Cliff Ryder - Out of Time

“What am I going to do with you?” Dayne asked. “I wonder who sent you? I wonder why? I wonder what it is you know about our work that would make you risk your life to destroy it?”

“You’ll never know,” Alex spoke through dry, chapping lips.

Dayne’s expression changed for the first time.

The man raised a single eyebrow and something sparkled in his eyes. Then it was gone, the eyebrow settled and Dayne broke eye contact. He brought his hand up and began examining his fingernails, pointedly avoiding looking at his prisoner. He turned to a short bench behind him and, as though seeing it for the first time, stepped over to examine its contents.

“I’ve learned a few things from years of leading men and asking questions,” Dayne said. His voice had softened, but somehow the shift was sinister rather than comforting. “I have learned that there are never questions you can’t get an answer to. I have learned, as well, that it isn’t always necessary to get an answer in so many words to find out what you need to know. Do you know another thing I’ve learned?”

Dayne turned. His expression had darkened. His face was flushed, and his brows knotted like lightning bolts ready to strike. Dayne seemed to sway slightly, and the motion was mildly hypnotic. Alex didn’t like breaking eye contact, but he did. He glanced toward the wall, away from the bright light.

Dayne stepped closer. He reached behind the holster on his belt, and Alex heard a snap released.

A moment later, Dayne had pulled free a long, slender blade. It gleamed where the light hit it.

Alex had used a similar blade before. He had used it on fishing expeditions for filleting fish. The blade could strip off very thin strips of flesh with almost no effort. Such knives were razor sharp and could reach bone with only a slight effort on the part of the wielder. Very slowly he swallowed. He had to clear the lump from his throat, but he was still unwilling to give Dayne the reaction he sought, despite the twitch that rippled through his muscles at the sight of the cold, honed steel.

“You are suffering from a misunderstanding,”

Dayne said. “You are assuming that I need information that you possess, and that my purpose here is to question you, grill you until you break and hand over your secrets. I would imagine you expect me to use drugs, torture, to pin your eyes open and shine this light directly into them until the retinas burn, and to employ other such tactics.

“I won’t lie to you. I would enjoy all of those things very much. I have spent a lot of hours studying the use of various tools on the human anatomy, but there are still breaks in my research, and I’d like nothing better than to fill those in.

Still, though you denied me information before I even asked for it, showing your fear, I have no questions for you. Instead, I have lessons to teach.

“The first is, you never come into another man’s house uninvited unless you are willing to pay the price. As you see, I am still employed, but you have caused me a great deal of anxiety and stress, and I intend to return these to you in kind. I will find out everything that I need to know about you, one way or another, but I find that any sort of conversation including questions and answers is best left until a much later point. It is better to establish guidelines up front, to put things in their proper context.”

Alex tried not to listen to what the man was saying. He thought about Brin. He thought about Savannah. He felt the power in Dayne’s soft, sibilant voice, and fought against its influence. He had to keep his mind clear. There were things that didn’t make sense, and he knew he had a short amount of time to put them in order before whatever Dayne had planned was put into action.

It made no sense that the man wasn’t more concerned about the explosives. It made no sense that he had made no attempt whatsoever to identify Alex, or to find out about the force behind him. Everything about this setup screamed at Alex to pay attention to some detail he couldn’t quite put a finger on.

Dayne rolled the hilt of his blade slowly over the palm of his hand and into the other, then back, watching the glitter of the blade as it rolled. He seemed to be lost in thought, as if something more important had suddenly occupied his thoughts and he was considering it carefully. Alex felt sweat bead on his forehead and dampen his underarms.

His pulse pounded through his poorly bandaged shoulder. He wanted to distract Dayne, to bring him back to the moment and ground the threat, but he could think of nothing to say that would not convey the wrong message, and he was fairly certain that Dayne was waiting for just such a chink in his armor.

“I’ll be up front with you,” Dayne explained. “I find it inefficient and a waste of my time to question a prisoner in the first session we spend together. There are levels of pain, and one can achieve results with a variety of threats, but the truth is that a threat is just that. Until there is understanding, it is possible to be brave in the face of a threat. I like to erase that inadequacy in the process up front.”

He stepped forward and reached out. Alex felt a soft tear, and Dayne held a bloodied strip of bandage in his hand.

“You are a fortunate man,” Dayne said. “The bullet only nicked your temple. It’s a nasty cut, but I don’t imagine that I have to explain to you what a 9 mm slug would have done to your brain had it been a more direct hit. It is fortunate for both of us that you survived. I know you don’t believe this, but it is true.”

Without warning, Dayne gripped Alex suddenly by his hair. The blade shot out, and Alex watched in horror as a thin slice of his scalp—a slice that showed a furrowed slot in the middle that could only have been the bullet wound, dropped past his eyes to the floor. Dayne’s smile widened. He leaned and skewered the bit of flesh, holding it up to inspect it. Alex’s stomach churned, but he bit back the bile. This new pain was sharp and hot. It sharpened his senses further and helped him focus.

“Now I see I have your attention,” Dayne said, flicking the bit of scalp off of his blade with one finger. “It is time to begin.” He sheathed the blade in a sudden, quick motion and turned back to the workbench. He rummaged through the tools, lifting some, examining them and replacing them, fondling others. When he turned back he held a large soldering iron in one hand. In the other he held the open end of an extension cord. Alex swallowed again and struggled to free himself. The pain that shot through his hands and his legs drove him near the edge, and he embraced the sensation.

As Dayne approached slowly, testing the tip of the soldering iron with the tip of his finger, Alex twisted his wrists cruelly.

Pain shot up his arms. His stomach churned with nausea and he twisted harder. It was a crazy ploy to gain time, but it was all he had. There was a white-hot flash deep in his mind, and then, again, he dropped into blackness.

Brin glanced up, saw that it was time to close the lab and sighed with relief. Never one to watch the clock, she’d found herself glancing up compulsively every few minutes if she didn’t check the urge. She couldn’t access the e-mail site where Alex might reply to her through the firewalls and security of MRIS without setting off flags, and she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself, or her problem, until she had a better handle on it.

Thankfully, the work she was preparing was tedious but not taxing. The research had been done, and it had been done well. Case studies lined up perfectly with the numbers and graphics. The reports on the results were spectacular. In fact, the one thing that kept dragging her back to it when she started worrying too much about Alex was the possibility that this technology—these nanoagents—might even lead her to a cure in time to help the man she loved.