mine.”
“You got us, but you don’t have the train. Touch the train and you lose it. You
lose the lot, Strasser. You think we wire up the odd booby here and there to
keep off predators? The old spark bomb to give a guy a shock? If you want the
truth, every damned vehicle in that train is set to blow if you so much as
breathe on it. I tell you, it’s like a house of cards. Tamper with one vehicle
and the whole lot goes. It’ll be the biggest blowout since the Nuke.”
Strasser laughed again, but the laugh was far too loud, far too bouncy.
“What a talent for exaggeration you have, Ryan.”
“Try it.”
“But you are going to tell me how to render your clever traps useless, Ryan.”
“Not me, pal.”
Strasser said, “Pain can make a man change his mind.”
“Some men. But with me you’re gonna have to work at it. And there comes a point
with some guys where pain suddenly doesn’t matter.”
Strasser’s skull-like face twisted up into a rictus of anger so swiftly and so
suddenly that it almost seemed his dry, parchmentlike skin might tear. He thrust
his head toward Ryan.
“Bravado, Ryan! Sheer fucking bravado! You’re no different from anyone else.”
Ryan said, “Suck it and see.”
Strasser was probably correct. Maybe he was no different from anyone else. But
in his past, the memory of it always kept deep in the lower layers of his
consciousness, only surfacing rarely these days—always at night’s end, when he
would sometimes erupt out of his bunk yelling at the black horror of it—was an
experience of pain and betrayal so terrible, so soaked in blood and despair that
it had seared both his body and his soul. And in the searing—like red-hot steel
thrust into the ironsmith’s water-barrel—it had tempered him, hardened him maybe
beyond the normal human limit.
“Perhaps,” said Strasser silkily, “we ought to take your other eye out.”
For a second, skeletal fingers of fear enclosed Ryan’s heart in a steel-strong
grip, clutching, squeezing tight, sending ice through his veins. It was the
ultimate terror, maybe his one single most vulnerable spot, the one threat that
mocked all his courage and turned cool objectivity into gut-churning panic.
Fighting to keep his face swept of all but the most neutral of expressions, he
thought, can he patch into my psyche? Is he some kind of weirdo mutie precog, a
mind reader?
He rejected the thought almost at the same instant as it flared up in his mind.
Strasser was as superficial in his thought processes as his men were in their
search for concealed weaponry. Inside trial skull was a warped and twisted brain
that simply homed in on and struck at the most obvious chink in a man’s or
woman’s armor.
A guy had one eye? Threaten to rip out the other.
It was as simple as that.
Ryan said in a voice stripped of emotion, “That won’t do you a hell of a lot of
good, Strasser. Frankly, once you’d achieved that you’ve achieved all.”
“Give the sucker to me. Let me work on him. He’ll squeal.”
Ryan’s glance flicked to his right. The room they were in was, he guessed, the
lower-level annex, a part of the old bank vault system, although little remained
to show it. The concrete walls had been stripped and were untidily whitewashed.
In the center of the room was a block of wood, coffin-sized. Straps attached to
rings set into it hung down almost to the concrete floor. Ryan could not tell
what kind of wood the block was made of because of the discoloration, the
reddish brown staining that was a crusted veneer on the flat surface, a rusty
seepage down the sides. So much blood had drenched that block over the years
that it had soaked deep into the wood’s heart.
On metal hooks around the walls hung an assortment of implements: knives, saws,
meat spikes, a number of what looked like old cattle prods. In one corner, near
where stairs disappeared down to what was almost certainly the main vault
itself, stood a small generator, a jumble of wires piled near it. Ryan saw there