"Can you do it? You'll save me the trouble of waiting around some doctor's office for two hours for five minutes' work."
Veil shrugged. "Hell, I put them in, so I may as well take them out."
I found a pair of small scissors in a drawer in the kitchen. Veil sterilized them with boiling water, sat me down over by a window, then proceeded to remove the stitches from the wound in my forehead.
"By the way," Veil said, "it looks like we won't have to wait around for Garth to tell us who poisoned him-assuming he knows."
I reached up, pushed Veil's hand away from my forehead. "Did you. .?"
"I didn't do anything."
"But the police have caught him?"
Veil shook his head. "Not him; them. Two men. The police don't even know about it yet, although they probably will by this evening. Chances are very good that they're K.G.B. They'd managed to infiltrate the manufacturing section of Prolix."
"How do you know all this?"
"Mr. Lippitt called earlier this afternoon to tell me. I was planning on coming up here anyway, so I said I'd tell you."
"Why the hell didn't Lippitt call me?"
"He said he tried to reach you a number of times, but you were never around. He also called your answering service in the city, but it seems you don't bother checking in with them anymore. He knew you'd be spending a lot of time up in the clinic, but for some reason he preferred not to call you there; he said it might make someone nervous."
I thought about it, nodded. It seemed Mr. Lippitt wasn't quite as oblivious to Charles Slycke's sensibilities as I'd thought. "He's right. I should have touched base with him, or made it easier for him to get hold of me."
"No problem. He wanted you to have the information as soon as possible, and now you've got it. Before I leave, it might be a good idea to set up some kind of system to make it easier for Lippitt or me to get in touch with you if we need to."
"Agreed. You say the police don't even know about these guys yet. Then how. .?"
"They took off; in effect, they fingered themselves. They must have been feeling the heat, and got a bad case of nerves.
"Lippitt told me that the D.I.A. had been working on the case overtime-but keeping a low profile, because they didn't want what's happened to happen. There were a dozen people under surveillance; yesterday morning, two of those people failed to show up for work. The surveillance people let themselves into the men's apartments, found them both cleaned out. Both guys had split during the night without being spotted. But they were in such a big hurry that they left some tracks, and those tracks appear to lead out of the country, probably to Russia. Mr. Lippitt is pissed."
"The hurry and the sloppiness sounds very un-K.G.B.-ish."
"Agreed."
"Maybe they were just amateurs selling information to another company."
"Mr. Lippitt thinks not. I don't know what the evidence is, but he seems certain they were K.G.B."
I thought about it, frowned. "You say they may have been feeling the heat, but they were only two of a dozen people under surveillance. From what I understand, the K.G.B. is usually pretty good at making clean, orderly retreats. Why would they have suddenly panicked and taken off like that?"
"Mr. Lippitt has a rather interesting theory on that subject."
"Which is?"
"Think about it. What's been happening the past couple of days?"
"For Christ's sake, Veil, I haven't exactly been keeping up on current events."
Veil's response was to go back to work on my forehead. When he had removed the last stitch and cleansed the wound with peroxide, he leaned back against a counter and made a gesture which seemed to indicate the building-or the entire hospital complex.
"Garth?” I said.
Veil nodded. "That's Mr. Lippitt's notion. It was four days ago that Garth first showed signs of coming around-after you started playing the Ring for him."
"Wrong. Four days ago I played Das Rheingold for him, and he didn't respond at all. He cried two nights ago, but I was the only one who saw that. Nothing heavy happened until last night, and according to you these guys were gone by then."
"To your eyes, Garth didn't respond to Das Rheingold. One of Garth's nurses made a note on Garth's chart four days ago that Garth had possibly displayed emotional reaction to a stimulus. The music, and your role, wasn't mentioned, but the possibility of increased awareness was."
"How the hell does Lippitt know that?"
"It seems your old friend has his own means of keeping track of what goes on in that clinic. He's been closely following Garth's progress since the day he arrived here. He knows all about the conflict between Slycke and you, because Slycke has been bitching about Lippitt and you to anyone who'll listen."
"That's almost funny," I said, and laughed without humor.
"What's almost funny?"
"Slycke has been worried about me being sent to spy on him, and all the while Lippitt must know every time the man farts. It makes me wonder if Lippitt gave me that high-powered pass to distract Slycke from the real spy, or spies, Lippitt has in there."
"That seems unlikely, Mongo, judging from the way he obviously feels about the two of you. But you know Mr. Lippitt better than I do."
"Nobody really knows Mr. Lippitt. I don't think anyone but Lippitt even knows how old he is; they just know he's old."
"Mr. Lippitt's thinking is that Garth, in hindsight, would know exactly who it was who tried to kill him. The K.G.B.-if that's who was behind it-would be very much afraid of that. As soon as it looked like Garth might be coming around, the two agents were given hasty marching orders."
"I told you: Garth hardly talks at all, and what he does say doesn't make a whole lot of sense."
"When the information was passed on, nobody knew what Garth would or wouldn't say; the source of concern was that he might be talking at all."
"That would mean Lippitt isn't the only one with eyes and ears in the clinic."
"Precisely Mr. Lippitt's concern. If his notion has any validity at all, it means there's a K.G.B. agent operating right under Slycke's nose."
Even paranoids could have real enemies, I thought. And valid reasons to be afraid. "Jesus," I said, "it could be Slycke himself. It would certainly explain the supersnit he's been in since Garth and I showed up, wouldn't it? Maybe he has damn good reasons for fearing that Lippitt sent me to spy on him."
Veil shrugged. "He's certainly made no secret of his distrust and suspicion of you. I think a trained operative would be a good deal more subtle."
"Maybe he's being subtle by not being subtle."
Veil smiled. "That's too subtle. Of course, it could be Slycke-but it could also be anybody with access to clinical information; it could be any of the psychiatrists, nurses, or other workers up there. It could even be a patient who'd been carefully planted; from what I understand, virtually anyone up there could have walked into Garth's room at any time, day or night, and seen the notation on Garth's chart."
"True-except for the patients in the secure unit."
Veil raised his eyebrows slightly. "People easily fall into predictable routines, Mongo, as you well know. People working at night often take naps at certain times. If I were an operative working a place like that, I'd prefer to be in a secure unit where my movements were supposedly severely restricted. I'd simply make certain I had a key."
"A good point. But all this talk is highly hypothetical, right?"
"Highly. Mr. Lippitt simply asked me to share his notion with you-and to tell you not to try to look into it on your own, in case you're curious."
"I'm much more skeptical than I am curious, but even if it were the other way around, I wouldn't do any kind of snooping while Garth is up there. He's too vulnerable."