A vast, hollow terror seemed to have replaced her stomach.
They’ll ‘bury you so deep,’
she remembered.
‘So deep’ that—
Her throat felt sore, as if she’d spent the entire night screaming. Odd, that. Maybe it was anticipation.
Somehow she swung her legs over the side of the strange bed. They touched the floor much too soon, and she sat up, pushing the thin comforter aside. The far wall was too close, and the window was set high up; in fact, the whole room was about the size of a closet. There was no other furniture except for a small stainless-steel sink bolted to the wall opposite the door. The door itself was a featureless slab of wood with a peephole implanted in it at eye level. She noted with a dull sense of recognition that the door was perfectly smooth, with no handle or lock mechanism to mar its surface: It was probably wood veneer over metal.
Her hand went to her throat. The locket was gone.
Miriam stood, then abruptly found that she had to lean against the wall to keep upright. Her head throbbed and her right arm was extremely sore. She turned and looked up at the window, but it was above the top of her head, even if she had the energy to stand on the bed. High and small and without curtains, it looked horribly like the skylight of a prison cell.
Am I in prison?
she wondered.
With that thought, Miriam lost what calm she had. She leaned against the door and pounded it with her left hand, setting up a hollow racket, but stopped when her hand began to throb and the fear swept back in a suffocating wave, driving a storm surge of rage before it. She sat down and buried her face in her hands and began to sob quietly. She was still in this position a few minutes later when the door frame gave a quiet click and opened outward.
Miriam looked up suddenly as the door opened. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.
The man standing in the doorway was perfectly turned out, from his black loafers to the ends of his artfully styled blond hair: He was young (late twenties or early thirties), formally dressed in a fashionable suit, clean-shaven, and his face was set in neutral lines. He could have been a Mormon missionary or an FBI agent. “Miss Beckstein, if you’d be so good as to come with me, please?”
“Who
are
you?” She repeated. “Aren’t you guys supposed to read me my rights or something?” There was something odd about him, but she couldn’t quite get her head around it.
Past his shoulder she could see a corridor, blurry right now—then she realized what it was that she was having trouble with.
He’s wearing a sword,
she told herself, hardly believing her eyes.
“You seem to be labouring under a misapprehension.” He smiled, not unpleasantly. “We don’t have to read you your rights. However, if you’ll come with me, we can go somewhere more comfortable to discuss the situation. Unless you’re entirely happy with the sanitary facilities here?”
Miriam glanced behind her, suddenly acutely aware that her bladder was full and her stomach was queasy. “Who are you?” she asked uncertainly.
“If you come with me, you’ll get your answers,” he said soothingly. He took a step back and something made Miriam suspect there was an implicit
or else
left dangling at the end of his last sentence. She lurched to her feet unsteadily and he reached out for her elbow. She shuffled backward instinctively to avoid contact, but lost her balance against the edge of the bed: She sat down hard and went over backward, cracking her head against the wall.
“Oh dear,” he said. She stared up at him through a haze of pain. “I’ll bring a wheelchair for you. Please don’t try to move.”
The ceiling pancaked lazily above her head. Miriam felt sick and a little bit drowsy. Her head was splitting.
Migraine or anaesthesia hangover?
she wondered. The well-dressed man with the sword sticking incongruously out from under his suit coat was back, with a wheelchair and another man wearing a green medical smock. Together they picked her up and planted her in the chair, loose as a sack of potatoes. “Oww,” she moaned softly.
“That was a nasty bash,” said her visitor. He walked beside the chair. Lighting strips rolled by overhead, closed doorways to either side. “How do you feel?”
“Lousy,” she managed. Her right arm had come out in sympathy with her skull. “Who’re you?”
“You don’t give up, do you?” he observed. The chair turned a corner: More corridor stretched ahead. “I’m Roland, Earl Lofstrom. Your welfare is my responsibility for now.” The chair stopped in front of burnished stainless-steel panels—an elevator. Mechanisms grumbled behind the door. “You shouldn’t have awakened in that isolation cell. You were only there due to an administrative error. The individual responsible has been disciplined.”
A cold chill washed down Miriam’s spine, cutting through the haze of pain. “Don’t want your name,” she muttered. “Want to know who you people
are
. My rights, dammit.”
The elevator doors opened and the attendant pushed her inside. Roland stepped in beside her, then waved the attendant away. Then he pushed a button out of sight behind her head. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise, but stopped only a few seconds later. “You appear to be under a misapprehension,” he repeated. “You’re asking for your rights. The, uh, Miranda declaration, yes?”
She tried to look up at him. “Huh?”
“That doesn’t apply here. Different jurisdiction, you know.” His accompanying smile left Miriam deeply unnerved.
The elevator doors opened and he wheeled her into a silent, carpeted corridor with no windows—just widely spaced doors to either side, like an expensive hotel. He stopped at the third door along on the left and pushed it open, then turned her chair and rolled it forward into the room within. “There. Isn’t this an improvement over the other room?”
Miriam pushed down on the wheelchair arms with both hands, wincing at a stab of pain in her right forearm. “Shit.” She looked around. “This isn’t federal.”
“If you don’t mind.” He took her elbow, and this time she couldn’t dodge. His grip was firm but not painful. “This is the main reception room of your suite. You’ll note the windows don’t actually open, and they’re made of toughened glass for your safety. The bathroom is through that door, and the bedroom is over there.” He pointed. “If you want anything, lift the white courtesy phone. If you need a doctor, there is one on call. I suggest you take an hour to recover, then freshen up and get dressed. There will be an interview in due course.”
“What
is
this place? Who
are
you people?” Finally Roland frowned at her. “You can stop pretending you don’t know,” he said. “You aren’t going to convince anyone.” Pausing in the doorway, he added, “The war’s over, you know. We won twenty years ago.” The door closed behind him with a solid-sounding
click,
and Miriam was unsurprised to discover that the door handle flopped limply in her hand when she tried it. She was locked in.
* * *
Miriam shuffled into the white-tiled bathroom, blinked in the lights, then sat down heavily on the toilet. “Holy shit,” she mumbled in disbelief. It was like an expensive hotel—a fiendishly expensive one, aimed at sheikhs and diplomats and billionaires. The floor was smooth, a very high grade of Italian marble if she was any judge of stonework. The sink was a moulded slab of thick green glass and the taps glowed with a deep lustre that went deeper than mere gilding could reach. The bath was a huge scalloped shell sunk into the floor, white and polished, with blue and green lights set into it amid the chromed water jets. An acre of fluffy white towels and a matching bathrobe awaited her, hanging above a basket of toiletries. She knew some of those brand names; she’d even tried their samplers when she was feeling extravagant. The shampoo alone was a hundred dollars a bottle.
This definitely isn’t anything to do with the government, she realized. I know people who’d pay good money to be locked up in here!
She sat down on the edge of the bathtub, slid into one of the seats around its rim, and spent a couple of minutes puzzling out the control panel. Eventually she managed to coax half a dozen jets of aerated water into life.
This is a prison,
she kept reminding herself. Roland’s words haunted her:
‘Different jurisdiction, you know.’
Where was she? They’d taken the locket. That implied that they knew about it—and about her. But there was absolutely no way to square this experience with what she’d seen in the forest: the pristine wilderness, the peasant village.
The bedroom was as utterly over the top as the bathroom, dominated by a huge oak sleigh-bed in a traditional Scandinavian style, with masses of down comforters and pillows. Rather than fitted furniture there were a pair of huge oak wardrobes and a chest of drawers and other, smaller, furniture—a dressing table with mirror, an armchair, something that looked like an old linen press. Every piece of furniture in the bedroom looked to be an antique. The combined effect was overwhelming, like being expected to sleep in an auction house’s display room.
“Oh wow.” She looked around and spotted the windows, then walked over to them. A balcony outside blocked the view of whatever was immediately below. Beyond it she had a breathtaking view of a sweep of forested land dropping away toward a shallow valley with a rocky crag, standing proud and bald on the other side. It was as untainted by civilization as the site of her camping expedition. She turned away, disquieted. Something about this whole picture screamed:
Wrong!
at her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
The chest of drawers held an unpleasant surprise. She pulled the top drawer open, half-expecting it to be empty. Instead, it contained underwear.
Her
underwear. She recognized the holes in one or two socks that she hadn’t gotten around to throwing away.
“Bastards.” She focused on the clothing, mind spinning furiously.
They’re thorough, whoever they are.
She looked closer at the furniture. The writing desk appeared to be an original Georgian piece, or even older, a monstrously valuable antique. And the chairs, Queen Anne or a good replica—disturbingly expensive.
A hotel would be content with reproductions,
she reasoned. The emphasis would be on utility and comfort, not authenticity. If there were originals anywhere, they’d be on display in the foyer. It reminded her of something that she’d seen somewhere, something that nagged at the back of her mind but stubbornly refused to come to the foreground.
She stood up and confirmed her suspicion that the wardrobes held her entire range of clothing. More words came back to haunt her:
‘There will be an interview in due course.’
“I’m not in a cell,” she told herself, “but I could be. They showed me that much. So they’re playing head games. They want to play the stick-and-carrot game. That means I’ve got some kind of leverage. Doesn’t it?”
Find out what they want, then get out of here fast,
she decided.
Half an hour later she was ready. She’d chosen a blouse the colour of fresh blood, her black interview suit, lip gloss to match, and heels. Miriam didn’t normally hold with makeup, but this time she went the whole hog. She didn’t normally hold with power dressing either, but something about Roland and this setup suggested that his people were much more obsessed with appearances than the dot-com entrepreneurs and Masspike corridor startup monkeys she usually dealt with. Any edge she could get…
A bell chimed discreetly. She straightened up and turned to look at the door as it opened.
Here it comes,
she thought nervously.
* * *
It was Roland, who’d brought her up here from the cell. Now that she saw him in the daylight from the windows with a clear head, her confusion deepened.
He looks like a secret service agent,
she thought. Something about that indefinably military posture and the short hair suggested he’d been ordered into that suit in place of combat fatigues.
“Ah. You’ve found the facilities.” He nodded. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” she said. “I see you ransacked my house.”
“You will find that everything has been accounted for,” he said, slightly defensively. “Would you rather we’d given you a prison uniform? No?” He sized her up with a glance. “Well, there’s someone I have to take you to see now.”
“Oh,
good.
” It slipped out before she could clamp down on the sarcasm. “The chief of secret police, I assume?”
His eyes widened slightly. “Don’t joke about it,” he muttered.
“Oh.” Miriam dry-swallowed. “Right, well, we wouldn’t want to keep him waiting, would we?”
“Absolutely not,” Roland said seriously. He held the door open, then paused for a moment. “By the way, I really wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself trying to escape. This is a secure facility.”
“I see,” said Miriam, who didn’t—but had made her mind up already that it would be a mistake to simply cut and run. These people had snatched her from her own bed. That suggested a frightening level of—competence.
She approached the door warily, keeping as far away from Roland as she could. “Which way?”
“Along the passage.”
He headed off at a brisk march and she followed him, heels sinking into the sound-deadening carpet. She had to hurry to keep up.
When I get out of this mess, I’m buying a new interview outfit—one I can run in,
she promised herself.
“Wait one moment, please.”
She found herself fetched up behind Roland’s broad back, before a pair of double doors that were exquisitely panelled and polished.
Odd,
she wondered.
Where
is
everybody?
She glanced over her shoulder, and spotted a discreet video camera watching her back. They’d come around two corners, as if the corridor followed a rectangle: They’d passed a broad staircase leading down, and the elevator—there ought to be more people about, surely?
“Who am I—”
Roland turned around. “Look, just wait,” he said. “Security calls.” She noticed for the first time that he had the inside of his wrist pressed against an unobtrusive box in the wall.