Page 14 of Double Shot

Chapter Five

Roan…

There were a few things that I knew, and these things sustained me. I knew for a certainty that I was somewhere in France, most likely the south of the country. There was almost no commercial fast food, and everything was familiar. I imagined that other people might consider this incarceration intolerable, but the bread was exquisite, and there was wine at most meals they brought me. The first of many non-sequiturs came when the old woman who handled most of my food and care asked me, the prisoner, if I preferred white wine or red wine. Being the polite person I am, the answer was whatever she felt would best go with what she brought me.

I imagined myself like a white-collar criminal, an insider trader, or a corporate embezzler. I was doing hard time in the south of France, where stoic Frenchmen were feeding me the rustic foods that I tried to make myself. My French was improving, and for the most part, my treatment was well enough.

Cassoulet, Provencal roast chicken, brioche or baguette?

My captor wasn’t following the line of interrogation and detention that I would have done were our roles reversed. I would have put myself in a black hole, used sleep deprivation, sound and music blasting, and lines of questioning involving disorientation, and dislocation. That wasn’t even digging into the ugly underbelly of enhanced interrogation, where the pain-inflicting tools and waterboarding equipment is brought out. They had done almost none of these things.

They did some physical restraining, and there was some questioning along with body punches and face abuse. It was the easy sort of thing to get through. I had the training from my years with Her Majesty’s Royal Marines. I had been taught what to expect if I had been caught by religious zealots and terrorists, and how to get through questioning techniques that were outright and evil torture.

They were softballing me, playing a long game and trying to befriend me. Good cop, good cop, and all of that.

The problem with that was that I knew I only had to wait. I knew without a doubt that Kyle was still alive, and if he was still alive, Sadie was too. In one of their more vigorous questioning sessions, I gave them a soft lead. They accessed the database I gave them the key to, and the key was rejected.

The database has a revolving encryption sequence, and it changes on a random trigger generator. If access is refused now, there is no way to access it,I had told them, and they went after the database. It had been at least a week since the house had been flattened when I told them, and they didn’t know it had been a gambit. If Kyle and Sadie had gotten out and he had accessed the Recovery Drive like he should have, the key would be rejected. If he was dead and hadn’t touched the drive, it would have been granted access.

It had also been the kill switch entry, and after granting access it would have dumped some very expensive custom-made viral weaponry into their system, and wiped the database they accessed. Interpol and other international police agencies didn’t storm the keep, and the query was kicked back.

Kyle and Sadie had gotten away. They were safe.

And if they knew I was alive, these assholes were fucking doomed.

That was what carried me through the actual bad parts of this incarceration.

And those came from Gwendolyn Kaijin.

Certainly not the Escadrille lieutenant I expected to handle my detention. I had expected Ajahi, the big black guy to apply the brutal techniques that the African warlords had become infamous for – vicious animals, hot brands, and stinging insects. That would be hard to resist. The narrow-eyed Aryan would have been my second guess, but that was mostly because he struck me as the sort who dressed in Nazi regalia and engaged in sexual self-humiliation. That was the sort of person who could do abominable things to people, horrific things, and not lose a wink of sleep.

But I got Gwen.

I almost wished that I had one of the others. There was something just insidious about the blonde Asian woman with the cutting French accent. She liked to make me wait, which was why I was restrained on what amounted to a sex bench. It gave me time to think. There was nothing else to do when I was tied up like a literal rib roast, completely naked, staring at the ceiling.

“Allo, lover,” she said, finally walking up to her play session. That’s what it was, it wasn’t torture, it wasn’t questioning, there were almost never questions.

“Nice weather we’re having today,” I said politely.

“You are such a model prisoner,oui?” she asked.

“The longer we’re here, the more artificial your accent sounds. Maybe you shouldn’t force it so much,” I suggested.

“Maybe you should remember to be polite. You are very vulnerable,” she said, dropping the accent. She patted me between the legs, enough to make me draw up, but not enough to really hurt. “And this is how I like you, big man.”

I sighed. There was no telling which way she was going to take her play today. She could be cruel and abusive, or she could be cold and strange; there was seldom any rhyme or reason to it. It hadn’t escaped me that this wasn’t entirely unlike what had happened months before when Lach carried Sadie into our house. It had been Gwendolyn who technically saved my life at the manse.

She was the one who figured out the warhead configuration and realized what it was. She had shouted orders, and after having shot me twice, she made sure that I was dragged to safety. We barely made it to cover before the timer ended and the Soviet fuel-air warhead leveled the property values on Bootlegger Head.

We had still been caught within the radius of the blast. The fire had roared over our heads, but the car we sheltered behind took the heat and force of the blast. Gwendolyn’s hair had been burned away, and there were many burns, lacerations, and bruises from flying debris, and worse. We were thrown into an SUV, where I passed out.

Then it had been a boat, blurred impressions of an airplane, and needles in my arm, keeping me sedated.

There had been a hospital ward, or something that looked like one. There was some concern over my leg before they realized it was an old wound and a missing prosthetic. The first few sessions I had endured with Gwendolyn were what I had expected – questions, basic violence, some willpower eroding techniques, some humiliation techniques.

Then she saw me naked, and everything changed.

The next session involved blindfolds, some naked beatings, and then things took an unexpected turn. While blindfolded, she put some sort of tension bands around my manhood, and simple biology and hydraulics took over. She did things to me, and I don’t know where all it went, but those places were hot and wet.

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