A large wooden case bounced up and down next to him, metallic clanks sounding. He reached over and repositioned the box. It was a minor arsenal, and he would equip himself better in the coming days. He panned the GPS system out from the state of Tennessee, revealing the entire eastern shore line up to Maine. A bright line indicating his route ran from his current location into the Catskill Mountains of New York State.
A man was waiting for him there. A man he would see and force to talk. Jason Miller. Miller would be broken, the key information that only he held taken from him. Then, Jason Miller would die.
After that, the last stage. The architects. The masters of war that hid behind their desks, pushing paper, and men’s lives, into the fire. When men play with fire too long, eventually they are burned.
Part 3
41
A soft breeze danced through the pines in the Catskill Mountains, ruffling the green needles and whispering gently over the bubbling noises of a meandering creek. A small bird hopped across exposed rocks in the stream, its head sharply angling one way and then the next, its feathers beaded with moisture. The sunlight refracted through the drops and scattered as from a jewel. After skipping over several stones, the bird took flight over the moss-covered bank and climbed sharply. Gliding over the pine-tops, it oriented toward an opening in the trees ahead of it, attracted by a plume of black smoke rising from the clearing.
As it neared the hole in the forest, flames could be seen licking upward from an overturned vehicle next to a house. The metal was warped and scattered across a yard, and the house itself appeared damaged. The bird hesitated, then entered a circling pattern over the structure, gazing down for possible sources of food. Above the sounds of the wind, and the crackling of fire and popping of heated metal, another set of sounds jutted into the sky. Screams.
Inside the wrecked home, a naked man was strapped to a chair. His body was bloodied, a deep gash across his upper chest and right shoulder. Soot and dirt coated his skin. Urine and feces coated the seat. The room stank of waste, blood, and charred flesh.
Standing beside him was another man, uninjured, blond and lean, a bamboo branch in his hand. As he paced around the seated figure, he broke splinters from the stick. His gait was irregular, evincing signs of a recent injury barely healed. As he came around to the front of the chair, he glanced down at the immobilized, clamped hands of his prisoner, then jammed a sharp splinter underneath the man’s bloodied fingernails.
The man screamed, then cursed his tormenter.
“Go fuck yourself!” He spit blood and saliva as he slurred his words, his mouth bruised and swollen, showing signs of further brutality. Burn marks were on his face and in one of his eyes. From the burned eye, a constant stream of tears fell. “Go ahead, use all that shit,” he said, gesturing with his head toward a tray filled with knives, electric props, and other implements of pain. “It won’t do any good. You won’t get their location from me.”
“Why are you so loyal?” the blond man asked as he fingered a curved hook. “I don’t want to do this. Torture is why I’m here, why you will die today. I would rather kill you quickly. But I have to finish this. Others must pay the price.” He flipped the hook to the other hand, and the tortured man flinched. “You were the liaison, Miller. You have the records. You know where they are hiding. I’ve searched the known locations. They aren’t there.” He leaned the hook close to the man’s penis, touching its tip. “Where are they hiding, Miller?”
“Fuck you!”
A car could be heard pulling up outside the house. The blond man tossed the hook on the table, removed a gun from his belt, and moved stealthily to investigate. Miller closed his eyes, panting, and then called out madly.
“Help me! I’m back here! He’s killing me!” His cries fell flatly to silence.
A few seconds later, a car trunk slammed shut, and the blond man was back. The sounds of a heavy cart rumbling across the wooden floors of the cabin could be heard. Miller glanced up at his torturer, his eyes having acquired a yellowed hue. The blond man spoke.
“This isn’t working. We’ll have to try something different.”
A thin and sickly man stepped into the room. He pushed a rattling cart piled with multiple objects. Miller’s eyes gravitated to several drills and syringes, and paused over a box that looked like some sort of power supply. The emaciated form pulled a lab coat from a box on the side and slipped into it. He nodded at the blond man, who stepped back and slightly out of Miller’s range of sight.
“I’ll need your services after all,” said the wraith.
“Excellent. It’s good to be paid in full,” said the new arrival. He stepped closer to Miller and bent his head to the prisoner. “Mr. Miller, I believe? I’m Doctor Driesman,” began the thin man.
“Fuck you, too.”
The doctor nodded. “I can see why pain has failed. His defiance is heavily fueled by an innate hostility. Gives him strength.” The doctor grabbed what looked like a helmet from the cart, along with a heavily weighted stand. In a series of quick and sure movements, he affixed the helmet to the stand, wheeled it behind Miller, lowered the metal cap over Miller’s head, and latched the cap securely to his head. Miller sought to avoid the device, but he was restrained too well, and the doctor too practiced in his movements.
“This place is not sterile,” said the doctor absentmindedly. He brought the cart alongside the chair and adjusted a floor lamp to shine on Miller’s head.
“An infection won’t matter,” said the wraith. “He will be dead soon.”
“Yes, I assumed.” He released two plates from the cranial cap, leaving behind straps of metal that encircled Miller’s skull but that exposed large regions of his head. He began to press firmly through the hair to the bone underneath, probing.
“What the hell are you doing to me?” said Miller, trying to shake his body away from the man and his fingers.
The doctor spoke flatly as he examined the skull. “Please stop struggling. The only sensory neurons are in the scalp, not below. The pain will be minimal if you cooperate.”
“What pain?”
“From the holes I’ll drill in your skull.”
Miller began a spasmodic thrashing. Even with his subject so tightly restrained, the doctor had to step slightly to the side to avoid being inadvertently jostled. He pulled out several metallic clamps and affixed them to Miller’s arms, legs, and neck. Once he had tightened the screws on the plates, Miller was completely immobilized.
“There, now you’re in nice and tight.”
“You sick fucks!” Miller spat out.
“Please, I’m a specialist, hired at a premium for extractions.” The doctor began to remove items from the cart: scissors, a razor, a drill.
“Do you think you’ll scare me with this? He’s going to kill me anyway. I can take the pain. I’m not talking, so fuck you.”
“The intention is not to inflict pain, Mr. Miller,” said the doctor, as he began to snip away at the hair poking through the openings in the cap. “My client clearly has examined that route to no avail. But, in the end, you will talk. There is no doubt about that.”
“Like hell I will.”
The doctor sighed as he snipped down close to the skin. “It’s the same every time. Everyone believes that they have free will.” He replaced the scissors on the table and removed a large razor and shaving cream. “The brain is a machine, Mr. Miller. We often have trouble grasping the true significance of this because we arrogantly ascribe cosmic significance to our thoughts, our sense of self.” Applying the cream, he began to shave the skull. “But our thoughts come from cells surrounded by vessels, bathed in nutrients. They are networks of electrochemical signals. They follow the laws of biochemistry and physics. I give you a pharmacological compound — LSD, say — and suddenly your sense of the world and yourself is very, very different. The universe hasn’t changed, only the functioning of the machine called your brain. Like the heart, the stomach, the eye, the liver — an organic machine. It’s all really quite amazing, actually. We know a lot about how these organs work. We have learned a lot about the brain.”