Game changer, p.2
Game Changer, page 2
All of this had happened in an instant, but the memory of it, although fuzzy, seemed eternal. Quinn had screamed and rushed forward, even before he had fully processed the absolute horror of this impossible scene, intent on killing Davinroy with his bare hands, but instead he crashed to the ground, face-first.
Davinroy had set a perimeter of nearly invisible trip wires, one of which Quinn had practically sprinted into. The next thing he could remember was being seated on a sturdy wooden chair, his ankles and wrists locked to it with plastic ties, and the chair itself strapped to a heavy bed frame.
The President of the United States stood before him with a powerful stun gun in his right hand. Quinn’s body throbbed painfully from head to toe, and he had no doubt he had absorbed an unholy blast of electricity. His senses were far from a hundred percent, but it was safe to assume he had temporarily lost consciousness when his head had hit the floor, and Davinroy had then used his gun to light him up like a Las Vegas billboard, causing further disorientation and tenderizing every muscle in his body.
Nicole was now lifeless in front of him, a fate shared by his unborn daughter still locked in his wife’s womb.
It couldn’t be. This beautiful, wonderful woman could not be gone. The child within her could not have been snuffed out just days before her birth. It wasn’t possible.
Nicole’s face was covered in ugly welts and dark purple bruises, and both of her eyes were black and puffy, her nose broken. She had taken a beating even before her head had been staved in by a monster, and there were what appeared to be burns on her neck and arms, along with other signs of traumatic injury his mind wouldn’t allow himself to fully process.
She had been so brutally tortured her death was almost a mercy.
Quinn felt as though his brain were bursting into flame, his entire being raging against the horror of what he had lost, the extraordinary, incandescent woman that Davinroy had taken from both him and the world.
“I am so sorry about this,” said the president, with the same level of concern he might have shown had Quinn’s invitation to the White House Christmas party been lost in the mail. “But Nicole did bring it on herself. She didn’t leave me any choice.”
Quinn didn’t remember his exact response, but he was sure shouting and cursing and threatening were involved. Davinroy shot him again with the powerful stun gun.
When he stopped convulsing, the president began again. “I like you, Special Agent Quinn. You’re one of my favorites. So I’m going to take the time to explain things to you. Not that this will end up mattering, but I will anyway. But I need you to not interrupt, and to show some civility, and we can avoid discharging any more electricity into you. Okay?”
Quinn was unable to respond, his paralyzed body having not yet recovered.
“First, let me say that I thought the world of your wife. You know that. Her loss is truly tragic.”
He said it as though he had nothing whatsoever to do with this loss.
“I’m going to kill you,” croaked Quinn, the words coming out as a whisper.
His eyes flashed over the lifeless form of his wife. He held them there for just a moment, as though somehow she would stir. Somehow he would learn that this was a big mistake. Somehow divine magic would breathe life into her and she would become reanimated while he looked on. But there would be no magic on this night, divine or otherwise.
Quinn forced himself to look away as tears began streaming down his face.
“So here is what happened,” said Davinroy conversationally. “Nicole stumbled onto some . . . indiscretions . . . from my past that were better left buried. Long story about what aroused her suspicions, but it involved considerable bad luck and some clever deductions on her part. Fortunately, I’m a very careful man, and I learned of her activities.”
“What are you talking about?” spat Quinn as the effects of the stun gun began to diminish.
“Turns out I have a need to inflict pain,” said Davinroy with a shrug. “Not sure why, but I was born that way. As a kid, indulging these urges on small animals was enough to get my head right, but there were a few times I took this to the next level.”
“You mean with humans?”
“Right. I know these urges are . . . problematic. Not exactly something voters would seek out in a president. So I keep them hidden and deny myself as much as I can. But I did have some youthful indiscretions that my family’s fortune enabled me to, um . . . pave over.” He sighed. “These instances were regrettable, but I control myself much better nowadays. I’ve pretty much been a Boy Scout since becoming president.” He glanced at Nicole’s body on the bed nearby and raised his eyebrows. “Well . . . for the most part.”
Tears were still falling from Quinn’s eyes, but these words sent him once again into a berserker rage. He threw his body toward Davinroy to strangle the life from him, ignoring the plastic straps that carved bright-red grooves into his wrists and ankles, and disregarding protests from his shoulders that they were close to dislocation.
Davinroy calmly shot him again. This time recovery took even longer, and Quinn was now too weak to even feel rage. But feelings of anguish and loss were able to thrive in the absence of more hostile emotions, and his suffering was more intense than ever.
Davinroy’s horrific behavior was impossible, surreal, but maybe not to the extent that Quinn had first thought. Professional politicians all pretended to be saints, but their ranks were enriched with those who were ruthless and without a conscience. The incidence of deviant behavior among politicians was far higher than average, and scions of rich and powerful families really could get away with atrocities that would earn the average citizen a life sentence in prison.
Michael Jackson had almost certainly molested numerous boys, but his fortune had protected him from any real consequences. Senator Ted Kennedy had driven his car off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick, leaving a young woman in the passenger’s seat to drown, returning to his hotel and not reporting the incident for over nine hours, yet he remained a senator and never served a single day in jail. Additional examples abounded. Revelations of hidden, deviant behavior in prominent people were legion.
“So Nicole was beginning to unravel some of my past I didn’t want unraveled,” continued Davinroy calmly. “Your wife was a regular Nancy Drew. As brilliant a detective as she was an advisor.”
Quinn’s thoughts and emotions had become muddled and disjointed. Not only had the light of his life been brutally murdered before his eyes, he had been repeatedly dosed with electricity and almost certainly drugged. But even though he knew he would soon be dead, something within him needed to know why. Needed to know how. Needed to understand the true nature of the evil that had destroyed him and the woman he had held so dear.
“Where are we?” he managed to whisper. “How did you slip your protection?”
“I’ll explain everything, but I need to know how you found us, since I made sure to destroy your wife’s phone.”
Quinn told him. What did it matter at this point?
Davinroy glanced over at the bracelet on Nicole’s lifeless wrist and nodded. “Nice precaution,” he said approvingly. “But even so, there’s no way you should be here. I dosed you with enough drug to put down an elephant for the night.” He shook his head. “You must have unique genetics that make you more resistant than average.”
“Are you going to answer my questions?” said Quinn.
“Certainly,” said Davinroy. “About ten years ago, I had contractors build tunnels under several of the rooms out here, accessible from ingeniously hidden entrances inside closets. My room has one, which allows me to easily escape my gilded cage and get some privacy. Your room is also accessible from one of these tunnels. They all feed together and lead to various destinations, including where we are now.
“I drugged you and your wife at dinner,” continued the president. “Easy to do. A dose designed to kick in after you had already fallen asleep. You Secret Service types are great at making sure that I’m not drugged, but you do tend to get sloppy when it comes to your own drinks. Nicole’s dose was small, so I could rouse her when I needed her.”
“So you came in through your tunnel and kidnapped her out of our room?”
“Exactly. She had become too suspicious to ever agree to meet with me one-on-one in a secluded location like this one. Bringing her here took some work, but I prepare well. I have golf carts and other equipment in the tunnels, which I make excellent use of whenever I’m here.”
“What kind of use?”
“Mostly sexual. I pay high-end hookers big money—anonymously—to come to one of the rooms here with a tunnel entrance. I then appear and lead them underground to this location. Which you can see contains a bed. This allows me to indulge my craving, to finally engage in what you might call . . . rough sex. I’m only truly satisfied when the woman I’m with is terrified and in pain. I don’t expect you to have any sympathy for me, but if you knew how much I suffer from suppressing these urges, I think you would. I’m the leader of the free world, with all the pressure this brings, and I’m forced to largely deny myself a primal need that is critical to my well-being. I battle against this fierce compulsion for months on end, until the pressure becomes unbearable. I only satisfy these urges the minimum amount required to keep my head on straight, so I can do the people’s business.”
“Keep your head on straight?” barked Quinn in absolute revulsion. “By killing helpless women?”
“I don’t kill them,” said the president, as though offended. “I’m not a monster. I do hurt them pretty badly, but nothing they don’t recover from. And I pay them extremely well.”
“Impossible. One of them would come forward, even if you are the most powerful man on Earth.”
Davinroy smiled broadly. “Except they don’t know what happened to them. America spends countless billions conducting secret research in Black laboratories across the country. In one of these labs, our best and brightest are perfecting a drug that causes total, absolute, take-it-to-the-bank, it-is-never-coming-back, memory loss. At the moment they’ve managed to create a pill that will wipe away the past twelve to eighteen hours of a person’s life.
“I made sure to get a supply of these pills a few years back. So when I’m done with these escorts, I just deposit them a good distance away from here and feed them a pill and a sedative. No harm, no foul. They don’t remember coming to my resort or their encounter with me. Not the trauma, the fear, or the infliction of pain, although it takes them a while to heal. They just know that their personal wealth has grown considerably. To be honest, if I could give them a choice, I’d bet most of them would be glad to take a beating for the kind of money I provide.”
Quinn hadn’t thought he could be any more horrified than he already was, but he had been mistaken. This man was a psychopathic monster in every way. How could such an abomination even exist, let alone masquerade as a human being? Davinroy looked as though he expected a humanitarian medal for improving the finances of the prostitutes he beat nearly to death, and killing Nicole and their unborn daughter hadn’t troubled him in the slightest.
The idea that a monster like Matthew Davinroy could even exist was unthinkable, let alone rise to the presidency of the United States.
And the greatest irony of all was that Davinroy was a man who spoke out against torture in any form, all the while getting a sexual thrill from doing this with his own bare hands. He spouted nothing but pacifism, withdrawal, and peace. This had been Quinn’s point of contention with the man. He was a modern-day Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who had famously sought appeasement with Adolf Hitler.
Davinroy’s hands-off approach, his failure to engage anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, left vacuums that bad actors around the globe were only too happy to fill. Bad actors like China, Korea, Russia, and Iran. And especially terror groups like ISIS, who gladly announced their intention to commit genocide and establish a global caliphate, a worldwide Islamic government.
So Davinroy painted himself as a pacifist, when all the while he was capable of torturing and murdering a helpless woman without even flinching. This man—utterly ruthless, without conscience or remorse—had frequently cited Mahatma Gandhi as being his biggest inspiration, portraying himself as the exact opposite of what he really was. Here was a wolf pretending to be as peace loving as the sheep he was busy slaughtering.
But Quinn realized all of this made a macabre sense, after all. Perhaps Davinroy’s refusal to truly engage against global terrorism, his call for civil rights for those who would butcher women and children, was just professional courtesy. He was just standing up for his fellow psychopaths.
If he derived sexual satisfaction from beating helpless women, perhaps he also derived satisfaction from seeing the world burn, the direct outcome of his lack of leadership and strength, but perhaps his goal all along.
“So did you rape Nicole as well?” asked Quinn, needing to know but dreading the answer, unaware that his eyes were still filling with tears.
Davinroy’s lip turned up in disgust. “I find pregnant women repulsive,” he replied. “And I don’t rape. I pay handsomely for consensual sex. But the thing with your wife had nothing to do with sex. I had to find out exactly what she knew. Who she had told. Where she kept her evidence. So I tortured her for the information, killing two birds with one stone. Despite the lack of sex, I got to indulge a compulsion while getting the information I required. The good news is that it turns out she had kept her suspicions all to herself.”
“You are the sickest piece of shit who ever lived!” spat Quinn. “And I know you’re lying! There’s no way Nicole wouldn’t have told me about this. So what’s really going on?”
Davinroy shook his head. “I was surprised she kept it from you myself, but she made a convincing case. And I put her under enough duress to be sure she was telling the truth. You’ve sworn to protect me. She didn’t want to put you in an awkward or compromising position. And she couldn’t really bring herself to believe that she was right about me. She hoped she was misreading the evidence. She came here searching for more. To really make a case against me, she knew the proof had to be overwhelming.”
This logic was more believable than Quinn had expected. The idea of the president being a sadistic monster was extraordinary, unbelievable. And extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence, especially when they were made against a man this powerful, this slippery.
“She didn’t tell you what she was up to,” continued Davinroy, “or anyone else. I have access to an advanced Artificial Intelligence program. Before I came here, I fed it comprehensive information about my indiscretions, along with Nicole’s known activities during the past few weeks, and the activities of others, including you. It concluded she was operating alone, with greater than ninety-five percent confidence. And tonight I made certain this was true. I forced her to give up the password to her computer account where she kept her evidence. And I verified everything she told me.”
He paused. “My interrogation technique was flawless. I guess torture really can lead to good information, after all. Although, I have to admit, once I began,” he added, looking almost amused, “I got a little carried away.”
Davinroy shrugged. “But my intent was to kill her tonight anyway. I had no choice. Erasing one day of memories wouldn’t do the trick, since she’d been working on this for weeks. I really wish this wasn’t necessary,” he said with a sigh. “Disposing of her body is going to be very inconvenient for me. And she really was a good advisor.”
At that instant, all the hatred and rage Quinn had been bottling up hit critical mass and exploded into a nuclear inferno. “I’m going to kill you if it’s the last thing I ever do!” he hissed between clenched teeth. “Even if you kill me first, this won’t help you. Because I promise you, I will find a way back from the grave. And I will make you suffer!”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” said Davinroy, shaking his head in amusement.
Quinn’s despair had become so great he now longed for death. Every second he remained alive was sheer agony, every instant knowing the wonderful woman he had married was lost to the world forever pure torture. “So kill me already, you psychopathic asshole!” he demanded. “What are you waiting for?” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Davinroy paused for several long seconds to let total silence once again descend on the room. “I wouldn’t think of killing you,” he replied finally. “I told you, you’re one of my favorite special agents. Also, as I’ve said, I’m truly sorry it has come to this. Truly sorry about your wife. Besides, both of you disappearing would just complicate things for me.”
A thoughtful expression came over the president’s face. “So here’s what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m going to use my memory erasure drug on you. Make you forget you ever saw any of this. Forget we ever had this conversation. I’m going to shock you one last time, and when you’re incapacitated, I’m going to feed you another sleeping pill, and a memory loss pill. Then I’m going to wipe the data from your wife’s tracking bracelet, disable it, and dispose of her body. I’ll leave some torn clothing in the woods for searchers to find, but they will never learn what became of her, what terrible tragedy befell her. Maybe she wandered off. Maybe she was abducted. It’ll be quite the mystery.”
Quinn just stared straight ahead, numb, his tears finally having stopped, perhaps because he had depleted his entire reservoir. All he could do was glare at the president in defeat, a caged lion about to die of starvation, desperate to attack any limb that wandered too close to the bars but too weak to do so.
“And here’s the best part,” said Davinroy. “I’ll have actually done you a favor. Because of this drug, I won’t have to kill you. When you awaken, you won’t remember your recent past, but you’ll feel awful. After everything I’ve put you through tonight, for good reason. For what it’s worth, I’ll be tired and sore also. Even with golf carts and powered gurneys, getting your carcass back to your room will take a lot of effort. A lot of effort.”
