The Sanctuary

Chapter 17

The man in the lab coat sat back, his hawklike eyes scrutinizing Evelyn. He seemed confused by something.

“And so, this man,” he questioned acidly, “who’s desperate to sell some antiques, travels across two rather daunting borders to come and find you, even though — by your own admission — you haven’t seen him in over twenty years, you’re not a client of his, nor have you ever brokered pieces for him in the past. You see what I’m getting at?” He paused thoughtfully. “It really all comes right back down to my very first question, which is, why did he come to see you?”

Evelyn felt a chill slide down her spine. There’s no point in lying or in skirting the issue, she thought. He knows. Unsure whether she was doing herself a favor or digging her own grave, her voice faltered. “He knew I’d be interested in one of the pieces.”

His expression softened, as if a difficult barrier in their little chat had been overcome. His brows rose questioningly. “Which piece would that be?”

“A book,” she answered somberly.

“Ah.”

He nodded slowly and sat back, looking satisfied. He steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “And why did he think you’d be interested?”

Evelyn cleared her throat. She told him about what happened in Al-Hillah in 1977. Getting called to the accidental discovery. The underground chambers. The remnants of what she believed was a secret society of some kind. She also told him about the Ouroboros. In the chamber, and on the book that Farouk was selling.

As she did, she studied her inquisitor’s face. Although he was clearly wholly intrigued by her story, she could tell that he already knew about the symbol. He asked if she had looked into this cabal, wanting to know what she had uncovered about them. She told him about the Brethren, about the similarities in the documents and the discrepancy in the locales. The truth was that there wasn’t much to tell. Her research had hit a wall. It was as if the cabal from the underground chamber had simply vanished.

Evelyn went quiet. She’d told him everything she knew, except for one thing. She’d kept Tom out of it. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to mention him. Tom hadn’t specifically asked her not to mention his interest to anyone. But she knew. She knew he hadn’t been truthful with her. She knew he hadn’t told her why he was really there, what had really brought him out there, what he really knew about this long-lost cabal. And right now, sitting with her wrists and ankles cuffed to a metal chair in a windowless chamber, she knew that the man facing her was after whatever it was Tom was chasing all those many years ago. And that, therefore, if the man facing her ever found out about Tom, he’d be more than interested in extending him the same invitation that he’d inflicted on her.

Thinking about it, she felt a slight stab of anger. Of betrayal. What did Tom really know? And — more to the point — did he know that others were also interested in the cabal? Others who were, shall we say, less than amiable? If Tom had told her everything he knew, would she have been any safer? Would she have done anything differently? She wasn’t sure it would have made any difference. It was all so long ago.

Despite her misgivings, and after all those years, she still felt an urge to protect him. Which was something she couldn’t quite explain. It was just…there. An instinct that defied her self-preservation instincts.

Oddly, it made her feel better, knowing she was keeping something back from her inquisitor. Knowing she was resisting him in some way. A small victory, of sorts.

Unfortunately, he seemed to sense it. Something crossed his face, then he asked, “And so you gave up on it and moved on to new areas of research?”

“Yes,” she confirmed flatly.

He studied her. She held his gaze with as candid an expression as she could muster, hoping the anxiety rushing through her wasn’t breaking through, before dropping her eyes and looking away.

“Who else knows about your find?” he asked.

The question, though expected, rattled her. She tried to stifle the unease. “No one.” That came out too defensively, she suddenly thought. Plus it was blatantly wrong, and he’d know that, for sure. “I mean, the people I worked with on the dig, the other archaeologists and the volunteers, of course,” she clumsily added. “And I asked around at the university in Baghdad, and with other contacts.” She wasn’t sure if that first “No one” had come out too quickly.

The man in the lab coat stared at her with a disturbingly penetrating gaze. It was as if he was inside her mind, she could feel him rummaging around in there, and she wanted him out. He finally nodded and leaned over. “May I?” He picked up the rubber strap.

Evelyn flinched. “What are you doing?”

He held up his hands in a calming gesture. “I’m just going to draw some blood from you. It’s nothing to worry about.”

She moved her arm left and right to try to impede him. “No, please, don’t—”

He lashed out and grabbed her by the jaw again, only this time his grip was as tight as a vise. His eyes hardened to cold steel as he leaned menacingly forward to within inches of her. He hissed out his words slowly. “Don’t make this any harder on yourself.” He held her there for a breathless moment, letting the point sink in, then unclamped her and went about wrapping the rubber strap around her arm, above the elbow.

Evelyn just sat there, shocked into silence, and watched him do it.

He held her arm open and tapped it with his long, thin fingers. A vein pulsed out welcomingly. He reached over and picked up the syringe. Without even glancing at Evelyn, he pricked the needle carefully into the vein. With an efficient touch, he flicked the rubber strap off her arm to allow the blood to flow back into it. He gave it a moment, then started pulling back on the plunger slowly, sucking out her blood.

Evelyn felt the nausea rising in her throat. She looked away, to the far wall across the room, trying to block out the unpleasant sensation.

“This wasn’t a bad start,” he noted casually. “Unfortunately, I’m going to need to ask you some more pointed questions. To start with, I need to know who else knows of your interest in this lost group. I also need to know exactly what our little dealer friend told you, as far as where he got the artifacts from and, more importantly, where he’s keeping them. And finally, I need to know where to find him. Now before you answer any of my questions, I would ask you to be as forthcoming and as detailed as you possibly can. The options at my disposal for inflicting pain on you are too numerous to mention, and I would very much prefer you not to have to explore them. Besides, I really don’t want to damage you. You seem to be in reasonably good health. A lifetime of physical work that’s not too intense such as yours is probably the best regimen to follow. You could be very useful to my work. But I do need some answers, and if I have to entice the truth out of you forcibly, I suppose some localized damage won’t really affect the usefulness of the rest of you.”

Evelyn didn’t know what to make of his words, which rang concussively in her ears. The usefulness of the rest of you? What the hell did he mean by that? Her mind struggled under a brief assault of horrific implications before she went light-headed as the blood was being sucked out of her. The minutes stretched until she finally felt the needle slipping out of her arm.

The man in the lab coat got up, held the syringe up to the light, gave it a small shake, and seemed satisfied by his work. He capped the syringe and set it on his worktable. He picked up something else and came back and sat down. Evelyn saw that he’d brought back another syringe, a smaller one, along with a small glass vial that held a liquid the color of pale straw. He also had a small ball of cotton dabbed with alcohol, with which he dressed the small hole in her arm. He then reached for the small syringe and the vial and drew the liquid into the syringe.

“I already know you haven’t been completely forthcoming on the matter of who you’ve shared your little fascination with. Our eyes and our voices can betray so much more than we imagine, if one knows what to look for.” He squirted out any air bubbles left in the needle and turned to her. A glaze of cruelty shimmered in his eyes as they settled on her again. “I do,” he warned, before reaching over, pinning down her arm, and emptying the syringe into her, adding, “and this is a small taster of what you can expect if I feel you’re not being entirely truthful with me again.”

Fear tightened around Evelyn’s heart like an iron fist as she watched the liquid disappear into her body. She looked up at her captor, her mind swamped by panic, her eyes searching his impassive face for clues, her breathing coming short and fast. Her mouth opened to form a question, but it was cut short by a strange burning sensation that flared up around the needle’s entry point. It held there for a moment before it started to spread in both directions, making its way down to the tips of her fingers and up towards her chest, and as it traveled in her blood, it quickly increased in intensity, growing from a prickling pain to a scorching, excruciating torment until it felt as if every vein in her body were on fire, as if her entire cardiovascular system were a pipeline of burning fuel.

She was shaking now, her body rigid with pain, her vision blurred, her lips quivering, bubbles of sweat coalescing on her forehead and trickling down her face.

She felt as if she were being fried from the inside out.

The man in the lab coat just sat there and watched. He held the vial up, in front of her face, and seemed genuinely impressed by it. “Interesting little substance, this. It’s called capsaicin. We get it from chili peppers, although biting into an enchilada’s not quite the same as having this concentrate pumped into your blood, is it?” His wry smirk went all fuzzy as she blinked away her tears and shuddered from the searing pain.

“The chili pepper’s such a great little fruit,” he went on matter-offactly. “It tells us a lot about human nature. I mean, think about it. The reason it burns so much when you bite into it is, in evolutionary terms, a defense mechanism. It’s how the plant wards off animals and avoids getting eaten. Which works fine for all the other animals, but not for us humans. No, we’re different. We take this little red fruit and we don’t stay away from it. We seek it out, we farm it, and we derive pleasure from it. Perverse pleasure. For one thing, we actually add the stuff to our food. Willfully. By choice. We enjoy the pain it causes us. But that’s nothing compared to the perverse pleasure we get from using it to cause pain to others. Did you know that the Mayans used to punish wayward girls by rubbing it into their eyes, and, when the girls’ virginity was in question, onto their genitals? The Incas used to position themselves upwind from their enemies and make massive bonfires of chili pepper before battles. Even today, the Chinese use it to torture Tibetan monks. They tie them up around raging fires and dump chili in the flames. It makes their burns much more intense, to say nothing of what it does to the monks’ eyes. Pepper spray or chili con carne? It’s the blowfish of fruit. And you know what’s most surprising? We’re now discovering it’s got huge potential as a painkiller. A painkiller. Talk about human ingenuity.”

His words were wasted on Evelyn. She could see his mouth moving and hear snippets of sentences, but her brain was swamped and had lost its ability to process them. The wave of pain raced through to every neuron in her body, ravaging her down to her very core. She tried to cling to something hopeful, some image or thought that would somehow counterbalance the pain, and her mind latched on to Mia’s face, not the screaming face from the alley, but the beaming, smiling face she was more used to. She was on the verge of blacking out when, just as suddenly as it had swept through her, the burning started to recede. She took some deep breaths, tensing up for another wave of pain, waiting for it, fearful of its return, but it didn’t come back. It just died out like a flame.

The man in the lab coat was watching her with grim interest, as if she were a caged test animal. His arctic eyes didn’t register the slightest glimmer of concern. Instead, he casually slid a glance to his watch and nodded almost imperceptibly to himself, as if making a mental note of her reaction and how long it had lasted.

His last words to her before he’d administered the injection swooped into her mind. He’d called it a small taster of what she could expect.

She shuddered at the thought.

Not just a taster.

A small taster.

She couldn’t even begin to imagine what a full course would feel like.

He watched her regain her senses and nodded to the ghost behind her. Without a word, the ghost gave her another sip of water, then receded into the shadows. The man in the lab coat tilted his head and leaned in for a closer look.

“I believe you have things to tell me?” he asked crisply.