17
Fog… the world was fog… all fog…
And pain. A dull pain in her left hand… her left little finger. It throbbed and burned and—
Then Jamie remembered. Jensen. The cleaver. Her finger. The indescribable pain as the blade sliced through skin and bone and tendon and nerve.
Bad as it was, the pain hadn't lasted too long. The sweet-smelling cloth had been jammed against her face again, taking away the world and the pain.
For a while.
Now both were back.
And other sensations… chill air on her skin… bands about her arms and legs and body, tight against her stomach and especially her chest, making it hard to take a deep breath. She opened her mouth for more air and realized she couldn't. Some sort of cloth had been shoved between her teeth and taped into place.
Gagged!
Fighting panic, she forced her gummy lids open and blinked her eyes into focus. Whatever light there was came from above. Images formed slowly. First came the lines, vertical and horizontal, all around her. For a moment she thought she might be dreaming… a nightmare in which she'd fallen into a Mondrian painting. But as the lines became clearer she made out their ribbed surfaces and recognized them as steel reinforcing rods, welded into a heavy-duty lattice.
What was she doing in a steel cage?
And beyond the rods loomed the inner surface of a giant metal tube, maybe twenty feet tall and five in diameter.
She felt a cool draft against her skin and looked down at herself. Shock blasted away the lingering effects of whatever they'd drugged her with.
She was naked.
Oh, God, Jensen or one of his drones must have stripped her while she was out. She wondered if they'd done anything else to her, but she didn't feel as if she'd been…
Her mind froze as she realized she wras bound hand, foot, and body to a dozen or more of the reinforcing rods… bound and suspended half a dozen feet off the ground… inside a tube…
Jamie tried to calm herself. This had to be a dream, a very bad one, because it couldn't be real. Things like this didn't happen to people, especially her. It was surreal, had no basis in the real world…
Check out the inner surface of the cylinder, for instance… all those strange looking, sharp-edged, geometric projections running up and down and around. She'd never seen anything like those before.
A dream…
But dream or not, something about the oddly unsettling shapes poured a stream of acid into her already quaking stomach.
What was this? Where was she? And why?
And then a part of her interview with Blascoe tumbled back to her. The part about the pillars Brady was burying all over the world. It seemed like years since she'd typed the words into her computer…
… the concrete's gotta be made with a certain kind of sand, and the columns gotta be inscribed with all sorts of weird symbols …
She'd been tied up and suspended inside one of Brady's columns. But why on Earth would—?
Blascoe's next sentence provided a chilling hint.
… And then they've gotta put something else inside it before they can bury it…
The old man hadn't known what that something else might be, but now Jamie did.
The gag muffled her screams.