Ultimate Power (5 page)

“So we changed it to make it work.”

Wes snorted, lit another cigarette and peered over the landscape again. Like a naughty child, Lance thought. Okay, it was time to take his toys away.

Lance leaned forward. “Look, Wes, you're one of the best directors in Hollywood.”

“The best.”

“I need you on this project.”

Coleman pursed his lips.

“But there are many other guys that will take the job in the blink of an eye.”

The man's head jerked around. “It was
my
script, Lance.”

Gerard chuckled. “And now it's mine. I bought it, remember?”

The chair scraped back as Wes stood up. “You know what, you guys are a bunch of arrogant pricks. I worked my ass off on the script. Decades of research.” He pummeled the wad of paper with a forefinger. “This is going to be an epic, Lance, think Titanic, think Schindler's list.”

Lance shook his head. “It isn't, Wes. I sell movies. It is more like The English Patient, da Vinci code.”

“I happened to love both those movies.”

“But the public didn't. They tanked at the box office.”

The man's shoulders slumped.

“It's not the flavor of the month, anymore, Wes. People want zombies or post apocalyptic thrillers, end of the world kind of stuff.”

Wes fell back into his chair. He shook his head slowly. “Why?”

“Because everything is going for a ball of shit, Wes, look around you.”

Wes turned to Lance with a deeply furrowed brow. “I don't know if I can do this, Lance.”

Lance stood up and patted his back. “Off course you can. Twenty-five percent royalties in a billion dollar block buster movie says you can.”

The man rested his bearded chin on his fist. Sighing, he closed his eyes.

Lance Grenard chuckled and slapped his back. “C’mon Wes, let's go get a drink.”

Alexa saw Neil and Bruce and drew up into a parking bay at the International Arrivals section of Charles de Gaulle. They were standing, chatting, backpacks slung over their shoulders. They travelled light. They had arrived at the airport within an hour of each other. Alexa checked her watch. Two thirty in the morning.

Alexa honked and waved them over. They strode towards the car, and Neil climbed into the back seat. Bruce pulled the passenger door open and slid into the seat, adjusting it all the way back. “Any news?”

Alexa shook her head. “No sign of his Geolocation Device, they must have removed it.” She pushed the stick shift into reverse and pulled out of the parking. She maneuvered through the traffic and within minutes they were on the A106 heading towards Paris.

“Where we going?” Bruce asked.

“The Presidential Palace, we’ve got a temporary office set up there. We’re liaising with Lyon via conference calls.”

The road was congested, and Alexa slapped a magnetized yellow emergency light on the roof. The twenty-three kilometer trip could take up to forty minutes, hopefully this would halve the time.

Bruce showed his tablet PC to Alexa. It had a map with a small, red blip that flickered on and off. “I know where he is.”
 

Her heartbeat started racing. “How the hell did you manage to track him?”

“I’ll explain when we get to the palace. Let’s brief everyone at the same time.”

“You sure it’s him?” Neil asked.

“Positive.”

“Where is he?”

Bruce dragged his fingers across the screen. “Somewhere close to Kabul.”

Alexa hesitated. “Dad, I suggested that they make you acting commander until Laiveaux returns.”

He slowly tilted his head from side to side, weighing his choices. “I don’t know if I’m cut out for the job.”

“There’s no-one else.”

Bruce frowned. “I guess you’re right.”

Alexa smiled. “I know I am.”

The man hit Laiveaux in the face again, rocking him back with the blow. “Where?” the man shouted, sweat dripping from his chin. He shook his hand painfully.

The mustached man that had identified himself as al-Sharif held his hands in the air, playing the good cop role. "Come now, General. This needn't go on. All we want is the location of the safe house where you're keeping Ahmad Ahmani in Paris."

Laiveaux licked his bruised lip. They were going about this the wrong way. They could beat him all day. Interrogations were about breaking the mind as well, not just the body.
 

The adrenaline that was pumping through his system acted as a natural painkiller, they could hack off a bloody limb, he doubted if he would have felt it. Plus, he was bound loosely, he could roll with every blow, minimizing the damage. The man was hurting himself more than he was hurting Laiveaux. He dropped his head on his chest and sighed.
 

These guys were damn amateurs.

He pushed the pain into the compartment in his mind that he had segmented for that exact purpose. Once he was safe again and had debriefed himself, he would toss that compartment away and never come back to it again. It would be like it had never happened.
 

He listed the mistakes they were making as a way to bide his time. Take for example the way he was bound. His arms were tied to the armrest of a sturdy chair, and his feet tied to the legs of the chair. Nice and comfy. When he opened and closed his fingers, the blood circulated perfectly.
 

No, he would have taken an entirely different approach. First of all, you needed to get the prisoner as uncomfortable as possible. Adrenaline eventually seeps away, but the extended periods of severe discomfort would be worse than any blows received.
 

What he would have done was to tie his arms over the back of the chair and fastened his upper legs to the seat, pulling his feet up and tying them to his arms, as tight as possible. You needed to stretch those suckers, no way the circulation was going to get going then.

Prisoners would say anything to get out of that unbearable predicament, they would sign a contract to wipe out their families if they had to.

That was the beginning. When the body was suffering sufficiently, the mind was next. Repetition was the key to breaking a man's mind. Don't give them a chance to think, to compartmentalize the pain.
 

He once interrogated a guy where all they did was take turns shaking the man's chair for a couple of hours, they didn't question him, just reminded him that this was going to go on for the rest of his life. After three hours, the prisoner started to vomit and begged them to stop. He sang like a little canary afterward.

Laiveaux looked up as the interrogator grabbed his chest and hammered two quick jabs into his nose. Laiveaux shook his head, his vision had gone blurry, but that would return soon.

Anyway, another method he had used with a lot of success was the Vietnamese method of drip torture. You would place a prisoner's head beneath a tap or a bucket with a hole in it, tie his head down securely. The water would drip onto their foreheads, drip, drip, drip, incessantly, the dreaded monotony of anticipating the next drop broke the mind sooner than any physical blow could. It felt like your head was going to explode.

He had been through this for two days in the Angolan bush war. The South Africans were masters at the art of torture. Sick bastards. It had taken him weeks to recover. That's where he learnt the trick of compartmentalizing your pain, like it was old baggage. No need to dwell on the past.

Laiveaux braced himself as the man pounded a fist into his stomach. He glanced up, licking his lower lip. The man was growing tired, there was hardly any power in that blow.

He chuckled as he recollected something that had worked with a dog handler.

They had threatened the man, told him he was going to be KIA, they threatened to kill his children, his wife. He didn't blink an eyelid. But when they brought his dog into the interrogation chamber and put a gun to the mutt's head, the man went ape shit, begging them not too hurt the animal. Laiveaux understood how he felt. Most animals were worth saving.
 

Laiveaux smiled as he looked up. The guy stood in front of him, clutching his hand open and closed, a painful grimace on his face.
 

"You laughing at me, old man? Tell me now," he shouted, pointing a finger in Laiveaux's face.

The guy was taking this personally. He wondered if he should end this now.

The man turned around, rolling his shoulders, preparing for the next blow. He sauntered to Laiveaux, pulled his arm back and aimed a straight jab at Laiveaux's jawbone. Ah, the perfect shot, a hook would have been more difficult to deal with. Laiveaux dug his chin into his chest, stood up on his toes and rammed his head forward with all the power he could muster.

The punch connected on Laiveaux's cranium, one of the hardest bones in the human body. He heard the crack as the bones in the man's hand shattered. Oh man, that must have hurt.

Laiveaux looked up with a grin as he tilted back in his seat. The guy was bouncing around, clutching his injured hand in his armpit, howling with pain.
 

“That's a bad fracture, your metacarpals are gone, but I think I got the bones in your wrist as well. That once happened to me up in—“

"Shut up," the man shouted, spittle dangling from his chin. "Just shut..the..fuck..up," the guy enunciated.

Laiveaux closed his eyes, sighed. “My point is that you better have that attended to by a good surgeon, those things tend to grow on skew. I knew a man who had to amputate his entire arm with a similar break."

The man glanced at al-Sharif with a panicked expression, excused himself from the room, holding his hand by the wrist. It was beginning to swell.

Al-Sharif grabbed Laiveaux on his chest. "Talk to me man, do you want to die?"

Laiveaux shrugged. "Off course I don't want to die, no-one wants to die, my dear man." He closed his eyes and licked his lips, took a deep breath and looked up. "Am I willing to die? That is an entirely different question, and my answer is yes. I am and I will not give you any information before I do."

Them man looked at him incredulously, slapped his forehead. "I'll kill you, infidel," he shouted, jabbing a finger in Laiveaux's face.

"We all believe in the same God."

The man spat on the floor. "You're an atheist."

"Now whoever told you that?"

The man's eyes narrowed. "A man in the military who has killed so many—“
 

"Look who's talking. Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups, Moktar."

The man stood there, assessing Laiveaux for a moment, then turned on his heel, flung the cell door open and slammed it behind him.
 

The phone on Emerico Barba’s desk rang and he heaved himself upright in his chair. “It’s done?”

“Yes. Target eliminated. And there’s more good news.”

“You’re shitting me, you got him too?”

“We were in luck. Right time, right place.”

Barba pulled himself up laboriously and steadied his bulky frame. He punched the air with a fist. “What do they say, second time lucky, eh?”

The phone disconnected.

Barba smiled, doing another fist pump. Emilio Marcos had been on that plane. The man was outmuscling him at the Port of Tarifa, establishing a foothold on the North African route. He had seen it a hundred times before, a young punk gets a foothold and then reckons he’s ready to expand into the rest of Europe.

Barba lit a cigar and poured himself two fingers of Scotch. He slugged it back and placed the tumbler on the serving tray. Ah, the satisfaction of knowing that you have secured your future. When he had received the phone call from Sonti telling him that Marcos would be on that flight, he had jumped at the chance.

He walked to the World Map that covered a wall of his office. The entire world’s shipping routes were marked with red lines, criss-crossing the width and length of the world’s oceans. His green lines covered almost half. This wasn’t a chump change business, a couple of million here and a couple of million there. It was worth billions per year. He considered the twenty-million well spent.

When Sonti told him that the target would be the Eiffel Tower, he thought that the gods were smiling down on him. He had mentioned that there could be another target that he wanted to eliminate; his brand new son-in-law, Pete Ricco.

“Well, get him on the Tower by six,” Sonti had said. “No extra charge.”

Sometime’s his daughter’s escalator didn’t go all the way to the top, she was a sweet, innocent, naive girl. But one thing you couldn’t take away from her was that she was well organized, like her mother had been, bless her soul. He told Carmen that she should go shopping, relax a little, and send Pete and that damn brat of his to go visit the Tower, she deserved some time off. She agreed, and obviously Pete agreed; he had no choice.

Barba shuffled to his chair, puffing on his cigar. He slowly lifted himself down, then leaned back with a grunt, folding his hands on his stomach. The little Italian prick had made some dubious investments lately. Penny shares, what the hell? Pete had stood in line to inherit all of his wealth, he would have run this company into the ground if it was up to him.