The Tin Man (31 page)

She swallowed hard, but
saw no point in answering.

“I asked you a question
.”

From the rising anger in his voice, she got the feeling she was going to hear about Wayne Adam Ford
—whoever the fuck he might be—whether she cared to or not.

“Wayne Adam Ford was a California trucker who killed four women
,” he went on, as predicted. “Raped them…beat them…snapped their spines…and, best of all, he cut off their breasts to keep as souvenirs. But old Wayne wasn’t like other serial killers. Oh, no. He was different. Some might even say
special.
Would you like to know why?”

She
’d rather not, but nodded anyway to avoid setting him off.

“Wayne,
it would seem, had a conscience,” he continued. “Unlike Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and other sociopaths, myself included, Wayne actually felt remorse for the terrible things he’d done. Or so he claimed when he turned himself in. And let me tell you something, Pussy: the psychiatrists are still scratching their heads over that one.”

He stretched out on her then and took
one of her nipples in his mouth. She shuddered with revulsion as he began to suck. Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes as he pressed his pelvis against her thigh. That he was mightily aroused was evident.  

“You have lovely
breasts, Pussy,” he said, releasing her nipple with a pop. “They’re just like my mother’s.” He released a sigh. “I miss her, Pussy. She nursed me up until she died, you know. Her milk always tasted so sweet. Just like cantaloupe. Sweet, ripe cantaloupe juice from her sweet, ripe melons. I kept them to remember her by. Would you like to see them?”

Thea
began to shake uncontrollably. Clearly, the man was insane. Not to mention a sadist. She cringed as she felt a hand working its way down her body. She squeezed her legs together as hard as she could, but his fingers forced their way between them. When he thrust them inside her, she began to thrash in protest. Withdrawing them, he took a deep, audible whiff.

“
You’ve had intercourse very recently,” he observed. “And I can guess who with. Did you enjoy it, Pussy? Was he a good lover? Did he make you cum? Do you like being fucked?”

She gasped when she felt his teeth
clamp down on her nipple.

“Shall I bite it off, Pussy? Bite them both off?
And your little clitoris, too? They still do that in some parts of Africa, you know. No more orgasms. And for what? To protect a man who will leave you the minute he learns you’ve been mutilated?”

The pain was so intense,
she was starting to hyperventilate.

“Save
yourself all that pain, Pussy. Tell me where he is.”

She wanted to cuss him out, but bit her lip.

“
Would you like to know a secret, Pussy?”

“I’d like
…to know…who you are,” she said, straining for words.

“Has your lover told you about his twin brother? How he died at Abu Ghraib? Did you not find it strange that a British journalist who was arrested by the secret police would end up in
an American detention center?”

Of course she’d
found it strange, as had Buchanan, but what was he getting at?

“I killed him,” he said, giving her a shock.
“That’s right. In Abu Ghraib. He stuck his nose where it didn’t belong, just as you and his brother have. Would you like to know what I did to him? What I’m going to do to you?”

His tone
of voice was disturbingly diabolical, as if he were getting off on the things he was saying to her.

“First, I hung him
strappado,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

She did. It meant hanging someone with their hands behind their back, usually dislocating both arms in the process. It was a torture method used by the Nazis, the North Vietnamese, and the Khmer Rouge, among other
regimes. She’d done a story about it a couple of years back when Amnesty International gave Turkey hell for still engaging in the practice. According to her sources, it was disturbingly commonplace there.

P
risoners in Abu Ghraib also were hung strappado. It was how Manadel al-Jamadi, a bombing suspect, was strung up while CIA interrogators beat him to death. Accidentally, allegedly. After they discovered their “error,” they packed him on ice and stuck him in the showers while they figured out how to cover it up. Some of the guards, including Charles Graner, the American soldier convicted of being the ringleader of the abuse, gave the corpse nicknames like “The Iceman,” “Mr. Frosty,” and “Bernie”—a reference to the movie
Weekend at Bernie’s
in which partiers pretended a dead man was still alive. Graner posed for pictures with the body, grinning with obvious satisfaction as he offered two thumbs up.

The whole Abu Ghraib affair made
her sick, as did the human rights abuses at Guantanamo and the British government’s collusion with torturers in Pakistan. It was all so dehumanizing, so hateful, so racist. But the fact that they were Iraqis—Muslims—justified it somehow. She wanted to believe Americans were better than that, that so-called Christians were better than that, despite all evidence, past and present, to the contrary.

Forgive them, Father. For the
y know not what unforgiveable acts they commit in your name.

The tuxedoed man went on boast
ing about all the ways he’d tortured Kenny Buchanan. She didn’t want to hear these things, didn’t need to know that he was capable of atrocities she couldn’t begin to fathom. But that was the idea, wasn’t it? This was psychological torture. He was trying to scare the living shit out of her so she’d tell him what he wanted to know. Well, she was scared all right. Scared to death, in fact. But she still wasn’t about to give up Buchanan or that disk.

And then, she felt a
painful prick in the muscle of her thigh. Had he injected her with something? Sodium pentothal perhaps to force her to give up Buchanan? As she tried to work out what to do, her mind grew fuzzy and, within seconds, completely shut down.

Buchanan was still at the coffee house, working diligently on the story as he waited for Osbourne and/or Sterling to return his calls. He was trying very hard not to think about Thea or what that sadistic motherfucker might be doing to her. Trying, but not having much luck.

He only prayed that, once the story was out there, Lapdog would come through. What was he anyway?
FBI? DOJ? Treasury? His money was on FBI, just because it made the most sense. But, for all he knew, the guy wasn’t even law enforcement. Maybe he was a high-ranking official. A senator or a judge, perhaps. He could be anybody. Or nobody. Maybe he was just some random nut-job who’d only been yanking his chain. But that wasn’t likely, was it? He had, after all, been right about Professor Aslan. Would a crackpot know about the interview? He couldn’t imagine how. No, Lapdog must be a federal agent. It was the only thing that fit.

And what about
Zeus? Who the hell was he? How did he factor into all of this? Feeling stumped, he went outside to smoke a cigarette, hoping it would clear his head. Feeling more focused afterward, he returned to the table, ready to get back to work. First, though, he wanted to take a minute to check something out, partly out of curiosity and partly out of concern.

Calling up a new window, he typed
c
ock and ball torture
in the Google box. To his surprise, the search engine instantly returned more than three million results. The first was an entry in Wikipedia. The link took him to an index page offering two choices: cock and ball torture (sexual practice) or Cock and Ball Torture (band). He clicked on the link for the sexual practice.

Cock and ball torture (CBT) is a sexual activity involving torture of the male genitals. This may involve directly painful activities, such as wax play, genital spanking, squeezing, ball-busting, genital flogging, urethral play, tickle torture, erotic electro-stimulation, or even kicking. The recipient of such activities may receive direct physical pleasure via masochism, or emotional pleasure through knowledge that the play is pleasing to a sadistic dominant…

Several of the words were highlighted with blue hyperlinks.
Buchanan clicked around, wincing as he learned more.
Ball busting
was the practice of kicking a man in the testicles…
wax play
involved dripping hot candles on the nipples and genitals…
spanking, squeezing,
and
flogging
were self-explanatory…
urethral play
referred to the insertion of objects into the penis…
erotic electro-stimulation
entailed shocking the penis and testicles. Accompanying the article was a disturbing image of a penis attached to an electrical device used for the latter, the sight of which gave him a serious case of the willies.

This was how some people got their jollies? He shook his head in disbelief. When it came to sex, he knew people were into a lot of seriously kinky shit
e, but this went way beyond kinky. This seemed downright sick and twisted. And he was far from a prude. He wasn’t averse to a wee bit of slap and tickle now and again. And yet, he drew the line at anything approaching abuse.

A sudden realization
shook him hard: genital torture was one of his deepest fears. When he was in Baghdad, bound and helpless on the floor of that festering shithole, eating his own scabs to keep from starving to death, listening to the agonized screams of fellow captives, his mind conjured up images of some of the horrifying tortures he’d read and written about. Things like
La Parrilla
, the torture method so popular among South American military regimes during the Dirty Wars and juntas of the 1960s and ’70s. Political prisoners were strapped to a metal cot with electrodes attached to their most sensitive areas. Nipples, ears, teeth, and, of course, the genitalia. The voltage administered sometimes made the victim jerk violently enough to break their own bones.

The thought of it made his stomach turn.
Then and now. How could anyone commit such cruelties against a fellow human being? And for what reason? Hatred? Fear? Ideological differences? Worse yet, he knew that the majority of people didn’t even need that much incentive to flip the switch. As Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram proved in a series of scientific trials back in the 1960s, most people would administer a deadly shock to a stranger simply because they were told to do so by an authority figure. The experiments had been repeated at different times in different cultures, always with the same results. 

I was only following order
s…

Buchanan
shook his head, fighting to put it all out of his mind. He went back to the story. Another hour passed. He was nearly finished and still no calls. He checked his watch. Eight-thirty. Bloody hell. There were still too many unanswered questions, but he had no choice but to go with what he had. It was his only hope for saving Thea. And stopping Babylon. Just as he was preparing to log in to
The Voice
, his phone started buzzing on the table, nearly giving him a heart attack. Snatching it up, he answered in earnest.

“
Don’t tell me you’ve come to your senses at last and decided to accept my generous offer.”

The sound of the scurvy spider’s
posh accent turned his blood to slush.

“Ac
tually, I’m calling about the merger.”

Silence.

“How did you know about that?” Osbourne wanted to know.

“
Let’s just say a wee birdie told me.”

“
Before or after someone shot up the place and put you out of business?” Osbourne asked, sounding entertained.

Buchanan’s
lips puckered with disdain. “And I suppose you know nothing about that.”

“
If I did, I certainly wouldn’t admit it.”

Buchanan took a breath
and clenched his fists, struggling to keep his cool. “I know about your scheme with Azi Zahhak.”

Another s
ilence.

“
That’s what I thought,” Buchanan said, feeling a bit smug.

“
Where’d you get your information? No, wait. Don’t tell me. A wee birdie. Am I right?”

“
A big fucking eagle, actually,” Buchanan told him. “Anyway, I’m about to break the story and wondered if you’d care to comment.”

“
About what?”

“
About how it feels to have the rug pulled out from under your own feet for a change.”

“
As it happens, I don’t.”

“
So, it’s ‘no comment,’ then?”

“
That’s right.”

Osbourne
abruptly ended the call. Buchanan returned to the story, adding a quick paragraph stating that the Golden Age CEO had declined to comment. He copied the file onto the clipboard, switched over to
The Voice
, and entered his username and password, drumming his fingers on the table as he waited. The cursor spun and spun until, finally, a window popped up.