Ministry of the Interior
21 February, 0955 Hours (GMT+5:00)
Something stabbed Chace in the nose, rising sharp and hard into her sinuses, and it tugged at her mind, trying to pull her awake. She moved her head, trying to escape, and the pain stopped, and she felt her hair being pulled and then it returned, stronger, and she gagged, coming fully conscious with a start. She tried to raise an arm and bat the offense away, but her arm barely moved, and a fresh ache tore along her shoulder.
Chace blinked, tasting blood and dust. A man in a suit was stepping back from her, looking at her, tossing aside the ammonia ampoule he’d held beneath her nostrils. Her vision was blurred, and one of her eyes, she couldn’t tell which, was seeing nothing but a milky white haze. The right side of her face felt tight, as if encased in dried wax, and when she moved her mouth to lick her lower lip, she felt it crack, and guessed the dried wax was blood, and probably her own. A pain ran in a circle from temple to temple, as if someone had wrapped her skull in wire and then decided to pull, just for the fun of it.
She wondered how badly she’d been hurt when the Audi exploded, if anything had broken.
It was cold in the room, very cold, and Chace saw her breath, and she shivered, and heard chains rattle as she did so. They had taken most of her clothes, her boots and socks and pants and jacket and sweater and shirt, everything but the underwear. They’d left those for later, she knew, the threat implicit.
She was sitting in a chair in what she thought at first might be a basement storage space or perhaps a boiler room. She tried moving her arms again, more carefully, and felt metal around her wrists and heard the clink of the handcuffs on the chair. They’d used two sets, one for each wrist, twisting her hands up to the middle of her spine before securing the other end of the cuffs to the back of the chair. The chair was metal, too, and conducted the cold from the concrete floor. Her feet felt like they’d already been soaked in ice water, and she realized they hadn’t bothered to restrain them, and she wondered if that’s where they would start, first.
Chace turned her head, taking in the room, trying to catalogue it, trying to find a means of escape. She saw a bathtub in the corner, and a tripod with a video camera. The camera appeared off. Lightbulbs hung naked overhead, high wattage so bright she winced when she looked at them. There was only one door into the room that she could find, metal and rust-stained, and she’d been positioned directly in line of it, just to make sure she could see how close it was, and how far away.
And so she could see that between her and the door there was a table, and at that table sat Ahtam Zahidov, looking at her like she was meat on a butcher’s hook, and he was deciding where to begin cutting.
He’d brought two others with him to wherever this was, both dressed in similar suits, both looking tired and angry. One of them lit a cigarette as she watched, staring at her the whole while. He was tall, looked young, perhaps mid- to late-twenties, broad-shouldered and big-handed, and there was nothing approaching sympathy in his expression. She guessed the beatings would come primarily from him.
The other one, the one who’d roused her with the ammonia, looked to be at least ten years older, shorter and fatter. Now he was ignoring her, more concerned with the contents of the red toolbox that rested open on the table, by Zahidov’s left elbow.
Chace tried not to be afraid, and found it impossible.
Zahidov stared at her without speaking, then removed his glasses and held them up to the lights, making a grimace of displeasure. He took a handkerchief from inside his coat and, leisurely, began cleaning the lenses. By Chace’s guess, it took him over a minute to complete the job.
Then he replaced the glasses on his face and nodded slightly, and the big one, the bruiser, moved forward, toward Chace in the chair, while the older one removed a short length of pipe from the toolbox.
“Don’t,” Chace warned.
Zahidov barely shook his head, and the bruiser came closer, bending as he reached for her legs. Chace twisted in the chair, feeling the cuffs trapping her arms, lashing out with a kick. The bruiser had expected it, blocked it with his forearm, then tried to grab her ankle again, and she kicked with her other foot, and caught him in the face. The bruiser grunted in anger, and the cold and the impact with bone made pain ride up Chace’s leg like fire. She kicked again, but this time he caught her, trapping her calf between his chest and arm.
She brought her free leg up, firing off obscenities without realizing she was even speaking, not hearing herself, and thrust with her toes into his crotch. He tried to catch the foot, missed, and groaned as she felt the kick sink into him. He lost his grip on the leg he’d been holding.
“Don’t you fucking touch me!” she yelled, hearing her voice rebounding off the concrete. “I’m a British citizen, don’t you fucking touch me!”
“You’re a British spy,” Zahidov answered in English.
The bruiser was trying to right himself, gritting his teeth, and Chace planted her feet on the floor and pushed off, taking the chair with her, lunging at him. She hit his nose with her head, felt the collision snapping cartilage, the ache in her head expanding. She staggered back, bending and turning as fast as she could, striking him with the legs of the chair. Her arms felt like they would tear free from their sockets.
Suddenly she saw red, even through the eye that wouldn’t work, and she heard a scream. Her air left her, blowing out over her lips, and she felt her gorge rising to follow it, and then she was hit again, and she knew she was on the floor. Something pressed down on her neck, and her vision swam, then cleared, and she was being righted in the chair. Another blow struck her stomach, and she pitched forward, and then another blow, higher, and again, and she skipped consciousness for a second, swimming in icy darkness. She felt hard hands grabbing her ankles, lifting her legs, and then forcing her thighs apart, and she struggled against the grip, but didn’t have the leverage or the strength or the air.
Vision returned enough for her to see the bruiser licking at the blood running down over his lips from his nose. He held her ankles at his waist, her calves pinned at his hips. The posture was obscene, and the bruiser knew it, and when he saw that she was seeing him clearly now, he rocked his pelvis toward her in a mock thrust, fucking the empty air between them. Chace saw the lump in his pants, realized he was aroused, and the fear and the disgust expanded inside her, and she wondered if she would be sick.
Zahidov’s chair scraped back on the floor, and she saw him come around, between the older man and the bruiser. The older man offered him the length of pipe, and Zahidov took it, his eyes fixed on Chace.
“That was stupid,” he told her. “Now Tozim wants to hurt you.”
She tried to free her legs, failing.
“Of course, I want to hurt you, too,” Zahidov continued. “That’s interesting, because mostly what I want in this room is information, and pain and humiliation, those are only tools to get it.”
“So ask your questions already,” Chace spat.
“No, you don’t understand. Mostly I want information, and you’ll give it to me, because everyone eventually does. But right now, I want to hurt you.”
He swung the pipe at the bottom of her right foot, almost casually. The pain that shot through Chace’s leg was extraordinary, and brought tears to her eyes.
“Where is he?” Zahidov asked.
The question didn’t make sense. She shook her head, choked out a response. “What?”
He hit the right foot again, twice, the arch and the base of her toes. Chace tried to stay silent, but it hurt too much, it hurt more than anything, and she heard herself whimpering, and that made it even worse.
“Where?”
She managed to shake her head, saw his arm draw back, tried to work her feet free and failed. He hit her left foot this time, four times along the arch, each blow harder than the one that preceded it. She screamed, struggling, and he struck the right again, and she was trying to move, to break free, anything to stop it, and nothing worked.
He had stopped hitting her, letting the lingering pain do his work for him. She was out of breath again, her lungs aching. She heard herself sobbing, fought to control it.
“There are other places that will hurt more.” Zahidov said when he thought she had calmed enough to hear him. “Places that will tear, places where bone is barely covered by skin, places that will rip and scar. Where is he, where is Ruslan?”
Chace blinked back tears of pain, trying to clear her vision from the eye that still worked, and trying to keep what she was thinking off her face. Either Zahidov was toying with her, or Ruslan hadn’t died by the Syr Darya. She didn’t know which to believe—if he was asking her a question she could never hope to answer satisfactorily because
