'Yes, I've got that,' he said and slammed the door shut and told the driver to move it.
Throat still raw, kept drinking water.
Decker, name of the driver, one of ours, a Bureau cab – Ferris had kept it standing off with Decker on the peep even though I'd told him I did not want support. I'd sent Decker away after he'd brought new clothes for me and taken the old ones, old, Christ they were more than old, more like the coat off a scarecrow after a lightning strike.
The phone rang and I picked it up.
'Who?… All right.'
Cardinal rule: we can't refuse.
There were two windows, north and west, because this was a corner room, and while I was waiting I took a look from both of them – the airport control tower a couple of miles away and some three-storey buildings nearer than that with billboards, United Overnight To These Ten Cities, Marlboro For Those Who Like To Smoke, Coors Is The Champion, no windows overlooking mine at a distance of less than fifty feet on the north, thirty on the west, a man in the doorway near the bus stop and another one at the corner and two more on the north side twenty yards apart and looking in shop windows and of course there'd be more of them on the south side of the hotel where the entrance was, prisoner of bloody Zenda but they weren't there only to give me moving cover whenever I left; they were also scanning the environment for possible pollution: field glasses behind windows or the hump of a magnum with a laser sight or an infrared night lens, so forth.
They would also note any opposition peeps standing off in the environment or coming into the hotel, leaving it, hanging around, it was ironic, if you will, that the first thing I always ask for at the start of a new show is that Ferris should direct me in the field, and here he was blocking me in with so much support that I wouldn't be able to move without saluting the troops.
'Come in.'
'Greenspan,' he said, a soft handshake and Charlie Chaplin eyebrows, dropped his bag on the bed and looked me up and down.
'Does anything hurt?'
'Bit of sunburn.'
'I'm not surprised. That was a gasoline fire, wasn't it?'
'Something like that. Are you from the consulate?'
'I look after their staff. I'd like your shirt off.'
It's a cardinal rule: you can't refuse a medical checkup after you've been through any kind of traumatising action, otherwise I wouldn't have let him come up, because I wasn't in the mood for coughing and saying ah when there was so much to think about, so many questions, did she set me up for those shots?
Take a full breath. Another one. Now, did you feel you were filling your lungs to capacity?'
'Yes.'
'Well you were lucky with that seat belt. I've seen osteo-chondritis of the cartilage around the sternum you wouldn't believe. You must have taken some of the shock with your right hand, even though there's no echymosis. I've had people with the belt go halfway through the side of the rib cage. Have you seen The Rainbow?'
'What?'
'It's a movie. You should see it. This hurt?'
'No.' The launch had moved in to the harbour parallel with the tug and they'd put me in the cross hairs from there, or come closer in a car or gone into one of the quayside buildings and climbed, though not more than two storeys because the first shot had smashed through the rear window and hit the speedometer at not much more than a fifteen degree angle from the horizontal. They 'Rock your head – gently. Now this way. Feels good?'
There wasn't any whiplash.' I'd got my head back on the support before we'd hit the other wall of the shed and bounced back. Are they friends of yours? With the field glasses. Friends, perhaps, of hers. But if -
'Look, I'm going to give you some Aloe Vera gel for these burns, and some propolis. I've brought some, because they gave me a rough idea what happened.' He raked around in his bag.
The sun was lowering across the ocean, reddening the wall in here. I would need to wait for dark before I moved.
'Use the propolis sparingly – it's quite sticky. You're sure you don't have any pain anywhere?'
'No pain.' Just a blinding impatience to find things out.
'You must keep yourself in pretty good shape. I'm going to leave you with some D-Phenylalanine, 500 mg. Take two tablets fifteen or thirty minutes before a meal and make it a total of six per day – it's on the label here. I want – '
'No drugs.'
'It isn't a drug, it's an amino acid, no toxicity, no side-effects. If you'd wanted aspirin and antibiotics and all that horseshit you'd have had to see someone else. It works with L-Phenylalanine to stimulate the neuro-transmitters and the body's own pain-killers.' Shutting the bag, soft hand-shake. 'Her Majesty's picking up the tab – is that how you guys put it? Two numbers there on the bed, the second one's my beeper. Call me any time, midnight, 3 am, whenever, if you need me – you can expect a bit of delayed shock in the night when the blood sugar's low. Call me, okay?'
Said I would.
At the door – 'And get to see The Rainbow. Make time. Trust me.'
The phone rang a minute after he'd gone and I let it go on ringing till it stopped. It would be Ferris, wanting to make a rendezvous for debriefing, and I wasn't ready yet. There'd been too much data coming in and I wanted to do some analysis first on my own.
Flat on the bed with my eyes shut, but the muscles wouldn't let go and I couldn't shift into alpha waves because there is no excuse, there is no conceivable excuse for putting off debriefing by your director in the field at any given time during the mission.
Delayed shock, just as the man said.
Bullshit. There is no excuse.
Sweating a little, cold on the skin, you must surely allow me to express at least a token reaction to being shot at with a trajectory two inches from the back of my skull before that thing smashed into the speedometer, to being shot at twice and hitting a shed full of petrol cans, maybe more than twice – they could have put half a dozen more shots into the inferno and I wouldn't have heard them above the crackling.
Proctor?
The muscles still tensed, the beta waves still whipping me along when all I wanted to do was rest, and wait for nightfall.
1330 West Riverside Way.
Nightfall because I'd need to go there alone, leave them all down there watching the hotel.
The crimson light in the room deepening against the closed lids, the nerves sending multicoloured firecrakers across the retinae, the blood singing through the tympanic membranes, the sweat coming faster now and more copiously because there was no excuse to delay debriefing and yet I knew it was what I had to do.