CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER
ONLY ONE NIGHT LATER NASH was in his bed asleep when strong hands seized him and something was placed over his mouth and nose. A few seconds later he fell unconscious.
When he awoke he was lying on the floor in a darkened room, spreadeagled and bound to steel rings set into the floor, so he could not move.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkened conditions and his senses began working normally, Nash jerked when Victoria Steers said, “Hello, Mr. Hope. Thank you for joining me.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he replied tightly.
She ran her eyes over his bare chest. “You are to be congratulated on your obvious physical discipline. And your skin art runs the spectrum from ordinary to. . .interesting.”
Nash had had the scales of justice tattooed on his chest, a roaring lion on his back, a dragon running from his right delt down his arm to the back of his hand, medieval shields across both thighs, and one large die on each of his calves.
She let her fingers dance over his shaved head.
“This is the truly interesting one. The kinks in the chain? What is the meaning?”
Running from earlobe to earlobe and over the crown of his head was a long chain, kinked in three separate places equidistant from one another into a fairly indistinctive shape, but one that he knew to be a heart.
He cleared his throat. “Honor, devotion, and sacrifice.”
This was a lie. But he could not tell her the truth without giving up a clue as to his real identity. They actually symbolized him, his wife, and his now-dead daughter.
Steers bent forward and let her long hair drift into his face. It smelled pleasantly of lavender and coconut. But he turned his head to the side.
Steers looked amused. “You do not like to be touched?”
“Not after being taken from my bed, knocked out, and bound, no.”
She stood over him, straddling his body. He could see she had on a long white robe that covered her completely. Not knowing what was going to happen, but suspecting something truly unpleasant was about to occur, Nash closed his eyes.
“Open your eyes, Mr. Hope,” she said softly.
When he didn’t she put a bare foot on his crotch and started to press.
As it became more and more painful, he finally opened his eyes and was surprised that she had only drawn up the sleeves of her robe.
Seeing his look she said derisively, “Did you really think I would take off my clothes for you?”
“I . . .” But then he focused on her arms and drew in a quick breath.
They were covered in what looked to be long-healed burns now cast as ripples of twisted flesh.
When she turned, and lowered her robe to her waist, he saw that her back, too, had been burned in sections; the flesh was raw and looked exceedingly painful.
She covered herself and turned back around to face him. “This is my skin art, of a sort, although I did not choose to have this done, as did you yours. Tell me, Mr. Hope, what do you see in what I have just shown you?”
“I. . .see someone who has obviously suffered greatly.”
Nash now believed that Steers might have been on the plane owned by the Steers family that had crashed, and perhaps killed her father.
If true, he couldn’t even contemplate how she had survived, or handled the pain.
And then he thought of her meditation. The way she moved, slowly and gracefully.
Had she the mental willpower to make the pain, if not go away, at least subside to a manageable level?
She did not strike him as one who would control pain with medication, because that would mean Steers had to rely on some artificial means, when it was clear she preferred to rely only on herself.
If she has such mental strength, she is even more formidable than I thought.
She gazed down at her arms. “This was once something of significance to me, but no longer. I was advised to have operations, to cleanse myself of. . .it. To return to my normal self, or as normal as possible. But though some medical attention was required, I decided to let it mostly. . .lie, as it were. As a remembrance.”
“Of what?”
“Of defeat, Mr. Hope. It is quite powerful. But if you hold it only up here,” she added, touching her temple, “that memory will fade. And you may even convince yourself it did not actually occur because the mind, the ego, does not like to dwell on personal defeat. And thus you forget your failures, your vulnerabilities, and become weaker, not stronger. But I will never forget, because I see this failure of mine every time I look at myself.” She turned her gaze to him. “What do you think of my logic?”
Nash chose his words carefully. “I think it is. . .unique. But I don’t think many people would have the. . .strength to carry this reminder with them so. . .viscerally.”
She ran her hand over the damaged skin on her right arm. “Most people are not me.”
“We are in complete agreement on that.”
“Do you know what I see when I look at you?” she asked, meeting his gaze once more.
“No.”
Steers cocked her head slightly and her disappointment in his rushed response was clear to Nash, as were her subsequent words.
“A quick answer that is wrong, is as wrong as an incorrect answer delivered after substantial delay,” she noted.
He collected his thoughts and an answer occurred to him with startling clarity.
It was as though Nash and Steers were suddenly operating on intermingled wavelengths.
That could be an advantage in all this, he knew.
Yet it also rattled Nash that he could even approach thinking along the same lines as this woman.
He said slowly, and in a measured tone, “Your whole life is about understanding and thus controlling everyone you come into contact with. And yet in me you see only an. . .enigma.”
She studied him for a long moment. “Much better, Mr. Hope.” She glanced at her arm. “You are perhaps repulsed by my injuries?” she said.
“What does it matter what I am? I am nothing to you.”
She stared at him as though he were a fascinating beast behind zoo bars. “If I cannot comprehend you, Mr. Hope, I can at least own you. That is something, is it not? Perhaps more important in the end.”
He left this comment unanswered simply because he wanted to. And in that, at least to Nash’s thinking, was conclusive proof that she did not own him.
“Is that why you brought me here?” he said instead. “To dispose of an. . .unwelcome mystery? So does that mean I’m not going on the trip to free your mother?”
“I have committed to your participation, and I never go back once committed.”
“So where does that leave us?” he asked.
“It leaves me still wondering, Mr. Hope, and it leaves you with this.”
Steers picked up a knife from the floor. She said, “I will not ruin your lovely dragon, as I am partial to them myself.”
She squatted and placed the tip of the knife near his left wrist and proceeded to walk it up his arm, careful not to sink the blade too deeply or hit an artery or a large vein.
She kept her focus on her work, but when she was finished, with the end of the incision right below Nash’s shoulder capsule, she moved herself squarely back over his torso and looked him in the eyes, her expression impressed.
“You barely flinched,” she said breathily, from the effort of slicing him. To Nash, her gaze now held the conflicting emotions of disappointment and admiration.
Nash, in truth, had known what she was going to do to him, because the FBI had warned him that Steers sometimes sliced up her underlings, including, probably, Rhett Temple.
While the blade had bitten into him Nash had held the mental image of a painting he had seen in Rhett Temple’s home back in America, depicting a young girl and a dog running in a field.
During a conversation Temple had been having with a detective concerning his daughter Maggie’s death, Nash had seized upon the painting as a mental refuge.
His friend Shock had told him how Ty Nash, his father, while a POW in Vietnam, had used the memory of himself as a teenager riding a beloved horse in Mississippi where he had grown up, to survive the torture inflicted upon him by his captors.
It was all about separating your mind from the present.
And if you did that, the pain, while still there, could be managed.
Nash was glad that he had practiced this technique over and over.
Otherwise, he would have been screaming in pain while Steers carved up his arm.
“Mr. Temple was not nearly as stoic when it was done to him,” she said, confirming what Nash had long suspected.
As his mind left the girl and the dog behind, Nash let out a long breath and felt the spread of blood across his skin.
“What good would that have done?” he said quietly. “If you can’t change something, the waste of energy is unforgivable.”
She wiped the bloody knife off on his bare chest, smearing, perhaps symbolically and intentionally, the tattoo of the scales of justice. “And are you saving your energy for something important, Mr. Hope?” she asked, her expression holding an air of expectation.
“Aren’t we all?” he replied smoothly.
Then Steers leaned down and kissed him on the lips.
When she pulled away and looked at him Nash noticed the strange expression on her face, as though she was surprised by her action.
Her lips parted and he glimpsed strong, white teeth and a flicker of tongue.
She started to lean back down, perhaps for another touch of his lips, but then stopped. The woman rose and was quickly gone.
A few moments after that men were all over him. One injected him with something in his other arm, and Nash fell unconscious once more.
When Nash awoke he was back in his bed. He would have thought it was all a dream but when he moved his arm, he realized it had all happened, painfully so. He lifted his limb and looked at the wrapped and bloodied bandages. He had the same brand that he now knew Temple carried.
We’re both owned by that woman, or at least she thinks so. But if I survive Myanmar her life will be over, even if it costs me mine.