Gone Black (4 page)

When Black came around again, he felt very confused and nauseated. Very weak and woozy, he slowly became aware of the pulsating beat in his temples, pounding so hard and so fast that he could barely stand it. He could taste blood, could feel a split in his bottom lip with his tongue. His face ached, and he tried to think, to remember where he was and what had happened. No explanation revealed itself, just the jackhammer slamming going on inside his skull. He kept his eyes shut tight and willed himself to get hold of his mind. Concentrate his thoughts. He had been going home, he remembered that much. To Claire. To their wedding. They were getting married. But something was not right about that. He forced his eyes all the way open and saw nothing at all. Just darkness, inky black, thick and close, as if he could reach out and touch it, as if it would feel soft, like fine black velvet. No light at all. Not anywhere. Where was he? What happened? Why was it so dark?

Then he realized that he was injured pretty badly. He ached all over; the muscles in his legs were cramping hard now, his face felt hot and hurt and puffy and swollen. He tasted blood again, down in the back of his throat, and his eyes seemed fused as if his lashes were glued together. Groaning, he tried to lift his hand to touch his bloated face. That's when he realized he couldn't move his hands. He couldn't move his feet, either. Or anything else. That's when panic surged inside him, and he struggled against whatever was binding his wrists and ankles, but it was too dark to see what was holding him down. Whatever it was, it was very tight and secure. He knew then that he had to pull himself together. He had to think straight.

After a moment, he remembered driving the red Ferrari convertible, heading down to the airstrip from the villa he had leased for the honeymoon. Then he remembered the scared little boy in the road, the one with a shock collar on, and then the image of the red-haired woman shot into his awareness. Oh, God, it had been Jaxy. Jaxy Soquet had him in her clutches. And if she had him, so did Max and Marcel. After that realization came recollections of his attack, how he was beaten and sedated. He had been taken captive, that's what had happened. His whole body reacted to the extreme danger of that bitter truth, his muscles taut now with fear and debilitating tension.

Once he was able to recall everything, his mind started spinning, first with the simple terror of the unknown, then with his utter helplessness. But as his military training from his days at Ranger School and the missions he ran thereafter kicked in, he slowly and methodically sought to calm down and get himself under rigid mental control. He pulled in several deep, bracing breaths. There wasn't much he could do until he figured out why the Soquets had him and what Jaxy was planning to do. But who was he kidding? He already knew why. It was vengeance, pure and simple. They wanted him dead. They had wanted him dead for a very long time. And for something he hadn't even done.

Black knew from his detailed research into the Soquet family that they were all psychopaths and that they all liked money. Maybe he could buy them off. But they were already rich, wealthy from ill-gotten gains stemming from Marcel's expert bomb making and gunrunning and for-hire assassinations, mostly to terrorist organizations. Black had to try to relax, pull himself together, and use his training. And he had to do it before they came back.

Suddenly, without warning, the lights came on, a bunch of overhead fixtures that were so bright, so blinding, that he had to shut his eyes again. His headache intensified tenfold under the terrible glare. It was so awful that he couldn't force his eyes open, not at first. In time, he squinted through half-closed eyelids and tried to see where he was. He needed to be observant. Find any weaknesses he could in them, in their organization, in their actions, in their personalities.

As soon as he managed to open his eyes all the way, however, the harsh light dimmed down to near normal brightness. That's when he saw that he was inside a big white room. It was completely empty. It appeared to be roughly thirty feet by thirty. The walls had some kind of white shiny fabric over soft padding, the kind of room used in mental hospitals to house the most violent patients. There was a big drain in the middle of the white tiled floor not far in front of him. A big tan fireman-type hose was coiled up on the wall beside a spigot. A wooden bench sat on one side of it, no doubt used for waterboarding prisoners. But he had already had that done to him when he was in training. He could survive it, he knew that. It just wouldn't seem like he could.

Black shifted his head slightly. A camera was mounted directly in front of him, the kind that was affixed to the ceilings of department stores, a small round dome of black glass with a small dark eye inside, focused on him. He suspected that the video feed was transmitted to some kind of control room somewhere, one with a bank of monitors, maybe in the room next door. He had seen similar operations. Someone would be in there now, watching his every move. So he didn't move. Just sat and waited. He had to be calm. He had to use his training, no matter what they did to him.

There were no windows, no door that he could locate. Directly in front of him, the entire wall was composed of sixty-inch, flat-screen television monitors, lots of them, all abutting, probably so that the screens could project a huge wall-sized image at times and/or play different images on different screens. But now he knew exactly what he was up against. He had seen places like this before. He was in a room designed for torture. Not the kind done in dark medieval dungeons with whips and racks and burning pokers, but the other kind, the modern kind. Psychological torment. He also knew that to be the Soquet family's favorite pastime. And through his study of their heinous acts, he knew they had gotten it down to an art. Three phases of breaking a man, both mentally and physically. Jaxy was always in control of Phase One, Max was Phase Two, and Marcel, last but not least, and most brutal of all, ended their games. Especially when dealing with Black. Marcel hated Black so much that he might just do everything himself.

Incongruously, once that the truth and realization of what was to come hit him, he relaxed a little. Okay, he knew all about psychological torture. He knew what it entailed. He knew Marcel Soquet's personal techniques and favorite atrocities, what they'd do to him, how they'd do it, and in what order they'd do it. He had studied their dossiers for years, had seen some of their stuff demonstrated in law enforcement seminars, and knew full well how they worked. He knew all about every kind of psychological torture and how to withstand it, though he had never taken part in it himself, either as perpetrator or recipient, except in his military training scenarios.

More important, he knew the best way to react to almost anything they chose to throw at him. It was not going to be fun, or pleasant, but he was well enough equipped to handle the mental stress and agony they would inflict on him. He was trained for it, thank God. And that was Jaxy's specialty in their evil school. She would work his mind over first, for as long and as hard as she wanted, and then when he was broken down mentally, she'd turn him over to Max for even worse abuse and degradation.

Jaxy had told him he was going to suffer. By the looks of it and from everything he knew, he was going to suffer a lot. The Soquets were all psychotic, each and every one, especially the father. He had raised his children to be cruel and evil and stone-cold killers, and they had learned their trade very well. Jaxy, though, was in a category all by herself. Psychotic didn't even touch what she was. And her head injury had only exacerbated her cruelty. Black tensed all over when the central television screen, the one at eye level, suddenly flashed on. The screen displayed a big lake with sun glinting off the surface with lots of wooded hills in the background. White letters printed across the bottom read:
Lake of the Ozarks
and under those words, the current time back in Missouri was ticking down. One-thirty p.m., July 4. The secondhand digits slowly ticked down. If that were true, and he wasn't at all sure it was, that meant it was around seven thirty in the evening in Italy. If he was even still in the Amalfi Coast area, or in Italy, at all. Maybe they'd taken him to France while he was drugged up. That's where he'd last heard that they planned and perpetrated their crimes, a big stone chateau on the ocean near Marseilles. But if that was the true time back home, he had been drugged and unconscious for almost an entire day. And if that were true, it was almost time for his wedding to begin. Claire would be dressed and waiting for him to show up.

That's when the truth dawned on him, and he recognized his captors' first gambit intended to break him down emotionally. They were using Claire to warp his mind. She was his main weakness, that was true, and they would know that. She made him more vulnerable than anybody or anything ever had throughout his entire life. He had known that for a long time, worried about it, worried about his enemies using her against him, fearing something exactly like this could and would eventually happen. But he got too careless, and now he was in deep trouble.

So Black sat as still as he could and waited, tried to remain as calm as humanly possible under these kinds of stressful conditions. He stretched his muscles as much as he could under the restraints, wanting to remain flexible. He was well aware his captors were watching. They would torment him from the sanctity of their control room. He might never see another person during his entire captivity, if they wanted him to suffer solitary confinement. But then again, it was Jaxy and Max Soquet. Both of them were known to want first row seats to the suffering of their victims, up close and personal. They were that sick. But that was good; he needed to see somebody. He needed one of the Soquets to come back and then he could try to reason with them.

Black had been highly trained; he could hold his own with interrogators, perhaps even turn the tables on them. He could possibly talk himself out of trouble or at least enough to be held inside that room unfettered. That was the most important thing. He had to get loose so he could move around. The room remained completely silent, heavy and nerve-wrackingly quiet, except for the barely audible tick-tick-tick as the digital clock in front of him continued on, one second at a time.

After some time passed, Black knew what they were trying to accomplish. They were forcing him to watch his wedding come and then make him watch it pass without him, unable to get hold of Claire and tell her where he was and what was going on. They would think that would get to him, make him crazy with worry. But it wouldn't. There was no telling if that clock was the correct time or if it was really time for the wedding. It could be a trick and only an hour after his capture, for all he knew. Or two hours. Or three days. He had no way of knowing, not for sure. And Claire was no porcelain doll that could be easily broken. If he didn't show up, she would find out why and do what was necessary to find him. He had no doubt about that. If anybody could make things happen, it was Claire. She had more grit and guts than most men he knew.

So he just sat there, forcing himself to remain perfectly still and perfectly calm, as he stared at the numbers blinking down on the screen. He was extremely thirsty, his throat parched, so dry that it was hard to swallow. There was a terrible taste in his mouth from the blood and the metallic aftertaste of the drug they'd given him, probably the strongest sedative they could get their hands on. After a while, he tried to turn his head, just enough to see what lay in the room behind him. There was a stainless steel toilet built into the back wall and a stainless steel sink and faucet. There was a steel shelf also built into the wall, which probably acted as a bed. No mattress. No blanket. That probably meant they would eventually release his bindings and let him move around the room. Good, that was good. He could find a way out, given a bit of luck and some carelessness on their part.

Looking down at his arms, he examined again the leather straps that encircled both wrists and secured them tightly to the arms of a metal chair. Similar cuffs bound his ankles to the front chair legs, and he moved slightly to see if the chair was bolted to the floor. It was. There was no way to escape, not until somebody came into the room and released him. So he sat very still and tried to show no emotion or give anything away with his facial expressions. He could not show fear. No matter what they said or what they did to him, he could not show fear. They fed off their victims' fear. Black knew they were impressed by gumption and much less likely to kill victims they considered brave when facing their inhuman torture techniques. He had to show courage under fire, no matter what they did to him.

But the picture of the lake right in front of him and the clock ticking down the minutes became effective, and he thought about Claire and how disappointed she would be when he didn't show up. How would she feel? What would she think? She would think he was in trouble, he told himself again. That's exactly what she would think. She would know that he would never skip out on the wedding. No way would she believe that. She would not stop until she figured out what had happened to him, just like she did in all her criminal investigations. And then she would not stop until she found him. Neither would Booker or Holliday or Novak.

When the numerals hit two o'clock, the scheduled time for the ceremony, he jerked spastically as loud music suddenly blared out into the room. The song was so earsplittingly loud that he felt deafened by it for the first few minutes. They were playing the traditional “Wedding March.” Again, he made sure he showed no reaction. He shut his eyes for a moment and tried his best not to picture Claire there, wearing the dress that she had gone to such lengths to hide from him.

Despite his resolve, he pictured her face when they told her he hadn't shown up. He cut off those thoughts at once, cleansed his mind of any thoughts of Claire or the wedding and started a deep mental meditation, slowly emptying all conscious thought, envisioning all thoughts of the wedding circling a mental drain and disappearing down a pipe. But the song played over and over and over, so loud that it was vibrating the fabric on the walls around him. He forced himself to remain unmoving, serene, managed to do it somehow, but still, Claire's face kept welling up. What would she think? What would she do?