It is, I’m sure, much preferable for you than the other option.”
“Which is?” Dick asked, but he already knew the answer.
“I’ll strangle you with my bare hands. Slowly, so that I see the life force ebb out of your body ounce by ounce. I’ll even stop and let you catch your breath once or twice, though it won’t feel like that.”
Dick realized at that moment that he had grossly misjudged Adrian Vandervoort from the moment they’d met.
He likes killing.
Adrian was a cold-blooded killer, who would stop at nothing to accomplish his objective.
“Which do you prefer?” He asked, running his fingers over a smooth, carved ivory elephant on his desk.
Dick thought long and hard. Nothing about his proposition made sense. He was hiding something. When he responded, his voice shook.
“Before I answer, why me?” Dick asked. The question had been burning in his mind since the moment that Adrian had recruited Dick to carry out Lord Alfred Gunter Katzmann’s body.
The blonde man shrugged his robust shoulders nonchalantly and took a sip from the crystal glass in his hand. Dick realized, with sickening certainty, that he hadn’t been chosen for anything. This whole ordeal had started because he had merely been in the wrong place at the right time.
If he’d just trusted the strange CIA agents who had shown up at the sewage treatment plant, if he hadn’t concerned himself with corpulent dead men floating in places they shouldn’t, none of this would have happened to him.
“Look, your friend has arrived.” Dick stole a glance at the door. One of Adrian’s hired thugs entered the room, carrying Sarah Nieminen. Her brown eyes were devoid of their usual sharpness as they scanned the office lazily.
She was there, but she wasn’t there. Like the lights were on but no-one was home.
“Sarah!” He yelled shrilly. “What… what have you done?”
“Don’t move,” Adrian said. Something in his voice demanded obedience. “Sarah Nieminen, CIA operative. This is why I wanted to meet with you. To thank you personally, my boy! The thorn in my paw. It’s all because of you, after all.”
Adrian lifted his glass of rum in a motion that said “cheers” and took a long pull.
“How?” Dick asked as ice froze his heart. It was unthinkable that he’d put anyone in danger.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Didn’t you ever wonder why you walked right out of prison? She came to save you,” Adrian laughed.
“Is she…”
“Dying? That is none of your concern, my boy. It doesn’t matter to you anymore. Or perhaps…” Adrian considered for a moment. “Yes, that shall do. A life for a life. Your freedom for her life. Now choose, you’re trying my patience.”
“I thought we were friends, once,” Dick said, trying to suppress the torrent of tears which threatened to burst out of his pale, blue watery eyes.
Adrian laughed. It was a cold and cruel sound that brought back memories of Delilah’s painful laughter in the champagne room of that strip club a lifetime ago.
“Friends? No.” Adrian finished the rum and stood up with the predatory grace of a big cat. “You were merely a pawn, my boy, and you played your parts admirably. Exactly as I wanted you to. I thank you for that; it certainly made my role that much easier.
“Friendship is a burden. Attaching yourself to another person is a weakness. Remember, at the end you’re alone. Always. Especially you, my boy.”
Adrian stood to his full height, crossed his arms and smirked. An animalistic grin stretched across his face as he bared white teeth.
“Take her away to the holding cell,” he commanded. “We’ll deal with her soon enough. Now, Dick Mitey, choose.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sarah came to her senses in a small, windowless gray room. It took a few moments for her to wake up and take in her surroundings fully.
Her tongue felt thick in her throat, her skin clammy. Her unfocused eyes registered a behemoth of a man sitting across the wooden table with sleeves of tattoos down each of his arms.
She blinked her brown eyes a few times and shook her head, trying to clear the fuzziness of the sedative from her head.
Sarah willed her eyes to focus on the man’s tattoos. Prominent in them was the symbol that she recognized as the crest of the Black Eagle.
How the FUCK could I have been so sloppy?
With the perfect hindsight of looking back at past events, she realized that she had gotten much too careless. She’d been too focused on Vandervoort that she hadn’t thoroughly thought anything through.
What was worst for her was knowing that, if Connor were still alive, he would have been furious with her.
She’d fucked up once again, and now she was paying the price for it.
The man across the table looked at her with his dumb bovine eyes. He grunted, looking her up and down and fixating on her breasts for a moment too long.
There was no spark of cleverness in his eyes, but there was a dull cruelness. Hired muscle, perhaps, but the tattoos denoted a deeper involvement in the organization. Sarah noted all of that and filed it away in her memory for later.
She’d heard stories in Chantilly of captured agents taking the dreaded cyanide capsule upon capture to avoid torture or to preserve information, but those rumors were derided mainly as false. She remembered as clear as day talking with Connor about that, following a class on how to resist torture techniques.
“If it ever got too bad, I’d bite my tongue off. It would hurt like hell for sure, but I’d probably bleed out pretty quickly. And if they managed to save me somehow, I wouldn’t have a tongue. Boom. Problem solved.”
It had always been so easy to talk about things like that back then. It was so hard to imagine getting into such a situation that it was easy to say, without fear, what you’d do.
Sarah pursed her lips and condemned that memory back to a small box in the back of her head. She had seen Dick in that tacky looking office talking to Adrian; she was almost sure of it.
Even in her doped up, semi-lucid state she had seen the fear in his eyes and the cruelty in Adrian’s.
Suicide was the cowardly way out. She wasn’t about to bite her tongue off and leave Dick to whatever cruel fate Adrian condemned him to. That was selfish and rash, and she wouldn’t consider it.
Not yet.
Instead, Sarah worked on the restraints tied to her arms. When they’d tied her arms behind her back with some zip-tie cabling, they had rushed, hadn’t tightened them all the way.
That had left her with a bit of wiggle room, which she was trying to expand upon. But that was just the beginning of her problems. If she somehow escaped from her makeshift handcuffs without the big ox in front of her noticing she would still have to find a way to subdue him.
That wouldn’t be much of an issue if she were able to strike first with the element of surprise. She did not doubt that she could if she was able to slip out and hit one of her captor’s sensitive areas.
The eyes, the throat, his testicles. All would succeed in disabling the bigger man long enough for her to escape if she connected.
If she were, somehow, to miss, she’d be in for a world of pain.
The large bearded man outweighed her by at least one hundred and twenty-five pounds, most of which appeared to be muscle. His eyes never left her, and she was feeling very uncomfortable in his gaze.
She wiggled the restraints slowly, carefully so to not alert her captor. They were almost over her palms now. A few more seconds and she’d be free.
“Stop,” the man said, lifting a gun and putting it on the table.
Sarah blinked her brown eyes and stopped wiggling. The man said a few harsh words in German, and another man entered the room. They exchange a few words in rapid-fire German before the new man walked over to her and not-so-gently pushed her back towards the table which divided her from the pot-bellied man sitting across from her.
“Ow!” Sarah yelled. Her breasts ached from
where they had abruptly hit the table. “That fucking hurts you small dicked pricks.”
The second man tightened the restraints until she could feel her heartbeat in her wrists and then left the room. It felt like her hands were swollen like a party balloon a few days after the celebration had ended.
Porky sat back and crossed his massive arms and stared at her, almost daring her to try something else.
Sarah thought again of Dick. She hoped that he was okay, somehow. She knew the truth, though, that Adrian in his cruelty wouldn’t be kind to him.
“Can I have a glass of water?” Sarah asked. The fog was beginning to lift from her mind. The man stared back at her impassively. The lean CIA operative knew that, at that moment, nothing she could say would provoke any reaction from her captor for better or for worse
“I’ve got an itch right here,” she said, indicating towards her chest with her chin. “Can you help me scratch it?”
Still no reaction.
Think Sarah, think! She willed herself. But no ideas came to her. She wanted to scream in frustration. So she did.
“Ahh!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Let me go you fucking pigs!”
Sarah didn’t see the backhand flash across the table, but she saw the stars explode in her eyes, and she tasted coppery blood in her mouth as the impact knocked her off the chair onto the ground.
“Fuck you,” she screamed in defiance. But no further strikes came from the dull-eyed man across the table. He looked at her with the same impassive expression as before.
Sarah tried to stand on wobbly legs, but she sank back down to the ground. Tears came unbidden to her eyes. She had never felt so helpless in her entire life.
She curled into a ball, pushing the chair out the way with her feet. It made an anguished noise as the wooden bottom scraped across the concrete floor as if it, too, were in pain.
But the fall had some unexpected benefits as well. Her arms, which before had been behind her back were now in a much more natural position in front of her – Sarah had slipped them under her legs as she was writhing in pain on the floor.
She made to stand again, feeling the cold concrete floor kiss the bruise growing on her face.
Suddenly, she jumped for the door and tried opening it with her hands, but she heard the click click click of the door handle as she attempted to turn it from side to side.
The door was locked.
Slowly she turned around and faced the man sitting at the table. He extended an arm as if to say “please, sit.” His face was as emotionless as the grave.
There’s no way out; she realized as a sinking feeling settled in her gut.
“I’m sorry, Dick,” she whispered, sitting back down at the table opposite the large, silent man. “I’m so sorry.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“I choose neither,” Dick Mitey gasped, “of course.”
“Splendid choice, my boy,” Adrian said, as a cruel smile spread across his face. “Always playing outside the box, I see. Now, which one of these do you like the best? The samurai swords? I should have known.”
The last time Dick had been in this office with the garish decorations had been the day he’d met Abelard Lochte.
He shivered.
The thin man reached up and snatched one of the swords off the wall with feline fluid grace.
“Here,” he said, offering the hilt of the blade to Dick. The tall, gaunt man took it reluctantly.
What is he thinking? Dick wondered.
“It’s heavier than I thought,” he said. Adrian went to his desk and took a Parliament from its carton. He considered briefly, then lit it up. The smoke eddied around his head for a moment before he blew it away.
“Heavier, indeed,” Adrian said, taking another drag from the cigarette. “I told you that I would let you hold it once, do you recall? Look at it. What do you think?”
The cold blue steel of the blade was highly burnished. Dick looked at his reflection, warped by the angle of the sword.
“It’s very nice,” Dick said, daunted by the deadly edge.
How many people have you killed with this blade?
“It’s tempered in an incredibly hot forge. Made from over a thousand pieces of steel all hammered together over and over again. For that weapon alone there were hundreds, if not thousands of hours spent to achieve perfection.”
Dick took an experimental swing. Even his clumsy arm succeeded in making the blade sing as it cut through the air.
“Why have you given this to me?” Dick wondered. “Aren’t you worried that, you know?”
“Come now, Dick, is that how you would treat an old friend?”
“We’re not friends,” Dick said. “I hate you.”
“Good,” Adrian said impassively, “you’re learning.”
“I am learning, yeah. A bit more every time I talk to you. I’m learning that people like you don’t care about people like me. And why should you? Maybe all along all you needed yourself was a friend, too. Have you ever thought about that?”
Adrian scoffed and turned away.
His back was exposed. He was vulnerable.
He’s taunting me. He wants me to swing!
“I know what you’re thinking,” Adrian said. “So why don’t you? It would be so easy. Yes, even for you.”
Dick hesitated, looking down at the sword.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” he admitted.
“Now that, that weakness of emotion. That is what separates us.” He turned around and punched him in the gut.
Dick Mitey doubled over gasping for air. The beautiful sword clanked harmlessly to the ground beside him. Dick could feel bile rising in his throat.
“I’ve wasted too much time on you already, my boy,” Adrian said, picking the sword up off the ground.” His intention was unmistakable, and he wielded the sword with practiced precision.
“But… you said… choose.” Dick huffed between gasps of air.
“When will you learn, Dick Mitey, that your choices don’t matter?” Adrian lifted the sword to his shoulders, ready to give the coup de grace.
As sometimes happens when you feel that your time on the planet was expiring, Dick Mitey’s life flashed before his eyes. He remembered his Mama, and his stripper neighbor, Delilah and Sarah Nieminen as well.
Dick had always thought that his life was one of mediocrity. He’d never been strong enough or smart enough or personable enough to make a difference in anything. He’d thought that he could live life on autopilot and expect things to turn out halfway decent. And yeah, for the most part, they did.
Life had a way of sorting itself out, after all.
But, Dick realized with the raw prospect of death looming something that he should have known a long time ago.
It’s not the cards that you’re dealt; it’s how you play them that matters.
Adrian himself had told that to Dick Mitey. Sometimes even assholes give good advice.
Dick did not want to die. Gathering all the strength in his long body, he catapulted himself towards Adrian’s knees.
“Argh,” cried out the blonde intelligence operative. Dick rolled away and got to his feet. He grabbed a heavy glass ashtray off the table and threw it at Adrian with as much force as he could muster.
It was a weak throw, but the weight of the projectile made it a force to be reckoned with. He was aiming for the head, but he wasn’t strong enough. It curved downwards in a sharp arc and hit Adrian in a sensitive part of his anatomy.
He dropped the sword and writhed around in overwhelming pain. Dick knew that he had precious little time to act. Already Adrian was trying to climb to his feet.
Adrian Vandervoort was indeed a tough son of a bitch.
Dick spotted Adrian’s silver revolver on the table. Reaching out, Dick lifted it, the weapon heavy and unfamiliar in his unsteady hands. He aimed and pulled the five-pound trigger with both of his index fingers.
The sound was deafening as fire erupted from the barrel o
f the gun. The recoil was powerful, as the weapon hit Dick in the middle of his forehead.
Adrian leaped up with the frenetic energy and desperation of a cornered dog.
I missed.
He roared, brandished the sword and charged at Dick, moving faster than Dick had ever thought possible.
Dick backpedaled and tripped over his own feet right before the massive oak desk. Adrian’s strike came down with terrible force, the sword singing as it cut through the air, embedding itself three inches into the wood.
Far From Ordinary Page 22
