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September 20, 2020 - June 4, 2021
Then he realized they saw him perfectly well, they were trying for a wall smear.
Whump
classical Vaganova method.
Practicing a pas de deux on a crowded floor, he stepped hard on her heel when she was en pointe, forcing her foot forward, and the colors bled and her world went swirling black, and she buckled to searing pain and total collapse.
Whump
one may fall in love with the State, but the State does not reciprocate, ever.
A twist of the steam dial and a broomstick through the outer door handles would poach them both in twenty minutes.
Whump
Dominika felt a tremor pass through his body, his feet drummed on the bed quickly two or three times, and then he was still.
Whump
Matorin stroked Dominika’s foot just as he had stroked the foot of the pegged-out Afghan bint that one afternoon in the Panjshir Valley.
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She could feel he was naked as he pushed her face against the wall of the shower and nuzzled her wet hair from behind. He was whispering something she couldn’t understand; she couldn’t see the colors.
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He was smiling as Dominika drove the pointed end of the faucet handle into his left eye up to her knuckle and his vomit-green scream of pain and terror washed over her as he slid down the wall clutching his face, his knees pulled up tight.
Whump
“Attempted rape and justifiable self-defense” was the secret AVR review board’s judgment, and Novosibirsk gained a one-eyed bus conductor and the board recommended that Dominika be separated from Academy training.
“I was in the shit so often I rented the top floor of the latrine. That’s how I got here.
Trouble was, at the front door two guys were marching Gable’s agent out of the house by the armpits. The kid’s wife was slight and dark with almond eyes from the south slopes of the Taurus Mountains, torn T-shirt, barefoot. She was right behind them, screaming, beating at the men. A baby about two years old stood in the doorway buck-naked, crying. These two dickheads were as skinny as Gable’s agent, but there was no resistance, maybe because one of the dickheads held a pistol.
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Browning and shot the Kurd,
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Call it the Mozambique,
The silver smokiness of a two-way mirror.
Before she could stand, the third man grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her off the bed and into the living room. When Delon saw her being manhandled he made to rise, but the other two men pushed him back down. The man spun Dominika to face him and slapped her across the cheek. “Shalava, suka!” he spat, and threw her to the floor. Staged scenario or not, Dominika looked up at the bastard who had called her a slut and a whore, and measured the distance to his eyes.
Whump
Her foot flashed out in a feint, and the SVR man bent forward to protect himself. Dominika quickly reached out and dug the nails of her thumb and forefinger into the septum between his nostrils, pinched hard, and pulled him toward her, a torture-cell NKVD come-along from the 1930s.
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the corner of which caught him on the cheek, knocking the table and the papers over and dropping the man into a heap on the floor. He didn’t move. From the couch Delon looked at her in disbelief.
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“Yest’ chelovek, yest’ problema. Nyet cheloveka, nyet problemy,” said Egorov. A chill ran through Volontov. He knew that one by heart. One of Comrade Stalin’s aphorisms: If there is a person, there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem.
The man held tight against her throat.
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The man flicked one side of her shirt farther open with the tip of the knife.
Whump
Then the rushing noise got louder and she passed out.
Whump
She was naked on her back, on her narrow, bitter little bed. She felt the pull of tape over her mouth. Her hands were tied behind her, the knots on her wrists dug into her back. The familiar bedside lamp with its faded, gauzy pink shade cast a mild light on the bedspread. Her legs were tied together at the ankles. She pulled and tested each knot, but there was no give.
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under her diaphragm nearly nine inches, completely through her heart, and up into her throat.
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A trickle of blood oozed from one nostril and out of the corner of her mouth. It took Marta three minutes to die.
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“Fucking guy,” said Gable when Maratos left, “thinks espresso means ‘nonstop train’ in Spanish.”
“If you guys fuck this up, better have your wife start your car every morning.”
stained cotton prison smock.
strapped to the arm of the chair, while she shivered.
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then slapped her to shut her up
Whump
sometimes they strapped her flat on the stainless steel tables.
Whump
the screaming pains rocketed up her body into her head, and she heard her own ragged breath in her throat. The nerve pain was different from the tendon pain, which was different from the pain of a cable tie cinched tight around her head, across her open mouth.
Whump
The glob of conductive lanolin slathered between her buttocks scared her more than the first nudge of the rounded aluminum peg they pushed into her, scared her more than feeling the electrical current, the bitter, pulsing pain, involuntary, back-arching pain, that left her limp when the current stopped. One female jailer indulged in personal sport while conducting official business.
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slapped Dominika across the cheek.
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her shins and thighs mottled blue-black, her fingernails purple, her ribs showing. They had accomplished all that in such a short time.
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She wrapped her wrists together with panty hose and strained the knot tight with her teeth, to feel her pulses. After all the edgy urges left her, she cried silently, tears wetting her cheeks.
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“Is it the nature of our business to be tied dripping wet in front of an air conditioner for four hours every day?”
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Benford thought he had never heard an agent refer to the possibility of his arrest and execution as a “kinetic retirement.
Boo Radley
“Prusik knot,”
With hideous power she swatted a lamp off a side table at him as she closed the distance in two long strides. Nate ducked the lamp, which smashed against the wall behind him, but straightened to find himself face-to-face with her, a rock-hard forearm against his throat, pushing him back against the living-room wall, while taking thunderous, sweeping clouts at him with her free arm. Nate put both hands on her forearm and pulled.
Whump
Nate threw an overhand punch at her face, his fist glancing off her cheek with no apparent effect.
Whump
and his head bounced off the wall and his throat constricted and he thought that this freak was part of the machine that killed her.
Whump
and Nate raked her shin with his shoe and stomped on one pretty, Lolita-pink foot, which made Jennifer ease up an inch,
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kicked the spandex bulge between her legs
Whump
hit Jennifer on the side of the neck with the poker,
Whump
“Avulsion. You separated her neck.”
Whump
“but I was preoccupied by the necessity of not bringing the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation with me to our rendezvous.” “How very professional of you.”
forty-five-fathom line.
