Black Sun: A Thriller by Graham Brown Read Free Book Online

of her memories and sense of time since her capture only made it more likely.
    She looked at her right arm. There were at least four needle marks, maybe more. Bruising around the injection sites made it hard to tell.
    Sodium pentothal, she guessed. Or scopolamine.Both drugs were barbiturates that could be used as truth serum. They didn’t exactly work that way, but people had a tendency to talk and give up secrets they might otherwise have withheld, especially under higher doses, doses that were dangerous and often resulted in amnesia.
    She thought that might explain the dryness in her mouth and the flaring of the lights.
    Before she could consider the thought further, the door clicked open and two Asian men came in. Both were muscular and fit, wearing suits, pressed shirts, and silk ties.
    The leader stepped toward her.
    “Put these on,” he said, placing her boots on the desk. She noticed a small bruise under his eye, a scabbed cut. She hoped it was her doing.
    She took the boots. “Why?”
    “Because you’re going to want them where we’re taking you.”
    Not liking the sound of that, Danielle pulled the right boot on. As she tied it, she thought of using the left as a weapon, but even if she were to overpower these men, where would she go from there?
    Out into the hall? Which led where, exactly? To what? For all she knew there would be another locked door twenty feet away. She would only get one chance, if that. She could not waste it.
    She pulled the other boot on and the men walked her out the door to an elevator. Entering, they used a key to access a panel beneath the other buttons. It popped open and the man who’d given her the boots pressed the lowestof the buttons. The indicator illuminated, the doors shut, and the car began to descend.
    Danielle did a quick count of the buttons, three rows of twenty, but the way the elevator was moving—and her ears popping—she guessed it was the express. That meant the building would be closer to a hundred floors than sixty. She tried to think of the buildings in China that were over a hundred stories. There were a number of them, but one in particular came to mind: the Tower Pinnacle, owned by Kang and sitting on prime real estate at the edge of Victoria Harbour.
    She was in Hong Kong.
    “I want to talk with the American consulate,” she said.
    “No,” the man with the cut said. “You’ve done enough talking. At least to us.”
    The elevator slowed and then stopped. The doors opened, not to a spacious lobby, as Danielle might have hoped, but to a metal threshold beyond which lay darkness and what looked like aged and blackened stone. The place had a dank smell, like garbage or urine.
    “What the hell is this?”
    The man with the scab got off the elevator.
    “Please step out,” he said, holding a Taser and energizing it. The electricity snapped across the prongs.
    Reluctantly Danielle moved forward into a hallway of some kind. It looked to be made of natural rock and mortar, like the interior of some medieval castle, only dark and wet with condensation. A heavy wooden door to her right was rotting off its rusted hinges. A single bulb attached to a bare cable cast little light.
    Danielle came to a gate made of iron bars.
    Before she could react the men shoved her forward. She tripped over a slight ledge and sprawled to the ground, skinning her hands on the stone.
    She sprang back up and rushed the gate, but they slammed and locked it in her face.
    “Why are you doing this?” she shouted. “What do you want from me?”
    “Nothing,” the scabbed man said.
    She glanced into the darkness around her. She heard movement: shuffling, groaning, and breathing, as if her arrival had disturbed some resting beast. The stench of the surroundings grew suddenly worse.
    “What is this place?” she shouted.
    The men were in the elevator now, the doors closing, cutting off the light. One of them replied as the doors slammed shut.
    “This is your new home.”

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