An explosion of gunfire.
Behind me, to my left, then a whiz of something awfully close, the sting of something against my ear, and I dove down. The gunshots kept up, erratic, close, and I scuttled along the grass and into the trees, thank God. A natural cover, protection. Just feet away a tree trunk splintered, then another one, and I put on one last agonizing burst of speed, running through the dizzying pain in my ankle and my shoulders, and I was at the fence.
Electrified, yes?
A fifteen-foot fence, solid black wrought iron, burglar-proof, high security… high tension? Was it possible?
I could scarcely turn around now, couldn’t turn back, couldn’t stop, I had a few seconds’ lead time on them, that was all, but now I heard them coming into the yard, in my direction, many of them, it seemed, and the gunshots were back now, they had located me, but their aim was off; the trees blocked their line of sight.
I inhaled a deep breath and took the measure of the situation. The house is surrounded by nature, set in the rolling Virginia woods, which means trees and animals, squirrels and chipmunks that skitter here and there, up and down fences, and-
I threw myself toward the fence, grasping a horizontal section as a handhold, and climbed up, toward the spiked top, up, and, hesitating a mere split second, which seemed an eternity, grabbed the ominous black spears atop the fence-
And felt the cool, hard iron.
No. Not electrified. Squirrels and chipmunks would wreak havoc on an electrified fence, wouldn’t they? You wouldn’t do it. I spun my legs around carefully, just grazing the sharpened spikes, and over, and dropped to the moist spongy grass below, and I was out.
Behind me the mansion was flashing, the lights pulsing, the clamor shattering the night’s stillness.
I ran, hearing shouts and running footsteps behind me, but they were on the other side of the fence, and I knew I had them.
I ran, and ran, wincing, probably moaning aloud, but keeping my stride, until the road bent, and I was at a junction that I had noticed as we arrived, and as I dashed up the dark, narrow road, I saw a pair of headlights coming toward me.
The car was moving along at a good clip, not too fast, not too slow, a Honda Accord. I saw it as it approached, and I considered waving it down, but I couldn’t be sure.
It had come from the main highway, but I had to be careful, and as I slowed down, its headlights suddenly went bright, blindingly so, and then another set of headlights came up behind me, high beams, and suddenly I was caught between the two vehicles, the Honda facing me, and behind me, another car, larger, American-make.
I spun, but the cars had hemmed me in, and then two others came out of the darkness, brakes squealing, pulling up alongside the other.
I was blinded by four sets of headlights, and I spun around again, tried to figure a way of escape, but knew there wasn’t one, and then I heard a voice coming from one of the cars.
Echoing in the night. “Nice try, Ben,” came Toby’s voice. “You’re as good as ever. Please, get in.”
I was surrounded by men and guns pointed at me, and slowly I lowered the Ruger.
Toby was seated in the back of a van, one of the last vehicles to arrive. He was speaking through the window. “Terribly sorry,” he said calmly. “But nice try all the same.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
They drove me in a plain government car, a dark blue Chrysler sedan, to Crystal City, Virginia. We entered an anonymous-looking office building with an underground parking garage. I knew the CIA owned several buildings in Crystal City and its environs; this was certainly one of them.
I was escorted by the driver into an elevator and up to the seventh floor, through a plain governmental-looking corridor painted bureaucrat tan. ROOM 706 was painted in a black curve on frosted glass. Inside, a receptionist greeted me and showed me to an inside office, where I was introduced to a bearded, fortyish, Indian neurologist named Dr. Sanjay Mehta.
You will no doubt wonder whether I attempted to read the thoughts of my driver, the people I passed in the corridor, the neurologist, and so on; and the answer, of course, is yes. My driver was another Agency employee, as uninformed as my last driver. I learned nothing there. The most I learned, walking down the hallway, was that I was indeed in a CIA building where work was being done on scientific and technical matters.
With Dr. Mehta, things were different. As I shook his hand I heard, Can you hear my thoughts?
I hesitated for a moment, but I had decided not to play coy, and I responded aloud, “Yes, I can.”
He gestured to a chair, and thought: Can you hear everyone’s thoughts?
“No,” I told him. “Only those who…”
Only those of a particular salience-such as those accompanied by powerful emotions, is that right? I heard.
I smiled and nodded.
I heard a phrase of something, in a language I didn’t know, which I assumed was Hindi.
For the first time, he spoke. “You don’t speak Hindi, Mr. Ellison, do you?” His English was British-accented.
“No, I don’t.”
“I am fully bilingual, which means that I can think in Hindi or in English. What you’re telling me, then, is that you don’t understand my thoughts when they’re in Hindi. You hear them. Is that right?”
“Right.”
“But not all of my thoughts, of course,” he continued. “I have thought a number of things in the last two minutes, in Hindi and in English. Perhaps hundreds of ‘thoughts,’ if one can so categorize the flow of the processing of ideas. But you were able to hear only those that I thought with great force.”
“I suppose that’s right.”
“Can you sit there for a moment, please?”
I nodded again.
He got up from his desk and left the room, closing the door behind him.
I sat for a few moments, inspecting his collection of plastic souvenir paperweights, the kind that produce a snowfall if shaken, and soon I was picking up another thought. This time it was the timbre of a woman’s voice, high and anguished.
They killed my husband, it went. Killed Jack. Oh, God. They killed Jack.
A minute later. Dr. Mehta returned.
“Well?” he said.
“I heard it,” I said.
“Heard what?”
“A woman, thinking that her husband had been killed,” I replied helpfully. “The husband’s name is Jack.”
Dr. Mehta exhaled audibly, nodding slowly. After a long silence he said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“You didn’t ‘hear’ anything just then, did you?” He gave the word “hear” the same spin I’d been mentally giving it myself.
“Just silence,” I said.
“Ah. But previously, it was a woman; you’re right. That’s quite interesting. I would have thought you’d pick up only that someone was in distress. But you don’t perceive feelings; you actually seem to hear things, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you tell me exactly what you heard?”
I repeated it for him.
“Just so,” he said. “Excellent. Can you distinguish between what you hear and what you ‘hear’?”
“The-I guess the timbre is different, the feel of the voice,” I attempted to explain. “It’s like the difference between a whispered and a spoken phrase. Or… or the way you can remember a conversation sometimes, inflections and intonations and all. I perceive a spoken voice, but it’s much different from the audible voice.”
“Interesting,” he said. He rose, picked up a snowball paperweight of Niagara Falls from his desk, and toyed with it as he paced in a small area behind his desk. “But you didn’t hear the first voice.”