at all. It might have been the hum of high-intensity lighting or the fans on the computer servers he’d crawled beneath—
when? Days before? Hours? Minutes? His thoughts began to focused, but he didn’t open his eyes immediately.
A quick assessment revealed that he was bound to some sort of straight-backed chair. He felt heat on his face and as his mind cleared, he knew it was bright light shining on his closed eyelids. His mouth was so dry that he wasn’t certain he could pry his lips apart, and the pain in his arms and legs was excruciating. It was much more intense than it should have been, even though the bindings were tight. He heard shuffling footsteps and an occasional muttered comment, but there was no real conversation, so there was nothing to learn. At last, taking a long slow breath to calm himself, he opened his eyes.
The light was so bright it was painful. He blinked, furiously, trying to clear away the sudden tears so that he could make out his surroundings.
There was a flurry of motion and sound, and he heard a voice call out in Chinese.
“He’s waking up.”
Alex’s shoulder was throbbing. His shirt had dried and stick to the gunshot wound. When he was able to see a little, he glanced down and saw that there was a rough bandage wrapped around his clothing, but that the wound hadn’t been treated.
He was almost grateful for it. The throbbing muscle pain from the MS stabbed through his arms and legs, and he felt his left hand fluttering again, as if it might cramp. His head pounded, and he felt a numbness in his left temple. He wished there was a mirror. It felt as if his head might be loosely bandaged, but he couldn’t be sure. The wound on his shoulder was an intense, more familiar pain, and he thought that maybe if he could concentrate on it he might find a way to release the tension in his afflicted limbs. He didn’t expect to have an opportunity for escape, but he also didn’t intend to blow it if one presented itself.
The man who had spoken wore a white lab coat.
He stared down at Alex through the thick lenses of heavy, black-framed glasses. A stethoscope dangled from his neck. He held a clipboard in one hand. The man reached out and lifted Alex’s eyelids one after the other. He reached out and poked the makeshift bandage on Alex’s wounded shoulder. When Alex grimaced and let loose a short gasp of pain, the man smiled.
Footsteps sounded, and Alex heard voices approaching. A moment later there was the creak of a door opening. He turned, but could not quite see where the sound came from, or who had entered.
The doctor—at least he assumed the man was a doctor of some sort—left him and stepped out of sight.
“Is he coherent?” a voice demanded.
“He is in pain, and he has not spoken, but I believe he is awake, and he will not die soon. There is something wrong with his hand—I had no time to diagnose—but it does not matter. He can talk.”
There was a grunt of assent or satisfaction. He heard footsteps, and then someone stepped past the blinding light, blocking it from Alex for a moment, and then allowing it to stream back into his face suddenly as the figure passed. Alex cursed under his breath and closed his eyes, turning away again and waiting for his sight to adjust.
When he was able to see again, he turned his gaze forward. Standing before him was a lean, dark-skinned man with dark, penetrating eyes. He wore fatigues with some sort of collar device. On his waist he wore a belt very similar to the one Alex had taken from Boswell. A black holster hung from one hip, the butt of a nasty-looking gun protruding from the rear. Behind this, Alex caught sight of a long, thin scabbard. He wasn’t sure what kind of blade such a sheath would house, but it wasn’t any kind of standard-issue military blade.
The man’s expression was unreadable. His eyes gave away nothing, and his face might as well have been chiseled from stone. Alex glared back at him.
He wasn’t about to be intimidated, and even if he had been his training would have kicked in. He wasn’t exactly frightened, but adrenaline pumped through his system and his senses were heightened. This sent waves of pain through his hands, and his legs felt as if they were collapsing in on themselves. There was so much pain he had to wrap it into one huge ball and set his will against it to hold his gaze steady.
“I am Captain Dayne,” the man said at last. “It is my duty to oversee the security of this facility.”
That answered at least one question. However long he’d been out, and whatever they had planned for him, they hadn’t removed him from the MRIS
complex. Alex met the man’s gaze, but said nothing.
“You have caused me quite a bit of difficulty,”
Dayne continued. “Not only am I now short a good man, but my superiors are not happy with me.
They count on me to provide absolute security. As you can imagine, they were not pleased to find you inside their complex. They were even less pleased by the explosives you managed to plant.”
Alex’s mind whirled. Had they found all of the charges? How long had he been out? Would they hear an explosion any moment, or were all the packages safely detached and disarmed? There was no way to know, and he could think of no taunt or question that might lead Dayne to tell him that would not, in the asking, give away too much. He held his silence.
“What am I going to do with you?” Dayne asked. “I wonder who sent you? I wonder why? I wonder what it is you know about our work that would make you risk your life to destroy it?”
“You’ll never know,” Alex spoke through dry, chapping lips.
Dayne’s expression changed for the first time.
The man raised a single eyebrow and something sparkled in his eyes. Then it was gone, the eyebrow settled and Dayne broke eye contact. He brought his hand up and began examining his fingernails, pointedly avoiding looking at his prisoner. He turned to a short bench behind him and, as though seeing it for the first time, stepped over to examine its contents.
“I’ve learned a few things from years of leading men and asking questions,” Dayne said. His voice had softened, but somehow the shift was sinister rather than comforting. “I have learned that there are never questions you can’t get an answer to. I have learned, as well, that it isn’t always necessary to get an answer in so many words to find out what you need to know. Do you know another thing I’ve learned?”
Dayne turned. His expression had darkened. His face was flushed, and his brows knotted like lightning bolts ready to strike. Dayne seemed to sway slightly, and the motion was mildly hypnotic. Alex didn’t like breaking eye contact, but he did. He glanced toward the wall, away from the bright light.
Dayne stepped closer. He reached behind the holster on his belt, and Alex heard a snap released.
A moment later, Dayne had pulled free a long, slender blade. It gleamed where the light hit it.
Alex had used a similar blade before. He had used it on fishing expeditions for filleting fish. The blade could strip off very thin strips of flesh with almost no effort. Such knives were razor sharp and could reach bone with only a slight effort on the part of the wielder. Very slowly he swallowed. He had to clear the lump from his throat, but he was still unwilling to give Dayne the reaction he sought, despite the twitch that rippled through his muscles at the sight of the cold, honed steel.
“You are suffering from a misunderstanding,”
Dayne said. “You are assuming that I need information that you possess, and that my purpose here is to question you, grill you until you break and hand over your secrets. I would imagine you expect me to use drugs, torture, to pin your eyes open and shine this light directly into them until the retinas burn, and to employ other such tactics.
“I won’t lie to you. I would enjoy all of those things very much. I have spent a lot of hours studying the use of various tools on the human anatomy, but there are still breaks in my research, and I’d like nothing better than to fill those in.
Still, though you denied me information before I even asked for it, showing your fear, I have no questions for you. Instead, I have lessons to teach.
“The first is, you never come into another man’s house uninvited unless you are willing to pay the price. As you see, I am still employed, but you have caused me a great deal of anxiety and stress, and I intend to return these to you in kind. I will find out everything that I need to know about you, one way or another, but I find that any sort of conversation including questions and answers is best left until a much later point. It is better to establish guidelines up front, to put things in their proper context.”
Alex tried not to listen to what the man was saying. He thought about Brin. He thought about Savannah. He felt
