Chapter 7: Scandiaglio - probing actions to test and discover the opponent's nature.

Trapped on another continent, James Dodgson had started work immediately Sloane and Sark had left the room. Knowledge was power and she intended to amass what she could. Sitting before a laptop, she picked up the shapes on the Rambaldi papers, altered for different scale, provided 3-D capacity, and then flicked them about in various permutations till they fitted – and she did it all in her head. The papers made it clear that the artefacts would be largely held together by their interlinking magnetic fields, which were finely calibrated to not only hold together, but more importantly to magnify and transmute energy. She knew the energy factor had to be the reason for the thing's existence – as without that it was just 15th century Jenga.

There were 47 tiny pieces, lending themselves to a small cylindrical shape, small enough to hold in the palm of a hand – a wand.

Harry Potter and the Wand of Doom – she mentally regaled herself in a deep booming voice. She remembered Blond Guy - and guess who's playing Draco Malfoy's even nastier elder brother!

She tossed the shape around in her head again. Looks like a 15th century light-sabre.

She knew she was working too fast for her own and Aaron's good – and Graham's too she reminded herself. If she hadn't been under such pressure she might have felt guilty that she hadn't given her husband's fate any real thought at all.

On occasions she looked up and found 'Mr. Sark' staring at her. Whenever she was caught under his glance, she felt the breath in her chest tighten and her own gaze skittered away.

Shit, that kid's got a look that could ignite a gas can at 50 paces.

She found his a disturbing regard. At times it was almost searingly direct, as though he was looking straight into her head. At others there was something almost tactile about it – she could almost feel it trawling over her. She felt embarrassed when she recalled that in the aquarium she'd first interpreted that very same gaze as that of a man intent upon helping her. His look was something she avoided now, it either burned her with heat or it burned her with cold.

"Bet when you make toast it either comes out barely brown or burnt to a crisp, right?"

He stared flatly at her.

"Yep," she muttered, "the gas can just blew up."

As the day drew on she resolutely told herself that she was not scared of Sark.

Yeah right, another part of her retorted, pants on fire anyone? Sure you're not scared, after all he's only the guy who was gonna torture you …

It wasn't just his gaze and his demeanour which she found alarming, although both were bad enough, but also his youth. Being held in the grip of someone notably younger than she felt … un-natural. It was sinister. He was sinister.

"You know, when you're making your little plans for world domination, do you sit there stroking a big white cat?"

No response.

Her day flew on in a reeling mix of resentment and some fear.

She flicked glances at him when she thought he wasn't looking. She decided it wasn't just his youth which bestowed him an extra menace –

Not the bastard needs extra!

- but also his intense, icy beauty that left him almost pretty. It made him seem other-worldly, somewhat inhuman. His face, with its stunning colouring of ivory, blue and gold, burned itself into the memory. It had something of an almost mathematical perfection about it, everything completely balanced. It's symmetry would have been almost unnerving if it wasn't relieved by one thing: his faintly crooked lower lip where a tiny sliver seemed missing from it. She had noted that he ran his finger across it when deep in thought, as though at some level its crookedness pre-occupied him.

"What happened to that?" She indicated his crooked lower lip as he unknowingly fingered it yet again. "Somebody finally get pissed enough at you to punch you in it?"

Surprised to find that she had spoken, it took Sark a few seconds to understand what she was talking about. "Hardly," he replied, looking her over as if considering whether it was worth continuing and then deciding what the hell, why not? "I got it at school, playing cricket." He clarified, "I was on the receiving end of a bad bounce."

When they'd taken her to her cell that night he'd unthinkingly held his arm out to her as she got up from her chair – a modern day Mr. Darcy toying with the idea that it might just be quicker to torture Elizabeth Bennett into compliance. He had acted with the seemingly certain confidence that she would accept. Instead she looked down at his proffered arm, her face a stunned expression of sarcastic disbelief. "Well you're a courteous little maniac, I'll give you that." Her voice took on a sneering tone. "Yep, Mr. Sark – The Lestat of Assassins – always polite to a person, right up until the second he kills them."

During her first conscious night after being taken, James lay cuffed to a cot in a tiny, locked cell; hemmed in by grey windowless walls and lit by a dim light that came in through a small watch-space cut into the door. Initially she'd quietly tugged at her bonds, looking always toward the door in case someone should see or hear, pulling with an increasing desperation; but she could not free herself and she realised there was no escape. Crouched, trapped in a filthy cell, friendless and alone - for the first time she understood that she was truly a prisoner.

The knowledge pressed in on her. She didn't even know where on the planet she was! It was hopeless!

Suddenly the emotion of the day rose up and engulfed her and although she was ashamed of it, she wept; stifling her sobs against the sleeves of her jacket so that she wouldn't be heard. She gave way to all the fear and despair she had repressed since being captured. Despair for herself and fear for her nephew.

She was overwhelmed by a wave of anger and resentment shot through with a dash of self-pity. She wasn't some super-spy, she was a woman who worked in a research lab for an engineering company! She wasn't prepared for this, she'd had no government training, no special ops preparations. She didn't even know how to shoot a gun! These guys were professionals! She felt as she had when she'd been six years old and had been picked on in the schoolyard by gangs of bigger kids, when she'd been filled with the simple outrage and anguish that: it's not fair!

'It's not fair'? Jeez, pull yourself together cry-baby! 'It's not fair' didn't work in the schoolyard and it won't work now!

She pulled herself together by thinking of Aaron. She had to come up with a plan, she had to get them both out of this – he was depending on her!

She lay rigidly awake for hours, the dark pressing against her open eyes. She tried to think, straining to hear every sound, unable to dispel the terrified conviction that at any moment she was to be dragged out and killed or beaten, or worse, to see Aaron beaten. Eventually her body had rebelled and surrendered to its exhaustion, pulling the plug on her and plunging into sleep.

Unconscious to the world, she lay with the boneless inertia of a dead dog.

Yet even then she had no rest. She was tormented by dreams of being lost and alone in strange cities, with nameless responsibilities which she alone must carry. She squirmed in her sleep, wanting to wake but unable to do so.

She awoke in the morning confused and afraid, as much as by the dreams as by her momentarily panicked reaction to her environment. She felt sickened as the horrifying, stomach dropping reality of the situation sank in: it was all for real.

No way out.

She silently raged at herself. This is all your fault! Aaron's in all this trouble because of you and you're damned smarts! Why couldn't you just be born normal like anyone else?

She almost wished that Sark had drugged her to sleep the night before, that way she might have gotten some mindless rest.

Gradually over the next few days she acclimatised to the reality of her position, she would feel no further need to sob privately in her cell. They hadn't hurt her, they hadn't turned up with Aaron, they hadn't tried to rape her or in any way attack her. Her initial estimation had been correct, these guys were professionals, and so to them she was just someone who sat in the corner of the room and did a job. The place was a bit like a prisoner hotel.

Okay, she thought, so the room and board wasn't great, but she had fantastic room service: ten staff to one guest.

At one point she'd demanded to know if Aaron was alright, in response 'Mr. Sark' had dialled a number on his cell phone, spoke French into it and then, with the mouthpiece covered, held it to her ear. As he held the phone, his wrist was so close that she could smell his cologne. It disturbed her – that he actually wore cologne in circumstances such as this. It whispered of a contained self-possession too far beyond his years, of an old soul distilled into far too young a body.

Creepy little bastard!

Then she had heard Aaron speaking and she had felt almost eviscerated with relief. Aaron had sounded actually excited, not a bit frightened. Sark had hung up before she could speak.

The scent of Sark's cologne had lingered after the call had ended. It was a clean smell but there was nothing warm about it; she could only describe it as somehow 'distant', 'remote'. He smelled like a cold, still Winter's day.

He was still doing the staring thing. She'd catch him occasionally, regarding her as though she were some specimen on a slab. The first few times James had jerked her gaze away as before. But then … she'd stunned herself by staring flat back at him. Once she had even stuck her tongue out. It wasn't bravery, it was just that after an insanely pressured and draining interlude she had simply gotten too damn tired to be scared of him.

She stopped working the Rambaldi problem and started working her own, covertly watching those around her. What did she know about her captors? She had only met Rat-Guy once but she had no doubt whatsoever that he was capable of calmly ordering the deaths of all three of them prior to attending a pleasant evening at the Opera. But as for Blond Guy…?

James snuck another look at Sark. She was puzzled by him. She didn't consider he was on Sloane's leash at all, whatever Sloane might think. Why did she think that? She pondered it and then got it. It was the way he had intervened during her Torture-Lite exchanges with Sloane: with hindsight he had taken the steam out of the escalating showdown, getting them all back on track before anyone got seriously hurt.

Did that scary blond brat have his own agenda?

She watched as Sark stood far across the barely furnished space; she could hear him faintly as he spoke into a cell-phone, strolling to and fro as he addressed the listener.

She'd been watching him by turns all afternoon. British, cultivated, self-controlled and poised: despite his youth he radiated a sense of groomed authority. She could not stop digging away at the apparent duality he presented: at once civilized, almost aristocratic, yet also somehow primal – something focused and prowling.

An urbane monster?

He stopped moving as he listened to the voice down the other end of the line. He casually looked across at her and she jerked her gaze back to the lap top. He held the cell-phone away from his ear, his other hand over it blocking his clipped voice as he called out.

"Mr. Sloane would like an update. Have you anything for me Dr. Dodgson?"

"Sure junior, I gotta quarter in my pocket. Use it to phone your momma and tell her you'll be late home tonight."

She could have slapped herself. Oh, great dumbass! Piss off the nice kidnapper why don't you?

From across the wide space she would have thought he was staring her down, except he viewed her with all the interest of a man watching a snail race he didn't have a bet on. He lifted his cell-phone to his ear and spoke acerbically.

"The answer is a 'no'."

Across the room Sark heard Sloane's voice come through the phone. "Then is there anything we can do to enable her to go faster?"

Sark felt his jaw clench in irritation.

The threat of 'no supper' tonight? Withhold her pocket money? What had Sloane said – that she was either stupid or boldly brave? In Sark's opinion it was both.

He recalled the incident late yesterday when he'd been looking at her and she had put her tongue out at him. Christ, but I'd only been looking! I've done plenty of illegal things in my life, but looking's not one of them!

He flicked her a glance and considered her. With her scruffy, lamb-dressed-as-mutton appearance she had all the allure of a wet umbrella flung down to dry. If she would just cut out the sneering she would look ten times better! He surveyed her. She's just the bad kid at the back of the class, the school rebel who cheeks the teacher, pays no attention, and then just for the hell of it gets top marks in a test anyway, just to show that she can.

"Mr. Sark? Is there anything I can provide?" Sloane prompted.

Sark jolted. "Yes, you can send over a Bayou to English translator."

For once he rang off before even waiting to hear if there was a reply.

Looking at her, he wouldn't have been remotely surprised to find that she was filling the lap top by designing a next level for a computer game! Well, let her have her little jokes and sneers. He was confident that she was assimilating the answer. When she had it, he would take it off her.

Eyes narrowing in an unwilling curiosity, he approached her almost unwittingly.

Her face held that scrunched up expression he was becoming familiar with – half contempt, half defensiveness. She was fiddling about with the laptop, not looking at him, but instead humming a vague tune. He wasn't entirely sure, but he thought it just might have been a hideously inept rendition of Zadoc the Priest.

"Doctor, are you aware that you're humming to yourself?"

She stopped and stared ahead into the mid-distance, shrugging, thinking about it fractionally before returning her attention to the laptop.

"Yeah, so? Are you aware that you have freckles?"

Sark's jaw would have dropped if he hadn't already had it clamped shut.

Freckles?

Irritation fought with amazement. There she was, an Alice yanked clean through the looking glass, and yet she had taken the worst of it straight on the chin and had stayed on her feet. She was even fighting back! He begrudged admitting it, but in her own way she was almost an impressive little thing.