With every second now, his physical shape was improving. The drug, whatever it was, was wearing off more and more rapidly. The stinging and tingling was easing, too.
Could he sit up? He moved his arms some more, not effectively, then took hold of the top of the sofa back in both hands and slowly pulled himself upward. There was one bad instant of no balance, a sort of threshold between lying and sitting, but he struggled past that point and there he was sitting up.
He was resting a second before trying the major operation of standing when a door to the right opened and three men walked in with drawn guns in their hands. None of them was the doctor.
Grofield looked at them, too worn out even to wonder what this bunch had in mind for him. In the middle of the floor a man was lying on his face, and across the way a door hung broken from its hinges, exposing a view of wintry mountains. Grofield had no way of knowing where he was or who anybody was or what anybody wanted. He had never been so helpless in his life, and was tending to react to it by simply giving up, on the basis that if it won’t do any good to struggle, don’t struggle.
One of the three men went directly to the gaping front door, the second went to the man lying on the floor, and the third came over to Grofield. Grofield looked up at him and was astonished to see it was Ken.
Ken said, “You all right?”
“Drugged,” Grofield said. “Wearing off.”
“Good.” He put his gun away and walked over to the second man, who was a stranger to Grofield, not Charlie. “How’s this one?” he asked.
“Dead,” the stranger said. He’d taken the dead man’s wallet and was leafing through it. “Driver’s license,” he said. “Made out to Albert Beaudry.” He pronounced Albert the English way.
“Don’t know that name,” Ken said. “Let’s see his face.”
The stranger rolled the dead man onto his back, and they both studied his face a minute. “New to me,” the stranger said.
“Me too,” Ken said. He looked over at the doorway, but the third man — also not Charlie — had gone on outside, so he turned to Grofield instead. “You strong enough to stand?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you get a good look at this guy before?”
“I didn’t get a good look at anybody. I’ve been out of it since they got hold of me.”
Ken shook his head. “You’ll never know,” he said, “how much I dislike working with amateurs.”
“Fire me,” Grofield said. “Go ahead, I can take it.”
“Forget it, Grofield. Come over here and see do you recognize this guy.”
“We used to be on a first-name basis, you and I,” Grofield said, trying to struggle to his feet.
The stranger came over and helped Grofield up, holding onto his arm so he wouldn’t fall over again. Ken said, “That was back when you were acting cooperative. Come over here.”
Grofield and the stranger weaved over there, and Grofield looked down at the face of the dead man. “He bumped into me on my way out of Holt Renfrew,” he said. “That’s when he drugged me.”
“Did you ever see him before?”
“No.”
“Did you hear them talking at all?”
“Sure. I was never really out, just paralyzed.”
“Did you hear anything to tell you who they work for, what they wanted?”
“Nothing. Just that they wanted to question me.”
“Did they question you?”
“They didn’t get around to it. You people showed up too soon.”
Ken nodded, looking grumpy, and glanced around the room. “Whose package is that?”
It was what Grofield had just bought, full of the new clothing, and it was standing now against the wall near the broken door. Grofield looked at it and said, “I don’t know. Theirs, I guess.”
“You’re a lousy liar, Grofield,” Ken said. “It’s yours. You were planning a runout.”
“Who says it’s mine?”
The stranger holding his arm grinned and said, “I do, pal. I watched you buy it.”
Grofield looked at him. “Oh,” he said, then flared up, saying, “If you were tailing me like that, how come you let those guys take me away?”
“I wasn’t tailing you,” the stranger said. “I dropped into the store to see what you were doing. Once I saw, I left again.”
“We were waiting for you to make your move,” Ken said. “We were gonna give you a little rope, then reel you in.”
“You people are sadistic.”
“We just want you to understand,” Ken told him, “that you’re with us for the duration.” He pointed a finger at Grofield. “You make any more moves toward running out on us, Grofield, we’ll pack you up and ship you back home to stand trial on that armored car job.”
Grofield shrugged. “All right. You’ve got me sewn up.”
“That’s right. Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“Okay.”
They started out, the stranger still helping Grofield stay upright, and Grofield said, “What about my package?”
“Leave it,” Ken said. “We’d rather you wore what we gave you.”
“Yeah, I guess you would.”
“It’s for your own protection,” the stranger said cheerfully. “If you’d had those other duds on, we’d never have rescued you.”
“Rescued me,” Grofield said. “So this is what it’s like to be rescued.”
They led him out to the car.
Nine
There was no way out of it. Grofield spent the long half hour of the ride back to Quebec thinking about that, learning reluctantly to accept it. There was no way out, he was going to have to try to get the information Ken and his buddies wanted, and at the same time keep that other bunch from kidnapping him again, and at the same time keep Marba and General Pozos from finding out he was actually working for the American government. A juggling act, that’s what he was going to have to perform, simply because there was just no way out of it. They had him in a cage.
The third man was driving, with the stranger beside him, and Ken in back with Grofield. Nobody did much talking until they were back in the city of Quebec again, this time coming in from the northeast, having traveled down out of bleak and snowy mountains north of the city. As the buildings of the city began to fill in the spaces around them, Ken said, “Have you met Henry Carlson yet?”
“He was in my room when I woke up. He wanted to know why Vivian Kamdela had been to see me.”
Ken looked sharply at him. “She went to see you?”
Grofield told Ken the history of his day, and when he was done Ken said, “All right, that’s good, that gives you a way in. She’ll be back, or others will come instead. You can’t let them know you know they work for Colonel Rahgos... ”
“I do?”
“President of Undurwa,” Ken reminded him. “Your friend Marba’s country.”
“Oh. Right.”
“What you do is, you insist on talking to their boss. Sooner or later they’ll take you to Marba, and from there on you can ad-lib.”
“I prefer working from a script, but all right.”
“In the meantime, we’ll try to find out who that bunch was that put the arm on you.”
“That’d be nice.”
“And keep them from doing it again.”
“That’d be nicer.”
They arrived at the hotel a few minutes later, but did not drive on in. Instead, they parked on the Place d’Armes. The short winter twilight had settled on the city now, and across the way the Chateau Frontenac was dramatically lit in amber and green.
Ken said, “We’ll check out your room first, just in case they’re waiting for you. You take a walk around the block and then go on in.”