A Creature of Smokeless Flame Page 3

  “At least we’re getting a good feed now,” Torres commented. “Did you ever figure out what went wrong with the infrared?”

  Dean shook his head. “Some power glitch, probably. All the cells lost the feed about the same time, and then a few minutes later it came back. It’s a crappy retrofit; we need to lobby for a completely new video system. Oh well, I hope it doesn’t happen again. We need to move on.”

  “Move on?”

  “We can’t wait for them to give in to mild discomfort,” Dean said. “It’s time to move on to phase two, and make them so unhappy they’ll have to teleport. You get a couple of guards and show the other three the nice room we have waiting for whoever is the first to break, while I set up the sound and light effects. For this, it won’t matter that we have to use the lousy prison broadcasting system.”

  “Did Harrison okay this?”

  “He is in more of a hurry than anybody else for results, and no wonder. He won’t object.”

  Not if they got results, Torres thought. What if they didn’t? They would have four royally pissed-off American citizens on their hands and nothing to show for it.

  But he kept his misgivings to himself and followed Dean’s orders. Just like in any big organization, there was nothing to be gained by bucking the hierarchy.

  ***

  The lights didn’t stay off long; allowing for the time we’d spent taking care of things in Austin, I was guessing it had been about two hours. A different man came in this time. He didn’t slam the door, which earned him a couple of points. And he looked less scary than the first guy: younger, longish black hair, steady brown eyes, no crazy twitches going on in his face. For just a moment, I was fool enough to feel relieved.

  “You should have responded to gentle persuasion,” he said softly, and a shiver of fear ran down my spine. Sandru Balan had spoken softly, just like that, when he told me that I was wearing a bomb that he could detonate at any moment. “I am afraid that now we will have to be more… convincing.”

  My mouth was dry. Fortunately – or perhaps unfortunately – that’s never been enough to stop me giving people grief. Only when they deserve it, of course.

  “You must be pretty damned desperate if you’re going to torture American citizens on American soil,” I said. “What do you think that’s going to do for your agency’s image?”

  “No torture,” he said. “Nothing that leaves marks, anyway. And the sooner you teleport to the other room, the sooner it’ll be over.”

  He left the room as quietly as he had entered.

  It didn’t start for several minutes, maybe as many as ten or fifteen – they had taken my watch, of course, when they grabbed me, and I hadn’t been stupid enough to replace it in Austin and give them hard evidence that I’d been out of this cell. From what I’d read, this was standard procedure for disorienting people: no watch, no windows, lights on and off in unnatural patterns. I began to hope that this disorientation, with occasional threats, was their entire repertoire.

  Then it started.

  The dim little overhead fixture went out. My eyes were just starting to adjust to the darkness when they were assaulted by a powerful white light that strobed on and off in a migraine-inducing sequence. I couldn’t find a safe dark corner to look at, and when I closed my eyes the jagged, arrhythmic strobing translated to red flashes stabbing through my eyelids. I started counting; maybe I could distract myself by figuring out what number series determined the timing of the light system. These people were way too dumb to come up with a good random number generator. I was betting on digits of π, but even that might have been too sophisticated for them.

  Then the noise began.

  I don’t remember all the sounds now. There was an air raid siren swooping up and down the scale, just like the ones they used in England during the second world war – and yes, as a matter of fact, I would know. 1941, remember? I happen to have up-close and personal experience of the Blitz, which is something not many people my age (I was born in 1994) can boast of.

  Next they added bits and pieces of the kind of rap rock that only someone as young as my kid brother could love. Then screams, very realistic – a most unwelcome addition to the mix. I didn’t want to think about how they’d gotten those recordings. They sounded like something that could have been the soundtrack to an ISIS torture video.

  And then, just in time to save my sanity, “Ride of the Valkyries” joined the rest of the cacophony, and I started laughing. Possibly laughing a tiny bit harder than the situation warranted; I might have been closer to hysteria than I like to admit. But – that music? Sure, there were people who considered Wagner at high volume a kind of torture. Before this night, I might even have been one of them. But at least one of the four of us was going to have her spirit cheered and her spine stiffened by her favorite fight song.

  The light and sound effects stopped abruptly and the dim blue overhead light came back on. A moment later the dark-haired man shoved the door open. “What’s so damn funny?”

  Touchy, touchy. “You idiots really haven’t done your research, have you?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  If I told him that they were arousing Ingrid’s alter ego as a Viking shield-maiden, I’d be pointing them right at her. I hoped I would never do something like that, but I wasn’t too certain how well I would resist actual torture. Noises and flashing lights weren’t going to do it, though.

  “Trying to make us teleport with your sound and light show? You don’t understand anything at all about applied topology. It’s just like any other mathematics; we can’t do it if we can’t concentrate. You’re doing the one thing that guarantees we won’t be able to help you at all. With whatever minor and limited capacities we may have,” I added, belatedly realizing that – as usual – I might have said too much.

  “Oh, really?” he sneered. “You seem to be very good at coming up with excuses for not producing. I’ll just have to try harder to motivate you. Tell you what – the first two of you to teleport, we’ll let them stay in the nice room we showed you. The other two can stay in these cells and think it over. They are not,” he said, “going to be very pleasant places to stay.”

  “And you’re not very consistent, are you? If we can teleport, how do you propose to keep us here? And if we can’t, what’s the use of torturing us to do something impossible?”

  Something ugly flickered in his expression, but he smoothed his face out almost immediately. “You won’t be so chatty in a few minutes.”

  Almost as soon as the door closed behind him, the sound and light show began again. Still heavy on the Wagner; I grinned, thinking of the effect that would be having on Ingrid. I wasn’t sure that, even with the augmentation of the stars, she would be strong enough to retrieve her latest accessory and get it into her cell. But I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t, either. And I did like the image of Wild Man and Menacing Dude being chased around a small cell by a shield maiden wielding a Viking axe.

  The air was beginning to smell funny. For just a moment I almost panicked, imagining that they’d found some way to bring fire into the cell. Then my eyes stung, my nose burned, and I sneezed violently. OK. Just pepper spray.

  So far.

  I wondered if these maniacs had any limits at all. The nastier they got, the more dedicated I felt to frustrating them. But I was uncomfortably aware that this dynamic could reverse quickly. I’m not a superwoman, nor am I stupid. If they kept escalating, there was some point at which they could inflict enough pain and fear to make me desperate to avoid more. I would then become more interested in pleasing these bastards than in thwarting them.

  I was actually surprised that we hadn’t reached that point yet. I’m not all that brave. But they seemed to be all that inept.

  I groped my way to the corner, took off my T-shirt and soaked it with water from the bottle. Then I tied it over my nose and mouth. By the sleeves, so the body of the shirt hung down in front of me and preserved a little modesty.

  I h
oped Ingrid did have her axe.

  I hoped even more that Dr. Verrick had seen my message and contacted Brad already, unlikely as that seemed.

  3. Corralling cats

  He was just leaning against the wall, looking menacing, while Patel questioned Balan. It wasn’t difficult; all he had to do was remember what the son of a bitch had tried to do to Thalia and the urge to tear him into small pieces, slowly, resurfaced.

  His expression got slightly harder as he reflected on the fact that frightening Sandru Balan into compliance was in fact his only role in this interrogation. The hotshots from DC had made it very clear that they and nobody else would ask the questions. Never mind that he’d tangled with Balan twice in the last year and had actually been responsible for his capture. Never mind that thanks to his posting in Romania, he could actually say, “You’re a dead man walking,” and other chatty tidbits in Balan’s native language. None of that counted against the fact that he’d been seconded to Domestic Operations for the last fifteen months.

  His scowl must have suddenly become more alarming; Balan started talking faster and more fluently than before. Over the last two days the contract bomber had gone from sneering at them, to dickering over a possible release, to pretending memory problems, and – remarkably quickly – to this last phase of babbling about anything and everything. The problem now was keeping him to the point.

  He had to admit that his colleague’s idea seemed to be working. It was hard to frighten Sandru Balan. If they’d taken him to a black site the man might have become worried, but the Deputy Director of Operations hadn’t wanted to take the time required nowadays to get permission to take custody of a prisoner and transport him out of the country. Instead, he simply told Patel, who was running the interrogation, to borrow Lensky from Austin.

  When Balan laughed in their faces, Patel had told him there was a possibility he could be repatriated.

  “Is that a threat or a promise?”

  “Unless you start cooperating,” Patel said, “you can consider it both. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention; if repatriated, you’ll be escorted by this gentleman.” He nodded and Lensky moved out of the shadows so that Balan could get a good look at his face.

  Up to that point Lensky’s chief worry had been that he would start laughing at his own impersonation of the ultimate bad cop. One good look at Sandru Balan removed that concern. Memories of the last time he’d seen Balan flooded him. For a moment he was back there, in Allandale House on a bleak January day, while the man before him gloatingly described how his own call to Thalia’s cell phone would have detonated the bomb that tore her to shreds. There was a sour taste in his mouth, a rushing noise in his ears, and he took two more steps towards Balan without thinking. The man flinched and Patel laughed. “I see you don’t care for the prospect,” he said to Balan. He nodded at Lensky. “Stay back behind the taped line from now on, okay? I don’t want him too scared to talk.”

  Every time Balan resisted the questions, Lensky stepped forward.

  “I didn’t actually think I had a face that would frighten hardened killers,” he had said, a trifle ruefully, after the success of the first day’s interrogation.

  “Ah, man, it’s the sincerity that gets them,” Patel reassured him. “You really do want to tear him into little pieces and set them on fire, and he can sense that. Way more effective than a standard bad-cop routine. And he knows you’ve got good reason to hate him, after what he tried to do to your girlfriend.”

  “Wife,” Lensky corrected him.

  Patel’s eyebrows shot up. “Nobody told me that… Was it in your report?”

  “We weren’t married then. We are now.” And that was as much as Patel, or any other colleagues, needed to know about his personal life. His marriage changed nothing about the agency’s arrangement with the Center; they funded the place, he ran the four topologist-mages as his assets. He passed on agency requests to them, and they reported their results to him.

  At least that was the theory. In practice, he’d discovered that managing mathematicians was more like corralling cats.

  On the evening of this second day, Patel was getting very excited about Balan’s revelation of a possible German connection for the bomber. Then Lensky took the call from Dr. Verrick, the titular director of the Center for Applied Topology, and minor matters such as bombings and German terror cells ceased to mean anything to him.

  “What? When? How long… I’ll be there as soon as possible.” He ended the call but didn’t put the phone away; he had an airplane ticket to buy.

  “Sorry,” he told Patel when he’d finished his business. “I have to be on the next plane back to Austin.”

  “So much,” Patel said sourly, “I gathered from your side of the conversation. But you can’t leave now. We’re just starting to get useful information out of him.”

  “Tell him I’ll be back if he stops cooperating,” Lensky suggested.

  “Will you?”

  “If possible. It may not be possible. Someone has kidnapped my topologists.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I plan to find out.”

  He didn’t reach Austin until quite late that night. Dr. Verrick was waiting for him at the Center’s offices on the top floor of Allandale House. The old man looked – well, old, in contrast to his usual look of ageless preservation. His hands were shaking. But he had news for Lensky. Something had happened while he was flying back to Austin.

  “You have a note.” Lensky shook his head in disbelief. “What, Thalia left a note to explain where everybody went, and you didn’t happen to find it until I was on the plane?”

  “It was not here when you boarded the airplane,” Dr. Verrick said. “I had left the office briefly; when I returned this was written on my whiteboard.”

  Thalia’s distinctive, angular capital letters slanted downwards from left to right on a board that had been unceremoniously cleared with a couple of quick swipes. They were all well. They were being held in a CIA black site approximately two hundred miles from Austin. TELL BRAD!!!

  Dr. Verrick told him that there were similar notes on the whiteboards of all the support staff.

  “Miss Kostis underrates me,” the Director sniffed. “It had already occurred to me to inform you of their disappearance. Once she failed to meet me for our dinner engagement, and then not only she but also all the other topologists proved to be unreachable by telephone, it was the obvious next step. Especially after Miss Wilson, Mr. DiGrazio and Ms. Melendez told me of their experience.”

  At the moment, the experience of the non-research staff was not Lensky’s primary concern. “So. They’re not stopping her from teleporting; she was able to come here long enough to leave a message. Messages.”

  “I presume,” said Dr. Verrick, “that they believe they have stopped my researchers from teleporting, but that they do not fully understand the powers and limitations of applied topology.”

  “But if she could get out, where is she now?”

  “She has probably returned to her pseudo-captivity to avoid alarming the fools who kidnapped them. She knows that you will sort out this idiocy.”

  Lensky sat, hard. For some reason he was feeling shaky. “I wish she had waited for me. No, no,” he held up a hand to stop Verrick, “I get it. If they found her missing, they would have taken it out on the others. And even if all of them were able to teleport out of the facility, where would they go? They won’t really be free until I make it clear to – whatever moron dreamed this up – that they can’t treat my agents this way.”

  He still wished Thalia had waited for him. Seeing the message on Verrick’s whiteboard had given him an almost painful pulse of hope, but nowhere near enough to counter the fear for her that consumed him.

  “Can you do that? Can you find them?”

  “Oh, yes.” He felt confident of that much. “There aren’t that many possibilities.” The CIA didn’t actually maintain black sites within the country, but Thalia wouldn’t have known that. He tru
sted her estimate of where they were more than the label she’d put on their location. They did have a facility she might have taken for a black site right here in Texas. It was just about two hundred miles from Austin, an abandoned and outmoded prison generously put at the agency’s disposal by Concho County in return for their help in getting appropriations for the new prison. He could be there in three hours. Fly to Washington first? No, that would take time, and he probably wouldn’t even be able to get a flight until tomorrow; they’d been turning out the lights at Bergstrom Airport when his plane landed. He had his boss’s cell phone number, he could talk to him while driving up to Concho County.

  “What about the others?” There was nobody in the office with them.

  “Free, but indignant,” Verrick told him. “Apparently someone pretending to be with the University administration persuaded them to come with him for some kind of petty paperwork, and then lured them into a little-used storage facility where they were locked in for several hours. They were finally released when a security guard heard them yelling and banging on the door. I felt there was little more they could do tonight, but if you require their aid…”

  Lensky thought it over. There were only three people involved: a receptionist, a robotics engineer, and a computer jockey. “No. It’s conceivable that I’ll need Jimmy to hack into somebody’s computer, but I doubt it. Just in case, though… Here’s where I’m going. If I disappear too, you need to call my boss at Langley. Steve Harrison. Here’s the number. He’s a good guy; he’ll sort this out. I’ll call him while I’m on the road.”

  4. A darkness in the air