Silent Killer

by George C. Chesbro

  Krowl stopped the wheelchair midway between the operating table and Bernard’s cart. When he stepped around and looked down at Chant, there was the faintest glint of surprise in his eyes. “You want to tell me about Operation Cooked Goose?”

  “Right.”

  “Are there documents?”

  “Of course. There are three copies of—”

  “Just a minute,” Krowl said, abruptly holding up his hand. “I want you to think very carefully before you speak.”

  Chant grunted. “What kind of a torturer are you? I’m ready to tell you what you want to know, but you don’t seem to want to hear it.”

  Krowl studied Chant for some time before he spoke. “It’s true that you’re exhausted—far beyond what you’re willing to show. You’re in pain, hungry, thirsty, and undoubtedly afraid. Why, then, do I doubt your willingness to cooperate?”

  “That’s your problem, Krowl. I hope I don’t have to be put through any more because of it. What do you expect me to do?”

  “I don’t want to hear lies.”

  “Now, would I lie to you?”

  “You won’t find things so amusing if you do lie, Sinclair. There are penalties for lying to me when an official interrogation takes place. This will be an official interrogation. The penalties are severe enough to cause considerable physical damage. It’s important for you to understand that. Every breath you take is under my control. I may choose to give you time, but there is no way that you can stall for it yourself.”

  “All right,” Chant said evenly.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you giving up with no more resistance?”

  “Because there’s no longer a point to resistance. I can’t win. I know a bit about torture myself, Krowl—and you’re good. Eventually, you will break me down. I’ve had time to look around the place and size up your operation. Frankly, if I thought there was any hope of escaping, I’d try to hold out. I no longer have that hope. I assume that your contract calls for my eventual termination?”

  “It does … of course. You’d know I was lying if I tried to deny it. But men, the notion of death in itself doesn’t bother you that much.”

  “Precisely. I’m not afraid of dying, and I’m willing to endure a good deal of discomfort if I think there’s a point. With no hope of successful resistance, there’s no point—and no reason for me to go through any more shit. About the only thing I can hope for is to die with my mind intact, and that’s what I’d like.”

  “If you tell the truth, you’ll have that.”

  “Are my reasons good enough for you? It’s hard for me to crawl around strapped into this wheelchair, but I can work up a snivel or two if it will make you feel better.”

  Krowl almost smiled. “A snivel won’t be necessary. Yours is the rational reasoning of a rational man—maybe.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “A great many things, Mr. Sinclair. Frankly, the CIA has their set of interests, and I have mine. I’m hoping you’ll be able to satisfy both.”

  “I’ll certainly try.”

  “I do hope you will. You’ll remember what I said about severe penalties for lying?”

  Chant glanced down at the wires stretching from his wheelchair back into Krowl’s office, then nodded toward the monitors on the wall. “I’ll remember,” he said. “I assume I’m hooked up to a polygraph or a voice-stress analyzer, maybe both?”

  “Both—and more.”

  “Sure,” Chant said with a wry smile. “After all, this is a class operation, right? How am I doing on the machines?”

  Krowl said nothing. He stared hard at Chant for a few moments, then abruptly hoisted himself up on the edge of the operating table and casually crossed one leg over the other. Feather glided silently into the room, sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of Chant. She cocked her head sideways and stared up into Chant’s face with her empty eyes and vacant expression.

  For reasons that he did not understand, the woman’s presence made Chant more anxious than the monitors, operating table, surgical instruments, or branding iron. Although he did not know why, he sensed that Feather was the most dangerous instrument in the room, and posed the greatest threat to him.

  Bernard tossed a handful of ice into Chant’s lap. “Damn, I hope you lie, Sinclair. I’d love to fry your fucking ears off.”

  “Subject two hundred forty three,” Krowl intoned. “Interrogation and termination contract, Central Intelligence Agency.” He paused, nodded to Chant. “What is your name?”

  “John Sinclair.”

  “Middle name?”

  “No middle name.”

  “Why are you called ‘Chant’?”

  “You’ll laugh—and you won’t believe me.”

  There was a hollow click as Bernard removed the electric branding iron from its socket. The six-inch heating element at the tip glowed white hot as Bernard stepped up to the wheelchair and brought the glowing metal close to Chant’s left cheek, just below his eye. Chant could smell his hair singeing.

  “Indulge me,” Richard Krowl said dryly.

  “It was a nickname I picked up in boot camp, and it just stuck.”

  “How did you get the nickname?”

  “I used to sing in the shower. I don’t have much of a singing voice.”

  Richard Krowl leaned back and consulted something on the other side of the table, hidden from Chant’s view. Then he glanced up at the monitors.

  Chant waited, squinting against the terrible heat of the branding iron, smelling his hair burn.

  The torture doctor, apparently satisfied, straightened up, nodded with his head for Bernard to move away. The heat dissipated, and Bernard uttered a disappointed grunt.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Osaka, Japan.”

  “Age?”

  “Forty-four. Incidentally, you were right on about my being hungry and thirsty. Is there any reason why I can’t have a snack while we’re about this?”

  “What branch of the service were you in?”

  “United States Army Special Forces.”

  “Were you a double agent?”

  “Not unless you count serving as a soldier and a CIA operative at the same time as being a double agent. We often felt that way.”

  “You never worked for the Russians?”

  “Not for the Russians, and not for any other foreign power.”

  “Were you ever approached?”

  “All the time. Everybody knew everybody else.”

  At a motion from Richard Krowl, the branding iron came close to his cheek again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The heat went away.

  The questioning continued for hours, with many of the same questions repeated over and over again: Chant’s childhood, his education, his training in the martial arts, his desertion, Operation Cooked Goose, the documents he held and the arrangements he had made for their dissemination, people he had talked to, his activities in the years since he had deserted, his residences.

  Chant answered the questions in a flat monotone while Bernard paced behind him, branding iron in hand, disappointment and increasing anger smouldering in his eyes and twisting his thuggish face out of shape. Occasionally he would look hopefully to his brother, but Richard Krowl ignored him.

  At one point food and water were brought by the broken man and woman who had first attended Chant in his cell. The cuffs on Chant’s wrists were released, and he was allowed to eat and drink while the questioning went on, hour after hour. Occasionally, Richard Krowl would refer to Chant’s dossier, which he kept open beside him on the operating table, and then repeat a question he might have asked a dozen times before.

  Krowl showed no signs of tiring—nor did Feather. Through the endless hours of interrogation, the woman had not moved, not even to go to the toilet or even change her position. She had not eaten or drunk anything; she simply sat cross-legged on the floor, staring vacantly
up into Chant’s face.

  After yet another series of questions on Operation Cooked Goose and the documents Chant held in his possession, it finally seemed to be over. Krowl sighed deeply, stretched, then got off the table and began to idly examine a few areas on the yards of paper tape that had spewed out over the tile floor from the polygraph machine behind the table. He pushed the pile of paper aside with his foot, then took a cigar out of an inside pocket and lit it with a gold butane lighter.

  “Some tough nut you are, Sinclair,” Bernard whispered hoarsely in Chant’s ear. “In the end it turns out that you’re nothing but one big fucking pussycat.”

  Krowl blew a large, blue smoke ring, waved it away with his hand, then turned around and looked inquiringly at Feather.

  Feather looked up at Krowl and very slowly shook her head. Then she rose and walked quickly from the room.

  Chant watched the woman go, and felt the muscles in his stomach begin to tighten. Suddenly he felt cold, and there was a tingling sensation along the base of his spine. He turned back to find Krowl staring at him.

  The torture doctor clamped the cigar between his teeth, abruptly reached out to the side of the operating table and flicked a switch. The lights in the operating room dimmed at the same time as lights behind one of the banks of mirrors came up, revealing a viewing gallery in which sat the dozen torturers who were Krowl’s guests on the island. All of the men appeared exhausted—yet also strangely exhilarated, and most impressed. Cigar and cigarette smoke made the air in the gallery look blue, and the aisles between the two steeply banked areas of seats were littered with paper and plastic food and drink containers. Krowl flicked another switch, activating a two-way public address system; the men in the gallery could be heard talking excitedly to one another.

  “Gentlemen,” Krowl said around his cigar.

  “Bravo!” someone in the gallery shouted.

  Krowl squinted into the lights as he studied the faces above him. “So,” he said, removing the cigar from his mouth. A few of the men began to clap, and Krowl motioned impatiently for them to stop. “In slightly less than three days I have extracted information from a man all of you predicted would die before he’d give me the time of day. Indeed, as you noticed, there was no resistance at all once we had begun. You’ve been privy to everything that has been done to this man, and now I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

  There appeared to be an initial reluctance to speak, but finally a few of the men began to offer their opinions and observations. All expressed their admiration for Krowl’s patience, his coolness, and his skilfull application of both pain and pleasure. Even Chester Norham, who had apparently been returned to the good graces of Krowl and the others, had something to say—although he avoided looking at Chant.

  Chant, increasingly uneasy, found himself constantly turning his head and glancing toward Krowl’s office, where Feather had gone.

  When the men had finished speaking, Krowl laughed without humor, reached out and touched the glowing tip of his cigar to the middle of one of the folds of polygraph readout paper. A dark smudge with a cherry-red center appeared on the paper and began to spread.

  “It’s all very neat,” Richard Krowl said. He glanced up at the torturers, then at Bernard, who was watching his brother with a mystified expression on his face. “The problem is that the information Mr. Sinclair has so graciously provided us with is a carefully constructed tissue of lies.”

  Chant began preparing himself; hopelessness, desperation, frustration, terror, panic—all had to be brushed aside, vanquished, as he stilled himself in order to marshal the inner forces he needed to trigger the ultimate weapon he carried within his mind.

  He had been defeated by the most dangerous instrument in the room, Chant thought, the most sensitive lie detector—Feather. Krowl was ignoring the reams of polygraph and voice-stress analyzer readouts that indicated he was telling the truth, relying instead on a simple shake of the head offered by the strange, mute woman torturer.

  Of course, Chant thought, Krowl was absolutely correct in doing so.

  “Lies,” Richard Krowl continued as he burned more holes in the paper. “There is, of course, some truth here; questions concerning facts that could be verified by checking his dossier or other sources were answered truthfully. Perhaps some of the other questions were answered truthfully, perhaps not. The point is that we don’t know. Certainly, John Sinclair has lied about every single important thing that we wanted to know.”

  There were murmurs of astonishment and disbelief from the men in the viewing gallery. Suddenly a strip of paper burst into flame and quickly spread. Krowl kicked the burning paper aside, then turned his back on the flames.

  Acrid smoke swirled in Chant’s face as he continued his preparations for the supreme exercise in body control he was certain he would need within moments, when Bernard would be ordered to come at him with the branding iron.

  “There are only two groups of individuals who could defeat this type of lie detector equipment,” Krowl continued in an almost conversational tone. “Psychotics could do it, for they themselves are usually unable to distinguish between the fact and fiction in their own minds; their respiration, galvanic skin reaction, and pulse rate may indicate they’re telling the truth even when they’re telling the most outrageous lies. Of course, that’s because the psychotic may believe he’s telling the truth.

  “The second group is comprised of men like Mr. Sinclair—although he is the best I have ever encountered. He is so good that you may think of him as making up a third group, of which he is the only member. These individuals understand just what it is the machines record—stress, which is normally self-induced in response to the anxiety produced by telling a lie. Quite simply, these men are able to control their reactions. I’ve met a few who do it by entering into a self-induced, trancelike state. It’s something to watch for. However, obviously, to successfully play this kind of game with a hot poker virtually stuck in your ear is a feat of incredible virtuosity.”

  “How can you be certain he’s lying?” the Greek colonel asked.

  “I’m certain,” Krowl replied brusquely. “The point here is that, in the final analysis, you must rely on your own instincts.”

  Chant felt Bernard come up behind him, felt the heat of the white-hot branding iron growing on the side of his face. He was ready, his mind still, armed, prepared …

  In another millisecond, as the iron touched him …

  “No, Bernard,” Richard Krowl said.

  “Let me burn him!” Bernard shouted, coughing on the smoke that was rising from the burning papers, filling the room. “Damn it, Richard, you’ve gotta let me burn him now! He’s making fools out of us!”

  “No, Bernard,” the torture doctor repeated simply. “Do as I say, please. Back away.”

  Almost a minute passed. Then Bernard cursed, and the heat moved away from Chant’s face.

  Still Chant waited, poised, the weapon in his mind triggered …

  “You’re a magician, John Sinclair,” Richard Krowl continued quietly, looking down at Chant as he waved smoke away from his face. “You are, indeed, a ninja—as advertised. What the CIA wants to know is insignificant compared to the other secrets of power, self-control, and will you carry in your mind and body. I want to know what those secrets are.” He paused, reached out and took the glowing branding iron from Bernard. “Take him back to his cell,” he commanded his brother.

  “Damn it, Richard—!”

  “Be quiet,” the torture doctor said, then turned around to look up at the perplexed faces in the viewing gallery. “Gentlemen, I believe you will find the few days you have remaining here of special interest.”

  Apparently he was not finished yet, Chant thought, and he slowly began to relax both the muscles of his body and the invisible muscles of his mind. As he was wheeled toward the office, he lowered his head slightly, began to take deep, measured breaths.

  Without warning, the white-hot branding iron was slapped across his le
ft shoulder. Chant had the sensation of liquid fire flowing across his skin, rushing through his veins as the smell of scorched fabric and burning flesh mingled with that of burning paper in his nostrils. Then Chant screamed and passed out.

  FOURTEEN

  Slowly, as if surfacing from the bottom of a very deep well filled with black water, Chant swam up to consciousness, the pain in his left shoulder serving as a kind of lifeline that he climbed sensation by sensation, thought after thought. Finally he opened his eyes, blinked in surprise, slowly and painfully eased himself up into a sitting position and looked around.

  He was back in his cell. His wrists and ankles were shackled, but the chains were slack and he was lying on a thin but comfortable mattress with a blanket thrown over him. The temperature in the cell was comfortable. The taste of burnt metal in his mouth indicated to him that he had been drugged to keep him unconscious for an unknown length of time. However, he had been bathed and dressed in clean coveralls, and the burn wound on his shoulder had been dressed and partially anesthetized. Beside the mattress was a large thermos bottle and a tray on which was arrayed a selection of cold meats and bread. When he opened the thermos, the dizzying aroma of rich, black coffee wafted up into his nostrils.

  He was being primed again, Chant thought. He had been taken to the edge of an abyss, shown a universe of agony. Now he was being soothed, relaxed, his emotions, flesh, muscles, and nerves given time to recover only so that the torment to come would be felt to its maximum.

  The darkness in the corridor outside the cell’s peephole told Chant that it was night, which meant that he might reasonably expect a return visit from Feather after he had fed himself and rested. He would, of course, eventually be allowed to pass out, and he would awaken to find himself in the wheelchair. Once again Bernard would wheel him back to the torture chamber inside the windowless building, where once again Richard Krowl would question him, and once again …

  It was absolutely sound technique, Chant thought, just as Krowl had outlined it to his resident torturers. He was supposed to dwell on the horrors to come, even as he enjoyed the food, coffee, warmth, and rest provided to him. Krowl was a worthy opponent, and the only flaw Chant could see in the torture doctor’s plan was that he wouldn’t be in the cell when Feather, Bernard, or anyone else came for him.