie was reclining elegantly on it in front of me. The chair had been carefully placed out of my reach, even if I’d had the energy to try. She was leafing through a file contained in a thick manila folder and swinging her crossed foot negligently.
She’d taken the time to primp while I’d been gone, I saw. Her platinum blond hair was immaculately pleated behind her head and her makeup was flawless. It helped to disguise the thick nose I’d given her, even if it failed to conceal the damage completely.
It didn’t take long to work out why she’d gone to the trouble, and the realization sent a greasy slither of fear coiling through my belly. They’d stripped me naked before they’d dangled me from the ceiling. Never a state of affairs that’s going to make you compare well to another woman and feel good about yourself. Not when she’s tall and slim and wearing a fistful of designer labels, at any rate. Quite a change from the chainstore brands she’d sported on the UK job.
I forced my stiffened legs to uncurl, biting back a groan as I straightened my feet out with slow, deliberate effort onto the cold floor beneath them, so I could take some weight off my arms.
They’d hung me just high enough so that, when I stood upright, the best I could do with my arms was bend my elbows a little, but they were still largely numb from the restricted blood flow. Eventually being cut down, I recognized ruefully, was going to hurt like a bastard.
“Did I miss anything exciting while I was asleep?” I said around a furred tongue.
Vondie smiled without looking up from her study, as though I wasn’t worth any greater response. I waited in silence, muscles shivering, while she played her games, knowing I’d been through this before, or something very like it, and emerged more or less intact.
When I’d been undergoing my Special Forces training, they’d allowed the full-fledged boys to have first crack at interrogating us. It was a matter of pride that they broke us, as they’d been broken in their time, and though I’d held out longer than most, they got to me in the end. They got to everybody in the end.
Vondie finished reading her page and looked up with a smile.
“Your record’s impressive, Charlie—in places,” she said. “Shame you didn’t make the grade for Special Forces, though. That must have stung—being one of the dropouts. The failures. Tell me, were you really raped, or were you just hoping you could screw your way to a pass? Should have started with the instructors. Oh, wait a minute—” She glanced back at the page briefly, raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “You did.”
“Why?” I asked, still breathless from the constriction in my chest. “Is that how you managed to make it?”
Her smile didn’t waver, but something tightened around her eyes. “I passed out in the top five percent of my class,” she said, and there was no mistaking the pride.
“Yeah,” I drawled, aiming for languid as I rolled my head round a few times, trying to work out the giant kinks. “I’ve heard that can happen in a slack year.”
Vondie let her breath out fast. She closed the file, held it over the arm of her chair and let it go, very deliberately, so it hit the floor with a sharp smack. Of no further interest.
I blinked a few times. I don’t know what they’d given me, but it was dispersing fast. I’d lost the muzzy feeling in my head and my vision was almost clear.
“Where’s my mother?” I said. My mind revolted at the thought of them doing this to her, treating her like this. She didn’t have the resources, the resolve, to cope. It would finish her.
Vondie got to her feet and came closer, the limp I’d given her in Cheshire almost imperceptible now. She was smiling broadly. “Well, well, I have to admit that normally it takes my interviewees a little longer to cry for their mommies,” she said, making a big show of looking at her platinum wristwatch. “Congratulations, Charlie—I think that’s a new record.”
I stopped forcing my eyes to lock onto different distances around the bare room and focused totally on her instead.
“If you’ve hurt her, you know I will find you and I will kill you,” I said with utter calm. I’d never meant a promise more, but I felt nothing. No emotion, no anger. Just certainty. Utter, cold, glittering, diamond-tipped certainty.
Vondie flinched before she could control it, saw that I’d registered her involuntary reaction, and damped down a scowl. Instead, she began to circle, lips pursed, eyes flicking up and down my body in slow, deliberate insult.
“I kind of thought you’d be in better shape—someone in your profession,” she said in a beautifully disparaging tone.
I didn’t respond. She disappeared out of my field of view and I forced myself not to move my head to try and follow her path. But I couldn’t stop myself tensing up, like seeing the fin slice under the surface of the water and waiting for the first crushing bite from the depths.
When it came, her touch was almost a caress, and far more creepy because of that. I felt a cool finger very softly trace the ugly scar of the bullet wound in my right shoulder blade and forced myself not to twist out from under it.
“Got it in the back, huh?” Her voice was soft, too, and very close to my ear. “Running away, were you, Charlie?”
I let my head come up a fraction, just enough to reinforce the memory of the head butt that had smashed her nose. I heard her quick sidestep, the little gasp the sudden movement provoked, and knew I was walking a very dangerous line here.
She stalked back round to stare me in the eye—but not too close. “What a pity you took Don out like that,” she said, her voice regretful. “They’re still not sure if he’ll lose the arm.” She paused for another dismissive visual sweep. “He would have had such fun with you … .”
“Like to watch that kind of thing, do you?” I said, ice in my chest now, flooding my limbs with such cold I struggled not to tremble. “Is that how you get your kicks?”
She smiled, and it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “You can indulge yourself in this little round of bravado all you like,” she said. “But it’s all going to be for nothing. News flash, honey, this is a pharmaceutical company. They got stuff here that will have you screaming for mercy and spilling your guts—in every sense of the word—in minutes.”
She gestured to my left. I twisted my head and noticed, for the first time, that someone had wheeled in a little trolley, on which was a steel tray containing several sets of latex gloves and a number of hypodermic syringes. I had no idea what was in them, and even less desire to find out.