King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  But the little search-creature just wouldn’t quit. Down he went, under the morass and into its center and back again, jiggity-jog.

  Ogawa-no-jutsu.

  All right already! Give it a rest and give me a rest, you little bastard! Take a break. Smoke if you got ’em, and you don’t have to stay awake on my account. Don’t call me, I’ll never call you.

  But it was no good, and by the time the elevator door opened again and we moved into another hallway—higher in the building, I thought; the elevator has seemed to be going up—my little friend had cleared away a little circle in an unnoticed corner of the mind and set up shop there. And suddenly I wasn’t happy anymore. Suddenly I was afraid.

  It was a new kind of fear, different from the terror of distorted reality that had kept me quivering when the wall of my room wouldn’t stay closed. I was afraid for Angela Palermo, for what had happened to her in the past and might happen to her again—might be happening to her right now, for all I knew.

  That wasn’t much. But it was enough; enough different from the happy, laid-back disinterest I had felt before so that I knew it represented progress—and the little workadaddy in the boondocks danced around shouting hosannas.

  Just in time.

  The gurney journey ended abruptly with a quick turn through the door of a bare little room where a single low-power bulb burned in the ceiling, and I was lifted from the wheeled cart to another bed. It was harder than the one I’d had before, and while I was pondering that, the pair who had been my tour guides strapped both my wrists into restraints affixed to the metal headboard and then secured my feet to the other end. There was even a nifty little headband to make sure I didn’t bump my rock during whatever was in store for me. I lay passive, letting it all happen, and stayed that way after they finally left the room.

  The ceiling light served well enough as a focus point.

  Ogawa-no-jutsu . . .

  It was harder than I remembered; I would have it almost right, then lose the thread and slip back into the slough of easy acceptance that seemed so warm and welcoming.

  Also, there were interruptions. I had been in the room a month or two when something short and solid and female bustled in and pulled back the sleeve of the hospital gown I seemed to be wearing and injected me in the upper arm, rubbing the spot with alcohol before and after with a kind of professional flourish that went with the ease and relative painlessness of the needlework. I wanted to ask her if she was an R.N. or just had gotten a lot of practice here at Gideon’s Halloween Club, but by the time I was able to frame the question she was gone—and I almost lost myself over the edge of the conscious world before I could get the parts of my mind that I still controlled to work on neutralizing whatever she had pushed into my system.

  Not knowing the exact nature of the substances made it harder; Master Masuda hadn’t brought me far enough in the art to handle this. I was a novice. Not really ready.

  But I could take it a little way, far enough to focus on the need to keep trying—far enough to begin to make progress. And always there was the goad, the little closet bogey of anxiety that kept popping out and telling me to get on with it. Time was passing. Hurry!

  I strained at the wristbands to make them hurt, and the pain helped.

  It helped me concentrate again.

  I never found out how long I was in that room, or how long it took to achieve even a small measure of control over the inner processes of my body. But by the time I had company again, progress had been made. I still wasn’t fully in command. If I had been, the straps wouldn’t have continued to immobilize my wrists and ankles. And head.

  Not to worry. The crest was behind and the anxious little fellow with the ferret instincts was laboring steadily, effectively, instead of describing panic-circles when the door opened again and a tall, thin man entered.

  He smiled at me—as with dear old Jackhandle Jack Soames, the emotion never seemed to rise as high as the bright-china eyes—and said his name was Immanuel Flax. Just call him Manny.

  I didn’t smile back, and that seemed to worry him.

  “What’s the matter?” he inquired. “Not treating you right around here? I expected to see you laughing and scratching, bro! Here . . . we can fix all that.”

  Fix.

  The doctor was a true wordsmith; exact nomenclature a specialty.

  He had brought a wheeled tray of equipment with him, and he whistled a little tune, rubbing his hands briskly as he made his selections from its array of plenty. Low-dose syringe—I was grateful for that; the spike is thin and Teflon-coated—and careful attention to injecting just the right amount of air through the rubber stopper before drawing out the colorless joy juice. Not much. Five units intramuscularly, push.

  No sting from the needle, the craftsman worthy of his . . . what? I couldn’t remember. He disassembled the kit with professional swiftness, removing the spike and bending the barrel to make sure it wouldn’t be reused for some perverted dope fiend, while keeping an eye cocked on my reactions. I did my best to give him a few, but had to wait for his cue to see what they ought to be. The good doctor would never understand, or believe, but whatever he had hit me with had entered my system in one form but reached the central cortex as salt water. Not pure saline, perhaps; I just didn’t know enough. But I thought Master Masuda might have been pleased. I certainly was.

  “You’re quite comfortable now, aren’t you?” Flax said. “Quite comfortable and relaxed? The injection I had given you is intended to help you feel that way. No need to fight it, and no need to fear. We all have your best interests at heart and you can relax. Let the lungs do their own thing. No pain, no strain. Eyelids want to close over the eyes . . . excuse me . . . over the eye? Just let it happen. You are falling into a deep sleep. Deeper . . . and deeper.”

  It almost happened, at that.

  The mental exertions of ogawa-no-jutsu, particularly for one not truly adept, are considerable, and I chose just the wrong moment to rest. The lung work had, indeed, become deep and regular and the eyelid was closing by the time I caught myself. And even then, I still had to pretend to go along with the gag.

  But the sleep-talk had told me what kind of garbage he had pushed into my system, and so I was able to give him the reactions he would expect.

  Very anxious to please. Very responsive to every comment, every comforting gesture. We were good friends. I let him see me folding back into myself, into the web of soft darkness, looking inward to a sea of blackness that was the core of the world and hearing his voice just the tiniest bit apart from me.

  “Now, then,” he said when he was sure that all resistance was history, “let’s have a little talk, you and I. You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you?”

  I said I would.

  And at first it was just that, a casual conversation between old and dear friends. A little of my family history. He seemed interested in me. Especially my marriage, and how it had ended during my first tour of duty in ‘Nam. Details: the visit to the grave after I got home and the resignation from the priesthood and from the Chaplain Corps. Reenlistment and the second—shorter—tour in country. As a grunt. And the second battle of Khe Sanh.

  It was easier than it might have been, and he didn’t seem to want to go too far below the surface, where the going might have been harder. I’d made what peace I could with the rest of it a long time ago and could talk about it with a fair approximation of sleep-trance. But I got the feeling he knew most of the answers anyway and was just checking out my reactions.

  And when he was sure, the conversation took a new turn.

  “The Master,” he said in a reverent tone that told me far more than I wanted to know about his personal relationship with Gideon, “is most interested in you.”

  I considered telling him I was glad to hear it. But didn’t.

  “Jack Soames was one kind of problem. A hard man, street-tough and street-wise. He came seeking to do the Master an injury. Because of his wife. Because of the effect the Master has
on some women . . . ”

  That time the words were on target. Doped or straight, I knew about the “effect the Master has on some women” and a lot about how it was achieved and found myself having real trouble keeping the memory out of the face I showed to his psycho-medical henchman.

  “ . . . and it was necessary to deal with him. Direct physical violence was, I may say, not entirely out of the question. Mr. Soames was, in fact, himself determined upon violence and such a reaction would have been both normal and even legally defensible had it become necessary. But the Master is subtle, and he saw the value of such a person—saw what a sure and steady asset he might become, did become, given a certain amount of reorientation—and was able to obtain total cooperation. With my help.”

  The walls around me had stopped growing doors, but one opened in the back of my mind and a little salamander of terror slipped out of it and screamed “just one mistake, one little slip . . . ” before I could shove it back out of sight and get the door locked again. This smiling brain-bandit really couldn’t see anything wrong with what he had done. And now wanted to do to me.

  “You,” he continued calmly, “show similar potential. The Master is aware of it, and I must say I concur. We will do great things in the days to come; you shall enter the choir of inspired souls chanting the glory of the Master—and furthering the work of his kingdom here on earth—of your own volition and with a sense of exaltation you cannot now imagine. Oh, we will do great things together, you and I!”

  He smiled fondly at me. And then shifted gears.

  “But for the moment,” he said, “we have more mundane tasks. You have a piece of information—nothing too important but the kind of loose end the Master does not like to leave behind—that we are anxious to obtain. You want to help us do that, don’t you?”

  I said I would like that, and he nodded his approval.

  “Excellent! Now, then—where did Sergeant Palermo hide the remainder of his diamonds?”

  We expanded on that theme, trying it backward and forward and from all sides, for the next few hours while I did my best to gauge time.

  The injection he had given me was obviously a hypnotic of some kind, and such things have a trajectory in the system that is both limited and predictable. At various stages I would be expected to show signs first of resistance to hypnosis, then of willing acceptance, in which state I would be most amenable to Flax’s questioning, and finally of near-stuporous surrender to the drug, from which state I would have to be revived if questioning was to be continued.

  Flax took me through the whole cycle several times while I simulated whatever whips and jingles I thought he was expecting.

  It should have been worth an Oscar.

  Or an Emmy at the very least—best performance by a male victim in a lunatic’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.

  But in the end, Flax didn’t seem entirely pleased.

  “I am very much afraid,” he said, gathering up the last of the spike-and-phial kits and dumping it into the disposal bag with the rest of the trash from our session, “that the Master is not going to be willing or able to accept this result. He will assume some flaw in my interrogation technique, and I will be criticized.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “For whatever comfort it may afford,” he continued, “I am satisfied that you have told me the truth. That the missing cache of stones either does not exist or that its location is in fact unknown to you. But the Master is convinced that it exists. That you can lead him to it. And you may be sure he will act on that conviction. My methods have failed to produce the desired result. Alternate means will therefore be found.”

  It was a late-movie exit line, turgid and leaden with overplayed menace. Heavy-handed.

  And utterly believable.

  He left me alone to ponder its wonderful sincerity, locking the door behind him.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Far better to recognize the danger as it approaches—and meet it with weapons in hand.

  And for this, there are simple but effective tests . . .

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was a long wait. The room Flax had chosen for his drug-assisted mind-stripping operation differed from the one where I’d first awakened in a major respect: You could tell the difference between night and day.

  Someone—another involuntary guest at the hotel, perhaps—had made a tiny pinhole above eye level in the composition board covering the window, and I had noticed a single ray of light coming through it during the earlier part of our interview. The light was gone by the time he left, but it returned later and I decided it was probably day again.

  Not much. But infinitely better than nothing.

  Flax had removed the headband when he was sure the babble juice had taken effect, but my hands and feet were still in restraint and I improved the passing hours with exercise in the art of muscle control. By the time the door opened again, I knew I could get both hands free from the leather straps in seconds and was constructing a game plan that would allow me to break the neck of the next male person who entered the room and use his clothing to get out of there.

  Good idea—but substandard timing.

  The next time the door opened, it was to admit Jack Soames, accompanied by two beefy young men I hadn’t seen before. They looked wary and competent.

  I estimated the odds, came up with a number I didn’t like, and relaxed.

  “Blessed be!” Soames said.

  It didn’t seem to require a response.

  “Dr. Flax tells me you’re some kind of a hardnose,” he continued, flashing the smile-rictus I remembered. “That, or you really don’t know what Palermo did with the rest of the rocks he brought back from ‘Nam. Either way, he’s out of the play now. And I’m in.”

  He stepped back a pace, and the pair he had brought with him moved quickly to remove the wrist and ankle straps, keeping a firm grip on my upper arms as they sat me up and assisted me to my feet.

  I swayed a little, for effect—and discovered that it wasn’t all an act.

  That minor-key chord sounded again in the distance, and suddenly the room was taller than I remembered. And I was narrower. Reality was a debatable proposition, one that could be rejected at will, and I felt all of it beginning to retreat while sounds and movement went on somewhere in an infinite void . . .

  “Grab him!”

  A voice I thought I ought to know issued a command I thought I ought to understand, but it was all too much trouble.

  “That fucking Flax,” the voice said. “He told me the scopolamine would be out of him by now.”

  “It is,” another voice said. “But remember, he’s gonna flash on the acid for a long time to come. And anyway, this is nothing. Watch this here . . . ”

  The words were followed by bright pain that brought me rocketing back from eternity to find myself still on my feet beside the bed with one of Soames’s playmates driving a knuckle into either side of my neck. He was smiling, obviously enjoying himself, and for a long moment I let myself consider the elbow-and-kite that would have been so easy and logical from our relative positions. Just the thing to send him off to never-never land. Bye-bye . . .

  But he let go a fraction of a second before I was ready to move, and the impulse passed.

  I said, “Christ!” and shook my head.

  “Better,” Soames said. “Much better. Here—we’ve brought your clothes. All freshly cleaned and laundered.”

  He gestured toward a little valet cart they’d brought with them.

  You couldn’t fault the service.

  Black coat, vest, and trousers were neatly pressed and hangered under a plastic slipcover; shirt and tie immaculate on their own hanger. Belt neatly coiled; socks balled. Shoes shined and fitted with steel-spring boot trees.

  “Put ’em on,” Soames said. “The boys—the angels, here—will help if you get dizzy again. But hurry. The Master is waiting.”

  As soon as I was dressed, they hustled me into the hall.
Soames led the way and I followed, flanked by my guardian angels, down the corridor and around a corner and down another hall to the elevator.

  It still clanked.

  I had thought we were on the top floor—the South Bay Plaza that I remembered had only five stories, and five was the first digit of all the room numbers—but Gideon had evidently made improvements.

  An electronic lock mechanism had been fitted into the top quarter of the elevator call-button panel, and Soames used a flat bit of plastic that looked like a credit card to make the old cage carry us up another floor to a level that should have been the upper service bay. The service bay was still there and I could hear the machinery noises associated with our arrival. But it had been walled off to connect with a windowless corridor leading to a door that was paneled to look like wood but made metallic noises when Soames used the plastic card-key to open and usher us through.

  Into darkness.

  I thought at first that we were in some kind of holding chamber, an in-between box with doors at either end. But the sound of the door closing behind us told me the room we had entered was bigger than that, and a moment later a single baby spot let us see a solid-looking metal chair with leather restraint belts hanging open on the arms, legs, and back. Soames’s angels hustled me into it, attached the leg and ankle straps—I was getting to the point where I would have felt naked without them—and were fiddling with the one intended to go around my middle when their boss told them not to bother.

  “He’s tame,” Soames said. “You can go.”

  They did.

  I had expected more waiting and was settling myself into the uncomfortable architecture of the chair, but the sound of the door relocking itself behind me seemed to be the signal for more light in the big room. Another baby spot came into play, this one fitted with a rheostat that allowed it to pick out details of the target area first as mere random motes of existence and then as a kind of sketch-outline and finally as the head and shoulders of a man floating in the darkness about ten feet from where I sat.