Gauntlet (14 page)

Y
OU DID WELL, sir,” Hamani told him when he came to. “I am impressed with a man who does not scream, but merely moans, as his hand is severed. And here it is. Your very own left hand.”

Hamani brought it closer to Zak’s eyes, until it was only an inch away, and then even closer, touching his prisoner’s face with the fingers that were no longer his. Zak passed out again, from shock, blood loss, and the conscious decision to leave the situation. Hamani quickly motioned to one of his men, commanding that the cauterizer be brought to him. The device, resembling an oversized branding iron, had been electrically heated, and was, at this point, white hot.

The shock of the burning heat on his arm brought Zak back to consciousness with a scream of pain. The cauterizer was hissing against his wrist joint, and the smell of charred flesh nearly choked him. He struggled in pain and anger, straining once again at his bonds.

Hamani smiled at Zak. “You see, I will become your benefactor. I will stop the bleeding. I will lengthen your life, a life that you will pray ends quickly. A life where your last words will be to thank me for letting you go. You will go mad, as the other prisoners do. But we have many weeks before that happens.”

He turned to the guards. “Take him back to his cell,” he said. “Take him, but with care. He is powerful and there is much fight in him. Use the restraints whenever you escort him to and from the cells.”

Hamani tossed Zak’s left hand onto the small pile of body parts that had once been Petroni. “Take that shit and drop it in front of the Embassy,” he said, motioning to the carnage. “Be certain that you don’t lose any of it.”

A
S TWO OF THE MEN lugged Petroni’s remains up the steep staircase that led to the outside world, his head tumbled from a poorly closed burlap sack. The second guard bent to retrieve it, and threw it up to his coworker, who threw it back down. The second guard threw the head up again, this time deliberately throwing it behind the first. This action led to an impromptu game of soccer. When the game ended another guard took what was left of Petroni’s head and threw it into a deep ravine behind the fortress.

“No need to worry about it now. The animals will get it. No one will ever find it,” he said, scuffing dirt at the disappearing head.

L
ATER, ZAK AWOKE to find himself in his cell once again. With Petroni gone, he had the place to himself. For a moment he forgot where he was, but then glanced down at where his hand should have been and nearly screamed as his memories came crashing back. Along with the memories of pain and frustration, though, came another realization.

Hamani had spoken of keeping him for a month or two. For interrogation. At the time he’d been able to think only of seven or eight Weeks of torture, if he didn’t get out. But now Zak remembered something else. And it was a far cry from what Hamani had said. Engulfed in waves of pain and partial unconsciousness after being attacked by Marak, Zak had still distinctly heard Yousseff say, “Extract from him whatever information you can, and dump his body in some remote canyon in the Hindu Kush.”

That seemed clear enough; Yousseff had wanted him killed. But the orders had evidently been lost. Hamani had confused the instructions. Instead, he was to be kept alive and questioned. Zak’s mind grabbed the idea and focused on it with a fierce intensity. He had prayed to God for a reprieve. It had been handed to him, through the death of the wrong man. Instead of being killed immediately, as he should have been, he had time... time to be tortured, from Hamani’s standpoint. Time to plan an escape, from Zak’s.

I
T WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT when Turbee slouched back to his apartment. Most of his colleagues left by five, and a few hung around till six, but even George was normally gone by nine. Turbee loved challenges, though, and didn’t rest until he had them figured out. He had stayed in the office until he had the Heckler and Koch issue sorted out, and thought now that Dan would certainly be pleased tomorrow. Another major victory, yet elation eluded him. The embarrassment of the day still stung. He wasn’t working on the possible WMD strike on one of the nation’s ports. Dan had deliberately excluded him from that and relegated him to the lower-priority problem of finding some stolen Semtex.

The mapping subsystem that Turbee had screwed up was accessible by Blue Gene, but it was in fact powered by a different network of computers, which stored and served the maps to the IBM-designed Atlas Screen. He simply had not known where the switches were, and had never bothered to learn the rebooting sequence, until this day. He could have learned it in a matter of minutes, but not under pressure.

In a situation like today’s, when the anxiety was notched up a tick or two and all eyes were on him, Turbee tended to stop functioning. Now, because he’d panicked at using a system with which he wasn’t familiar, he had been rebuked before his colleagues and in the presence of what was apparently a large and distinguished audience on the conference call. Dan’s sarcasm had stung. The laughter of the TTIC group, and the condescending attitudes of those on the conference call, bit like acid rain. Once again he was back in the third grade, with the laughter of his classmates ringing in his ears, when he had been unable, try as he might, to stop the repetitive movements of his right forearm. He heard his instructors mutter derisively about failures and disasters. He felt the isolation, the exclusion, and the cutting pain of not belonging. Before the medications, he had been unable to control and focus his thoughts, no matter how much he struggled. Socially, he had been almost totally dysfunctional. He recalled the tears at age 11, as he cried in his tutor’s arms. “I have no friends. None. I can’t think. I can’t do anything. I can’t even ride a bike,” he had sobbed in despair. Things didn’t seem to have changed much with time.

He crossed 19th Street and walked the one block homeward, his right forearm moving back and forth to his head. He was agonizingly alone. He had ’colleagues.’ He had a ’supervisor.’ He had fans and detractors. He had money. He thought he had some friends at TTIC, but didn’t think he had anyone who would truly stand by him. He didn’t have a girl. He walked, because he didn’t have a driver’s license. He knew he would never be able to drive. The whizzing of traffic overwhelmed his brain to the point of utter confusion. He had never learned to ride a bike, although he understood the mathematics of centripetal and carioles forces better than most. His father had purchased the small condominium he lived in because he had no sense of money or commercial transactions. He owned a basic four-room basement apartment in the middle of Washington, DC, although he could have purchased a palace by the nearby ocean. He could have bought a Learjet, or an armada of Harleys, or a Ferrari or two, but he walked.

Nothing had really changed at TTIC. He’d thought it had, but he’d been wrong. He was still the stranger. He was the outsider. He knew that he’d live that way for the rest of his days. Blue Gene had become his only real friend. “I’ll always be alone, always, and no hope for it,” he muttered to himself as he unlocked his apartment door, oblivious to the curious stare of his neighbor, who was entering from across the hall.

Over the years, Turbee had built a substantial set of armor for himself; protection for when his self-deprecating humor didn’t work as a defense against the rest of the world. As part of that armor, and as a refuge from inferiority, he had created Lord Shatterer of Deathrot. When the games turned serious, and when the stakes were high, in the international multiplayer Doom-type games that he played, he rolled out Lord Shatterer. Lord Shatterer was a master web-bot, capable of making his own decisions and instigating his own actions, as well as following Turbee’s orders in intricate detail. An incredibly high level of programming and design had gone into his creation. No one had ever associated this legendary cyberspace slaughterer with Turbee, but whenever he entered the arena, those acquainted with him took note, and either fled or prepared to die. He had rarely been vanquished, and then only when a conspiracy rose against him on the Internet. Further, Turbee’s programming skills were such that, in the middle of a Doom game, he could send a smaller web-bot to invade the computer of an enemy and reprogram it, mid-battle. There were many tales of Lord Shatterer’s opponents being reprogrammed during a fight and turning their blasters or cannons on themselves. In this digital world, he was the antithesis of slight and small. There were no physical incapacities, no mental or emotional handicaps. Heaven help those who dared laugh at
this
version of his personality.

He entered his apartment and walked directly to his main computer, shedding his coat and shoes carelessly on the floor. After the day he’d had, it was definitely time to play.

I
NDY SLAMMED the telephone down. Two weeks? Probably longer? A cabinet decision? He was living in an idiotic country tied up by bureaucracy. He was a cop. He had risen quickly through the Force, and he had gained the coveted inspector status, complete with his own office at the Heather Street complex, before he had turned 50. Fast work for his field. But he had worked his entire professional life fighting a losing battle against an ever-growing influx of drugs into his country. And the laws were now so screwed up in Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, that he, the king of the undercover drug sting, did not know whether the possession of marijuana was legal or not within his province.

Marijuana was legal for “medicinal” purposes. So now, tens of thousands of people were using the drug for anxiety, depression, chronic headaches, back pain, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, restless leg syndrome, and a host of other real, imagined, and sometimes contrived afflictions. He snorted. Everybody had a headache every now and then. Everyone had to deal with anxiety and depression at times. The identities of doctors willing to write prescriptions for marijuana were well known. Now people had a perfectly legitimate medical reason to possess and grow the drug. And who couldn’t fake up a constellation of subjective maladies to qualify for marijuana use? To add insult to injury, the courts were now throwing out simple possession charges. Possession of a large amount of marijuana for the obvious purpose of trafficking was dealt with, in the Canadian courts, by a few months of probation. The unfortunate truth was that the students and drug experimenters of the ’60s and ’70s were now the ones in control. They were the judges, prosecutors, and politicians, and to them the possession of a joint or two was not a big deal. Edgy after a difficult day at the office? Have a toke. Got a migraine? Role a fattie. Wife bitchy? Reach for the weed and rolling papers. It was completely out of control. No wonder Washington was putting pressure on Ottawa to do something about it.

Indy slammed his fist down on his desk, causing pens and paper to go flying. It was because of this lax stand on drugs, and marijuana in particular, that Indy was being stopped in his investigation. He slammed his fist down on the desk again. Here he was, in possession of documentation that demonstrated an obvious money-laundering scheme, and he couldn’t get his country’s cooperation. All he wanted to do was pressure a financial institution in the Grand Caymans to release account information. But no. The Federal cabinet would have to “consider” the rules of international law. It had to be “placed on the agenda.” It required “briefing notes” from the solicitor general’s office. And besides, it was August. Didn’t he know that all important people went on holiday in August? Come back in September, they said. Ease up a little.

He dialed Corporal Catherine Gray, more for commiseration than anything else.

“Can you believe those assholes in Ottawa?” he moaned. “Here we have the clearest evidence you could have of a large money-laundering operation, leading directly to a Cayman account, and we can’t get at it.”

“Yes you can, Indy,” replied Catherine, trying to be soothing. “You just need to be patient. You know what they’re like east of the Rockies. They want to look at it. They want to work behind the scenes. They want to exert diplomatic pressure. You’ll get what you want, Indy. It’s obvious what we’re dealing with here. Even the government will be able to see it, eventually. Just give it some time.”

“And in the meantime, the evidence is going to disappear. Going, going, gone,” Indy muttered.

“No it’s not, Indy,” she said. “No it’s not. We need to apply more manpower to this. We need to get undercover people into Fernie. We need to get close to the Hallett and Lestage operation. We can build our evidence and do the same thing you’ve done so many times in the past. We can find out how these guys are getting their marijuana and heroin across the border. We might even find out how it’s getting into BC in the first place. It would all help the case, in the end. Let’s just do the normal, steady, slogging police work we always do. We’ll get into the heart of what’s going on and then we’ll throw the lot of them in jail.”

Indy knew she made sense, but it didn’t ease the sting. “Throw the lot of them in jail? Well, that’s another problem, isn’t it?” he retorted. “Someone is found with a couple hundred kilos of heroin, and some two-bit doper judge in Vancouver is going to give him two months of probation and ten hours of community service.”

“Indy, Indy, Indy. You can’t change the world. You just have to do your job,” replied Catherine. “Just do the job.”

She was right, of course. Still, the frustration of it was getting to him.

With some political will and focus, this problem could be eradicated completely, but the will was absent and the smugglers knew it. BC was becoming an easier point of entry into the American drug market than Mexico. What a revolting thought. But do the job. OK, he thought. Time for a ten-page memo to the head of the Ottawa drug section, setting out why he needed to pressure the Caymans. Time to get onto the computer. Again. He sighed heavily.

“You’re right, Catherine. We’ll throw some manpower at this. I’m going to deal with Ottawa. Stay in touch.” Indy hung up the phone, then groaned as his computer, a ten-year-old Dell, flickered and crashed.