§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
CHAPTER IV
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
When he was eight, Chase's father had taken him to Tokyo.
Rowan Chase had been invited to give a presentation in some prestigious congress about rheumatology that he attended every year. That year he had decided that his son was old enough to go along, because the boy had never been to Japan.
It had been spring then, and springtime in Japan meant sakura, the cherry blossoms. The small and delicate white flowers, managing to look at the same time fragile and imposing, escaped the boundaries of the parks where they grew and wondered in to the busy streets.
Robert remembered that it was just like watching snow fall down, only it wasn't cold.
Even surrounded by the tallest of buildings, the big Japanese city had managed to retain a sort of balance that gave it both a grace and beauty that Robert couldn't find in the big cities of his own country. Two hours after arriving there, he'd already fallen in love with the country.
Even though most of the buildings lining the streets of Tokyo had left Robert mesmerized, he had loved the fact that there had been at least one garden or a large park every couple of streets. The green was as much part of the city as were the concrete and glass, a constant reminder for those living and working inside those tall buildings that there was a whole world outside their jobs and busy lives.
It was a good reminder, one that an eight year old Robert whished his father could understand.
Busy with his schedule at the congress, Rowan Chase had pretty much left his son free to wander around the hotel where they were staying, with a firm warning not to venture in to the street alone.
Robert, too bored to stay in the room and watch TV in a language that he couldn't understand, had aimlessly navigated the corridors and lobbies of the hotel until he found himself in the service area. The aromatic smell of exotic food had led him straight to the kitchen.
It was nearing lunch time, and the place was pulsing with organized activity. It took awhile for the busy workers to notice the small, occidental boy, quietly observing them.
They didn't spoke English that well, but they had let him stay around for a bit, amused by the fascinated look the boy had on his face as he watched the expert hands of the main chef manoeuvring his sharp knife, cutting fish and sea weeds in to precise forms and shapes.
It didn't look like food, it looked more like art.
It seemed like an incredible hard thing to do and Robert was amazed at the speed in which the chef worked, his hands never wavering, never doubting the accuracy of his cut. Like a surgeon.
At eight, he thought that preparing sushi looked a lot cooler than watching his dad working around books and petri dishes.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
It was the smell that woke him up. It smelled of fish and spices, like the kitchen in that hotel in Tokyo had smelled.
Or maybe it was the man shouting at him that had woken him up.
Chase couldn't really tell. What he could tell was that he felt numb all over, like he'd fallen asleep in a bad position. Only he wasn't. And he hadn't.
He was lying on his back, on the floor, arms extended by his side, positioned. Unnatural.
The floor underneath him didn't felt like Thomas house anymore. He remembered landing on top of broken glass. The ground beneath him was smooth and smelt of fish and wood. He had been moved somewhere.
There was an unpleasant sense of violation that came with the knowledge of having been carried around unconscious by strangers. Outlaw strangers at that.
The memories of what had happen assaulted him a second later, coming abruptly and uninvited, one after the other, sequences of moments that he really rather forget.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
He'd been talking to Cameron on the phone, walking towards the front door of Thomas' house, when he had heard the gunshot.
In theory, Chase knew that the only thing faster than the speed of sound was the speed of light. Bullets being fired from a gun didn't even made it to the top five.
In practice, he could've sworn that the two had travelled at the same damn speed, because he had felt the impact as soon as he heard the sound.
The phone dropped from his hand more out of surprise than pain, as his left leg seemed to turn in to jelly and gave out on him.
Chase tried to remain up, holding on to the wall, unable to see who had fired the gun, unable to escape the path of more bullets.
From the floor, he could still hear Cameron's disembodied voice, calling his name. She sounded scared.
Chase forced himself to look at his leg, finding mesmerizing the rapidly spreading red stain just above his knee. Blood. His blood.
He figured he should be stopping it, but couldn't bring himself to let go of the wall.
If it didn't hurt and he was still standing, Chase could fool himself in to believing that it wasn't all that bad.
Only he couldn't fool himself. He was a doctor.
He knew that the reason why he wasn't in pain yet was because of all the adrenaline running through his body. He also knew that adrenaline highs didn't last long.
Chase lost his battle with gravity as soon as the pain hit him. It felt like fire, tearing apart the muscle in his leg.
He must've closed his eyes, because the next thing he saw was the ceiling of Thomas house and an angry asian man, standing above him with a gun in his hands.
Chase closed his eyes. If this was the end, the angry face of his own murderer was not the last thing that he wanted to see.
A second shot broke through the silent house and Chase briefly wondered if the killer had missed. When his head exploded in pain, his last thought had been that no, he hadn't.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
The man was still shouting.
Chase opened his eyes and realized that the man wasn't shouting at him after all.
The ceiling was grey, without the wooden supports that he remembered from Thomas' house.
The voice was coming from the left, where he could see the top of a flight of stairs that led to a single door.
There was a lit lamp on the ceiling by the end of the stairs, providing a weak illumination; the bulb was dangling, like it had been hit recently, and the dancing light was making him feel dizzy.
Beneath it, Chase could see two men arguing. Or one man shouting and another pretend to listen.
The one doing all the shouting had an apron with red stains wrapped around his waist, and kept pointing directly at him.
The other was taller, built like a wrestling fighter, dressed in a business suit that seemed a size too small for him. He looked more bored than sympathetic with the smaller man's protests.
It took Chase a while to figure that they were arguing in Japanese. It took him a while longer to remember that he had tried to learn the language when he was younger and that if pushed, he could still understand a bit of it.
However, the man was talking too fast and his head was pounding too hard for him to make any sense of their words. He gave up.
If this was some sort of illegal organs operation, he didn't want to know which part of him they wanted to cut.
With more effort than he remember being necessary, Chase raised his right hand to gingerly touch his right temple. There was a dull ache there and his fingers came back wet and sticky.
He couldn't tell if the wound was a result of the second shot or something else. Either way, it was academic. His head hurt because they had cracked his skull open.
Feeling the pain in his head, Chase briefly wondered why the pain in his leg was nothing more than a throbbing ache, when it should've been hurting like a bitch. He wanted to look at it, but the idea of raising his head from the floor seemed like an impossible task right now, and he had to admit that, if he didn't move at all, he felt pretty good.
The two men had stopped talking the second they saw him move.
The bigger man spoke two short words to the other, who didn't seemed all that happy with it, but left in a hurry anyway.
Chase tried to seat up when he saw that the big guy had remained downstairs and was nearing him with a disturbing smile on his lips. There wasn't much that Chase could do, but he figured that he would feel a little less vulnerable seating up than lying down.
As it turned out, his arms left him little choice in the matter, as they refused to bear his weight and collapse under him when he tried to rise. He felt pathetic, wiggling on the floor like a small kid.
The other man stood above him, silently observing his struggles like a scientist watching his experiment.
If the situation wasn't disturbing by itself, having the impassive face of a Japanese man who was built like a sumo wrestler staring at him, certainly was.
"Look, I don't know what you wa…aaah!" Chase tried to reason, but his words turned in to a yelp when he felt the bulky man's hands grabbing his arms. His heart was beating wildly against his chest as Chase wondered how much damage he could do to the other man if he was forced to defend himself. With his body feeling partly numb, he figured not much. The idea left him terrified.
The japanese man chuckled as he sensed the other man's fright over being held, but said nothing as he lifted the injured man up and dragged him to seat against the nearest wall, adjusting his arms and legs like he was nothing but an oversized dummy.
Chase didn't had time to feel relieved, as he felt the bile rising in his throat, his body rebelling against having been moved. He managed to turn his head to the side just in time to avoid barfing all over Big Guy's shoes.
He hit a wooden box instead. The place seemed to be filed with them, he notice only now, some just seating on the floor, others pilled up in shelves that went from the ground almost to the ceiling. A storage room, he figured. How cliché.
He squinted, trying to read the labels on the side, not because he thought that he would be able to understand the complicated Asian scribbling, but because he needed something else to focus other than the churning in his stomach.
"Mr. Kuong will not be pleased when he finds his supplies drowning in your vomit, Doctor Chase," a man's voice interrupted his concentration.
Chase looked up to find another man standing next to Big Guy. He hadn't even heard him come down the stairs.
From the perfect American accent, Chase was expecting to find a western guy, but he was wrong. It wasn't Apron Guy, but like the other two, this man too looked Japanese and like Big Guy, he was wearing a suit. His however, looked tailor made, expensive, fitting him like a second skin.
It took him a long time to realize that the man had called him by name. The answer to his puzzled look landed on his lap before he could voice it.
His grinning face was staring back at him from his driver's license, inside his opened wallet. He couldn't remember what had possessed him at he time to grin like a fool when his picture was being taken.
He tilted his head back, staring at the man. Who was Mr. Kuong anyway?
"We know who you are, where you live and where you work," Nice Suit told him, sounding unimpressed with the knowledge. "What we want to know now is where is it hidden."
Chase blinked, not sure if the man was asking a question or just chatting up with him.
It was starting to scare him the way in which his sluggish brain struggled to understand what was happening to him and to process simple things like his own wallet. Was he concussed? He certainly felt dizzy and nauseous enough to be. Maybe it was blood loss... why hadn't he noticed before that someone had wrapped a crude bandage around his left thigh?
"Focus, Doctor Chase. We need an answer."
'Ah, so it had been a question' Chase concluded. The 'Ah so' in his mind brought a giggle to his lips. He'd watched too many martial arts' movies in his childhood.
The situation was anything but giggle-worthy, but he was coming to realize that his concussed brain was less than effective in censuring dumb things before they reached his mouth. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he confessed, hoping that they hadn't noticed the giggle.
Weren't his organs that they wanted? Chase wasn't sure if he should be glad or scared to discover that, because if it wasn't that, then he didn't want to imagine what it might be. Imagination can be a frightening thing, especially when you're scared.
"Trust me, you don't want to play the clueless card with me," Nice Suit said, sounding less pleasant now. "There was a reason for you to be in Thomas Joyce's house and we both know what that reason was. Now, you have a choice between maintaining this matter on cordial grounds by answering me, or we can start to be unpleasant towards one another."
Chase wondered if this was really happening. Had he really heard what he thought he'd just heard?
House had commented that, after being shot, he had experience some wild hallucinations, involving exploding genitals and spilled guts. He'd gushed about ketamine being better than LSD, but given that it was House, Chase had thought that he was just pulling their collective legs.
Now he had his doubts about House's honesty, because he could've sworn that he was hallucinating too.
There were too many things in this whole situation that made no sense to him, like why wasn't he in excruciating pain, why did these guys went to the trouble of kidnapping him instead of just killing him and why the crap was this guy acting like he was a spy caught behind enemy lines?
"I have no idea what reason you think I had to be there, but I can tell you mine," Chase started, figuring that, hallucination or not, he was sure that he didn't want Nice Suit to become unpleasant with him, specially if that involved Big Guy in any way. "Thomas Joyce is a patient at the hospital where I work. He couldn't remember the names of his previous prescriptions, so he asked me to go to his home to get them."
There was no point in telling them that he'd never even seen the man, or that Thomas hadn't exactly asked for anything. They didn't need to know that he had been breaking the law at the same time they were.
"You expect me to believe that you went all the way from Princeton Plainsboro to Thomas' house, just because he asked you to? A perfect stranger asks you to go fetch, and you obey?"
Chase' shoulders sagged. Phrased like that, it really did seem kind of lame.
"You are not a very good liar," Nice Suit said, acting like they were long lost friends. "You do realize what I have to do next, don't you?"
Chase's brain might have been slow, but his treacherous imagination was running wild, feeding him violent images that went from CNN's reports of tortured prisoners to Discovery Channel's documentaries about medieval devices. He swallowed the saliva that was threatening to choke him. "Let me go?" He asked lamely.
The minute the words left his mouth, Chase regretted ever having spoken them.
This had to be a hallucination, because never in his whole life would he try to be funny in the face of his soon-to-be-torturers.
"Look, this is all one giant misunderstanding," Chase tried again. "You obviously have the wrong person and no amount of 'persuasion' will ever change that. Trust me, if I had the slightest idea about what you want to know, I would tell you."
The argument was nothing but pure honesty and it sounded compelling, or at least it did to Chase's ears. The man staring down at him didn't seem impressed.
"I guess we will find out the amount of persuasion it will be necessary then," the Japanese man said matter of factly as he looked at his watch.
Chase would've crawled inside the wall if the solid concrete behind him allowed. If this was a hallucination, he wanted out now.
"So, is this the part where you tell me what sort of…" he cleared his dry throat, looking for a word less frightening than torture, "… strategy will be used to force me to tell you what I don't know?"
If there was one thing that Chase hated about himself was the way he talked too much when he was nervous or scared. He figured that since he was both right now, the blabbing would be twice as bad.
The man standing above him, menacing and imposing in his stance, smiled condescendingly. "Western heads… so filled with nonsense that they miss the obvious," he said to no one in particular, although it was obvious about whom he was talking. "Do you think we would actually torture you, Doctor Chase?"
Chase felt his face redden, angry at himself for feeling embarrassed at all.
Nice Suit turned to Big Guy, who was still standing silently beside him, searching for support.
"We're not barbarians," the man said, managing to sound offended. "We're Japanese, we are patient people."
And then his gaze was back at Chase, analysing him like he was a bug under the microscope. "The morphine we so kindly gave you half an hour ago should be wearing off in about ten minutes… I'll be back in thirty."
Although he struggled to keep any reaction from showing in his face, Chase's eyes revealed his surprise, quickly followed by the dreaded realization of what the other man was saying.
What he had blamed on a possible concussion and blood loss were actually symptoms of the morphine high he'd been ridding. And the ride was coming to an end.
Nice Suit was right. If they believed that whatever they wanted to know could be squeezed out of him through pain, they didn't need to lay a finger on him.
Chase had treated enough gunshot wounds to know how much they hurt. Between the torn tissue and the almost certain infection, when left untreated, bullets were not nice on the human body. It usually took the strongest of pain killers worked to bring some sort of relive to those patients.
Five minutes after the morphine running through his vessels wore off, Chase knew he would be begging them to tell everything. Even what he didn't know.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§