‘Joanna, please tell me. What did you see?’
Joanna looked into his eyes but her awareness was directed at the two guards lingering just outside the room. Both looked young, fit and well fed. Both carried the ubiquitous AK-47 rifles clasped across their chests. At this close range, even the inaccurate Kalashnikov could not fail to miss her.
‘What did you see?’ Sheviz repeated in desperation.
Joanna focused on him again and a smile dragged itself onto her face, born of sweet and yet poisonous revenge. A word fell from her lips as soft as a whisper.
‘Justice.’
Joanna sucked her stomach in as she flipped her head forward, her entire body jerking in a whiplash motion that smashed her forehead across Sheviz’s face like a club. The doctor let out a strangled gasp of pain as he tumbled backwards and sprawled across the floor of the cell.
Joanna leaped up from the bed and jumped into the air, lifting both feet high as she plunged down and landed directly onto Sheviz’s ribcage. She felt his ribs crack like dried twigs beneath her, just as the two guards raced into the cell and smashed her aside.
Joanna hit the wall hard, stars dancing in front of her eyes as her legs crumpled beneath her. She slumped down as she glared at the doctor with a savage smile plastered across her face.
Sheviz lay curled up into a foetal ball, weeping as thick blood spilled from his ruined face to pool in scarlet smears across the floor of the cell. Joanna watched as the doctor was dragged screaming in pain from the cell by the two guards and the door was locked behind them, sealing her in once more.
She got up, still reveling in the first act of defiance for years, and sat on her mattress. Her heart was pounding so hard inside her chest that she felt as though it were shaking her entire body. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps that she fought to bring under control.
Sheviz was finished with her, that much she knew. The men outside her room had spoken loudly enough that she knew the doctor had failed in his experiments and that her fate now lay in the hands of the CIA.
The CIA, she had deduced from months of overheard conversations, were working in conjunction with a powerful arms company called MACE, whom she had been investigating over claims of rigged ransom abductions, first in South America and now here in Gaza. When she got too close, they had decided to use a CIA grab-team loosely disguised as militants to abduct her. The CIA then took over, running its bizarre experiments on her and no doubt others. The family connection she had heard described long ago was her father, who had unwittingly been caught up in a program she had often researched: MK-ULTRA.
Her father, Harrison, had responded well to the experiments, which used drugs and other forms of mental suggestion, ending up in a jail in Singapore for three years for his efforts after he had abruptly shot four prominent Communist sympathisers during the Vietnam War. Joanna had guessed that the experiments were all an effort to try to ‘program’ her in the same way, and she didn’t doubt that it would have worked were it not for Doctor Sheviz’s sloppy mistake.
Joanna’s resolve, strengthened since seeing the doctor’s watch, had prevented her from slipping fully into a mental state entirely open to suggestion. But that did not mean that the doctor’s experiments had failed entirely.
She curled up on the mattress, her mind filled with vivid imagery, sights that had changed her notion of what it meant to be alive. She had died during the experiments, and had seen a tunnel of light that had drawn her up into a place that was beyond imagination, beyond words, beyond anything that she could ever have conceived until she witnessed it herself. The darkness of her final visit was not enough to deter her, for she knew now that it was her own damaged soul that she was witnessing, not some place of suffering for the damned.
In no less than thirty-seven separate experiments, she had witnessed the afterlife. The very thing that Doctor Sheviz had sought confirmation of had been the very thing that had strengthened Joanna’s resolve to the point that nothing could break her. Joanna Defoe no longer feared death and, in life, she had resolved to pursue one thing above all others: revenge. The cold iron ball in her belly pulsed again, fueled by the memory and the knowledge of the cruel resolve that lay within her, just waiting to be unleashed.
Damon Sheviz would not be fit enough to return for some time, due to the pain he would be suffering from his multiple fractured ribs. That meant that the CIA would probably seek to move or perhaps even terminate her.
Whatever they decided, when the time came, she would be ready.
36
‘Ain’t no talkin’ me down!’
The bars of the cell were too solid to rattle as James Gladstone tried to shake them in fury, the guards nearby taking no notice as they patrolled the block.
‘You’re wastin’ your time, man,’ said Earl Thomas from behind him. ‘We’ll be walkin’ from here soon enough, but those dudes —’ he pointed to the guards with a cynical smile — ‘they’re the ones doin’ life.’
Gladstone turned away from the bars to face back into their eight-by-twelve-foot cell. White-washed cinderblock walls, two bunk beds with reed-thin mattresses, a shared sink and latrine stared back at him.
‘Man, I hate this shit.’
They had been incarcerated in the federal jail for little more than twenty-four hours, but Gladstone was already pacing up and down like an enraged, cornered bull. Six foot three and two-hundred forty pounds, he wasn’t good with confined spaces. His glossy black face was bunched up like a prune, predatory eyes searching for someone, or something, to take out his frustrations upon. Earl, on the other hand, was half Gladstone’s weight and barely five-nine. He rested back on his bunk and shrugged.
‘Just gotta bide our time,’ he insisted. ‘Ain’t nothing to worry about, long as the suit does his work right.’
Gladstone sneered at him. ‘Mighty big gamble when we’re looking at twenty-five to life.’
On the other bunk lay two scrawny prisoners, both wearing the same baggy orange correctional facility jumpsuits as Gladstone and Earl, both wearing the same anxious expressions. Their eyes were fixed fearfully upon Gladstone as he prowled up and down the cell.
‘Man,’ Earl said, ‘just cool it, okay? You’re doin’ nothing but causing yourself more grief, gettin’ all worked up.’
Gladstone’s glare fell upon their two cellmates, who both looked away from him as though they’d caught the attention of a wounded tiger.
‘Whatchoo lookin’ at?’ Gladstone boomed, pointing one heavily muscled arm at them like a shotgun. ‘You want some?’
Gladstone reached the bunks in a single pace. His height meant that he was looking down at the man lying in the top bunk.
‘I weren’t lookin’ at you man, ’kay?’
‘You callin’ me a liar?’ Gladstone growled, one fist bunching into the size of a football.
Wearily, Earl dragged himself up into a sitting position on his bunk.
‘Dude, seriously, let the kid go. You smash him to pieces, we’ll never get out of here.’ Gladstone’s huge frame trembled with frustration as he realized that there was little he could do to vent his anger. ‘James, stand down, dude.’
Gladstone backed off, lowering his fist, his jaundiced eyes fixed upon the two cowering inmates. The one on the lower bunk smirked at Gladstone.
‘That’s it, do as he says.’
The huge convict’s eyes flicked down to the inmate as he sat on the bunk. Rage swelled inside Gladstone’s immense frame as he struggled to comprehend what was happening.
‘You talkin’ down to me, boy?’
The inmate’s smirk didn’t slip. ‘Sure I am. You got beef with that, James?’