Cold War - Jerome Preisler [69]
“Why the paint, though?” she asked aloud. “To get the color right? One color?”
And then she realized they had looked at things backwards.
“He has a Picasso,” she told her partner. “From this period. He’s trying to authenticate it.”
“C’e?”
“Who else but a master forger would know all the tricks? It must be.” She jumped up from her desk. “An unknown Picasso, painted around the time of Guernica—perhaps even intended as a companion. It would be worth millions. Many millions.”
“Magnifique,” said Jairdain. “Now all we have to do is find the bastard, and we will both be the most famous Interpol detectives of all time.”
Nessa frowned and picked up another carrot.
Bull Pass, Antarctica
She had been alone in the blackness for hours, or what seemed like hours, before she heard the scream.
Her hands cuffed in front of her, she’d sunk down in a corner after they took him, her knees pulled to her chest, welded rivets pressing into her spine. Hunkered in that angle between two walls, she’d listened numbly to the pounding of machinery somewhere outside the cage. The noise and blackness seemed one, merged. A grinding, shapeless thing wrapped around her, confining her as surely as the walls of the cage itself.
After a while she had slipped into a faded, bottomed-out semblance of sleep, only to be awakened by the scream, startling as a rocket flare inside her head. But when she came back to full alertness, she heard nothing. Nothing but the machines grating away out there.
Out there in the black.
She felt her heart bumping in her chest now, felt her temples throbbing, pulled in a breath of stale air. It helped a little, but not much. God, God. That single, piercing scream. Maybe she’d imagined it. She’d been woozy with fatigue before she nodded off. Very possibly she’d imagined it.
She thought about the beatings they’d given him, tears swelling into her eyes. She didn’t want to think about the beatings, hated to think about the beatings, but couldn’t keep her mind from turning back to them. He was a strong man. Physically and mentally. Stronger than she ever could be. But it was hard to see how anyone would be able to withstand much more of their vicious, unforgiving abuse.
She sat there gathered into a ball. The blackness was absolute. She could have held her hand directly in front of her face and not seen the vaguest hint of its outline. Absolute. Only the noises beyond the cage had variation.
She listened to them, trying to take note of the changes.
Time passed.
The drumming rhythms quickened and slowed. There were periods when everything switched off. Beneath the sound of the machines, and in the occasional lulls, she could hear the quiet susurrus of air blowing through unseen ventilation grilles.
She prayed to God the scream had been something she’d imagined, dreamed, whatever.
She listened intently to the machine noises. She wasn’t sure what compelled her. Perhaps it was ingrained habit, a mind used to filing and sorting information. Perhaps it was only to give her moments shape, definition, a sense of onward movement. Or perhaps the reason was simpler, and she just needed to try and focus on something besides what those men had done to him. What they might be doing to him right now.
She hoped she hadn’t actually heard that scream.
The beatings had been awful.
He couldn’t take much more.
Alone, trapped, the cuffs digging into her wrists, she slumped against the walls of the cage. The air hissing in from the shaft was not exactly warm, but it had raised the temperature enough to keep her from freezing, keep her alive down here, keep both of them alive before they took him away.
She wished she knew where he was, how he was.
The beatings.
Her thoughts insisted on doubling back to the beatings.
Like those that came afterward, the first assault had been sudden and brutal. The men who’d burst into the cage wore hard-shell helmets with lamp assemblies, and she’d flinched from their piercing