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  BLACK JACK

  Rani Manicka

  Black Jack

  Published by Rani Manicka

  First published in paperback 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Rani Manicka

  Cover Design by Spiffing Covers

  The right of Rani Manicka to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  ISBN: 978-0-9576812-0-0

  Other Novels by Rani Manicka

  The Rice Mother

  Touching Earth

  The Japanese Lover

  Rani Manicka is an economics graduate and the prize-winning author of the international bestseller, The Rice Mother. Her works have been translated into 26 languages. She currently divides her time between Malaysia and the United Kingdom, and lives with the two loves of her life, Rick and an indescribably naughty German shepherd puppy called Tyron. Find her at http://www.ranimanicka.com

  Previous Praise For Rani Manicka

  The Rice Mother

  ‘You'll struggle to find a more powerful, moving read this year.’ GLAMOUR

  ‘Powerful.’ SUNDAY MIRROR

  ‘Emotionally satisfying, complex books like this are hard to find.’ HEAT

  ‘You'll love Rani Manicka's first novel.’ NEW WOMAN

  Touching Earth

  ‘Woven with the beautiful intricacy of a spider creating its web, Touching Earth uses exquisite, lyrical writing to present us with the harsh realities of heroin addiction, prostitution and innocence lost.’ HEAT

  ‘High on atmosphere and tension, this is another powerful novel from the author of The Rice Mother.’ WOMAN & HOME

  The Japanese Lover

  ‘A seductive tale of forbidden love' STYLIST

  ‘This unconventional love story is told with great imagination. Vivid, complex and full of color, it's a fabulous read.' CHOICE

  For my beloved Ty,

  ‘Run free, my love. One day we’ll meet again.’

  For our struggle is not against [human beings], but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual [dark forces] of wickedness in outer space."

  - Ephesians 6:12 [the uncensored citation translated from Greek]

  ANNUIT COEPTIS

  (He looks favorably upon our work)

  Schooner Klaus stood with his nose slightly raised: a bi-pedal wolf sniffing for prey. Yet, his was no wolf brain fighting for survival in the wilderness; inextricably bound by the dark, sweet call of warm blood. Dressed in high-ranking military uniform and shaven-skulled, he stood in the control room of one of America’s top secret military bases. His thickly muscled, hulking form appeared curiously immobile in the bluish glow emanating from the wall of soundless television screens. A green light on the console flashed.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was unexpectedly silky, hypnotic almost.

  ‘They’re ready for you, Dr. Klaus,’ a disembodied voice informed.

  Only his eyes, gray and cruel, shifted. To the largest screen on the wall. To the image of a naked, gagged child secured to a metal table in a metal room. Her fair hair was plastered to her head, and her thin body covered in cuts, bruises, and burns. There was an IV in her left arm, a leather strap across her forehead, audio phones over her ears, and electrodes attached to her fingers. Her terrified, pleading eyes were darting desperately around the six men who had arranged themselves on either side of her.

  But staring straight ahead the men displayed the only objective they had ever made known to her, day after day, week after week. To subject her to excruciating pain. And to this effect they used jellied acid, long needles, electrified probes, and other unspeakably horrible instruments that they found on the shelf underneath the table she lay upon. Every session ended with the substitution of the leather headband for a metal one so that the electroshock torture could commence and continue until blessed blackness came for her.

  She awakened inside a metal cage too small to stand or lie in, with a blinding headache from the electroshock treatment, and her body hurting so bad she felt certain she was dying.

  ‘Mommy. I want my mommy,’ she had begged in the beginning.

  She may as well have been invisible. Not one uttered a word. Food pellets and water were shoved through a slot, the portions barely enough to keep her alive. There was no toilet: she had to urinate and defecate in her pitiful position, and afterwards sleep in her own mess. Hardly had she slept when the door opened and men wearing rubber gloves yanked her out by the arms and dragged her down a corridor to a room with a concrete floor. There a cold-water hose was directed at her cowering body. No soap. A rough towel.

  Then it was back to the metal table.

  One day they threw an armless teddy bear into her cage. It stank of excrement, but in the freezing darkness she reached for it. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to the helpless thing. ‘I’ll be your friend. My name is Dakota. What’s yours?’ She hugged the silent bear tightly, but when she was awakened it was gone. The loss was so traumatic, she did not even gasp when the icy water struck her body.

  Being only seven, she could not understand any of it. But her nakedness, the lack of sanitation, the constant cold, the disturbed sleep, the mutilated bear, and the complete lack of human interaction were all aspects of a carefully controlled, extreme trauma program. Even the meager food portions were not chance cruelty. Sugar and protein deprivation starved any rebellious tendency, and the severe limiting of her water intake increased her brain temperature, which disorientated her, and induced hallucinations.

  Since there were no windows or clocks there was no way for her to tell day from night. She began to imagine she had been in that terrible place for years. She used to dream of her father coming to her rescue and her return to her mother’s soft, yielding arms, but the memories of her previous life when she had worn mittens and a red coat and had run free in a snow covered field were leaving her fevered brain. A handful left, and even those were fading fast. She was already so weak she could hardly stand unaided, but with the instinct of an animal caught in a mangle, she understood; the men would never stop until she was dead.

  So it would have surprised her greatly to know that Schooner Klaus, observing her from his concealed position, saw not a helpless child enduring a slow, torturous death in a steel trap, but an unbelievably dangerous and unpredictable creature - one capable of killing and injuring his team. Perhaps even him, in unimaginably bizarre ways, using nothing more than her mind.

  Otherwise, she would not be on his table to learn the meaning of real fear.

  Her journey to him had begun with a local newspaper story in Kansas. It claimed a child had stood at her bedroom window, and with psychic force alone held back a rabid Rottweiler from her pet, a wolf cub, until her father had arrived, shotgun in hand. A whole hour later! Even if he allowed fifty-five minutes for small town hot air it remained an astounding feat. Field operatives had been dispatched.

  They had been casual in their approach, but not in their detailed report: Celtic ancestry, RH-negative blood group, able to finish other people’s sentences, and numerous accounts of shopkeepers who suddenly developed an irresistible urge to rush out with candy for her as she passed their shops. But most intriguing of all was her nickname - the Locator - an
allusion to her uncanny ability to find lost things and people.

  In truth, he had not needed the report. He had had only to look at the first long-range photograph of her, eyes gazing fearlessly out at the world, to know instantly: she was special. There would be no hanging about for months while she learned to psychically restrain hamsters dying of thirst from partaking of their water sprouts. That she might even be ‘the one.’ Her participation in the agency’s program had become a foregone conclusion.

  Her disappearance had been easily accomplished. An unmarked vehicle. An empty swing. A lone, travelling pedophile, perhaps? He imagined the one-street town’s people, stupid rednecks, kicking the dust, shaking baffled heads and muttering, ‘Damn shame, what happened to the Locator, but why take the wolf cub?’

  All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  - Humpty Dumpty

  Dakota’s eyes rolled frantically from one implacable face to the next, begging and begging. How could she know that they had no say in her fate? That they were the most expandable of the twelve that made up her torture team. So many of them had left in body bags that they were nicknamed ‘targets’. In the event that a psychic child was capable of retaliation it was always one of them who suffered the consequences. Their orders were specific and ruthless. They were not to stop until they were given the signal, and they could never move away from the metal table no matter what the circumstances. If for any reason at all they disobeyed either of these two cardinal rules, they would be shot in the head by the Dead Man.

  The Dead Man, a superb marksman, sat in a concealed booth to the right of the door. His instructions were chillingly simple: if anyone in the torture chamber moved away from his assigned post or behaved in any way out of the ordinary, he was to shoot them dead. The only person he was not authorized under any circumstances to eliminate was the psychic child. That task was the sole responsibility of the two armed guards located outside the chamber. Their orders, in the event that the small strobe light located on the wall just above the door flashed red, were to open the doors without entering it, and, no matter what they saw, regardless of what anyone else was doing, kill the child.

  Unseen by her were also the ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) technician, responsible for controlling the electrical part of the torture, and a highly trained medical person who monitored her vital signs and accordingly administered the optimum dosage from a selection of psychoactive drugs. With subtle changes he could greatly enhance her pain or bring on impressions of confusion and extreme terror. He was also in charge of administering the nerve receptor blockers that made it impossible for her to faint or black out to escape the pain, no matter how horrific it became. At the end of each session he provided the ‘blackness’ by injecting a quick-acting sedative directly into her carotid artery by order of the Eye in the Sky.

  Safely located in a separate room a short distance away, the Eye was the unquestioned leader of the team. He alone had access to the fail-safe button and absolute life and death rule over the child’s life. A trained psychologist, he monitored the chamber’s activity via closed-circuit TV, and the brain activity of the psychic child via remote EEG. His commands were issued through electronic reader boards. Schooner Klaus sat down, his movements precise and fluid, and into his voice activated console said, ‘Begin.’

  On the screens above his head, his team came alive. The gag was removed from the child’s mouth, the biotech injected her with the necessary chemical cocktail, the ECT man turned his dials, the six targets reached for their specific instruments, and the girl began to scream. Schooner Klaus had a headache and he found it more unpleasant than usual to endure her hoarse screams, but it was as vital to her to experience her own reverberating screams, as was the sight of her spasmodically jerking body on the mirrored ceiling.

  Fifteen minutes passed with the girl’s futile shrieks and moans, and Schooner Klaus staring at her impatiently. Fisting his right hand, he tapped it lightly against the rim of the table, a supremely aggressive gesture. Her brain was surely on fire with all the drugs and, yet, she lay there squirming and trying to outwrestle her steel manacles, as if she was without options.

  ‘Fight back, you little bitch,’ he urged softly.

  His eyes drifted away from the screens. The clock told of the passage of another four minutes. His head throbbed. He switched the microphone off and slumped back. Why did she not strike back? If she did not retaliate soon she would die in the process like so many before her.

  Then… At twenty-two minutes her sweat-soaked body convulsed horribly and became still. He sat forward and watched eagerly as her eyes turned in their sockets. To stare at him!

  ‘Impossible,’ he exclaimed. The cameras were minute and so skillfully concealed amongst other equipment that they were undetectable even to professional sweeps. But those large, empty eyes were boring into him. She had ‘located’ him! He jerked back and stood suddenly, his chair skittering away on the smooth floor, a creature of fear. But nothing happened, and he realized that months of torture had turned her gaze weak and harmless.

  He bent toward the mic, his eyes no longer anxious, but shining with excitement. ‘The men will only stop if you stop them. The same way you stopped the rabid dog.’

  She frowned. A memory, not yet lost. Sleeping on the sunlit porch. A pink tongue on her face. Shadow. Her father’s voice, ‘If I see one teeth mark on your face, young lady, that wolf’s going right back to where he came from.’ Her voice full of laughter, so confident, ‘He won’t bite me, Daddy. He loves me.’

  Schooner Klaus willed her to act. ‘Come on,’ he whispered.

  Suddenly, movement on the other screens. His eyes darted to them. Two of the targets had downed their tools and were coolly untying the girl’s hands. She had gone for two. A thrill of pleasure coursed through him. Not taking his eyes off her face, he signaled the Dead Man.

  The Dead Man responded instantly and with great efficiency. Both renegade targets crumpled where they stood. The other four stared ahead stonily. None dared look at the fallen. True, they had undergone the rigorous de-sensitization process and been injected with all kinds of drugs to deaden the evolutionary instinct of self-preservation, but even so, by God! With fear in their throats they clutched their shining instruments and rued the day they had ever thought to enter that hell-hole. Within minutes the standby targets assembled outside the door came in, to take the places of the dead.

  Dakota’s hands were rebound.

  Schooner Klaus leaned forward until he was inches away from the middle screen. She looked an ill little thing in that monstrously clinical room, but he suffered neither shame nor pity.

  ‘Go on, show me what else you can do,’ he taunted.

  As though she had heard his challenge, all six targets as if of one mind turned away from her and buried their faces in their hands.

  Schooner Klaus took a startled, delighted breath. Impressive. No, not impressive; extraordinary. He alerted the Dead Man. ‘All,’ he ordered callously.

  With their faces still covered they died. Not one had tried to run or defend himself. The Eye in the Sky did not spare a thought for the men he had sacrificed. They were not important. What was important was that the child understood that no matter what she said or did, the torture would carry on. She must conclude that all resistance was useless and passively submit to her fate. Blind, unthinking obedience - that was what he needed. He barked for more back-up to stand by. From their quarters men heard the buzzer and poured into the rubber-tiled corridors, perhaps to their death

  The girl was grizzling softly when the six new targets arrived at the door. They stepped over the corpses to take over where their predecessors had stopped. When the girl saw the implacable faces arranged around her, different and yet the same, she stopped crying. She had lost heart. She knew then - her enemy was too great to defeat.

  Schooner Klaus sent a directive to the ECT controller.

  The tech knew t
he girl’s brain was close to frying, but displaying neither emotion nor hesitation he increased the voltage. The girl convulsed uncontrollably. Her mouth frothed and her eyes rolled up into their sockets. They remained white for so long Schooner Klaus felt a tinge of apprehension. Had he gone too far? But like blue stones, they slowly dropped into place to stare blankly at the overhead lights. Years of practicing on hundreds of children brought in from Mexico and other poor South American nations had taught him the meaning of that glazed look.

  She had lost and he had won.

  The Hypercube

  (The perfect double prison)

  ‘Put her down,’ Schooner Klaus commanded the biotech.

  The trauma had become so unbearable that her child’s mind had said, No, this isn’t happening to me, and escaped to a place without fear or pain. Monstrous details that should have mattered terribly no longer did. The taste of the rubber plug jammed between her teeth, the feel of the steel clamped to her skin, the smell of her burning flesh and hair. They collected harmlessly in glass jars while she floated free. Pain had become pleasure.

  While the sedative was being administered, Schooner Klaus dabbed lavender perfume onto his wrists. It was no shallow affectation - in future, he would be able to make her dissociate with nothing more than a whiff of the scent. He stepped into a pair of specially made rubber boots and walked into the deserted corridor. He entered the torture chamber where the bright headlights had been dimmed and stood for a moment looking at her small, still figure. He registered and savored a victorious sense of cold possession. It had been a spectacular battle of wills: he had gambled the thing he believed to be his most precious find, and he had won.

  He had shattered her mind. Now his intention was to further split it many times more and to mold each fragment into a personality in its own right, capable of thinking, feeling, and functioning by itself. Each one would have its own name, memories, behavioral traits, emotional characteristics. Separated by amnesic barriers, they would all be unaware they were sharing a body with ‘others’. And all of them unavailable to the core personality or the ‘real Dakota’s’ conscious recall. Her inner world would become a labyrinth full of strangers who could only be called forward and controlled by him or someone to whom he gave the appropriate access codes.