Hour of the Assassins (21 page)

“I tell you, getting a tiny splinter in your little finger will bother you personally more than the death of thousands of people you don't know.
Ja
, all the rest is liberal posturing”—nodding his head sagely.

“Shut up,” Caine said.

“You can't take the truth can you, filthy Jew,” Müller muttered, almost to himself.

Caine took the Bauer from his waistband and with a single sweeping movement smashed the butt into Müller's mouth.

“I said, ‘Shut up,'” he spat out sharply.

Müller coughed and out came a mouthful of blood and broken teeth. His lips glistened bright red, as if he had smeared on lipstick.

As he drove the remaining few miles in silence, Caine tried to compute how much time he had before Steiger came. Getting a car would take him a few minutes, but that was all. Steiger would know whom to look for and he would only have to ask a few people to find out what kind of car Caine was driving. Then it was only a matter of questioning people until he found someone who had seen the Ford. Only two roads went out of town and he would have to explore a few side ones. Figure half an hour at best.

He glanced over at Müller, who stared impassively into the darkness. His bartered face might have been sculpted from stone. Müller knew all he had to do was hold out till Steiger came—Caine was clearly alone. Either he would be rescued or killed—so in any event the pain period would be limited. Müller had no incentive to talk. But Caine had other ideas.

He remembered Smiley Gallagher, his small squinting eyes gleaming with shy pride as he defended his techniques. They were sitting in that noisy bar in Saigon where the MP's never came because Madame Wu had the girls service them with French ticklers if they came in civies, and razors if they came in uniform.

“If all you're after is information, you don't need lots of time and an elaborate apparatus. All that is required is a basic knowledge of human physiology and the creation of the right psychological conditions. For example,” Smiley had said, pausing to delicately pluck a morsel of lemon grass from his plate of
Ga Xa Ot
and chew it with the contented air of a well-fed cow, “suppose you want to interrogate two prisoners from the same outfit. All you have to do is bust them up for a while to see which of them takes it better. Then you question the stronger and when he refuses to answer, you shoot him. Then you cock the gun and put the same question to the weaker one. At that point you couldn't stop him from spilling his guts if you tried.

“The essence of torture is expectation,” Smiley said, his soft brown eyes as untroubled as if he were calmly describing the behavior of laboratory animals. “You see, Johnny, the key is that the subject must have the clear notion that the pain will increase indefinitely until he gives you what you want. Oh, yes,” he added, like a physics student rewriting an equation, reducing it to its simplest form. “The subject has to feel that you're threatening the thing he loves most, his sight, his manhood, his woman, or his life.”

The car bumped slowly across a field to the dark silhouette of the old abandoned farmhouse. After he shut the headlights, the darkness was almost complete. The night was filled with crawling sounds and bird cries and, somewhere, the plaintive shrieks of an animal that he couldn't identify. Caine took the flashlight, fishing hooks and line, and the car flares from a paper bag in the trunk, then put the bag over Müller's head.

Caine dragged Müller from the car and leaned him against the fender. Using the flashlight, he carefully examined the knots around the wrists to make sure they were holding. Müller's clenched hands had turned into dark purplish claws. Soon they would be useless.

“Where are you taking me?”—Müller's voice sounding hollow and muffled from inside the bag. Caine responded with a savage knee to the groin. Today's lesson, class, is to speak only when spoken to, he thought. He waited for Müller to finish retching into the bag, a thread of vomit dripping down onto his chest.

He cut the line binding Müller's legs and prodded him with the Bauer down the trail that was barely discernible in the narrow flashlight beam. Even though he remembered exactly where he had placed the trip wires, he almost missed them in the darkness. He had Müller step carefully over the wires and then shoved the stumbling figure down the trail to the clearing.

Using the fishing hooks and line, he tied Müller to a tree. It was essential that Müller be unable to move and he crisscrossed his chest and arms and legs with so many coils that Müller looked like a fly trussed up by a spider for later consumption. He was careful to leave the head and neck free, so that Müller would be unable to kill himself. When he was finished, he positioned the flashlight in the crook of a nearby tree so he could see what he was doing and checked the Omega. There wasn't much time left.

He removed the bag from Müller's head and lit a cigarette. Müller's bloodshot eyes glowed as red as coals in the pale light. An insect buzzed Caine's face and he slapped at it automatically. They heard a bird shriek not far away and then the shriek was suddenly cut off. Around them the jungle darkness stirred and thrashed like a restless sleeper, spilling the rank smell of the marsh toward them like a pail of dirty water.

“You can scream all you like,” Caine said conversationally. “There's no. one within miles; that's why I chose this place. And don't think Steiger's going to come to the rescue like the U.S. Cavalry. I've taken care of that. So there's just you and me. Now let me tell you what I'm going to do,” he said, unbuckling Müller's belt and pulling down his pants and undershorts. Müller's eyes were almost all pupil, black as a hawk's with fear and rage.

“I'm going to cause you more pain than you can imagine. You won't pass out, you won't be saved, and you won't die. The pain will just get worse and worse until you tell me what I want to know. It's like you said before. All anybody ever thinks about is himself. So I suggest you forget about trying to protect anyone else and just think about yourself.

“I'm going to start on your testicles. After maybe forty seconds or so you might as well cut them off because they'll be absolutely dead and useless. Understand?

“Now then, I'm going to ask you only one time and one time only. Where is Josef Mengele?”

“
Bitte
,” Müller's voice quavered. “I don't know.”

“Too bad for you,” Caine said calmly and flicked away his cigarette, checking his watch again.

“God in heaven, I'd tell you if I knew. I swear it,” Müller shouted desperately, twisting uselessly against the fishing line.

Caine took Müller's soft penis in his hand, pulling it up to expose the testicles. The penis stirred slightly as he flicked open his cigarette lighter and touched the tip of the flame to the testicles.

Müller's body leaped and quivered with electric shock, as it thrashed mindlessly against the fishing coils, which began to drip with blood. A piercing scream seemed to emanate from his very bowels, as the acrid smell of burnt hair and scorched flesh reached Caine's nostrils. It was not a human scream. The body jerked with desperate convulsions and the stench of charred meat grew very strong as the skin blistered and began to turn black. The animal-like screaming went beyond pain or dying and it seemed to go on forever, like an echoing air-raid siren wailing desperately for the end of the world. The skin was gone and Caine could see one of the testicles itself, blistering and charring as it shriveled to the size of a pea. Then he became aware that the scream had become a ululation, that it had a pattern, and that Müller was somehow screaming the word
Peru
as if it were the name of God.

Caine clicked the lighter shut, grabbed Müller's head, and banged it against the tree trunk. Müller continued to wail mindlessly, like a small child. He slapped Müller's contorted face two or three times.

“Mengele is in Peru?”

Müller tried to look at him with hatred, as if remembering the SS officer he had been, but he was broken and there was nothing in his eyes except the dull glaze of pain.

“
Ja, bitte
. No more,
bitte
. No more,” he whimpered.

Müller's head fell forward and hung from his neck like a broken fixture. His rasping breath shattered into a series of sobs. His face was a death's head, glistening with sweat and tears and blood. Then Caine heard it. The tinny, rattling sound of the trip-wire alarm and a sudden crackle of underbrush. Steiger.

Caine moved quickly. He tore Müller's shirt and wadded it for a gag that he stuffed into Müller's mouth. He bound the gag in place with another strip of shirt, his fingers bumping against each other in his haste. Then he grabbed the flashlight and a car flare. Just as he clicked off the flashlight, he heard another jangling rattle and a muffled curse. Steiger had hit the second trip wire. There were only seconds left. He struck the car flare and dropped it near Müller's feet, where it burned cherry-red, like a dying star, as he blundered into the underbrush and rolled behind a tree. For a moment he froze and closed his eyes, so that his vision could adjust to the darkness as quickly as possible.

He knew the Bauer wouldn't stand a chance against the range of the Luger, so he would have to play cat and mouse, hoping to get within range before Steiger spotted him. Even if he could manage it, the .25 caliber shell was too light to risk a body shot. It would have to be a head shot, and he couldn't afford to miss. Steiger wasn't about to hand him the luxury of a second chance.

Caine lay silently, breathing shallowly to minimize the sound of his own breath and straining his ears for any sound of movement. A mosquito's whine by his ear sounded loudly as a plucked guitar string. There was the distant chattering of two birds engaged in a nervous dialogue. And a faint, almost inaudible grinding sound that could have been a beetle chewing on a leaf. Otherwise there was nothing.

Obviously Steiger had also frozen, waiting for him to make a mistake. Caine felt he had a few things going for him. Steiger didn't know where he was or how he was armed, so he would have to be cautious. Steiger didn't know the terrain or if there were any more trip wires, so he would probably stick to the trail and move slowly. Also the flare light would inevitably draw Steiger like a moth to a flame and at the moment of firing would fractionally reduce his night vision. Finally Caine had the flashlight, which could be used to mislead as well as illuminate.

Even so, Caine knew his chances were no better than fifty-fifty because at this stage he hadn't wanted to risk bringing anything bigger than the Bauer through Paraguayan Customs. When Steiger approached the clearing and first spotted the flare, he would realize his danger and choose to crawl around one side of the clearing or the other, so he could dive into the cover of the underbrush the instant he heard or spotted Caine. If he came on Caine's side, he would be within range of the Bauer, and Caine would have a shot at him. If he went on the far side, it would be a long shot for the Bauer and Caine wouldn't stand a chance. Either way it was an easy shot for the Luger.

His heartbeat sounded loudly as a drum, in the deathly silence. Sweat burned his eyes and the old tightness grabbed at his solar plexus like a fist. It was like being back in Indochina—the jungle sounds, the heat and the death you couldn't see but you knew was out there. It was the terror of a nightmare grown real, and for a moment he felt as if he were drowning in black water. Then he remembered the training at the Farm, Koenig speaking quietly in the tent after night maneuvers on the boom-boom course.

“When you've done everything you can and the fear comes, and believe me, it'll come, ask yourself the question: Is there anything else I can do?” Koenig had said.

There was still one thing he could do, Caine thought. Stealthily, placing his hands slowly one at a time so as not to disturb any animals or leaves or twigs, he began to creep on his hands and toes through the brush toward the trail. When Steiger came, he would expect to find Caine somewhere in front of him and not so close to him by the trail. He crept slowly; each movement seemed to take hours. His eyes caught every shadow and his ears registered barely audible sounds, as instincts millions of years old came alive in him. He had become the most efficient killing machine nature had ever created: the human animal stalking its prey.

As he neared the shadow of a tree at the edge of the clearing, its trunk about half the width of a man, the jungle itself seemed to hold its breath. He crouched behind the tree, steadying the Bauer in his right hand against one side of the trunk and the flashlight in his left hand against the other side. Most people hold a flashlight in front of them near their side. Caine was counting on Steiger knowing that and firing in the vicinity of the light as soon as he saw it. Caine wiped the sweat from his eyes against his shoulder, holding his breath in the dark silence. Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly, he thought.

The sound of a broken twig thrilled through him. It seemed to come from about twenty-five feet away, right around the maximum effective range of the Bauer. It was going to be very close. There was a flicker of shadow in the faint reddish glow from the flare and he thought he heard the faint scuffle of a shoe in the same direction. He no longer had any time to think about it because those primordial instincts had taken over and he clicked the flashlight on. The beam caught a crouching Steiger, silhouetted for an instant against the darkness. He was on the far side. But it didn't matter, because he was already whipping the Luger into a two-handed stance aimed at the light. The two guns fired simultaneously. Steiger missed. Caine didn't.

Steiger crumpled forward and lay still, but Caine didn't move. He carefully and deliberately placed four more shots into Steiger. The body jerked spasmodically with the first two shots, as if jolted by electric shocks. The body received the last two shots without movement. Caine reloaded the Bauer and listened for any sounds on the off-chance that Steiger hadn't come alone. But there was nothing.