“It was for her protection, Ben.”
“I see. The way I’m being protected.”
“That’s right,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm.
“Maximum security,” I persisted. “We’re as safe as any two prisoners can be.”
“Come on, Ben. Tomorrow, after we’ve talked, you’ll be free to walk out.”
“And now? What about now?”
“Tomorrow,” he replied. “Tomorrow, hear us out. If you want to leave then, I promise you, I won’t stand in your way.”
With an electric hum he guided his wheelchair across the long expanse of Persian carpet toward the door. “Good night, Ben. They’ll show you to your room.”
It was at that point that an idea occurred to me and, thus preoccupied, I followed the two guards out to the main staircase.
TWENTY-SIX
The room they had provided for me was large and comfortable, furnished in the style of a Vermont country inn, spare and elegant. Against one wall was a plump, king-size bed draped in a white chenille spread. After this long, exhausting day, it looked supremely inviting, but I couldn’t sleep yet. There was a dark walnut armoire and matching end tables; I noticed after brief inspection that they were immobile, somehow bolted down. The adjoining bathroom was spacious and elegant as welclass="underline" green Italian marble floor, the walls tiled in white and black porcelain, the fixtures of 1930s vintage.
The floor, which creaked reassuringly as I walked, was covered in pale wall-to-wall carpeting. A few paintings had been placed, tastefully, here and there: oil paintings of nautical aspects, done in a nondescript style. Those, too, were fastened to the wall. It was as if they were expecting a violent animal who might at any moment decide to fling objects around the room.
A set of heavy floor-length drapes, striped in broad bands of maroon and gold, concealed a set of windows, finely leaded. I saw at once that the windows were reinforced with a fine, almost invisible, metallic webbing, which no doubt made them at once shatterproof and electronically alarmed.
I was a prisoner.
This particular room in this “safe house,” I decided, was probably used to keep intelligence defectors or other agents with whom they couldn’t be too careful. That category obviously included me.
For all intents and purposes, I was a hostage, despite Toby’s gilded rhetoric. They had caught me here, like an exotic laboratory specimen, to be run through a set of extensive tests and then pressed into service.
But everything about this setup smacked of improvisation. Usually, when an operation is preplanned, every angle is covered, every detail thought through, sometimes ridiculously so. Often, of course, things still go wrong-SHIT HAPPENS, as the bumper sticker says-but not for want of planning. But I sensed that arrangements here had been hasty, ad hoc, jury-rigged, and that gave me hope.
They held Molly captive, but I would be able to negotiate her release much more readily if I were free. I had to move at once.
Even then, as I changed out of my ripped, soiled suit (a casualty of the shootout on Marlborough Street) I knew that Molly was going to be all right. It was quite possible that they were indeed protecting her-in addition to which, of course, they wanted to keep her separated from me as a means of suasion. You know, tie the girl up to the railroad tracks so that you’ll change your mind, right? Well, there wouldn’t be any express train coming, and the worst that would happen from this was that Molly would have subjected her captors to a severe tongue-lashing. I knew how the Agency liked to apply pressure.
As for me, however-well, that was another story. Ever since I had acquired this extraordinary talent, my life was in danger of one sort or another. And now I had the simple choice of cooperating, or…
Or what?
Hadn’t Toby spoken the truth-why would they want to take out the only living, successful subject of their top secret project? Wouldn’t it be like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs?
Or would the need for secrecy take precedence over everything else?
Perhaps, though… perhaps I could take matters into my own hands.
For I had an unquestionable advantage over other human beings, at least as long as it lasted, and it showed no signs of diminishing. And-this was what told me that my incarceration was hastily, even sloppily, arranged-I had been able to acquire some useful information from one of my guards.
Toby, or whoever was running this operation, had taken the precaution of requisitioning guards who were absolutely uninformed about me, or about the project itself. But naturally, they had to be fully briefed about the details of their own security operations.
As one of the guards-Chet, his name was-took me upstairs to the third-floor bedroom in which I was to be kept, I walked beside him, as close as I could. He had evidently been ordered not to engage me in discussion, and to keep a good distance from me.
But he had not been instructed not to think, and thinking is one of the few human activities over which we have no control.
“I’m concerned,” I said to him as we mounted the first staircase. “How many of there are you?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Chet said with a brusque dip of his head. “I’m really not permitted to speak with you, sir.”
I raised my voice in mock anger. “But how the hell do I know I’m safe? How many of you are going to protect me? Can’t you at least tell me that?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Please step back.”
By the time he had ushered me into my bedroom, I had learned that there would be two stationed in front of my room throughout the night, that Chet was on the first shift, that he was glad of it, and that he was insatiably curious to know who I was and what I had done.
I spent the first hour or so carefully inspecting the room, looking for the transmitting devices (they had to be there, but I couldn’t locate them) and such. Beside the bed was a clock-radio, which was a likely candidate for a bug.
But the radio was a mistake.
At about half past one in the morning I knocked on my bedroom door to summon the guard. The door opened after a few moments to reveal Chet. “Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “It’s just that my throat is parched, and I wonder whether you can get me a glass of seltzer.”
“There should be a little refrigerator in there,” he said tentatively, but he was tense, his body as tightly coiled as a clock spring, his hands at his sides, as he’d been taught.
I smiled sheepishly. “All gone.”
He looked annoyed. “It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, then closed the door. I expected that he would call downstairs on the walkie-talkie, since he had been given instructions under no circumstances to leave his post.
About five minutes or so later there was a soft knock on the door.
By now I had the clock-radio on full blast, an AM rap station, raucous and rhythmic. And the shower was running, filling the bathroom with steam. The bathroom door was open, and steam billowed into the bedroom.
“I’m in the shower,” I yelled. “Just put it anywhere, thanks.”
A different uniformed guard entered, bearing a tray, on it a bottle of French mineral water-nice touch, I thought-and looked around the room appraisingly for a few seconds, trying to decide where to put it down, and that was when I lunged.
He was a professional, well trained, but so was I, and that two or three seconds that I had on him was just enough to take him by surprise. I tackled him to the floor, the tray and water tumbling noiselessly onto the carpet. He recovered with impressive speed and reared up, knocking me aside momentarily, his left arm smashing into my jaw, a painful, wounding blow.
That old glacial calm came over me.
The radio blasted on and on, stridently: “DOWN she gotta go DOWN now I really gotta…” and the white noise of the shower drummed and above this racket very little could be heard, of course, and-