“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lee said.
“I do apologize,” Two said. “I told you that we would not torture you. At the time, I thought it was the truth. I regret it is no longer the case.”
Lee said nothing to this. She knew by all outward indications it would look as if she were trying to keep from crying.
“Six is a medical practitioner of some note,” Two said. “I can promise you that you will be inflicted with only as much pain as is necessary and not a single bit more. Six, you may begin.”
Lee opened her mouth just slightly to offer what she hoped would sound like a frightened, keening wail.
Six reached over to the table, picked up a scalpel and moved it toward Lee’s right ring finger, slipping the very edge of it underneath the fingernail.
Lee, who had bit her tongue quite severely for several seconds, spat a gout of SmartBlood at Six, covering her arm and the hand wielding the scalpel. In the reflection of the spitting noise she saw Six’s chin move sharply, as if she had moved her head to look at Lee quizzically.
“You’re going to make some noise now, Six,” Lee said, and ordered all the SmartBlood she’d spit out to ignite as furiously as it could.
Six became a bright spot of noise as she jerked back, wailing, arm and hand incinerating. She wheeled in reverse, colliding with the desk that held Two’s PDA. It dislodged from its position and fell forward, leaving Two in the dark about what came next.
Lee wailed as well as the bit of SmartBlood that had landed on her wrist burned like hell against her skin. Then she gritted her teeth and as hard as she could started yanking against her right wrist restraint, currently being weakened by the SmartBlood burning into its fibers.
One yank, two yanks, three yanks…four. There was a ripping sound, and Lee’s right arm was free. Without bothering to put out her wrist or uncover her eyes, she reached over to the table and grabbed the shears and as quickly as possible started cutting her other restraints: left wrist, neck, waist and ankles.
It was when she got to her ankles that Six exclaimed through her pain; Lee guessed that Six had finally figured out what Lee was up to and scrambled toward the table with the shotgun on it. Lee cut through the final restraint and leaped for the table, too late; Six had the shotgun.
Lee yelled, grabbed the scalpel Six had dropped and pushed up, getting inside the radius of the shotgun and driving the scalpel up Six’s abdomen. Six made a surprised gasping sound at the sharp, slicing pain, dropped the shotgun and slid to the ground.
Lee finally removed her blindfold, turned off the audio map and blinked down at Six, who was looking at her with something akin to wonder. She was, Lee noted, a bloody mess.
“How did you do that?” Six whispered between panting breaths of agony.
“I have good ears,” Lee said.
Six had nothing to say to that or anything else.
Lee grabbed the shotgun, checked the load and then moved quickly to position herself by the door. Less than twenty seconds later, the door burst open and a man came through, sidearm at the ready. Lee dropped him with a shot in the abdomen and then pivoted to get a second man in the doorway square in the chest. She dropped the spent shotgun, picked up the sidearm, checked the clip and went through the door.
There was a hallway with another doorway five meters down. Lee grabbed the second dead man, dragged him down the hallway with her, kicked open the door and hurled the corpse through. She waited until the second shotgun report and then walked in herself, sighting and hitting center mass the man still holding the shotgun. He went down. Lee resighted and aimed at the PDA sitting on a table, blowing it to pieces. She went into the room and looked at the chair to find Hughes, naked, restrained and understandably anxious.
“Private Hughes,” she said. “How are you?”
“Ready to get the fuck out of this chair, Lieutenant,” Hughes said.
Lee reached over to the table that held surgical instruments and then cut through Hughes’s bonds. Hughes pulled the blindfold over her head and looked at her naked lieutenant, blinking.
“This was not what I was expecting the first thing I would see to be,” Hughes said, to Lee.
“Knock it off,” Lee said, and pointed toward the corpse of the man she’d flung through the door. “Check him for a sidearm and let’s get out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hughes said, and moved to the corpse.
“What did this one call himself?” Lee said, pointing to the man who held the shotgun.
“One,” Hughes said. “But he never called himself it. I didn’t even know he was a he until right now. Someone calling himself Two called him that.” She found the sidearm, checked its load.
“Right,” Lee said. “I killed three more, including that one and one called Six. So that’s four dead and at least two still alive.”
“Are we going to wait around to meet them?” Hughes asked. “Because I’d prefer not.”
“We agree,” Lee said. “Come on.” They went to the door; Hughes took point. The two of them made their way back down the hall, toward the direction Lee had come from. Another door lay five meters past the door of her room; they opened it and found it empty except for a chair and a spray of gray matter and fluid on the bar floor.
“Jefferson,” Lee said. Hughes nodded, unhappy, and they continued onward.
A final door stood near a stairwell. The two banged through and found a small office with a PDA on a desk and very little else.
“This was Two’s room,” Lee said.
“Where did the son of a bitch get to?” Hughes asked
“I think I scared him off when I set a friend of his on fire,” Lee said. She picked up the PDA. “Watch the door,” she said to Hughes.
On the PDA were a series of video files of Lee, Hughes and Jefferson as well as other documents Lee didn’t bother with. She swiped past all of them to look for the PDA’s file system for a specific program. “Here it is,” she said, and pressed the button that appeared on the screen.
Lee’s BrainPal suddenly came alive with a long queue of increasingly urgent messages from her sergeant, her captain and the Tubingen itself.
Hughes, who apparently received a similar queue of urgent messages, smiled. “Nice to know we were missed.”
“Make sure they know where we are,” Lee said. “And make sure that if I tell them to, they’ll flatten this place into the ground.”
“You got it, ma’am,” Hughes said.
The two of them moved out of the office and went up the stairs, Lee taking the PDA with her and tucking it under an arm. The stairs emptied out into another short corridor that looked like a wing of a hotel. The two soldiers stalked through it carefully, turned a dogleg and were confronted by a closed door. Lee nodded to Hughes, who opened it and pushed through.
They came through the side of a lobby filled with lumpy-looking older people in ordinary clothing and very attractive younger people wearing almost nothing at all.
“Where the hell are we?” Hughes said.
Lee laughed. “Holy shit,” she said. “It was a brothel!”
The lobby quieted as the brothel workers and their potential clients got a look at Lee and Hughes.
“What?” Hughes said, finally, not dropping her weapon. “You all act like you’ve never seen a naked woman before.”
“I don’t think I can tell this story again any differently than I’ve already told it the last three times, ma’am,” Lee said, to Colonel Liz Egan. Egan, as she understood it, was some sort of liaison for the State Department, which had taken considerable interest in her abduction and escape.
“I just need to know if there’s any additional detail you can give me regarding this Two person,” Egan said.
“No, ma’am,” Lee said. “I never saw him or heard him except as a heavily treated voice over that PDA. You have all the files I made, and you have all the files on the PDA I took. There really is nothing else I can tell you about him.”