The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (13 page)

It was a line drawing. Two men held the naked body of a third. Blood dripped from his throat. His captors were working on his back with knives.

“This is a drawing of an ancient bas-relief, found in an old Hittite ruin. Four thousand years old. They're flaying him alive.” He held out a small, ugly knife, curved with a nasty hooked end. “They would open the throat first, because otherwise the screams were rather annoying. Then”—he touched the hooked end to Flynn's chest, pressing just hard enough for him to know that it was there—“you slip the blade in and lift the skin.” He drew it back. “Let's talk. Really talk.”

Flynn said nothing.

“Here's a question for you. Very important. Which company manufactures these?” He held out a silver object. It was the implant taken from Doxy's head, and Flynn thought again that these people were really very good at what they did.

“I'm not sure. What is it?”

Ghorbani smiled a little. “Did you ever read anything about medieval methods of torture?”

“Not my area of interest.”

“There was something called slow fire, where the subject is cooked over a low flame. Roasted alive.” His hand came back, gently stroking Flynn's forehead. “There are people in this room who will eat the meat of a victim while he still cooks. Eat it, and force the victim to do the same.”

“I don't know any more than I've told you.”

They had recruited Doxy, then intentionally raised enough suspicion about him to get CIA to implant him. Then they stole the implant, killing him in the process. Brilliant. Ruthless. More Aeon than Iran, too.

“We'll come back to the implant at a later time. Perhaps next week or the week after.”

A common ploy, to face the victim with an unthinkable amount of time. No man being tortured at this level of intensity was going to last anything close to a week, not even him.

“We've seen video of you fighting some of Aeon's biological entities. You're extremely fast. Inhumanly fast. When did this start with you?”

“Two years ago.”

“Did you notice any change prior to this happening?”

“Over a period of a week, I began to draw my pistol faster and faster. Finally I could pull my trigger faster than my gun's mechanicals could respond. I had to have it modified.”

“The Casull Raging Bull?”

“Both Casulls. All my guns.”

“And your accuracy is also perfect.”

“It is.”

“Now, a question that may save your life. Can you teach this?”

This was a chance, a very serious one. He had something they wanted. “I can.”

“Will you teach it to Revolutionary Guards?”

“I want to live.”

“Your eyes are moist, Flynn,” Ghorbani said as he withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket.

“Like I said, I want to live.”

“And now you think you have a chance.”

When he wiped Flynn's face, Flynn felt a gratitude so overwhelming that a choking sob escaped his throat.

After they left, music began to play, and it was familiar music: “Plaisir d'amour,” the old French love song that Abby used to sing with her guitar long ago.

How had they known that?

“The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, the grief of love lasts a lifetime.”

Once again, he was left to watch the sunlight crawl across the floor of the smoky, empty room. Pain assailed him from every muscle, from his still-hammering heart, from his captured soul.

 

CHAPTER TEN

HE AWOKE
in the night cold and thirsty. The moon shone down through the high windows, sailing in fast silver clouds. He strained against his bonds, contracting the muscles of his arms and legs until the table itself groaned. He expanded his chest until he was ready to break a rib, but the thick leather strap gave not at all. He writhed, he shook like a wet dog, he twisted and turned.

His itching, burning skin tormented him, sour acid rose in his stomach, and his heart seemed to be skipping beats.

So this was it; this was how it ended. How ironic. He'd been hounded by aliens using highly exotic weapons and technology, but he was going to die here, in the basement of a house in Tehran, tortured to death by people he could have killed with a flick of his wrist if the right moment had presented itself.

“Flynn?”

Oh, God, Abby's voice—even that. He'd heard it often at home in Menard, but it never was her, and it wasn't her now; it couldn't be.

“Are my brown eyes bright?” She laughed a little.

“Are my brown eyes bright? Is my nose on right?” had been something between them when they were kids.

She stepped into view and his heart, already hurting, began to hammer. His mind was simply blanked by the incredible, perfect physicality of the apparition. She could not be here, not really, but here she was.

She wore a crisp white jumpsuit. Her hair was as it had been in the days of their happiness, flowing around her face, framing that delicate shape. She laid a hand on his chest, and it felt as if his heart was being touched by light.

“Abby?”

“Listen up, because I can't stay long. I'm going to release you. The guard on this corridor is one of ours; he'll let you pass. When you leave the house, turn right. You'll see a blue Corolla. Get in—you're going to the airport. But hurry, Flynn, there's very little time.”

With that, she reached down and unbuckled the strap that was stretched across his chest, then the one binding his right wrist. At once, he opened the other one, sat up, and unbuckled the ones that held his ankles. He got off the table. “They have eyes in here—they must.”

“At the moment, a loop is running. They're not seeing this.”

He went to her, he embraced her, and it felt so incredibly, deeply good, as if the sweetest water in the world were being poured on the deepest pain in his heart. But he knew—he
knew
—that this was not really Abby, that it was just another trick of some kind.

“Go,” she said. “There's no time.”

He remembered that look, soft and stern at the same time. “Flynn, you can do it”; “Flynn, I have faith in you.”

He met her eyes, and that really, really hurt.

“Go, Flynn.”

“I have to see you again. I have to be with you.”

“Yes.”

“What about our baby?”

She shook her head, lowered her eyes. Then she put a plastic bag on the table. In it was a Revolutionary Guard uniform. She helped him get it on. It was sweaty and still warm. He wondered if somebody had been killed for it. It was a question he didn't intend to ask.

“Come with me, Abby.”

Silence. He whirled around, but the room was empty. He bent double, such was the sorrow, as powerful as a blow to the gut.

Gone.

If he hadn't been off the table and actually wearing the uniform she'd given him, he'd have thought she was a hallucination. He thought that nobody could disappear that quickly and quietly, not even him.

In three steps he was at the door and through it. The corridor outside was lit by a couple of bare bulbs. At its end, as she had said, sat a guard behind a small table. He was nodding over a Persian comic book.

Flynn passed him and all but flew up the stairs.

Voices. He froze.

They came from the back of the house. He smelled something hot and spicy, and cigar smoke. There was another guard on the front door, this one smiling and nodding like a fun-house clown. Flynn realized that he was high. As Flynn approached, the guard reached up and pulled back the dead bolt that locked the door.

The outside air was still thick with pollution, the moon now almost directly overhead. To the right along the quiet street, he saw the Corolla. A couple came toward him, the woman behind the man with her head down, a child tagging along on each of her hands.

He was appalled to recognize the nurse, and to see in her face an eerie, haunting echo of Abby. He drew the bill of the uniform cap down over his eyes and walked quickly past the couple.

As he approached the Corolla, he saw that there was someone in the driver's seat, a man who turned his face away.

“Don't look at me,” he said. “Safer for both of us.”

It was true, he couldn't deny it. “Agreed.”

The question of whether or not to trust him was not an option. He didn't know Tehran at all. It would have taken him hours to find the airport.

He got in and the driver pulled away from the curb. As he drove, he handed Flynn his Grauerholtz passport and a boarding pass. He'd be flying to Amman aboard Royal Jordanian Airlines.

“You're sure I can get out on this?”

“The Guard plays its hand close to its chest, so customs is unlikely to know about you, at least not yet. We're stopping for another change of clothes, then we're moving out.”

Ten minutes of hurtling traffic and confusing side streets later, they were in another neighborhood, a much poorer one. The streets were twisted and narrow and there were people everywhere.

“Here,” the driver said. “Second floor, apartment on the right. Knock three times quick, once slow.”

“Do you know anything about my wife? Where is she?”

“Your
wife
?”

“She freed me. She's in your group—she must be.”

“You were freed by Nadja.”

“Who is Nadja?”

“She was the nurse who attended you. She's one of ours. She's from New Jersey.”

Flynn concealed his surprise.

“Get changed, and for God's sake, take a shower. They're not gonna let you on the plane smelling like that, let alone wearing that uniform.”

The apartment door was answered by a young boy who looked up at Flynn with grave, scared eyes. There appeared to be nobody else in the house, so he went into the tiled bathroom, stripped off the uniform, and showered.

It hurt. A lot. His skin was rubbed raw, there were cuts, there was a nasty wound where the flaying knife had gone in, and the water made it all burn like hell. Still, though, it felt almost a little miraculous, and the mint-scented soap was soothing.

As he was drying himself, the boy said through the door, “Him say hurry now.” Flynn wrapped the towel around himself and went to the bedroom, where a business suit was laid out on the bed. It was a good worsted, the cut British, the label inside the jacket Chinese.

Dressed, he went quickly through the apartment and back to the car.

“I almost had to give you up,” the driver said. He pointed to a scanner embedded in the dash. “They're looking.”

“The airport's gotta be closed.”

“Soon. We need to hurry.”

“I thought they were efficient.”

“The moment they close Khomeini, every intelligence operation in Tehran will start trying to find out why. They'll be fending them off for weeks.”

The car careened through the streets, the driver lying on his horn.

“How did you find me?”

“We looked.”

“Who's we?”

Silence.

“Shouldn't I know?”

“Let's do a little trade. I'll tell you who's saving your ass and you tell me why in hell you offed that prof at the agricultural school.”

In Flynn's weakened state, he couldn't be sure if he had revealed the shock that this question delivered.

Oh, they were clever. So very, very clever. This was just brilliant. He hadn't escaped at all. This was simply another interrogation technique. It had to be, because a Western intelligence agent would obviously know the answer to that question.

The Inquisition of the Middle Ages had used this technique—the false escape—to trick heretics into revealing themselves.

“I'm thinking I made a mistake,” Flynn said carefully.

“But then why did you turn up here? What are you after in Iran?”

“Something is wrong.”

“You nearly get yourself killed because of some vague suspicion? Why were you suspicious in the first place?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Mossad.”

A lie, of course. He was still very much in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard. He played along. “What does Mossad know about Aeon?”

“Less than we'd like. We'd welcome a briefing.”

“I'll try to make it happen.”

“Really? How much do you know?”

“Less than I'd like.”

They pulled into the jam-packed airport departure lane. “Good luck,” he said.

Flynn stepped out into the surging crowd. Doubtless he was being tracked in a dozen different ways, but this transfer might also offer a chance to escape.

He now had clear questions—major questions—that led from Aeon to Iran and right back to the White House. The best answers were undoubtedly here but with Aeon giving the guard support, he was outgunned and he knew it. There was one, single objective now, which was to get out of Iran alive. He would take what he did know with him, and they would work from there. If there was time.

He leaned back into the car window. “What's my next move?”

“Everything normal. Pass through security, get on the plane, that's it.”

Khomeini was large and, he hoped, complex enough to provide him with some sort of escape route. He couldn't bolt, because the instant he did it, they'd be on him. He had to play their game, pretending that he believed in the rescue. Just when he was stepping onto the plane, he knew, they would recapture him and drag him back. They would want him to taste freedom before they made their move. Their plan was to completely crush his morale, and with it his resistance.

Firmly, he choked off the hope that seeing Abby had given him. Damn them all, damn them to hell. Just for those few moments, he'd opened his heart again, and now all the grief of not knowing was back, waves of anguish exactly as powerful as they had been the day he'd acknowledged to himself the bizarre and horrific truth of her dissapearance.

Passport control moved him on with a perfunctory glance, and he was soon in the international departure zone. Quickly evaluating his fellow travelers, he located a man standing near a soft drink kiosk, looking away toward a distant mirror on a booth that sold scarfs.