The Nowhere Man

42 Corners of His Mind

Straps bit into Evan’s chest, stomach, and thighs, adhering him to the gurney. Hard leather restraints bound his ankles and wrists to the side rails. He fought to find a place inside himself that would protect him from what would come. SERE training had taught him to deal with stress, disorientation, torture. To this end he’d been maced, electrocuted, and drownproofed, his reactions observed and critiqued. He’d learned to find corners of his mind to retreat into. It never made the pain go away, but it allowed an extra layer between him and it, let him observe the agony from a slight remove. As with meditation, it was essential not to take his thoughts or sensations literally. He had to find the space around them. In the space there was relief.

From whatever René was readying over by the vault, Evan would be requiring a good deal of relief. Dex stood at René’s side, but facing Evan. He held up his grinning hand, wore it over his mouth.

“I’ve tried to be reasonable,” René said, “but I’ve never come across anyone as stubborn as you.” His back remained turned, his bowed shoulders rippling with some movement of his unseen hands. Daylight and frigid air streamed through the shattered basement window. “I wanted this to be civilized but you refused and refused and refused. And so now.” He turned to face Evan, a syringe in hand. “This.”

In the course of his training, Evan had been injected with sodium pentothal and other “truth serums.” He wondered if that was what René was up to here. A psychoactive medication would make him more pliable, more likely to be manipulated into sending the wire transfer and unleashing whatever came with it. But even as a kid, he’d found the drugs not to live up to their reputations.

Judging by Dex’s tattooed grin and René’s very real one, whatever that syringe held was something much worse.

“I can promise,” René said, as if reading Evan’s mind, “it’s like nothing you’ve ever encountered.”

A fly buzzed over and landed on Evan’s knuckles. He wiggled his fingers to scare it off. “More sadistic research out of Cornell?”

“Out of Oxford, actually. You wouldn’t believe what it cost for me to procure a few tiny vials of this.” Taking his time, René ambled closer to Evan. “Like most experiments, it started with a simple question: What if you could make prison sentences for heinous crimes last longer?”

Evan’s heart rate ticked up, pulsing in the side of his neck. “Longer?”

“Longer than a lifetime.” René regarded the syringe with something like affection. “There was a couple who kidnapped a four-year-old boy. They kept him in a closet, tortured and starved him for weeks, then beat him to death. Given the UK’s disdain for capital punishment, the husband and wife were given a thirty-year sentence. Which seems woefully inadequate.”

Evan thought of the Horizon Express, plowing along at twenty-three knots, a white furrow in the deep blue sea, and Alison Siegler somewhere aboard in one of thirty-five hundred containers, closing the distance to a fate nobody deserved.

And he thought of the boy’s voice over the phone line: You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.

“Yes,” he said. “It does seem inadequate.”

“What if you could make someone serve a thousand-year sentence in eight hours? Ten lifetimes of purgatory crammed into the span of a single workday?”

The tip of the needle neared. Evan’s fear mounted, threatened to overtake him.

“Can you imagine the horror?” René said, leaning in.

Evan struggled furiously against the straps, but they were designed for precisely this purpose. The needle slid into his arm.

René smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just going to give you a single dr—”

Evan felt a slight pressure in his vein and then watched René’s mouth continue to open more slowly than seemed conceivably possible, each millimeter taking an hour, two hours, and the end of the spoken word pulled out and out, stretched from a block of steel into a thin metal wire, a sound and a vibration, the endless tunnel of the o like a wormhole through the ages, and over the forever-gaping mouth René started to blink, but the movement of his eyelids was like the rise and fall of a lake’s watermark across the seasons, limitless microseconds crammed between microseconds, the creased skin around his eyes rearranging infinitesimally, a universe of motion contained in a single blink until at last, after a day’s grueling wait, Evan could see the thin blue veins etched in his closed lids and he knew it would be another day for them to open yet again, and the word was not yet completed, the wrinkled lips still closing the o into the p even as another sound overpowered the slow-motion hum of René’s voice, a buzz slowed to its constituent audio parts, and Evan pulled his gaze to the source, but the shifting of his eyeballs felt like altering the course of a freight ship, ligaments and muscles flexing and tugging to recalibrate his view excruciatingly, until at last he fixed upon the bottle flying airborne over René, its hairlike bristles waving sluggishly on its metallic green thorax, its wings flapping so gradually that Evan could see the quality of light alter through the semitransparent wings that were embellished with intricate patterns to put any stained-glass window to shame, and the whole horrifying, unfettered, attenuated time, Evan’s mind raced inside his skull at a real, frantic pace, alive and horror-filled, scrambling like a mouse trapped in a bowl of water, desperate, so desperate to get—

He jerked his head back into the pillow, a breath screeching through his lungs. His muscles had knotted from neck to calves, arching his body against the restraints. He turned his head to the side and vomited, warmth drooling across his cheek onto the sheets.

“I’ll do it,” he said, in a voice so hoarse he didn’t recognize it as his own. “I’ll wire the money.”