No Survivors Read Online Free PDF Page B

start. Afterward, they took him down to a room and tied him to a chair. The room was painted white: every wall, the floor, the ceiling, all white. It was very cold, too. They gagged his mouth with a leather strap. They taped his eyes open, so that he could not close them or even blink. They put headphones over his ears. Then they turned on lights, bright lights, right in front of his eyes. And they put noise through the earphones, so loud, without stopping. That was how I found him. He had been like that for almost four hours . . .”
    “I see . . .” murmured Geisel, thoughtfully. The story was horrific, but he tried not to be shocked by what he had heard. At that moment, in the context of his consulting room, it all had to be looked on as information that might help him reach a more accurate diagnosis. Only that evening, sitting at home with a drink in his hand, might he go back and contemplate Carver’s ordeal in more human terms.
    “Now I understand the fear that consumes him,” he continued. “His conscious brain has blanked the torture from his mind, but his subconscious dreads its repetition. Still, there is one aspect of your story that puzzles me. . . . If he was tied to this chair, completely unable to move, how did he escape?”
    “I cut him from the chair,” said Alix.
    “But there was this man you spoke of, with other men under his command . . .”
    “Yes.”
    “So how did you . . . ?”
    “I am not your patient,” said Alix. “Our conversations have no legal privilege.”
    “Quite so. . . . Still, with one woman and many men, I’m sure that whatever you did, it must have been in self-defense.”
    “Exactly. It must have been like that.”
    Geisel nodded to himself, coming to terms with what he had just heard.
    “There’s something else,” Alix added.
    “Yes?”
    “I want you to understand the man he was . . . before all this.”
    She paused for a moment, trying to find the right words. Then she remembered that night in Paris again, and looked away from Geisel, her eyes unfocused, her concentration turned inward.
    “When I first met Samuel Carver, I was trying to kill him. An hour later, I followed him into an apartment. We both knew that it had been booby-trapped. The explosives were set to detonate within thirty seconds. But I followed him into that apartment, I chose to do that, because I trusted him completely to keep me safe, and I wanted to be next to him. . . .”
    Alix turned her eyes back on the psychiatrist, then glanced away again. She was almost talking to herself when she said, “I just want to be next to him again.”
    “I understand,” Geisel replied. “And thank you, Miss Petrova. I know how hard it must have been, summoning up such painful memories.”
    He stood up and held out his hand to her as she rose. They shook. He did not move away, though, but kept looking at her, as if she were his patient.
    “You have been through a deeply traumatic experience, too,” he said. “You will need to talk to someone. Please, if you wish to arrange a consultation, do not hesitate to ask.”
    He smiled. “Then you will be my patient, and you can speak as openly as you like.”
    “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll bear that in mind. Now, if you will excuse me, Samuel will be waking soon. And he needs to see me there when he does.”

9
    F ar away in Russia, Lev Yusov was sitting in a dingy bar called Club Kabul trying to explain the significance of an apparently worthless strip of computer paper covered in numbers to Bagrat Baladze, a swarthy, mustachioed, shiny-suited psychopath in his early thirties. What with the noise in the club and the significant quantities of vodka that both men were consuming, it was not easy to convey the value of this document, particularly since Yusov was not willing to reveal its physical whereabouts until Bagrat committed to the deal.
    “How can I agree to pay without seeing what I am paying for?” asked Bagrat.
    “If the document is real, what will you