Rough, dirty hands hauled her up and out of the pit, the pitiful shawl around her falling away to reveal her nakedness once more, smeared now with bodily fluids. Gasps of disgust were followed with more angry shouts as Kiera felt something draped across her shoulders, felt a more gentle touch guide her away from her captors through the building.
Crippled by fear, Kiera allowed herself to be led, her bare feet slapping on cool stone. She could feel the man alongside her, could smell the scent of tobacco on his breath, could hear the sound of his breathing as he led her into another room and closed the door behind them.
‘This way.’
She startled, the voice almost American, Middle East accented but recognizably touched with a New York twang. For a moment she wondered whether she was about to be rescued, but she quickly realized that such good fortune was not possible. This man was as much an abductor as the men who had raped her, was her enemy as they were.
Her thighs bumped against the edge of a bed and the man’s hands guided her to sit down. Keira perched on the edge of the bed and suddenly she felt her ankles swung up onto the mattress and a strap pulled tightly over her legs to secure them in place. Her heart sank as she realized that she was once again to be raped and she was unable to stifle a sob.
‘Quiet now,’ the man said. ‘You will not be harmed.’
She felt his hands unwrap the blindfold and suddenly light filled her vision. She squinted, trying to focus on the room around her. Slowly she noticed a series of lights set into the ceiling, the walls around her painted a clinically bright white that reflected the glare. She turned her head and saw that a man was standing over her. Dark skin, dark eyes, heavy beard, a white lab coat that contrasted with his tanned skin and the cruel gleam in his eyes.
Keira glanced to one side and a wretched fear twisted her guts as she saw a trolley bearing medical equipment; scalpels, needles and tweezers all gleaming in the light.
‘Do not fear them,’ the man said. ‘Soon, you will fear nothing.’
Keira’s limbs began to twitch erratically and her breath came in short, sharp gasps as she replied.
‘Who are you? What are you doing?’
The man smiled without warmth or compassion as he turned away from Kiera and walked across to the trolley. He picked up a hypodermic needle that was filled with a clear fluid and flicked the needle to ensure no air was trapped before he moved beyond a muslin veil that shielded her view from the rest of the room.
She could hear movement outside the veil and she fell silent and still. Another noise, like two pieces of metal being tapped together, then that voice whispering in the darkness.
‘Has he survived?’
Her breathing rasped and she could feel her heart trying to thump its way out of her chest.
‘We have signals verified from the pre — frontal cortex.’
A figure moved past nearby and the muslin sheet rippled and parted enough for her to see into the room beyond. Some ten feet away was a metal gurney upon which lay the naked form of a man. Tubes protruded from his body and she could see his chest rising and falling. An intravenous line rose up to a saline bag suspended above his head and she could see that his nose was swathed in blood — stained bandages.
Kiera started to twist her hands back and forth, seeking a weakness in her bonds. Her wrists were narrow and her hands small, perhaps small enough to squeeze free. She forced the thumb of her left hand inward and then pulled against the strap. The strap scraped against her skin but she felt the edge move. She pulled harder and the strap slipped further over her hand. She gritted her teeth against the pain and pulled hard.
The strap slipped across her hand and then it jerked free. She clenched her hand a few times before reaching across and loosening the strap on her right wrist.
‘He’s coming round.’
She sat up in the bed as she heard a faint whimper from across the room as though someone were crying out for help. She turned and saw the naked man’s body quiver.
‘He’s almost awake,’ the voice said again.
The body shuddered again as though live current were zipping through dormant muscles. Another murmur came from deep within the man that rose suddenly to an ear piercing scream of anguish that soared through the building. The body flailed, the naked man sobbing and screaming as he thrashed about on the table as the doctors sought to restrain him.
The man began frothing at the mouth, choking on his own saliva and his head began crashing violently against the gurney. Kiera’s guts convulsed as she saw him suddenly snap his mouth open and shut with sharp cracks and a thick torrent of blood spill down his chin as he crunched through his own tongue.
The man’s body convulsed violently once again and then suddenly it stiffened and then sagged, the limbs falling to its sides as the sound of a fixed — tone pulse monitor droned in the sudden silence. Kiera stared in horror at the corpse, its ruined tongue dangling by threads from his mouth and strings of blood drooling away toward the floor.
She heard a sigh, and then another voice.
‘At least we still have the woman.’
Kiera yanked the restraints free and leaned forward in a desperate attempt to free her legs as a whimper of terror blurted from between her lips. The muslin sheet was whipped aside before she could free herself, and she cried out as two men wrestled her back down onto the bed and fastened her wrists back into place.
‘Let me go!’ she screamed. ‘What are you doing?!’
The doctor smiled down at her without compassion.
‘It would not matter if I told you who I was, why you were here or even what is going to happen to you, for you would not recall it anyway.’
Kiera whimpered as the syringe in the doctor’s hand drew closer to her. ‘Please, let me go.’
Again that cruel smile, fixed it seemed upon his face as he leaned in.
‘That, my dear, is precisely what I intend to do.’
Kiera squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the needle slip with a sharp pain into her arm, and then a cold sensation flowed through her veins that chilled her to her core. Slowly, her rapidly beating heart and labored breathing faded away into blackness, and her last thought was her horror at feeling the man gently caressing her brow with one hand as she passed out.
IV
‘This feels weird.’
Nicola Lopez stood at the security check point inside the entrance to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a pass was clipped to her shirt by a security guard, showing an image of her exotically tanned skin, dark eyes and long black hair. Even such a small photograph seemed to project the supressed anger she carried around with her like a talisman.
‘Don’t knock it,’ Ethan Warner replied. ‘It’s better than all the sneaking around we’ve been doing these years past.’
The DIA’s south wing entrance, in front of which was a fountain before broad lawns, made up only a tiny part of the agency’s sprawling complex. Huge, silvery buildings with mirrored black windows contained some of the most sensitive intelligence gathering equipment in the world, including vast 24/7 Watch Centers manned by specialists monitoring events across the entire globe.
It had been a long time since Ethan Warner had set foot in the building, a long series of controversies separating Lopez and he from their official work for the DIA. Years in fact, ever since the events in Idaho. Only now, with presidential support for the DIA’s operations under the control of Doug Jarvis, had they finally been able to come back in from the cold.
In all they had conducted seven investigations for the Defense Intelligence Agency since Ethan, a former Marine Corps Lieutenant and later vagrant, had been plucked from Cook County Jail by his former platoon commander, Doug Jarvis, and given a new life working for one of the most clandestine units ever created by the intelligence community. Despite the trials they had faced over the years, he had to admit to himself that it felt good to be officially working for the good guys once again, if that they could be called.