Assassin Ch. 14

Megan

Her body was folded in half, her knees tied to her shoulders, her ankles tied to the ceiling. Her wrists were still trapped beneath her, pushed up between her shoulder blades and tied to her neck. Back on the ground and legs in the air, she had never felt more vulnerable. The Russian could do anything to her and there was not a damn thing she could do about it. At least not right away.

The only good thing was she was alone now. Time to think. Time to prepare for the next session. Would the Russian come back to continue the bad cop act? Or would Alan come back to play good cop?

They had abused her physically and sexually. They had withdrawn their junks at the last second and unloaded outside her vagina. Did they not want to have the ultimate union with an infidel? Did it meant she would not be at risk of pregnancy? It was a ridiculous thought. Worrying about pregnancy when that was the least of her problems.

Focus, she yelled aloud. Focus, focus, focus. She hollered as loudly as she could. Her energy spent yelling, she was panting in her half upside down position. If anyone was standing outside the door, they would have heard her. She waited for a response. None. Nobody was near enough. No guard posted outside. Or perhaps he was asleep. Perhaps he was told to ignore her.

She stayed silent for an entire minute. No sound of life at all. No engine sounds. She could feel swaying sensations. Tell tale signs of being in the open ocean. She was in a boat in the middle of the South China Sea.

They obviously wanted her alive. Or she would be dead by now. They wanted her because she had held back information. She had not told them everything she knew, so they thought. She actually knew nothing about why the laptop was so important. They had assumed that American intelligence would not send her to kill somebody for a laptop unless they knew it was really important. They did not know she did not work for a government agency. They did not know that she did not know. And she knew that they did not know that she did not know. It was mighty confusing. But this critical nugget of fact could save her life, she kept reminding herself.

Ten minutes of consciousness. No matter how hard she tried, that was all she could managed. The lack of sleep and blood loss had taken its toll. The sexual violations did not help. Her sugar level was low. They had let her drink but did not give her food for almost two days. She was feeling drowsy again.

The colors faded in black and white as she felt something throbbing behind her back, the mild pain emanating midpoint between her shoulder blades. She adjusted her body slightly, as much as she could, before she was swallowed up in darkness. It was as if a laptop unplugged from the power source had been running on batteries for too long.

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Paula

She had dark brown hair that was straight until her shoulders, then curly from her shoulders to her waist. A quarter of her disheveled hair was in front. The rest was behind her shoulders. Her wrists were shackled behind her back by standard police department handcuffs. Her elbows were brought together by her own bikini top.

She was on her knees.

A kick landed on her lower left rib. "Ready to talk?" The Russian drew out the words slowly, as if she did not understand English well.

It was in her interest to pretend. He had no idea she attended an American-run private high school in Hong Kong. In reality, her command of the English language was ten times better than the Russian.

"Talk what? I no not understand." She stayed in character.

The Russian backhanded her across the breasts. They swayed from side to side. His eyes looked down on her as he gathered a bunch of her hair and forced her head to look up.

"Open your mouth."

She obeyed.

He balled his other hand into a fist and forced it into her mouth, holding firm her head with the other hand wrapped around her hair. Her head was tilted up as he continued shoving his fist down, slowly, an inch at a time, until her gag instinct kicked in and she choked.

He removed his fist. "Who sent you to spy on us?"

Paula Jiang blamed herself for getting caught. The night before, she had checked into a luxury hotel in Hong Kong. Her instructions were simply to hang out in the hotel swimming pool night and day. Two Arabic looking men waded into the pool around noon the next day. She was reclining on her back, a modified iPhone in hand, snapping pictures of the two men and transmitting it to the Chinese Intelligence. There were dozens of guests relaxing around the pool and she felt safe.

She returned to her room, filled up the bathtub with an inch of water, and tossed the phone in. A hissing sound and a couple of beeps accompanied the death of the phone. She did not know who the two men were, what they were doing in Hong Kong, and why she needed to snap scores of pictures. All she knew was to do so and fly back to Beijing soonest. Chinese intelligence operated on a strict need-to-know basis.

Her mission done, she checked out.

"Would you like a taxi to the airport?" The bell boy asked in the sing-song version of Cantonese common in Hong Kong.

"Yes, please. I would like a taxi." She imitated the local Hong Kong accent.

He made a phone call and asked for a taxi to Hong Kong International Airport in Lantau Island.

A bunch of taxis were at the side of the hotel entrance fifty feet away. But none except one pulled forward. It was driven by a cheerful man with his head wrapped in a turban. Indian taxi drivers were a common sight in Hong Kong and Paula did not give a second thought to it.

"Where to Miss?" The turbaned man asked cheerfully, his smile broader than any taxi driver she had encountered in Hong Kong. She missed the first sign.

"Airport." She had no luggage.

"No problem." He said as he closed the door behind her.

She thought the bell boy had already told the taxi driver she was going to the airport. At the time, she thought he was probably too busy smiling to remember what came over the radio. She missed the second sign.

The driver was chatty. He told her stories about how he moved from India and how he had to work very hard to get the right to drive a taxi in Hong Kong. According to him, the Chinese government was the most racist people on the planet. Not like India, a multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual country. Did she know India spoke more than a thousand languages, he asked. She said no, hoping he would stop talking. Yet India was the biggest democracy on earth, not like China. She tuned him out for the rest of the thirty minute ride. He was trying to distract her and had succeeded. She missed the third sign.

It was hot and humid, the AC in the taxi hardly keeping up with the rising temperature. She had forgotten to direct him to use the shortest route to the airport. Finally, he fought through the traffic and they were cruising along on a paid highway. She exhaled and relaxed, shifted her position at the back of the taxi, and looked out the window to the high mountains that blocked the airport from the city.

The taxi exited the North Lantau Highway to the Tung Chung Waterfront Road. There was no good reason to do that, except the toll charge could be slightly lower. Paula rolled her eyes. Indian people were so stingy, she thought. She missed the fourth sign.

The taxi stopped at a red light, parked in the middle lane of a three-lane road. Another taxi was on the right lane. Paula could see the airport a block away. She looked into her purse for the taxi fare. A big mistake.

She did not notice that both taxis had rolled down all four windows. She looked at her driver's face off the rear view mirror. He looked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact. She turned to look at the taxi to her right. The man sitting at the back of the other taxi held a stun gun, aimed directly at her chest between her breasts.

She tried to duck but felt the cold metal probes on her chest, one of them hooked into her right nipple. Her muscles froze as she was handcuffed and dumped in the trunk of the other taxi.

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Megan opened her eyes and was glad to see Alan sitting next to her. She had been dressed in a long flowing skirt and a sports bra. Her wrists were cuffed to the bed, which was raised to a sitting position. There was a flat screen television mounted on the wall facing her.

"Please do not scream. You are in a foreign country and no SEAL teams are nearby." Alan thought it was funny and laughed to himself.

"Can I have some water?" The room was stuffy. She was perspiring.

Alan picked up a phone and a bottle of mineral water appeared shortly.

"Listen to me carefully. This is your last opportunity to cooperate. I pleaded with Hashim to give you one more chance." The good cop at work.

"Or else?"

Alan picked up a remote control and pointed at the television. A beep later, the red light on the side of the screen turned green. A frozen picture of a naked woman appeared on the LCD screen. She was tied to the ceiling by her elbows.

"If not for my intervention, Hashim wanted to do this to you."

He clicked a button on the remote and she saw the moving image of an attractive Chinese woman hanging from the hook of the ceiling by her elbows. Her legs were spread apart by a spreader bar. Her face was down and her butt up. She was slowly being lifted up until she was forced to stand on her toes, the bulk of her weight painfully rotating her shoulder joints inward.

The single handheld camera moved. An image of the Russian appeared on the background. The same Russian who played bad cop. She realized what they were attempting to do to her. The anticipation of what could be done was often worst than the actual torture.

The Russian folded his thick belt in half. He moved in front of the Chinese woman and lifted up her head by her long hair. He made sure she saw the belt and knew what he was about to do.

"Why were you spying in the hotel swimming pool?" The slow pronunciation with a thick Russian accent was comical. It made him even harder to understand.

"What say you?"

A crack of the whip on her stomach. "Why you spy, bitch?"

"Sorry. No understand question."

Another whip. This time on upwards and aimed at her breasts. She cried out. Encouraged, he quickly landed a half dozen on her chest, none of them as precised as the first. She twisted and turned to ride them. He was furious she did not cry out after the initial hit.

His reaction was to pull the rope to lift her totally off the ground. Suspended by the elbows, her toes a couple of inches from the floor, she groaned and hung down her head.

The Russian whipped her between her legs. She howled. Another crack. Then another. Her hair hung upside down from her scalp. Her face was away from the camera. But her animal screams piercing through the TV speakers left no doubt of the intense pain cutting through her nerves.

Megan tried not to hide her anger. These men were animals. When she got her hands on them, she would have to skin them alive. Especially the Russian. She would have to string him up and whip him to death the same way he was doing to the poor Chinese woman.

"She is a Chinese agent sent to spy on us," Alan explained as he walked the room in a half circle around her bed. "The Russian will torture her to death if she does not talk."

"And the same will happen to me?"

He nodded.

"I do not know everything, but I can tell you what I do know."

Alan sat down and leaned in.

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to be continued ...