Shadow of a Broken Man

changed my mind. No law was going to touch Kaznakov; Garth had made that clear.

But the Russian had the strength and endurance of a bull, and he seemed to have become indifferent to pain. When I saw him struggle to his feet I was reminded of Antaeus, gaining his strength from the earth, rising from the ground again and again until his opponent's strength was exhausted.

Kaznakov was listing a bit to starboard, but he was standing. He spat blood, then fixed the bloodshot moon eyes in his ruined face on me. He stared at me a long time without saying anything, although I could hear strange, guttural rumblings in his chest, as if he were a volcano about to explode.

'You bastard,' I said through clenched teeth. 'I'm going to ask you some questions, and you're going to answer them. If you don't, I'm going to start shooting you to death. Slowly. One chunk at a time.'

Kaznakov spat more blood, grinned crookedly around broken teeth. 'You are tough little fucker,' he said in labored English with a heavy accent. 'But now I got you. I hurt your friend, the Pakistani, pretty good before he jumped. I'm going to hurt you even more. No one will find you for a long, long time.'

'That sock in the nose must have mashed your brains, asshole. I've got the gun now. You sneeze wrong and you get a bullet between the legs. Now, let's go see if there's a phone in the house. If there is, you're going to call your people and tell them you want the Fosters dropped here. Tell them you're negotiating with Rafferty; tell them anything you want, but I want the Fosters brought here. You understand?'

'I understand what you say,' Kaznakov said as he began to shuffle toward me. 'But I think I call and say you are dead. How do you like that?'

'You idiot! Don't you think I'll shoot?' I decided I couldn't take any chances with Kaznakov and I pointed the gun directly at his heart.

'I don't care if you shoot,' he said, and he kept coming.

The gun exploded and kicked when I pulled the trigger. The bullet made a thwacking sound against his chest and pushed him back a few inches, but that was all. Kaznakov was a man who hedged all his bets; he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

I aimed for his head, but I'd run out of time. He swatted the gun away with one huge bear paw of a hand and wrapped the fingers of the other hand around my throat. He lifted me off the ground and started to squeeze. I stabbed with my fingers at his eyes, but it was as if someone had pulled the plug on my will and all my strength was draining out. I couldn't even reach his body.

A red cloak of blood was dropping down over my eyes. I kept trying to suck air, heaving my stomach, but nothing was coming in. Kaznakov was still holding me off the ground, and I expected at any moment to hear the sound of my neck breaking. Finally I got tired of waiting. I expected to see flashes of my life, but I didn't even get that. I finally let go of whatever it was I'd been hanging on to and let myself drop into the deep, warm pool of red in front of my eyes.

There was too much pain for it to be heaven, and I doubted I'd done anything in my life to warrant a place in the same circle of hell as Kaznakov, and that's who was walking around me at the moment.

My wrists were tied together behind my back and anchored by a rope that went around my waist. I'd been hauled off the ground by a suspended iron bar lying between my elbows to a point where just my toes were touching the damp concrete of the farmhouse cellar. It was an ingenious truss: if I allowed myself to hang freely, the joints of my elbows caught fire and, with all the pressure placed on my lungs and rib cage, it quickly became almost impossible to breathe. The alternative was to try supporting my weight on my toes, which was only good for about two minutes before pain started shooting up through my ankles and calves to my hips. I would have to release-and then I couldn't breathe. It was a kind of crucifixion; a slow, very painful way to die. It looked as if I were going to be there, as Kaznakov had promised, a long, long time, and the cavalry was nowhere in sight.

Kaznakov was busy with something behind me that I couldn't see, but that I knew I wasn't going to like. I could hear the sound of metal on metal, and it grated on my nerves. Obviously, Kaznakov hadn't yet exhausted his repertoire. He emerged-limping-from the darkness behind me. He was carrying a telephone from which the casing had been removed. Wires from the telephone snaked back into the darkness.

'You wanted a telephone,' Kaznakov said. 'I found one for you and have gone to trouble of hooking it up down here. It's on what I think you call 'party line.' It will ring when anyone else gets call.' He came close to me until his smashed nose was only inches from my face; it stared at me like a red third eye. 'It will hurt you very much,' he whispered.

I'd been hanging for a minute or so and it was getting hard to breathe again. Hot lightning was flashing through my elbow joints, across my back, through my lungs. I stood on my toes and gulped for air. Within seconds my toes began to cramp.

'If you want answers from me, you'd better get me down from here,' I gasped in a voice that creaked like an old man's. 'In a few minutes I'm not going to be able to say anything.'

'I don't want you to say anything,' Kaznakov said evenly. 'I only want you to hurt. Bad.'

'Do you have proof Rafferty is alive?' The pain in the lower half of my body had become unbearable. I released the pressure from my toes; my lungs and elbows immediately began to burn.

The Russian's answer was to tear my clothes open. He then attached two thin wires to terminals in the phone apparatus, and he securely taped the other ends to my body. He'd made me part of the circuit, but I was past caring. I didn't believe that any pain could be worse than what I was already experiencing, and every fiber of my being was assigned to the monumental task of drawing air through my mouth and nostrils.

'Something else for you to think about while you wait to die, dwarf,' Kaznakov whispered.

And then the Russian was gone; the door to the cellar slammed shut and I was left alone with the silence and the pain. I would die there, I thought; not from the pain, but from suffocation or thirst. I went up on my toes and tried to catch a quick breath. I could no longer feel anything below my knees, and my stomach had begun to cramp.

The telephone rang. Instantly my body was engulfed in pain bouncing back and forth between my belly and brain like a ball of molten fire. The ball became a column that flashed between rings, expanded between each flash and the next, filling me up, hurtling me toward madness.

The ringing stopped just as the sour taste of bile crept up into my throat. Someone in the neighborhood had answered the phone. I imagined two people talking: about the weather; making plans; exchanging gossip.

I was crying, precious breath robbed from me as I heaved on the bar, gasping with great sobs, spewing mucus. Now my life started to pass before me-and I was astonished to find that it had been so brief. Now the last of it was melting away under a searing blowtorch of agony. I passed out. But there was no escape from the prison of pain, as I woke up again almost immediately. My face was wet with tears and mucus; I cursed my endurance and will, whatever it was inside me that wouldn't let me die.

I heard-or imagined I heard-the cellar door creaking open. The phone rang, and once again I was hurled into a dark hole filled with pain and cracking joints. When it was over, my body was consumed by a flame that wouldn't go out.

But there was someone else in the basement with me; I was sure of it; I felt it. Someone, or something, Death? Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, the pain was gone.

I assumed it was madness, that the sensory paths to my brain had finally, mercifully, burned out. At the same time there was a soft, steady buzzing in my ears; the sound was soothing, like white noise blocking out the terrible pain. The sound suggested that I sleep. It was a good suggestion, and I took it. I let my head slip down onto my chest; I sighed and closed my eyes, allowing myself to drift away into the warm, welcome embrace of death.

Fooled again. I wasn't dead, but I was still hurting, my body wrapped in a blanket of torment. But the pain was not the same as what I'd experienced before; the difference was that I was lying on the cool concrete of the cellar floor, and I could breathe. I drank in great drafts of the cold night air.

I rolled over on my back and looked up toward the ceiling. One of the ropes that had held the iron bar had parted, and I'd been unceremoniously dumped onto the floor. The only explanation I could come up with was that my thrashing under the deadly tickle of the electricity had done the trick. The wires were still attached to my body, but they'd been torn away from the phone terminals when I'd hit and rolled. I couldn't tell if there were any bones