pushed himself off the piano stool and came over to Alex. “Do you remember I told you about pain synthesis?” he said. “In London. The demonstration… Pain synthesis allows game players to experience the hero's emotions—all his emotions, particularly those associated with pain and death. You may wonder how I programmed it into the software. The answer, my dear Alex, is by the use of volunteers such as yourself.”
“I didn't volunteer,” Alex muttered.
“Nor did the others. But they still helped me. Just as you will help me. And your reward will be an end to the pain. The comfort and the quiet of death…” Cray looked away. “You can take him,” he said.
Two guards had come into the room. Alex hadn't heard them approach, but now they stepped out of the shadows and grabbed hold of him. He tried to fight back, but they were too strong for him.
They pulled him off the sofa and away, down one of the passages leading from the room.
Alex managed to look back one last time. Cray had already forgotten him. He was holding the flash drive, admiring it. But Yassen was watching him and he looked worried. Then an automatic door shot down with a hiss of compressed air and Alex was dragged away, his feet sliding uselessly behind him, following the passageway to whatever it was that Damian Cray had arranged.
The cell was at the end of another underground corridor. The two guards threw Alex in, then waited as he turned round to face them. The one who had found him on the stairs spoke a few words with a heavy Dutch accent.
“The door closes and it stays closed. You find the way out. Or you starve.” That was it. The door slammed and Alex heard two bolts being drawn across. He heard the guards' footsteps fade into the distance. Suddenly everything was silent. He was on his own. He looked around him. The cell was a bare metal box about five metres long and two metres wide with a single bunk, no water and no window. The door had closed flush to the wall. There was no crack round the side, not so much as a keyhole. He knew he had never been in worse trouble.
Cray hadn't believed his story; he had barely even considered it. Whether Alex was with MI6 or not seemed to make no difference to him … and the truth was that this time Alex really had got himself caught up in something without MI6 there to back him up. For once he had no gadgets to help him break out of the cell. He had brought the bicycle that Smithers had given him from London to Paris and then to Amsterdam. But right now it was parked outside Central Station in the city and would stay there until it was stolen or rusted away. Jack knew he had planned to break into the compound, but even if she did raise the alarm, how would anyone ever find him?
Despair weighed down on him. He no longer had the strength to fight it.
And still he knew almost nothing. Why had Cray invested so much time and money in the game system he called Gameslayer? Why did he need the flash drive? What was the plane doing in the middle of the compound? Above all, what was Cray planning? Eagle Strike would take place in two days—but where, and what would it entail?
Alex forced himself to take control. He'd been locked up before. The important thing was to fight back—not to admit defeat. Cray had already made mistakes. Even speaking his own name on the phone when Alex called him from Saint-Pierre had been an error of judgement. He might have power, fame and enormous resources. He was certainly planning a huge operation. But he wasn't as clever as he thought. Alex could still beat him.
But how to begin? Cray had put him into this cell to experience what he called pain synthesis.
Alex didn't like the sound of that. And what had the guard said? Find the way out—or starve.
But there was no way out. Alex ran his hands across the walls. They were solid steel. He went over and examined the door a second time. Nothing.
It was tightly sealed. He glanced at the ceiling, at the single bulb burning behind a thick pane of glass. That only left the bunk…
He found the trapdoor underneath, built into the wall. It was like a cat flap, just big enough to take a human body. Gingerly, wondering if it might be booby-trapped, Alex reached out and pushed it. The metal flap swung inwards. There was some sort of tunnel on the other side, but he couldn't see anything. If he crawled into it, he would be entering a narrow space with no light at all—and he couldn't even be sure that the tunnel actually went anywhere. Did he have the courage to go in?
There was no alternative. Alex examined the cell one last time, knelt down and pushed himself forward. The metal flap swung open in front of him, then travelled down his back as he crawled into the tunnel. He felt it hit the back of his heels and there was a soft click. What was that? He couldn't see anything. He lifted a hand and waved it in front of his face. It was as if it wasn't there. He reached out in front of him and felt a solid wall. God! He had walked—crawled rather—into a trap. This wasn't the way out after all.
He pushed himself back the way he had come. and that was when he discovered the flap was now locked. He kicked out with his feet but it wouldn't move. Panic, total and uncontrollable, overwhelmed him. He was buried alive, in total darkness, with no air. This was what Cray had meant by pain synthesis: a death too hideous to imagine.
Alex went mad.
Unable to control himself, he screamed out, his fists lashing against the walls of this metal coffin. He was suffocating.
His flailing hand hit a section of the wall and he felt it give way. There was a second flap!
Gasping for air, he twisted round and into a second tunnel, as black and as chilling as the first.
But at least there was some faint flicker of hope burning in his consciousness. There was a way through. If he could just keep a grip on himself, he might yet find his way back into the light.
The second tunnel was longer. Alex slithered forward, feeling the sheet metal under his hands.
He forced himself to slow down. He was still completely blind. If there was a hole ahead of him, he would plunge into it before he knew what had happened. As he went, he tapped against the walls, searching for other passageways. His head knocked into something and he swore. The bad language helped him. It was good to direct his hatred against Damian Cray. And hearing his own voice reminded him he was still alive.
He had bumped into a ladder. He took hold of it with both hands and felt for the opening that must be above his shoulders. He was lying flat on his stomach, but slowly he manipulated himself round and began to climb up, feeling his way in case there was a ceiling overhead. His hand came into contact with something and he pushed. To his huge relief, light flooded in. He had opened some sort of trapdoor with a large, brightly lit room on the other side. Gratefully he climbed the last rungs and passed through.
The air was warm. Alex sucked it into his lungs, allowing his feelings of panic and claustrophobia to fade away. Then he looked up.
He was kneeling on a straw-covered floor in a room that was bathed in yellow light. Three of the walls seemed to have been built with huge blocks of stone. Blazing torches slanted in towards him, fixed to metal brackets. Gates at least ten metres high stood in front of him. They were made out of wood, with iron fastenings and a huge face carved into the surface. Some sort of Mexican god with saucer eyes and solid, blocklike teeth. Alex had seen the face before but it took him a few moments to work out where. And then he knew exactly what lay ahead of him.
He knew how Cray had programmed pain synthesis into his game.
The gates had appeared at the start of Feathered Serpent, the game that Alex had played in the Pleasure Dome in Hyde Park. Then it had been a computerized image, projected onto a screen—
and Alex had been represented by an avatar, a two-dimensional version of himself. But Cray had also built an actual physical version of the game. Alex reached out and touched one of the walls.
Sure enough, they weren't really stone but some sort of toughened plastic. The whole thing was like one of those walk-throughs at Disneyland …an ancient world reproduced with high-tech modern construction. There had been a time when Alex wouldn't have believed it possible, but he knew with a sick certainty that once the gates opened, he would find himself in a perfect reconstruction of the game—and that meant he would be facing the same challenges. Only this time it would be for real: real flames, real acid, real spears and—if he made a mistake—real death.
Cray had told him that he had used other “volunteers”. Presumably they had been filmed fighting their way through the various challenges; and all the time their emotions had been recorded and then somehow digitally transferred and programmed into the Gameslayer system. It was sick.
Alex realized that the darkness of the underground passages hadn't even been part of the real challenge. That began now.
He didn't move. He needed time to think, to remember as much as he could about the game he had played at
