Alice had no expectation that things would go according to plan. In her experience on such ops, Murphy’s Law was a good-case scenario. Her “go” order was to be decided by a number of variables and protocols perhaps best summed up, by her backup unit’s chief, as “whenever you feel the time’s right.”
Shortly after the tactical team arrived, she’d watched Fielding enter the vestibule, then use a key to admit himself to the Perriman offices. She itched to send a couple of troops rappelling through a plate glass window and into the rogue’s face, but the time still wasn’t right.
A few minutes later, a lanky young man who reeked of the Farm prodded in Charlie. Given what Alice had gleaned of his travails, Charlie appeared in great shape. She again refrained from issuing any orders; Drummond still might be en route or somewhere else altogether. Also, she could afford to hold off because Cranch needed time for his act.
When four men parked a van, studied Perriman as if casing the place, then broke into the neighboring apartment building carrying a fifth man who appeared to be unconscious, she still lacked sufficient cause to order in her team. Upon hearing faint but unmistakable bursts of AK fire, however, a vegetable would have known it was time.
“It’s Desdemona with a green light,” she said into her cell.
“Desdemona, we’ve just been ordered to go home,” came the voice of her backup unit’s chief.
“You’re kidding? By who? Nick Fielding?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, on conference with the interim national security advisor.”
“What about our cable to HQ?”
“Pending investigation by the inspector general. Meanwhile, our top brass were briefed by the director of the CIA and now they’re basically telling us, ‘Yeah, Nick Fielding’s supposed to be a bad guy-it’s his cover.’”
Alice was incredulous. “Great, he’ll probably win an award,” she said.
Before she could begin to ask any of the questions flooding her mind, the bell on the pub’s entry door jingled. Two young men in Columbia sweatshirts strolled in.
“Hang on,” she whispered into the phone. “Looks like a couple of boys are about to hit on me.”
Sure enough, the young men wandered toward her booth. They wore no coats though the night was arctic. In all probability, she thought, she’d been hit-listed at Echelon or the like. They’d rushed from wherever they’d been lurking when she made her cell phone call.
“We need to talk, Ms. Rutherford,” said the stouter of the two.
“Sorry, angel, you got the wrong girl.”
“It’s okay, Alice, we work for the same uncle you do.”
She believed him. The issue was the thinner man’s hand, inching past his hip and toward the back of his waist.
“I’m not Alice Rutherford, but I’m looking for her,” she said. “I’m Rita Hayworth-Thomas, with National Recon. Here’s my ID.” She flung a cardboard coaster.
Hardly an air-cushioned Bicycle, it wobbled in flight. It slapped the thinner man in the wrist, barely inhibiting him as he drew a silenced SIG Sauer. But it caused a slight delay, allowing her to loose the Beretta from her shoulder bag and fire first. Her bullet hit his knee as he fired. He fell into the next booth, vanishing behind the high seat back. His round bored past her shoulder and into the top of her seat back, creating a cloud of sawdust.
The other man produced a SIG as well. She shot at him while diving for the cover of the bar. When she came down, her head exploded-or felt like it had. The world began to fade. Just before it went black, she glimpsed the barkeep standing over her, gripping a baseball bat.
12
Fielding sat in one of the comfortable Naugahyde recliners in the observation room, puffing a Seora Dominguez cigar. On the other side of the two-way mirror, at the head of the conference room table, Cranch was getting started. His white lab coat, usually crisp and immaculate, was rumpled. He’d traveled for much of the night, first in the vintage motor launch, which made him seasick; then for three turbulent hours in a small jet; and finally in a helicopter buffeted by a snowstorm. Still, he radiated energy and enthusiasm. He would have flown to the moon on his own dime, Fielding supposed, for the opportunity to crack Drummond Clark.
Drummond was still handcuffed to the theoretically uncomfortable chair at the foot of the conference table. A pneumographic tube had been fitted around his chest to measure his respiration rate, a cuff had been inflated around his left bicep to gauge his blood pressure and pulse, and galvanometers had been clamped onto two of his fingers to detect sweat gland activity. The sensors were wired into Cranch’s laptop computer, which was linked to a monitor in the observation room.
“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Clark?” Cranch asked.
“No, but someone said this is the Manhattan Project complex. I’d very much like to see it.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“No, will I need a ticket?”
Fielding glanced at his monitor. The polygraph registered no deception.
“Actually, I was hoping to ask you about Placebo,” Cranch said.
“Placebo?”
“The covert operation. Do you know of it?”
“No.”
Again, as far as the polygraph could determine, Drummond’s response was truthful.
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Clark, I need to ask a few meaningless questions, just to make sure this system is properly calibrated. Could you tell me, please, what year it is?”
“1995.”
The yellow, red, and green lines running across Fielding’s monitor were identical to those of the previous responses.
“Actually, Mr. Clark, 1995 was a little while ago,” Cranch said. “Of course everybody forgets the date now and then, right?”
Drummond sighed. “Tell me about it.”
“Actually, it’s 2004.”
“Oh, right, of course.”
“I mean, 2009.”
“Oh, right, right, right.”
“Excuse me for a moment,” Cranch said.
He signaled, and O’Shea opened the door, letting him out. He disappeared into the maze of corridors. A moment later, he trudged into the observation room.
“It’s no act,” he told Fielding.
“I’m not so sure,” Fielding said. “If you hook me up to the poly, I can explain in great detail how purple two-headed men from Pluto and I traveled from another time and shot JFK, and it would read as gospel truth. A number of us can temper our responses that way.” He pointed through the mirror. “He was our teacher.”
“This isn’t an issue of true or false,” Cranch said. “It’s been proven that even subjects with the utmost training and ability respond on some level to meaningful stimuli more vigorously than to nonmeaningful stimuli. If the senility is artifice, and I say something he purports to know nothing about at random, he has no time to ready his defenses. If the information is meaningful to him, like the current year, the polygraph detects it; 2009 read as no more meaningful to him than 1995. If he’d known that it was in fact 2009…” Cranch sank into one of the recliners.
“Okay, so he isn’t lucid-where does that leave us?” Fielding asked, even though Cranch’s deflated look alone probably provided the answer.
“He won’t be able to answer our questions.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t mind sitting here in this comfortable chair and enjoying my cigar until he blinks on. The one little hitch is he may have written down details compromising our entire operation — then placed what he wrote in a dead drop somewhere between here and Virginia, to be serviced any minute by God knows who. Isn’t there something you can pump into him so we have a chance of finding out at least that much?”
Cranch shrugged. “Even if we were to penetrate his defenses with an absolutely perfect combination of sodium amytal and thiopental or secobarbital, we’d be asking for information he’s incapable of retrieving, whether he wants to or not. Also, because methedrine-or a comparable stimulant-is a necessary component in a tr
uth cocktail, we’d risk ratcheting him to acutely confusional on a permanent basis.”
Fielding took a long drag of his cigar. He barely tasted it. “I don’t suppose there’s anything on earth-no contraption, no holistic remedy, no prehistoric fish extract-that can spark lucidity?”
“Not really,” Cranch said.
Fielding saw a glimmer of hope. “‘Not really’ is different from ‘no,’ isn’t it?”
Cranch’s lips tightened. “It was done. Once. In 1916.”
“1916? By who, Dr. Frankenstein?”
“A Dr. Lovenhart at the University of Wisconsin. He was experimenting with respiratory stimulants, and to his amazement, a catatonic patient, after being injected with sodium cyanide, opened his eyes and answered a few basic questions. It was the first time he’d said a word in months. But immediately thereafter, due to complications inherent with sodium cyanide, he dropped dead.”
Fielding stabbed his cigar into the ashtray. “Good, now we have a Plan D.”
“There are other, more conventional methods,” Cranch said with enthusiasm, but it felt synthetic. “We can try making him comfortable. Playing music has been shown to reduce stress hormones in the blood, which has a tranquilizing effect on the limbic system. Reflexology can-”
“Sorry, I don’t see Charlie Clark rubbing his old man’s feet.”
“Why would Charlie have to do it?”
“That’s a very good question,” Fielding said. “For two months, Duck was a zombie. But since Charlie’s entry onto the scene, he’s been Mr. Lucidity.”
Cranch looked away, probably to hide his skepticism. “Are you hypothesizing that a professional horseplayer has become the first person in medical history to discover a means of triggering lucidity in an Alzheimer’s patient?”
Fielding leaped up. “I knew I had a reason for letting him live.”
13
“So how do you do it?” Fielding asked.
Charlie had reached the same conclusion science had: There was no precise trigger. But if he could convince them he had the silver bullet, he would likely be taken from the employee lounge to Drummond.
“As I’m sure you know, Alzheimer’s sufferers are triggered by family members they haven’t seen in a while,” Charlie said.
Across the table, Fielding shook his head. “Possibly that explains his mild resurgence at the senior center, when he saw you for the first time in two years. But since then, you’ve been old hat, otherwise he would have flickered on every time you opened your mouth. Tonight, when I told him that you were here, all it sparked was, ‘What’s he doing up so late on a school night?’”
“I guess you’re right.” Charlie hadn’t expected getting to Drummond would be that easy. Also, getting to Drummond wasn’t enough. Charlie needed to work it so he could get a weapon to Drummond too, or at least get one within Drummond’s reach. He cupped his chin in his hands now, trying to appear contemplative. “I guess it has been, mostly, random.”
Fielding sat up. “ Mostly? So then there is a kiss that turns the frog back?”
“I’m ashamed to say it.”
“Pretend there’s a gun to your head.”
“Well… I’m a disappointment to him, to say the least. You know, he graduated from MIT with a crateful of awards. I barely made it through a year of college. He’s a patriot and a hero. I play the horses, and not that well. He’s the fastest gun in the East. I’d never even used a gun until yesterday, and the times I needed to, it was a disaster. At best, I was too shaky to shoot straight. Up on the ridge tonight-or last night, I guess it was-he flickered on and snatched the gun away from me just in time to shoot that meth guy-then he led us down the mountain like a Sherpa. When we were attacked at that battlefield, he was napping. I couldn’t defend us. Suddenly he grabbed the gun from me and figured out a way for us to escape. While I sat there cowering, he said, ‘There’s nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result.’”
“It’s Winston Churchill,” Fielding said. “I’ve heard him recite that one before.” He sat back, interlacing his fingers behind his head-not the posture of a man who had just seen the light or otherwise had been convinced. “I want to share something with you, Charlie. In all of the years I worked for Duck, he mentioned you just three or four times, and all he ever said was that you were good at math. But I knew a few things about you anyway. One was you always avoided the disagreeable or difficult in life, finding refuge at the racetrack, for instance. Another was you considered seeing him one day a year, on Christmas, to be one day too often. Yet now, lo and behold, you’re false flagging Red Mafiya thugs, pretending to go to ground at a nowhere fleabag, and blabbing to the Washington Post to induce us to capture you, then launching a veritable paramilitary assault on the Manhattan Project complex, all in an effort to rescue your not-so-beloved father. Meanwhile you could have gotten away with a small fortune in cash and diamonds, and millions on top of that if you know where he’s squirreled his stock options hoard, as I suspect you do. So I have to conclude something’s changed.”
Charlie wasn’t sure where Fielding was headed. “Maybe he and I got off on the wrong foot for the first thirty years,” he allowed.
Fielding stood. “He had us fooled all these years. Everyone always thought that all that mattered to Drummond Clark was getting revenge against his crazy pinko parents. But in the past two days, he’s shown something else mattered to him. He showed it with his episodes of lucidity. Each was triggered when his son was in harm’s way.”
Fielding had hit the nail on the head. Charlie felt it. He felt terrible, too, that he’d failed to see it himself. And he suspected he was about to feel a lot worse.
14
Charlie lay on his back lengthwise atop the conference room table, his wrists and ankles bungeed to its legs. He’d been stripped to his boxer shorts. Most of his skin was covered in goose bumps, and not because he was cold. It was a reaction to the telephone on the chair to his left, a rotary device that could well have been in the complex since the ’40s. The cord was plugged into the wall, not at a phone jack but at an electrical outlet. In place of the usual coil and handset was a rubber wire that hissed subtly, like an asp. The ghoul in the lab coat they called Dr. Cranch loomed over Charlie and dipped the copper mouth of the wire toward his face.
“This will deliver a near-lethal amount of electrical current,” Cranch said to Drummond, who was handcuffed to the chair at the foot of the table.
“A placebo is used as a control in drug experiments,” Drummond said, the fifth time he’d done so since Charlie was brought in, each time with greater distress.
“Sir, we need to hear about Placebo, the operation,” Cranch said, “or, more specifically, whom you’ve told about it.” Repetition had progressively deadened his delivery.
“I just don’t know what else I can tell you.” Drummond sighed.
Charlie wondered whether his rescue effort possibly could have made things any worse than they were now.
“Just a light spray,” Cranch said to Dewart, who sat to Charlie’s right.
Dewart gave a gentle pull at the trigger of a plastic plant mister. The water was warm, yet the droplets caused Charlie’s bare legs to shiver. Cranch touched the copper tip of the wire to Charlie’s right thigh briefly, as if he were testing the ink in a pen. The tip emitted a buzz no louder than a gnat.
Charlie shot straight into the air. If not for the restraints, it seemed, he would have hit the ceiling. Hot, maddening pain filled his blood vessels, and his body began to convulse. It felt like muscles and tendons were being ripped from bones. An involuntary wail rose from deep within him, unlike any sound he would have imagined he could make, or that any animal could.
A velvety blackness materialized around him. A cool and comfy refuge. Unconsciousness. He welcomed it.
Before he could settle in, his spine cracked back onto the tabletop, and he was again in the fierce glare of fluorescent lights. All his joints felt like they’d been dislocated. He tried to b
reathe. He retched, then inhaled air hot and heavy with the smell of his own burned flesh. His body settled, but a thrum continued inside his temples. Bells rang in his ears. The worst was the stinging in his eyes. Some sort of lingering electrical current?
Cranch and Dewart looked at Drummond, presumably for his reaction. He stared at his shoes as if he sought to avoid seeing his son suffer.
“Please, just talk to Mr. Cleamons,” Drummond begged Cranch. “I have his home number in my office.”
Cranch looked to Dewart. “Cleamons?”
Dewart shrugged. “We’ll find out.” He gestured at the two-way mirror: Make a phone call.
Charlie knew who Cleamons was but didn’t see how mentioning it would do any good-even if he could move his mouth. Also, they would know soon enough. Lionel Cleamons had been Perriman’s district sales manager. He dropped dead one afternoon in his office more than a decade ago.
15
Charles would die, Drummond speculated, if the man in the white laboratory coat used the crude stun device a second time. The younger fellow, to Drummond’s left, seemed inclined to do nothing about it. He just sat back sipping Gatorade.
Drummond wondered: Who are these men? Gamblers Charles has fallen in with?
No, something told him. This had to do with his own work.
He recalled passing his office at Perriman Appliances earlier, then being led down the back stairs to this subterranean facility.
The Manhattan Project complex was rumored to extend beneath the Columbia campus as far as West 112th Street, where Perriman was situated.
Or was it on East 112th Street?
Yes, East, he decided.
He’d worked there a long time.
How long, five years?
No, more than that. Eighteen. No, no, no, twelve.
He demonstrated the appliances in the showroom, then went on-site with building owners and property managers. He ensured that their specifications were met.
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