Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

“There he is!” the male voice cheered as Sam woke up on the floor of the aisle where they had put him to perform emergency resuscitation. His face was cold and damp under Nina's gentle hand, and a middle-aged Indian man stood over him, smiling.

“Thank you so much, doctor!” Nina smiled up at the Indian man. She looked down at Sam. “Honey, how are you feeling?”

“Like I’m drowning,” Sam managed to wheeze as he felt the heat dissipate from his eyeballs. “What happened?”

“Don't worry about that now, okay?” she soothed him, looking very relieved and happy to see him. He propped himself up to sit, annoyed about the gawking audience, but he could not lash out at them for pointing their attention to such a spectacle, could he?

“My God, I feel like I have swallowed a gallon of water in one go,” he whined as Nina helped him to his seat.

“That might be my fault, Sam,” Nina admitted. “I kind of… threw water in your face again. It seems to work for waking you up.”

Wiping his face, Sam stared at her. “Not if it drowns me!”

“It was nowhere near your mouth,” she scoffed. “I’m not stupid.”

Sam took a deep breath and decided not to argue for now. Nina's big dark eyes stayed on him as if she was trying to figure out what he was thinking. And she was, in fact, wondering just that, but she allowed him a few minutes to recover from his seizure. What the other passengers had heard him mutter had been only the unintelligible gibberish of a man in the throes of a seizure for them, but Nina had understood the words all too well. It unsettled her immensely, yet she had to give Sam a moment before she started prying — if he even would remember what he had seen while under.

“Do you remember what you saw?” she asked inadvertently, the victim of her own impatience. Sam looked at her, looking surprised at first. After some thought, he opened his mouth to speak but remained mute until he could articulate. In truth, he recalled every detail of the revelation this time, far better than when Dr. Helberg had hypnotized him. Not wanting to cause Nina any more worry, he toned down his response a bit.

“I saw that well again. And this time the sky and ground was not yellow, but red. Oh, and this time, there were no people crowding me either “ he reported in his most nonchalant tone.

“That’s it?” she asked, knowing that he was omitting most of it.

“Aye, basically,” he answered. After a long pause, he casually told Nina, “I think we should follow your hunch about Purdue.”

“Why?” she asked. Nina knew that Sam had seen something because he had said Purdue's name when he had been unconscious, but for now, she was playing dumb.

“I just think you have a valid reason to probe into his whereabouts. The whole thing smells like trouble to me,” he said.

“Good. I'm glad you finally understand the urgency. Maybe now you will stop telling me to relax,” she delivered her short sermon from the Gospel of I-told-you-so. Nina shifted in her seat just as the announcement sounded through the aircraft intercom that they were about to land. It had been an unpleasant and long flight, and Sam hoped that Purdue was still alive.

Outside the airport building, they decided to get some early dinner before returning to Sam's apartment on the Southside.

“I need to call Purdue's pilot. Just give me a minute before you get a taxi, alright?” Nina told Sam. He nodded and proceeded to place two of his cigarettes between his lips to light. Sam did a splendid job of hiding his apprehension from Nina. She was walking in circles around him while speaking to the pilot, and he casually handed her one of the fags when she passed in front of him.

While sucking on his cigarette and appearing to stare into the setting sun just above the skyline of Edinburgh, Sam went over the events in his vision in his memory, trying to find clues where Purdue could be held. In the background, he heard Nina's voice ebb and flow in emotion with every morsel of information she received over the phone. Depending on what they would get from Purdue's pilot, Sam intended to start at the very spot Purdue had last been seen.

It felt good to have a smoke again after hours of abstaining. Even the horrible sensation of drowning he had endured earlier was not enough to deter him from inhaling the therapeutic poison. Nina slipped her phone into her bag, her cigarette pursed between her lips. She looked completely flustered as she walked briskly toward him.

“Get us a taxi,” she said. “We need to get to the German Consulate before they close.”

Muscle spasms prevented Purdue from using his arms to stay afloat, threatening to let him sink below the surface of the water. He had been swimming for several hours in the cold water of the cylindrical tank, suffering from severe sleep deprivation and slowing reflexes.

‘Another sadistic Nazi torture?' he thought. ‘Please God, just let me die quickly. I can't go on much longer.'

Those thoughts were not exaggerated or born from self-pity, but a rather accurate self-assessment. His body had been starved, depleted of all nutrients and forced into survival exertion. Only one thing had changed since the chamber had been illuminated two hours before. The color of the water had turned to a sickening yellow hue that was Purdue's overstrained senses perceived as urine.

“Get me out!” he had been screaming several times through intervals of absolute calm. His voice was hoarse and weak, quivering from the cold that was seeping into his bones. Although the water had stopped pouring in a while back, he was still in danger of drowning if he stopped kicking his legs. Under his blistered feet lay at least 15 feet of water-filled cylinder. He wouldn't be able to stand when his limbs grew too weary. He simply had no choice but to keep going or else he would surely die a terrible death.

Through the water, Purdue noticed a pulse every minute. It caused his body to jerk when it happened, but it did not hurt him, leading him to the conclusion that it was a low-current jolt meant to keep his synapses firing. Even in his delirious state, he found it quite peculiar. If they wanted to electrocute him, they could easily have done it already. Perhaps, he thought, they wanted to torture him with by sending an electrical current through the water but misjudged the voltage.

Warped visions entered his weary mind. His brain was barely capable of keeping his limbs moving now, exhausted from lack of sleep and nourishment.

‘Don't stop swimming,' he kept urging his brain, not certain if he was speaking out loud or if the voice he was hearing was coming from inside his mind. When he looked down, he was horrified to see a nest of writhing squid-like creatures in the water below him. Screaming in fear of their appetite he tried to pull himself up the slippery glass of the basin, but without anything to hold on to, there was no escape.

One tentacle reached up to him, causing a wave of hysteria in the billionaire. He could feel the rubbery squidgy appendage curl around his leg before it pulled him down into the depth of the cylindrical tank. Water filled his lungs and his chest burned as he looked up to the surface one last time. Looking down to what was awaiting him was simply too horrifying.

‘Of all the deaths I imagined for myself, I would never have thought I'd end like this! How alpha fleece going ashes,' his confused mind was struggling to think straight. Lost and scared to death, Purdue gave up on thinking, on formulating, and even on paddling. His heavy limp body sank to the bottom of the tank while his open eyes saw nothing but the yellow water when the pulse shot through him one more time.