Soaked and sloppy, she started walking around the lake, just a meter or two from the shore. Her more adult common sense seemed subconsciously to keep her from walking out into the deep center.
A thousand meters or so brought her to a partially submerged boat-house. The double doors were locked, but by going under the part that was angled just out of the water she found a number of missing boards. It was an old place, neither used nor fixed up in a decade or more.
Feeling suddenly very tired, she crawled into the boathouse from underneath and pulled herself wearily onto a fairly flat dry section smelling of oils and paints. It didn’t matter to her; she was sleepy and it was a nice place to stretch out just for a few minutes.
Just a few minutes…
“Mitoricine,” the psychiatrist told Braden, “is a funny drug. I’ve never liked our using it, and its effects and aftereffects are extremely unpredictable. Enough constants are there, though, to tell me that I would not like to be on the stuff myself, ever.”
Braden nodded. “Tell me, when is her dose going to wear off?”
The medical man looked at a chart and shrugged. “Hard to say. She was due for it today at two, and repeated early doses at a larger rate were administered, so the last shot, to be on the safe side—this stuff can kill you or turn you into a vegetable if you blow it—was a low to medium dose. Assuming vigorous exercise, which will aggravate the drug condition, she should just about pass out within a couple of hours, maybe sooner, maybe later—it varies with the individual. She’ll sleep a good long time, the body fighting the remnants of the drug, then wake up uncomfortable and lethargic. It’ll take a long time to get her back to normal, and it’ll come gradually.”
“So you mean she’ll still be a retard?” the security man asked eagerly.
The psychiatrist shook his head. “Not in that sense. Reaction time will be down, things will be foggy, like that. She’ll be jumbled, confused, have some trouble behaving normally. It’s much like an adverse reaction to pentathol, only much longer.”
“So she’ll still be no problem to catch,” Braden said hopefully.
The other man shrugged. “Who knows? All I can tell you is that she might have a hell of a time convincing anybody she was a doctor.”
Military men and State Policemen combed the area with bloodhounds. They quickly followed her to the stream, found the abandoned sneakers, and picked up the trail. They were all convinced that they were after a severely retarded woman, and that intensified their search.
Within minutes they made the lake, and were stopped dead. A complete circle of the lake was made with the hounds, but there were no signs of Sandra O’Connell coming out of that lake. More than once they passed the old, broken-down boathouse, but it was obviously padlocked and there were no signs of any sort of forced entry. Once or twice one of the searchers would duck under and shine a light around, but saw nothing.
They decided then to drag the lake, and it took time for the local fire department’s rescue equipment to arrive. It was past six in the evening before they started dragging; the sun went down a little over two hours later, and they were forced to call it off for the night.
They had found two badly decomposed bodies in there, a lot of junk, and an entire automobile the New York State Police had been looking for as a getaway vehicle for over three years.
They didn’t find Sandra O’Connell, and patrols that ringed the lake farther out found no sign, either. They concluded that she had to be in the lake when they knocked off for the evening. They felt sorry that they hadn’t found her, but weren’t in much of a rush any longer.
During this entire period, Sandra O’Connell slept in a drug-induced comatose state inside the boathouse, unmoving and barely breathing.
They were all gone by ten; most had been out in the field for many hours, through suppertime and beyond. They left their equipment and went home. An all-points bulletin was issued for her, however, on the off chance that she had indeed escaped. Phony name, of course. But they weren’t finished with her, no, not finished.
Braden needed a body to preserve his own neck.
SIXTEEN
Jake Edelman checked the funny-looking greenish box that was now attached to his phone. It was a little larger than a cigar box. A three-pronged plug connected it to a nearby wall outlet, but the only sign of power was a dully-glowing red LED in the middle of the box’s faceplate.
There was a recess in the top of the box containing a number of copper-clad conductors. From his pocket, Edelman removed what appeared to be a small pocket calculator with a series of copper bars on its back that corresponded to those in the recess atop the box. He placed it in the recess and pressed down, only to fume when it wouldn’t go in.
Cursing, he glanced at his watch to see that it was approaching midnight. This thing had to be working by then. Finally he admitted defeat and buzzed for his secretary, an older woman named Maxine Bloom who’d been with him over ten years. She smiled that infuriating smile, grasped the calculator, turned it upside down, and put it in the recess. It snapped into place with a satisfying series of clicks.
He glowered at her to cover his embarrassment, sighed, cleared his throat, and nodded to her.
“You might as well be here anyway, Maxine,” he said. “I can’t take any notes or written records on this and I’ll need a good backup memory.”
She nodded and took a chair to one side of his desk. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d been there or not, he knew. Maxine was the best spy any office ever had. He was just thankful she was on his side.
He looked at her. “You checked the bug detector?” he asked.
She nodded. “Used the hand-held one, too. You know the department’s computer missed two of them?” She didn’t seem at all surprised. “The only leak’s the phone, now—I guarantee it.”
He shook his head in satisfaction. “The phone and box were installed and checked by the best,” he said. “And then I uninstalled it and had Fred do a number on both. It’s clean.”
“Let’s have at it, then,” his secretary suggested.
He turned and stared carefully at the calculator. It really wasn’t one, of course; the numbers were more on the order of a touch-tone phone faceplate, with an additional two rows of symbols. He held his breath nervously as he punched the laborious thirty-two digit combination of numbers and symbols that would connect him with the party he wanted. One mistake and it would clear. Three mistakes and, on the third clear, it would short out.
Despite his nervousness, he didn’t make any mistakes.
He put it on the speakerphone turned to low volume, then set up an additional desktop debugger nearby that would let out a squeal if there were any last-minute attempts to eavesdrop. The debugger was the best there was; it was programmed to detect just about every known device except a person in the room or leaning against the door. He had other precautions against that old-fashioned kind of stuff. He was certain that if the device didn’t go off no one else would hear him except those to whom he was talking.
A decade of counterespionage work was behind that confidence.
It was amazing, the number of clicks and funny phone-like noises the thing went through. First, anything going through his phone would pass through the incrediby sophisticated scrambler circuits in the green box. Unless you knew the entry key, there was simply no way to decipher the oddball digital scramble that came out the other end. Quite a number of government phones all over the country did know the key, and at midnight had punched the proper codes into their decoder boxes and waited for the phone to ring. All of those locations were also carefully debugged, and most would listen, not talk.