Predator One (12 page)

He had not been
given water or food for thirty-two hours. He had not been allowed to use the toilet. His legs, hips, and the chair on which he sat were streaked with urine and feces. The stink rose around him and filled the room. Boy, Mason, and Jacob occasionally rubbed mint ChapStick on their upper lips to kill their sense of smell.

The three of them waited with calm patience as Davidovich fought to get free
and cried out for someone—anyone—to help him.

No one did.

Not that time, and not the five other times he’d been brought to consciousness.

The apartment was soundproofed. None of the people who came and went to the falafel shop downstairs heard a thing.

When Davidovich could scream no longer, when his throat was so raw he spit droplets of blood onto his naked thighs, when he slumped forward,
weeping and spent, Boy nodded to the two men.

They rose as one, graceful and silent. Jacob picked up another of the heavy wooden chairs and carried it into the living room. He set it down in front of Davidovich. Mason went into the smaller of the apartment’s three bedrooms and returned carrying a body over his shoulder. A man who was secured by the wrists and ankles.

Jacob went and helped lower
the man into the chair. They tied him in the same way as Davidovich, using the plastic ties to secure him firmly to the arms and legs of the chair. The man wore only striped boxers and a ribbed tank top. Both undergarments were stained with blood and spit, though the man did not look to be seriously injured. Merely unconscious.

“Wake him up,” said Boy, and Jacob nodded. He went to a closet and
removed two items. One was a leather gladstone bag of the kind doctors once carried when making house calls. The other was a slim zippered vinyl case. Jacob handed the doctors’ case to Mason and unzipped the smaller case himself. From it he produced a prefilled disposable syringe. Jacob squirted some of the liquid into the air, tapped the barrel of the syringe with a fingernail, and then jabbed
the needle into the unconscious man’s arm.

The effect was nearly instantaneous. The man jerked as if shocked, then began blinking and sputtering. He raised his head and looked wildly around.

“Oh God,” he said in a voice that was already cracking with fear. “No. No more. Please, for the love of God, no more.”

Boy unfolded her legs and walked over to the man, who cringed back from her. The man
was in his early forties, with an intelligent face and bright blue eyes that were wet with unshed tears. Boy cupped his chin and raised his face to hers. Then she quickly bent and kissed him. It was a long kiss. She pushed her tongue against his teeth until the man opened his jaws, and then she stabbed her tongue deep into his mouth. She straddled him and ground her pelvis against his crotch. Despite
everything—despite his terror and the bizarre circumstances—the man grew hard. His penis poked out through the opening in his boxers. Boy broke the kiss and slid off of the man’s thighs, sinking to her knees in front of him. She kissed the swollen shaft and then took it in her mouth, working up and down to make him harder still. Her head bobbed faster and faster, and the bound man moaned in
equal parts fear and passion and horror and shame.

Then Boy raised her head, letting the engorged glans pop from between her lips, though she continued to stroke the man’s hard length. She turned and smiled at Davidovich, her lips wet with spit, her eyes smoky and glazed.

Her smile was a devil’s smile. Filled with the promise of so many wicked things. Her hand moved up and down, up and down.

“Now,” she said softly.

Behind the bound man, Jacob and Mason opened the gladstone and began removing their instruments. Skinning knives. Scalpels. Bone saws. The bound man saw none of this. Only Davidovich did. He began to scream a warning, but Boy put a finger to her lips.

“Shhhh,” she said.

Her other hand continued to move up and down, and the bound man’s back was beginning to arch as he
neared an impossible, improbable, and entirely unwanted orgasm.

“Now,” she said again.

Jacob and Mason approached the man. Both of them wore identical expressions of complete indifference. The knives gleamed in their hands, reflecting the twisting figure.

Boy’s hand was a blur as it moved up and down, and the bound man cried out as he came.

He threw his head back.

And he saw the knives.

His scream changed in frequency and volume and emotional content.

Davidovich screamed, too.

He screamed so loud.

He kept screaming and screaming and screaming as the knives did their work.

The bound man screamed, too. He was able to, because he did not die.

Not for a long time.

Not for a terrible, long time.

Chapter Nineteen

Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa

849 Verdier Avenue

Victoria, British Columbia

October 13, 9:22
P.M.

“Is he here?” asked the burned man.

“Yes,” said Pharos. Fear sweat ran in lines down the sides of his face and gathered in pools inside his clothes. His hands were clasped with knuckle-hurting tightness behind his back. His buttocks and stomach muscles were clenched. His single
word of reply came out almost as a squeak.

The burned man smiled. “Good. Then send him in.”

Pharos did not risk saying anything else. He was afraid a scream might bubble out. He bowed and scurried toward the door.

It opened before he got to it.

And
he
was there.

Smaller than Pharos remembered. Older. His skin as dry and withered as oak bark. Eyes whose color seemed to flow and change. A smile
like some hungry thing from the pit. Pharos stood aside, and, as the old priest entered, he bowed again. It was more appeasement than respect, and in this one case Pharos did not castigate himself for acting like an obsequious toady. He kept his eyes averted until the priest had passed into the room. Then Pharos exited quickly and pulled the door shut behind him. The click of the lock was like
a splash of cool water on his hot face. He leaned against the door, chest heaving, heart pounding, sweat running.

Then he licked his pasty lips, pushed away from the door, took two staggering steps, and stopped, fighting to pull the pieces of his armor back into place.

No one ever affected him like this.

He doubted anyone could, even if he was brought in chains to a private meeting with Mr.
Church.

No … this man was different.

This little priest.

This monster they called Nicodemus.

Whatever he was.

Pharos, feeling faint, hurried away.

Interlude Six

Ha-Nagar Street

Above the Stein Family Falafel Shop

Ashdod, Israel

Three Years Ago

Boy sat on the floor.

The floor was awash in blood, and she sat in that. In a lake of red.

Davidovich sat on his chair six feet away. Blood
spatters painted him from hairline to toes. Mixing with his tears and with the muck that ran down his chair legs. He panted like a man who had run up fifty flights of stairs.

Behind Boy, the lumps of things that had been the bound man sprawled on, and over, and around the chair.

Jacob and Mason were in the shower, cleaning each other off. Their laughter and snatches of song drifted through the
noise of the spray. They were always happy. After.

Davidovich was no longer screaming. That time had passed. All he could do now was stare. Not at the ruin of the stranger. At Boy.

“You understand now?” she asked.

The scientist was so terrified that he did not dare answer.

“Do you understand?” she repeated.

He nodded. Shook his head. Nodded. His expression told her that he was trying to tell
her what she wanted, to agree to anything. A stalling tactic, but understandable.

She pulled her crossed ankles under her and rose. Blood dripped from her shorts and ran in crooked lines down her slim legs. She did not have any on her hands. She padded across the room to the entrance to the kitchenette, took her laptop from the table, and brought it over. She turned it toward him so that he could
see the pictures on the screen.

Three people in small video-feed windows. An old woman seated at her kitchen table doing the newspaper crossword with a blue ballpoint. A woman soaking in a tub, a wet rag across her eyes, a glass of wine on the flat rim. A fifteen-year-old boy walking beside a school soccer field while he read text messages on his cell phone. It was obvious that they were being
filmed, just as it was obvious they did not know it.

Davidovich goggled at them.

He found that he could scream again after all.

The three people in those three little video squares were his mother, his wife, and his son, Matthew.

The only three blood relatives Aaron Davidovich had in this world.

Boy stood next to the destroyed red debris that had been a man and showed the images to Davidovich.

“Do you understand?”

“Please…” His voice was barely a croak.

“They have not yet been harmed, but if you do not do exactly what we want, you will sit there and watch what happens to each of them. This,” she said, nudging a piece of meat, “is not the worst thing that can happen. Do you understand that?”

He stared at her, his horror so great that it detached him from any possible intelligent reply.
Boy understood this. The man needed some help. She shifted the laptop to one hand and dug her cell phone out of her shorts pocket, punched a number in, and waited for an answer. She put it on speaker.

“Yes?” said a male voice.

“Take Matthew Davidovich. Send me his balls and his eyes but leave him alive.”

Davidovich launched himself at her with such fury that he stood up, the heavy chair still
attached to him.

“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. “You motherfucking bitch!”

Boy kicked him in the chest. Very fast, very hard. A ball-of-the-foot thrust to his sternum. It knocked him backward so that the four chair legs crashed down and pulled him with them, back into almost the exact spot where he’d been.

“Not my son,” moaned Davidovich. “Please don’t! Please, please…”

“Wait,” Boy said
into the phone.

“Please don’t hurt my son. He’s only a kid. You can’t.”

Boy yawned and held out the phone toward him. “Would you prefer we take your mother? She’s old. She probably wouldn’t last more than three days. Or do you want to kill your wife? I can have a dozen men over there in half an hour. They can make her scream for days. For weeks. And then they will begin cutting parts off of
her. They’ll mail them to me here. By the time they arrive, I bet you’d be so starved that you’d eat them.”

Her voice was soft, quiet, almost without inflection.

Which made it all so much worse.

“No,” begged the scientist. “No, no, no, please God, don’t hurt them!”

She squatted down and looked up at him. “You have the power to kill them,” she said. “Or to save them. You have that power. You
say the word, and I will tell my people to do whatever their imaginations can conjure. Can you imagine what we could do to a little boy? Picture it, doctor. Put those thoughts in your mind.”

“No, no, no, no, no…”

“Or,” she said, and watched how that one little word made Davidovich freeze and listen with every atom of his being. “Or … you help us. You do some work for us. Freely, without hesitation
or reservation. You do exactly what we want. You come to work for us. You become part of us. You do that, and your mother, your wife, and your son, Matthew, will never be harmed. They will prosper. They will be protected from any harm. That tenth grader who has been tormenting your son? We will make him go away. We will keep them all so safe. Safe.” She leaned closer. “But it’s all up to you.
What orders will you let me give? How will you use your power, Doctor Davidovich?”

Davidovich began weeping.

And nodding.

And begging.

Boy smiled and smiled and smiled.

Into the phone, she said, “We’ve reached an understanding. Remain on station. Wait for my next call.”

Chapter Twenty

Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa

849 Verdier Avenue

Victoria, British Columbia

October 13, 9:25
P.M.

The little priest came and sat in a visitors’ chair beside the hospital bed. For a few moments he said nothing, did nothing except look at the machines, following each pendulous plastic tube, each trailing wire.

The burned man watched him with his one good eye.

“You came,”
he said.

“Of course.”

“Thank you. I—didn’t know if you would. After all, we never actually met. You were in prison when I—”

“I was never in prison.”

“What?”

“Someone was in prison who wore my name,” said Nicodemus, “but that wasn’t really me, was it?”

They studied each other for several burning moments.

“No,” said the Gentleman. “No, I suppose not.”

Nicodemus glanced at the closed door.
“Your keeper is out there.”

“Pharos? He’s my doctor.”

“Don’t be an ass. He’s a vulture sitting on your tombstone.”

The Gentleman flapped his hand weakly. “Maybe. He’s harmless, though. He takes care of me because he wants something I have.”

“Routing and account numbers?” asked Nicodemus, arching his eyebrows as if surprised at what he was saying.

“How do you know—?” began the burned man,
but let it hang. “Yes.”

“Will you give them to him?”

“If I do, he’ll pull the plug on me.”

“Maybe he won’t.”

“Why on earth would you say that?”

Nicodemus smiled. His lips writhed and twitched when he smiled. “He still has some conscience left. Not a lot. But some. I think he actually cares for you.”

“Bullshit.”

“No,” said the priest. “He cares, but he isn’t really aware of it. It makes
him feel conflicted.” He spoke that word as if it tasted delicious.