The Doll (6 page)

He straightened.

Jahan and Walker blocked his exit.

“War room,” Bradford said, and wordlessly, they turned, Jahan following Walker, Bradford following Jahan.

Bradford opened the envelope, took out the documents, and tossed the contents onto Jahan’s desk. Searched through the stack of papers until he found what he was looking for, a spreadsheet and an old newspaper article, and shifted both of them to face Walker and Jahan.

“This is who we’re hunting,” he said. “This is our shooter.”

The collected papers from the envelope were over an inch thick: bank records, company records, notes, and threads that detailed a web of evil that wound out of Europe and across the globe. After a moment of flipping through them and scanning the data, Jahan paused and stared at Bradford. “Where did these come from?”

Bradford tapped the pages in his hand. “About two years ago,” he said, “Michael took a missing-person job in Central Africa. Was the first time I’d worked with her and the case took us places we had no idea we’d go. These came out of the aftermath.”

“You were dealing with this?”

“No, I discovered these at the end, here in the U.S. in the safe of a guy who died.”

Walker said, “If this had nothing to do with Michael, why would people like this come after her and Logan?”

Bradford moved to the door. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I know where to dig.”

The only source of light was a sliver beneath the door, but that was enough to make the headache worse. Vanessa Michael Munroe shut her eyes against the pounding beat and returned to darkness, to the words and sounds that echoed along the walls.

Not real speech, a recording. She could tell that even from this drug-induced haze. She stretched fingertips to the wall and heard from touch the same story told by the smell of this place. Dank. Damp. Buried.

Her leg was stiff and tender, her shoulder badly bruised. Mental nudges took her toward the last thing that she remembered: The tollway. The bike. The hit to her thigh. Falling into darkness and into pain.

Beyond the door came footsteps. Voices, real voices—occasionally screaming—while the steady pattern of language played on and on, masking and muting the sounds of the world beyond the walls and providing a strange sense of continuity in this dungeon of a place.

Munroe breathed a slow, deep in-and-out, and sank fully into the mattress with its stench of mold and grime and human sweat, floated in the vibration of the language, drowned in it until the lock
clanked metal against metal and the door slid to the side and the room went blinding white.

The pain returned with the light and she squinted at the shadow that stooped and filled the doorway. The intruder was followed by another, and the two kept a cautious distance until they were joined by a third, who moved in closer. “You are awake now,” he said, and there was a familiarity to his voice, as if she’d dreamed him or this was déjà vu. “That is good,” he said. “You eat, then you come with us.”

His English was accented and clearly enunciated—perhaps from an education in England or even in Canada; he wasn’t a native speaker. But he’d stopped talking and Munroe’s mind, still numb from the drugs, worked too slowly to capture what she should have known. Knowledge was there on the edge and then it vanished, and she sighed and let go again, into the peace.

The shadowed voice spoke to the two behind him, words that fractured and spun inside her head. Meaning, but not exact, a language familiar, although not perfectly so.

“Let her sleep some more,” he’d said. “She’s not ready.”

Yes, that was the meaning. And then they were gone and she was left with the silence and the voices, always the voices, and the darkness, and the passage of time.

Then awareness.

Her eyes snapped open to blackness, her mind fully awake.

Munroe flipped to her stomach and into a crouch.

The sliver of light was gone and the Hungarian recording still intruded into the silence.

She slid from mattress to floor, followed the wall to a corner, taking minutes to explore through touch what sight would have told her in seconds, tracing along the perimeter of a cell that she guessed at seven feet by about six, with a ceiling so low it occasionally snagged her hair.

Near the door she knocked into a metal tray, paused in reaction to hunger, then continued past because nourishment wasn’t worth the risk of being drugged again. Returned to the mattress, and there, seated with her back to the cold stone, she let her mind meander in slow soft circles—puzzle unfolding, questions forming—timed to the rhythm of voices that imitated the language immersion she would put herself through before entering a new country or new
assignment—as if they—whoever they were—
knew;
knew of the inexplicable ability that had been with her since childhood, the ability to assimilate language with nearly the same speed others processed what they saw, a poisonous gift that had defined every moment of her life and brought her to the place that had created what she now was.

H
E RETURNED AT
last, the articulate one with his silent companions. Forearm to her face, Munroe shielded her eyes from the light that shadowed the men in silhouette. The English speaker put a packet on the floor. Used his foot to slide the bundle toward her.

“Clean clothes,” he said. “Put them on. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” He glanced at the tray. “The food?”

“I’m not hungry.”

He shook his head. “There are no drugs.”

“All the same,” she said, leaning forward to reach for the package.

His response to her movement—their responses—gave her pause.

They stood there, three against one, blocking the exit to a prison cell built for miniature people, and twitched when she’d shifted toward them.

“Can you turn it off?” Munroe said, nodding her head toward the strongest source of sound.

“It’s not possible,” he said, and she knew then that whoever this young man was, and whatever role he played in what happened to her, he wasn’t the final authority. “I apologize for this treatment,” he said with a cursory wave toward the mattress, the walls. “We’d been told you might not come willingly and felt it best to take precautions. You understand, I think.”

She didn’t reply, just stood, and in a space small enough that she could have simply reached out and taken the package, stepped forward. Microsecond gaps of instinct measured their body language, reported back with clarity and understanding: They’d come three against one into this cell because all three were unarmed—brute force in place of weapons.

The articulate one watched her with curious eyes, as if like the others he knew she had the potential to be dangerous, but like a child waiting for the snake to strike just to see what happened, he doubted.

“Won’t you open it,” he said, eager, she supposed, for her reaction to the clothing in the package. She slipped her finger into a crease and tore the paper.

Inside were men’s clothes. Pants. Shirt. Shoes. Undergarments. Elastic bandage. The hair on the back of her neck raised slightly. These people, whoever they were, knew far more about her than was comfortable.

“Fifteen minutes,” the young one said. He nodded toward the larger of the two flanking him, a man with scars and disfigurement that spoke of fighting that had been close and personal. “Then Arben will cut your hair.”

Munroe returned to the mattress. Placed the wrapping and the clothes beside her and, with hands relaxed on her thighs, looked up at the young one. Said, “If he touches me, I’ll kill him.”

Rattle on a snake, a dog’s growl to prevent a bite, her warning was meant to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and the burden of taking life, because as surely as the earth turned, if that man put a hand on her, instinct and history would overwhelm reason and she would destroy him or die trying.

The young man choked back a cough and followed it with a snicker.

Arben and the nameless third showed no reaction; the guards spoke no English.

Fingering the collar of the new shirt, her eyes deliberately avoiding the English speaker, Munroe said, “Get me clippers. I’ll cut my own hair.”

“I will consider it,” he said.

T
HEY LEFT HER
to change, although she needed a shower: hot to the point of scalding, to rid herself of her own smell, the sick of this place, and the remnants of the cotton-headed fog of whatever they’d used to put her under. But there was no water. Only the mattress, the cold concrete floor, and the drain in the corner that she’d noticed once the hallway light had filtered in.

She stripped down and put the new clothing on.

Their charade, their rules. For now.

Slipped back into the leather jacket and zipped it closed.

The men came again, fifteen minutes as promised, although she had only an internal clock to gauge the truthfulness of time. They
waited for her at the cell opening; didn’t approach, didn’t attempt to cuff or touch her, nor did they move to force her to rise when she remained seated on the filthy mattress staring blankly at them. Curiosity dared her to test their resolve, to see how hard she could push before they reacted, but the desire to escape this dank hellhole was stronger.

She rose to follow.

In the doorway, the English speaker stared at her jacket as if demanding she remove it, as she had the rest of her clothes. She shook her head, a slow no. The man-boy paused and, in an act of maturity that belied his youth or ego, half grinned. “We take care of the hair later,” he said, and stepped out of her way.

Munroe ducked through the opening. Squeezed by him into the narrow corridor, where fluorescent bulbs, crudely daisy-chained along the ceiling, made the hallway institutionally bright. The sting of bleach smarted in her nose, masking more of the moldy wet damp that had filled the cell.

The sight, the scent, hit her with the full impact of a brick to the head: memories of violence and retribution still fresh from Argentina. And although the events that had previously drawn her into the arms of evil had been random, because of them she knew what this place was and what being here might mean, and for the first time since she’d been awake—for the first time in a very long time—bloodlust, immediate and feral, burned up from inside and crept toward her fingertips.

Munroe clenched her hands and glanced down the hall.

To the right stretched the length of two more cells, and near the end, drowning out the Hungarian, came another scream, carrying with it not pain but all the primal vibration of animal rage.

Munroe turned in the direction of the cry. Flanked fully in the narrow hall, two in front and one behind, she would have had to move through the men to get anywhere. They paused because she paused, did not touch her, and offered no explanation. After a long wordless standoff, the young one finally motioned her to the left, in the opposite direction of the screams.

She followed down a seeming dead end that cornered to face steep stairs beckoning with fresh air and natural light. A thick metal door separated the world below from the living above, an otherwise impenetrable barrier, that at the moment stood open
and inviting. Still flanked and guarded, Munroe stepped through to a high-ceilinged room, where light from transom-style windows bathed her and the workers’ whispers flowed around her in a mixture of words; some Slavic—not identical to the Macedonian she already spoke, but familiar—others the language of the silent ones, a language she hadn’t heard in years. In response to the multiple conversations, as naturally as breathing, intrusive and invasive, without work, without effort, flashes of illumination set off inside her brain.

They walked the corridor of the stone-floored room, a path formed between smaller offices off to one side and the oddly spaced desks and cluttered tabletops that filled the open-spaced area. Munroe’s eyes roamed from ceiling beams to floor, from wall to wall, searching out routes of escape, scanning for improvisable weapons.

Employees were busy over mounted magnifying lenses and small Bunsen burners, wax molds and scalpels: gold-crafting in all its stages. No one paused when they passed, and in the apparent nonchalance Munroe sensed a mixture of fear and commonplace experience, as if a dirty prisoner of war being marched along a goldsmith’s workstation was a normal course of events in this place.

The scene, surreal as it was, ended as quickly as it had begun.

The scarred man whom the articulate one had called Arben and his still nameless partner took up sentry positions outside a door; he opened it and nodded her inside. She paused. The young English speaker continued past her without a backward glance. Munroe stepped into the room, the door shut behind her, and she stopped.

Filling the room, floor to ceiling, on shelves along each wall, in glass cases, resting on chairs, and standing on credenzas, were porcelain dolls: small and life-size, hand-painted and air-brushed, richly clothed with waxen hair, curled and styled. They stared out at her—more lifeless eyes than she could count—each doll in perfect condition: items a collector had doted on and cared for, with not a speck of dust to tarnish them.