Ratlines (27 page)

Ryan’s gaze darted left and right, searching for the door he had been unable to find with his hands.

A creak, and light trickled in.

He struggled through the confusion, the disorientation, until he looked up and saw the open doorway strangely suspended eight feet above the floor. In the feeble light, he made out the zig-zag that cut down through the wall’s faded whitewash, the remnants of a staircase that had been removed to make this cellar a pit.

“He’s awake.”

Ryan recognised Wallace’s southern African accent.

A ladder descended until its feet rested on the floor in front of him. He looked back up to the doorway. Wallace held the Browning pistol, levelled the suppressor at Ryan.

“On your feet.”

Ryan pushed himself up onto his knees. Nausea rolled up from his belly and through his head. He retched and spat on the floor.

“Up,” Wallace said.

Ryan hauled himself upright, listed to the side, found his balance. He placed his left hand over his genitals, feeling like a child caught in some shameful act.

“Back against the far wall.”

Ryan did as he was told, keeping his eyes on Wallace, until the cold damp brickwork pressed against his shoulders. He coughed and shivered.

Wallace kept the pistol’s aim on Ryan as he stepped back to allow Carter to pass, turn, and climb down the ladder. The tall man followed, then finally Wallace slipped the Browning into his waistband and joined them in the cellar.

The three men faced Ryan, each staring hard.

Wallace took the pistol in his grip once more, brought it up two-handed, finger on the trigger.

Carter said, “Take one step forward.”

Ryan obeyed.

“Put your hands on your head.”

Ryan breathed what little air the room had left in it. He placed his fingers on his scalp, felt his testicles retreat from the chill.

Wallace smirked. The tall man kept his gaze on Ryan’s face.

“Legs apart,” Carter said.

Ryan shuffled his feet on the packed earth, his stomach already tightening against what he knew was coming.

Carter made him wait for it, the only sound in the room the air ripping in and out of Ryan’s chest. Then Carter took one long stride and swung his boot upwards.

A fleshy slap followed by numbness in Ryan’s groin. The heavy heat came after, the pressure in his bowel, the molten lead in his stomach. His knees folded and he sprawled on the floor. His gut clenched, sending bile into his mouth and nostrils. He coughed it out. A long groan rose from the hot pit of his abdomen and gurgled in his throat.

Carter and the tall man went to work. Not the florid rage of the beatings they had given him before, but precise blows, sharp knuckles and booted toes delivering pain to the most tender parts of Ryan’s body.

They asked no questions and he screamed until his voice cracked. After a time, Ryan’s consciousness withdrew so that the pain belonged to someone else, some other man crawling and bleeding in the dirt of some other cellar.

R
YAN DRIFTED INTO
waking, back to darkness again, the tide ebbing to reveal the pain that had sunk beneath the surface. He lay still, listening to his own heart, the thudding in his ears. When he could resist no longer, he inhaled.

His sides and his back shrieked. The clamour of it reached his mouth as a whimper, and his mind retreated to the darkness.

Time dissolved and reformed, the sediment of minutes and hours settling on the cellar floor. Ryan became dimly aware of lying in a cold wetness, and a sour odour. He knew it was his own urine tainted by the smell of blood. The thought of lying in his own waste got him moving. He fought to bring his elbows and knees under him, every movement punished by a new stab of pain in his midsection.

Three feet of crawling and he lay flat on the floor, his shaking limbs unable to carry him further. When the tremors and the nausea eased, he moved again, kept crawling until he felt the wall with his fingertips. He rested there, he had no idea how long, before tracing the brickwork to the corner.

Once there, Ryan squatted, his back pressed into the angle formed by the meeting of the walls. He hissed through his teeth as the stinging heat sputtered between his legs, gagged when the smell rose to him. As dizziness rushed over him, he placed his hands on the walls to steady himself, desperate not to pass out and collapse in his own foulness.

Empty, drained, Ryan crawled as far away from it as he could before his arms and legs gave out. The coarse floor grazed his cheek. He sank into it, let it swallow him whole.

As his mind fell into blackness, Ryan swore he would kill them all.

T
HE LIGHT STIRRED
him.

“Jesus, he stinks.”

Ryan looked up, saw Wallace blurred in the doorway. The squat man held something in his hand, not a pistol, something else.

“Stand up,” Wallace said.

Ryan got to his feet, trapping his cries behind his teeth as pain shot through his groin and midsection. He blinked, tried to focus on what lay in Wallace’s hand. His mind grasped what he saw just as the stream of cold water hit him.

A howl escaped him as the shock coursed through his body. He fell and scrambled back.

“Get back here,” Wallace said, flicking the hose so the water lashed at Ryan.

Ryan crawled forward and got to his feet. He hunched his shoulders against the cold as Wallace ran the water over his body.

“Turn around.”

Ryan did so and felt the freezing punch of the water against his back. Wallace focused the stream on Ryan’s buttocks and thighs, washing away the stench.

“Dirty bastard,” he said. “Take a drink if you want it.”

Ryan turned back to the doorway. He opened his mouth and lapped at the stream, swallowing more air than water. He coughed, and doubled over as the spasm seemed to tear him in two.

The flow of water died and a tin bucket clattered to the floor, rolled across the sodden earth.

“Use that next time.”

Something small and solid struck Ryan’s chest and bounced away. He looked for it in the puddles at his bare feet. There, a chocolate bar.

“Eat that. It’s all you’re getting.”

The door closed, sealing out the light, locking in the darkness. Shivers rippled through Ryan’s torso. He dropped to his knees on the wet earth, ran his fingers over the slick floor, found the chocolate bar.

He ate in the blackness, blinded, swallowing despite the pain it caused.

T
HEY BEAT HIM
again, Carter and the tall man, as Wallace kept the pistol trained on him.

Every time the light faded, a hard slap dragged Ryan back to its harsh glow. Carter’s open hand left stinging shadows on Ryan’s cheek. An anchor in the waking world, mooring him to the pain.

When they were done, Carter crouched over Ryan’s shaking body. He reached out and grabbed a handful of Ryan’s hair.

“Get some rest, son. Tomorrow, you and me are going to have a talk. And we’ll settle this. Now, you have a good long think about what you’re going to tell me. Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, you’re going to think everything up to now was just a tickle fight. Understand?”

With his free hand, Carter gave Ryan one last slap to the cheek.

“Good boy,” he said, and released his grip on Ryan’s hair.

He stood and went to the ladder. Wallace and the tall man followed him up to the doorway. The tall man pulled the ladder up behind them and closed the door.

In the darkness, Ryan wept.

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

S
KORZENY FINISHED THE
cigarette and stubbed it out in the crystal ashtray. He heard the rustling of a newspaper at the other end of the line.

“Here it is,” Haughey said. “Exactly like you wrote it.”

“It’s done, then,” Skorzeny said.

“I don’t like it. These boys are dangerous, and you’re goading them.”

“I am simply playing them at their own game. Their weakness is greed. It will destroy them.”

“I pray you’re right,” Haughey said.

Skorzeny smiled. “Minister, I have never been wrong.”

He returned the receiver to its cradle.

It was as if Haughey believed no one had ever attempted to blackmail Skorzeny before. Several had tried over the eighteen years since the war had ended, and none had succeeded. Indeed, none had survived.

Though Luca Impelliteri had almost escaped death. Almost, but not quite.

A tour of Tarragona’s Roman amphitheatre, undergoing restorations since the previous decade, had been arranged for Skorzeny and the rest of Franco’s guests, with the mayor himself acting as guide. The guests clambered across the arced stone seating, built eighteen hundred years ago, where the region’s wealthy would have watched gladiators spar or Christians burn.

The ruins of the amphitheatre clung to the edge of a cliff not far from the hotel where Franco’s guests stayed, a sheer drop to the sea beyond its eastern walls.

The mayor stopped his lecture on the sins and virtues of the Romans, pointed, and cried, “You! Yes, you!”

A young woman, petite and full-bosomed, bare-legged in shorts, turned to his voice. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” the mayor called to her. “Who let you in? This area is not open to the public.”

A frown broke on her face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

She spoke her Spanish with an accent that might have been French.

“Well, now you do,” the mayor said. “Out you go.”

Skorzeny watched as she descended the rows of stone seats, dropping from one to the next, her arms held out for balance. As she passed Luca Impelliteri, she slipped. He caught her before she could fall into the gladiatorial pit below, his hands at her slender waist, pushing up beneath her breasts.

She smiled up at him, said thank you, brought her hands to his.

“My pleasure,” he said.

Skorzeny turned his attention back to the mayor, whose lecture droned on.

At that night’s dinner, the girl with the French accent replaced the young Spanish woman at Impelliteri’s side. She laughed at his jokes, let her hands wander beneath the table, and made no eye contact with Skorzeny.

As midnight passed, Skorzeny stood on the small balcony of his hotel room, his shirt open, enjoying the breeze on his bare chest and belly. He drew on his cigarette, wondering if Luca Impelliteri still lived. A crash and a scream from the floor above stopped his thoughts dead.

He remained still and listened.

Shouting, glass breaking. A door slamming.

More voices. Alarm, cries for help, calls for someone to stop her, she’s escaping.

Skorzeny’s throat tightened. He flicked the cigarette over the balcony and buttoned his shirt before going to the door. Opening it, he found other guests peering into the corridor, drink and sleep clouding their eyes.

“What’s going on?” a man asked in English.

“I don’t know,” Skorzeny said. “Perhaps someone had too much champagne.”

The Englishman smiled and nodded.

Then the voices from the stairwell at the end of the corridor, and the gunfire, and the girl’s dying cry.

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

“B
ACK AGAINST THE
wall,” Wallace said.

Ryan obeyed, taking careful steps, his innards seeming to writhe with each one. He kept his genitals, still tender, cupped in his hand.

The ladder touched the floor.

Ryan waited, ready to strike at any man who came near him. None did.

Carter appeared in the doorway.

“Up you come,” he said.

Ryan blinked at him.

“Come on, let’s have you.”

Ryan shook his head. “No.”

Carter nodded to Wallace. Wallace raised the Browning and took aim. The pistol spat, the report deadened by the suppressor. The earth by Ryan’s toes exploded. By reflex, he hopped aside. Wallace giggled.

“No messing about,” Carter said. “Up here. Now.”

Ryan shuffled towards the ladder. He gripped the stiles with his hands, placed a foot on the second rung, and hauled upwards. Another rung, and another, and more until he had to stop, the effort tearing through his body. His head lightened, and he hugged the ladder close to keep from falling back to the floor.

Carter leaned out from the doorway. “Move it.”

Ryan climbed until he could crawl out into the hall. He stayed there, hands and knees on the wooden floorboards, as he recovered his breath.

Wallace stayed back, the Browning up and ready.

Carter grabbed Ryan’s hair and pulled. Ryan hissed at the stinging of his scalp. He followed it up until his feet were under him, reached out to the walls to steady himself.

Something cold and hard pressed against the skin beneath his ear. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the tall man, a pistol in his hand.

“Come on.” Carter walked through a doorway into a small room. The tall man jabbed the suppressor against Ryan’s ear, telling him to follow.

The room dripped with damp, the wallpaper long rotted and blackened. Through the tiny square of a window, Ryan saw overgrown hedges and shrubs, heard the singing of birds. A cottage somewhere out of the city.

A wooden chair had been fixed to the floor with nails.

“Sit down,” Carter said.

Ryan did so. Carter set about binding his wrists and ankles to the chair’s arms and legs with rope. Ryan smelled his sweat. The hard base of the seat chilled Ryan’s thighs and testicles.

Wallace and the tall man took up their positions, one at each side of the room, weapons held loose at their sides. Carter walked to another door, exited through it, and re-emerged a moment later carrying a metallic block and something that looked like a wand made from aluminium and bright orange rubber. Two cables joined the wand to the block.

Ryan’s heart raced. He steadied his breathing.

Carter set the block on the floor. Ryan felt the impact of its weight on the floorboards through the soles of his feet. He saw the terminals, and the wires wrapped around them, and knew it was a car battery. A small black box with a knurled dial was fixed to the battery with sturdy tape. The wires joined the box to the terminals, and two more wires led from the box to the wand in Carter’s hand.