Clive Cussler - Plague Ship

As he became more aware, he realized he was lying on a bed. There were no sheets or pillows, and the mattress was rough under his shoulders. Pretending he was still asleep, he shifted slightly. At least they had left him the dignity of his boxer shorts, although he could feel the cold caress of steel around his ankles and wrists.

It came back to him in a rush. Zelimir Kovac, Eddie’s escape, and the sickly sweet smell of the rag being clamped over his nose and mouth. The headache was a result of being drugged. And then the other horror hit him like a slap to the face, and he involuntarily gasped.

He was back in a van, driving away from their hotel. Kovac had given him only enough narcotic to make him compliant, like a drunk who needs to be led away from a party. In the van Max was laid out in the back. He was dimly aware of other figures. Kyle? Adam Jenner? He couldn’t tell.

Kovac had run a wand over his body, like an airport metal detector, and when it chimed over Max’s leg Kovac sliced open his pants with a boot knife. It took him only a second to find the scar, and he unceremoniously rammed the blade into Max’s flesh. Even under mild anesthesia, the pain had been a molten wire driven into his body. He screamed into the gag tied around his mouth, and tried to thrash away from the agony, but someone had pressed his shoulders to the van’s floor.

Kovac twisted the knife, opening the wound so when he withdrew the blade he could stick his fingers into Max’s flesh. Blood gushed from the cut. Max strained against the pain, fighting it as though he stood a chance. Kovac continued to probe the wound, uncaring that he wasn’t wearing gloves and that blood had soaked his shirtsleeve.

“Ah,” he said at last, and withdrew his hand.

The transdermal transponder was roughly the size and shape of a digital watch. Kovac held it up so that Max, staring goggle-eyed, could see it. The Serb then dropped it to the floor and smashed it repeatedly with the butt of his pistol until nothing remained but bits of plastic and ruined electronics.

He then slid a hypodermic needle into Max’s arm, whispering, “I could have waited for this drug to take effect, but where is the fun in that?”

It was the last thing Max remembered until just now, coming awake.

He had no idea where he was or how long he’d been held captive. He wanted to move, to massage his temples and check his leg, but he was sure he was being watched, and he doubted there would be that much play in his manacles. There wasn’t anyone in the room. He’d been awake long enough to hear or sense them, even with his eyes closed. That didn’t mean cameras weren’t mounted on walls and microphones planted nearby. He wanted to wait for as long as possible before alerting his captors to his consciousness and use that time to let more of the narcotics work their way out of his system. If he was going to withstand what he knew was coming, he needed to be as fresh as possible.

An hour passed—or it might have been ten minutes—Max wasn’t sure. He had lost all concept of time.

He knew that time deprivation, the inability to set the body’s internal clock, was an essential tool in the interrogator’s arsenal, so he purposefully forced himself to lose all conscious awarness of its passage. A prisoner could be driven over the edge trying to determine if it was night or day, noon or midnight, and by willing away that natural need Max took away his captor’s ability to torture him with it.

That had never been a problem in Vietnam. The cages and boxes they kept him and his fellow prisoners in were rickety enough to always allow at least a sliver of light to enter. But Max kept apprised of interrogation techniques as part of his job, and he knew time deprivation was effective only if the captors let it remain a factor in their thinking.

As for whatever else they had in store, he would just have to wait and see.

A heavy lock was opened nearby. Max hadn’t heard anyone approach, so he knew the door had to be thick. The room, then, was most likely designed as a jail cell and not something temporary that had been converted to hold him. That the Responsivists had such a cell, ready and waiting, did not bode well.

The door creaked open with a screech of rusted metal. Either the hinges weren’t often used or the cell was located in a humid climate or possibly underground. He didn’t move a muscle, as he listened to the sound of two separate and distinct pairs of feet approaching the bed. One had a heavier tread than the other, but the latter was definitely male. Kovac and an accomplice?

“He should have come around by now,” Zelimir Kovac said.

“He’s a big man, so he should have,” another man agreed. He had an American accent. “But everyone is different.”

Kovac lightly slapped Max’s cheek. Max made a mewling sound, as if he were dimly aware of the contact but was too far under to care.

“It has been twenty-four hours,” the Serbian killer said. “If he doesn’t wake in an hour, I will inject him with a stimulant.”

“And risk cardiac arrest?”

Max had slightly elevated blood pressure. He would make damned sure he’d be awake the next time they entered the room.

“Mr. Severance will be here soon. We need to know what conversations took place between this man and his son. They kept him sedated the entire time they had him. Who knows what he could have told them under the influence of drugs?”

They needed information quickly, Max thought. Contrary to popular belief, proper interrogation takes weeks and oftentimes months. The only remotely effective way to extract information quickly was the application of pain, tremendous amounts of pain. A victim in that circumstance will tell the interrogator anything he wants to hear. It was the interrogator’s job to not reveal his intentions so the prisoner had no choice but to tell the absolute truth.

Max had one hour to figure out what Kovac wanted to hear, because there was no way in hell he would ever tell the bastard the truth.

KEVIN NIXON FELT SICK to his stomach as he stepped past the barricade and onto the movie set.

Being there, he was breaking a vow to his dead sister. He could only hope, given the circumstances, that she would forgive him. This part of Donna Sky’s new movie was being filmed in an old warehouse left to decay after German reunification. The building reminded Kevin a little of the Oregon , only here the rust was real. A half-dozen semitrailers, catering trucks, scaffolding, dolly cranes for cameras, and narrow-gauge railroad tracks for what were called tracking shots were spread across the acres of parking lot. Men and women buzzed around the set, moving at double time, because, in the movie business, time quite literally is money. Nixon judged by what he saw that the film’s producers were spending about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day here.

To him, the organized chaos of a big-budget motion picture was familiar but now, at the same time, utterly alien.

A guard, wearing a uniform but without a weapon, was about to approach when a voice called out from across the lot, “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

Gwen Russell breezed past the security officer and hugged Nixon tightly, burying her face in his thick beard after kissing both cheeks. Always a bundle of energy, she quickly broke the embrace and regarded him.

“You look fantastic,” she said at last.

“I finally admitted that no diet on earth was helping, so I had the stomach bypass surgery two years ago.” In his lifelong battle with his weight, it had been a desperation play that had paid off. Before the operation, Kevin hadn’t seen the underside of two hundred and twenty since college. Now he weighed a respectable one eighty-five, which he carried on a solid frame.