Janko seemed nonplussed. With his arms folded across his chest, he motioned nonchalantly toward Joe. “Give it to him.”
The first punch landed seconds later, and for the next few minutes Janko’s strongmen kicked or punched Joe repeatedly, allowing just enough time between shots to get in a question or two.
Joe never answered, and the beating continued.
Unlike Gregorovich, who’d been intent on taking each hit as if he were unbreakable, Joe used his boxing skills both to harden himself against the rain of impacts and to reduce the damage by twisting and bending, turning the punches into glancing blows. Even then, after the fifteenth or sixteenth punch, he felt certain a rib or two had been cracked.
Finally, Janko raised a hand like a Roman emperor calling a halt to the gladiator games. “All this is so unnecessary,” he said. “Just tell us who you are. How you got here. And if there are any more of your people out there.”
Joe kept silent and was rewarded with a punch to the face. He turned away as best he could, but it caught him in the jaw, splitting his lip.
Joe looked up. “I was just about to tell you,” he said, “but you’ve given me amnesia.”
Janko gave up on him and pointed to Hayley. She cowered against the wall, trying desperately to pull her hands free from the shackles. Seeing the two men beaten to a pulp first had probably filled her with fear by now. That would only make it easier.
“Giving up so quickly?” Joe shouted, trying to draw their attention back to him.
The muscle-bound torturer looked over.
“And I thought we were just starting to bond,” Joe shouted. “Really beginning to make a connection. I should have known you were too weak to finish the job.”
The guy fumed for a second, obviously aware it was a trick. He looked back toward Hayley, intent on intimidating her, only to have Joe spit a mix of blood and saliva at his face.
Furious, the thug stepped back over to Joe and slammed another fist into his stomach. Joe doubled over, only held up by the chains.
“How do you like that for a connection?” Janko asked sarcastically.
“Barely felt it,” Joe grunted, righting himself.
Janko nodded a green light to the thug, who stepped up and slammed Joe against the wall with his left hand, before connecting with a right cross and snapping Joe’s head to the side. A huge welt, split down the middle, formed instantly and began bleeding. Joe’s head hung for a moment.
Joe lifted his head. He made sure to look weary and woozy. “Is that… all you’ve got?”
This time, the thug reared back and fired an overhand right at Joe’s eye. Joe snapped his head to the side with surprising quickness. The torturer’s fist slammed into the wall of rock behind Joe, and a sickening crack rang out.
The big thug shrieked in pain and dropped to his knees, cradling his wrist.
Joe managed a smile. Gregorovich laughed out loud.
“Enough of this!” Janko shouted. He stepped toward Hayley and grabbed her by the hair. “Talk or I’ll take it out on her!”
Before he could do anything more, the steel door opened. Three men stood there in the shadows. Joe’s vision was a little fuzzy at this point, but he was fairly certain the man in the center was wearing some kind of mask.
They stepped into the room.
Janko snapped to attention.
“So these are our enemies,” the masked man said. His eyes lingered on Hayley until she returned his gaze. Next, he glanced at Joe, and finally Gregorovich.
“When they get done with you,” he said, “you’ll need a mask like mine.”
Gregorovich only stared.
“What did they bring?”
Janko pointed to the hard-shell-suitcase bomb.
“Has it been deactivated?”
“There was a timing device,” Janko said, “but we have disabled it.”
The masked man looked to his guards. “Bring it,” he said, and they quickly lifted it and took it out into the hall.
As the guards vanished into the hallway, the masked leader turned his attention back to Hayley. “Get her cleaned up and bring her up to me,” he said. “I have something to show her.”
“She’s part of this,” Janko replied. “She’s been with the ASIO from the beginning. She knows what’s at stake here.”
“Yes,” the man replied in a sinister, raspy voice. “She knows more than you think.”
He turned around and left. Janko stood still, looking stunned.
Slowly, he began to act, doing as ordered, moving to unlock Hayley’s cuffs and disconnect her shackles from the wall. He left with her in tow. The two interrogators followed him out. One of them, no doubt, headed for the sick bay.
As the steel door slammed and locked tight, Joe and Gregorovich were left in the room with the dead commandos.
Joe glanced over at Gregorovich. “You’re welcome,” he said.
Gregorovich turned back to Joe, his face mostly bruises and blood. “I didn’t need your help.”
“Really?”
“But thank you anyway.”
Joe figured that was the best he would get out of Gregorovich. “You take a punch pretty well for a Russian.”
“Sure,” Gregorovich said. “And you handled your pain fairly well for a decadent American. You didn’t even need any whisky to make you strong.”
Joe accepted the backhanded compliment. “I’d take some,” he admitted, “if you happened to have a bottle on you.”
The two men stared at each other for a moment, and finally Gregorovich began to laugh. Joe joined him. It hurt like crazy, but it was worth it.
“What happened to you out there?” Gregorovich asked. “I thought you were going to get the shot off.”
“Didn’t count on their wingman coming up behind me,” Joe replied. “What about you?”
“They sideswiped me and knocked me off the sled.”
“How’d they get so close?”
Gregorovich hesitated. “I may have doubled back to look for you. An obvious tactical mistake.”
So Gregorovich hadn’t been hit by the stun gun, but he’d been felled anyway, trying to help Joe.
“We all make them,” Joe said, looking at the bodies thrown in a heap on the floor. “You notice something about these men?”
Gregorovich nodded. “They’re one short,” he said. “The board hasn’t been totally cleared just yet.”
“Kurt won’t give up,” Joe insisted. “If he’s alive, he won’t leave us here to die. If there’s any way to get help or get us out, he’ll find it.”
Gregorovich shook his head, but it was disbelief in the situation, not disagreement. “One piece left,” he muttered dejectedly. “One knight trying to save all the pawns. Hard for me to fathom that I’m one of them now.”
Joe smiled through his busted lip. “Welcome to our side.”
FORTY
Hayley shuffled along through the half-lit tunnels of Thero’s underground nest. The man named Janko had given her a chance to clean up, and given her a change of clothes, before bringing her deeper into the lair.
She moved slowly, filled with trepidation and half wishing she was back with Joe and Gregorovich in the dungeonlike interrogation room. Something about being all alone made this fate seem worse.
“Be strong,” she whispered to herself. “Whatever comes, face it bravely.”
Janko arrived at an open room filled with an eight-pack of electrical generators. The squat, cylindrical-shaped devices were the size of industrial washing machines. They were arranged in two rows, and Hayley was marched between them to a door on the far side.
Janko pressed an intercom button beside the door. “I have the woman,” he said into the microphone.
“Bring her in,” a harsh voice replied.