Elaine Atwood was fifty, five years younger than her husband and twenty-four years older than her lover. She knew the man who had driven her wild and brought back her youth as Adrian Queens, a British graduate student at American University. Her husband knew all about her lover, but he knew that Adrian Queens was really Alexy Ivan Podgovich, an aspiring KGB agent who hoped to milk the wife of a prominent American intelligence officer for information necessary to advance his career. The “affair” between Podgovich and his wife amused him and served his purposes very well. It kept Elaine busy and distracted and provided him with an opportunity to make an intelligence coup of his own. Such things never hurt a man’s career, if he knows how to take advantage of opportunity.
“I may just stay over at Jane’s after the concert, darling. Do you want me to call?”
“No, dear, I’ll just assume you are with her if you aren’t home by midnight. Don’t worry about me. Give Jane my love.”
The couple emerged from the house. Atwood delivered a perfunctory kiss to his wife’s powdered cheek. Before she reached the car in the driveway (a sporty American car, not the Mercedes) her mind was on her lover and the long night ahead. Before Atwood closed the front door his mind was back on Maronick.
Malcolm saw the scene in the doorway, although he couldn’t discern features at that distance. The wife’s departure made his confidence surge. He would wait thirty minutes.
Fifteen of that thirty minutes had elapsed when Malcolm realized there were two men walking up the driveway toward the house. Their figures barely stood out from the shadows. If it hadn’t been for their motion, Malcolm would never have seen them. The only thing he could distinguish from his distant perch was the tall leanness of one of the men. Something about the tall man triggered Malcolm’s subconscious, but he couldn’t pull it to the surface. The men, after ringing the bell, vanished inside the house.
With binoculars, Malcolm might have seen the men’s car. They had parked it just off the road inside the gate and walked the rest of the way. Although he wanted to leave traces of his visit to Atwood’s house, Maronick saw no point in letting Atwood get a look at their car.
Malcolm counted to fifty, then began to pick his way toward the house. Three hundred yards. In the darkness it was hard to see tree limbs and creepers reaching to trip him and bring him noisily down. He moved slowly, ignoring the scratches from thornbushes. Halfway to the house, Malcolm stumbled over a stump, tearing his pants and wrenching his knee, but somehow he kept from crying out. One hundred yards. A quick, limping dash through brush stubble and long grass before he crouched behind the stone wall. Malcolm eased the heavy magnum into his hand while he fought to regain his breath. His knee throbbed, but he tried not to think about it. Over the stone wall lay the house yard. In the yard to the right was the crumbling tool shed. A few scattered evergreens stood between him and the house. To his left was blackness.
Malcolm looked at the sky. The moon hadn’t risen yet. There were few clouds and the stars shone brightly. He waited, catching his breath and assuring himself his ears heard nothing unusual in the darkness. He vaulted the low wall and ran to the nearest evergreen. Fifty yards.
A shadow quietly detached itself from the tool shed to swiftly merge with an evergreen. Malcolm should have noticed. He didn’t.
Another short dash brought Malcolm to within twenty-five yards of the house. Glow from inside the building lit up all but a thin strip of grass separating him and the next evergreen. The windows were low. Malcolm didn’t want to chance a fleeting glance to the outside catching him running across the lawn. He sprawled to his belly and squirmed across the thin shadowed strip. Ten yards. Through open windows he could hear voices. He convinced himself different noises were his imagination playing on Mother Nature.
Malcolm took a deep breath and made a dash for the bush beneath the open window. As he was taking his second step, he heard a huffing, rushing noise. The back of his neck exploded into reverberating fire.
Chapter 10
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Consciousness returned abruptly to Malcolm. He felt a dim awareness around his eyes, then suddenly his body telegraphed a desperate message to his brain: he had to vomit. He lurched forward, up, and had his head thrust into a thoughtfully provided bucket. When he stopped retching, he opened his aching eyes to take in his plight.
Malcolm blinked to clear his contacts. He was sitting on the floor of a very plush living room. In the opposite wall was a small fireplace. Two men sat in easy chairs between him and that wall. The man who shot Wendy and his companion. Malcolm blinked again. He saw the outline of a man on his right. The man was very tall and thin. As he turned to take a closer look, the man behind him jerked Malcolm’s head so he again faced the two seated men. Malcolm tried to move his hands, but they were tied behind his back with a silk tie that would leave no marks.
The older of the two men smiled, obviously very pleased with himself. “Well, Condor,” he said, “welcome to my nest.”
The other man was almost impassive, but Malcolm thought he saw curious amusement in the cold eyes.
The older man continued. “It has taken us a long time to find you, dear Malcolm, but now that you are here, I’m really rather glad our friend Maronick didn’t shoot you too. I have some questions to ask you. Some questions I already know the answers to, some I don’t. This is the perfect time to get those answers. Don’t you agree?”
Malcolm’s mouth was dry. The thin man held a glass of water to his lips. When Malcolm finished, he looked at the two men and rasped, “I have some questions too. I’ll trade you answers.”
The older man smiled as he spoke. “My dear boy. You don’t understand. I’m not interested in your questions. We won’t even waste our time with them. Why should I tell you anything? It would be so futile. No, you shall talk to us. Is he ready yet, Cutler, or did you swing that rifle a little too hard?”
The man holding Malcolm had a deep voice. “His head should be clear by now.” With a quick flick of his powerful wrists the man pulled Malcolm down to the floor. The thin man pinned Malcolm’s feet, and Maronick pulled down Malcolm’s pants. He inserted a hypodermic needle into Malcolm’s tensed thigh, sending the clear liquid into the main artery. It would work quicker that way, and the odds that a coroner would notice a small injection on the inside of a thigh are slim.
Malcolm knew what was happening. He tried to resist the inevitable. He forced his mind to picture a brick wall, to feel a brick wall, smell a brick wall, become a brick wall. He lost all sense of time, but the bricks stood out. He heard the voices questioning him, but he turned their sounds to bricks for his wall.
Then slowly, piece by piece, the truth serum chiseled away at the wall. His interrogators carefully swung their hammers. Who are you? How old are you? What is your mother’s name? Small, fundamental pieces of mortar chipped away. Then bigger hunks. Where do you work? What do you do? One by one, bricks pried loose. What happened last Thursday? How much do you know? What have you done about it? Why have you done it?
Little by little, piece by piece, Malcolm felt his wall crumble. While he felt regret, he couldn’t will the wreckage to stop. Finally his tired brain began to wander. The questions stopped and he drifted into a void. He felt a slight prick on his thigh and the void filled with numbness.