A Korean Tiger (11 page)

That one stopped him for a moment. He blinked at her. "The old Roman law? Not much, I guess. Why? What's it got to do with finding Bennett?"

"Perhaps a great deal. A very great deal — with me finding Bennett. Doctor! The equipment, please. I think I will begin now." She reached a hand back and wriggled her ringers. Killmaster, remembering certain details of Zoe Kalinski's dossier, felt the sweat grow cold along his spine. He could take torture. Had taken it many a time. But he had never gotten to like it. And there was a limit to what any man could take.

Nick was prepared for knives, dental drills, even air hoses. He would not have been surprised at brass knucks, clubs, whips. This was an old warehouse and they would have to make do with what was at hand, yet the equipment that the dope addict produced puzzled him. It was so simple, so innocuous looking.

Two pieces of thin wood. About an eighth of an inch thick and five inches square. A small rubber mallet, very similar to a judge's gavel.

Colonel Kalinski stood back from the table. "Prepare him."

Two of the muscle boys came out of the shadows. Both were grinning. Nick tested the bonds that held his wrists to the table corners. Rock firm. Hell! What pleasure to have smashed the grins off those flat faces. But it was not going to be — this time he was just going to have to lie there and take it. But what?

He found out soon enough. He had been stripped to his shirt and trousers. His weapons were gone, of course, and the heavy Army shoes were also missing. Now, at the woman's command, the men unbelted his trousers and pulled them down. His shorts were ripped off and he was exposed to the hot glare of the light.

It was a strain, but Nick managed to preserve both his grin and his cool — as the cats back Stateside would have said — and he could even leer up at the Colonel. "Please, Colonel! I know we're enemies and all that, but isn't this going just a bit far? I'm a modest man and..."

"You talk a great deal. Carter, but you never say anything. But you will — you will." Her cold stare was unwavering. Nick was reminded of giant squid he had once confronted in i sea cave near Madagascar. The squid had looked at him the way she was looking now.

"I was speaking of the old Roman law/' she said. She began to draw on a pair of very thin rubber gloves. Surgeons' gloves. Again he noted the delicacy of her hands, then forgot it in a wild flurry of panic. He did not like thinking about surgeons. Not exposed like this.

"The old Roman law," she went on, "was just the opposite of your decadent English law. Now, in your country, confessions extracted by torture are thrown out of court. In the old Rome it was just the opposite — a confession had to be obtained by torture to be valid. You: begin to understand, Carter?"

"I understand," he blurted, "but you're wasting your time. If the drug didn't work..."

"Drugs!" It was as though she had spat. "I have little faith in drugs. Even less in the fools who administer them." She turned to glare at the doctor. "You will remain, understand. No creeping away because you have a weak stomach. You are a poor thing, but you must have some knowledge, and I must know when his pain threshold is reached."

"As you command," said the emaciated man with his first show of dignity. "But I will be sick as usual. I promise you that, Colonel." One of the other men laughed.

"Then be sick!" the woman rasped. "But attend closely. You and your drugs! I will show you the best drug of all — the best truth drug. Pain!"

In all his long career as an agent Killmaster had never experienced anything quite like this. Even as he steeled himself against the pain that was to come he found that he was curiously fascinated. Those delicate hands in the pale rubber gloves. Certainly she was clinical enough; there was nothing but the most dispassionate interest as she went about her business.

She put one piece of wood beneath him; the other piece of wood she lay on top. A sandwich of wood. Very thin wood. Colonel Kalinski picked up the rubber mallet and gazed down at Nick Carter. Her expression was very close to benign. She might have been a dumpy, rather ugly, nurse dealing with a recalcitrant child. She poised the mallet deftly in one hand.

"Possibly I am wasting my time," she told Nick. "And inflicting needless pain. Perhaps my intuition is correct and you know nothing of the Yellow Widow — but I cannot trust my intuition. As an agent yourself, Carter, you will understand that. I must be sure! And there is no surer way than by torture. This has been true since the world began — when all else fails, torture works. Now, Carter? One last chance. What do you know of the Yellow Widow? I know you people have a file on her — what is in it? Also I want the names of your people in this city, in Cologne and in Berlin. Quickly now!"

Nick Carter shook his head. "You're right about one thing, Colonel. You're wasting your time. I..."

Colonel Kalinski rapped the upper square of wood with the mallet. Sharply.

At the very first there was no pain. Only a gathering sickness that began in his stomach and moved up into his chest and throat. Nick thought he was going to spew and fought it back. He was choking. Then the delayed wave of pain hit him, a searing wash of agony that tore at his brain.

"You nave a foolish courage," she said. The mallet came down again. A little harder this time. The pain came faster and Nick could not restrain the hot scald in his throat. He was conscious of vomit on his lips and chin. She struck again with the mallet. And again. Nick was floating on a hot raft of pain that was unendurable and yet must somehow be borne. And more than that — he must keep at least a part of his mind clear. He must listen to, and try to remember, what this sadistic bitch was saying.

Her voice came clearly enough out of the scarlet mists of his pain. Pain that he could not remember, for one cannot remember how pain felt; pain that he would never be able to describe any more than he could describe the odor of a rose; pain that was the essence of here and now, an immediate thing that banished the rest of the universe. His racked body personified pain. He
was
pain!

"I will tell you the little we know of the Yellow Widow," the woman was saying. "I do this because I am sure you already know all this — a fact which you will admit presently."

The mallet fell.

"Her real name is Chung," the voice went on. "She is half Korean, half Chinese. She is considered very beautiful, though now she must be in her forties. She is now known as Madame Hsu Tzu Tsai — in Peking, that is. Her late husband was on the Chinese General Staff. She had been most unfortunate with her husbands. The last one was her fourth."

Again the mallet.

Nick put his lower lip under his teeth and bit down hard. Tasted the salt of his own blood. He wasn't going to scream for her. Not yet.

"She is a top echelon agent, this Yellow Widow. She works only on the most important missions. Our own dossier on her is very scanty, which is why I must know what you know, Carter. Because this woman must be caught, she and Bennett, before she can get him to China."

"My thought exactly," said Nick. Was that groaning, pain-racked mumble actually his voice? "If you would just listen to..."

Tap-tap-tap — Three brisk strokes with the mallet. Vast new vistas of pain opened before him. He was wandering over white hot coals, over a vast plain of pain. He began to fight hard for his sanity.
The pain in Spain falls mainly on my brain.
There it was again! Oh God... oh God... oh God... stop it... stop it... stop it...

The mallet rested, poised over his bruised and swelling body.

"My people," said Colonel Kalinski, "have in the past made the mistake of underestimating Chinese Intelligence. This present generation, I for one, is paying for their mistakes. To use your gangster slang — we did goof on the man Bennett. He was recruited, and planted in Washington, some thirty years ago. And then forgotten. His file lost. The idiots! His file was found recently quite by accident — in some trash that was about to be burned. That led to the discovery of a bank account in his name, into which a great deal of money had been paid." The voice was a little puzzled. "That is another thing we do not understand — why this Bennett would defect to the Chinese when he has a fortune waiting for him in Moscow."

Through pain-bleared eyes Nick saw her raise the mallet. To forestall the immediate agony he blurted, "It's the woman! Bennett loves women. He's a psycho, a sex nut. I don't think he cares much for money. But a pretty woman could talk him into anything." He was, he told himself, not giving away anything of import. So far he was getting far more information than he was giving. But that mallet — that horrible mallet!

Silence. The mallet hovered, but did not fall.

"Hmm — so that is it. Thank you, Carter. See, you are beginning to talk. So Bennett is a sex psychopath? We do not have that information in our files. Yes. I can see now how it was worked. The Chinese knew this, and we did not. They sent the Yellow Widow as bait. And it worked."

Nick Carter kept talking, his eyes on the mallet. He was getting very near to the end of his resistance and he knew it. A few more strokes with that sledge hammer — the mallet grew bigger by the moment — and he would be babbling like a brook. Be begging them to listen to AXE secrets. Unless he could somehow, mercifully, lose consciousness. But it was never that easy.

"The Widow might be sorry she got Bennett," Nick told the face hovering above him in the pain cloud. He killed his wife, you know. Or did you?"

The face nodded. Through the mists that clogged his brain he could see the blue eyes boring into him like gimlets.

"We know that. When his file was reactivated we had our people in New York run a check on him immediately. We were just too late. Only the day before the body of his wife had been discovered. Bennett had disappeared. We could do nothing but wait for him to contact us."

The trick was to keep her talking. As long as she talked the mallet would not fall, the sickening agony would not return. But to keep her talking he had to feed the kitty — keep handing her bits and pieces of valueless information. But how? What? Who could he throw to the wolves without endangering AXE security?

The mallet came down. Hard. Nick screamed. Or so he thought. He could not be sure. The scream seemed to come from a distance. One thing was sure — someone had screamed!

He could bear it no longer. Why not give them the porter? The porter at the Hotel Dom? He opened his bleeding mouth to speak, then clamped it shut again. No. Fool! They would take the man and torture him — and that would lead them to the poor drab on Ladenstrasse. He couldn't do it.

The mallet again. And again. Pain entered his being and got mixed and came out as a pleasure of such purity that it could not be undergone. Pleasure such as this was quite unendurable.

"Stop!" He was screaming again. "Stop it! I'll talk... I'll talk." He would give them Avatar. The Berlin man. He was dead and nothing could ever hurt him again.

The mallet rested from its labors. The voice of the Demon Goddess, Purveyor of Pain, said with a chuckle: "I thought you would, Carter. Now you are being sensible. I am glad. I do not enjoy inflicting pain."

Lying bitch!

Killmaster spoke rapidly, as though the rush of words could congeal into a barrier, a physical shield, against the mallet.

"I don't know anything about the Yellow Widow," he panted. "It's the truth — I don't. I'd tell you if I did. But I can give you our Berlin setup — from the head man down. Our whole network. That should be of some use to you, Colonel! His code name is Avatar and..."

It wasn't going to work. He saw the mallet strike down again. His body exploded in a gust of flame and he felt new vomit spew from his lips and down over his chin to trickle on his bare chest.

"You
are
a fool," said the voice. "We know all about Avatar. We killed him as he was following us across the roof. We took his wallet which, as you know, will be of some help to us. Not much. That is minor. As for his network in Berlin, Carter, you lie! You would not know of that — not unless you Americans are even bigger fools than we think."

All true. He couldn't buy himself out of torture that way.

The voice went on: "It is the Yellow Widow that we. must know about. She, and only she, is the key now. She will try to hide now until this thing has time to cool. Where will she hide, Carter? Where would you look for her — if you were free to look?"

He still had enough brain left to think of a plausible lie. It would have to do. Maybe it was even true. He had no way of knowing — he only knew that somehow he must gain respite from the pain for a time. Time to pull himself together. Time to gain strength for the new ordeals. But it had better be a good lie!

"In Albania," he gasped. "In Albania! That's a ChiCom stronghold. You must know that. According to our files this Yellow Widow has got a villa on the Adriatic. She'll probably take Bennett there. She'll have plenty of protection and she'll lie low until the heat is off and she can make the run for China."

It was purest moonshine, of course, but it didn't sound so bad. Even a little plausible. As a guess it might be better than most. And it was buying him time, time which he sorely needed. For Killmaster was nearly at the end of his tether.

He heard her laugh and say something to the doctor. There was triumph in her voice and Nick clutched at the sliver of hope. Maybe if he could keep it up, keep feeding her plausible lies, he would black out. He cudgeled his pain-mangled brain, trying to think of a city, a town, in Albania. Anything. Damn — damn! He couldn't think — What in hell was the capitol of Albania? Wasn't it near the Adriatic? He'd better be right or it would be the mallet again.

"Tirana," he gasped. "She's got a villa on the sea near Tirana. I'm telling the truth — I swear it!"

She tapped him very gently with the mallet. A bare touch. The pain shivered through him in little modulated waves. Bearable. Only just bearable.