Silent Killer

by George C. Chesbro

  “Well, you’ll certainly have no shortage of subjects to work on there,” Chant said evenly. “You and the Russians will get on famously; you’re both interested in absolute control of people.”

  “My work has scientific validity, Sinclair. Eventually, much good will come of it for all mankind. But to do the work, I’ve had to make compromises.”

  “You should learn to deliver that line with a German accent.”

  “Do you want to die?!”

  “If I told you the truth about Cooked Goose, then I really would be a traitor, wouldn’t I?”

  “This is in your best interests, Sinclair. Remember, it was your countrymen who sent you here to be tortured and killed.”

  “What the hell do you really want from me, Krowl?”

  “The secrets of the ninja,” Krowl said softly. “I want to know how you learned to control your autonomic nervous system and your emotions so well. I want to know how you elevate your tolerance for pain. There are many, many things I want to learn from you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Krowl. You’ve been listening to too much of your guests’ mumbo jumbo. Frankly, I’m surprised at your gullibility.”

  “Oh, but I’ve observed the wonders of your control first hand.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a businessman who hasn’t minded getting his hands dirty.”

  “Or bloody.”

  “That, too.”

  “Agree to cooperate with me—as my associate, if you will—and you can live.”

  “What about all the other people—the broken people—you have wandering around on this island? You going to take them to Russia, too?”

  “No,” Krowl said in a flat voice.

  “You’ll kill them?”

  “Painlessly, yes—except for Feather. There’s no other place for them to go, Sinclair. I’ll be doing them a favor.”

  “There are organizations, other facilities. For Christ’s sake—”

  “I can’t leave tracks like that, Sinclair. If anything that’s happened here could be proven, it might forever jeopardize publication of my research findings. What’s been done can’t be undone—but it can be forgotten, if it’s allowed to be. Then, in ten or fifteen years, the Russians can slowly begin to publish my work. I’ll be dead in fifty years, but my work will live on. When the whole story is known, and when it can be viewed dispassionately, the world will be able to understand the great value of my work.”

  Chant nodded toward Feather. “What’s her story?”

  The woman shook her head ever so slightly, but if it was a sign of disapproval, Krowl paid no attention to it.

  “Maria was camp physician with a group of guerillas fighting Somoza, in Nicaragua,” the torture doctor declared matter-of-factly. “She was captured by Somoza’s soldiers, who, naturally, wanted to know the location of the camp and the names of other guerilla leaders. Maria refused to talk, and so she was tortured out in the jungle. The soldiers were unsophisticated, and they began by burning Maria’s genitals with a flaming brand.”

  Chant groaned inwardly. “I’m sorry,” he murmured to the woman, who had bowed her head. Her shoulders sagged.

  “Maria would have told them what they wanted to know,” Krowl continued in the same matter-of-fact tone, “but she was in too much agony to speak. Her torturers mistook this for reluctance, and they redoubled their efforts, actually inserting the brand up into her vulva and womb. She passed out frequently, but she was never given time to recover—to catch her breath, so to speak, so that she could talk. As soon as Maria woke up, they went to work on her again. All Maria could do was scream … and after a time she stopped doing even that. Finally her torturers gave up and left her for dead, which she might as well have been. She was found by her companions and nursed back to something approximating physical health, but her mind appeared to be completely gone. She could not walk, talk, or even feed herself. She was catatonic, totally unable to care for herself, just a breathing lump of flesh.

  “During those years, I was a research neurologist who was part of a team studying the treatment of multi-damaged, psychologically disoriented trauma victims—like Maria. When the Sandinistas defeated Somoza and took over the government, Maria was sent to us for evaluation and possible treatment. Because of the extensive physical damage that had been done to her, I was put in charge of her case.

  “To get right to the point, extensive reconstructive surgery was considered pointless; the psychiatrists deemed her hopelessly catatonic, her mind completely gone. I wondered. In fact, I wondered what her reaction might be—and if there were any reaction at all, the psychiatrists would have been amazed—if she were given the opportunity to torture her torturers, or one of them. It so happened that the opportunity was available; Maria’s chief torturer was well known to the Sandinistas, and they had him in prison. I made contact with certain individuals in the government, and they indicated their complete willingness to … make the individual available to me.”

  “I take it you didn’t bother informing your colleagues, or the medical school, of your plans?”

  “Of course not. The experiment would have been disapproved immediately, and I considered the chance of helping Maria to be more important than the approval of my colleagues.”

  “Bullshit, Krowl. The idea of playing torturer turned you on.”

  “History will act as my judge, Sinclair, not you!” Krowl snapped. “You see the results before you.”

  “I’m not sure what I see before me,” Chant said quietly, cocking his head and looking directly at the bowed head of Feather.

  “She began to respond when I simply told her of the arrangements that were being made. The day after I spoke with her, she ate by herself for the first time since she’d been found. She was told that he would be totally under her control, and that she could do with him what she wanted, for as long as she wanted. I told her I would provide her with whatever she wanted. Two days later she handed me a drawing—of a feather. I got it for her, and I made arrangements for her to visit her torturer, held in a soundproofed room inside the consulate of a government friendly to the Sandinistas, at her convenience. I learned a great deal from watching those sessions, Sinclair. Maria is a woman with considerable skill, intelligence … and imagination. She killed the man using nothing but that single feather. It took him almost seven weeks to die. She was very patient with him.”

  Chant remembered the agony of the one night Feather had spent with him, shuddered involuntarily. “Then, I take it, the med school got wind of what you were doing?”

  Krowl nodded. “I was dismissed, and my license to practice taken away.”

  “I’m surprised you weren’t prosecuted.”

  “There would have been a trial, and all parties agreed that the medical school wouldn’t benefit by being written up on the front pages of every scandal sheet in the country. The charges against me were dropped, in exchange for my agreement to leave the country and never practice medicine anywhere in the world again. So I left, and I took Feather with me.”

  “That alone makes you a son of a bitch, Krowl.”

  “Maria chose to come with me.”

  “Of course, she chose to come with you. You’d provided her with a bridge to reality. At that point, you should have given her over to people who could have continued her treatment.”

  “There was, and is, no other treatment. In order for Feather to be able to function at all, she must be in a situation where she is allowed to administer both agony and ecstasy.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say.”

  “Who have you consulted? Amnesty, Inc. runs programs that—”

  “There are no programs that will help Feather. And I don’t have to consult anybody; I’m the one who should be consulted, for I am now the leading expert in this field.”

  “I’ll tell you what you are, Krowl, and I don’t have to consult anyone to know it. You’re a fucking nut case. This whole island is
one huge pornography parlor for you, and I’ll bet you jerk off a dozen times a day. It’s too bad Chester hung himself. Once the two of you had gotten to know each other better, you really would have enjoyed jerking each other off.”

  Chant’s words had been carefully calculated to create an explosion—to disrupt, disturb, confuse, and distract. But Krowl’s reaction surprised him. The torture doctor sat in silence, staring at Chant. Strange shadows—sadness, perhaps, or guilt, or confusion—passed across the man’s pale green eyes. Finally he looked away. His voice, when he spoke, was barely above a whisper.

  “If you wish to live, you will accompany me to Russia. You will share your training with me, cooperate in tests I will design. You will voluntarily share the secrets of your remarkable mind and body in exchange for your life. What do you say?”

  Time. Two more days.

  Chant sighed resignedly. “I’m tired, Krowl,” he said evenly. “You’ve given me an honest proposal, so I’ll give you an honest answer. Give me a day or so in peace to think about it. It sounds like an offer I can’t refuse, but I have to be certain in my own mind that I can live with it; otherwise, I won’t be able to give you what you want.”

  Immediately, Krowl swung around in his chair, leaned forward, and rested his hand on Feather’s bowed back. More than a minute passed, and then the woman slowly shook her head.

  “Too bad,” Krowl said with a sigh. He opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a machine pistol, which he aimed at Chant’s head. “Feather says you lie; you have no intention of cooperating with me, now or in the future. Please place your arms back on the armrests of the wheelchair.”

  Chant did as he was told. Krowl pushed the button beneath the desk, and the wrist cuffs snapped back into place.

  “It’s a real pity that you’re so stubborn, Sinclair,” the man with the long blond hair and pale green eyes continued softly. “But then, I suppose that’s just one part of the power you have that intrigues me so much. I will learn the secrets of that power; I will learn to play you. You could have saved yourself a lot of agony, and you’ll be accompanying me to Russia in any case. For now … ? Perhaps another visit from Feather will help you to reconsider your bad attitude.”

  “You’re a tough audience, Dr. Gonzalez,” Chant said quietly to the woman. When she did not respond or look up, Chant turned his attention back to Krowl. “For an administrator who lost two guards, three guests, your records, and a fortune in pearls last night, and then had another guest hang himself this morning, you seem remarkably sanguine and relaxed about it all.”

  Krowl seemed genuinely amused. “Do I? Maybe I’m learning something from you.”

  “Krowl, your fixation on me in the light of your other problems strikes me as positively unhealthy.”

  “Sure, but you’ve already told me how unhealthy I am.”

  “I don’t mean to tell you your business, but don’t you think you should be devoting more attention to catching your in-house Jack the Ripper?”

  “Oh, but I told you I’ll find the person responsible. Where is he going to go? There is no one else on the island but us, and no one will be going anywhere until he is found out and the missing items recovered. I have my new guards to watch the old guards, and all of them to keep the others under constant surveillance until I decide which individual to start working on first. So, you see, there really is no problem, at least certainly nothing to keep me from proceeding with the other business at hand—you.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “You’re going to be even sorrier.” Krowl pressed a switch on his desktop intercom. “Bernard?”

  Bernard’s surly response came over the loudspeaker above Chant’s head. “Yeah?”

  “Bernard, do you still want to fight John Sinclair? He indicates that killing you would hardly cause him to work up a sweat.”

  “Give him to me, Richard.” Bernard’s voice hummed with rage and tension. “Ten minutes; that’s all I ask. Give me ten minutes with him, and he’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  “That’s enormously reassuring, Bernard,” Krowl said dryly, glancing at Chant out of the corners of his eyes. “Have the guards gather everyone out by the helicopter pad. Then you may come and fetch Mr. Sinclair. He’s all yours.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “Bernard,” Chant said easily as the burly, crew-cut man came to get him, “your brother’s looking for a way to get rid of you. He’s planning on going to Russia, and he probably knows you won’t want to make the trip. He also won’t want to leave you behind, since he could never be sure who you might end up talking to. He’s counting on my killing you. How do you feel about that?”

  Bernard, startled, glanced around at his brother, who was leaning casually against his desk, the machine pistol in one hand, and the other hand thrust into the pocket of his jeans. Feather, head still bowed and shoulders slumped, stood silently beside him.

  Richard Krowl shrugged. “If you want to fight him, take him outside where we can all watch. If you want to hear him whisper sweet nothings in your ear, take him back to his cell and let me get on with other business.”

  Bernard flushed purple. He stepped around behind the wheelchair, yanked it around and pushed Chant out of the office. Chant was wheeled outside and down a concrete walk toward the helicopter pad and the assemblage that had been gathered in a large circle on the grass around it. It appeared to Chant that everyone on the island had been brought to the site. There were half a dozen of the strange, white-haired broken people, the two brown-uniformed guards, and the ominous-looking, black-uniformed mercenaries with their Uzis.

  The circle parted slightly as they approached. Chant was wheeled to the center, turned around. Bernard, glaring at Chant, removed his shirt, shoes, and socks as his brother stood next to the wheelchair and addressed the group.

  “Well,” Krowl said wryly, “now we’re going to have a break from this other nasty unpleasantness while Bernard provides us with some entertainment. We’re going to have a martial arts demonstration.”

  There were murmurs from the eight remaining torturers, and they exchanged surprised glances. Eyes that were glassy from fear and lack of sleep came alive in their pasty faces.

  “But there is a more serious purpose,” Krowl continued in a sharper tone. “All but one of you came here to learn from me, but perhaps it is I who shall learn from you. In the last few days, I have noted mounting disagreement among many of you concerning my handling of John Sinclair. You, I take it, would prefer a more sustained and brutal approach. Bernard, as you all know, agrees with you. He’s told me he will beat the information we want out of the prisoner. For his own reasons of pride, he wishes to do this with no restraints on the prisoner. Now, perhaps, I’ll discover that you were right all along.”

  There was more murmuring among the torturers, and a few loud expressions of dissent. The men started to step back, stopped when two of the black-uniformed guards raised their machine guns slightly. Chant scanned the faces before him, smiled.

  “It’s absolutely amazing,” Krowl said, and laughed. “I’m certainly looking forward to this demonstration. After all, I’ve heard so much from you about John Sinclair’s fighting skills that I want to see for myself. Now I see that you don’t share my enthusiasm, even though he’s exhausted, seriously weakened, and has painful wounds on his belly and shoulder. I’m almost sorry I didn’t follow Bernard’s advice and have this demonstration earlier, before so much of Mr. Sinclair’s strength had been drained away.”

  “Let’s get on with it, Richard,” Bernard growled in a low, tense voice. “I want to get at this bastard.”

  Krowl turned to the tall Japanese with the bright eyes. “Direct your men to shoot Mr. Sinclair in the legs if he tries to run away, or if it looks as if he means to attack anyone but Bernard. I don’t want him dead, but you may cripple him.”

  “You have already told them,” the Japanese replied evenly, in perfect English.

  Richard Krowl removed what app
eared to be a tiny radio transmitter from his back pocket. He pressed a button on the device, and the cuffs restraining Chant’s wrists and ankles snapped open. Chant slowly rose from the chair, stretched his muscles, cracked his joints, then stepped away from the chair and stood in the center of the circle, arms hanging loosely from his sides, a thin smile on his face as he looked at the bare-chested man standing a few yards away.

  “Come and die, Bernard,” Chant said softly.

  Bernard went down into a fighting stance, inched forward. He expected the other man to adopt a stance, but the man with the cold, iron-colored eyes simply stood still, waiting for him in the center of the circle.

  More than anything, Bernard had wanted to fight this man, defeat him, kill him. More than anything, Bernard had wanted to be known as the man who had killed John Sinclair. But now, standing in the circle free of shackles and out of the wheelchair, John Sinclair seemed so much bigger.…

  “Bernard?” Richard Krowl had taken Chant’s place in the wheelchair and had wheeled himself to a position next to the tall Japanese. He was sitting with one leg casually crossed over the other, the machine pistol resting in his lap. “We’re all waiting for you. Is this going to take all day?”

  He had wanted to be taken seriously by his brother, to be respected by other men as well as feared. He had seen himself gaining these things by defeating John Sinclair. Now, as he stared into the other man’s cold eyes, all he saw was his own death. He straightened up, took a step back.…

  Richard Krowl absently scratched his temple with the barrel of the machine pistol. “Bernard? Could we get on with it? You can hardly expect Mr. Sinclair to come to you, since you’re the one who’s threatened to tear his ass off.”

  “That’s all right,” Chant said evenly as he stepped forward. “I’ll be happy to go to Bernard.”