The Shield of Darius (4 page)

FOUR

Ben’s mind awoke before his body. He felt only pain. Sharp explosions bursting between his temples. He cracked open his eyes and squinted dizzily at the white, mildew-spotted ceiling above him. With each throb, the ceiling seemed to sag downward, then retreat. Sag. Retreat. His gut twisted into a cramped spasm and he swallowed hard to keep from retching, gagging on his thick, pasty tongue. The room was musty. Smothering. He closed his eyes again and struggled to capture a complete thought, but found only images. The castle ruin above him on the hill. PJ on the tumbled stone wall.

Feeling a swollen tenderness behind his left ear, Ben wondered fleetingly if he had fallen from the wall himself, and was in one of those colorless London hospitals he had seen in the city. The pain forced life into his other senses and he focused on sounds, finding the irregular drone of distant traffic. This must be London. He struggled again for images, piecing them together until they suddenly coalesced into a memory, capturing the frantic woman in the woods and the race to the van.

As the memory developed, a pressure in Ben’s chest grew with it, crushing him downward until he could barely suck in a breath. He wanted to groan but as the sound formed, he choked it back, realizing he may not be alone. Letting his lids droop shut, he concentrated again on sounds, straining to discriminate voices from the general din beyond the room. More honking than usual in the grumble of distant traffic. Rush hour. In another direction, the faint clatter of metal against metal. Pans or garbage cans.

Suddenly Ben’s nose intervened, sending a jolt of olfactory electricity to his brain that caromed wildly about, searching for meaning, then shot to his heart with a surge that charged it into furious pounding. It was not a solitary smell that sparked Ben’s memory, but a mixture of odors that were more vivid than sight or sound. Not the sour-sharp blend of sickness and antiseptic that meant hospital, but a faint acrid odor of fetid water mixed with raw sewage. Strong spices favoring garlic that lingered in the air after a meal was cleared. Earthen buildings that smelled of damp clay, even when dry, and the sour tang of sweat from men and animals. And diesel fumes. A sky full of diesel fumes spewed from the tail pipes of a thousand Mercedes taxis and red double-decked buses. The smell was as distinctive as a signature. Ben Sager was back in the Middle East.

The smell seeped through his nostrils and into his mouth, swallowed in a dry gulp and sucked into his lungs. It spread like a cold injection through his body, adding lead to his limbs and twisting again into a lump in his stomach. His nose must be lying, playing tricks on his already disoriented brain. He
couldn’t
be in the Middle East...not when minutes ago – or possibly hours – he had been stretched on the grass at Sherborne Castle. They – whoever they were – must have him in some ethnic section of one of England’s cities where customs and foods laced the air with the same memory-jarring odors.

He tried to block out the smells and focus on the rest of his body. Though his head seemed about to burst, he couldn’t feel much of anything else, and strained to concentrate on fingers. If there were fingers, there must be arms and shoulders. Gradually he forced movement into his hands, wincing as sharp needles of pain flashed from the inside of both elbows up into his armpits. The pain was strangely reassuring.

Now toes. Toes meant feet and legs. There was sensation there too. Not pain as much as cold. That
wasn’t
reassuring. His bleary mind vaulted to an article he had read about phantom pain, the continued jangling of nerve endings in a limb that has been severed. My God, he thought. They’ve cut off my legs! He forced his eyes downward to see if his toes were actually there. They stuck up naked and bluish against the far wall, looking as if they belonged to someone else. He willed movement into them and they twitched almost imperceptibly. The modest success relaxed him and he drew a long, deep breath to slow his racing heart.

Fully opening his eyes, Ben studied what he could of the room without moving his head. The mildew spots spread across the whitewashed ceiling and onto the wall a foot to his left. New sensation in his body told him that he was lying on a decent mattress and from the height of the ceiling, he must be two or three feet above the floor. The wall beyond his toes stretched six feet to the right to a closed door, and beyond that…. He decided he must be alone and turned his head slightly to the right, seeing beyond the door a small inner room that reminded him of the bathroom of a cheap hotel. In fact, this looked very much like a hotel room. No overhead light. A paintless scar where a chain lock had once been on the door. He often passed through a section of Leeds on his way to the Tech building that looked and smelled like it had been lifted right out of Karachi. Pakistani women in native dress. Window signs in Arabic and Farsi. Shops piled with spices, vegetables, and hammered metal pots. And open markets hanging with strings of garlic and pink naked lambs and chickens. Whoever clubbed him had taken him to an ethnic district of one of these sprawling cities. London. Maybe Birmingham, Leeds, or Manchester. He wondered if he was tied to the bed.

Forcing his head farther right, he glanced across the room. He wasn’t alone. A thin pale-skinned man with salt and pepper hair and a short white beard sat cross-legged on a bed opposite, dressed in loose fitting pajamas and leaning forward, peering at Ben with concerned suspicion. Between them was an empty table with two backless stools. No other furniture. At Ben’s movement, the man pushed back against the wall, turning his head quickly aside and staring blankly at the door to the room.

Ben looked at him until the man slowly turned to study him again through furtive, sunken eyes.

“Who are you?” the white bearded man demanded sharply. The voice was American, deep and raspy that made the words sound like they were coming from one of Ben’s voice simulator programs.

“Where am I?” Ben asked thickly. The words burned in his throat and made his own voice foreign.

“Who are you?” the man demanded again.

“Benjamin Sager,” Ben said through chalky lips, his tongue searching his mouth for a trace of moisture.

“Where you from?” the man demanded.

“Baltimore,” Ben murmured.

“Baltimore U.S.A.?”

Ben nodded slightly. “Am I tied up?”

“Nope,” the man said simply, then unfolded his legs and put his feet on the floor, leaning forward on the bed and appearing to relax a little. He watched Ben for a moment in silence then said, as if continuing the same thought, “...but you’ve been drugged a while. You’re likely to have one helluva headache for the next few days. Want to sit up?”

“No. I think I’ll stay put for a few minutes. If I move too much, I think I’ll be sick.”

The man leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and nodded slowly. “You’ll get to feeling better as soon as you move around some.”

“How long have I been here?” Ben asked.

“Just got here. But you may have been traveling a lot longer than that.” The man glanced toward the door and continued in a forced whisper. “The bastards forgot to steal my watch until after I woke up, and I noticed it was five days from the time they snatched me till I came to in here.”

Ben tried to raise his head but found his neck too weak to support the throbbing mass, and let it fall back onto the mattress.

“
Five days
?”

“Yep.” The man focused on him again. “Don’t know where we are, but it was five days before I woke up. Or…,” the man mused again, “I guess they could have set the date on my watch forward. Hadn’t thought of that ‘till now.”

“Five days? Five days?” Ben repeated it slowly, trying to get his mind around it. “Who’s
they
?  Do you know who has us?”

The thin gray figure shook his head “Don’t know who’s got us. Arabs, I think.” He pronounced Arabs as if it were two words.  A-rabs. Despite the rest of his discomfort, the pronunciation grated against Ben’s ears.

“I don’t see much of them, and they never say anything,” the bearded man continued. “A guy came in and gave me a speech just after I got here, but all he said was that if I tried to get out, they’d kill us all.”

“All? Are there others here?”

“Not in with us. You’re the first American person I’ve seen since I got here, and I haven’t really seen anyone else. But I’m pretty sure there’s more in the building, including one woman. I heard her screaming one night.”

Kate? The thought again sent the jolting charge to Ben’s heart. Had they taken his family too? He struggled to raise his right arm from the mattress and winced at the pain in his elbow.

“That’s going to be sore for awhile. They’ve been feeding you and keeping you doped up through needles. Both arms. One of mine still gives me fits.” The man stretched out his left arm and rubbed absently at the inside of his elbow. 

“The woman you said is here. When did she get here?”

“Don’t know. This was quite a long time ago.”

Ben tried his own left arm and felt the same hot sting at the elbow. He pushed onto his right side, but collapsed back onto his back. The man sprang forward and hurried across the room, lifting him into a sitting position with his back against the wall and his legs hanging loosely over the side of the narrow bed. Ben noticed that he also had on the loose striped pajamas. A pair of round-toed shoes made of a coarse, flax-colored weave and soled with tire rubber lay beside the bed. Their backs were crushed flat to make them open-backed slippers.

The man sat beside him with his feet tucked under his legs and gently shook Ben’s hand. He smelled faintly of urine and unwashed clothes.

“Jim Cannon,” he said brightly. “Salem, Oregon.”

“Benjamin Sager,” Ben repeated. “Baltimore, Maryland.”

“Can’t tell you how happy I am to see another friendly face, Benjamin – though I hate to see someone else in this mess.”

“Just ‘Ben’ is fine. And what kind of a mess are we in?”

Jim Cannon looked confused. “You got any idea why you’re here?” he returned the question.

Ben tried to shake his head but there was still too much pain. He settled for a negative grunt.

“Me neither. And don’t expect to find out. The last I knew, I was on vacation in Portugal. Left my wife at the hotel in Lisbon early one morning for a jog along the waterfront. As I ran up this one little hill, a woman came screaming out of her house, yelling that something was wrong with her baby. At least that’s what I thought she was saying. Anyway, I ducked in to help her and
wham
! Out went the lights. I woke up here and haven’t been out of this room since.”

“You just get here too?”

Jim sniffed coldly, pointing to the wall above his bed. “Looks like
The Count of Monte Cristo
or something doesn’t it. But if my marks are right, I’ve been here almost eighteen months. Course I could have missed a day or two when I was sick, and I didn’t think about them setting my watch up.”

Ben managed to turn his head and squint at Jim Cannon. “You’ve been here
eighteen months?
” His hazy brain worked the statement over and over, not wanting to accept it.

“Seventeen months, three weeks and two days.”

Ben pushed stiffly forward to the edge of the bed and stared at the marks Jim had etched into the wall. “Help me walk around a little. I need to clear my head. Is there any water in here?”

Jim twisted over beside him and Ben draped an arm over the man’s wide, bony shoulders. When they stood, Jim was almost a head taller, but stooped forward as they eased around the room.

“Yeah, there’s water, but I wouldn’t drink it.”

“What’s in there?” Ben nodded toward the bathroom.

“Sink, toilet, shower with no water, but water from a tap down near the floor. There’s a big brass pitcher thing and a bowl in the sink that I can fill up to wash and dump water down the john. Works okay if you pour water down it. No paper though, but you’ll get used to it. Guess that’s true about why they don’t eat with their left hand!” He chuckled under his breath. “I tried to drink the water in the jug when I first got here, but it gave me the runs something awful. If you don’t think
that
was a mess. Now I just stick to the tea. I think you’d better wait for the tea to have a drink, or you’ll get them too. They finally brought the bowl to use in the sink so the water doesn’t run out, but you can’t shave. No razors in this place and no hot water. But there’s a brass pitcher with a long curved neck.”

“
Oftob
,” Ben said. “That’s what you’re supposed to use to wash your hand after you wipe yourself. We’ve got two sitting on the mantle over the fireplace in the study at home.”

“Hmmm,” Jim mused. “Guess I’ve been using it for the right thing.”

“What do you know about where we are?” Ben asked.

“You’ve already seen about as much as I have.” Jim waved with his free arm toward a high window in the wall opposite the door that Ben hadn’t noticed. The bottom half was painted black, and where the top pane was clear, thick wire mesh covered the outside. “If you climb up on a stool, you can see out. We’re at the back of the building on the second floor, looks like, and there’s an alley down below. Across the way, there’s a courtyard that looks like it must be the back of somebody’s house. Sometimes a woman comes out all wrapped in one of them black sheet-type things, or sometimes she just has on a black dress. Old lady. All bent over. She washes dishes and hangs out clothes. Never seen any men out there, but some must live in the house, guessing from what she hangs out. I’m figuring some place in I-raq or Afghanistan or someplace like that.”