The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Forty-Nine

Back in the olden days, the military brass had occasionally thought it worthwhile to pit small SAS units against superior numbers of regular British troops in tactical exercises, to test the training of both sides and practise covert operations and resistance-to-interrogation skills in realistic conditions. Ben and his team had used those exercises to become highly proficient at sneaking up on regular units in total darkness and in ghostlike silence and magicking one of them away, bound, hooded and utterly bewildered, to some secret location before his comrades had even noticed him gone. After a little roughing up, the thoroughly humiliated and slightly bruised squaddie would be stuffed in a Land Rover and dumped back on his unit, the butt of jokes for the rest of his life. It had all been a bit of innocent fun.

Fun wasn’t what Lars Kurzweil was having as dawn broke over Tulsa. One moment he’d been carrying out his job along with the guys, the next, something had come up behind him out of the shadows and hit him so hard and fast he was down before he could make a sound. He’d felt a hand clamp over his mouth and then a sharp pain as a bent needle stabbed deep into the side of his neck. He’d lost consciousness too quickly to see his attacker’s face or even to feel himself being dragged away into the trees.

As the drug’s effects began to wear off, his eyelids fluttered open and he lifted his chin off his chest. His vision was watery and blurred, but he could tell he was in a darkened room. Something about it made him think it wasn’t a normal room, but he was too fuzzy to figure out what, and so he tried to concentrate on his immediate situation. He was sitting upright on what felt like a wooden chair, unable to move his arms or legs. Slowly, he realised that he wasn’t paralysed, but that he was tightly trussed to the chair with his hands tied behind its back and his ankles bound to its wooden legs. He struggled weakly, tried to speak but couldn’t for the gag around his mouth. His head was pounding and awful nausea was washing over him in waves. He blinked to clear the wetness from his eyes.

The first thing Lars Kurzweil saw when his vision focused was the large black O of the sawn-off shotgun muzzle that was resting very still over the backrest of another chair in front of him, just a couple of feet from his face. His drugged brain was still lagging behind the rest of his senses, so it took a few seconds before he registered it for what it was and his eyes shot wide open.

Pant-wetting fear was a very appropriate reaction for someone awakening to the sight of a twelve-gauge in their face. A moan burst from his gagged mouth and he rocked in the chair, trying to recoil from the business end of the gun. The man pointing it was sitting backwards astride the chair opposite him.

‘Welcome back to the world of the living,’ Ben said. Three hours had passed since he’d carried his inert prisoner through the woods to where he’d hidden the Barracuda, far enough away for the rest of the men not to hear the throaty burble of the V8 Hemi as he made his escape. He could easily have put Kurzweil to sleep simply by compressing his carotid artery, cutting off the oxygen to his brain to knock him out almost instantly — but he’d needed the man to remain unconscious for longer, so he’d pumped about two-thirds of the syringe into him. That had allowed plenty of time to drive back to the Perryman Inn, pick up Erin and bring her and their captive here. The lock-up was proving useful in more ways than one.

The wide-eyed prisoner mumbled something through the gag that might have been, ‘Where the fuck am I?’

‘Where you are is up shit creek, without a paddle. I’m Ben. This is Erin. I think you already knew our names. I heard your buddies calling for you, so I know yours, too, Kurzweil. I know a lot of things, about Ritter and Moon, and your boss McCrory. When I take this gag off, you’re going to be an obliging fellow and fill me in on the rest.’ Gripping the shotgun butt in his right hand, Ben reached forwards with his left and yanked the dirty rag from the man’s face. Kurzweil spat bits of fluff mixed with blood where the gag had chafed the corners of his mouth.

‘Now let’s get down to business,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t need to tell a bad boy gangster like you that nothing says “instant brain death” like a twelve-gauge Brenneke slug at point-blank range. That’s only if you act stupid and don’t tell me what I want to know. Quick, concise answers. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or I will carve out a river valley through the middle of your skull. Are we clear?’

‘Fuck you,’ Kurzweil said, even though he looked no less terrified than before.

Ben leaned closer. ‘I didn’t quite catch that, Kurzweil. Do you want to start again and have another go? This time, think about what I just said.’

‘Fuck you to hell,’ Kurzweil quavered. ‘Go right ahead an’ shoot me if that’s what you gotta do.’

Ben gave him a long, hard look. ‘Do you have a death wish?’

‘I talk to you, Ritter and Moon will kill me anyway. I ain’t dyin’ slow and ugly for you, not for nobody.’

Ben sighed. He laid down the shotgun. He’d had no intention of using it anyway. He needed information, and headless men weren’t known for their loquacity. ‘Looks like you have me over a barrel, Kurzweil. Which makes me very unhappy. It brings out my darker side.’

The prisoner was silent. His eyes were liquid and bulging.

Without looking back at her over his shoulder, Ben said, ‘Erin, would you please mind stepping outside? Close the shutter behind you.’

‘I want to stay.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Ben said in a steady tone, not taking his eyes off the prisoner. ‘Trust me.’

Erin hesitated anxiously for a moment, then nodded to herself and walked to the steel shutter. She knelt down, grasped its lower rim and raised it three feet, letting in the rays of the dawn light. The wheels of the Plymouth parked outside were visible through the gap, the wide tyres and arches still speckled with forest dirt. Erin clambered out and used her foot to press the rim of the shutter back down to the concrete, closing Ben and the prisoner inside alone. Ben heard the car door open and shut as she got inside to wait.

There was a silence in the lock-up. Kurzweil just went on staring at Ben, moisture glistening on his forehead.

‘Everybody has a dark side,’ Ben said after a few moments. ‘But mine is so dark, it scares even me.’ He paused. Stood up and walked over to the workbench where all the tools lay. ‘It should scare you too. Because the things I’m capable of doing to you, right here, right now, on this beautiful summer’s morning, are far more inhuman than what Ritter or even Moon will do to you. You want to know where you are, my friend? You’re in my torture chamber. Whether you leave it in one piece or in several, that’s up to you.’

‘I don’t know anything!’ Kurzweil blurted out, finally talking again. ‘I was just doing what I was told!’

Ben turned and grinned at him. ‘I’ve heard that one before. You’ll change your tune. They always do, even tough guys like you. You’ll be crying like a little girl, and that’s before I even get started for real.’

He picked up a ball-peen hammer. It was a tool often used by bad guys to shatter kneecaps, break hands, tap out teeth and depress skulls. He inspected it thoughtfully, then laid it back down to pick up something else. ‘Have you any idea how easily a pair of bolt croppers will shear through human flesh and bone? Let me show you.’

Kurzweil wriggled and cried out as Ben walked around the back of the chair with the bolt croppers. He levered its jaws wide with the long handles. The prisoner had a very clear idea of what was coming, and clenched his fingers into trembling fists. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned.

Ben grabbed the little finger of the man’s left hand, winkled it out straight and fastened the jaws of the bolt croppers around it. ‘After this one comes off, we go to work on the other nine,’ he said.

Erin heard the piercing scream from outside in the car, and closed her eyes.