Gradually, the fat man grew quiet.
Shuddering uncontrollably, McAlister went out into Bryson's secretary's office and vomited in the wastebasket there.
Oh God Jesus Christ no Jesus oh shit oh shit no!
Bernie Kirkwood came in and said, “Are you all right?”
Braced against the desk, his head hanging over the basket, McAlister said, “Is he dead?”
“Just unconscious.”
“Coma?”
“The doctor said it's not.”
“I'll be there in a minute.”
Bernie went away.
After about five minutes McAlister got up, pulled a handful of paper tissues from the box on the secretary's desk, and wiped his greasy face. He threw the tissues in the reeking wastebasket. There was a water carafe on the desk and it was half full. The water was flat, but it tasted marvelous. He rinsed out his mouth and spat into the can. After all of this he felt no worse than terminal.
He went back into the room to have a look at Rice.
“At first,” Teffler said, “I thought it was anaphylactic shock, a deadly reaction to the drug. But now I think the dosage was just too large for his system.”
“It was the normal dosage,” McAlister said.
“But as overweight as he is,” Teffler said, “he might not react in any normal fashion.”
McAlister watched the fat man's belly rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.
“What now?” Kirkwood asked.
“How long will he be unconscious?” McAlister asked the doctor.
Sitting on the floor beside Rice, Teffler took the patient's pulse. He peeled back an eyelid. “No less than an hour. No more than two or three.”
“We wait for him to wake up,” McAlister said.
“Then?” Kirkwood said.
“We give him another dose of the serum. Half what we shot into him the first time.”
“I don't know as I like that,” Teffler said sternly.
“Neither do I,” McAlister said. “But that's what we're going to do, all right.”
Rice stirred at eight o'clock, opened his eyes, looked around, closed his eyes.
He was able to sit up at eight-fifteen.
By a quarter of nine he was nearly his old self. Indeed, he was feeling good enough to smile smugly at McAlister.
At nine o'clock Teffler gave him the second, smaller dose of the truth serum — and by two minutes past nine Andrew Rice was spilling all the secrets of The Committee.
But was it too late? McAlister wondered.
The telephone burred.
Canning woke, rolled over, and lifted the receiver.
“Guess who is waiting for you down in the drawing room,” Ambassador Webster said.
“He's here already?”
“Hasn't poor Mr. Sung suffered enough?”
“I imagine he has,” Canning said. “Tell the general we'll be down in ten minutes.”
The President was shocked at McAlister's bedraggled appearance. He kept saying how shocked he was all the while that McAlister got the tape recorder ready. He stood behind his desk in the Oval Office and clicked his tongue and shook his head and said he felt entirely responsible for the awful way McAlister looked.
For his part, McAlister could not tell if the clicks of the President's tongue were expressions of sympathy — or whether the chief was off on another of his shtik. And not knowing which it was bothered the hell out of him. He said, “It's nothing, sir. I'm fine. It's just about all over now. I've sent an urgent message to Canning. I took the liberty of using your name on it For his eyes only.”
“But from what you've told me — do you think he'll get anything we send to him?”
“Not everyone is involved,” McAlister said. “The communications man at the Peking embassy is trustworthy. He'll see that Canning gets it.” He ran the tape forward at high speed, watching the white numbers roll around and around on the inch-counter. When he found the numbers he wanted, he stopped the tape, checked them against a list of numbers in his note pad. “You'll want to listen to the entire interrogation later,” he told the President. “But right now, I have a few special passages you'll be interested in.”
“By all means.”
McAlister pushed the Start button:
mcalister: But even if the Nationalists manage to seize the mainland eventually, it won't be an easy thing. I mean, the Chinese may not have much, but it is a hell of a lot more than they had under Chiang. He was a real despot. They'll remember that. Even without guidance from Peking, they're going to fight — with guns, clubs, even fists. Do you realize how many people are going to die?
rice: Oh, yes. We've done computer analysis, worked it out in detail.
mcalister: And it doesn't bother you?
rice: No. I look at it like Mr. West does.
mcalister: How does Mr. West look at it?
rice: They aren't people. They're Chinks. Both sides.
mcalister: Have you calculated the Russian reaction?
rice: They'll come in from the west. But they'll never keep the territory they take.
mcalister: Why not?
rice: Because we have something for them too.
mcalister: Something like Dragonfly?
rice: That's right.
mcalister: You have a Dragonfly in Moscow now?
rice: We have a dozen of them, all over Russia. It was much easier to plant those than to plant one man in China. Russia is a more open society than the People's Republic.
The President was stunned at Rice's obvious insanity, stunned that he had been deceived for so long by such a lunatic. His face alternately — and sometimes all at once — registered dismay, surprise, and horror as he fully perceived Rice's lunacy and ruthlessness. But worst of all, in the President's view, was Rice's naïveté, and it was at this that the chief executive winced the hardest. He didn't crack his knuckles once.
McAlister closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He had heard all of this before, of course. And now he could see Rice under interrogation: sweat beading on his white face, sweat glistening in his eyebrows and along his hairline, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, saliva drooling from one corner of his mouth, his massive body twitching continuously and sometimes spasming uncontrollably as the drug savaged his central nervous system… McAlister felt a long snake of self-loathing uncoil slowly within him. He opened his eyes and stared at the whirling reels of tape; and he began to listen to the contents as well as to the tone of Rice's words. And when he listened closely and heard the evil in the man — the delusions of grandeur, the ruthlessness, the bigotry and jealousy and mindless hatred — he became so enraged that the snake of self-loathing coiled up in him and went back to sleep.
Rice babbled on and thought that he was dispensing gems of military strategy, wisdom for the ages. He talked about the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Neither he nor West nor anyone else in The Committee considered that a major worry. The Committee had Dragonfly's equivalent — with code names like Boris and Ilya — in many Russian missile installations. These Dragonflies carried liquefied nerve gas instead of deadly bacteria. When such a spansule was punctured, the gas would literally explode out of the carrier, expanding at an incredible speed. The personnel of an entire missile installation could be eliminated in seconds by a single Boris planted among them. Even so, some missiles would be launched. Warheads would be exchanged; there was no avoiding it. But Americans should not be frightened of nuclear war, Rice said. They should view it as a potentially necessary and helpful tool. Even a peacemaker like Henry Kissinger had said as much when he had written on the subject years before he became Secretary of State: we can survive a nuclear war. Millions would die, but most likely not tens of millions; and civilization would not pass. There were big risks involved here, Rice admitted. But the only way to destroy Communism before it destroyed us, the only way to insure the dominance of the White Race was to take big risks. Wasn't that true? Wasn't that true? Wasn't it?