Jezebel's Ladder

by Scott Rhine

  Frank went into the room first, then Jez. The room was lit by a state-mandated, red emergency light at each end. Oobie floated unseen above the water’s surface, watching for any sign of treachery. Her last two guards closed the door and took separate sides of the pool. Frank shielded her every step until she was within ten feet of Seth Wannamaker. They met in the center, by the green, metal door labeled “Danger! Chemical Storage.”

  Poker-faced, she scanned the rabid environmentalist. He was hideous beyond imagination. His flesh was like a frozen waterfall. Even his earlobes had triple chins.

  His voice sounded like a frog gargling. “Enemy of my enemy, I greet you.”

  When Seth held out his huge but oddly normal hand, she replied in kind, “Well met. I applaud your choice of venue. It reminds me of Hogan’s Heroes, right under the Germans’ noses.”

  His expression was unreadable, but his words were clear. “This was your demand, not ours.”

  Jez turned so fast, she collided with Frank. “Abort! Abort!”

  The storage closet started beeping.

  She grabbed Frank by the arm and pulled him into the pool with her. Before they hit the water, the wall detonated, sending shards of cement and clouds of chlorine billowing through the room. Oobie vanished when the first person died in the explosion. Anyone not knocked unconscious by the concussion was blinded and choked by gas. One emergency light was shattered and the other was flickering and sparking. It was like an electrical storm in Hell.

  Jezebel’s headset shorted out, cutting the official connections. Only the cell phone in her pocket was still transmitting as she swam underwater toward the safety of the shallow end. The cell lasted only long enough to send the warbling of their back-door alarm and the muffled sound of automatic weapons.

  Men in gas masks stormed the room. Jez crouched on the bottom of the pool, praying visibility was poor enough for her to hide. Even blind, Frank shot out the ankles of the first row of noisy invaders from his vantage point. Red swirls bloomed around him as they took easy revenge. Twenty gunmen swept in and terminated each member of her team with precision.

  She tried to raise her own gun, but the page on her arm burned like liquid nitrogen. Her finger wouldn’t squeeze the trigger against a human being. She couldn’t kill anymore, at least not like this, as suicidal revenge. She wanted to scream, to cry. Instead, dripping wet, she crept quietly out the back. Her vision was blurred from chemicals and her ears were ringing. Running into the bar area, she could see the promise of moonlight out the back window when she came face to face with the architect—Maverick.

  He matched his photos down to the black crew cut. However, the pictures couldn’t convey his utter confidence, or the air of evil that surrounded him. Jez dove through the large picture window in desperation, but the Taser darts hit her in the left calf.

  Unconsciousness wasn’t far behind.

  Chapter 19 – The Smell of Desperation

  Benny was shouting to everyone around him. “Steve, get me Frisco Life Flight, now! You in the van, get me a satellite feed on the Arkansas meeting!” Into the cell phone, he said, “Eye Corps, what’s happening? Uncle Buddy, override Cosmic Purple.”

  “Cornflake Girl here. Oobie surfaced from his dive too fast and is suffering from the bends. Vader won’t let me medicate him. He took control of the operation and ordered everyone back to the bus.”

  “Give the phone to the Doc,” Benny said, dropping the code names.

  “Weiss,” he answered, obviously running and panting.

  “Explain,” ordered the former actor. “What’s with the Al Haig routine?”

  “Jez inoculated me last night and gave me orders.”

  In the background, Benny could hear a guard in Arkansas report, “SUVs, five of them incoming.”

  Weiss terminated the connection.

  Benny spiked the phone into the sidewalk out of frustration. Then he swore at his own idiocy for breaking the communications link. “Will somebody give me a status report?”

  The man in the van said, “Satellite shows one friendly being carried away. Smoke is pouring out of the building. Jesus, this doesn’t look good. Hostiles in riot armor coming out. Five. Ten. Shit. Twenty gas masks. A couple are limping. One of them is carrying a white ball under his arm.” When the view shifted enough, they could make out Seth’s severed head.

  An obscenity went out over the open line.

  Another guard reported. “No word from the driver at the country club. All the monitors are dead.”

  “Helicopter lands in ten,” Jezebel’s guard said.

  Benny paced in circles. “Zoom in on the survivor.”

  Another technician took over. “No face, but the hair is light and long.”

  “Butterfly,” several people said in unison.

  “She got tossed into the back of a Suburban.”

  Benny snapped, “Do not lose track of that SUV or I will personally kick your ass all the way back to LA.”

  “Oobie’s team reports gunfire. The rear van is slowing to cover the others. Vader has ordered them to use their rocket on a telephone pole.”

  Benny put his hands behind his head and gripped his hair.

  “The pole is now blocking the road!” A cheer went up from the others, but the radio man's face fell. “Sir, they lost the trailing van to enemy fire, but the bus and lead van have escaped unharmed.”

  Benny sat on the grass, waiting. When the countdown for the helicopter reached one minute, one of the guards handed him a phone. “Vader, sir.”

  “Good job,” Benny said glumly.

  “It was a cluster… you-know-what,” said the doctor.

  “Jez put the right man in charge. You lived. How’s Oobie?”

  “In shock. I don’t know whether it was the people dying near him or flashbacks from his own explosion, but the boy is a mess.”

  “Try to have him up in about two hours. I need eyes for a rescue. Use DNA from Olive to track her.”

  “Olive?”

  In the background, Nena said, “The stuffed reindeer, I’ll get it from her bags.”

  The sounds of an approaching rotor could be heard. The doctor said, “You aren’t coming here, are you? Dirt Bag said that was expressly against policy.”

  “I can’t hear you!” Benny shouted into the phone before hanging up. Next, he used his formidable powers of persuasion on the pilot and then they were underway. The Life Flight administrator on the radio took more monetary means, but was swayed just as quickly.

  ****

  Dr. Weiss hid the remaining team at a cheap motel behind the State Police building outside Fayetteville. He sat on a plaid-orange bedspread with a lucid but terrified Daniel. The teenager was sitting on the bed, hugging his own legs.

  Clutching a handful of maps, the white-haired doctor did his best to sound confident and soothing. “I know this mission has been hard for you, but it’s not over. We’ve tracked Jez to the Fossils’ headquarters complex outside of town. It’s about forty miles from here. There are fifty-six acres of office buildings on that campus. That’s as close as we can pin-point her for now. I’ve moved the satellites to watch all the incoming roads to our site.

  “We’re as safe as you can get in a war. We’ve got coverage from the satellites for another two hours, but then we have to bug out. I need you to scout for Butterfly, a quick in-and-out, just to tell us her building number on this map.”

  Daniel shivered. “Their death screams burned into my brain. It’s like seeing purple spots for minutes after a flashbulb goes off. Only it was worse. I knew every one of them.”

  “I don’t mean to be cold, son, but you have a window of opportunity here. If you fail to take this chance now, you’ll wonder for the rest of your life. It’ll affect your ability to make new friendships and even make you question your manhood.”

  “You’ve had a choice like this?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Not exactly. But I had a defining moment in my aerospace career. I only wish someone had
told me how important it was at the time. I knew that a piece of equipment they were sending up on a mission was sensitive to cold, not like an O-ring, but enough to make it squirrely till it warmed up. I put it in a report, but did not explicitly inform mission control of the danger. When the main cabin got tight, someone moved the device to the cargo bay.”

  The young man furrowed his brow. “That opens to space, really cold.”

  The doctor nodded.

  Daniel looked down at the sheets. “What if she’s dead already?”

  Softly, Weiss replied, “Then we’ll mourn her properly, but not risk the rescue team. Going in blind, they will certainly die. Benny is leading them. We need intel, son, and we need it now.”

  “Only if Nena can be there to hold my hand. If Jez is dead…”

  “Understood.” The doctor shouted through the door, “Monitors, crash cart, Olive, Cornflake Girl, stat!”

  They set up in record time. As Daniel received the green injection, he stared into Nena’s eyes. He held the reindeer in the other hand.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she insisted. “They don’t pay you to die.”

  “This isn’t for money,” he replied as he drifted off.

  Daniel appeared in a narrow section of steam tunnel. The walls were covered in duct-taped, plastic sheeting. Jez hung from a pipe, held up by a pair of handcuffs. Her gear and clothing had been removed, leaving only a white jogging bra and underwear. Her arm bandage had been joined by several cruder patches, super-glue field dressings on numerous facial and arm scratches. She dangled over a plastic kiddy pool lined with a thin layer of cat litter. The balls of her feet could barely touch the gritty surface.

  A female technician with her hair in a bun attached electrical leads to several medical-monitoring points on her body. There were also electrodes on the feet, armpits, and other sensitive pain points. Then, the technician announced, “She’s awake.”

  Jez suddenly gripped the woman with her legs. The technician screamed for help as Jez dragged her close enough to bite an ear. The woman thrashed and shouted incoherently. Her hair spilled down as the captured agent head-butted her in the nose.

  With smug satisfaction, Maverick thumbed a button he was holding. Voltage coursed through both women, and both went limp. Releasing the button, Maverick kicked the technician clear.

  Daniel flickered back briefly in a moment of panic. “They’re torturing her!”

  “What building?” demanded Weiss.

  “Steam tunnels. I didn’t check where.” He described the scene.

  “She wasn’t trying to kill the technician,” Weiss explained. “It was a diversion so she could grab a security badge or something. Jez is a big girl. She can use it to escape if we can just distract them long enough.”

  “That’s right,” Daniel brightened. “Jez did this for a living. The hair fell—she stole a bobby pin and hid it in her mouth.”

  “What?” Nena asked.

  “She’s a professional escape artist.” Daniel explained.

  Nena looked confused. “I thought she was just a secretary.”

  Both men smiled. Wavering but encouraged, Daniel said, “I think I can do it one more time.”

  Closing his eyes, he concentrated. Back in the tunnel, he saw Maverick holding her by the jaw, giving Jez the ground rules. They were alone in the room. A sturdy, metal office chair and a TV tray of odd garage paraphernalia sat beside the head of Fossil security.

  Daniel waved, but she couldn’t see him. Frantic, he scanned the area for any kind of room number or distinctive marking. The outlet that the torture device was plugged into had a string of odd numbers associated. A pillar off to the right had a fire-escape-route arrow and the label AF73. He memorized both as he listened to the interrogation.

  Maverick said, “You weren’t supposed to be the one at the meeting, but I’m going to keep you alive until Buddy shows up for you.”

  “I’m the bait? It’ll never happen. It’s against Dirt Bag’s rules.”

  Maverick shrugged. “Then, I cut off a body part each day and mail it to him till he breaks the rules.”

  Jez stared into his stone-black eyes. “I thought you were into rape, not mutilation.”

  “You mean Claudette?” he grinned. “She submitted willingly. Every time I pushed into her, I thought about how crazy it would make Fortune. Sadly, she’s a bit old and tires easily. It got boring, but she begged for everything I did to her.”

  He pulled out a knife and whispered in her ear. “You’ll beg, too. When Buddy gets here, I’ll strap him in that chair and make him watch while I do you. I want to watch him squirm while he sees what a real man can do. You’ll live as long as you beg for more of me, and I stay interested. The more exciting you make it, the longer you live.”

  “That’s the second time you admitted needing to fantasize about a man in order to get an erection.” That’s when he used his knife to cut off the little toe on her right foot. Blood dripped into the cat litter and clumped.

  Daniel vanished again, vomiting before he could even turn his head. Dr. Weiss kept him from choking. The monitors were triggering alarms. Nena popped out a red syringe, but the doctor knocked it out of her hand. “You people always overmedicate. Just let him breathe.”

  Daniel recited numbers from the steam tunnel as tears poured down his cheeks. A guard wrote them down and started a search of the blueprints. He relayed the events as quickly as possible, his voice getting higher. “Why her little toe?”

  Nena answered. “To help break her. She has to learn who’s in control. It’s particularly personal because of her love of dancing and shoes. Those will never be the same, even if she’s rescued. It will also make running away difficult.”

  Daniel was horrified. “Why did she antagonize him like that?”

  Weiss answered. “She can’t lie. If he thinks to ask her certain things, she might tell. It’s a side-effect of the page. So she has to keep him emotional, off-balance, and stall.”

  “Stall how?” asked Daniel.

  The doctor seemed unable to stop his own reply. “The pain of cauterizing in such a circumstance will likely make her pass out again. It’ll buy much-needed time.”

  “The car cigarette lighter. Oh, God!” Daniel whimpered.

  Nena whispered as she stroked his hair. “She won’t remember afterward. Pain erases memories.”

  Chapter 20 – Judgment

  After calmly bagging the toe he had removed as proof of life, Maverick clipped his digital recorder to Jezebel’s bra so he could pick up every detail and replay it later.

  She was deep in theta, trying to escape him. He grabbed her ponytail and said, “Good show, Jez.” When her eyes fluttered open, they went wide with horror. The Fossils had her post-hypnotic key. If they had everyone’s, this was very bad for the Project. He said, “From now on, each time you try to go unconscious, I will remove another digit.”

  He hung up his jacket and Kevlar vest on the utility pegs studding the wall. She could see the photo-ID badge on his jacket’s front pocket, a key to every door in this complex, just out of her reach. After he removed an extra layer of body armor from under his t-shirt, she noticed that the strength of his active signal went down, like someone using a dimmer switch on a light. Had Maverick been carrying a page next to his skin? Maybe he drew comfort from the alien device, or maybe it was an added layer of bullet protection.

  The sadist ended her speculations when he chose an implement from his surgical table: two feet of steel pipe with a rubber grip. “Meet the rod of instruction. As part of martial arts training, they taught me how to administer public canings. I can punish someone for days, and they will feel every nuance. Allow me to demonstrate.” Maverick beat the bottoms of her feet, kidneys, breasts, and other sensitive places. “This will happen every time you fail to answer fully and with proper respect. Do you understand?”

  Jez shrieked, “Yes.”

  He struck the arch of her right foot so hard that something had to have broken
inside like glass. Tears flowed down her face. She hadn’t cried since the day she heard the news about Chance, not even at the funeral.

  “Yes, what?”

  Choking, she gave him the answer he wanted. “Yes, master.”

  From then on, she answered questions as completely as possible, padding with unnecessary details wherever she could. When the topic of the country club came up, she asked, “How could you kill all those people?”

  “Seth was a thorn in his father’s side for years. This trap was years in the making. We would have killed a hundred people to get him. Your people were just a bonus.”

  “Who betrayed us, other than you?”

  Maverick smacked her across the face, bruising her jaw and lips. “I ask the questions.”

  Blood trickled down her chin. This gave her good reason to speak more slowly and slur her words. She had to go back several times for clarification. Eventually, they got to the important questions.

  “What’s the combination for the safe where the pages are kept in the LA office?” Maverick demanded.

  This was the question she dreaded. “Checkmate, you bastard.” She was interrupted by the sound of an explosion ripping through the night.

  This was followed shortly after by a report over Maverick’s headset. “Machine-gun fire in the north parking lot.” Jez surprised him by giving the type and military specification for the device. He eyed her with suspicion. “How did you know?”

  “The attack is straight out of our contingency book for see…seizing your pages in an emergency. I know because I objected to the potential loss of life. Trench Coat overruled me. A rocket attack on the office with the safe could start a fire. Dogs… would kill the fire crews. Innocent lives could be lost.”

  Maverick snapped orders into his headset over the next several minutes. “Concentrate on zone three. Move all forces there except squad four. Do not allow a breach in the command bunker. Pull in the dogs between there and the main gate. Contain, but do not pursue in the north parking area.”