Gregg Loomis - The Pegasus Secret

But it felt too good to complain.

Then everything went black.

Location unknown

Time unknown

When he regained consciousness, Lang had no idea how long he had been out or where he was.

Of course, they wouldn't have wanted him to know, not if they were planning extensive questioning. They were succeeding. All he knew was that he was lying in an unusually uncomfortable bed, staring up at what appeared to be an old-fashioned canopy. And that his shoulder still hurt like hell where his arm had been wrenched upwards on the hillside.

Lang's Agency training taught total disorientation as an effective interrogation tool. Keeping a captive ignorant of day or night, the date or the hour upsets the internal clock just like jet lag. Jet lag, though, goes away once the body accepts the new schedule. To question someone effectively, you make sure nothing is done at the same time twice. Likewise, not letting the subject know where he is may open up all sort of anxieties the questioner can put to use.

Also the lights. You keep the subject in a place without windows and at the same light level twenty-four hours a day. Intensely bright light if sleep deprivation is part of the plan; low light, too dim to see well, if not.

The talk about truth serum had been just that, talk. Outside of some old spy novels, drugs are usually little help. Sodium pentothal, scopolamine, narcotics like that, inhibit the brain's ability to fabricate, to make up lies, but they also are risky. Too little and you still get lies; too much and the subject is either sound asleep or dead. Whatever the drug makes them babble is going to be incomprehensible.

Plain old-fashioned torture was less than reliable, too. It worked for confessions for the same reason it doesn't work to get information: a man will tell any lie just to stop the pain. Lang very much hoped the Templars realized that.

Lang had been taught that modern interrogation consists of simply wearing your subject down, breaking his will. A less polite word for it is a species of brainwashing.

Lang slid out of bed to the floor, some three or four feet down, and walked the perimeter of the small room. The bowed exterior wall made him curious as to the outside appearance of the building. The single window was shuttered and, no doubt, barred on the outside. The only door was fitted with a intricately cast brass lock plate. When he bent over, closed an eye and squinted through the keyhole, he saw nothing. The key had been left in the outside of the lock.

The dim overhead light cast few shadows because, other than Lang and the bed, there was nothing in the room. No pictures on the walls, no window treatment, no rug, nothing. Had it not been for the hand-pegged hard wood floor and the ornate and undoubtedly expensive wall paper, he could have been in a jail cell.

Except… He looked for a door he might have missed, an entrance to a toilet. There was none. Bending over, he saw the porcelain jar under the bed. At least he wasn't going to be the guy that had to deal with emptying that. At this point any good news was welcomed.

On his second lap around the room, he counted the pegs in the floor. Keeping the mind occupied was the best defense against disorientation.

Sixty-two pegs later, a key scratched in the lock and Lang raced for the bed, lay down and pretended he was still out cold.

"Come now, Mr. Reilly," an all too familiar voice said. "The sedative we gave you has worn off some time ago. Playing possum, as I believe you Americans call it, will do you no good."

Lang opened his eyes and gawked in surprise. He could have gone back in time. Silver Hair stood in the doorway wearing a suit of chain mail over which was a white surcoat open at the sides with a red Maltese cross emblazoned on the front. Pointed shoes of steel covered his feet.

"Don't tell me," Lang said. "You're on your way to ask the wizard for a heart."

The Templar looked at Lang blankly. "I beg your pardon?" Then he scowled. "I gather you are referring to my attire," he said stiffly. "Templars dress traditionally when in the temple."

Temple? Had Lang been kidnapped by mad Shriners?

He wished.

Silver Hair stepped aside. Behind him was another man, this one in what looked like a monk's cassock. Bare ankles were visible above the flip-flops. He was holding a plate from which came the unmistakable aroma of food. Lang suddenly remembered he hadn't eaten since breakfast of whatever day it was that he had been taken prisoner.

Silver Hair said, "You are hungry, no doubt. The cellarer had something brought up from the refectory. It is humble fare, a local dish of salt cod, but you will find it nourishing."

The man in the monk's outfit set a wooden platter on the bed. It smelled even better. White meat swimming in vegetables.

"Go ahead, eat," Silver Hair entreated. Lang looked from him to the man who had served me. "Got a fork?"

Silver Hair shook his head. "The fork was not used until the sixteenth century. We use only the knife, as did our predecessors. We try to eschew the vanities of the modern world."

That explained the chamber pot. "Okay," Lang said, eyes on the wooden trencher with the wonderful fragrance, "we won't tell Miss Manners." The man in the brown habit set the food in front of Lang.

"Afraid you'll have to do the best you can without eating implements, Mr. Reilly," Silver Hair said. "I think you can understand our reluctance to furnish you a knife."

Lang was hungry enough not to care. He scooped up a piece of the fish in his fingers and plopped it into his mouth. He hadn't eaten many things that had tasted so good. He was nearly finished as Sliver Hair and his companion backed out of the room.

"Until later, then," he said as the door closed.

A second later the lock clicked.

Lang was draining the liquid from the platter when the room began to spin. The outlines of the corners got fuzzy and the planks in the floor lost definition. His head was suddenly too heavy to hold up. They had seasoned dinner with something besides herbs.

But why, Lang wondered as his world again grew dim. They could hardly interrogate him if he was asleep.

And he was too sleepy to care.

Location unknown

Time unknown

Only his still-full stomach told Lang he had not been unconscious more than a few hours. A bright light was shining in his eyes. Although awake, he was lethargic, and his head weighed a ton.

"Back with us, I see," said a voice from behind the light. "Time for you to answer a question or two." Lang struggled to get up to a sitting position. "I get to make one phone call before my final answer, right?" There was no response. Clearly Silver Hair had better things to do than watch American TV.

"I want to know two things, Mr. Reilly: How did you find our secret and to whom did you send that letter?" "Right," Lang said. "And as soon as I tell you, I walk out of here. Wherever 'here' is."

"Something can be arranged, I'm sure."

Something like a bullet in the back of the head.

But Lang said, "I've got a few questions of my own. Like, if you wanted to keep the secret of Blanchefort, why have a virtual map of it painted by that guy Poussin?"

"You test my patience, Mr. Reilly, but I will give you an answer as a demonstration of our good faith. We have always faced a choice: risk committing the secret to writing or risk it being lost if enough of our members succumb to any number of unpleasant possibilities. Centuries ago, plague; today mass destruction by heathen terrorists the

West does not have the fortitude to destroy first. It was not unreasonable, then, in Poussin's time, the first half of the seventeenth century, to want some sort of record as to where our… discovery might be found. Along with the oral parts of our initiation rites, a picture would serve to find the precise location."