The Killing House (34 page)

Fletcher removed the knife from its sheath. A favorite among scuba divers, this knife had a long blade with a serrated edge that could cut through cartilage and muscle with minimal effort and, if needed, bone.

Borgia groaned as he turned his head, his good eye staring up at the knife. He tried to speak, but his words were muffled by the rag that had been stuffed in his mouth.

'Relax, Mr Borgia. I have no intention of treating you the same way Miss White did. I promise you, I won't be anywhere near as kind.'

Fletcher slit the zip ties binding the man's ankles. He
tucked the knife into his pocket and hoisted Borgia out of the trunk - an easy task, given the man's rather diminutive size.

Fletcher searched the trunk, found the usual assortment of offerings: jumper cables, reusable shopping bags and a plastic container stocked with bungee cords. He selected the jumper cables, shut the trunk, and, with one hand gripping the back of the Borgia's neck, marched the barefoot man across the bumpy mat of dead leaves, twigs and small rocks.

Fletcher didn't speak as he led Borgia deeper and deeper into the woods. The only sounds were Borgia's footsteps and his laboured breathing.

The man's frame held barely any body fat. Without this much-needed insulation, he couldn't stop shivering. He fell several times. Fletcher lifted him to his feet, and he kept stumbling about, disorientated, until he fell again.

Ten minutes had passed; it was enough. Fletcher shoved Borgia face first against a tree. He used the jumper cable to secure the man's neck against the trunk.

Borgia had turned his head so he could watch the forest with his working eye.

'Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse." Emerson was referring to a man's conscience.' Fletcher tapped the blade against Borgia's forehead. 'Now let's see if we can find yours.

'I don't know what you've read or heard about me, Mr Borgia, but know this: I find dishonesty unspeakably ugly. Please bear that in mind before you answer.

'We'll start with the most obvious question: why did you order one of your HRT operators to kill Ali Karim?'

Fletcher pulled the rag from Borgia's mouth. More than one tooth had been knocked loose during his altercation with M.

'You forgot something, Malcolm.'

'Please, enlighten me.'

'I'm not afraid to die.'

'That remains to be seen,' Fletcher said, and grabbed two of Borgia's fingers. A quick turn of the wrist and they broke.

Borgia screamed. Spittle mixed with blood sprayed against the tree bark.

'Why did you try to kill Ali Karim?'

Borgia started to giggle.

'Did that give you an erection?'

Fletcher broke two more fingers.

Borgia gave another scream. When it subsided, the manic giggling returned.

'I know who you
really
are,' Borgia said. 'I know what you did.'

'Which is?'

'Go ahead, Malcolm. Use the knife. Go ahead and cut me and make me bleed. Do what you were born to do - what you
love
to do.'

Fletcher stuffed the rag back inside the man's mouth.

'Goodbye, Mr Borgia.'

The man was still giggling. Fletcher turned and walked back through the woods, heading for the car. He would wait there for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes; any more than that and he would risk losing Borgia to hypothermia. Then he would return, and if Borgia still failed to answer his questions, Fletcher would be forced to take the man to one of Karim's nearby properties.

Fletcher ran down a slope, branches snapping underneath his boots. The car came into view and he caught a blurred shape rising on the other side of the hood. Quickly he turned to his left, his hand already inside his coat and ripping the SIG from his shoulder holster, when the person near the Mustang fired - not a gunshot but a hiss, like compressed air escaping.

Fletcher was moving into the woods, when a man emerged from behind a tree, a man with a disfigured face and holding a handgun. The man who had killed Boyd Paulson and abducted Dr Sin and Nathan Santiago from Karim's New Jersey beachfront home. Brandon Arkoff.

Arkoff fired. A
pop
of compressed air escaping and something shattered against Fletcher's bulletproof vest. Arkoff kept firing and the person near the Mustang - his partner, Marie Clouzot - was firing too.

Fletcher felt something sharp pierce his thigh, like a needle. Warmth trickled through his muscle as Arkoff ducked behind a tree. Fletcher fired off a round, saw the exploding tree bark. He fired again and felt another needle-sting on the back of his head.

He ran, stumbled and quickly righted himself. He pressed ahead until his legs gave out.

Fletcher collapsed against the hard ground. He had dropped the SIG, could see it lying just a few inches away among the brown dried leaves. He went to crawl for it, collapsed. His arms had turned limp, and his vision was fading. He saw a tranquillizer dart sticking in the meat of his thigh.

He heard approaching footsteps and then he saw a rifle. Looking down the gun sight was the pale, almost bloodless face of Arkoff's partner, Marie Clouzot, the woman who had tried to kill him in Colorado.

IV

The Killing House

78

Malcolm Fletcher awoke to warm air and voices.

'Sit still. It will be over before you know it.'

A woman's voice, deep and husky. The kind cured from a lifetime of cigarettes and hard liquor.

'Why can't you give me Novocain?' Alexander Borgia's voice, and it was coming from the same direction as the woman's - someplace straight ahead, only a few feet away. 'Don't you have any of that shit down here?' Borgia asked.

'Just grit your teeth and bear it,' the woman replied. 'You've been through worse - and you're goddamn lucky I installed this thing. Otherwise, I never would've found you, and you'd still be freezing to death out in the woods.'

A great fog filled Fletcher's head, but his senses were working, alert: he was lying on his left side, his cheek pressed against something cold and hard. It had the rough, gritty texture of sandpaper. He didn't feel any bindings on his wrists or ankles. His mouth felt dry, and there was a throbbing in his forehead, a tight band of pressure that had the feeling of a hangover.
The sedative loaded in the darts
. One had hit his thigh and the other had grazed the back of his neck.

New sounds, some near by, some faint: a low, guttural
moan. The rattle of chain link. And everywhere, raspy, sickly breathing. There was a pervasive reek of blood and unwashed skin, and, behind it, the distinct and overpowering stench of human decomposition.

His eyes slit open to a tight cluster of intensely bright lights. A pair of blurry figures stood on either side of what appeared to be a very long and very tall stainless-steel table.

Fletcher didn't move his head or body; he wanted Borgia and the woman to think he was unconscious. He blinked, and kept blinking, until everything came into a sharper focus.

The light came from a portable floor-standing surgery lamp, its wide, twenty-inch elliptical reflector dish positioned over a stainless-steel operating table. Borgia stood behind the table. His face was still grotesquely swollen, but it had been cleaned up. A surgical mask covered his mouth and nose, and he had changed into a grey sweatshirt several sizes too big.

Fletcher glanced over Borgia's shoulder, at the wall and corner shelves packed with sterilized bags of surgical scrubs and towels. He saw boxes of latex gloves, vials and syringes, and a wide assortment of medical equipment.

An operating room.

Back to Borgia: the man's left sleeve had been rolled up and he leaned slightly over the table, his hand splayed across the stainless steel. His skin was covered with a dark liquid that was, most likely, Betadine. Borgia hissed through gritted teeth as Marie Clouzot made a
small incision on the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Then she traded the scalpel for a pair of surgical forceps, dipped the ends inside the wound and came back with something small pinched between the prongs. She set the tiny object on the table, not far from Borgia's hand.

Fletcher lost sight of it; Clouzot blocked his view, having turned to a nearby surgical cart. She was much taller than Borgia, stockier. She wore dark jeans, black boots and a pink, V-neck sweater that had the texture of cashmere. She also wore a surgical mask and latex gloves. Her dark hair had been pulled back into a tight bun.

Fletcher's gaze focused on the barrier separating him from the operating theatre: a chain-link door secured by at least one padlock. His head remained absolutely still as he conducted a cursory examination of his immediate surroundings.

The same grey/silver chain-link fencing had been used to erect his walls and ceiling. Eye bolts secured the chain link to a galvanized stainless-steel frame. He had been imprisoned inside what was essentially a custom-made dog kennel: just enough room to lie down. Judging from the ceiling height, he wouldn't be able to stand. To the right of his cage, fifteen to twenty feet away, was an open door leading to a dimly lit passageway of concrete.

His gaze shifted back to the operating table. Clouzot dabbed gauze on Borgia's hand, then she picked up the needle and went back to stitching his wound. The
operating lights were extremely bright but it still took Fletcher a moment to find the small object she had removed from the incision: a glass tube, the size of a grain of rice. Something was contained inside the glass. He was too far away to make out what this was, but his mind was working.

Slightly larger than a grain of rice
, Karim had told him.

Then the information came to him: he had been riding with Karim to New Jersey, they had been discussing how Nathan Santiago could have been found, and Karim offered up a theory - radio-frequency identification.

A glass-encapsulated
RFID
chip slightly larger than a grain of rice can be tucked inside a pocket or sewn into clothing - or, in the case of biometric security, surgically inserted beneath the skin
, Karim had said.
The Mexican attorney general did that to his senior staff, had a chip implanted in that web of skin between your thumb and index finger. You notice anything like that on Santiago?

Fletcher hadn't. But Clouzot, he suspected, had just removed an RFID chip from Borgia's hand - Special Agent Alexander Borgia's hand.

'When do you think he'll wake up?' Borgia asked.

'Hard to say,' Clouzot replied, pulling the surgical thread. 'One dart hit him in the thigh. The one that grazed his neck delivered maybe a quarter of the sedative. He's a big man.'

'So, what, another hour? Maybe two?'

The woman laughed, a deep, throaty sound. 'You're not going to let it go, are you?'

'I have to try,' Borgia said.

'You can't reason with a monster, Alexander.'

Borgia made no reply. The conversation ended, and was replaced by moaning, dry and plaintive whispers asking for mercy and forgiveness. Fletcher couldn't see Clouzot's face, but Borgia gave no indication that he'd heard the inhuman cries. Either he had inured himself to this suffering, viewing it as nothing more than a necessary by-product of his cause (whatever it was); or, like most psychopaths, his limbic system was defective, rendering him incapable of feeling empathy, fear, guilt and remorse.

Clouzot finished stitching Borgia's wound and straightened. Fletcher, his eyes nearly closed, could see her boots as they whisked past him. He watched them until they disappeared through the passageway. He was listening to her footfalls when Borgia approached his cage.

79

Fletcher lay still, waiting, his eyes shut. The footsteps stopped in front of the kennel door. He heard Borgia's laboured breathing.

'
Wake up
,' Borgia screamed, and kicked the cage door.

Fletcher didn't flinch at the sounds; he remained motionless.

Another kick.

'
Wake up, you son of a bitch.
' Borgia kicked again.

Again. '
Wake up.
'

Clearly Borgia wanted a confrontation, but what would happen if the target of his rage failed to awaken? Would the man have the nerve to remove the padlock and enter the cage? Fletcher hoped the man had a key.
Unlock the padlock and come inside, Mr Borgia ... No, he's decided against it.
Fletcher heard the man's footsteps storm away.

Fletcher rolled on to his back. The stench in the room was overpowering; he breathed deeply through his mouth to clear the fog from his head. Eyes opening wide, he stared past the cage's chain-link ceiling, at the hanging water pipe. It contained sprinkler heads. Was this how they showered the prisoners? He thought about Nathan Santiago, wondering how a seventeen-year-old
had wrapped his mind around living inside a chain-link kennel minute after minute, day after day, year after year. How had Santiago and the others kept from going mad?

No, don't think about that now
, Fletcher told himself. A final deep breath and he sat up, groggy, head swimming.

They had removed his overcoat and tactical belt. All he had left was his shirt and trousers, his leather dress belt and boots. They had emptied his pockets. The tranquillizer dart that had hit his thigh had left a small hole and a crust of drying blood on the trouser fabric. He appeared to be uninjured. He swivelled around to examine the rest of the room.

Fletcher had seen many things over the long course of his professional life. He had seen hidden torture chambers used by serial killers, had viewed corpses dumped by roadsides - he had witnessed first hand the ways dark and sinister urges found expression on human skin and bone. But what lay inside this rectangular concrete room of dim light momentarily overloaded his senses: human eyes peeking out from behind chain-link kennels bolted to the walls and floor. The prisoners were young and old, male and female. Some wore threadbare clothing or no clothing at all. Some were slumped against the bars or curled into foetal positions. Some of the victims were missing hands or feet or both. He wondered if they had been surgically hobbled to prevent them from escaping.