Carver started issuing orders. He was shouting into his intercom, but he must not have made himself heard because the men weren’t moving and even though the chopper rotors were turning at top speed, they didn’t seem able to lift off the ground, and suddenly the whole landing zone was filled with Iraqis. He couldn’t work out how they’d got there so fast, or why they were speaking Russian at him. He thought he recognized their faces, but they kept blurring out of focus. He pulled the trigger on his submachine gun, but no bullets came out, even though the magazine was full.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The Chinooks were meant to take off with all his men aboard. Then the explosives would blow and cut the cable, turning an imminent fiasco into a last-minute triumph. But that wasn’t happening at all, because now his men had all disappeared and he was alone with the Russians, and they were taking him through a door into a room where there was a log fire burning in an open grate. And he didn’t have his combat gear on anymore, in fact he was stark naked except for a black nylon belt strapped around his waist.
There was a man in front of him, sitting in a chair, and next to him there was a woman, an incredibly beautiful woman in a silver dress. Carver cried out to the woman to help him, but she couldn’t hear him, either. And that was wrong, too, because she was supposed to love him. But she didn’t love him at all. In fact she was laughing at him, and all the men around her were laughing at him, too, and now the woman was looking at him with a new face, twisted, ugly, and hate-filled, and she was screaming, “Hurt him! Hurt him! I want him to suffer!”
The laughter was getting even louder and one of the men was pointing a small black box at Carver, holding a finger above a single white button. And suddenly Carver was filled with a fear that tore at his guts and dropped him to his knees, begging for mercy, though his pleas came out as wordless whimpers because he knew what was coming now-the same thing that always came at the moment that the man with the box pressed the button.
Then the finger moved down. And the agony began again.
8
“You must let me help him, you know.” Dr.Karlheinze Geisel was the psychiatrist assigned to Carver’s case. He turned away from the bed where his patient was writhing in torment, and spoke to Alix in a voice whose overlay of sympathy could not disguise his frustration.
“Come,” he said, and led her out through the clinic to his consulting room.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, when the door had closed behind them.
Geisel did not answer until they were both seated. Then he said, “You already know the answer to that question. You must tell me exactly what happened to him. How else can I provide the best treatment?”
Alix said nothing. She glanced away, brushing a strand of blond hair away from her face. Finally she turned back toward Dr. Geisel, looking directly at him.
Geisel was all too accustomed to the effects on those whose loved ones suffered serious illness. Miss Petrova had been worn down by the months of worry and uncertainty. Her face was thinner, more drawn than it had been; her complexion was pale, the skin dry and unattended; there were deep, dark rings around her eyes. But, my God, he thought, what eyes.
They were pure sky-blue, but as he looked more closely-purely in the interests of dispassionate analysis, he told himself-Geisel noticed a slight asymmetry. One lid was very slightly heavier than the other and the two eyes were fractionally out of line. This imperfection in an otherwise flawless assembly-her lips were full, her cheekbones high, her nose straight and neat-served to add to, rather than detract from, her beauty. Without it, she would merely have been very pretty. With it, she was mesmerizing.
“I understand,” she said, “but I can’t discuss it…”
“Let me be frank,” he said, steeling himself. “For months you have refused my questions. But if Herr Carver is to have any hope of a recovery, I must have the information I need to treat him. You must understand-I am very used to dealing with patients who require extreme discretion. What you say to me goes no farther. But I need to know.”
“If I tell you, can you make him get better?” she asked.
“No, I cannot promise that. But I can promise you this: If you do not tell me, I have no hope of helping him. The longer you remain silent, the more certain it is that Herr Carver will remain like this forever.”
“I’m only trying to protect him.”
Her voice was little more than a whisper. She was trying to persuade herself as much as him. Her anguish was so stark that Geisel’s human instinct was to reach out and comfort her. But his professional self knew that he must do and say nothing. She had to have the space to find her way to her own decision.
Alix suspected that the timing of his approach was no accident. He must have known that she had been visited by Marchand yesterday, and had realized at once what that must mean. Carver’s bills had not been paid. Unless they were, he would surely be forced to leave. So now there was a ticking clock counting down to Carver’s expulsion, making the need for a cure even more desperate.
Alix struggled to defy the inexorable logic of her situation. Finally, she came to her conclusion.
“All right,” she said. “I will tell you… I tried to escape from a man, a Russian, like me. He was very rich, very powerful.”
“Was?” asked Geisel.
Alix ignored the interruption and what it implied. “He sent his men to take me back. Carver… Samuel found out where I was and came after me, to Gstaad. He hoped to exchange me for… certain information. The man who had taken me had no intention of making the deal. His men took Samuel and…”
She seemed unwilling or unable to finish the sentence.
“He was harmed?” asked Geisel.
“Yes. They stripped him, blindfolded him, and put him in handcuffs. Then they… excuse me…”
She stopped for a moment to compose herself, blinking rapidly and clearing her throat.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You were saying…?”
When Alix spoke again, she sounded dispassionate, almost matter-of-fact. “They placed a belt around Samuel’s waist. It was linked to a remote control. When the remote control was switched on, the belt gave him an electric shock, very strong, enough to make him fall to the floor and jerk around, with no control over himself. They made him do this in front of me, at my feet, to make him ashamed.”
“How many times did this happen, the shock?”
“Three or four times for sure, maybe more that I didn’t see.”
“Was that all?”
“No, that was just the start. Afterward, they took him down to a room and tied him to a chair. The room was painted white: every wall, the floor, the ceiling, all white. It was very cold, too. They gagged his mouth with a leather strap. They taped his eyes open, so that he could not close them or even blink. They put headphones over his ears. Then they turned on lights, bright lights, right in front of his eyes. And they put noise through the earphones, so loud, without stopping. That was how I found him. He had been like that for almost four hours…”
“I see…” murmured Geisel, thoughtfully. The story was horrific, but he tried not to be shocked by what he had heard. At that moment, in the context of his consulting room, it all had to be looked on as information that might help him reach a more accurate diagnosis. Only that evening, sitting at home with a drink in his hand, might he go back and contemplate Carver’s ordeal in more human terms.
“Now I understand the fear that consumes him,” he continued. “His conscious brain has blanked the torture from his mind, but his subconscious dreads its repetition. Still, there is one aspect of your story that puzzles me… If he was tied to this chair, completely unable to move, how did he escape?”
“I cut him from the chair,” said Alix.