World Without End (47 page)

"I thought about calling the police, and then I remembered the skills of your friend Mr. Cole, the one you set up to get killed," Angel Eyes said.

"Mr. Cole's on his way to see you. Bon appetit, Raymond."

Raymond Bouchard didn't see the floor or the wonderful room, all he could see behind his eyes, branded, was the picture that everyone all over the country, maybe even the world, had just seen: the image of himself standing over John Riley's dead body. It was like… it was like he had stepped sideways into another dimension, back in time to that day from his childhood when he had come home and discovered the two moving vans parked in the driveway. Right now, he felt the way his mother must have that day, useless, powerless against the men who were removing their lives.

Just a few minutes ago, everything had been under control. And now… and now… That inner voice came on, it was very cool, very collected, and Raymond listened to it: You've got your gun. Grab your suitcase, drive to Lynn, and get the suit before Cole gets here.

Inside the elevator, Raymond put on his sunglasses and pushed his damp hair down across his scalp, giving him a George Clooney kind of hairdo.

The elevator doors chimed open. Take it easy. Act normal. Remember who you are.

The suitcase strap slung over his shoulder, Raymond moved into the lobby and then walked toward the front entrance, taking his time and staring straight ahead as people whisked past him. Casually, he moved out the doors and stepped into the cold night air. A young black man dressed in the cap and white gloves of proper valet attire stared at him for a moment.

It's the sunglasses. You're wearing them at night, guy probably thinks you're a celebrity. Just relax and smile, act casual.

"Good evening, sir."

"I just need my car," Raymond said. His voice sounded confident, firm.

"It's a black Dodge Durango." He gave the man the license plate number and watched as the valet nodded and then disappeared.

From behind his black lenses, Raymond watched the faces of the people who walked in and out of the hotel. He didn't see Cole. But Cole was an expert at disguising himself. It would be hard to find him if he was Sirens. Raymond heard sirens.

The noise grew louder. Police? Ambulance? Fire? His muscles tensed, ready to run. But where? Where was he going to run to? His car pulled up to the front. Raymond tipped the man and got in. Three police cruisers whizzed by the hotel in a wail of sirens and then disappeared, taking his panic with them.

It wasn't until he was out of the city, traveling on Route One North, passing through the city of Saugus, that he felt himself start to relax. He was inside the car, alone; nobody knew where he was. He was safe; protected. Once he had the suit, he would be invisible.

Inside his pocket, his cell phone rang. He ignored it and drove faster.

Both sides of the highway were filled with brightly lit strip malls, gas stations, and retail stores. He had turned the radio to the twenty-four-hour news station, the AM channel, WBZ, and listened for a breaking news report. Fifteen minutes and no news about what he had just witnessed on TV Wait. Was it a trick?

Get the suit.

Raymond turned off the highway and onto 144 East, the route that would take him straight into Lynn. He heard a hissing sound.

He turned off the radio. The noise was faint but was definitely coming from inside the car. What the hell is that? He shut off the heat. The hissing was still there. He couldn't smell anything.

A press of the button and the interior light turned on. Raymond looked around as he drove. Nothing on the floor, and it sounded like it was coming from under his seat. He reached under and instantly felt something hard, something made of metal, and pulled it out and examined it in the small strip of light.

A canister hooked up to what appeared to be a remote-control device, the nozzle hissing air.

Get out of the car.

Raymond rolled down one window, tossed the canister outside, and using the automatic controls, rolled down the other windows. He drove faster.

His eyes started to burn.

Don't scratch them. Keep driving.

Minutes later, his chest felt tight. He tried to suck in the cold air but it was becoming too difficult to breathe. Tear gas, was that what was inside the canister? Or was it something worse? He kept trying to breathe. It was getting worse. He pulled the Durango to a side street. He couldn't call the police or go to the hospital, but if he could just lie somewhere and wait for the effects to wear off, he would be fine. Raymond collapsed against the steering wheel, against the horn, struggling to breathe.

A moment later, the car door opened.

Raymond Bouchard saw a pair of latex-covered hands grab him and push him back against the seat. He couldn't see the person, but he could hear the guy's voice breathing against his ear.

"It is finished," Angel Eyes whispered.

When Cole heard the automatic gunfire, the rain of bullets ricocheting off cars, ping! ping! ping!" glass shattering everywhere, people shouting orders and screaming for help, he knew a rescue operation was being staged. His men were here. Behind him Mr. Mark "the Elf Alves engaged in a desperate struggle to free himself of his situation.

"Get it all out now, Mr. Alves," Cole said, calmly.

"When I get you up north, I'll have you screaming for weeks."

The heavy thud of footsteps rushing up the stairs caused Cole to look toward the half-opened door. Outside in the dark hallway, he saw a flashlight zigzagging across the dirty floor and broken walls and ceiling.

"In here," Cole yelled.

The footsteps slowed to a walk. The beam of light hit the floor near the door, turned inside, and shone directly into Cole's eyes.

"They brought Owen Lee to the hospital," Cole said, squinting.

"Conway just left via helicopter. He still has his Palm Pilot. We can listen to it, get his location. You need our van get that goddamn light out of my face."

The light moved away. Cole blinked, his eyes readjusting to the darkness.

Standing before him was a man dressed in black combat gear, his face and head covered so Cole couldn't identify him. Then his eyes focused on the weird looking rifle the man carried. Wires ran from the butt of the rifle and fed directly into the base of the bulky backpack strapped across his back.

The scene from the bridge: his men stumbling about in a daze, screaming that they had been blinded. This one belonged to Angel Eyes.

The man reached down and grabbed the boxes of matches that had been left on the floor. He opened the box.

Cole, a man used to wielding terror, was not used to feeling it. In that quick moment, he tried to sum up the man standing before him, tried to figure out the key to disconnecting his present agenda in the only way he knew how: through greed.

"You let me go, you can name your price."

"Some men don't have a price." The man struck a match and tossed it into the air.

Cole watched it turn around in slow motion, like a baton, not believing what he was seeing until the small flame gently bounced on his lap.

It was like being swallowed inside a cone of fire. His clothes and hair went up first, and when the flames started to eat at his skin, the pain became unbearable, so searing in its intensity that he screamed and screamed for it to stop, screamed and screamed for help until his voice burned away. Inside the flames he saw his mother's smiling face come for him, her bony fingers forming a claw that reached out to drag him down into her world, a place where he would forever burn.

Major Dixon did not want to open his eyes. Every time he did he saw (his two missing fingers, they're gone, Dix, GONE) something that made him scream so loud he blacked out. He never thought such a thing was possible, but when the Russian guy who looked like a boiled ham in a bad suit raised the cleaver above his head, Dix's mind screamed out:

This isn't happening this is just a bad nightmare good God DON'T DO IT! and the cleaver came down crashing down with a hard clank against the steel table and separated his fingers from his hand.

When he came to later minutes, hours, he had no idea, time had no meaning here he felt a warm stream of water hitting his face. Dixon opened his eyes and saw his torturer, the boiled ham, a big grin on his face as he finished urinating. Laughing, he zipped up his fly and walked out of the basement. Dixon was still lying horizontally, still naked and cold and wet and bound to the torture chair, but the pain was gone. A bad dream, that's all it was, just a bad dream, he told himself, and a bubble of hope built in his chest. He tilted his head to the side and saw the IV bag and the line hooked into his left arm, and when he raised his left hand up, his wrist still bound to the armrest, he saw the missing fingers, the stumps blackened, and the bubble burst.

It had happened. He was a prisoner in this gray dungeon and would be tortured an inch at a time until he delivered up the decryption code to the military suit a code he didn't have.

He lost it later that night.

"You want the fucking code?" On and on until someone walked into the basement, a guy who had sleepy eyes and wore a bandanna and two gold hoop earrings. It was Chris Evans, Dixon's jump instructor and partner the same guy who had sat in a chair in the corner and enjoyed a Twix candy bar while Dixon begged and screamed for the torturing to stop.

"Spill it," Evans said. He was dressed in some baggy jeans that showed off the stitched Calvin Klein band of his underwear. The guy was a spitting image of the steroid meatheads from Dixon's youth, guys who liked to kick him around because he was weak. Dude probably lifted weights without his shirt on in front of a mirror and then jerked off because he thought he looked so good.

"Conway knows the fucking code."

"What did you say?"

"I said Comvay knows the code. You want him, not me. I've got nothing to do with this!"

"I can't believe you called me down here for this." Evans shook his head, agitated, turned and walked back up the stairs. Lights out, and Dixon was back alone in the dungeon of permanent midnight where time didn't exist.

Time passed.

Through his anger and pain, a voice came to him and said, You can't change what happened, you can only go forward. Conserve your energy, eat the food they give you, and use this time you've got to think of a way out of this mess.

"It's hopeless," Dixon said into the dark.

It's not hopeless.

"Yeah, easy for you to say. You didn't have two of your fingers hacked off."

You can indulge in a pity party, or you can think of a way out of here before they remove another body pan. Like an arm or a leg.

Time passed and Dix tried to think of a way out. The Russian never came back down. No one did. In fact, it seemed like everyone had lost an interest in him. Only one time did anyone come down, and it was Evans. He set up a TV, turned it on loud to some annoying twenty-four-hour Southern gospel show, Evans saying he was sick and tired of listening to Dixon cry and yell and scream like a pussy and needed something to drown out the sound. It was keeping him up all night.

Then they brought the girl down, and it all went downhill from there.

Dixon had been awake the entire time that had happened. When that guy with those gentle blue eyes bit the girl's ear off and then picked up the circular saw, Dixon clamped his eyes and tried to ignore it, wanting to black out. But he couldn't shut off his hearing. He heard the whining bite of the saw as it caught skin and bone and the way that girl screamed it wasn't like in the movies or on TV where they tortured someone, the way she screamed, it was like her soul was being ripped out of her an inch at a time, and when Dixon felt her blood rain down on him, he screamed along with her and plunged into a blackness that severed any permanent ties to reality.

And you know what? He didn't care. Dix was thankful for the void.

Deep in the void, he had a companion, the one true friend left over from his childhood with that idiot slob of a father whose only talents lay in drinking and the kind of systematic verbal humiliation that if you weren't careful could strip you of your humanity. This is the deal, Dix, straight up, no bullshit. No matter what your captors say or do, they can't touch your mind. Your imagination, its contents and powers, they all belong to you. You control them. Just like the Holodeck on Star Trek, you can program your imagination to take you wherever you want.

As he lay in the pitch-black basement that bled with its awful smells, his missing fingers still twitching like phantom limbs, Major Dixon blocked out the sound of the fat hens singing their gospel songs on the TV and transported himself aboard the captain's chair of the best ship in the fleet, the USS Voyager. A dreaded Borg cube had entered the Delta quadrant again and had somehow found an opening in its shields and transported aboard a team of drones. The drones had destroyed several of Voyager's power grids; the bridge was dark and so were the hallways. Battle in the darkness. Screams. Human screams; the Borg was assimilating members of the Voyager crew. Hurry. Dixon ran down the hallway, phaser rifle in hand as he led his strike team to overtake the Borg. Wait. There was a distinct, muffled sound of a suppressor masking the gunfire of some twentieth-century automatic weapon. The gunfire ended. Silence. Darkness.

"Dixon."

A woman's voice, and she was close, too damn close, he could feel her breath and her words strong and loud and sharp against his ear. Had to be one of the Borg, maybe even the Borg queen. Phaser ready, lock and load, baby.

Dix felt the distinct sensation of a cold blade sliding against his skin as it cut through the rope and tape that bound his hands, feet, and neck to the chair. Blood flowed back into his limbs. He moved his hands to his face and touched his nose and mouth and lips. He was free.