The Specter (22 page)

He opened his eyes to slits. He was lying on his back in a vehicle, trees racing by the windows. It was either a van or a makeshift ambulance. Wires or IV lines hung from hooks and a stethoscope rested from the knob of a small cabinet that held numerous small bottles with labels on them.

He tried to lift his good arm, but something held him down. He tried again, his strength all but spent.

What have they done to me?

He tried to lift his head, but it was too heavy.

“Hey, the asshole’s awake.”

A man came into view. He lips curled up and his face skewed in an angry scowl.

Do I know you?
Aaron tried to ask, but his mouth didn’t move.

Music played from the vehicle’s radio. A truck raced by going the other way, the wind swooshing the small van.

The man touched the wires dangling above Aaron’s head. Aaron tried to see what the man was doing.

“Fuck off!” the man shouted at Aaron.

He leaned closer, smiled and lifted his hand in the air for Aaron to see it. Everything in Aaron’s body fought to move, to counter the strike, to manage the man in front of him bodily, but nothing worked.

The man’s hand dropped hard and fast. His fist crossed Aaron’s cheek and grazed his teeth as it passed. Aaron’s face whipped sideways, the pain immediate and intense.

Aaron groaned, but nothing else in his body responded to his brain’s commands. He had never felt so paralyzed, so out of control.

The man laughed, a long and hearty guffaw. He smiled in Aaron’s face, showing off the yellowed teeth of a smoker.

With his finger, the man touched the side of Aaron’s face and withdrew it to show Aaron what he had done. Blood covered the edge of the man’s fingernail.

“Not bad, eh? Just wait, in the next little while you’ll learn what real pain is. You think popping a man’s eyeball out is bad? That’s nothing to what you’re going to go through.”

The man drew back his arm and then dropped it hard and fast again. This time, Aaron lost consciousness.

Nothing moved under him when he came to. With care, he opened his eyes and looked around. He touched his tongue to his swollen lip. One tooth felt out of place. The only plus was the pain in his head had subsided some.

They had propped him upright in a wooden chair, his hands tied behind his back, ankles bound to the legs of the chair. From the neck up, his head was free. He turned slowly and examined the chair. The wooden edges were trimmed with metal, the chair reinforced to maintain its durability.

Moonlight shone through a window to his left, lighting the dirt floor enough for him to see he was in some kind of unfinished building or a condemned structure.

There was nothing else to see in the dark. He couldn’t detect anyone close or any movements.

Hunger gripped his stomach and his bladder screamed for release. He wore only his underwear, but fortunately, the temperature in the building was quite warm. His underwear was already soiled.

Whoever brought him here hadn’t cleaned him. All they had done was strip him, tie him up and leave him in his own filth.

Who does this kind of shit? What the fuck is this?

“Hello,” he called out in a cracked voice.

He struggled against his binds to no avail. Even if he could knock himself down or try to bang the chair against the floor or the wall, it would do no good. The chair was too strong. To leave him here tied up, unattended, they had to be certain the chair would hold. And he had to be far from others or they would hear him scream when he woke.

Think, dammit, think.

Pain returned slowly. First his broken wrist and then his head.

They drugged me …

As the narcotics wore off, and the minutes clicked by, the pain came on, stronger than any pain he’d ever felt before. He groaned, closed his eyes tight and willed the pain away. He tried to move the fingers of his right hand, but it hurt too much. He moved the fingers of his left to examine his broken wrist. Something hard and covered in thick sticky liquid stuck out of the skin by his wrist.

His empty stomach revolted and he retched a chunk of bile up and out. He spat a dark, bloody lump onto the moonlight carpeted floor.

He was in a den of lions. These men had the advantage and they knew it. There were many of them and only one of him. Wherever he was, only the men who brought him here knew of his whereabouts. He was wounded. Possibly fatally, depending on what they’d been pumping into him. The fight he had put up in Toronto had been for his life so it had been vicious and necessary. Now that they had the advantage, they would exact the same kind of violence on him with extreme prejudice.

He shook with fear—the fear of pain and death—a natural fear that humans felt at the end.

He got his breathing under control, lowered his chin to his chest and closed his eyes.

Then he released his bladder. The warm liquid moved out around his buttocks and dripped off the chair, running down his calf muscles.

He wondered how appropriate it was that he just pissed himself.

I’m a cliché.
He willed sleep to take him from this hell.

Chapter 27

The awe-inspiring Fortress of Palamidi perched in regal beauty atop the large, rocky hill, over two hundred meters above Nafplio, Greece. Built in the late 1600s and completed before 1715, the fortress was a huge task, incorporating all the experience the Greeks had available to them at that time. Bastions had water reservoirs, munitions depots, food storage areas, and frequently moats, machicolations or
murder holes,
outer retaining walls and a barracks. For its day, it was a marvelous piece of work. Today, it was a tourist attraction with thousands of visitors yearly.

Clive Baron looked up at the expanse of steps that led to the top of the fortress. Local legend held that there were 999 steps, and that one was broken by a soldier’s horse and never repaired. Items on restaurant’s menus use this number to attract tourists’ eyes.

But Clive loved history and had visited Palamidi before. He knew there were actually 857 steps from the street level to the edge of Palamidi and more than a thousand to the top.

“Go,” Clive ordered his driver. The sleek Mercedes moved away from the center of Nafplio and drove past the fresh fruit and fish market that popped up every Wednesday and Saturday, en route to the access road to the top of the hill where Palamidi sat. Tour buses moved slowly past the market, and Greek farmers walked back and forth across the road selling and shouting out the prices of their produce. Clive smiled. None of these people would ever experience his wealth.

The day the strike team attacked his condo, he had made it to the private Vnukovo Airport in Moscow and chartered a plane that took off within an hour. They’d landed in Rome to refuel, altered their flight plan, and continued to the Athens airport. On the way, he had negotiated the use of the Fortress of Palamidi for two days for a private party. With the economic crisis, the Greek government was more than happy to accommodate him and his considerable contribution to their political party.

Using a secured line on the private plane, he had his men take Aaron Stevens to Palamidi and place him in the second bastion, just to the right of the main entrance.

They arrived late last night and stopped drugging Aaron, per Clive’s instructions. He wanted him awake for this morning’s first interrogation in honor of a prisoner’s interrogation hundreds of years ago.

Clive wondered if Aaron really had any idea what he had in store for him.

The driver started up another street that led to Karathona Beach. Near the top of the hill, he turned to the right, up the winding slope to Palamidi. Clive wondered how many vehicles had slipped over the edge with no guardrail, the town a two hundred meter drop below.

At the top, the driver pulled up to the gate guarded by Clive’s men. Weapons were well hidden in case any members of the public didn’t know that it was closed for a private affair and wandered up. All vehicles were redirected as soon as they approached.

The driver opened Clive’s door. Clive’s forehead beaded with sweat as soon as the oppressive heat hit him.

“Provisions stocked up?” he asked.

The guard who approached the vehicle nodded.

“Take me to the prisoner,” he said in the most official tone he knew.

This was his playtime, his
let my hair down
time. When bored, he would tour ancient ruins and castles and marvel at the tales of torture and how the people of days long forgotten had lived.

He followed the guard through the main gates, the same one all the tourists entered, and then to the right, toward the second bastion.

Palamidi was built in typical baroque style. It was freed from the Turks on November 29, 1822. The Greeks entered by way of the Achilles Bastion, which by the name, depicts the weakest bastion for defense. At one point on the stone wall on that side, it is not much higher than three meters.

Clive stopped at the door, where he admired the architecture. The sun shone down from a cloudless sky, beating his back in a soundless cry for him to enter the dark recess of the cooler prison cell. Clive relented, entered and waited for his eyes to adjust.

In the center of the room, Aaron Stevens sat on a wooden chair, ankles bound to the chair’s legs, arms twisted behind his back and a single rope wrapped around his chest.

He didn’t lift his head or acknowledge Clive’s presence in any way.

I’ll break you soon enough,
Clive thought.

He motioned for his men to leave. The guard who had escorted him here waited by the door as Clive instructed the men to never leave anyone alone with Aaron.

“You have proven to be a bit of a problem for me.”

Aaron didn’t move.

“Are you asleep?”

Aaron lifted his head and glared at Clive. “You are a dead man. Talking to you is a waste of time.”

Clive almost stepped back. No one said anything remotely close to words like that to him, ever. The nature in which the words were spoken reminded Clive of the Spartans. Maybe Aaron had Viking blood or ancient Greek blood, as he had shown himself to be quite the warrior.

“You have made mistakes,” Clive said as he walked around to the back of Aaron’s chair. Blood surrounded Aaron’s wrists. He smiled at the broken right wrist. “And you just made another one. It is not me who is the dead man. It is you.” He made it full circle and stared down at Aaron. “Many great men were held in this prison. Did you know this was the cell of lifers hundreds of years ago?”

Aaron lowered his head.

“That’s right. Theodoros Kolokotronis was a hero in the Greek Revolution in 1822. He was held prisoner in the same room you’re in now. The Miltiades Bastion served as a prison for those serving life sentences. Theodoros was executed for his crimes as a result of a civil war that broke out during the Independence of Greece. Did you know any of this?” Clive grabbed Aaron’s hair and yanked his head back. “You’re going to listen to me or you’ll wish you were dead. The pain I will cause you …”

Aaron spat, the phlegm hitting Clive’s cheek. Clive wanted to shoot Aaron in the face for that, but he controlled himself. He wanted to have fun, enjoy the process. He couldn’t allow the prisoner to win and have an easy death.

“I want to see my sister,” Aaron said.

Clive pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the saliva from his face. “Your sister is dead.”

“Are you fucking stupid?” Aaron shouted.

Clive stopped wiping his face. “What did you just say?”

“I asked if you were stupid. I know my sister is dead. Kill me, so I can see her again.”

Clive took a deep breath. He tossed his handkerchief aside and moved behind Aaron. The blood had congealed around the split skin of the wrist, a piece of bone protruding with a jagged edge.

Clive leaned in with his finger and thumb, gripped the small bone and held tight.

“This is what you get for your disrespect.”

He twisted hard, yanked down and pulled as if he was using a joystick to play a video game. The effect was more split skin and a renewed gush of blood.

Aaron’s wail chilled Clive, but also rekindled his spirit. He didn’t get to do this that often anymore. There were always too many people around. The boys Jessica had brought him routinely were almost always smothered, a quiet closure to the pleasure they offered him in their short time together.

The real joy was in torture, and at Palamidi he could have Aaron yell as loud and as hard as he wanted for days. Even if a police officer drove up the access road to investigate a noise complaint, Clive’s men would apologize and excuse it as rowdy partygoers.

The Greeks are the noisiest culture I know
.
They won’t care or notice.