blinded by the light. As his eyes adjusted, he noted the small Yamaha generator softly chugging in a corner. The stone walls must have insulated its sound from the outside. He got a glimpse of a pair of iron cots with thin cotton mattresses. He was less than surprised to see a poster bearing the likenesses of Sun Yat-sen, Mao and Chou En-lai hanging over two packing crates that served as a dresser. Across the room a blanket hung over what Lang surmised was an entrance to one of the corridors outside the gun rooms.
Hands snatched his arms behind his back and pressed him into a reed-bottomed chair to which his wrists were tightly bound before he was spun around to face the door.
An Asian of undeterminable age peered back at him. The man wore a woodland-pattern camouflage uniform whose epaulets bore two stitched stars. His fatigue cap had a single red star pinned above the red band above the bill. If Lang remembered correctly, he was facing a Zhong Xiao, lieutenant colonel, of the People’s Liberation Army.
The man reached somewhere beyond the angle that Lang’s bindings permitted him to see and produced the mate to the chair in which Lang sat.
Dragging it to within a few feet of Lang, he reached into a pocket, produced a cigarette without removing the pack and lit it as he sat. “I am Lieutenant Colonel Shien Dow,” he announced in American-accented English, “and I have a few questions for you.”
Lang said nothing.
Dow took a long drag, expelling the smoke somewhere above Lang’s head. “First, who sent you?”
“I came on my own.”
“With a false passport? Why would you enter Haiti on a false passport? That could get you in serious trouble, you know.”
“With whom? The People’s Republic of China?”
The lieutenant colonel stared at him a moment, and then Lang’s head seemed to explode. He never saw the blow coming. The next thing his brain registered was the chair, with him still in it, sideways on the floor. Unseen hands righted both.
“Let us try again, Mr. Reilly…”
“My name is Lowen and I am a German citizen.”
This time he saw what was coming but was unable to prevent it. His interrogator’s fist smashed into Lang’s mouth and he tasted blood as the chair toppled over again.
By the time Lang was propped up, Dow was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the left, cigarette dangling from his lips.
He gave a deep sigh. “We know who you are. Your name is Langford Reilly; you are a lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. We even have your address, where you and your wife live with your young son. Speaking of your wife, she came here to the Citadelle with you. If you cherish her safety, you will cooperate.”
Implicit and direct bluffs? Lang suspected so. Harming Manfred or Gurt would not produce the immediate result this man wanted. Besides, Gurt should be on her way back to the Mont Joli by now, fully alerted for trouble when Lang didn’t return. The question was, how did they know who he was? Some sort of face-recognition equipment used in conjunction with a surreptitious photo taken, perhaps in Venice? Perhaps the credit-card receipt for the costume? No matter. What was important was that they did know who, and what did he do now? The sole weapon Lang had was to stall, to drag things out as long as possible to give Gurt time to get help. The problem was that this guy was going to use Lang as a punching bag or worse in the meantime.
He was not disappointed over the next hour.
Time ceased to exist. Only pain was real, throbbing pain from the places Lang had been hit, stabbing pain as another blow was delivered. If Lang gave them the information they sought, they had little incentive to let him live. He had to hold out, delay until Gurt came up with a plan.
He tried to withdraw his mind from this place, a technique Agency training had included. He saw the azure waters caressing the verdant cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, the majesty of the Austrian Alps draped in winter white. He almost smiled as he recalled something Manfred had said, a particular wild romp in bed with Gurt.
But always the pain intruded, shattering his thoughts like a china plate hitting the floor. The pain was sapping his energy as well as his will. At some point, his resistence to it would be gone. Why suffer the agony? Tell them what they wanted now. Death would take the pain away.
And I’ll never see Manfred or Gurt again.
His head snapped up from his chest and he realized with a start Dow’s face was inches from his own, close enough that the spittle from his screaming mouth sprayed Lang’s cheeks.
Lang was familiar with the interrogation tactic: soft voice rises unexpectedly to yelling, a sudden about-face designed to keep the person being questioned off balance. He also had a pretty good idea of what came next. If physical beating did not produce the desired result, there were two options. The first was to put the prisoner someplace where sleep and a sense of time would be impossible, nothing to occupy his mind but the dread of future beatings. Lang thought that scenario unlikely. Dow would not wait for days to find out why Lang and Gurt were here. The second option was to simply increase the pain factor: electric shock of the genitals, pull a few teeth, some form of mutilation.
The options were both limited and unpleasant.
As though to confirm Lang’s fears, Dow nodded to someone behind Lang. Fingers grabbed his shirt and tore it from his body. An instant later, the Chinese colonel stubbed out a burning cigarette against Lang’s left nipple.
Lang was almost deafened by the sound of a scream, a sound he hardly realized came from him.
Gurt was close enough to see the men just inside the massive entrance to the Citadelle. Darkness prevented her from making out their features, but there was enough light from the declining moon to see there were two of them, one on each side of a portal that must have been twenty feet high. She leaned forward along the narrow spine of the small horse, hoping to diminish her stature. Unless one of them chose to use a flashlight, she would appear as indistinct to them as they to her, just one more man returning from a patrol.
She entered without challenge. Her little mount picked up its measured pace, perhaps in the realization the stable and feed were near.
She was abeam the two guards when one of them spoke, a low, guttural sound with a definitely inquisitive inflection.
A question, of course. He wanted to know where the other member of the patrol was. How was she going to answer a question in a language she did not know?
Lowering her voice into what might, possibly, be the range of a male tone, she growled a muttered response imitating the sound of the words she had just heard.
The man who had asked the question spoke again, this time louder. She could see him approaching as his partner reached for the strap of the rifle slung over a shoulder.
Gurt pulled her horse to a stop, slowly slipped her right foot from the stirrup and began to swing a leg over her mount’s spiny backbone in a slow dismount, the casual movement of a man weary from both the hour and his duties just now complete. From the corner of an eye she measured the closing distance between her and the question asker. It would not do to appear too deliberate or in a hurry.
She timed it so he came in range just as her right foot cleared the saddle. With her weight shifting to her left leg, she pivoted in the stirrup, her right foot swinging in a blur of an arc that connected neatly with the man’s jaw.
He staggered backward, just far enough to give Gurt room to unsling the rifle from her back. Dropping both feet to the ground, she grabbed the gun’s barrel and brought the stock down on the man’s head with a crunch that left him sitting on the ground, too dazed to present any immediate threat.
Spinning on her toes, she faced the second guard, now moving to get around the horse between them. Gurt could easily have shot him, but the sound would have alerted anyone within a mile, including whatever garrison now occupied the old fort.
He had no such qualms, as evidenced by his efforts to bring his weapon to bear around a nervous, diminutive horse.
Gurt dropped to a squat, merging her silhouette with that of the animal and effectively disappearing in the darkness. She used part of the one or two seconds before her adversary could find her to draw the bayonet from its scabbard and test its balance in her hand.
With her left hand, she slapped the horse’s rump, causing it to shy away. The man with the gun swung the
