The Killing House

78

Malcolm Fletcher awoke to warm air and voices.

‘Sit still. It will be over before you know it.’

A woman’s voice, deep and husky. The kind cured from a lifetime of cigarettes and hard liquor.

‘Why can’t you give me Novocain?’ Alexander Borgia’s voice, and it was coming from the same direction as the woman’s — someplace straight ahead, only a few feet away. ‘Don’t you have any of that shit down here?’ Borgia asked.

‘Just grit your teeth and bear it,’ the woman replied. ‘You’ve been through worse — and you’re goddamn lucky I installed this thing. Otherwise, I never would’ve found you, and you’d still be freezing to death out in the woods.’

A great fog filled Fletcher’s head, but his senses were working, alert: he was lying on his left side, his cheek pressed against something cold and hard. It had the rough, gritty texture of sandpaper. He didn’t feel any bindings on his wrists or ankles. His mouth felt dry, and there was a throbbing in his forehead, a tight band of pressure that had the feeling of a hangover. The sedative loaded in the darts. One had hit his thigh and the other had grazed the back of his neck.

New sounds, some near by, some faint: a low, guttural moan. The rattle of chain link. And everywhere, raspy, sickly breathing. There was a pervasive reek of blood and unwashed skin, and, behind it, the distinct and overpowering stench of human decomposition.

His eyes slit open to a tight cluster of intensely bright lights. A pair of blurry figures stood on either side of what appeared to be a very long and very tall stainless-steel table.

Fletcher didn’t move his head or body; he wanted Borgia and the woman to think he was unconscious. He blinked, and kept blinking, until everything came into a sharper focus.

The light came from a portable floor-standing surgery lamp, its wide, twenty-inch elliptical reflector dish positioned over a stainless-steel operating table. Borgia stood behind the table. His face was still grotesquely swollen, but it had been cleaned up. A surgical mask covered his mouth and nose, and he had changed into a grey sweatshirt several sizes too big.

Fletcher glanced over Borgia’s shoulder, at the wall and corner shelves packed with sterilized bags of surgical scrubs and towels. He saw boxes of latex gloves, vials and syringes, and a wide assortment of medical equipment.

An operating room.

Back to Borgia: the man’s left sleeve had been rolled up and he leaned slightly over the table, his hand splayed across the stainless steel. His skin was covered with a dark liquid that was, most likely, Betadine. Borgia hissed through gritted teeth as Marie Clouzot made a small incision on the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Then she traded the scalpel for a pair of surgical forceps, dipped the ends inside the wound and came back with something small pinched between the prongs. She set the tiny object on the table, not far from Borgia’s hand.

Fletcher lost sight of it; Clouzot blocked his view, having turned to a nearby surgical cart. She was much taller than Borgia, stockier. She wore dark jeans, black boots and a pink, V-neck sweater that had the texture of cashmere. She also wore a surgical mask and latex gloves. Her dark hair had been pulled back into a tight bun.

Fletcher’s gaze focused on the barrier separating him from the operating theatre: a chain-link door secured by at least one padlock. His head remained absolutely still as he conducted a cursory examination of his immediate surroundings.

The same grey/silver chain-link fencing had been used to erect his walls and ceiling. Eye bolts secured the chain link to a galvanized stainless-steel frame. He had been imprisoned inside what was essentially a custom-made dog kennel: just enough room to lie down. Judging from the ceiling height, he wouldn’t be able to stand. To the right of his cage, fifteen to twenty feet away, was an open door leading to a dimly lit passageway of concrete.

His gaze shifted back to the operating table. Clouzot dabbed gauze on Borgia’s hand, then she picked up the needle and went back to stitching his wound. The operating lights were extremely bright but it still took Fletcher a moment to find the small object she had removed from the incision: a glass tube, the size of a grain of rice. Something was contained inside the glass. He was too far away to make out what this was, but his mind was working.

Slightly larger than a grain of rice, Karim had told him.

Then the information came to him: he had been riding with Karim to New Jersey, they had been discussing how Nathan Santiago could have been found, and Karim offered up a theory — radio-frequency identification.

A glass-encapsulated RFID chip slightly larger than a grain of rice can be tucked inside a pocket or sewn into clothing — or, in the case of biometric security, surgically inserted beneath the skin, Karim had said. The Mexican attorney general did that to his senior staff, had a chip implanted in that web of skin between your thumb and index finger. You notice anything like that on Santiago?

Fletcher hadn’t. But Clouzot, he suspected, had just removed an RFID chip from Borgia’s hand — Special Agent Alexander Borgia’s hand.

‘When do you think he’ll wake up?’ Borgia asked.

‘Hard to say,’ Clouzot replied, pulling the surgical thread. ‘One dart hit him in the thigh. The one that grazed his neck delivered maybe a quarter of the sedative. He’s a big man.’

‘So, what, another hour? Maybe two?’

The woman laughed, a deep, throaty sound. ‘You’re not going to let it go, are you?’

‘I have to try,’ Borgia said.

‘You can’t reason with a monster, Alexander.’

Borgia made no reply. The conversation ended, and was replaced by moaning, dry and plaintive whispers asking for mercy and forgiveness. Fletcher couldn’t see Clouzot’s face, but Borgia gave no indication that he’d heard the inhuman cries. Either he had inured himself to this suffering, viewing it as nothing more than a necessary by-product of his cause (whatever it was); or, like most psychopaths, his limbic system was defective, rendering him incapable of feeling empathy, fear, guilt and remorse.

Clouzot finished stitching Borgia’s wound and straightened. Fletcher, his eyes nearly closed, could see her boots as they whisked past him. He watched them until they disappeared through the passageway. He was listening to her footfalls when Borgia approached his cage.