Ryan Lock 01 - Lockdown

by Sean Black

  Fifty

  Lock lay face down on the ground while they searched him, taking his wallet, cell phone and Gerber. His 226, thankfully, was back in his car.

  Brand scrolled down the names on Lock’s cell. He stopped at Ty, held up the display so Lock could see it. ‘He’s still outside waiting for you. Better tell him you’ll find your own way back, that you didn’t find what you were looking for and that you’re going out of town for a while.’

  ‘And why would I want to do that?’

  ‘I thought he was your buddy. You wouldn’t want to drag him into this any further than you already have, would you?’

  Brand hit the green call button and handed the cell back to Lock. He then took an M-16 from one of the two men with him, tucked the stock into his shoulder and pressed the business end into the centre of Lock’s forehead.

  ‘Ty? Yeah, listen, no need to hang around . . . No, I found a different exit. Listen, I have a few things to do. I’ll catch up with you in a few days.’ He paused. ‘No, man, I’m fine.’

  He ended the call and Brand snatched the cell back from him, powered it down and jammed it into his pocket.

  ‘Now, you want that tour or not?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘Nope. It’s like the old Chink curse. Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.’

  They reached what Lock guessed was the main entrance to what Ty thought had looked like a brig. There was no handle or external lock. It simply clicked open.

  ‘No expense spared, huh?’ he asked Brand.

  ‘Not when you see what we have inside.’

  ‘Oh, I’m as giddy as a kid at Christmas,’ Lock shot back.

  Inside there was a hallway. It was about six feet wide, and extended about thirty feet, ending in a door of a similar type to the one they’d just come through. The walls were bare whitewashed concrete.

  ‘This where you kept the kid?’ Lock asked Brand.

  ‘Just keep walking.’

  They reached the next door and stopped. Brand pushed past Lock and went ahead. ‘I’m going to prepare your room.’

  The door clicked open and Brand walked through it, leaving Lock with the two guards. On the other side, Brand called for another two-man team to join him at the door into one of the cells. They were instructed to bring his riot gear down with them.

  Five minutes passed. Then ten.

  Finally, Lock could hear heavy boots and a door being opened followed by the sound of a brief but violent struggle. Then the door facing him opened again and Brand stepped through, removing his helmet. He had deep scratch marks running down one side of his face, but he was smiling. ‘Wanna meet your new roomie?’

  Lock was led through. They stopped outside Mareta’s cell. There was a smear of blood on the wall next to the door. Lock counted off six doors on each side. Banging noises and shouts were coming from behind all but one of them. The one they were standing in front of.

  Brand produced Lock’s cell phone again. Flipped it open. ‘Anyone you want to say goodbye to?’

  Lock stood where he was and said nothing.

  Brand started to scroll down through the numbers. ‘Here’s one. How about Carrie?’ Then he stopped and slapped his head with the palm of his hand in a mock show of embarrassment. ‘Silly me. Should have told you earlier. There wouldn’t be any point calling her.’ Brand held the phone up so Lock could see him deleting her number. ‘Hit-and-run accident. Driver didn’t even stop. Some asshole in a Hummer.’

  Lock lunged at him. The open palm of his right hand came up at an angle into Brand’s chin, snapping his neck back and sending him stumbling backwards. The shouting from the other cells intensified.

  A baton smacked into the back of Lock’s knees, and his legs folded underneath him. Black shapes swam in front of him as he took a second blow to the back of the head. Then he heard the door being opened and he was hauled to his feet and thrown inside.

  He landed a couple of feet clear of the door, and heard it slam shut. Then came the sound of something metal skittering across the floor. He blinked a few times to try to clear his vision.

  His Gerber lay on the floor of the cell, the blade extended. A woman’s hand reached down and picked it up. He lifted his head. She stood over him. The fingers of her right hand formed a tight fist around the handle in a hammer grip.

  Lock stared into her eyes and braced himself for the blow.

  Fifty-one

  Carrie slept late. Her late unscheduled appearance the previous evening meant she wasn’t due in to work until lunch. Usually she jumped straight into the shower but this morning she could smell Lock on her skin and she didn’t want to lose that. In the kitchen, she made breakfast for herself and Angel. They both cleared their plates in record time.

  She wandered through into the living room and flicked on the TV. A few of the other networks had picked up the Meditech story. They were following in her wake, and had been since Gray Stokes’ assassination. The next month would be a good time to ask for a move into the studio. She liked the buzz of chasing stories, but she also knew that people doing her job were likened to sharks for a reason: you kept moving forward or you died.

  On the kitchen counter her PDA blinked red. She picked it up and scrolled through the emails. There was a fresh one from Gail Reindl giving her the overnights. Gail wanted to congratulate her in person when she got into the office. That anchor job was getting closer.

  Angel had taken up position at the door and was barking. Carrie went back into the bedroom, threw on some sweats and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She grabbed Angel’s leash from the closet next to the door, along with a jacket, and headed downstairs. In the lobby, the doorman greeted them both.

  Outside it was still cold, but the sky was bright blue and the sun was shining. The weather reflected Carrie’s mood. She half walked, half jogged to the end of the block. Angel trotted alongside her, occasionally outpacing her and straining on the leash, desperate to get to the park.

  Carrie gave the leash a sharp tug as they reached the crosswalk. ‘Hey, easy there.’

  The dog stopped and looked up at her. The sign flashed WALK.

  ‘Now we can go.’

  Carrie stepped off the sidewalk. She didn’t even see the Hummer as it ran the light and barrelled straight towards her, ten thousand pounds of chaos doing forty miles an hour and picking up speed with every foot of blacktop rolling beneath it. She looked up at the last minute, and hauled herself and the dog back up on to the sidewalk as the vehicle’s rims scraped the concrete at the top of a drainage hole.

  An old man in his sixties, milk-bottle-thick glasses, touched her arm. ‘Are you OK?’

  Her heart was drumming against her chest. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating. It was coming straight for me! she thought.

  ‘Those damn things don’t belong on the roads!’ the old man shouted after the receding Hummer as it ran the next lights, slowed, and swung left out of sight.

  Fifty-two

  ‘Man, we should have popcorn for this.’

  Brand was like a guy who has to go to work at the start of the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl and decides to TIVO the whole game to watch later. As soon as Lock was inside the cell he’d radioed the CCTV operator to make sure to dump the footage from Mareta’s cell on to hard drive.

  ‘You got it cued up?’

  The operator nodded. ‘All ready to go. This one here,’ he said, pointing to the centre screen in a bank of monitors.

  The image was frozen: Mareta, the grieving widow, staring down at the wounded soldier as he crawled his way towards her.

  ‘Man, when this is over, I’m uploading this shit on to Live Leak. Come on, lemme see.’

  The operator hit play, and Brand leaned forward to enjoy the action.

  Lock had had a few things already worked out before the door into the cell had opened. It was clear that Brand was enjoying himself immensely and in a manner that went way beyond the satisfaction he would have gotten
from just locking him up. Something lay on the other side of the door that was giving Brand one hell of a woody.

  From the design of the building, both inside and out, Lock was clear it hadn’t been built just to prevent escape, but also to limit and contain movement to the nth degree. That meant the occupants were deemed dangerous to staff.

  Lock had readied himself for a fight. To the death, if necessary. His or the other guy’s. Then Brand had dropped the bomb about Carrie. Brand had obviously expected the news to cut Lock off at the knees, but it had had the opposite effect. He’d felt a surge of energy, and with it a surge of adrenalin. Even in his diminished physical state he’d felt that the raw anger would carry him through.

  When he looked up from the floor of the cell to see a woman, the decision had been simple. Natalya dumped in the East River with her brains blown out. Carrie, the victim of an unfortunate ‘accident’. Two dead women was enough.

  He lay still and waited.

  ‘You sure this thing’s working?’ Brand asked, slamming a meaty hand down next to the keyboard.

  Lock and the detainee had hardly moved on the tape. Just remained where they were, watching each other in some goddamn Mexican stand-off.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the operator replied.

  ‘Move it on. Let’s get to the action.’

  The operator moved his mouse, pulling the slider along. The woman jerked forward as Lock lay on the floor.

  ‘OK. There.’

  On screen, Mareta laid the knife down on the floor. Still within reach should she need it. Then she knelt down next to Lock and helped him to his feet.

  ‘What the hell?’ Brand exploded. He’d got halfway through the first quarter only to find one of the defensive linesmen break through and start waltzing with the opposition quarterback.

  Mareta had heard the men approaching. Even after all this time she hadn’t been able to escape the low dread that clouded her mind as the cell door opened. She’d tensed and then relaxed each part of her body. Less chance of breaking a bone if you were relaxed. Bruises and lacerations were one thing, but she’d spent three months in a prison in Moscow with a fractured fibula and no medical attention. The bone had healed on its own but left her with a limp and the memory of the intense pain.

  They’d rushed in, one at a time. The biggest of them had dragged her off the bed and pinned her shoulders against the wall. The other man had reached down to her waist and grabbed her wrists with one hand while his other hand fumbled in his pocket. There was a click and one of her hands was free. She’d waited for him to uncuff her other hand and scratched at his face. She’d felt his skin wedging in a strip under her nails. She’d tried to get hold of his hair but it was too short. He’d shouted at her, calling her a bitch, and punched her in the face.

  She’d gone down under the force of that punch. One man had sat on her chest and the other on her legs, sending a shard of pain shooting up her left leg, the one that had been broken back in Moscow. She’d heard the shackles clanking against the concrete as they too were taken off.

  The men had then retreated from the cell, and she’d run at the door as it closed. Slamming her fists against the steel. She’d heard a door open and slam shut. Then they’d come back, her cell door opened again, and another man was thrown inside.

  He was dressed normally. He looked American, or at least how she imagined Americans looked when they weren’t in uniform. His hair was shorter than the guards’ and he had a fresh scar that ran along the top of his head. He’d looked from the knife to her but made no move towards it, not even when she bent down to pick it up.

  His gaze had met hers. There was no fear in his eyes. She’d held the knife in a hammer grip like she’d been taught by her husband. Still he hadn’t moved. They’d stayed that way for what seemed like an eternity. She’d sensed he was conscious of the knife but he never looked at it. Not once.

  Then, finally, he’d spoken. ‘I’m not going to fight you. So if you’re going to do it, then let’s get it done.’

  She’d looked from the man to the unblinking eye of the camera mounted in the corner, put down the knife, and put out her hand. He’d taken it, and she’d helped him on to his feet.

  Back in the control room, Brand had tired of the love-in. ‘OK, go live.’

  The operator punched a key. The screen went blank. The operator hit it again.

  ‘What is it? What’s the problem?’ Brand asked, agitated.

  ‘We’re not getting any signal from that camera.’

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘I just did.’

  Brand kicked out at the wall in frustration. Half an hour ago the cell had been occupied by a solitary woman, cuffed and shackled. Now it was her, Lock and a knife. What the hell had gone wrong?

  Fifty-three

  Lock handed the knife back to Mareta – a calculated show of trust he hoped he wouldn’t have cause to regret. If he was going to get out of here he’d need her cooperation.

  An alarm that had been shrieking in the background for the past five minutes fell silent. Lock prowled the cell, examining its construction from every angle. Mareta watched him.

  ‘The only way out is through the door,’ she said.

  ‘You speak English? Sorry, stupid question.’

  ‘They don’t know I understand them,’ she said, nodding to the disembowelled camera which lay on the bed.

  ‘Who are you? Why are you here?’

  ‘My name is Mareta Yuzik.’

  That piece of information alone went most of the way to answering both questions. Lock wouldn’t have recognized her face, because very few people had seen it. And most of those who had were dead. But he sure as hell knew the name. In fact, it sent an involuntary shudder all the way from the base of his spine to the back of his neck.

  Mareta was the most infamous of Chechnya’s black widows, women whose husbands had been killed by the Russians and who operated as suicide bombers in the Chechens’ bloody guerrilla war to win independence from the motherland. Mareta’s husband had been a notorious Chechen warlord. But that wasn’t what had made her exceptional. What made her stand out was the fact that she’d disavowed martyrdom to assume command of her former husband’s group of fighters.

  Mareta’s band had spent the last few years on a murderous rampage. Lowlights included the wholesale slaughter of some of Moscow’s prime movers and shakers during a performance by the Bolshoi. Demonstrating a horrifyingly accurate understanding of the theatricality required to get yourself noticed as a terrorist in the modern world, Mareta had kicked off proceedings by personally beheading the lead ballerina live on stage. Of course, where the newly rich Russians were, so were their bodyguards. A firefight had taken place during which the respective close protection teams took out more of each other’s clients in the crossfire than the Chechens managed. The finale had been a huge explosion.

  In that particular puff of smoke, Mareta and her comrades had disappeared, leading to speculation that the whole thing was a putup job by the Kremlin, who’d seen one of their main political rivals taken out during the outrage. The apparatchiks had seen it as a happy coincidence.

  Mareta’s follow-up was no less demanding of world headlines. Her fighters entered a kindergarten just over the border from Chechnya and held two dozen infants hostage before slaughtering them in cold blood, taping events for posterity. Once again, Mareta slipped into the night before the building was overrun and most of her fighters were killed by Russian special forces.

  It was this second escape which had earned her the nickname of the Ghost in the Russian media. There had been numerous sightings of her since then, including in northern Iraq, Pakistan and Helmand Province. Her popping up here beat them all.

  Lock decided to follow Mareta’s lead and play dumb. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘To die,’ she said, matter of factly.

  ‘Are the other people they brought here also from your country?’

  ‘Some. Some from other places.’ She picked at
a hang nail with the tip of the Gerber. ‘Now, let me ask you the same question you asked me. Why are you here?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  Mareta glanced around the cell. ‘Maybe we have a long time.’

  Lock trusted his new cellmate about as much as Brand, so he gave her an edited version of events, telling her he was an investigative journalist looking into the activities of a drug company.

  ‘You have investigative journalists, right?’

  ‘Investigative?’ She rolled the word around in her mouth like it was the funniest thing she’d heard. ‘Yes, we have these people. The government kills them.’

  She was clearly a glass-half-empty kind of a gal.

  ‘So when I was looking around this place,’ Lock continued, ‘they found me, beat me up. I guess they threw me in here hoping you’d finish me off.’

  Mareta listened calmly. She paced to the door and back again, making shapes in the air with the blade of the knife. ‘So why do you think I’m here?’

  ‘You mean, what would a drug company want with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think you’re a guinea pig.’

  ‘Guinea pig?’

  ‘Yes. They’re going to use you to see if something they’re developing is safe to use on humans.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That, I don’t know.’

  In fact, he had a couple of ideas. Mareta’s presence here had to have been sanctioned at the highest level. Maybe a private deal between governments. Maybe Meditech was developing something which the Russians thought could open her up for interrogation. Both the CIA and KGB had chased down so-called ‘truth’ drugs during the Cold War, everything from sodium pentathol to a more orthodox tongue loosener like whisky, or a picture of the target in a compromising position. In a world where quality intelligence could save thousands of lives, something surefire would be worth more than its weight in gold.

  ‘So, which paper do you work for?’ Mareta asked.

  ‘I’m freelance,’ Lock said. It was only half a lie, but Mareta’s expression told him that she didn’t buy it – and neither did he for that matter. It wasn’t such a bad thing to be crap at playing dumb, he supposed.