by Glen Robins
He realized after he hung up just how presumptuous his request had been. Maybe Mahoney would brush it off as an off-base request from a haughty college student who had contributed nothing significant to building the case against Pho Nam Penh and, therefore did not deserve any sort of special treatment, let alone to be awarded with a “get out of jail free” card. In fact, Lukas realized, it was likely there was no official record of Lukas’s involvement with the NSA, which provided Mahoney perfect cover to ignore his message and duck out of the way of what could potentially become an inter-agency cat fight. He had read of such things.
So, he sat alone, motionless, with his thoughts and his grief and a million questions bouncing around in his highly developed brain while time flowed on the way it always does.
Nothing fit together. Nothing added up. Except for the one person he was not supposed to mention: Pho Nam Penh, the prime and only plausible suspect, according to Lukas’s way of thinking.
Being in a windowless room, Lukas didn’t know if it was daytime or night until a pretty young female officer, her shoes unscuffed and her new uniform still stiff, delivered dinner on a stainless-steel tray. Lukas learned from her that it was six o’clock in the evening. With no response from Mahoney and no sign of deliverance, he resigned himself to an overnight stay in the city jail, hoping only that he would not be put in general population.
He sat on the steel-framed platform that served as a bed, holding his face in his hands. As he tried to remain positive about his predicament, he could not help but worry about his parents, Theresa’s parents, and his reputation. How would something like this affect his future? Would the university revoke his degree? What was Mahoney doing? What would happen when his day in court came? How did he end up the prime suspect for the murder of the woman he was falling in love with? How did his phone call that taxi? Who was it the cab driver saw? The answers came easily: Penh. Penh and his money bought influence and favors. Penh and his technical know-how allowed him to mirror Lukas’s phone to set him up. But why? Was he on to Lukas and his spy gig for the NSA? Or was he just an easy target?
All of these questions with no firm answers felt like another dozen lead vests had been added to the pile on his chest.
Lukas picked at his dinner. His appetite was absent, but he knew he should eat something. The meat was tough and the potatoes lumpy, but he managed a few bites of each. The green beans were cold, and the uninviting fruit salad looked as if it had been dumped out of a can. Despite its inglorious presentation and total lack of culinary panache, the meal was a welcome distraction and curbed his growing anxiety, if even just temporarily.
At six-thirty, the kind-faced rookie officer returned to take his tray. There was a certain energy and charisma about her that caused Lukas to study her as she approached. The name tag said “Lynn Carlucci.” She was young, vivacious, and seemed to enjoy what she was doing. Her dark hair had been pulled back, twisted, and pinned on top of her head. The compassionate smile that sprang up so easily conjured up images of Theresa’s face when she listened to his worries and complaints. It was laced with both patience and empathy. As he observed the young policewoman, Lukas realized he would never have the chance to behold Theresa in all her beauty ever again. The finality of it triggered a new emotional avalanche. He turned away from the pretty officer and leaned his forehead on his forearms against the wall of his cell, holding back the emotions that threatened to sink him.
“Is it something I did?” she asked, a trace of shock and concern in her voice.
“No. It’s just that you remind me of someone.”
She stopped short, checking in all directions to make sure no one was listening, and lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “Do you mean your someone special?”
Lukas nodded.
“Yeah, I saw pictures of her. I can see some resemblance before ...” She halted.
Lukas picked up on something in her tone. “Before what?”
She checked around again. Whispering, she added, “I can’t imagine someone who seems as nice and respectable as you would do something like that to a beautiful girl like her.”
“What do you know that I don’t?”
The officer took a step toward the bars that separated her and Lukas. Her whispering was even softer now. Lukas had to strain to understand the words. “It’s just awful what they say you did.”
Lukas urged her on silently, his face showing the despair and desperation he felt.
“Her face was all carved up. The coroner says no amount of plastic surgery could ever have repaired the damage. And with all the heparin in her system, it’s likely she bled to death.”
Lukas bowed his head as anguish surged through him. “Heparin? As in the blood thinning drug?”
“Yes.” She bit her lip and cast an apologetic look with her eyes. “I said too much. I’m so sorry.” The officer turned on her heels and tip-toed away, carrying the tray down the hall, her shoes tapping an uneven, hurried rhythm as she went.
It felt like a gut punch from a heavyweight boxing champion. Dinner threatened to rise up and spill out onto the floor; then it did. Shortly after the violence of his gastrointestinal revolt subsided, the pretty officer reappeared and said, “Oh, dear,” then scurried back out of sight. She returned moments later with a janitor pushing a mop and bucket.
Once the mess was cleaned up, Lukas felt weak, so he laid down to rest. His rest was soon interrupted by two guards who escorted him to the infirmary. He waited in an exam room for a long time. When the doctor finally arrived, he did nothing more than a cursory exam before releasing him to the guards who walked him back to his cell.
Soon after his return, the pretty policewoman announced lights would go out at ten o’clock. A few minutes later, they shut off with a clang.
That’s when Lukas’s mind began to whir and hum, like a computer running a script without a command prompt. The video recall system in his memory banks immediately started playing back scenes from the recent past. Two in particular stuck and kept repeating. One was the first time Pho Nam Penh met Theresa and held her hand and kissed it repeatedly. At the time, Lukas brushed off the dark look in his eyes as he sized up Lukas afterward. The menace and malice of that dark look now haunted him.
The other experience he could not shake was when Penh said to him, “What does a woman like that see in a man like you?” When Lukas questioned what he meant by that comment, Penh said simply, “An intelligent woman of extraordinary beauty who comes from such an inauspicious background and has therefore never truly experienced the world…” The regal air with which he spoke, and the aristocratic verve of his British accent rubbed Lukas wrong then and made him cringe now. How did Penh know anything about Theresa’s blue-collar background? “She deserves someone who can open new possibilities for her. A woman of her incredible intelligence and talent, needs someone with means and the ambition to give her everything she could ever want.” The resolute look in his eyes when he said it should have been a red flag at the time. Lukas never allowed himself to imagine these two incidents could have led to something as sinister as what had transpired.
Lukas was just beginning to appreciate the depths of Penh’s depravity when two jailors appeared at the door of his cell. They were different from the ones before, but he figured that was because of a shift change. “Lukas Mueller? Come with us.”
Chapter Fourteen
Cambridge Police Department
Graduation Day
After being escorted down a long well-lit hallway with gleaming linoleum floors, sandwiched between thick policeman, each with an iron grip on an elbow, Lukas was guided into a bare bones rectangular room with a small metal table bolted to the floor. He was seated on a metal chair which was also bolted down and equipped with ankle straps and handcuffs. As the officers secured the restraints, Lukas felt the last glimmer of hope for freedom extinguish. A mirror adorned the wall to his left. He’d seen enough cop shows to know there was video equipment and observers back there, watch
ing and talking about him.
All of the energy seeped out of his body. A touch of claustrophobia set in as his chances of escape vanished. The march down the hallway, the stark room, and the shackles all combined to drive home Lukas’ powerlessness, leaving him to feel doomed and utterly disheartened—the intended result. It was enough to trigger a break down, but he couldn’t allow that. Lukas figured a breakdown would be the worst possible response, so he just sat still and fought back the panic, absorbing the hollowness and loneliness of the moment. He tried to engage the recesses of his mind, hoping an intelligent resolution to his situation would bubble to the surface. Nothing came. He sat there without a thought in his head, only a vision. The vision was from the movie “The Abyss.” In a nightmare scenario, Ed Harris’s character is thousands of feet underwater and sinking out of control into sheer blackness. Having lost the ability to arrest his descent, he eventually reached a shelf in the unknowable depths of the sea. The character realizes there is no way to ascend back to the underwater base where he started, so he lies still, awaiting his doom. That scene mirrored Lukas’s state of mind at that moment.
It was an uncomfortable and unprecedented experience for him.
Lukas felt keenly the gaze of those behind the glass. He wondered what they were thinking, but more importantly, he wondered how he could convince them that he was innocent. The longer he remained chained to the hard metal chair, the more uncomfortable he became. His discomfort would become his interrogator’s advantage. This was how they broke down suspects and made innocent people confess to crimes they had not committed. That would not happen to him, he vowed. He was stronger of mind than that. His will and determination had to rise to meet the challenge.
In his desperation to come up with a solution, Lukas decided he would resort to the only defense he had. If need be, he would divulge every shred of intelligence he had collected for the NSA about Pho Nam Penh without compunction. Mahoney had been a no-show, having abandoned him in this jail in his time of need. What else would he expect Lukas to do? Hold a secret to help the NSA rather than divulging it to save himself? That would be preposterous.
The story was all arranged in his mind, neatly catalogued and chronological. He would walk the police detective through each phase of his infiltration into Penh’s social club, starting with his freshman year. There were plenty of details about the weird episodes and demonic looks he had witnessed. His insider information into the workings of the club and the mysterious financing of their high-tech projects would surely be enough to cast suspicion on Penh and send them looking for the man he knew was responsible for the heinous crimes against his beloved sweetheart. He would also bring Harold Fung’s case into play. Though he doubted this would result in his release from prison any time soon, it was better than remaining a silent victim.
After rehearsing the entire tale in his head twice, Lukas was sure enough time had expired for his interrogator to step in and start the process. His legs were going numb and his shoulders ached from lack of mobility. His fingers and toes were growing cold as well.
From inside the room, Lukas could hear nothing. It was completely silent, which would have rattled him had he not been so focused on practicing his speech.
A metallic click and scrape caught his attention. It was the sound of a key being inserted into the door lock and the chamber turning. Then the doorknob rattled, and the hinges creaked. A thud followed as the door hit the adjacent wall. The clatter of wheels rolling across linoleum came next and a whispered command. “Hurry. Let’s make this quick. Go. Go. Go.”
The door slammed shut and three men appeared before Lukas wearing emergency medical technician garb. One of them moved to the straps at his ankles. Looking Lukas in the eye, he said, pointing at Lukas’s lower leg, “No funny business or I’ll break it. You got that?”
Lukas was too stunned to speak and too numb to move, so he gave a nod. The man quickly unlocked the cuffs and arm restraints while the other two positioned a gurney next to his chair. The one working on the locks said, looking at the one behind Lukas, “Ready? On three. One. Two…”
The second man grabbed Lukas under the armpits while the first one lifted him by the ankles. The two men hoisted Lukas out of the chair and onto the gurney while the third man secured him on the rolling bed with straps across his knees, chest, wrists, and ankles. Then the man covered him with a sheet. Before covering his face, he said, “No sound, OK? You’re dead. You either act dead now or you will be dead in a matter of seconds. Got it?” He showed Lukas a syringe. He placed it in a breast pocket and patted the pocket as he flashed a fiendish grin.
Lukas, confused at what was going on, could only nod his head in agreement.
“Good. This will all be over in two minutes. Just don’t move a muscle.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cambridge Police Department
Graduation Day
Finding himself once again immobilized, this time with the threat of death hanging over him, Lukas fought back the urge to scream for help. But the syringe with its mysterious contents was not far away. He was being transported somewhere in a hurry. He sensed that it was very late at night and that the hallways he was being wheeled through were empty. Except for the clattering of the gurney’s wheels, the place was void of sound. No voices, no stirring, no computer keyboards being tapped.
The first fear that popped into his mind was that this escape had been engineered by Pho Nam Penh and that these men had brutally slain every peace officer in the building and were lighting him away to an even more horrifying nightmare.
But he was helpless to do anything.
Soon enough, he heard the familiar sound of an elevator door opening. His bed was carefully maneuvered into the tight space and the three men loaded in with it. Down they went in complete silence. When the door opened, the throaty purr of a powerful V8 engine idling just a few feet away greeted Lukas’s ears. Doors were flung open and his gurney was shuttled into the back of the waiting conveyance. The rear doors were slammed shut first, after two of the men scurried in after the gurney and took up positions on either side. Then two front doors were closed in quick succession before the engine roared and the van or ambulance or whatever it was lurched forward, racing out of the garage and into the unknown. The sheet was still draped over Lukas’s face and no one had yet given him permission to speak or to move, so he lay motionless and tried to ascertain where they were headed. A right turn out of the parking garage onto Cambridge Street, he guessed. Followed by another right at the end of the block told him they were heading north. After several more turns, Lukas had lost track of the direction of travel and any sense of where they might be. He suspected that was done on purpose to confuse him.
No one spoke and no one removed the sheet from his face. They drove through the city in silence until they were out on an open highway traveling at a high rate of speed. Eventually, the droning of the engine and the thrumming of the tires as they rolled across the dry asphalt conspired to lull Lukas into a deep sleep. Being exhausted from the mental and emotional strain of the most taxing week of his life, he succumbed rather easily.
It was still dark outside when the sound changed, waking Lukas from his slumber. The engine had slowed, and the noise of the tires had changed to the crunch of gravel under their tread. Then there was the screeching of branches scraping along the sides and top of the van. After a few minutes of jouncing and jarring through ruts and divots and sloshing through puddles, the van climbed a long hill, angled to the right, then came to a stop.
Lukas was unloaded. The air was chill, and he could tell even through the sheet that it was pitch black outside. Crickets chirped and bullfrogs bellowed in the middle distance and the distinctive freshness of country air met his olfactories. The wheels of the gurney struggled to roll properly across the soft, bumpy track he was being pushed along. All four men, presumably the driver and his three kidnappers, worked together to heave and steer the bed up another incline. Soon the whole bed was bein
g lifted and carried up a series of wooden steps. Lukas counted five of them. The wheels clattered against the wooden planks of what he supposed to be a front porch before a door opened and he was pushed into a room where the air was considerably warmer and more stagnant. There was, however, the smell of warm coffee wafting in from an adjacent room.
A sense of dread had begun to take hold. He was sure he would hear Penh’s familiar aristocratic voice any moment. There would certainly be an air of victory in his tone along with plenty of menace. Lukas gulped, steeling his resolve and summoning his courage.
The four men moved in concert around his bed, securing the locks on the wheels and moving items around the room. It sounded to Lukas like they were sliding furniture towards the walls, opening up space around him.
A voice from another room, perhaps down a hallway, beckoned the men and they obeyed, retreating from the space and leaving Lukas alone with his imagination. He couldn’t help but fear what was to come. Knowing Penh, there would be insults hurled at him for being naïve and starry-eyed. The invectives would be followed by a rousing soliloquy about the evils of the society in which Lukas had been raised. This would be followed by a summation of all the good things Penh had done and would soon do with his superior intellect and means. Perhaps Lukas would be recruited; perhaps he would be killed and buried in the forest outside. Or, more likely, he would be blackmailed into joining the cause. It was anyone’s guess. All he knew was that the dark forebodings threatened to consume him. He had to start thinking through his approach.
Behind him, the front door opened, and several sets of foot falls shuffled first through the doorway, then along the boards of the porch and down the steps. He heard them fade and realized what was happening. All witnesses were being removed from the scene. He was being left alone with either the mastermind or some villainous underling who would practice his torture craft on a newly minted college grad that only a few people would ever miss.
