Enemy Agents, page 26
“Have you thought about the agent who’ll be waiting for us? Won’t she wonder why you have a gun drawn and her boss is dead?” Quarrel asked, as he slowly walked with his hands in the air.
“This building is soundproof, so you didn’t hear when my partner killed her five seconds after she closed the basement door.”
Quarrel, seeing a chance to get inside Thompson’s head, kept talking. “You sure your partner is that good? What if the timing’s off and they’re not here yet? Or if that agent was as tough as she looked and all you did was piss her off? She could be waiting outside this door, ready to blow you away with your dead partner’s gun.”
Thompson pressed a button on the wall to unlock the door. “If she’s waiting, then I guess she’ll shoot you once that door opens. Move.”
Quarrel took a deep breath as the door opened in front of him. The hallway smelled of gunpowder, and there was no sign of the house agent. As Quarrel stepped into the hallway, he saw the agent’s denim-clad leg sticking out from the living room. She was laying face-up on the floor, unmoving. Thompson’s partner had been good.
“Front door,” said Thompson, still keeping a safe distance. Quarrel started down the hallway and heard Thompson emerge from the stairway behind him, when there was suddenly a second set of footsteps coming from the darkened kitchen.
“She’s dead,” said the partner in the darkness. “But killing the cameras alerted Langley. We have to move.”
Quarrel turned, the partner’s voice sending a chill up his spine.
“Did CIA send anyone to the Teacup?” asked the partner.
“No, all he did was put satellite surveillance on it,” Thompson said. “How long do we have?”
The partner’s voice was monotonous, emotionless. “Oh, not much time at all.”
There was a muzzle flash from the darkness, and Thompson took the bullet in his forehead. He went limp and fell straight down, a tangle of limbs. His partner stepped out of the kitchen, silenced pistol aimed at Quarrel. He was dressed all in black, including black face paint, but Quarrel recognized him all the same.
“Hershey.”
Thompson’s partner smiled, his white teeth standing out from his darkened face. “Hiya, Chris. I’m alive.” Pete Hershey fired a shot into the floor behind Quarrel’s feet. “Move it, or you won’t be.”
“I saw you die.”
Hershey kept smiling, but his voice was still heartless. “You weren’t supposed to be outside, but then you were such a great witness to convince everyone that I was dead. I really should thank you for that.”
Hershey shot another bullet into the floor. “Outside. Get in the back of the SUV. You don’t want to keep Sidorov waiting.”
32
“Sometimes, when I’m torturing somebody,” said Anton Sidorov, a cigar shoved into the corner of his mouth, “the men I pay to do the torture say to me, ‘Anton, why not just kill him? Why make it so slow?’ And do you know what I tell them?”
Jack Hall shivered and exhaled hard through gritted teeth. Frustrated, Sidorov picked up a plastic bag full of ice with his right hand and swung it at Hall’s shoulder. The bag was heavy, the impact knocking Hall against the steel arm of the chair he was bound to. Hall grunted. “You tell them,” Hall said, teeth chattering, “that you’re a sadist.”
“Not so, Mr. Hall. I tell them I do it because death should hurt. You should feel it filling your body, weighing you down and pulling you to hell. You should spend your last hours knowing that you are already dead and that I’m the one who killed you. The last hour of your life, your thoughts should be nothing but pain and regret and fear of my name. Because if I can do that to my enemies, no one will get in my way.”
Hall was shirtless, his feet bare, tied to a steel chair in a corner of a basement somewhere. The walls were concrete; the only window was at the top of a wall looking out onto a window well and some brown grass. His feet were in a bucket of ice and water, his chair surrounded by bags of ice. There were a car battery and some jumper cables sitting on a folding table against the wall, but so far Hall had not been electrocuted. There was a red metal toolbox sitting below the table, which they hadn’t opened yet. Sidorov liked to mix up his tortures, make his enemies die for days. There were stories of Sidorov pulling out defibrillators or adrenaline shots to revive dead victims, just so he could kill them again a few hours later.
For the last twenty-four hours, Hall had been through two of Sidorov’s tortures. The first was a set of headphones taped to his head playing a loud high-pitched screech, accompanied by randomly timed sandpaper swipes against his skin. The sound was worse than the scraping. Nevertheless, Hall had been grateful for it. The car crash he had survived while Sidorov and Scarret framed him had knocked him out cold. He had a severe concussion, and he knew that if he blacked out again, he could likely lapse into a coma. The high-pitched tone, while maddening, had the effect of keeping him awake. He wasn’t sure how long that torture had lasted, but Sidorov was wearing a different shirt when he returned to the basement and ordered his men, in Russian, to “Switch to cold.”
The goons were two young men, early twenties, with muscled arms and eyes that never showed any emotion but sorrow. They worked in shifts, one watching Hall at all times, the other resting or eating. It was rare that Hall had more than one man in the room with him. Hall figured they were street criminals who had earned Sidorov’s interest through a combination of brutality and loyalty. Sidorov’s network was filled with this sort of man; impressionable, violent, able to completely suppress their humanity when Sidorov ordered it. Hall knew he would get no sympathy from men like them.
Now Sidorov had returned, holding a blowtorch in one hand and a drink in the other, a thick Cuban cigar in his mouth. He had told the guard to leave, and now Sidorov was alone with Hall, indulging in a rant about the joys of slow death, sipping his vodka on ice and snorting out smoke.
“I was going to hook up that chair to the car battery. It’s so much fun to watch Americans lose their bowels and twitch and scream. It reminds me that I’m better than them.” He sipped his drink, put the cigar back in his mouth, and continued. “But your old friend Shark told me the story of how you burned his face, and made me promise to use fire.”
Hall couldn’t feel his feet in the tub of water, and he had given up fighting to suppress the teeth chattering, but he was far from broken. He had tested the ropes that tied him down; they were good, tight lines and well tied. He would need to find something to cut himself free. His legs had been bound during the first torture, but the guards had cut them free in order to put them in the ice tub. The tub was as tall as the seat of the chair, and once his feet were submerged, the goon had tied his thighs down to the seat so he couldn’t lift his legs out of the water. The chair was heavy and solid, but Hall was sure he could at least tip himself over if he needed to. Beyond that, there was little a concussed, hypothermic, bound man could do to escape from this situation. If Hall was going to survive, Sidorov would have to make a mistake.
“So the question is,” Sidorov put the cigar down on the table and opened the gas on the blowtorch, “what part of you do I burn? I was thinking I’d see if I could remove your pants with nothing but the flame, but seeing as your pants are soaked with water that would be tricky.” Sidorov lit a match and used it to fire up the torch. He dialed in the propane until he had a solid blue flame. “Perhaps I could burn the hair off your head. That would be fun. It should make quite the smell. And then tomorrow when I really get you screaming, every movement of that face will make your burned scalp shift and bleed and shoot pain all through your body.”
The look in his eyes was hunger, and betrayed that the oncoming torture filled a need that Sidorov couldn’t appease any other way. His was gleeful. “Yes. I think that would be fun. Hair it is.”
Sidorov set his glass on the table and approached Hall with the blowtorch. It was a typical torch you might see a plumber use, with a blue propane tank beneath the blowtorch itself. He held it in his right hand—his dominant hand—but as he neared Hall he steadied it with his left. Sidorov came around Hall’s right side, between the chair and the cement wall. He had to walk a wide path around the chair since there were still bags of ice piled under and all around Hall.
As the searing blue flame came down toward his head, Hall waited through the first jolts of pain, not tilting his head away from the flame until he could smell his own hair burning, then he flinched hard to the left.
“Ahh, so you thought you were tough. Nobody is tough when it comes to fire. Not even you.”
Sidorov leaned over the ice toward Hall, shoving the blue fire toward his victim’s scalp. That was when Hall snapped his head and shoulders to the right, toward the blowtorch. His skin shoved through that searing flame until his skull clunked off the metal nozzle on the blowtorch, and caught Sidorov off guard enough that the force of the headbutt knocked the blowtorch out of his hands. The blowtorch bounced off Hall’s shoulder, then fell to the top of a bag of ice, which served as a landing ramp and rolled it straight at Sidorov’s feet. The Russian jumped and the blowtorch passed under his left foot and settled, still burning blue-hot, against the wall. The puddle of melted ice sizzled around the flame.
Sidorov scoffed and punched Hall in the face, a weak punch with his left hand, while he was looking at the blowtorch on the floor. It was a punch Hall could have shrugged off normally, but in his concussed state it sent a jolt of pain thundering through his skull, and sent a wave of nausea through him that was so strong he nearly vomited. Sidorov placed his right hand on the back of the chair and leaned to pick up the blowtorch with his left.
Hall did his best to brace his useless feet against the side of the ice tub. It may have been the guards’ one mistake that they filled the tub so full, and made it heavy enough for Hall to push off of it. He put everything he could muster into forcing his weight as hard to the right as he could, and he felt the chair tip. Sidorov felt the impact of Hall’s weight, but he was half-bent-over, with one foot standing on a chunk of melting ice. When he tried to shove Hall’s chair back into its upright position, his twisted body fell with it, landing face-down on the wet cement. The piled ice beside the chair acted as a brace, a pivot point, and Hall turned upright as the chair came down hard. Hall’s weight and the weight of the chair hit the ground at one single point—the seatback over his right shoulder, precisely where Sidorov’s hand had been clutching. The impact mashed the hand with a wet crunch like the sound of tearing a head of lettuce. The ice bucket tipped with his legs, dumping ice water over both men, and Hall’s body weight pulled him down until a second point of contact—his right knee on Sidorov’s right thigh—took most of his weight.
Hall was upside-down, balanced for the moment on a small stack of ice, his own weight pinning Sidorov to the floor. Sidorov’s body was more or less pinned between Hall’s chair and the wall, with Sidorov’s left arm jammed between himself and the wall, only inches from the still-blazing blowtorch.
Sidorov moaned in pain, first from the crushing blow to his hand, and again when he realized the heat of the flame was inches from both his fingers and his face. With a grunt, Sidorov pulled his left arm free, stretching it out above the burning torch for a moment, before awkwardly reaching down to fish at the blowtorch. He managed to get a grip on the top of the propane tank and pulled the blowtorch up and away from his face.
Sidorov swung his arm backward until he was flailing the blowtorch over his own lower back in an attempt to catch Hall with the flame. It was a fruitless effort, since Sidorov couldn’t see what he was doing but Hall had a clear view. Hall waited for Sidorov’s weapon to come close enough to his own hand to snatch at it. Hall was bound to the chair, but Sidorov was awkwardly twisting his arm behind himself. It didn’t take much effort for Hall to pull the blowtorch away from Sidorov’s grip. Then it was only a quick shake of the wrist to turn the torch upside-down and angle the flame toward the ropes that bound his left hand.
Sidorov braced his now-free left hand against the wall and shoved. The bags of ice shifted and Hall’s chair tilted away from Sidorov, lessening the weight that pinned the Russian. Sidorov twisted his legs and got his left foot against the wall as well and braced for another shove that would knock Hall away and free himself.
Hall took his time on the ropes, burning each almost completely, but not all the way because he didn’t want the flame to touch his bare skin. If he burned himself he could involuntarily flinch and drop the blowtorch, so he had to be patient, his eyes flicking from Sidorov to the ropes on his own forearm, and back. Just as Sidorov started to shove again, Jack snapped his arm free of the bonds, and with this freedom he shoved the flame at Sidorov. He jammed the tip of the blowtorch at Sidorov’s left hand until the Russian flinched and pulled his arm away, ending the attempt to push off the wall.
Hall went to work on freeing his right arm, his eyes always watching Sidorov for any move. The painful tingling in his feet told him that feeling was slowly returning, and he knew that tingling would become agony as the blood flow returned to his feet. He ignored it and kept the flame steady against the ropes.
“I’m going to make you die for a month!” screamed Sidorov, and he jammed his left foot and hand on the wall in a last-ditch effort to scramble free. Sidorov shoved hard, and Hall fell away, freeing Sidorov. Hall was still tied firmly to the chair by the ropes around his right arm and his thighs, so he could do little as the chair slipped away from Sidorov. Sidorov quickly rolled over, facing Hall and scrambling to find his footing. As he turned to face Hall, his face was a grimace of pure rage, nostrils flaring, mouth gasping for air. In that instant, Hall jammed the blowtorch away from his effort to free himself and jabbed the blue flame straight at Sidorov’s hate-filled eyes. Sidorov jerked back and away, recoiling in shock and horror and pain, toward the wall.
Hall screamed in effort as he pulled his right arm against the weakened lines that held it. One of the sections of the rope broke, and that loosened the rest of the loops enough that he squirmed his right arm free. He was still tied to the heavy chair, and his legs were useless, but at least he had two arms and a weapon.
Sidorov, blinded at least temporarily by the bright flame, waved his hands in the space between himself and Hall. Sidorov’s right hand was useless—crushed at the knuckles, the fingers hung by the skin, with trails of runny blood and ice water trailing down Sidorov’s arm. The left was still a useable hand even though Hall had given it a bit of a burn. Hall used his own left hand to grab Sidorov’s by the first two fingers, wrenching them out of the way with a snap, while his right hand held the blowtorch out toward the torturer’s face.
When the flame hit his lips they melted on contact, and Sidorov’s involuntary scream was enough for Hall to shove the flame inside Sidorov’s mouth. He held it there as the Russian screamed and shook, his left hand fighting so hard to get at the blowtorch that he broke both of his own fingers in Hall’s grip. The right banged uselessly against Hall’s forearm, the dangling broken fingers slapping weakly on his skin. After twenty agonizing seconds of holding the torch in his enemy’s mouth, Hall heard Sidorov take a breath. It would have been involuntary, his body’s last effort to acquire oxygen when there was none to be inhaled. It was the same sort of dying gasp that invites water into a drowning person’s lungs when their body can’t go on any longer, and with that sharp intake of breath, Anton Sidorov inhaled fire into both of his lungs. His arms dropped and his head went limp.
Hall removed the torch but kept it burning since he still needed to get his legs free. While Hall tended to the careful business of cutting himself off the chair, Sidorov twitched, opened his eyes, and died.
Hall managed to cut himself free, lying awkwardly in the sideways chair until he pulled the lines away from his tingling legs. The henchmen hadn’t come down the stairs despite Sidorov’s screams, so Hall hoped that they had left the building. Hall rolled off the arm of the chair, over the bags of ice, into a puddle of ice water and bumped into Sidorov’s legs. He crawled, mostly on the strength of his arms, to the table and out of the puddle. He was directly under the fluorescent light here, the brightest part of the room, and he took the time to study his legs.
When he poked at his foot, he could feel it, but his flesh was soft and he got jolts of pain. He flexed his toes and winced as the figurative pins and needles stabbed him. He reached for the button of the fly of his jeans and found his fingers shaking. He took a slow breath and tried again. He popped the button and pulled at the zipper. Sliding out of the wet pants took a few seconds but was relatively easy. Still crawling, the nearly-naked Hall searched the basement for clothes. Near the stairs there was a hallway, and Jack crawled along until he found the next room. Jack had assumed from the looks of the basement that this building was a house, and discovering the laundry room confirmed it. There was a pile of men’s dirty clothes on top of a washing machine, and Jack recognized a red shirt that one of the goons had worn the day before. There was a laundry chute above the pile. The chute was the sort of thing a younger Jack might have used to climb up to the top floor, but in his current state he was just glad to drag the pile of clothes down to the floor.
There were some pants in a size larger than Jack’s, all of them dirty. He pulled on a pair of black chinos that smelled like sweat and grass, then found a baggy pair of sweats to pull on top of them. One pair of socks was wet with someone’s sweat, but Jack dug through the pile until he found two dry socks for his feet, which had thawed from pale blue to a shade of deathly grey.
He pulled a t-shirt on before slipping one of Sidorov’s expensive dress shirts over his arms. He didn’t bother trying the buttons. Gripping the side of the washer, Hall pulled himself up to a vertical position that was almost standing. He kept most of his weight on the washer while he tested the strength of his right leg, then his left. Satisfied that the pain was bearable, he tried putting his full weight on his feet. He stood for a moment before his knees felt rubbery and he had to lean back to the washer again.
