Skywatcher

by Winona Kent

  He yanked again, and Wendy of the Perpetual Injections appeared in the doorway, slightly bemused by the look of alarm on Robin’s face.

  “Is that old man all right?” he said.

  Wendy peeked around the yellow curtain that separated the two beds. “He’s fine,” she answered at last, with what Robin took to be a perverse fondness. “Just a little bronchitis, that’s all.”

  She transferred her attention to Robin, moving over to his bed and taking his pulse. They seemed to do things like that automatically, nurses. Any spare wrists around? Let me feel.

  “Did you get up at all today?” she asked. Her fingers were cool, nice.

  “Twice,” Robin said, fairly pleased with himself. “Jogged around the park.”

  Wendy was unimpressed.

  “Here,” Robin said, offering her his other wrist. “Check this one, too—I think it might be running a little fast.”

  That got a smile out of her. She let him have his pulse back—both arms—and left to check on the miserable old woman across the hallway who kept complaining about draughts.

  On the other side of the yellow curtain, the growling began again, in earnest. Robin kicked off the sheets and eased himself up, using his elbows for leverage. He sat on the edge of the high mattress for a few seconds, legs dangling, waiting for his head to clear and the momentary dizziness to pass. Then he slid off, grasping the corner of the night table, making sure he wasn’t going to pitch headfirst onto the floor.

  The Angel of Bronchial Death was nothing but a bag of bones, blankets pulled up to his chin, nose pointing to heaven. He didn’t seem long for this world. Robin stood at the foot of the bed, watching the ragged breaths struggle in and out, feeling sorry for the man because no one had come to see him during visiting hours. A nurse from Puerto Rico had fed him his dinner, using the kind of verbal coaxing mothers reserve for very young children. As he watched, the coughing started once more, disgorging what he imagined to be some kind of foul soup from the depths of the old man’s shriveled lungs.

  He looked away and caught sight of the battered mess that was his back in the large oval mirror hanging over the dressing table. He turned slightly, so that he was looking into the mirror over his shoulder. He stared at the damage for quite a long time.

  Honorable scars. That’s what his father had said, a curious observation in the middle of his visit today. Honorable scars—yes, he supposed, there would be a few, after everything had healed. Something interesting for the women to ask about, later on.

  For a brief period, my darling, I was a spy, and these marks were acquired in the line of duty, protecting father, brother, and country.

  Giving the beleaguered face in the mirror an encouraging smile, he limped over to the doorway and leaned against it, looking out. The night nurses were beginning to do their rounds, tucking in patients, administering little dosages of medication from trays full of miniature paper cups.

  Robin deliberated. He was technically free to check himself out at any time, and Evan’s offer still stood. He’d mentioned it again this afternoon, dangling it like a Skor bar in front of Robin’s nose. Spy Psych. 101: Give the kid something to look forward to. Keep his brain occupied. Don’t let him feel sorry for himself.

  Robin stared at his bare toes. Not that he had plummeted into any more great depths of despair while he’d been here. Thank God it was Anthony who’d come to see him, and not his other brother, Mister Macho—eyes-that-dare-shed-tears-shall-never-gaze-upon-my-Guccis—Ian.

  He glanced up again. There was Wendy, working her way down the corridor with a trayful of disposable syringes. He ducked back inside his room, shut the door, reached into the closet, and pulled out the sloppy sweatshirt Anthony had brought in the shopping bag. He poked his head through the neckhole and carefully maneuvered his arms down the sleeves, then replaced his pajama bottoms with his jeans. There. Dressed for an evening stroll. Even if it was only to the end of the ward and back. He opened the door and set out, giving Wendy a friendly wave as he passed her in the hallway.

  It was slow going. His left foot wouldn’t bear much weight. He stopped at the patients’ kitchen and helped himself to a ginger ale, then continued on his tour. There was an intriguing little storeroom next door to the kitchen, stocked with boxes of plastic gloves, lab coats, sterile bandages, towels, sheets.

  Down at the end of the hallway was the sun lounge. He stuck his head through the doorway, sniffing old cigarettes and oranges. Last year’s Chatelaines and National Geographics sat on the coffee tables, along with pamphlets on heart disease and good nutrition on a minimum budget. Exciting. He drank half the ginger ale and left the rest sitting in a pedestaled ashtray by the door.

  Hooking his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans, Robin turned around and began the slow walk back to his room.

  There were some doctors in the nursing station, studying patients’ files, signing forms, and generally looking importantly medical. Robin glanced at them as he wandered by and then stopped, frozen. It was him.

  Grosch.

  He was dressed up like a physician, right down to the white coat and name tag and the stethoscope clipped around his neck. He hadn’t seen Robin: he was looking over a file, his back turned to the hallway.

  My file, Robin thought, his heart going into convulsions. He came back for me. Evan was wrong. Evan was wrong! Desperately, his eyes flew around the corridor. Keep walking. Walk slowly. Don’t attract attention to yourself.

  Holding back the urge to run, he sauntered casually past the nursing station, and then flew into his room, shutting the door. What now? Oh God—where do I hide?

  You don’t hide, he told himself, sensibly. You run. Where? How? He can’t find me—he’ll kill me this time!

  Fighting panic, he pulled on his shoes and socks. Damn—these were Anthony’s old sneakers, half a size too small. Never mind! Go! He stuffed pillows and pajamas under the blankets on the bed, plumping them up to look like a sleeping Christopher Robin. He hooked his ski jacket off the hanger in the closet. Anything else? Yes. He grabbed the Spy Squad novel off the night table; Anthony would never forgive him if he lost it. Now go! He dragged the curtains around the cubicle and darted into the bathroom.

  Four people shared the facilities between his room and the next. Robin locked the door on his side and went through the opposite one, to where two old men were snoring into their pillowcases. He peeked into the hallway: Grosch was coming down from the nursing station, chatting with Wendy, thoroughly convincing as a doctor called in to consult on a case.

  He had his hand on the doorknob. He was turning it. He was inside—

  In the split second it took Grosch to shut the door to the first room, Robin was gone from the second. He streaked down the hallway, past the kitchen, past the storage room, the nursing station. He pounded on the elevator call button. Come on! Come on!

  Grosch would just now be discovering the lump of bedclothes, the pillows…Robin glanced back down the corridor. The door was opening—there he was—

  Praying his lacerated foot would carry him, he threw his shoulder into the heavy Exit door and stumbled down the stairs, two at a time, leaning on the railing. One floor—two. Tears of pain blinded him, making the stairs swim. His shoulder had been jarred, and his back—his foot—things were beginning to bleed.

  The doorway to the fifth floor banged open above him and heavy steps echoed in the stairwell.

  Ground floor. He burst into a deserted corridor and ran, vaguely recalling that this way led back to Emergency. Blood seeped into his sock; his foot throbbed; he was certain he’d ripped the stitches out. What now? What? He scanned the concerned faces that stared at him in the emergency ward. Run!

  Down at the other end of the hallway, Grosch lumbered out of the stairwell, his white lab coat flapping. Robin limped through the waiting room. There had to be a cab outside—one crummy cab—

  There wasn’t. Not even an ambulance. The parking lot was full of cars, and nobody in them. Clenching his f
ists, Robin forced himself to keep walking. He couldn’t go any faster than that; there was no strength left in his legs.

  The Emergency door exploded open behind him and Grosch pounded out onto the sidewalk, sweat beading on his forehead. With a last surge of energy, Robin pushed himself to the limit. His foot screamed; tears poured down his cheeks. Sobbing uncontrollably, he collapsed into the shrubbery as a dark-colored car careened out of the parking lot, headlights blindingly bright.

  The driver rolled down his window. “Get in!”

  Robin raised his head.

  “Get in!” the driver hollered again. “What are you, deaf?”

  Robin crawled across the sidewalk and stumbled through the glaring high beams. He fell against the door, wrenched it open, tumbled into the front seat. Tires squealed and rubber burned.

  Grosch was left standing on the sidewalk, cursing and out of breath.

  “Christopher Robin Harris,” said the driver, with a grin. “How you doing?”

  Robin wiped the tears out of his eyes with his sleeve. He sat up slowly, grabbing onto the seat belt as the car screeched around a corner. “I’d be doing a lot better,” he said, “if people stopped trying to kidnap me.” He fastened himself in. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Randy Lundberg. You don’t remember—we’ve met before. Close call, eh?”

  Chapter Nine

  Wednesday Evening

  “Your old man,” Randy was saying, “is a legend.”

  Robin swigged his beer without comment. They were sitting on a king-size bed in a room in a five-star hotel that overlooked the downtown core of Vancouver, Burrard Inlet, and the mountains. The room was on the twenty-first floor, and the nighttime view was spectacular. He glanced at Randy, who had taken off his tie and jacket and shoes, but not his gun and shoulder holster. On the television, Napoleon Solo was trying to locate Illya Kuryakin, who’d been consigned to a dungeon beneath a gazebo in the middle of a maze somewhere in England. It was a bizarre end to a totally bizarre evening for Robin; his adrenaline levels had only just returned to normal.

  “It would be nice if he stopped being a legend and started being right for a change,” he said.

  Randy peeled the soggy blue-and-silver Kokanee label off his beer bottle. “When I grow up,” he said, “I want to be just like your old man.”

  “He was wrong about the robot, too. He thought they didn’t know I had it.”

  “Give the guy credit. You got caught in a shift change, that’s all. My predecessor decided to take off early, and Grosch slipped through.”

  “Wonderful,” Robin said.

  “You heard what happened to your old man this afternoon, eh?”

  “No, I was in the hospital,” Robin said, pointedly. “Recuperating from his last miscalculation. What happened to my father this afternoon?”

  “I guess he was out making that movie of his and he took a ride down some stairs. Messed up a hand and some ribs.”

  “Good,” said Robin, not really meaning it.

  “How’s the foot?”

  Robin looked down the length of the bed and wiggled his toes experimentally. The stitches had been put back in by a thoroughly unpleasant doctor in a chaotic downtown emergency room. The guy had given him a lecture about taking proper care of his injuries and the rising cost of provincial health care. Just what he needed.

  “Freezing’s worn off,” he said. The skin on the bottom of his foot felt swollen, too tight.

  “Your old man,” Lundberg said, flipping the cap off another bottle of beer with an opener attached to his key chain, “is more than a legend.”

  “Please,” Robin said. “You’re making him sound like the White Spot. I’m new to the idea of his being a spy—in real life, anyway. I grew up believing he was an actor.”

  “He is an actor. You ask him—he’ll tell you. That’s his number one occupation.”

  Napoleon Solo was being persuaded to make a very important call to Mr. Waverly in New York by a dapper-looking villain and an odd lady who kept going on about South American rain forests.

  “How long,” Robin asked, “has he been working for your organization?”

  “Off and on…I’d say around twenty-five years. Give or take.”

  “Since before Spy Squad?”

  “I guess so. Yeah. Mind you, he’s getting pretty close to being put out to pasture. They don’t like to keep them on much past fifty.” He drank from the bottle. “The reflexes go.”

  “They fall down stairs,” Robin said, his eyes on the TV. Since before I was born. “I wonder why he did it.”

  “What?”

  “Signed up. Or whatever it is you do when you decide to be a secret agent. Is it like the French foreign legion? A hundred men with a hundred different tales of heartbreak and sorrow?”

  “Nah,” said Randy. “I can’t speak for your old man, but nowadays some fellow gets a desk in a room at UBC during career week and you show up for an interview and next thing you know, you’re in. Easy.”

  “Spy Canada,” Robin answered, humorously.

  “Yeah—but we don’t get flashy with it. Weapons in Canada attract a lot of attention. If this was New York or Chicago, no sweat. Shots fired in Vancouver—the TV networks find out and before you know it, CBC’s doing a Fifth Estate on you.”

  Robin laughed. Outside the hotel, in the rain that was insidiously turning to snow, a Seabus was making its way across the inlet to North Vancouver, and a freighter, deck lights ablaze, was being nudged down to the docks at Port Moody.

  “Just whose idea is this protective custody business, anyway?”

  “Your old man’s. I got ahold of him while you were having your foot fixed.”

  “Figures.”

  “Hey, relax. Enjoy. It isn’t every day you’re put up for free at a luxury hotel with unlimited room service and a panoramic vista of downtown Vancouver.”

  “It costs you guys, though.”

  Randy dismissed the idea. “We get a government rate.”

  “While you were talking to Evan, did he happen to mention if he’d found out who Mara was?”

  “Mara…” Randy said, thinking. “That may be who I spotted earlier, while I was tailing Berringer. We got some information this morning.” He rolled off the bed and retrieved his notebook from his jacket, which was draped over the back of a chair. “Yeah, here,” he said. “Mara. Lesley Totter. Mara’s the name she adopted when she got involved with this Shirda character.”

  “That’s him,” Robin said. “That’s the other person they were talking about.”

  Randy stretched out on the bed again, reading from his notebook. “Shirda Neeshla, High Bagraj of New Dehra Dun.” He looked at Robin. “Blows my mind away, the names they come up with for themselves.”

  “I’ve read stories in the paper about this guy. Dehra Dun’s some kind of religious community—like Jim Jones and Guyana.”

  Lundberg shook his head. “Closer to a cross between Woodstock and the Reverend Moon, from what I’ve been able to find out. They’re all jaded hippies. Souls in search of peace and love.”

  “You could have fooled me,” Robin said, thinking of Berringer and Grosch.

  “Yeah, well, apparently the Americans have been keeping an eye on this place for a couple of months now. They’re supposed to be liaising with us, but I haven’t heard anything about it. This Shirda guy’s real name is…” He flipped the page over. “Lawrence Hamelin.”

  “That’s pretty mystical, all right,” Robin agreed.

  “Lately of Southern California. Where else? Birthplace of the weird.”

  Robin leaned his head back against the wall. “You said you saw Mara earlier?”

  “Yeah. I was following Berringer. He had lunch with her at a Greek place in Kitsilano. Not a bad-looking lady. Fortyish. All in yellow.”

  “Did you recognize her?”

  “Nope. I ran her through the computer down at the office—no match. Mind you, we’ve been getting quite a few read errors lately, so to be on
the safe side I copied a query over to the Americans. And we’ve sent a couple of our own operatives down to Dehra Dun, just to keep things interesting.”

  Robin closed his eyes; he was getting sleepy. Hard work, this spy business.

  He slipped his hand under the neck of his sweatshirt, where earlier he had tucked one of the hotel’s plastic-bag shower caps filled with crushed ice against his bruised shoulder. The ice had all melted; his back was aching. He got up and went into the bathroom for a 292.

  I need a razor, he thought, as he glanced in the mirror. And new running shoes. He filled a tumbler with cold water and looked woefully at the bloodstained sock he’d rinsed out and hung over the shower curtain railing to dry. And another pair of socks.

  “How long are we keeping me here?” he asked, limping back to the bed. He plumped the pillows behind his shoulders again.

  “Couple of days,” Lundberg shrugged. He’d picked up the Spy Squad book Robin had rescued from the hospital and was studying the picture on the cover with an amused expression on his face. “Till we get Berringer straightened out, anyway.” He looked at Robin. “I guess you never had to work at a summer job or anything—living up in the Properties, being rich.”

  “We work,” Robin said, smiling. The codeine in the 292 was beginning to trickle through his system, warm and numbing. “Rolf is a great believer in earning your own way. Anthony put in a couple of months last summer, planting trees.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  “Up the coast.”

  “Interesting?”

  “He met a lot of bears,” Robin said. “Last summer, I was an op at the station.”

  “An op?”

  “Operator. You know. You sit behind the board and push the buttons for the DJ and play the tunes, so all the jock has to do is talk and be clever.”

  Lundberg nodded, then checked his notebook again. “One more thing: I’m supposed to remind you to call your mother.”

  Robin smiled at the ceiling. “Who’d that order come from—the old man?”