"It's nearby," the White Man said. "You'll see it before long."
The door opened again, and two young soldiers entered and walked briskly to Caan's bedside. As usual, one held Caan's arms locked behind him while the other unfastened the ankle straps.
He didn't resist. The routine was too familiar by now. The bed, the endless, bloody movies on the wall, the white man, the soldiers. And The Room.
"Don't take me," Caan said in a small voice shaking with fear. "Please."
'The White Man smiled briefly, a crisp acknowledgement of his own successful efforts. Then he gestured to the two soldiers.
"Not the room," Caan howled, the sound utterly out of control, half-moan, half-scream, with a hint of question in it. "I can't go there..."
The soldiers dragged him from the bed.
To The Room.
In The Room, which was an operating room, a white bird flapped from its perch to light on the White Man's shoulder as Caan was being strapped onto one of the two flat metal tables there. The White Man stroked the gull, cooing lovingly, then turned to inspect the tray of arcane surgical instruments that had been wheeled to Caan's side.
"Thank you," he said to the two soldiers. He removed the bird from his shoulder and handed it to one of the men. With a nod, they left.
Caan's breathing quickened as the other man snapped on a pair of rubber gloves with easy expertise.
"You do not have to be here," he said. "Just agree to perform the mission, and you'll never see this room again."
Caan blinked silently. The White Man's icy eyes moved closer, peering at him from above the gold-rimmed spectacles. "You will have exercise and good food and companionship. Perhaps even a room with flowers where you can sleep. Wouldn't you like to sleep, Mr. Caan?" he teased.
"But..." Caan caught himself blubbering, and stopped.
The White Man bent over solicitously. "But what? Go ahead, speak. It will help us both to talk together, don't you think?"
"The mission," Caan said.
The White Man smiled, again only with his lips. The cold eyes still bored into Caan's. "That's all," he said with studied patience. "Just one flight. Before the flight, you'll be treated with care and respect. Afterward, you will be free. You will never have to return here."
"But you're asking me to destroy my country!" Caan screamed. "My country."
The smile clicked off like a mechanism. "You are a Jew," the White Man said with loathing. "You have no country."
There was no more talk. He picked up one of the metal instruments, held it up to the light, and pressed it behind Caan's ear. As the metal touched flesh, a single image crossed Caan's terrified mind. A strange image, incongruous under the circumstances: it was a memory of his grandmother sitting in the stuffed brown rocking chair in her living room, a crocheted antimacassar behind her head.
The pilot's first scream echoed through the cave. As he weakened, they grew faint.
?Chapter Eight
Remo waited in an isolated chamber of the cave complex. Two orange vinyl settees were the only furniture. The rest of the room was bare except for the shelves lining all four stone walls, fitted with Latin-labeled specimen jars containing various sorts of tissue. A solitary finger, half eaten by disease, floated in one. Others held organs, human embryos, and skin samples. Some full limbs floated in covered plastic vats, neatly labeled and piled in a corner. They bore little resemblance to human beings, but one thing was certain: all the bodily parts lining the shelves had once belonged to lepers.
He almost dropped a jar filled with lung tissue when he heard the pilot's scream. It came from somewhere nearby, but the deceptive echoes of the cave dispersed the sound so that it seemed to come from everywhere. Remo replaced the jar and moved over to the window, which had been chiseled out of solid rock.
No guards surrounded the opening, and only four iron bars separated the room from the rest of the valley. Beyond, the leper village stood like a Nativity tableau. A row of fat white birds perched on the sill outside, placed and watchful.
With a click the door opened and Ana stepped inside. Her eyes were glassy and dreamy. They passed over Remo as if he weren't there.
"What happened to you?" he asked.
The girl sat primly on one of the settees, straight-backed and silent. She stared straight ahead.
"Ana, you've got to talk to me. What's going on? Why'd you run away from me like that?"
Her smile reminded Remo of the Mona Lisa's, demure and faintly questioning.
"Don't you even remember me?"
She shook her head slowly, her eyes never quite meeting his.
"Who's Zoran?" he asked.
Her brow furrowed.
"Who's Zoran?"
She clapped her hands over her ears.
"Who's Zoran?" he repeated.
"Stop!" she shrieked.
The door opened quietly. Caan's "white man," the bird again perched on his shoulder, entered. He was brisk and efficient, paying attention only to the girl. With a yank, he pulled her head back so that her terrified eyes were on him. He passed a hand near her face several times in a quick wave. She grew quiet, her expression soft and lost.
After a moment, he stepped back and looked Remo up and down in cool appraisal. "I am Zoran," he said. "Although knowledge of my identity will not be of much use to you."
"What have you done to her?" Remo demanded.
Zoran chuckled. "You Americans have always fancied yourselves heroes." He walked to the far end of the room, picked up a specimen jar, and fondled it distractedly. Ana here has told me that you are much respected among her people." He continued to look at Remo for a moment after he spoke, then burst suddenly into a bout of loud, coarse laughter. "Her people. Lepers. The dregs of the human race. Nature's irreparable mistakes, the discards of evolution. How does it feel to be king of the lepers?"
Ana continued to sit silently, oblivious to what was being said.
"You the guy who did this?" Remo asked, sweeping his arm to indicate a row of pickled fetuses.
"Oh, they do have their uses, I suppose," Zoran said with chilling whimsy. "The lepers, I mean."
"I can guess what use you have for them."
Zoran snapped to attention. "My experiments are for the good of mankind," he said hotly. "They always have been. By using as test cases an inferior group of humans— humans for whom the rest of humanity has no use— a scientist can further the world's knowledge of the human organism and its possibilities by great bounds rather than by the slow inches of animal research and laboratory mathematics. Do you understand me?" He dismissed Remo with a flick of his wrist. "No, of course not."
"Don't give yourself so much credit," Remo said. "You're not the first creep to try your so-called 'experiments' on human beings. The concentration camps in World War Two were full of your kind."
"Their kind, you mean," Zoran corrected, pointing to the specimen jars with a smile. "There are always more laboratory rats than there are laboratory researchers."
The sight of the man disgusted Remo. He turned to the window, where the birds crowded one another with shoves and angry squawks. One of them pecked viciously at the bird next to it. It drew blood. The recipient of the blow fluttered upward for a moment, spraying dots of red over its glossy wing feathers, then swooped onto its attacker's chest with talons like razors. With its victim screeching and jerking beneath it, the bird thrust its beak into the soft white neck and, in an instant of gory triumph, tore out its throat, still throbbing with its heartbeat. The dead bird's head rolled back, bathed in its own blood.
Suddenly it all made sense. "These birds killed the crew of the Andrew Jackson," Remo said flatly, knowing it to be true.
"Very perceptive." He stroked the feathers of the gull on his shoulder. "Actually, it was the simplest sort of genetic engineering. But you see, the lepers made it all possible," he said expansively. "Another giant leap for mankind." The half-moon smile on his lips broadened.