Dr. Death Read Online Free Page B

was empty except for a small compartment at the top far end, which contained a few gallons of wine which could be drawn to deceive anyone who suspected the barrel was a dummy.
    I turned to the girl. She was pressed against the damp wall, shivering now in her flimsy costume.
    "You stay here," I said. "I'll be back for you. If I'm not back, go to the American Embassy. Tell them you must contact David Hawk at AXE. Tell them that, but no more. Talk to no one but Hawk. Do you understand?"
    "No," she said quickly. "I'm going with you. I don't want to stay here alone."
    "Forget it," I said tersely. "It's only in the movies that you can get away with that I'm going with you' line. If there's any trouble in there, you'd just be in the way. Anyway," I ran one finger down her chin and neck, "you're far too beautiful to be walking around with your head blown off."
    Before she could protest again I had climbed into the end of the barrel and swung the lid shut after me. Instantly, it became obvious that the barrel had actually been used for storing wine a long time before it had been made into a dummy. The residual fumes gagged me and made my head reel. I waited a moment, steadied myself, then crawled to the far end and listened.
    At first I heard nothing. Silence. Then, some distance away, voices. Or at least, sounds that might have been voices. Except that they were distorted, and the almost inhuman quality told me that the distortion wasn't caused merely by distance.
    I hesitated for another moment, then decided to take a chance. Slowly, gently, I pushed against the butt end of the barrel. Silently, it swung open. I crouched with Wilhelmina in my hand at the ready.
    Nothing. Darkness. Silence. But by the dim shaft of moonlight that came in through a tiny square window set high in the wall, I could make out the bulky shapes of wine barrels and the wooden tiers of the wine-bottle racks. Akhmed's wine cellar, housing the best collection of vintage wines in North Africa, seemed in perfectly normal condition for this hour of night.
    Then I heard the sounds again.
    They weren't pretty.
    I crept out of the barrel, shutting it carefully behind me, and padded across the stone floor to the metal bars that lined the entrance to the wine cellar. I had a key for those, too, and I used it in silence. The hallway beyond, leading to the stairs to the bar, was dark. But from a room off that hall came a dim, yellow rectangle of light.
    And the voices.
    There were three. Two, I could recognize now as human. I could even recognize the language they were speaking — French. The third — well, its sounds were animal. The sounds of an animal in agony.
    Pressing my body against the wall, I moved toward the rectangle of light. The voices grew louder, the animal sounds more tormented. When I was a few inches from the door I leaned my head forward and peered through the opening between door and doorjamb.
    What I saw wrenched my stomach. And then made me clench my teeth with anger.
    Akhmed was naked, his wrists were bound together around a meat hook from which he was suspended. His torso was a blackened ruin of scorched skin, muscles, and nerves. Blood ran from his mouth and from the gouged-out craters of his eye sockets. As I watched, one of the two men puffed at a cigar until its tip was glowing red, then brutally pressed it to Akhmed's side, to the tender flesh under the armpit.
    Akhmed screamed. Only he couldn't manage a real scream anymore. Only those gurgling, inhuman sounds of pain beyond pain.
    His wife had been luckier. She lay a few feet away. Her throat had been slit so deeply and widely that her head was nearly severed from her neck.
    The cigar-tip was applied to Akhmed's flesh again. His body twitched convulsively. I tried not to hear the sounds that came from his mouth, or see the bubbling blood that came out at the same time.
    "You are still being foolish, Akhmed," the man with the cigar said. "You think that if you still refuse to speak, we will