Coercion (17 page)

So, you can’t see, you can’t hear, you can’t talk, and you’re tied to the floor with your hands behind your back.  What do you do?

Alex’s current situation reminded him of a game he and his Turkish partner Mehmet used to play.  They would burn up time on boring stakeouts by working their way out of hypothetical binds, challenging each other to find the solution.  Aside from exercising their creativity and strengthening their logic skills, the game got them in the habit of thinking out of the box and approaching problems from multiple perspectives.

Now it was second nature for Alex to look at his investigations from the perspective of everyone involved as he searched for motive, opportunity, and intent.  But that may not have been the greatest benefit of the game.  The what-do-you-do game had taught Alex that there was no such thing as helplessness, just differences in perspective. 
So once again, Alex, what do you do?

Before he could tackle what-do-you-do, he had to ask himself what-do-you-know?  At first glance the answer in this particular instance was,
not a lot
.  That was no coincidence; the people who had captured him were pros.  But Alex knew from experience that people in his situation usually knew a lot more than they thought they did.

There had been no conversation since his initial apprehension, just a lot of
man-handling.  Apart from “Turn around,” and “Move,” the only words spoken to him since his capture in the boardroom were, “Now I’ve got your number.”

The giant had uttered those words just after stabbing Alex in the ass with a syringe that looked more suited for a horse than a human.  That had put the fear of God in him.  Alex had seen what interrogation chemicals could do to a man’s brain. 
This is your brain.  This is your brain on sodium pentathol
…

Only later on, sitting there in the dark and feeling as normal as one could under such circumstances, did Alex’s unwavering state of mind convince him that it was not a chemical cocktail they had injected him with, at least not a mind-altering one.  Perhaps, he wishfully
hypothesized, it was just a scare tactic.

Alex had just drifted off to sleep when the obvious answer woke him like a kick in the chin.  They had implanted him with the same device they had used on Elaine’s mother and daughter Kimberly. 

Now Alex’s mind was really cranking (his stomach was growling as well).  If that hypothesis was true, then he now had an electronic leash he could not outrun.  Would they try and control him now, like a puppet on a string?  Would they send him back to America, try and turn him into a traitor and a terrorist?  It added a whole new dimension to what-do-you-do.

Now I’ve got your number
.  Those five words, spoken in that gruff voice, echoed over and over in his mind like the jingle from a popular commercial.  They also took him from a self-controlled state of analysis to the edge of hysteria. 
Why’d you have to go and be so smart?

Alex worked hard to r
ein in his imagination, to focus on the positive and think about escape.  There was always a way out.  He took three deep breaths and forced himself to pull a Descartes, to put speculation out of his mind and focus on that which he knew to be certain.

What did he
know
had happened?  After giving him the injection, the giant had gagged him with a modified racquetball.  It was uncomfortable to say the least and had forever ruined that sport for him.  Then the giant directed a scene worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.  He filled Alex’s ears with wax dripped from a burning candle.  While the function was obviously to deafen him, the purpose seemed to be providing the big guy with a few laughs.  The paraffin had stung, but given the images the giant’s appearance conjured up, Alex was just glad it wasn’t molten lead.

With the gag and earplugs in place, his captor pulled out a dark burlap bag.  Alex was afraid he would drop in a starving rat and tie the bag over his head, but the giant just used it like a blindfold for the very ugly.  As he did so, Alex found himself feeling oddly gratefu
l, and thought of Mehmet’s lesson on perspective...

Overall, the treatment was better than a head full of lead or a rat in your hat, but with time Alex was finding it maddening nonetheless.  That was undoubtedly one of the desired effects.  He had to calm himself, and the best way to do that was to take his min
d off his physical condition.  He knew it was possible. 
Focus, Alex, focus.
 
You are going to think your way out of this, you always do.  Now, what do you know?  Who is holding you?
 

Up until that point the only things he had learned about his
captors were that they were KGB and that the giant in charge was named Yarik.  He picked up the last tidbit when one of the soldiers had referred to the giant by that name in Alex’s presence.  Yarik rewarded the loose-lipped soldier with a punch to the face so brutal that he had lost consciousness to the sight of spurting blood and the sound of snapping cartilage.  Alex appreciated the sacrifice. 
Yarik
sounded tough, but it was just a name and thus less demoralizing to repeat than
the giant
or
the hulk
.

He added Yarik’s name to Victor’s on his
Who
roster: two first names, one description, and counting.

Where are you?
  Alex’s best guess was that he was tied to the floor of a stationary cargo plane somewhere near Irkutsk.  Given the metal floor, he had assumed it was a truck at first, but when he felt the curvature of the wall he realized that it was a plane’s fuselage.  He wanted to explore more but his hands were tightly bound to a D-ring welded to the floor behind his back.  They were numb and his arms were cramped.  He also had a pain in his backside where the syringe had gone in, and the cold, metallic floor wasn’t helping that any.  He had never missed his San Diego Jacuzzi so much.

Alex had no way of telling how long he had been there—each minute seemed like an hour with the sensory deprivation—but he guessed that it really had been hours.  Surprisingly, they hadn’t removed his watch, although of course he couldn’t see it.

Speaking of which, what tools and weapons are at your disposal?
  Well, his legs were not bound, so he could kick, and if he ever got free he could run.  Those were two big checkmarks in the assets column.  He couldn’t bite, but he could head-butt.  Of course, this was all worthless as long as he was tied to the ground with his hands immobilized.  But unless the burlap bag was really an execution blindfold, they would be moving him at some point.  Furthermore, he was tied rather than chained, and ropes could be cut.  Perhaps he could search the floor for something to cut the ropes with.  It wouldn’t take much: a staple or nail from a hastily opened crate, a chip from a carelessly broken bottle, a beer cap. 
Now you’re thinking, or dreaming
...

The range of motion available to his hands was close to zero, but Alex
guessed that he might be able to sweep up to 180 degrees with his legs.  Of course, if there was a guard sitting next to him Alex would probably be rewarded for his efforts with a kick in the balls.  Perhaps he should just stick with the sensory deprivation.

It occurred to Alex that if he could work the wax out of his ears he would be able to hear if a guard was watching him.  With that thought, the need to hear became as intense as the need to breathe. 
Removing a plug was easier said than done.  He could wiggle his ears a little from the inside, and jiggle them a bit from the outside with his shoulder and the wall, but that seemed painfully slow and inadequate. 
What’s the problem, do you have something better to do?

While he labored at inconspicuously getting the wax plugs out of his ears, Alex analyzed
what he knew about his captors.

Yarik was obviously a brute, but apparently he was above petty brutality.  He hadn’t kicked or punched Alex after securing him.  Ironically, Alex found that unsettling.  It led him to suspect that Yarik was saving him for the time he could go whole hog.  He figured Yarik’s restraint indicated that he did not want to spoil his own appetite, or deaden Alex’s.  No sense dwelling on that thought either.
Even more distracting, however, was the fact that Yarik had recognized him.  That had been confirmed both by the look in his dark eyes, and by the treatment Alex had subsequently received.  Alex had no idea how that had happened, but he assumed that the root cause was the same one that put Gold Frame on his tail.  Before he left Russia, he would have that answer.

What else do you know?  Why is this happening?
  Looking at the big picture Alex knew that he had discovered an international industrial espionage ring run by either the KGB or an associated party.  According to what he had seen on the acetates, the group was involved in multiple high-technology industries.  He had seen the words microprocessor and photovoltaic several times.  He also knew that in addition to Irkutsk, they had factories in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.  And he knew that their headquarters was on a crescent-shaped lake just east of Academic City.  Perhaps that was where his plane would be flying. 
At least he would avoid Aeroflot
.

Alex also knew
that the group he was up against was ruthless.  If what he had learned from Elaine was the truth, rather than some devious fiction invented to control her—and now him—then these people had the most diabolical device ever conceived at their disposal.  Remembering the pain in his backside, Alex didn’t hold out much hope for the “devious-fiction” hypothesis.  “
Ruthless” however clearly had a poster child in Yarik
.
  He wondered what the giant’s boss looked like.

As he sat there contemplating the situation and working to dislodge his earplug, Alex began to get a grasp of just how big the picture was.  That thought in turn made him acutely aware of how little he was; yet another thing not to dwell on. 
(His list of imponderables was about to surpass his list of ponderables.)  Alex knew that Russia was in desperate need of a solid industrial base, one that would be competitive in a modern capitalist marketplace, one that would form the foundation for a restructured economy.  Of course the USSR had lots of factories, but none of them was economically viable without the virtually-free energy supplied by mother Russia and the State-guaranteed monopoly with consumers in the fifteen Soviet Republics.

Soviet factories were elephants, and with the iron curtain now down, they were being forced to compete in a world of tigers.  They were too big to maneuver, too slow to respond, and too expensive to maintain.  If this group was doing what it looked like it was doing, it would be filling an economic and political vacuum
. Alex realized that such a vacuum could suck the conspirators right to the very top of their transforming nation.

With that thought running through his mind
, the paraffin-plug popped out of his right ear. 
Yes!
While he continued to work at the paraffin in his left ear, Alex began surveying his surroundings with his right.  It wasn’t easy.  His head was still covered by the burlap bag so noises were a bit diffused, and as he only had one ear he didn’t get stereo sound, so direction was difficult to judge.  After taking a couple minutes to adjust and process, he concluded that all sounds were originating from his right, as if coming through a large doorway before echoing off the walls.  That fit with his airplane theory, for all the good it did him.

All Alex really needed to know right this second was if he was alone, so he would know if it was safe to search for something with which to cut his bonds.  To determine this, he thumped his feet on the metallic floor and then listened intently for any reaction.  None came.  Good.  He set to work feeling around with his legs, all the while keeping his ear finely tuned to his environment.

Alex was just finishing his first sweep of the floor when he heard footsteps approaching.  He froze his legs and then dropped his chin to his chest in order to appear as though he was sleeping.  That motion caused the left earplug to pop out. 
Yes again!
  He hoped the plug was not visible on the floor; the thought of another hot-wax session, perhaps topped off with duct tape this time, was not appealing.

If Alex’s
newly freed ears weren’t deceiving him, just one person had entered the cargo hold.  The intruder walked toward him and paused.  Then Alex heard and felt something heavy thump to the ground beside him.  Could it be another body?  A cauldron of boiling oil?  A tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey?  Alex braced himself for a kick in the chest, but instead he got a very different kind of wallop.

“Alex … Alex, can you hear me?”

It was the voice,
the
voice.  He had only heard it once before, but he knew it like his mother’s.  Standing before him, just the other side of the burlap blindfold, was the man who had called him the night of Frank’s death.  Alex was about to meet his brother’s killer.