The Power of Five Oblivion

into the building. He had been right to think it was a church – weren’t all the doors hidden in religious places of one sort or another? He saw stained-glass windows and, on one wall, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a blue robe, although somebody had defaced it, chiselling out her eyes. The whole place seemed to be empty. All he could hear was the sound of his captors as they dragged him further in, up a staircase, along a corridor past a wooden screen. Nobody had said anything to him yet. Everything seemed to be happening incredibly quickly.
    He heard a bolt being drawn. The door opened. Then he was propelled into a small room that might have been an office or a cell, with a stone floor, a tiny barred window, a mattress and a plastic bucket. He thought that Pedro would be thrown in with him but it turned out he was going to be left on his own. One of the guards knelt down and Scott felt a sharp blade cut through the plastic ties that bound his wrists. His hands came free. One of the men was right next to him – bald, unshaven, dark-eyed. Scott turned and spat in his face. The man stared at him and for a brief moment there was dark fury in his eyes. But he must have been given strict orders not to harm his captive. He simply straightened up and walked out.
    Scott spent the next three days there. The window had no view. There was a wall directly opposite and he could only tell the time of day by the light reflecting on the brickwork. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody let him out of the room. The bald man brought him bread and water and occasionally a bowl of thin soup. He took out the bucket and emptied it. But he ignored the questions that Scott threw at him. “Where am I?” “Where’s Pedro?” “What do you want with me?” Scott tried to provoke him, swearing at him, using every foul word he knew. It was a waste of time. The man showed no reaction at all.
    Scott remained angry. He needed his anger to keep going. Because if he thought rationally about his situation, his complete helplessness, he knew he would get scared. So he blamed Pedro. He blamed Matt. He even blamed Jamie. Refused proper exercise, he paced the cell, slamming the heel of his hand into the stone walls until the skin broke and he bled. Eight paces from wall to wall. Eight paces back again. He was a caged animal, tracing out his territory. If he had stayed there much longer, he might have gone mad.
    But after three days they came for him again. He was curled up on the mattress asleep when he felt hands grabbing at him, and before he could react there was a bag over his head and his wrists were locked together behind him once more. He couldn’t see. He could barely breathe. He was scooped up and dragged out and he realized that there was absolutely nothing he could do. He might just as well have been dead. He found himself shouting, his whole body writhing. But the men didn’t care. He thought he heard one of them laugh and kicked out even harder.
    They took him upstairs. Scott was able to measure his progress by his heels hitting the steps. They must have passed through a doorway because he felt air against his hands and – even with the thick cloth pressing against his face – smelled the burning. He heard the whine of a helicopter. The wind from the rotors beat at him as he was bundled inside it – not onto a seat but onto the floor. His shoulders brushed against someone else.
    “Pedro!” he called out.
    “Scott!” He heard the single word shouted out from close by and felt a surge of relief. He had been glad to have Pedro with him then. He had to admit it. But that had been a long time ago. And as the hours had become days and the days had become weeks, Scott had found that he had changed. Maybe it was the anger that was changing him. He was getting used to being on his own. In a strange way, it was making him stronger.
    This new prison had to be in some sort of castle, judging from the look of it, with thick walls, tiny windows and battlements. In the day it was cold and at night much worse, but even so they only had one blanket each and they shivered for hours before sleep came. The exercise yard was at the end of a short, whitewashed corridor with just one door on the way leading into the toilet and shower complex. Apart from the men who took them there and back, they hadn’t met anyone. Scott had decided that the guards were probably Italian. He had seen acrobats from Rome once, when he was performing in the theatre in Nevada,