Beyond all Limits (30 page)

PART SIX

1

Clark Mason strolled past the White House metal detectors, smiling at everyone as he went.

This morning’s meeting of the National Security Council sure was going to be fun. Maybe not as much fun as he’d had with Sarah Lansing last night, but fun nevertheless.

He cast his mind back for a moment to the delicious games that Lansing had introduced him to, and felt a shudder of pleasure from the mere memory. Yes, she was a keeper, that one. Well, at least until something better came along, anyway.

She had already left the house by the time he’d woken that morning, but he wasn’t surprised; the earlier she left the better really, they both knew that.

He had awoken to disturbing news – General Wu had been on state television, accusing the United States of trying to assassinate him. He cited the efforts of a single man to kill him personally – and had film of the purported assassin’s escape attempt across Beijing – and also talked in pained tones about a supposed bomb attack which had destroyed part of the Forbidden City, with the entire remaining members of the Politburo along with it. There was footage of the smoking ruins of one of the palace complexes within the Forbidden City, and Mason had to admit that it didn’t look good.

He knew that General Wu wasn’t above staging events for his own benefit – the sinking of the Chinese frigate, the
Huangshan
, by the Taiwanese submarine was a case in point. Wu had obviously orchestrated the whole event to excuse the invasion of that country.

But the man caught on film – the man apparently now in Chinese custody – was definitely Western, and Mason was tempted to believe Wu’s interpretation of events this time. It certainly smacked of a US covert op gone wrong.

Mason knew that the Paradigm Group was a front for a covert action cell, and he also knew that Vinson had something going on right now. Mason’s contacts in the Special Operations Command had been slow getting back to him, but there was some talk of a SEAL Delivery Vehicle being routed – along with a special release team – to somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t proof, but it was suspicious by any stretch of the imagination.

And that wasn’t to mention the missing ‘Dr. Alan Sandbourne’, a man who Mason was convinced was actually Mark Cole, a shadowy assassin codenamed the ‘Asset’. Definitely the sort of man to be sent on such a mission, and someone whose appearance wasn’t a million miles away from the person racing across Beijing on the television news. Mason wondered why they had not shown a close-up of the man, but suspected it was because Wu couldn’t be sure that the assassin was an American, and didn’t want his tirade against the United States being spoiled by such details.

General Wu had been stern with his televised statements, warning President Abrams that she was playing with fire.

‘You may have heard,’ he’d said with a knowing smile, ‘of something known as ‘the Great Wall Project’. Well, I would like to confirm to you that what you have heard is true. We have a capability in this particular area that goes far beyond that of any other nation on earth, including that of the United States. And let me be clearer still – I have the will to use that capability if any nation tries to stop the ascendance of the Chinese people. I would advise you to remember that in the days to come.’

The news had been full of detailed explanations of the Great Wall Project ever since – five thousand miles of reinforced tunnels under an impenetrable mountain range, a stockpile of thousands of warheads and no way to target them, no way to stop General Wu if he decided to go through with such threats.

Mason knew that panic would start to spread through America as the morning wore on, as more and more people switched on the breakfast news, listened to the radio on the way to work, read the papers, spoke to colleagues.

By midday, the country would be in full crisis mode.

For Mason, he was still wondering how he could make the most out of this situation. Did he have enough evidence to push for Abrams’ impeachment?

It was possible, given what he knew about Vinson, Sandbourne and the Paradigm group. Given what Wu had just presented to the world, even the mere hint of US action without congressional approval – or even discussion at the NSC – would be enough to warrant a full investigation into the think tank and its staff.

And if the investigation showed that Abrams had knowledge of the group’s ‘extracurricular’ activities, or was in any way involved with it at all, then Mason wouldn’t even have to push for impeachment himself; the American public would demand it.

And with the president impeached and gone, who would step into her shoes and help the United States out of this mess?

Yours truly
, Mason thought with a little smile as he entered the White House Situation Room, ready to do battle.

Cole shook his head, trying to get some feeling back into his bare, naked body; but then, deciding this might not be a good thing, he stopped.

Every muscle in his body hurt, every bone, every sinew; and the huge man-mountain that was Zhou Shihuang hadn’t even started with him yet.

The renegade monk just sat on a chair opposite him, watching him. He hadn’t moved a muscle for what seemed like hours; he’d just sat there watching, his single working eye not blinking once.

Cole knew what the man was doing; it was purely psychological. The soldiers had already beaten him, he was already in a whole world of pain, but Zhou knew of his own reputation, knew the man in front of him would be scared, off-balance, frightened of what was about to happen to him. And the way Zhou just sat and observed him was designed to make him even more afraid, make him think that Zhou was insane, a man willing to do anything to another human being.

But another side of Cole considered the fact that it
wasn’t
a trick at all; there was always the possibility that Zhou
was
insane, that he
was
truly capable of anything, and – despite his years of training, his decades of experience, Cole felt his skin crawling with a deep, almost supernatural fear.

He tried to take his mind elsewhere, think about what was happening to the Force One team and the Politburo. What time was it now? Where would they be now? In Shanghai? Or even further?

He remembered General Wu’s anger at the state he had been in when brought to the cold, dank Zhongnonhai basements. The soldiers had beaten him black and blue, and Wu had been enraged – the general had probably wanted him paraded in front of the television cameras for propaganda purposes, something that could be forgotten now that he looked like a torture victim. Bruises and cuts covered his swollen eyes and cheeks, his lips distorted and puffy. There was no make-up in the world that could make him look any better.

He wondered what Wu had done to the soldiers who’d beaten him and lost Wu his public relations prize, and decided that it certainly wouldn’t be anything good.

Wu had watched Cole get strung up in the cold, dank basement room, and had then come so close that Cole could smell his sweet, oily breath. There had been no questions, just an examination, perhaps to check the resolve in the prisoner’s eyes.

He had turned away and spoken to Zhou, who had merely nodded his head and sat down to watch him.

Cole couldn’t even fall asleep, forced to balance on his tiptoes to help keep the weight off his arms and chest; he was strung up in a crucifix position, arms outstretched, and knew if he let his body collapse then he could well die of asphyxiation, the hyper-expansion of his chest muscles and lungs leading to increased difficulty of inhalation. He had been placed at such a height that the only way to keep the weight off was to stretch his feet down, touch his toes to the cold floor below.

And so he kept balanced there, the tips of his toes red raw, his body wracked with pain as Zhou Shihuang looked on.

‘What is your name?’ Zhou asked finally, his words in heavily accented English, his mouth barely moving.

‘Dietrich Hoffmeyer,’ Cole spluttered, knowing he had to at least try and put up the pretense.

Zhou just laughed humorlessly, looked Cole’s naked body up and down. ‘Dietrich Hoffmeyer is Jewish,’ he said, lips still barely moving. ‘According to records, circumcised at birth.’ He looked again at Cole, his meaning clear.

‘It grew back?’ Cole managed to respond, gasping through the pain.

‘You are a funny man,’ Zhou said, standing finally, his massive bulk causing a shadow to fall across the entire room.

And then he was there in front of Cole, inches from his face, his meaty, callused hand grasping Cole’s testicles and pinching them tightly between his vice-like fingertips.

The pain was immediate and intense, like a thousand fireworks going off in his groin, in his head, everywhere, and he thought he was going to pass out; and still the man was squeezing, harder and harder, and then Cole was sick, vomit trickling down his chin, his chest, and he choked on it, his feet slipping, his weight taken on his arms, across his chest and suddenly he couldn’t breathe, and still the man squeezed his testicles harder, and Cole was seeing stars now, his mind trying to black out, and he wanted to let it, why wouldn’t he let it? He could hear a noise, high and piercing, and realized it was his own screams, ringing and reverberating around the cold concrete cell; and then Zhou let go, but the pain stayed with him, leaving him weak, dizzy, confused.

‘If it can grow back,’ Zhou said with a smile, a razor blade coming up in front of Cole’s eyes, sweeping back and forth before him to leave him in no doubts as to what it was, ‘then you won’t mind if I cut it off again, no?’

He must be joking
, Cole told himself,
he’s got to be joking.

But then the razor was gone from his eye line, and the next thing Cole felt was a hot, burning sensation below, and the warm trickle of fresh blood dripping down his bare legs, and he screamed again like he never had before.

2

The meeting was in full swing, accusations being bandied about back and forth, and Clark Mason was enjoying himself tremendously. Whatever the truth of Wu’s accusations, they were being taken very seriously by the men and women in the Situation Room, people who were all too aware of the possible ramifications of unlicensed covert US action – the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Iran-Contra scandal, Project MK Ultra, the unfortunate list went on and on.

Foremost on everyone’s minds was the question of Wu’s response. If he felt the US had attacked him, what was his next move going to be? He already had over four thousand US servicemen and women in his sights, and plenty more American citizens trapped within the Chinese mainland itself. Would he kill them in retaliation? And if he did, what would the US government do then? How would it respond? Because if it did anything, Wu had made it abundantly clear that he had thousands of well-hidden nuclear warheads that he wouldn’t mind using.

To Abrams’ credit, she rolled with the punches well, betraying no weakness, admitting nothing. She was adamant that the US had no involvement, and urged the meeting to push on to consider contingency plans.

Just when it looked like it might be doing just that, Mason recognized the time to strike. ‘Just before we move on,’ he said in his charming manner, pleasant yet authoritative, ‘I would just like to add my comments, further to a visit I made yesterday afternoon. I – ’

‘Let me stop you there, Clark,’ Abrams said, looking at her watch, keeping completely cool. ‘I say we have a ten minute break, then meet back here. Everyone’s a little hot under the collar, and I understand, so let’s back off a little and come back to things fresh.’ She looked around the table, then back to Mason. ‘That okay with you, Clark?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’
Damn her
. What else could he say? She was still the president, for now at least.

The NSC members started to stand up, stretch their legs and filter out of the room, and Mason watched as Abrams approached him, hand on his arm. ‘I need to have a word with you,’ she breathed. ‘In private.’

‘Okay,’ he said, allowing her to guide him to a secondary conference room.

They entered the room and Mason saw Abrams lock the door behind them, noticed that all the blinds were drawn. He turned, surprised to see Bruce Vinson seated in a corner chair, his hand cradling a remote control.

‘What is this?’ Mason asked, worry starting to creep up on him. ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘Take it easy,’ Vinson said calmly. ‘Really. All it is, is a little private viewing. That’s all. Really. Relax. Take a seat.’

Despite his reservations, his distrust of Vinson, the man’s tone was so soothing, so reasonable, he couldn’t help but do what was asked of him. He took a seat across from Vinson, noticed that Abrams was already seated. He looked at the large screen on the wall, blank for now, and wondered what they were going to show him. Evidence of the US operation? Were they going to try and win him over, get him on the inside, make him an accomplice?

Well, they’d have another thing coming, he decided. He had his own plans, and he was going to stick to them.

The president was going down.

‘So what do you have to show me?’ Mason said, his confidence returning. ‘What’s this
private viewing
all about?’

‘Well,’ Vinson said easily, ‘let’s just show you, okay? You can make comments after if you want to.’

With that, he clicked his remote control and the screen fired up.

Mason, expecting to see military training footage, or else live feeds from in-zone helmet cams, was shocked to instead find himself staring at footage from his own house, Number One Observatory Circle.

From his bedroom.

The camera was directed at the bed, and Mason watched in horror as he saw himself stride out of the bathroom dressed in the white hood and robes of a Ku Klux Klansman, the semi-naked, ebony-skinned form of Sarah Lansing recoiling from him in mock horror.

He watched as he pulled her violently onto the bed and took her in pseudo-rape, watched the way she pulled his mask off, the way his face looked on the camera as he mounted and dominated the young black woman beneath him, face contorted in ecstasy.

The bag.
She’d had a camera in the bag. She’d left it on the dresser, and he’d never given it a second thought.

He waved his hand in front of him. ‘Enough,’ he managed to say through dry lips. ‘Enough.’

‘That
is
your house, isn’t it?’ Vinson asked softly.

‘Don’t,’ Mason said, broken, a man seeing his political career, his marriage, his
life
, flashing before his eyes. He shook his head sadly. ‘Don’t.’

‘Your wife is a very understanding woman,’ Vinson said. ‘But I doubt she would understand this, any more than would the American people if this video were to be somehow leaked to the press.’

Mason continued shaking his head, seeing no way out, understanding how clever, how
ruthless
, Vinson truly was.

He wondered how Sarah had been turned. Had she been an agent of Vinson all along?

‘The girl?’ he asked, weakly.

Vinson shrugged. ‘Not a long-term deal, if that’s what you’re wondering. We got in touch with her after our meeting yesterday. Didn’t take long to convince her really, we offered her a
lot
of money. What do you think she was after with you in the first place? Power and money are what that girl’s interested in, and I guess at the end of the day, our money outgunned your power.’

Mason nodded his head, knowing how clever Vinson had been. A mistress was nothing, especially with a forgiving wife and a jaded American public. But dressing up as a Klansman to perform a mock rape of a black ‘slave-girl’? He’d thought the idea was kinky, knew some women had rape fantasies, just thought this was a simple step further along that route. More detailed, but essentially harmless. But he knew how it would be perceived by anyone else watching it, just as Vinson did. It would ruin Mason in every single way there was to ruin a man.

Abrams turned to him, watching him carefully. ‘So Clark,’ she said. ‘Given what we have just seen here, can I count on your support?’

Mason shrugged his shoulders, a pained, defeated look on his face as he spoke to his president. ‘Yes ma’am,’ he said miserably. ‘Yes ma’am, I guess you can.’

Cole looked with bleary eyes at the man standing in front of him, the pain between his legs intense; but the psychological effect was even worse.

Zhou grinned, holding up Cole’s bloody foreskin between his fingers. ‘Do not worry,’ he said, scarred face inches from Cole’s, ‘you can grow it back, right?’

He laughed again, throwing his head back, his body heaving with fits of deep, gruesome laughter.

The strange thing was, Cole was momentarily relieved; a part of him had thought that Zhou was going to cut the entire thing off at the root. And no matter how tough Cole was, there was no amount of training that could have prepared him for
that
.

But then fear and worry clouded his mind again, as he realized that this was just the
start
of what Zhou had in store for him; and if the man was willing to do this as his first move in the game, what depths of hell would he willing to visit at a later stage?

The man still held Cole’s severed foreskin in his hand, and he looked at it for a moment, studying it intently before he returned his gaze to Cole. ‘I like you,
Dietrich
,’ he said, up close to Cole’s face, so close that Cole could see his battered, bloody reflection in the monster’s pale glass eye. ‘You are a handsome man, I find you . . . attractive.’ He breathed in, sniffing Cole’s skin, his hair, with delicate appreciation. ‘Ah yes, I like you.’

Zhou backed away, holding the bloody piece of Cole’s body up again, making sure that he saw it. ‘I will go now, leave you to consider what my plans might be for you.’ He smiled again, strolled gently around the hanging man. ‘But I will give you a hint,’ he said as he went behind Cole. ‘It will involve
this
,’ he whispered, stroking the cleft between Cole’s naked buttocks, before coming back round to the front. ‘It will involve
this
,’ he continued, pointing to his own groin and smiling, ‘and it will involve
this
,’ he concluded, holding up the bloody razor in front of Cole’s eyes. ‘I will let your imagination do the rest. But believe me, by the time I finish with you, you will have told me everything and will be
begging
me to kill you.’

Zhou strolled casually to the cell door, turning back at the last second and winking at Cole with his good eye. ‘Until we meet again,’ he said, and strode through the door, locking it behind him and laughing to himself as he padded off down the corridor.

Left alone in the dark with just his pain and his imagination for company, Cole’s head hung down on his vomit-slicked chest and – despite himself – he started to sob bitter tears as he thought about what was going to happen to him when Zhou returned.

It was nearly eleven o’clock at night now, and the waters of the East China Sea off the coast of Shanghai were as black as ink, any natural light from the moon and stars completely covered by dense cloud.

Force One and the Politburo were aboard a pleasure cruiser which – having arrived in Shanghai that evening – they had caught from the Bund, the city’s famous waterfront thoroughfare which ran alongside the vast Huangpu River.

It was a CIA-chartered boat, run by members of the Shanghai station, and it had headed north up the river until the Huangpu emptied out into the East China Sea, at which point it had slipped unseen into the open waters.

It was now on the blind side of the small islet of Sheshan, waiting for their rendezvous.

They didn’t have to wait long, and the pleasure cruiser rocked up and down with the bow waves as the dark, menacing conning tower of the USS
Texas
breached the surface just fifty feet away.

It took just a minute more for the huge submarine to come fully up and settle, another minute for the hatches to open, and Navarone watched in pleasure as the Navy SEAL dive team who had helped release the SDV spread out along the deck, weapons at the ready.

Then he saw Captain Hank Sherman come on deck, nodding his head for the pleasure boat to come alongside.

Navarone’s boat did just that, moored against the titanic hull of the US submarine, and then – as the SEALs stood guard – a chain of sailors helped ferry the members of the Politburo across and onto the deck, feeding them onwards towards the hatches and the welcoming safety of the submarine’s interior.

The politicians had finally and mercifully discarded their disguises within the cabins of the pleasure cruiser, and were dressed in smart, casual clothes; relaxed, comfortable and – more importantly for many of them – made for the correct gender.

Once the Politburo members were gone, the sailors gestured for Navarone and the commandos to follow, but he shook his head.

Sherman came forwards immediately. ‘Hey,’ he barked quietly, ‘quit messing around, get in the sub. We don’t have time for games, damn it.’

Navarone knew he was right – the
Texas
must have been running around in these waters unmolested for days now, but their luck might not hold out forever. There was the entire Chinese navy out there somewhere, after all.

But Navarone wasn’t playing games.

‘We’re not coming back,’ he said evenly, having made his decision with the team on the boat ride over.

They had seen the footage on television in Shanghai, knew that Cole had been captured, and were damned if they were going to leave him there.

Navarone had already been in touch with Liu Yingchau, who had an idea of where they might be keeping him, and it was definitely worth a shot.

‘Our chief’s been captured,’ he explained to Sherman, ‘so we’re going back.’

The old navy captain looked at Navarone, saw the determination in the man’s eyes; looked behind him at the rest of the team, saw that they shared his feelings, and nodded his head.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘okay. You’re one bunch of crazy sonsofbitches, that’s for damn sure.’ He straightened, smiled at them in admiration for their courage. ‘Good luck,’ he said simply, before turning his back on them and marching towards the submarine hatch.

‘Yes sir,’ Navarone whispered in return as he turned back to his own boat, the one that would take them back to the Bund, where they would then proceed onto the Maglev station that would take them straight back into the dark, dangerous heart of Beijing.

Yes,
he thought with trepidation,
we’re going to need all the help we can get.