Dead Silence

by Randy Wayne White

  I’m no carpenter, but I recognized the polished drill bit. It was stainless steel, the diameter finer than pencil lead but forged solid, designed to bore through tile or concrete. It, too, was stained.

  Myles appeared to be dead. I couldn’t be sure.

  The stable consisted of a half dozen stalls, doors open. There were also ancillary rooms, but I didn’t pause to weigh the possibility that Navárro and Yanquez were hiding inside. I crashed through bushes to the front entrance and kicked open the office door, pistol at eye level, flipping off lights as I hurried to the barn’s main area. Darkness was to my advantage.

  The ceiling was pitched, twenty feet high, with a loft. On the main beam, a winch was bolted to a boom, used for hauling up bales of hay or machinery that needed to be stored in the loft. It was an electric winch. Tonight, it had hauled up a six-foot man, suspending him like a trophy fish.

  Myles heard me as I banged my way into the room, or the sudden darkness had frightened him, because I heard his scarred vocal chords whisper, “Don’t! Don’t . . . Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

  Surprise! He was alive. When he pleaded, “Lights on . . . can’t see,” I hesitated before finding the nearest switch. I removed the night vision monocular as banks of neon flooded the room with the cheery luminescence of a retail shop. Anyone outside could see us now. I didn’t like it, but the man had been through enough without adding to his fear.

  I knelt beside him, saying, “It’s me . . . Ford. I’ll get you down. You’ll be okay.”

  Myles moaned, “No more hurt me . . . Please, can’t . . . Sit it . . . ? Can’t stand it no more!,” as the cable made abbreviated pendulum arcs, caused by his recent convulsing, a musculature response to pain. He was having difficulty selecting words and forming sentences. It was because of what Navárro and Yanquez had done to his brain.

  I found the winch toggle and lowered Myles almost to the floor before using one arm to lift his weight while my free hand threaded the cable hooks out of his ankles. I attempted a slow, gentle pull, but his reaction told me it was better to do it fast, in one swift motion, like ripping adhesive tape off a wound.

  The man screamed again, twice, then began to sob, as I carried him to a stack of hay bales in the corner and placed him on his back. His body felt as light as that of a withered old man.

  As I freed his hands, I asked, “Why’d they do this? What did they want?” Myles’s eyes blinked open. “Dr. Ford . . . ?” His relief was audible—and also misplaced, considering what I had done to him earlier.

  “You’re safe. You’ll be okay after I call an ambulance.”

  It was a lie, but he was too damaged to discern truth.

  “Where’s my phone?”

  “Phone,” he whispered. “They took . . . your phone . . . the Spanish man . . . sillll-verr-haired man . . . Woman called . . . the . . . the Cuban answered . . . Woman’s name is . . . I saw her picture in the . . . Nawww York Times . . .” Myles stuttered, fighting to retrieve words. “The woman . . . she is in . . . the Amerr-ii-can Sin . . . Sin . . . Senate.”

  Barbara Hayes-Sorrento had tried to call me. René Navárro had answered, and still had my phone.

  “Did the man know who she was?” A pointless question. Of course he knew, for the same reason Myles knew. I log names with the same exacting consistency I log specimens: last name, first name, title, address. The data would have flashed on the caller-ID screen.

  “The Cuban . . . called her . . . Snn-Snn-Senator. He asked her . . . to come . . .”

  “Where? Did she agree?”

  Myles replied with a helpless shrug: Don’t know.

  I said, “Rest for a second, maybe you’ll remember,” as my brain began a rapid review of associated data. Barbara had told me that she was meeting Will Chaser’s foster grandparents tonight in Tampa, then going to a vacation home owned by a senator from Oklahoma. Barbara would have arrived by now. It was likely she’d called me from the airport. Just as likely, she was in a hurry, as always, and started talking the instant the man answered, telling him, “We just landed in Tampa,” or something like that.

  I asked, “Your neighbor, the senator, is he from Minnesota?” I was trying to compute the odds. The Senate is the most exclusive club in the country—only a hundred members—but about half spend part of the winter in Florida. A statistical guess: twenty-some on the Atlantic Coast, twenty-some on the Gulf. Still, the coincidence was unlikely, unless . . .

  Myles appeared to shake his head—No, not from Minnesota—more concerned with what had happened to his wife. He whispered, “Did they . . . hurt her? I didn’t tell them . . . where my wife . . . where Roxanne . . . was hiding! They hurt me . . . threatened to kill me . . . but I didn’t . . . tell them!”

  The man’s eyes widened, proud he had defended his wife, but his wife was Connie, not Roxanne Sofvia. It was impossible to know if he’d confused the names or his loyalty. But he had refused. Nothing else mattered.

  “Hiding where?” I asked.

  “Drove to a friend’s . . . house . . . Saw them coming . . . from the beach . . . the . . . Cubans. Told her it . . . was business . . . didn’t want her . . . around.”

  I was thinking about Detective Palmer, worried she would confront the Cubans if they’d gone to the house, searching for Connie Myles. I was also looking around the room for a water spigot and a working telephone, or even an alarm button like the one in the Range Rover.

  There wasn’t much I could do for the man but summon an ambulance and try to get some water down him. He’d lost a lot of blood and needed fluids. I told myself water might keep him alive, but it wasn’t true. Even if he did live, would he want to?

  Myles continued talking as I filled an empty Coke bottle from a water-trough spigot, but he was difficult to understand because the wiring of his brain had been scrambled. Most of what he said was disconnected gibberish. He transposed words or selected nonsensical ones that conveyed no meaning. Inside his head, I guessed, the synapse junctions had to be sparking like meteorites. Even so, I managed to piece together the story.

  The Cubans had tried to force him to fly to the Bahamas. They didn’t believe him when he told them Lear employees had flown his plane to Miami that afternoon for servicing. That’s when the bigger man, Yanquez, grabbed Myles and strung him from a rafter.

  The interrogators not only wanted the truth, they wanted to neutralize Myles as a witness by erasing his memory but also keep him alive as long as possible. A hostage is still a hostage, whatever his condition, as long as he is breathing.

  As they questioned the multimillionaire, the silver-haired Cuban—the veteran interrogator, René Navárro—used a power drill to systematically destroy the cerebral lobes that had just provided the answers he’d demanded. It was a brutal, ingenious way of covering their tracks.

  The human brain possesses the symmetry of a walnut, and its similarly wrinkled skin has the effect of increasing the neuron surface area. A channel divides the brain into left and right hemispheres. Like a walnut, the hemispheres appear to be twins, but they function differently.

  The right hemisphere is associated with creativity, the left with logic. We remember the lyrics of even inane songs for years yet struggle to memorize poems or numerical chains because the right brain storehouses music while the more tidy, less fanciful left brain organizes linear data and is also quick to trash what isn’t vital.

  Navárro had a physician’s understanding of how the brain functions, the duties of the various lobes and where they were located within the cranial vault. To create maximum terror but minimize damage, he had begun at the back of Nelson’s head, on the creative side. That, too, was ingenious. After the first penetration, there was less chance of Myles tricking them by composing a believable lie.

  There were several entry points. I didn’t count them, but at least one had pierced the cerebellum, which is the command post of coordination and balance. If Myles lived, he would spend his remaining years in a wheelchair.

  Judging f
rom Navárro’s knowledge of physiology, and his reputation for cruelty, he had probably waited until the end before targeting the man’s forehead, behind which lies the highly evolved neocortex.

  The neocortex is the oversized mammalian brain, complex in its layering and abilities. Memory is stored in many regions, but it’s the frontal lobe that makes us distinctive as individuals, capable of deep reasoning and original thought.

  There was no reason for Navárro to destroy Myles as a person before killing him. But he had, needlessly and viciously, used the power drill in the forehead area. Joined by lines, the three holes would have formed a triangle, a one-dimensional pyramid.

  I had felt contempt for Nelson Myles. That wouldn’t change, not only because of what he’d done long ago to a thirteen-year-old girl but also because he’d gone on with his life while the child’s family was condemned to suffer through their lives, scarred by loss and haunted by the unanswered question Where is our daughter?

  No amount of good deeds or rationalization could redeem his self-centered cruelty. But in the small arena of large personal bravery, my respect for the man once again was on the ascent. Myles had told me he was a member of a noble society, an ancient and honorable fraternity, that his membership was the one good thing no one could ever take away from him. For the first time, those words—ancient, honorable—had credence.

  The silver-haired man, called Farfel by POWs, had put a drill bit to the multimillionaire’s head and demanded to know where Connie Myles was hiding. Myles had chosen to endure the horror rather than put his wife—or his lover—in harm’s way.

  We are a much-flawed species, capable of deeds so inhuman that only humans could devise them. But even the worst of us are capable of acts of heroism and sacrifice far beyond the purview of lesser primates. Here was proof.

  I said to Myles, “Drink some of this.” I was holding the bottle to his lips. When he tried to push the water away, his malfunctioning neurosystem only managed to flop one chilled hand on my shoulder, the hand which still wore the Skull and Bones ring. He was dying before my eyes.

  I had been in the stable for less than three minutes, yet the life of a man was flickering away. Rather than drink and preserve himself, Myles continued talking, trying to anchor his presence by jettisoning information.

  “I told them to . . . use my boat. Told the . . . Cubans . . . gave them the keys . . . to my . . . crown? . . . No! . . . Keys to my . . . Tah . . . Tah . . . Uhhh! . . . Wrong word!”

  He was getting frustrated, trying to recall the make of his luxury yacht, a Tiara. He had told Navárro and Yanquez where to find the keys, hoping they would go away.

  “Cubans,” I said, trying to reassure him with an easy question. “There were two of them, right?”

  “An . . . eight,” Myles said, managing a smile as if he’d done something clever. For a moment, I was confused but then understood. It was Bonesman code—eight: yes—there were two men.

  The death rattle is not folklore. A final spasm of abdominal musculature creates a distinctive crackle. A moment after Nelson Myles died, I flicked off the lights and checked the windows for the first time in almost four minutes.

  Standing outside the stable was a silver-haired man and a giant companion. They were staring at me, their expressions amused, as if they’d been watching a television sitcom.

  The SIG Sauer was jammed between belt and butt in the back of my pants. I drew it, already leaning toward the window as I leveled the weapon, hammer back, ready to fire. But I caught myself in time. I didn’t shoot.

  Slowly, slowly, I lowered the pistol, index finger parallel to the barrel. I used the decocking lever to release the hammer, then squatted and placed the weapon on the floor. When the silver-haired Navárro motioned me to step away from the gun, I did so without hesitation.

  Whatever they told me to do, I would do—for now—because they had Shelly Palmer.

  The giant, Angel Yanquez, had his arm around the woman’s throat. He was holding the detective’s pistol to her temple, grinning at me, head down as he made eye contact, showing me his stub of a horn like a rhino.

  32

  The rhino-sized Cuban pushed Detective Shelly Palmer into the stable as the older man, with his neat gray hair and tidy mustache, locked the door, then pointed the pistol he was carrying at me. It had a laser sight. My eyes squinched shut, temporarily blinded by the red dot that painted my face.

  “Sit!” the man yelled. “Sit on your hands!”

  When Navárro emphasized Sit!, his dentures clicked, just as I’d been told they would. So it was Farfel. . . . Farfel and his giant assistant, Hump.

  I sat immediately. Palmer did not, which gave Hump reason to grab her hair and trip her legs from beneath her. She collapsed on the floor beside me, her body making a bone-on-cement thump, as he yelled something in Spanish about her being stubborn like a mule.

  Palmer righted herself, pulling her skirt over her knees, then turned to me, eyes dazed. Her lip was bleeding, and there was a cut above her right eye. She hadn’t surrendered without a struggle.

  “I’m so damn sorry,” the detective said, her voice shaking. “I should have believed you. Who are these people?”

  I whispered, “Did you get a chance to radio?,” as Farfel yelled, “Quiet!”

  I watched the woman’s eyes blink No, then move around the stable. She froze when she came to Nelson Myles, then leaned away as if to create distance. A corpse is an overpowering presence. It shrunk the room and weighted the air with a tangible dread, an absence of energy and a silence—an inexorable silence.

  The nearby power drill was more unsettling because Farfel knew who I was. I could tell by his reaction as he went through my billfold, checking the driver’s license, then looking from the photo to me, before pocketing my cash and credit cards.

  Maybe he recognized my name from the newspapers: the civilian who’d gone through the ice with Choirboy. I hoped that was the reason.

  “Marion Ford,” Farfel said with a heavy accent, tossing my billfold aside. “Finally, some luck that is good! It is what we need, an excellent boat captain to drive us to Cuba. Not an idiot boat captain, one who steers like a farmer pulling a plow.” He shot a withering look at Yanquez, who looked like he’d been in a minor car wreck: His right ear was scabbed over by a recent injury and there was a goose-egg-sized bruise on his forehead.

  Newspapers hadn’t mentioned my prowess with boats, so now I hoped Myles had told him about me. What I feared was that Farfel had gotten info from someone else, a person who knew about my former life—Tinman possibly. If that’s how the Cuban knew, I wouldn’t survive the night.

  The drill: I couldn’t keep my eyes off the thing. It was a perverse magnet demanding my attention, so I stared at the floor, choosing not to make eye contact. For someone like Farfel, even a poor reason to torture a man was good enough. It was terrifying to imagine him doing to me what he’d done to Myles.

  Fear is an antonym of bravery. I am often afraid but only occasionally brave. We all deal with small, nagging fears on a daily basis. But I had never been in a situation where I risked the ultimate indignity, the violation of my own skull. The fear I felt was a cloying, physical manifestation. It sucked the air from my lungs, making it difficult to breath or think clearly.

  Farfel startled me when he stepped closer, demanding, “In a boat to Havana, how many trips do you have? You are an expert with boats, yes?” The man used reversed syntax characteristic of Spanish.

  When I didn’t respond immediately, he pressed, “I know of your identity. You are Dr. Ford but not a real doctor. You are the marine scientist. Or . . .”—the little man was examining my face—“. . . or the one who is a trained killer, some say. Which?”

  Myles could have told him I was experienced with boats or about my role as a hit man earlier, but something in Farfel’s eager contempt suggested he knew I hadn’t been acting back on the dirt road. The question produced a quizzical stare from Palmer, her expression asking What’s he talkin
g about?

  I glanced at her and replied with a slight shake of the head: Don’t ask.

  “Stop looking at the woman,” the Cuban yelled. “Look at me!”

  I said, “I’m sorry,” gauging the distance to Farfel’s ankles, picturing how I might work it. Trip the man to the floor and wrestle the pistol away before the giant crushed me from behind. No . . . both men would have time to shoot. Even if Navárro missed me, he might hit Palmer.

  I was also considering the distance to the winch—two bare, bloodstained hooks hanging near the ground—as Farfel said, “Look how I was forced to treat poor Mr. Nelson Myles.” He motioned toward the body, enjoying himself. “I considered it yet another experiment. As a scientist, you may appreciate the precision of my technique. I am a real doctor, unlike you. Does that impress you? It should.”

  I shrugged, a nonanswer that I expected to irritate him. It did.

  Voice louder, he said, “The experiment I conducted earlier I can also apply to you. You see, I knew all about Mr. Myles. That he murdered a poor, young girl, as the rich often do, yet he tried to deceive me. When men talk, they tell me everything or they talk never. If you do not cooperate, I will conduct the same experiment on you.”

  Once again, the woman was staring at me. She had to be wondering what form of insanity I had led her into.

  Eyes on the floor, I replied, “Tell me what you want me to do, I’ll do it. But I want something in exchange. Tell me where the boy is. Is Will Chaser still alive?”

  The man began to pace, checking the windows, checking his watch. “Shut up! What do I care about some American brat? He is no longer my responsibility.”

  Farfel wasn’t just desperate, I realized, he was as frightened as Palmer and me. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered his predicament. He had tortured men—American men—a few of whom were still alive. No matter how many years had passed, they would jump at a chance for revenge, to tell their horror stories in a U.S. court or World Court. With the media in attendance, René Navárro would spend his last years like an animal in a zoo, condemned to die in a cage.