Thin Air

by George Simpson

Yablonski wrapped an arm around her shoulder. "Momma, I'm okay. Really. We've got to trust them...for a while." The last he said with a dark glance at Hammond.

  "Mrs. Yablonski," said Hammond, "I wish I knew enough to tell you exactly what's going on, but I don't yet. Until then, you and your husband will be somewhere safe, and if he needs medical care, he'll have it."

  She frowned at him in mistrust, then caved in. She went to get her purse and Hammond gave out instructions. Andrews and Keyes would personally deliver the videotape and sound master to Cohen and Slater at the Naval Research Lab in Washington. Hammond himself would send all of McCarthy's effects over by special car when he got back to the Pentagon. He and Yablonski would fly back to Washington aboard the Jet-Star and meet Mrs. Yablonski at Hammond's apartment.

  He didn't remember about Jan until the moment his key entered the lock. He opened the door and switched on a light. She wasn't there. Leaving Yablonski in the living room, he ducked into the bedroom. She wasn't there, either. Her clothes and luggage were gone. He stood trying to figure where she might have gone. He looked around for a note, but there was nothing. At least he wouldn't have to explain her to Yablonski. He went to the kitchen to get some beer.

  NIS headquarters was still open, so Hammond called Jack Pohl, Assistant Director for Operations, and pressed him for a safe house.

  "The one in Herndon sounds fine. Is it available?" he asked. "Well then, how soon? I got a guy sitting here with no place to stay."

  He winked reassuringly at Yablonski, who was slumped in a chair, his legs up on the driftwood coffee table, one hand methodically sifting his thinning hair. Hammond checked his watch. Mrs. Yablonski would be arriving in another hour. He wanted everything set up so he could leave them alone overnight. He definitely did not want them here in his apartment.

  "Yes, Jack, I'm still here," Hammond sighed into the phone. "Yes, Admiral Gault is well aware of what I'm doing. Uh-huh. That's fine. What day can we have it?" Hammond listened, then swore under his breath. "Let me know when I can return the favor." He hung up and turned to Yablonski. "There's a house in Herndon, Virginia, out near Dulles Airport, code, name MAGIC. We can have it in a couple of days. Meanwhile, there's a beautiful little inn right up the street. I suggest we stash you there. Security will be a little tough, but we'll make, every effort."

  Yablonski was angry. "What makes you think anyplace is safe from that Irish Houdini? You saw how he got out of that cell. He can probably get in just as easily!"

  "I didn't see how he got out. I would very much have liked to. And as for getting in, first he's got to know where you are. The Herndon house is very safe: it's unknown outside of NIS operations."

  "I don't know, Hammond....I'm not too happy about subjecting my wife to any of this."

  Hammond cracked a beer and handed it to Yablonski. "The more I think about it," he said, "the more I'm positive there was a secret exit in that detention cell. McCarthy knew the building."

  "Oh, come on, Hammond. How did the guy know you were going to put him in that room? How could he have made preparations for being caught and jailed in the same place?"

  Hammond sipped his beer, and tried not to think of the answer, but it was right there in front of them: somehow, Dr. McCarthy had dematerialized. Hammond shook his head and was about to make another idiotic guess when the phone rang. It was Jack Pohl. He had secured penthouse number nine at the Georgetown-Dutch Inn, a two-story apartment with a kitchen and two baths.

  Hammond relayed the information to Yablonski, who grunted in grudging approval. Then Hammond added: "I'm giving you an agent. He'll sleep on your couch."

  "My wife'll probably cook for him."

  "Then I'll get you one who's undernourished."

  After arranging for Mrs. Yablonski to be met and brought to the inn, Hammond threw on plain clothes and walked Yablonski up Thomas Jefferson Street. Yablonski glanced over his shoulder at the C&O.

  "Got a great view of the canal from that penthouse," said Hammond.

  "I don't give a shit about canals. Just get my wife here."

  "Shortly."

  The penthouse suite started on the sixth floor. Hammond looked it over carefully, checking closets and rooms while Yablonski watched him. The security agent arrived. Ike Menninger was a tall kid with a perpetually open mouth, and he certainly looked undernourished, Hammond left them alone, admonishing Yablonski to send out for food as needed or to let Menninger go get it "I'll pick you up at nine a.m.," he said, and left.

  Back home, Hammond tumbled into his own bed for the first time in days and reflected briefly on Jan Fletcher's whereabouts before falling into a dead sleep.

  Hammond picked up Yablonski promptly at nine, pausing only long enough to be certain Mrs. Yablonski was comfortable arid to reassure her that everything was going to be all right. He left Menninger with her and drove to the Pentagon with her husband.

  "How long do you think this will take?" asked Yablonski. "Catching McCarthy."

  "Not long," Hammond said hopefully.

  "I'm liable to lose a lot of business while you're playing Kojak. Maybe I should give you a week and then go home and take my chances."

  "Fine," said Hammond. He could negotiate for more time later.

  He stashed Yablonski in his office and let him use the phone to call the McKay brothers and arrange to turn his boat over to them until further notice.

  Hammond ducked into another cubicle for privacy, and made the obligatory call to Admiral Gault.

  "I suppose you're going to want expenses for all this" was Gault's first comment after ten minutes of listening. "I'd like to see that videotape," he added.

  "I sent it over to Slater for copying. I can have him run it for you later."

  "Why didn't you tell me about these, uh, dreams before?"

  "Honestly, sir, I didn't put much credence in them, but now since there are two men with the same—"

  "You better write it all down, Hammond. You know, the way we usually do things around here."

  "Yes, sir—"

  "I suspect you're trying to tell me this McCarthy bugged your office?"

  "I think he knows who did, sir."

  "And you want to press on even if it turns out he didn't. Right?"

  "On the nose, sir."

  "Well, where is McCarthy? I'd like to have a word with him."

  Hammond closed his eyes and struggled to describe how he and Yablonski had entered the detention room where McCarthy had been locked up and found him missing.

  "Whaddaya mean, missing?"

  "Gone. Vanished. He slipped out. I have no idea how."

  There was silence for a long, agonizing moment, then Gault came back. "If you didn't have that videotape, you'd be picking up your discharge right now."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I can't go to Smitty with a fruitcake story like that, Nick!"

  "Maybe on paper—"

  "Put it there fast! Because you're still leaving me wide open to two questions: who bugged your office and what's being done about it?"

  "Yes, sir..." Hammond replied meekly.

  He finished the conversation and got up, depressed that Gault's major concern was still the goddamned bugging incident. Hammond opened the door and looked down the hall. His eyes fell on Ensign Just-Ducky, wearing a plaid sweater and skirt and looking good enough to eat. What he wouldn't give right now for two weeks on a beach with her.

  He straightened as Cohen and Slater entered the Pit and came toward his office. Slater was lugging a heavy suitcase. They convened in Hammond's office and he closed the door.

  Yablonski was slouched in a chair. He met the boys' cheerful smiles with a blank stare. Slater dropped the suitcase on Hammond's desk with a resounding thud. "Greetings," he said.

  "What've you got in there?" asked Hammond. "Dr. McCarthy?"

  "Wouldn't that be cozy?" said Cohen as Slater popped the lid and exposed the innards stuffed with tapes and graph paper and bound reports and McCarthy's personal gear. Cohen turned to Yablonski a
nd told him, "We put your Zethacide session through the voice-print analyzer, and it's taken the position that your dream experience was real—at least to you."

  "Didn't fare quite so well with McCarthy," added Slater. "We put the tape of your Boston Tea Party through the analyzer, too. And, just look, at the pretty pattern." He held up a print-out that looked like the cardiogram of a patient badly in need of heart surgery. "Here, see this spot? The bozo lied right off the page!"

  Slater put a report on Hammond's desk and announced, "Transcript of our session with Yablonski, more copies available as needed—" Then he shoved a handful of rough-typed copy under a paperweight. "Transcript of your meeting with McCarthy, typed by two left-handed monkeys. Here's the original software and two copies."

  Slater turned over the videotape and sound master and the copies they had made. Hammond's desk was nearly covered.

  "We culled out all the names mentioned in the session with Yablonski, and your Data Center is running checks on them through BUPERS. We instructed them to pinpoint the ones marked with red flags but ignore the code follow-through."

  Slater moved the suitcase to the extra desk and hauled out McCarthy's gear, including the cassette recorder, a big envelope containing his personal effects, and the file notebook on Yablonski.

  Cohen opened the envelope and dumped McCarthy's effects on the desk. He picked up a gold ring with a red stone set in the center. "High school ring. Black-Foxe Military Institute, Los Angeles, California, 1962."

  Hammond looked puzzled. "McCarthy's a lot older than that."

  "It's not his ring. Probably picked it up in a pawn shop somewhere. Thought it would give him the image of a regular guy. School doesn't even exist anymore. However, Slater located a former graduate from two years later who checked his old yearbooks. No McCarthy at all."

  Cohen picked up McCarthy's wallet. "Every scrap of ID in here is phony, but none of it is stolen, and it's all been carefully pieced together to give no indication whatsoever of the man's true identity."

  "Too bad you didn't get his clothes," said Slater. "We could have traced the labels."

  "Government issue?" Hammond snorted.

  Slater shrugged. Cohen held up the cassette deck. "A standard Sony TC-66 Auto Shutoff Cassettecorder, several years old, serial number expertly burned off, probably with a soldering gun. It's like every other model of its kind except for one thing: it doesn't record. Instead, it throws out a low impedance oscillation, which, in combination with a rhythmic motion of the microphone, can induce a state of hypnosis. I put Slater under in five minutes."

  "It's really not very sophisticated," Slater commented, "just insidious—and effective."

  "We thought perhaps we could work on Mr. Yablonski with this for a while—" Cohen glanced at Yablonski, whose eyes were shut, hands pyramided before his mouth and nose. "See if we can't peel him back any further. Using McCarthy's gear, we might be able to reverse the process."

  Yablonski's eyes opened and he stared uneasily at the small black instrument.

  "Not just yet," said Hammond. "Carry on."

  Cohen flipped 'open McCarthy's notebook. "Basically, this book is a record of McCarthy's treatment-for Yablonski, complete with update notations and separate status reports. There are progressive instructions on how to deal with him: some typed, some written in several different hands. The progressive comments lead, us to believe they were perfecting their technique over a period of years. New ways to keep the patient under control, tailored to the man's current psychological profile and taking into account changes in his personal life."

  Cohen walked behind Yablonski. "They watched him; they judged him; they even molded him a little bit."

  He threw a cautionary glance at Hammond, who looked to Yablonski. The older man was staring at the floor but well aware of Cohen standing behind him. "Don't hold back on my account," Yablonski said.

  Cohen turned pages in the notebook. "It's right here in black and white: clear instructions on how to get the patient to do whatever they wanted. Mr. Yablonski, do you own a Bertram Sportfisherman?"

  "Yes."

  "When did you buy it?"

  "Three years ago."

  "August, three years ago?"

  "Yes."

  "Here's a report dated the previous April, in which McCarthy has located three boats to choose from and he recommends the Bertram Sportfisherman." Yablonski looked up. "There's an entry in early June," Cohen went on, reading: " 'Bertram Sportfisherman, first suggestion to patient.'" Cohen faced Yablonski. "He made you buy that boat, Mr. Yablonski."

  "I wanted to buy it!" Cas bellowed.

  "He made you want to buy it. He guided you. He led you by the nose."

  Yablonski stared up at him, angry, tensing to spring.

  "That's enough," Hammond said softly. "We get the idea."

  Cohen shrugged, unflappable. He flipped a couple of pages and resumed. "Phone calls—Yablonski's requests for help—all logged in here along with date and place of treatment. They've been using the Boston Naval Hospital for better than fifteen years. During that period, the spread between time of call and time of treatment has been substantially shortened. In 1964, Yablonski called on a Tuesday and met with the doctor on Thursday. Last year, he was able to call on a Monday morning and be treated that same night."

  "And yesterday, the spread was three hours," finished Hammond.

  "Not so amazing if McCarthy lived full time in Boston and had nowhere else to go. But we know he was treating Harold Fletcher in Los Angeles, also on twenty-four-hour call. We're faced with an interesting problem: how does this guy get around so fast?"

  "And how does he walk through walls?" added Hammond.

  Cohen grunted. "I leave that to you. Now, the best for last," he said, and yielded the floor to Slater, who held up McCarthy's cigarette lighter.

  "Anyone need a light?" he asked. "Hope not, because this is not your garden variety Zippo. A light from this one will put you out like a light. Forever. It contains a lethal dose of a little-known gas distilled from tropical cone shells.

  "There's nothing much new about the device itself," Slater continued. "It's just like any other butane lighter. The Russians have been using this little devil for years. But the gas—that's something else. Very new, very classified. It comes from a deadly species of cone shell called the textile cone, found in profusion from Polynesia all the way to the Red Sea. Its sting consists of a puncture wound delivered by a highly specialized venom apparatus. The mortality rate from such a, wound is 20 percent, higher than from rattlers and cobras. Death can occur within several hours. Symptoms begin with a binning pain, followed by numbness and tingling throughout the body, centering primarily on the mouth and lips. If the sting is severe, it will induce paralysis and possibly death through cardiac failure. To manufacture a lethal dose, you catch yourself a few cone shells, extract the poison, and distill a concentrate strong enough to kill instantly. I wanted to try this one out on Cohen, but he talked me out of it—"

  He stopped. Hammond was getting to his feet, his face white. An image was running through his mind: Harold Fletcher's body slumped over a coffee table in the apartment at the Watergate—the chain-smoker who would never question the offer of a light from his own doctor.

  That's why the ashtray was empty: McCarthy had cleaned it.

  Hammond turned to Slater. "Are you sure it leaves no trace? We've got a body that might have to be exhumed."

  "Waste of time. Let the poor guy rest."

  Yablonski stood up, staring first at Hammond, then at the ominous cigarette lighter. "Fletcher?" he asked.

  "I'm almost sure," Hammond replied with disgust. He nodded at Slater. "What about fingerprints on that thing?"

  "Nada. And none on his stolen car, either. Personally, I'd say the guy doesn't have fingerprints, or maybe he burns them off regularly."

  Cohen and Slater spread their hands simultaneously and Slater said, "That's all, folks." They wrapped up, stacking all the originals, tapes and reports, o
n Hammond's second desk and chucking duplicates back into their suitcase. Hammond asked them to take the videotape and run it for Gault, and to keep going on their content analysis of Yablonski's Zethacide session.

  As soon as they were gone, Hammond turned back to Yablonski. He was tense with anger. "How do you feel about McCarthy now?" Hammond asked.

  "I'd like to settle up." He got to his feet. "Nobody runs my life for me."

  They sent out for coffee and doughnuts, which arrived just ahead of a yeoman from the NIS Data Center with the results of investigating the names taken from Yablonski's tape.

  Butler and Martin were both deceased. So was Terkel: he'd committed suicide in 1967. They were still checking on Rinehart. Of the handful of names checked through BUPERS, only one turned up alive and available: Olively, listed as a patient at the Navy Psychiatric Center, Bethesda, Maryland.

  Hammond thanked the yeoman and looked at Yablonski. "Remember anything about Olively?"

  "No. I'm sorry."

  "Don't worry." Hammond reflected a moment, then said, "I think we should pay turn a call. Feel up to it?"

  "Okay."

  They were just leaving the Pit when the receptionist motioned Hammond to the phone. It was Jan Fletcher, calling from Dulles Airport. She was going back to L.A. to straighten out her husband's affairs and get his will filed. Hammond barely listened—he still had images of her husband taking the light offered by Dr. McCarthy. But he couldn't tell her that. He asked for her home phone number.

  "Why?"

  "I want to keep in touch," he replied.

  There was a silence from her end and Hammond found himself listening to the airport terminal sounds over the line, then a set of digits came across in a hurried Voice: "Four-seven-three, seven-three-oh-four." She hesitated another second, then said, "Thanks for showing me you haven't changed at all."

  She hung up and Hammond scowled with confusion. Was that a compliment or an insult? "

  An insult, he finally decided, as they drove up Wisconsin Avenue to the National Naval Medical Center. And she was right. He hadn't changed. His job still came first. But what was she supposed to be to him now? Friend? Sister? Conscience? He decided he would get in touch with her...someday...if only to get in the last word. But if he contacted her again, wouldn't he be obliged to tell her the truth about her husband?