A Triple Thriller Fest (122 page)

Chapter Thirty-two:

Dmitri didn’t looked up when Tess descended the ladder into the dungeon. Lars had chained him to the wall and he balanced his feet on a peg. It was a terrible, awkward position. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

Someone had suggested they throw Dmitri over the walls. A return to sender of the grisly gift flung into the castle by the enemy. Others wanted to hang him from the gate tower. But Tess said she would deal with him in the dungeon. The discussions stopped. Everyone had seen the torture instruments—museum pieces, it had been assumed.

Tess got to the bottom and stood in front of her former friend. Lars came with her. Dmitri had slept for three or four hours until persistent efforts had roused him. She’d ordered him doused with water to keep him awake until the drug wore off.

Dmitri lifted his head. “I was expecting you earlier.”

“I’m pretty busy up there.”

“I’m sorry, Tess, I know I let you down.”

“I’ll give you a chance,” she said. “Give me a plausible story. Tell me how all this was a mistake. I’ll listen with an open mind.”

Dmitri looked at her for the first time. She knew he was guilty before he opened his mouth. “I’d make up something,” he said, “but you’re not an idiot.”

“No, I’m not.” She sighed. “Okay, then, let’s talk about Kirkov and Yekatarina.”

Dmitri shook his head. “No, I’m not talking.”

“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” she said. “God, Dmitri, do you know how much I don’t want to go through with this?”

“What are you planning?” Lars asked. He licked at his lips and looked from Dmitri to Tess, and then back to Dmitri.

She turned to Lars. “Are you losing your enthusiasm? Doesn’t the Viking in you want to cut open his chest and pluck out his living heart?”

“Tess, I’m serious. You’re not going to, you know…”

“I need answers. I need to know what the enemy is up to. So far as I know, Dmitri is the only one in the castle who knows.”

“There’s got to be another way.”

She fixed Lars with a humorless smile. “Like what? Bribe him with ice cream? Dancing girls and an erotic massage?”

“But torture? Jesus.”

“Damn it, Lars. You wanted to come here. You practically begged me. It was this cool game. Something real, right? Well, here we are and now we’re in deep shit. We’re trapped in this castle until they kill us or we kill them. That’s pretty real, alright.”

“What about a fire? We could light a big, smoky fire and signal for the Coast Guard.”

“You can’t see the castle from the water, remember? And there’s just not that much boat traffic on the lake at this time of the year, if any. We’d have to burn down the castle to have a chance of drawing attention, and where would that leave us?”

“So you’ve decided,” Lars said. “You’re going to make me see the error of my ways by going all Inquisition on me.”

“This isn’t an object lesson, I’m not playing a game. Don’t you understand that? We’re not in the modern world anymore. We need to go back to the old rules. That’s what everyone around here wants, and now they’re going to get it.”

“I’m sorry,” Dmitri said. “I’m sorry to both of you. Especially you, Tess.”

“So am I. You know what I have to do, right?”

“I know. And you know I won’t talk.”

“I know that you
think
you won’t talk.”

Dmitri wiggled his thumb. It was still in a splint. “Someone tried that already. I can take it.”

“Amateurs. Did you read the chapter on medieval torture in my first book? No, well it was very instructive, taught me more than a few tricks.”

No way to tell what Dmitri was thinking, but Lars paced back and forth. If he’d been the one in chains, he’d already be babbling like an idiot. And that was the problem with torture. It made people talk, but it didn’t make them tell you the truth, just what you wanted to hear.

“What’s it going to be first?” Dmitri asked after several seconds. There was a slight tremble in his voice, but he mostly managed to sound indifferent. He nodded toward the table with its torture devices. “That claw thing looks like hell.”

“What?” she asked. “Forget about all that stuff, I’m not a sadist. I want you to talk, not just suffer.”

“What do you mean?” Lars asked. Hope in his voice.

“I’m not going to tear him to pieces, although I would if it would keep us alive. What I want you to do is keep him awake.”

“Me?” Lars asked.

“Right. You’re in charge. I’ll send someone else down to help. Let Dmitri down from that peg when it starts to hurt too much. But keep him awake, no matter what. I want two guys on him at all times, shift them out every six hours. I want Dmitri on his feet. Talk to him, poke him, splash him with cold water, whatever. Don’t let Dmitri close his eyes, not even for a few seconds. That’ll be a good start.”

“What then?”

“I’ll take over from there.” She turned back to Dmitri. “You’re probably half there already. You scored a few hours with Yekatarina’s drugs, but if you’re like the rest of us, you could use a good night sleep already.”

“So? A few more hours won’t kill me.”

She’d come down when he couldn’t take it anymore. Let him fall asleep for a few seconds, then jolt him awake again. He’d be swimming in a haze, desperate, weeping for sleep. People could stand pain, or hunger, or thirst. Sleep deprivation was another matter entirely.

“We’ll see, Dmitri.” She turned to go.

“Can we go back to the dancing girls and massage?” he asked.

His tone had changed. Gone was the false bravado, replaced by the real thing. He really thought he could beat her. Fool.

“Let me know if you’d like to talk. Otherwise, I’ll see you in about two days.”

“You’ll be dead in two days,” Dmitri said.

“You’d better hope so,” Tess said.

#

Anton Kirkov found two more defectors that evening. He loaded them into the trebuchet and launched them toward the castle. They wanted to fight for Peter, then let him have them. The first slammed into the outer curtain. The second—after an adjustment to the trebuchet—flew screaming into the bailey. And survived the fall, apparently, if the continued screams were any indication. They stopped ten, twenty minutes later.

If there were any more potential traitors, they kept their opinions to themselves. This left Kirkov with one hundred and three men and women, plus Yekatarina. The castle defenders would have less than half that many.

But he was still angry when he made his way into Yekatarina’s tent. Nothing stung more than his defeat at the hands of Tess Burgess.

“Still smells like your husband,” he said.

“It’s your imagination.”

“No. It’s sour sweat. And onions.”

“I changed the blankets on the bed and even moved the tent to a drier spot. And I hung blankets to keep it warm.”

She’d found time to bathe and wore a clean robe, open at the breast.

“Come to me,” Yekatarina said.

“I’m dirty,” he said as way of protest. “And splattered with blood.”

“Other men’s blood. It’s sexy. Take your clothes off. Hurry.”

He was hard when he came to her. She pushed him away and he grabbed her wrists. She drove him away with her knee. A moment later she was on top of him. He was still sore from the battle and it was all he could do to wrestle her down again. She moaned when he entered.

“The men outside can hear, you know,” he said.

“Good. Make them think you’re raping me.”

That was good for his mood. He pretended at first that he was an enemy soldier, despoiling the king’s daughter. But then she became Tess Burgess, and he thought of pinning her down, while she kicked and screamed. Stupid bitch, he’d give it to her.

When they were done, he rolled over. No need to act anymore, everyone could know what he and Yekatarina meant to each other.

All those years, hating, despising his cousin Alexander Borisenko, yet forced to act like the man’s bitch lapdog, because that was the only way to climb. Until he met Yekatarina. He’d thought her a rival at first, until a long weekend in the dacha in Zhukovka, where the Politburo used to seclude themselves. His cousin was held up in London and Yekatarina’s tennis coach was ill, so he stepped in as her tennis partner.

He overpowered her in the first set, but gradually she wore him out with her greater stamina and her ability to nick the corners of the court.

“You’re not letting me win, are you?” she asked at one point when she’d blanked him two games in a row.

“I only let Sasha win,” he said. It was an unguarded moment, born of exhaustion.

She gave him a slight smile. It was a muggy day with an angry sun—as they said in Russian—and sweat soaked her sports bra, revealed her nipples. He hadn’t thought her pretty at first, a bit chubby in the cheeks, but the more he knew her, the sexier she looked.

“See, now Sasha says that what he likes about you is that you’re always one hundred percent genuine. Throwing a tennis match, well, that might disabuse him of that notion, if he ever found out.”

“Just a joke,” he said. “Sasha beats me because he’s a better tennis player than I am.”

“And better at chess, durak, better at everything it would seem, because he always beats you.” Yekatarina walked to the net, picked up her towel, used it to wipe sweat from her forehead and her neck. She dipped the edge of towel under her sport’s bra to wipe at the sweat that dampened the area between her breasts. He looked up to see her watching him watching her.

“It’s hot out here,” Kirkov said. “I’m going inside to wash up. You win, you were up two sets to one anyway.”

He went straight to the shower, lathered up his hands and started to relieve the sexual pressure that had been building the last twenty-four hours. What he needed was one of those jiggly girls that used to follow them around. Or maybe one of the maids. The Latvian who came in the morning, he could pay her a little extra. But he couldn’t fix her in his head, could only see Yekatarina rubbing off her sweat with the towel. Damn it.

The door opened to the bathroom and he froze. “Who is that?”

The shower door swung open and there was Yekatarina, still in her tennis skirt and sports bra, but barefoot. She looked down at his groin, lathered and rigid.

“You’ve got a problem, Antosha. Does Sasha know?”

He backed against the wall as she came into the shower and shut the door. She turned on the other two shower heads and turned up the temperature of the one he’d been using.

“What problem, what do you mean?”

“Does he know that you hate him?”

“I don’t hate him, he’s my cousin, and like a brother to me.”

“A brother that you want to kill, that you hate,” she said. “A brother whose wife you want for your own. And you want him for something else, only problem is, you don’t know what.”

Kirkov was unable to take his eyes off her as the water soaked her clothing and hair. She squirted soap into her hands and rubbed them over his crotch. He shut his eyes. He was too far gone already, it only took seconds.

“What is it you want Antosha?” she asked. She kept massaging him with one hand and put the other down her panties. But she spoke in a perfectly controlled voice. “You want to be rich like Sasha? You’re already richer than almost every man who ever lived. Peter the Great didn’t have the luxuries that you do.”

“Relative to my cousin, his friends, I have nothing.” He closed his eyes again. “And I’m so weak and pathetic I would lick their balls if Sasha told me to do it.”

“Ah, so you want power,” Yekatarina said.

“Yes.”

“It’s impossible in this world. Sasha’s money isn’t enough, not even his position in the Oil Ministry. There are too many rich people, too many people sharing power. Nobody has it, except maybe the American president, and a few other heads of state.”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

Yekatarina didn’t answer. She leaned back against the wall while her breath came faster and faster. He could barely see her in the steam, and the water was so hot that it made him weak. But he was hard again in her hand that gripped him, almost painfully.

After that, they were lovers.

Sometimes, Borisenko was with either Yekatarina or Kirkov every minute of the day and weeks would pass before they slept together again. It would be a furtive act in a closet or the back seat of a car, as hard and fast as a mugging. Other times they would live together for a week or a month, spend half the time in bed.

No need to pretend now. Borisenko was broken in the other tent. They had his money and his power with the ministry. Soon, they would take the castle and they would break the other rich people, too. He knew that Yekatarina would take special delight in crushing Peter Gagné.

“They caught Dmitri,” Kirkov said. “He never sent the signal.”

He cooled rapidly now that he’d stopped moving, and he pulled the blanket over their bodies and pulled Yekatarina close to share her heat.

“I thought they would. He’s unreliable. He wants to bring it down, but then he worries about individual people. I’ll bet he confessed.”

“You’re wrong. They must have caught him,” Kirkov said.

“Question is, will he talk?”

It was a question he’d already asked himself. “No, I don’t think so. I broke his thumb. He didn’t talk, and he could have taken more. But I’m not sure. It’s Tess Burgess I don’t know about.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Yekatarina said. “We have everything we need to take the castle.”

“And what we don’t have arrives the day after tomorrow when the boat comes.”

“Right,” she said. “Just in case. In any event, it will make it easier to take prisoners. We don’t want everyone dead, not right away.”

“What’s the net worth inside that castle?” Kirkov asked. “A hundred billion dollars? Two hundred billion?”

“At least. But net worth is only one part of the puzzle. And that means we need some of those men alive.”

“Of course.” He felt warm now and sleepy.

“Five hours,” she said. “And then I want you out of bed. I want that castle.”

He slept four. It was still night when left her in bed, asleep. Outside the tent, snow fell from the sky in great, swirling flakes. There was a half inch on the ground already. His pee steamed where it fell.