The Mobius Man

by M. S. Karl

  I stepped around the corner of the building so that no one could see me, and lit a match. I touched it to the straw thatch, and when I was sure it was going well, I went around the back and kept going until I stood behind the hut that served as a jail. I waited until I saw the flicker of the flames and heard someone yell fire. Several forms rushed past, out front, weapons in their hands. Then I stepped around the corner, ready to come down hard on the sentry’s head with the pistol. I didn’t have to, though. The sentry had run up the path with the others, and I was glad because I had not decided the right place to hit a man wearing a steel helmet. I moved the makeshift door and shined in the light.

  “Let’s go.”

  He must have been standing by the door. “Have you got the thing I told you about?” His hand was like a talon on my arm.

  “Yes, for chrissakes, now let’s get out of here.”

  “Where?”

  It would be only ten seconds before someone looked around and saw what was going on. Already I saw movement in the corner of my eye, near the water’s edge. One soldier had not gone and he was coming toward us, bringing his carbine down to aim, but then he saw my gun, hesitated, and the hesitation cost him. Because by then the man called Bassett was on him, wrenching the weapon free and giving him a knee in the guts.

  “The boat!” I yelled. “Get down to the boat!”

  He heard because as I ran for the headquarters hut, I saw him rise from the prone figure of the soldier and head for the river. There was only one thing I wanted in the hut and that was the radio. I fired into the middle of it, and the bullet went out the back. Footsteps were coming toward me now, at the run. I darted out the back of the shack and headed on a diagonal for the river. Halfway down I fell and rolled the rest of the way. The flashlight flew out of my hand. Above me I heard voices, yelling, and a light probed out and touched the black water. Just then I heard the motor cough, and the light picked out the figure of the wanted man, the starter rope in his hand. I fired at the light and it went out as its bearer hit the ground. Somebody opened up with an automatic weapon and the ground around me began to dance as mud flew into my face from the bullets. The motor caught now and the boat started to move.

  I fired once more to keep their heads down and reached for the side of the canoe. I would have made it except for the mud. I felt the suction under my feet and heard the sucking sound and felt the wetness around my knees.

  “Get in!” his voice was urgent and I felt his hands on me.

  “I’m stuck.”

  A pattern of bullets hit the wooden sides of the boat and, this time, the light fixed me in its glare.

  “Get out of here!” I said.

  “Shut up.”

  I turned in a final gesture of defiance and fired at the light again. I heard a curse in Spanish and at the same time his hand wrenched me out of my shoes. I felt the water all around me and held to the side of the canoe as it drifted into the stream.

  A bullet pinged off the top of the gasoline tank and I smelled fumes. At any second the gas might give out and then we would be at the river’s mercy. There would be no avoiding the pursuers.

  Another flurry of bullets tatooed the side of the dugout, inches above my head. We were into the channel now and I was drifting with it. The light was on again but it was farther away. Now and again a stray bullet thudded into the wooden side of the boat, but the hits were getting less frequent. The motor chugged on, missing now and again, but never quitting. His arms helped me up over the side. For five minutes I lay there, half in, half out, afraid of tipping the boat. We were going sideways now in the current, and the engine began to cough. I lurched and made it the rest of the way in. The little canoe rocked, but righted itself. Now we were alone on the river.

  I turned around to look at him, but his outline was almost invisible in the dark. It was a good thing for our escape that there had been no moon, but now the darkness had closed in and menaced us. If we were away from the soldiers, we were into another form of danger; alone and blind in a small canoe on one of the most treacherous rivers of Central America. There were currents we would never know about until we were in them, snags we would never see until we hit them. If we grounded offshore in mud we might still be there by morning. If that weren’t enough, there was a pain in my leg that was slowly getting worse and spreading up to my knee. Afraid of what I would discover, I made myself reach down and touch it. My calf was sticky with mud, but the pain told me that part of the wetness was blood. There was something sloshing in the bottom of the boat and I wondered how much was blood. Next to drowning, I had to consider the possibility of bleeding to death. I sought for the femoral artery and pressed down. He must have heard me moving because I heard his voice over the throb of the little motor.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m hit.”

  “Where?”

  “The leg.”

  “Well, hang on.”

  “Yeah.”

  Then the motor quit and everything was silent, I looked up at my friends, the stars, and wondered if they were laughing. If we stayed on the river long enough we would come to the point where Guatemala gives way to Mexico, above Tenosique, and then there would be no need to worry about which shore. But long before that we would hit either the right shore or the left, or something in between. My thoughts were interrupted by splashing behind me and it took a moment for me to realize what was going on.

  “This cocksucker’s sinking,” he said. “Can you bail?”

  I reached down and felt the water to my ankles. The bullet holes had done their work. I tried to scoop out the water with my cupped hands, but after what seemed half an hour I could not notice any difference.

  “We’re going sideways,” he said in alarm. “Some fucking current’s got us.”

  I could tell we were picking up speed now. A sickening turn in my stomach told me that we had made a half-corkscrew and now were stern into the current. If we could only see the shore, could tell if we were in the middle or near the banks. We were going too fast to be near the shore, though. There was no sense fooling ourselves. We completed the turn and started another, this time faster. But we didn’t finish. Midway through I felt a jar and suddenly the boat was tipped over and I was tilting into the dark waters.

  I heard his curse behind me and the splash as he hit, but I didn’t know what happened to him because I was too busy trying to find a side of the boat. I got a grip and felt it go down. The damned thing was sinking. And my leg was too stiff for me to swim. In that moment I knew that I was going to die and it was all for nothing.

  But I was wrong. I felt his hand on my arm and heard a sound like sticks breaking.

  “Hold on!” he yelled. “I can touch bottom.”

  A few seconds later I felt branches against my face and reached for them. He scrambled onto the bank and then helped me up. I fell onto the soft soil, panting. There was grass around us, and the smell of dead leaves and mold. I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t move.

  “What side of the river are we on?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. All we can do is wait until morning. But I think we made it.”

  I strained my eyes to try to see which way the current was moving but it was no good. He was right: morning would tell. I tried to crawl farther up onto the bank, but a pain shuddered through me and I groaned.

  “Get me some water to wash the mud off my leg,” I told him. He stopped by the river and brought me water in his cupped hands. I sloshed it over my wound and bit my lips as it flowed into the hole the bullet had made. Now, at night, I did not have to look at it. That was both a blessing and a curse. In the morning there would be no avoiding it. I imagined the purple swelling, the puckered hole, the ground-up bits of bone inside. I would never make it from this spot without help, and I’d never survive infection without medical treatment and antibiotics, soon. He squatted down a few feet away and I heard the sound of his breathing.

  “Can you go on?” he asked quietly.

/>   “No. But thanks for the help.”

  “It’s okay. You still have my things?”

  I touched my waist. “I’ve got them.”

  “I’ll need that.”

  “You’ll get them. No hurry. Nobody’s going anywhere tonight.”

  “True.” I heard him ease back, trying to find support against a tree. “We’re stuck until daylight.”

  “Yeah. Then we can go our separate ways.”

  “You can’t go anywhere.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re free.” I tried to smile, but it was a grimace instead.

  “Why? I don’t understand? You save me in the fucking jungle, you let me dump you and the woman and take off, and then you come after me and save me again. What the hell is it with you? Good Samaritan week?”

  “Not hardly.” I felt a wave of pain go over me and gritted my teeth.

  “Then why?”

  “Because of those bastards in Langley and getting it in the ass. Because you’re good at your job. Because Harold Bassett means something to me. Take your choice.”

  “You aren’t making sense.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’ve lost me. What do I mean to you?”

  “You? Nothing. It’s Bassett that means something.”

  “But I’m Bassett,”

  I managed a smile without groaning. “No. I don’t know who you are, but I do know who you’re not. And you’re not Harold Bassett.”

  “What?”

  It seemed strange to have to be dying in the Central American jungle in order to finally be able to confront him with the truth. I propped up on one elbow and looked at his motionless form.

  “Because,” I said, “I am Harold Bassett.”

  There was a long silence, punctuated only by the lapping of the waves, and then he laughed softly. “That’s crazy.”

  “It sounds like it, but it isn’t. Yeah, I know. I’m probably the last person you ever expected to meet down here. When they gave you my name and life, you had no reason to think I was still alive. It isn’t supposed to happen that way. Ever. But you didn’t count on what goes on inside the power structure. And you didn’t count on Leah.”

  “You’re way beyond me,” he said, but now there was doubt in his voice.

  “Sure. Nobody told you the rest of the story. Well, we have time. So I’ll tell it to you now. You had it all down right, you know? I mean, the life of Harold Bassett. My life at the university, the trouble with Judy Howard, my marriage breaking up. You learned it perfectly. Even better, you lived it. You became me and you made it real. The field notebook, with the agonizings. I don’t like to admit it but you got inside me. You were Harold Bassett, and when I saw him I didn’t like him. I was seeing myself objectively for the first time, only I didn’t know it. You’re a great actor, whoever you are. But there’s a part you didn’t get, because all they gave you on Harold Bassett, all you had to memorize, ended on US 77, near Sarah, Texas. When the real Harold Bassett forgot about his driving for a few seconds and met a truck head on.” I stopped to catch my breath. He said nothing so I went on.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to south Texas. If you have, you know it’s one of the most godforsaken wastelands on the face of the earth. It’s an area of vast landholdings, in the hands of a few families. The King Ranch, the Kenedy Ranch, the Armstrong Ranch. And there are others. Acres and acres of private empires as far as the eye can see. And private armies to guard those empires. The law in south Texas hasn’t got anything to do with ballot boxes—it’s the law of a few big land barons, like George Parr. There are parts of that area that even the Geological Survey has been unable to map. Fence lines patrolled by mounted guards and airplanes. A total feudal system. And like in any feudal system, the people who run it are conservative politically. They think they’re still on the wild frontier, upholding the American way. Their politics are often reactionary. They don’t like big government. But when they can maneuver government, manipulate it, get a piece of the action, that’s different. You’ve heard of the way the Hughes Empire was set up? So interwoven with the defense establishment that nobody could tell which was which?”

  “So what’s the point?” he asked.

  “The point is this: On one of the ranches in that area, not as well known as the King or the Armstrong or the Kenedy, there’s a hospital. A privately endowed establishment for medical research. Lots of these land barons try to salve their consciences by setting up trusts and scholarships for their Mexican help, their peones. In this case, it’s a medical foundation. It gets the ranch a tax write-off and makes points with the locals because it takes a lot of local charity cases. But what the locals don’t know, what damned few people know, is that the hospital has one section devoted to a special kind of research. The kind of research Congress and the President have said that the CIA won’t do any more. And, of course, the agency obeys. Because at the Sagan Foundation, as it’s called, the government isn’t doing it. These are private doctors, private technicians, private psychologists, most on indefinite leaves of absence. That hospital was where they sent Harold Bassett. Probably because it was close.

  “When the real Harold Bassett came to, he was in one of those rooms. But it wasn’t in the part of the hospital the public ever sees. Because when they ran the name through their computers for credit, reference and military record, they came up with some interesting results: They came up with the fact that Harold Bassett was expendable, and that part of the hospital dealt in expendable people. You know what I mean, of course. No relatives, divorced or separated, no close friends. Nobody to miss you. That’s what made it so horrible—the fact that the hospital was where it was. Because every week, every day, tens and hundreds of expendable people walk through the fields around it, literally stumble on it. Wetbacks from Mexico, with no identification, nobody to complain, no rights as citizens. And the hospital just sits there like a gigantic spider. And some of them are just never seen again. They’re only missed in some little Mexican village where somebody’s brother or uncle went off to the U.S. and never came back. No questions. It’s a brilliant idea. Evil, but brilliant. And when they ran the name Harold Bassett, he might as well have been one of those wetbacks. But he was something special. A one-in-a-million shot. An educated man, ex-college professor, who could speak Spanish because he’d done his doctoral work in entomology describing new species of lepidoptera in Mexico. They could do a lot with someone like that, though the they in this case is just one person. A female psychologist named Leah. Someone who had waited for months, even years, for the right opportunity. And I was it.

  “It came back to me in a dream, last night. All the bits and pieces finally fit. The strange sensation of watching someone else’s life when I thought about my past, the terrible nightmares, my inability to make it with my wife, the wife who was supposed to be mine. Don’t you see? The brainwashing of the Chinese in the Korean War was nothing. Under Leah, they decided to build me an entirely new personality, a new self. They used everything they had. Psychotherapy between electroshock, to blot out my previous self and convince me it was all hallucination; sodium pentothal and hypnosis to work on my unconscious, sensory deprivation, and sensory overstimulation, even Leah coming to me in my room. Maybe that was hallucination but maybe it was real. I guess that was the whole point, to make reality unreal, so I wouldn’t know what it was. That way, I was susceptible to being programmed. A few sessions with electroshock and I was completely amnesic, like they wanted. They could start the charade and begin to program me with a new life.

  “But then something happened that Leah, the case supervisor, had been afraid of: The higher-ups at the agency took a second look at what she was doing and decided it was too risky, even with the cover they had arranged. Suppose it got out? Even worse than that, suppose it didn’t work? What would they do if someone she had programmed began to remember who he was? That was Kestering’s fear, the reason he argued against the idea. And maybe it was partly because he was just old
-fashioned, too. But she went over his head, politicked, or maybe slept, with the Deputy Director of Operations, got him interested.

  “So Kestering did the wise thing. He agreed to the idea, but he made it clear that if it failed, the responsibility would be hers. And then he looked for the right opportunity to make sure that it would fail. And by the sheerest luck he got more than he ever hoped for.” I bit my lip. The pain was beginning to throb all through me now and it was hard to talk.

  “This part you’ll understand. The part about the agent that they gave my identity. The agent they sent to Mexico with the name Harold Bassett. The agent whose control was Paul LaCour. I don’t know what you were supposed to do. Maybe act as liaison with this Santos. Chances are, you didn’t do much of anything, that’s how I figure it. You saw LaCour sitting back and getting rich off agency funds and filing false reports. Somewhere along the way your loyalties changed. Or maybe they had changed a long time before. You decided to double. To go over to the other side. They call it treason.” I saw his bulk shift in the darkness, but he still did not interrupt. I went on, “It’s usually considered the crime of crimes. But in this case, I think it was a sign of character. Something the real Harold Bassett never had much of. So the man who called himself Bassett decided to switch allegiances from those back-stabbers and power-grabbers in his own agency and go to the other side. Who was it? Chinese? Russians? I suspect the Russians because they operate out of Cuba, and Cuba’s only a couple of hundred miles away. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is you switched and LaCour found out. That was what the fight was about. That was why you killed him, not over butterflies.” I had to change positions, and as I moved, the fire seared through me.