The apartment house was a dingy, ancient, crumbling structure, the remains of some long-ago project for the very poor. The squalor, filth, and smell of the place was more animal-like than human. People shouldn’t have to live this way, Jake Edelman thought.
Up the stairs to 3A; the door was so warped it looked off its hinges, and there were only the ghosts of where the numbers once had been, slightly cleaner than the surroundings. The other residents had been cleared out by this time; most were grumbling and protesting behind police barricades in the street outside.
Edelman put his ear to the door. There was no sound, and for a moment he feared that she was dead. Then, suddenly, he heard a noise, a shifting of a body.
“Dr. O’Connell?” he called, as calmly as he could. “Dr. O’Connell, this is Jake Edelman. Are you in there?”
Suddenly her voice came back at them, its sound strange, almost terrible to hear, its inflection reminiscent of a hysterical retarded person. “Stay away! Don’t come near me!”
“I’m coming in,” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you, only help you.”
“No!” she screamed. “I’ll make you sick, I will!” “They lied!” he said. “You don’t have the disease! They lied to you! Now, let me in!”
“No, no! Keep out! I’ll—” There was the sound of someone getting up, moving away, then the sound of something dropping on the floor and the person struggling to pick it up.
Jake Edelman acted. The landlord’s passkey was already in the lock and now he twisted it suddenly and pushed open the door.
She screamed wordlessly and ran to a far corner of the room, standing there, a little hunched over, like a cornered and frightened animal. She had the knife in her hand.
Edelman looked at her and found it almost impossible to believe that it was the same woman he’d known. There was a sadness mixed with outrage at the sight of her, but he kept it inside.
“Give me the knife, Doc,” he urged gently. “It’s all over now. No more drugs. No more pain. No more double-crosses. No more fear. Just give me the knife.”
She looked at him wildly. “Go away!” she said. “I’ll kill m’self!”
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No, now, don’t do that. That’s what they want you to do, and you don’t want to do anything they want you to, now do you?” He slowly started toward her as he talked. Finally he was just two meters from her, but she raised the knife, awkwardly, to her own throat. He was afraid she might do it without meaning to.
“They lie, Doc,” Edelman told her. “They said you had the germ. You don’t. That was to make you kill yourself. The drug was to make it hard for you to think, to figure a way out, and to make it easier for you to kill yourself. They did this to you. Don’t do what they want you to do now.” He held out his hand, his voice calm, gentle, and steady. “Let me help you. Give me the knife.”
Her eyes were wild, her expression afraid and confused. The knife shook a little, but it touched her throat, scratching her.
“For the love of God, Sandra, give me the knife!” he said, more a prayer to himself than a statement directed to her. She wavered; the knife moved away a little. There was a tiny trickle of blood on her throat.
“I talked to Bart Romans at Bethesda,” he told her. “The drug you got can be treated, Sandy. It can be treated!”
Again there was that frozen tableau for a few seconds; all seemed suspended in time. None of the people just outside the door moved or breathed; even the street sounds and the air seemed stilled.
Suddenly the knife dropped onto the floor and she pitched forward. Edelman caught her, and she pressed into him, sobbing uncontrollably. He put his arms around her and hugged and soothed her.
Now the others came into the room, slowly, carefully, led by Bob Hartman. He walked over first to the typewriter, looking at the sheet still in it.
I, Sandra O’Connell, can stand it no longer, it read. I became part of the conspiracy to destroy the United States many years ago, while still in college. The deaths 1 have caused
It broke off.
Another agent reached down, picked up a balled-up piece of paper, flattened it out and handed it to Hartman.
I, Sandra O’Connell, can no longer stand the burden of my sins, it read. I killed Mark Spiegelm
Jake, still gripping the sobbing woman, walked out with her as they uncurled more of the balled-up papers. There were lots of them, each apparently a false start on a suicide note. Joe Bede, who’d been abducted with her, was implicated in some, in others there was an almost insane mixture of leftist radical rhetoric and Catholic moralizing.
“I woulda been convinced,” one of the agents said to Hartman. “But the autopsy would have showed the mitoricine, wouldn’t it? Made it obvious she couldn’t write these notes.”
Hartman nodded. “I’d think so. But they must have prepared for that somehow. Find out how long traces remain in the body, and also check with the city medical examiner’s office. An autopsy shows only what a coroner says it does.”
The agent nodded. “Okay, we’ll work on this end. You?”
Bob Hartman sighed. “I think it’s time for me to go back to D.C. and get a good twelve hours’ solid sleep, then see what your field boys came up with.” Counting the hour on the plane, he managed to get seven hours’ sleep before they called him back in.
TWENTY-SIX
“Three-4-7-3-6-8-8-3-6-8-7-3-2-8-4-8,” said the computer technician. “I wish there’d been a better, more effective code. Do you know how many combinations that makes? And most of these sons of bitches used non-standard abbreviations like mad.”
Jake Edelman was sympathetic. “Remember, these people have risked more than their necks for us,” he said. “And this was the most unobtrusive manner of getting information to us. So—what have we got on this one?”
She sighed. “Well, of all the ones the computer flashed past we think we have it. It came in on the number for a Sam Cornish. The back-billing on the 800 exchange gave us a small chemistry lab in Westminster, Maryland. As far as we can tell, the lab’s clean.” She handed him the paper.
The general idea was to assign each plant a separate 800 number, so when he or she called in they could immediately tell who it was—and by that also know who not to shoot, if it came to that. Since the 800 numbers were toll-free only to the calling party, the recipient had the long-distance record of what number and area made the call, which made it easier.
The code was simplicity itself. You just used the letters still on most phone dials to spell out your message. This meant three possible combinations per number, unless it was a “Q” or “Z”, which were not on the dial, in which case the “1” was a “Q” and the “0” a “Z”. So the first three letter combinations were punched and run up and down until they made some kind of sense, then the next was added, and so on. The problem was in abbreviations and strange geographical expressions.