Page 19 of Connected
He was in that strange room in the tipple, the one with the clean shiny surfaces. Overhead lights shone brightly, but flickering shadows lurked in the corners. The shadows resembled… something. An animal? He couldn’t quite identify the shape, and besides, staring gave him gooseflesh. Something was wrong with those shadows.
Better, perhaps, to stare at the man. He seemed to be an entirely ordinary man with a bland smile and moderately priced suit. Those deep-set eyes, though, were terrifying. Owen had seen corpses with more warmth in their eyes.
“Who…?” Owen croaked through a dry throat.
And that was when he became aware of his own situation: bound firmly to a thick metal St. Andrew’s cross, the soles of his feet resting on the cold concrete floor. And he was naked.
“Let me go,” he growled. Not because he expected to be obeyed but because he had to at least try. He couldn’t just stand here and do nothing.
The man—Miller, apparently—didn’t bother to reply. His body language implied that he could wait all day.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Owen tried to not sound frantic.
“I told you—call me Miller. And what I want is you.”
“I don’t?—”
“I’m sure you understand from your Bureau training why I’ve placed you like this. The helpless position with mild religious connotations. The nudity. The isolation in the unsettling physical space. The mental confusion.” Miller shrugged. “All intended to make you feel more vulnerable and therefore more amenable to influence. Physical pain is also helpful, of course.” Miller raised a hand and made a small motion with his fingers.
Agony blazed through Owen’s body, the pain everywhere at once. He screamed and writhed, blind with agony. Had he been able, he would have flung himself off a cliff to escape this.
And then it stopped.
Owen hung in his bonds, sweaty yet chilled, heart thundering and throat raw.
“In case you didn’t notice,” Miller said pleasantly, “you pissed just now. I mention it because humiliation is also ahelpful tool. As you know. I believe you’ve used all of these tactics yourself during your years with the Bureau.”
Panic was going to get Owen nowhere, so he fought it into submission. Then he took several deep breaths. “Will you tell me who you are and what you want?”
“Eventually. In fact, who I am doesn’t particularly matter. I’m just a very boring man. My goals do matter, however, and I’ll share them with you in a bit. But first I’ll let you marinate for a while. We have time.”
The room went completely dark.
Owen strained to hear anything aside from his own breathing and rushing blood, but couldn’t. He wasn’t absolutely sure he was still in the tipple. He didn’t know whether anyone was here besides Miller, he hadn’t identified those creeping shadow-things, and he was clueless about what was going to happen to him. And how the hell had Miller triggered such horrible pain?
Stop it.Concentrate on what youdoknow. Use your resources to learn more.
Fine. He was attached to the cross with thick metal fetters, tight enough to dig in even when he remained still. Tugging and straining got him nowhere. The cross itself seemed solidly fixed. No matter how much he tried to move, it remained still. He couldn’t tell whether it was attached directly to the floor or whether it was anchored to the wall or ceiling, but the specifics likely didn’t matter.
He couldn’t see a damned thing. Even as he waited, his eyes never adjusted to the dark. As he recalled, all the sections of the tipple had windows of some sort, so either they’d been covered up here or he was no longer in the tipple. If he inhaled, however, he caught the faintest whiff of coal and old oil.
How about the temperature? Now that he’d calmed down, he was a little chilly. He’d been warm when he entered the tipple, but the storm could have lowered temperatures. Also,he’d been wearing clothing then and moving around. He might also be somewhat shocky right now, which would lower his body temperature.
This wasn’t much to go on. He couldn’t plan any sort of defense if he had no understanding of what was happening. But Jesus, he’d spent over two decades with the Bureau. Surely his training and experience should tell himsomething.
It was hard to judge the passage of time, but he spent what felt like a long while trying to amass explanations. He came up with a long list of things that almost certainly werenotthreatening him right now, but unfortunately that didn’t tell him what was.
Sometimes he heard the faintest whisper of movement around the edges of room. The shadows, maybe. He didn’t like that at all, but he preferred them to Miller. He tried not to imagine them creeping nearer to him, reaching out….
Dammit, this was his own fault. He’d been careless, preoccupied by thoughts of his family and, more pleasantly, of Keaton. He shouldn’t have assumed that he alone could handle whatever thing Keaton had sensed. He should have insisted on backup, returned in the morning when the storm had passed. He should have been paying better attention.
Then he remembered something Townsend had told him over twenty years ago, when Owen was fresh to the Bureau and had messed up during an assignment. Owen and a more senior partner had been sent to the outskirts of Sacramento in search of a reported chupacabra. When a local caught the two agents stalking around the edges of a goat pasture, Owen had earnestly told the guy what they were up to. The man thought he was crazy or possibly a thief, and he’d called the local cops. The end result was a shouting match. The chupacabra, if it had originally been there, got away.
When Owen and his partner returned to HQ, the chief had called him up to his office. Owen had been positive he was going to get fired. But Townsend had given him an avuncular smile. “Son, next time come up with a plausible lie. In fact, you’ll find it easiest if you have some stories prepared, just in case. We can nearly always do our jobs better if the local authorities remain blissfully unaware of us.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It was really stupid of me. I just wasn’t thinking, darn it, and?—”
“And you made a mistake. We all do. Even me, now and then.” Townsend had chuckled. “In this case, it’s not especially important. Nobody will die because of what you did. However, there may very likely come a day when your errorwillresult in a death. Maybe many.”
