Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

The man brought the spinning tip close to Calvary’s eyes. Stopped the motor for a moment. Protruding from the clamped jaws was a masonry bit, eight or nine gauge by the look of it. The tip was shaped like a blunt arrowhead, designed for boring holes through tiles.

The man fired the drill up again, held it horizontal. Gripped Calvary’s hair in his other hand. Brought the blurred tip of the bit towards the centre of Calvary’s forehead.

It was time to go.

*

In the last four years Calvary had carried out six hits for Llewellyn and the Chapel. The kills had required meticulous planning, incorporating sometimes months of research beforehand.

Nonetheless, Calvary knew that at a metaphysical cocktail party someone would eventually approach him, gin and tonic in hand and ask: In between jobs, what do assassins actually do ?

Calvary would have an answer in such a situation. He had spent the time in between hits mastering his weapons, his tools of the trade. He had achieved a high standard of knowledge in geopolitics, in military history, in game theory.

And he’d burrowed deep into the psychology and physiology of interrogation science, and implemented what he’d learned. Usually he’d been on the dishing-out end, finding out what he needed to know about the location of a target. Start extreme, with a serious threat to physical integrity — this was the most useful tactic in the interrogator’s arsenal. He’d employed it with Janos on the roof and with Tamarkin in the hospital room. And it seemed his captors, Krupina and her minions, were doing the same with him. No questions initially, just the promise of mutilation.

Calvary had practised being on the receiving end of a hostile interrogation, though until now he’d never found himself in such a situation while on a job. The best advice he’d had was from an elderly Chilean man, a survivor of the Pinochet terror in the early seventies. From this man he’d learned the technique of dissociation.

Most people he’d read of who’d undergone dissociation in whatever form found it unpleasant in the extreme. The Chilean dissident had described as a waking dreaming state, waking death, a sensation of cosmic, existential wrongness. It was a biological survival mechanism, kept alive in the species by its value in preserving the integrity of the psyche at times of extreme physical or emotional stress. It could therefore be usefully employed deliberately for the same reason, or to some other end, such as uncoupling the perception of pain from the recognition of what needed to be done to end that pain. Put simply, it enabled one to tolerate torture without providing the information that the torture was intended to elicit.

Dissociation which is achieved voluntarily was, however, no less unpleasant than the other kind, said the Chilean. It required one to do something profoundly counter-instinctive, which was to focus inwards rather than outwards towards the threwarer atening stimulus. It involved disciplining one’s self to ignore something that all the senses scream was not to be ignored at any cost.

The first thing Calvary did was turn the drill into a snake, a special type of snake that was deadly but could detect only moving prey. If he remained absolutely still, slowing his breathing so that not even his ribcage moved, it would be unaware of his whereabouts. Calvary concentrated on stillness.

The next thing he did was find a tunnel within himself. Calvary’s knowledge of human anatomy told him there were plenty of tunnels leading from the head to the rest of the body: the oesophagus, the trachea, the foramen magnum in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passed. He needed a narrow passage, one down which the snake would have difficulty following him. The foramen magnum was the narrowest and least flexible, so Calvary opted for it. He became a small huddled homunculus, perched on the bony lip of the orifice, aware of the approaching snake and aware that the only escape, terrifying though it seemed, was downwards. He made the homunculus that was himself lean back over the edge until he was past the point of no return, and drop into the void.

Black walls with strange starry silver streaks in them rushed past as he built up speed. Calvary felt as though he were hurtling through time as well as space, plummeting away from the present with its immediate concerns — the drill/snake, Prague, Nikola and the others, Gaines — and towards a place in the distant, primeval past, where his sole concern was to perpetuate his life, existence becoming an end in itself. Calvary saw, or imagined he saw, primitive life forms as he descended: bizarre deep-sea beings festooned with machine-like attachments, blurred jelly shapes skittering past shrieking through enormous fanged maws.

Then Calvary stopped falling.

There was no trauma involved, no jarring. He simply ceased to drop, and hung in utter stillness. Around him, and above and below, the darkness was absolute. Calvary created a soft cocoon of gauzy light around him, a fire substitute evoked by his species memory to keep predators at a distance. Within the sheath of light he concentrated on making himself smaller, curling himself up into a ball, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped tight around his legs. He remained like that for a long time.

After a while Calvary looked up. Far, far above there was a pinpoint in the blackness. He made his eyes able to see with telescopic vision. This allowed him to identify the pinpoint as a square window. Through the window he saw a tiny man, himself, tied to a chair. A woman and one other men stood off near a wall, watching him. Another man stood over the man in the chair and did something to him. As though through miles of ocean water, Calvary could hear shouting. He didn’t need to worry about hearing what was said; it would all be there in his memory when he eventually surfaced again. Calvary closed the window with his mind and retreated into his cocoon of light.

The cocoon took on, slowly, a tangible physical character, like some alien material, impossibly soft yet clinging to every exposed surface. It was comforting. It insinuated itself into his ears, his nose. Then it crept between his lips and slipped around his tongue, worming its unnatural substance over and under his teeth. Calvary gagged. It crawled down his throat, suffusing both his gullet and his windpipe. It was suffocating him. He couldn’. Ht clingit swallow, couldn’t breath.

Panic seared through him. Calvary began to rise, growing huge, barrelling back upwards towards the surface. A far-off part of him cried out, Not yet . He tried to listen to it, tried to stop and reverse and go back down and become small and safe, but there was no safety there and he couldn’t. Instead, Calvary focused on understanding what had been happening while he had been under, and on deciding what to do next.

He had been injured. The extent didn’t matter for now.

He had told them nothing about who was employing him, why he was after Gaines, or where Gaines was being held.

He had to tell them something, because they would know he was nearing the end of his usefulness to them.

It was time to come back and play his ace.

*

‘Where is Gaines.’

The drill’s whine was accompanied by the ripping noise of the tip of the bit breaking the skin. Calvary stiffened in his chair, his back arching as far as it could against the restraints.

Krupina watched his face. His eyes were half closed, his teeth bared and glistening like a feral beast’s.

‘Why are you trying to find him.’

A new sound, that of bone splintering. Through the cellar odour of stale wine and damp, the keener tang of burnt blood made her almost gag. The cellar was beneath one of the several safe houses Krupina kept across the city. They hadn’t used it before, certainly not for something like this.