Skeleton Key

the coral had inflicted on his limbs. But there was no time to do anything about that now. As soon as he was standing on the deck, he unhooked his weight belt and dumped it to one side along with his mask and snorkel. There was a towel in Turner‟s bag. He took it out and used it to rub himself dry. Then he went over to Garcia.
    “We have to go,” he said. “Turner and Troy are dead. The cave is a trap. Do you understand?
    You have to take me back to the hotel.”
    Garcia still said nothing. For the first time, Alex noticed something about the cigarette in the man‟s mouth. It wasn‟t actually lit. Suddenly uneasy, Alex reached out. Garcia fell forward.
    There was a knife sticking out of his back.
    Alex felt something hard touch him between his shoulder blades and a voice, which seemed to have trouble with the words it was saying, whispered from somewhere behind him.
    “A little late to be out swimming, I think. I advise you now to keep very still.”
    A speedboat which had been lurking in the shadows on the other side of the diving boat roared to life, lights blazing. Alex stood where he was. Two more men climbed onboard, both of them speaking in Spanish. He just had time to glimpse the dark, grinning face of one of Sarov‟s macheteros before a sack was thrown over his head. Something touched his arm and he felt a sting and knew that he had just been injected with a hypodermic syringe. Almost at once, the strength went out of his legs and he would have collapsed but for the invisible hands that held him up.
    And then he was lifted up and carried away. Alex began to wonder if it would have made any difference if the shark had reached him after all. The men who were carrying him off the boat were treating him like someone who was already dead.

THE CRUSHER

    Alex couldn‟t move.
    He was lying on his back on a hard, sticky surface. When he tried to raise his shoulders, he felt his T-shirt clinging to whatever it was underneath him. It was as if he had been glued into place.
    Whatever had been injected into him had removed all power of movement from his arms and legs. The bag still covered his head, keeping him in darkness. He knew that he had been loaded into the speedboat and taken back to the coast. Some sort of van had met him and brought him here. He had heard footsteps and rough hands had grabbed him, carrying him like a sack of vegetables. He guessed that three or four men had been involved in the journey, but they had barely spoken. Once he had heard the same man who had spoken to him on the boat. He had muttered a couple of words in Spanish. But his voice was so indistinct, the words so garbled, that Alex had found it hard to understand what he was saying.
    Fingers brushed against the side of his neck and suddenly the bag was removed. Alex blinked.
    He was lying in a brightly lit warehouse or factory; the first thing he saw was the metal framework supporting the roof, with arc lamps hanging down. The walls were bare brick, whitewashed, the floor lined with terracotta tiles. There was machinery on both sides of him.
    Most of it looked agricultural and a hundred years out of date. There were chains and buckets and a complicated pulley system that fed into a series of metal wheels that could have come out of a giant antique watch, and next to them, a pair of earthenware cauldrons. Alex twisted round and saw more cauldrons on the other side and, in the distance, some sort of filtration system with pipes leading everywhere. He realized now that he was lying on a long conveyor belt. He tried once again to get up or even roll off, but his body wouldn‟t obey him.
    A man stepped into his line of vision.
    Alex looked up into a pair of eyes that weren‟t actually quite a pair. They weren‟t positioned correctly in the man‟s face and one of them was bloodshot. Alex wondered if it could even see.
    The man had been horribly injured at some time. He was bald on one side of his head, but not on the other. His mouth was slanting. His skin was dead. In a beauty contest, he wouldn‟t even come a close second to the great white shark.
    There were a couple of dark, unsmiling workers standing behind him. They were shabbily dressed, with moustaches and bandanas. Neither of them spoke. They seemed keenly interested in what was about to happen.
    “Your name?” The movements of the man‟s mouth didn‟t quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film.
    “Alex