Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  The man in the laboratory coat kept asking about “Placebo.” Maybe it was a code for something new in R amp; D. The new nanotechnology in the wash and rinse cycles? Probably not. Nanotechnology was already trumpeted throughout Perriman’s advertising and promotional campaigns.

  Could the Manhattan Project have something to do with it?

  Manhattan Project…

  At Columbia University.

  Columbia University was originally called King’s College. The name was changed for reasons of patriotism after the American Revolution…

  Which commenced on April 19, 1775…

  The shot heard ’round the world…

  At the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts…

  An interesting piece of information about Concord-

  Drummond felt his thought process derailing.

  It was hard to concentrate to begin with. And Charles’s scream still resonated within him.

  It reminded him of another scream.

  The memory began with dawn, as if beamed from a old film projector, sputtering through the blinds and into the drafty waiting room in the maternity ward at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital. Drummond was sitting there alone, savoring the silence. For most of the night, the waiting room had been a hive of expectant fathers. Nurses had brought bundles one by one. Each man, seeing his son or daughter for the first time, declared the moment the happiest of his life. Drummond anticipated no such sentiment. He wasn’t bent toward giddiness. But that was only a small factor: 2 percent, he estimated. The other 98 percent was fear.

  That he felt fear at all was confounding. Displacing fear was second nature to him.

  He’d been timid initially, as a boy, a voracious early reader living a largely internal life. But when his parents fled the country without him and a spinster aunt capitulated and took him in, he commenced a campaign to prove his worth. He drove himself to be first in his class, first in his weight group, first at anything-if he found himself walking parallel to a stranger on the sidewalk, he would be first to the corner. He would even finish his ice cream cone before other children. Winning intoxicated him; the greater the challenge, the greater the high. By his first day at Langley, perilous situations practically whetted his appetite.

  On learning Isadora was pregnant, however, he felt standard-issue fear, like anyone else’s. He was at a loss to explain it. He hungered to succeed as a parent, especially in light of his own parents’ record.

  In the ensuing months he sought a remedy. The problem, he theorized, was his lack of enthusiasm for the baby-he couldn’t summon so much as a spark. Attributing this to insufficient data, he read everything on the subject. The only applicable wisdom he found, repeatedly, was “If he can afford it, the new father is wise to hire a baby nurse.”

  Now, with just hours to go, he was scared as a cat.

  The squeal of crepe soles in the hallway outside the waiting room momentarily diverted him from his predicament. Probably it was the nurse coming to update him on Isadora’s status. “Another few hours still,” she would say-he hoped.

  She entered with a swaddled bundle in her arms. “Mr. Clark, it is my great honor to introduce you to your son,” she said. She had delivered the line to new fathers thousands of times, but the joy was fresh, and augmented by a particularly musical Indian accent-Gujarati, he was certain of it.

  He had thought learning that the baby was a boy might stir him. It made no difference. And the squirming, tomato-headed creature itself kindled none of the love at first sight on which he’d pinned his last atom of hope. If anything, the sight validated his fears.

  “Would you like to hold him?”

  He put on exuberance. “Of course!”

  His arms became stiff as shelves, and on contact with them, the baby began a cry that might have been mistaken for an air-raid siren.

  “This is just wonderful,” Drummond exclaimed; he could spew lies at a poly and leave examiners swearing he was the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.

  Registered Nurse Aashiyana Asirvatham, however, did not appear to be fooled. “It’s time for baby’s bath,” she said, offering Drummond an out.

  As soon as the baby was safely away, strangely, Drummond felt a desire to hold him again. Within a few weeks that desire exploded into a dizzying love. Ironically, his challenge became keeping a lid on the sentiment, lest his enemies exploit it.

  The memory had the effect of turning night into day in his mind as he sat in Conference Room A at the foot of the table originally crafted for the Jersey City narcotics dealer known as Catman because of his fondness for leopard skin.

  Drummond sat up slightly to better get the lay of the land. He maintained the appearance of staring dully. Even if he could get his hand free of the cuff, he would need to grapple immediately with young Dewart, who almost certainly had a sidearm. The guard standing outside the door, onetime IRA heavy Jack O’Shea, would be in the room within five seconds, his own firearm drawn. And of course Cranch had the “helle-phone,” as everyone here liked to call the torture device. Drummond’s own prospective weapons included the chairs and table, though the latter would be too heavy to budge even without Charles atop it. Also within reach were three dry-erase markers, a half-full bottle of Gatorade, and a plastic plant mister, the last item probably purchased at the twenty-four-hour DrugMart at West 110th and Broadway specifically for use with Cranch’s device-to Drummond’s knowledge, the plants in the Manhattan Project complex were all plastic.

  The Gatorade had promise.

  16

  “You’ve left me with no choice but to increase the voltage to a level he may not survive,” Cranch told Drummond.

  Charlie craned his neck-the simple act felt like being choked-and glimpsed the interrogator tweaking the rotary dial on the telephone.

  Drummond’s eyes were glassy and rimmed red. He sucked a finger, as if to pacify himself. He’d never done that before, and, Charlie reckoned, never would, given the unsanitary nature. So maybe he had something in the works. Also, albeit slightly, he had sat up. But where the flicker of hope should have been, Charlie felt nothing. What could Drummond Clark, even at the height of his powers, do to get out of this fix?

  “How about this?” Drummond asked Cranch. “By ‘placebo operation,’ is it possible that your people mean a medical operation performed more for the psychological benefit of the patient than for any physiological effect?”

  Cranch sighed.

  “Can you at least give me some sort of hint?” Drummond pleaded.

  Cranch gestured and Dewart pumped the plant mister five or six times. Charlie’s chest glistened. Cranch moved the tip of the wire toward Charlie’s heart.

  Charlie tried to will himself into unconsciousness.

  Drummond sat upright in his chair, abruptly, as if he had been shocked. Cranch jumped in surprise. Dewart nearly lost hold of his Gatorade. Like Charlie’s, their eyes flew to Drummond.

  Drummond took in the room with unmistakable sharpness. “Ernie, why are we interrogating my son?” he asked Cranch. His voice was ragged, like he’d just risen from a long slumber.

  Each time he’d flickered on before, Charlie recalled, it was with an awareness of the immediate past. So the Rip van Winkle act was almost certainly an act. But to what end?

  Drummond tried to rub his eyes. The cuff snapped his hand back into place. “Or should I be asking, ‘Why are you interrogating me?’”

  “First, allow me to say that I’m flattered you remember me, sir,” Cranch said.

  “Dr. Ernest Cranch, you come happily to mind every single time I look in a mirror to shave and see no scar whatsoever from that Croatian hooligan’s blade. Now, what is going on here?”

  “There’s an urgent need that we know whether and to what extent Placebo has been compromised.”

  Drummond seemed shaken. “Placebo has been compromised?”

  “If you could tell us what you last recall of it?” Cranch said.

  “Yes. Of course. Tell me, what’s today�
��s date?”

  “The twenty-eighth.”

  “Forgive me. Of which month?”

  “Forgive me, I should have begun there. It’s December 28,2009.”

  “Good Lord,” Drummond exclaimed. “The last I remember, the leaves had just begun to fall.”

  Cranch’s eyes drifted to the rotary telephone, leaving Charlie with a fresh coating of goose bumps. “Mr. Clark, please,” Cranch said. “You’ve had several clear-cut and extensive episodes of lucidity since autumn. Per my clinical experience with Alzheimer’s patients, I would expect-”

  He stopped abruptly as Dewart slid from his chair, fell hard to the floor, and didn’t move.

  Charlie supposed either the pain or the painkillers had gotten the better of Dewart. Then the Gatorade bottle rolled from Dewart’s hand, and Charlie had a better idea of what had happened: Drummond had just pretended to suck his finger as a means of pacifying himself. Really he tripped the spring-loaded release on his molar and, with incredible sleight of hand, while feigning focus on his shoes, he deployed his L pill. Once Dewart sipped the Gatorade, Drummond stalled until the saxitoxin took effect!

  Cranch too eyed the rolling Gatorade bottle, possibly thinking the same thing. The thickest part of Drummond’s iron seat back flew into the interrogator’s head, crushing his skull from the sound of it.

  With the cumbersome chair still cuffed to his wrist, Drummond dove at Dewart’s body and snatched the Glock from the dead man’s waistband. Bouncing up, he swung the chair as hard as he could into the mirror. The glass exploded like a bomb, spraying thousands of bits into the adjoining observation room.

  From his seat in one of the recliners there, Karpenko rushed to take up his big AK-74. Two thunderclaps from Drummond’s Glock and Karpenko keeled over, spouting a rooster tail of blood. He fell into the recliner, flipped it over, then came to rest onto its upturned swivel base, almost certainly dead.

  A third report from the Glock and the fair-haired guard, surging into the conference room from the hallway, fell as if clotheslined. Blood streamed from his forehead, turning the front of his powder-blue rugby shirt maroon. He was definitely done for. Still Drummond pounced on him. He retrieved a set of keys from the guard’s pants pocket, freed himself from the handcuff, then hurried to unbind Charlie.

  Incredulity acted as a pain remedy for Charlie. “Good thing I came to the rescue,” he said.

  The observation room preoccupied Drummond. Charlie followed Drummond’s gaze to the smoldering cigar in an ashtray on the arm of one of the empty recliners. The door was open.

  “Fielding?” Charlie said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot back?”

  “In his mind, what happened here is a positive step. Now the real inquisition can begin.”

  17

  Drummond took the slain guard’s pistol and, leading with it, inched out of the conference room. With leaden limbs, Charlie followed, still clad only in boxer shorts-there hadn’t been time to locate the rest of his clothes. The chill of the cement floor bit into his bare soles and shot up his shinbones.

  “We’ll sneak out through the old east tunnel, to the university campus,” Drummond said. “Less chance of running into guards.”

  The corridor was still and quiet, save the drone of the ventilators. The bare concrete walls meant no recesses or shadows in which an adversary could hide; a mouse would have stood out.

  “I need you to cover me,” Drummond said, passing back the Glock.

  “I’ll try,” said Charlie. He took the gun with both hands, judging just one frail hand inadequate.

  If Fielding or his remaining men were to shoot, they would likely position themselves at one of four corners-there were two corners at each end of the corridor. Charlie pivoted on his numb heels, swinging the gun barrel from one end of the corridor to the other, a motion like a metronome’s. He wasn’t sure whether it was a good system.

  Drummond ran west, or so Charlie thought; his bearings had been scrambled along with the rest of him. He was certain, though, that the tunnel to campus was to the east.

  Drummond beckoned from the corner, and Charlie sprinted. Concern that they were headed in the wrong direction took his mind off the pain.

  Nearing Drummond, he asked, “Isn’t the campus the other-?”

  Drummond shot a finger to his lips. “I said that in case anyone was listening,” he whispered. “Really we’ll go out through the tunnel to the Perriman subbasement.”

  Again he was on the move, with Charlie left to supply cover fire. The next corridor was identical to the last, with the exception of a six-foot-high metal canister imbedded in the wall. Drummond stopped at it and signaled Charlie.

  As Charlie reached him, Drummond pressed his right eye into the scanning module mounted on the wall beside the canister. A laser hummed within it.

  Charlie wondered whether the Cavalry had taken Drummond off the guest list. Perhaps while shooting at him throughout the woods and mountains of Virginia all day and night, they hadn’t considered the chase would wind up back at the office. The answer came with a hydraulic hiss, as the canister rotated, presenting a compartment like that of a revolving door.

  Drummond ushered Charlie in, then crammed in alongside him. The cylinder began to rotate again, groaning beneath their weight. The compartment was sealed by the circular wall, plunging them into total darkness. Halfway around, it reopened onto a galaxy of luminous dials, gauges, and displays. When the compartment was completely open, the conveyance stopped with a mechanical grunt.

  Drummond reached out and swatted at a wall panel. Rows of lamps high overhead tingled on, revealing a white rubber-walled laboratory the size of a gymnasium. “For reasons that will become apparent straightaway, this is known as the laundry room,” he said, at normal volume.

  Charlie followed him into a cityscape of gleaming machines and ducts. He recognized centrifuges, condensers, incubators, and robotic arms; there were exponentially more gadgets whose functions he couldn’t guess. On the back wall was a garage door big enough to allow through the motorized pallet truck parked beside it. By Charlie’s reckoning this door opened onto the tunnel to Perriman’s subbasement. He assumed the door was their destination.

  Drummond stopped well short of it, at a row of washing machines. “I don’t think we’ll be able to sneak out or even gun our way out of here,” he said. “But if we arm one of these devices, then threaten to detonate it by remote control, Fielding will let us waltz out; he may even call us a car.”

  “I thought these don’t really do anything.”

  “The uranium doesn’t do anything, but the systems still operate like nuclear weapons insofar as they initiate with ninety-seven-point-eight pounds of penthrite and trinitrotoluene. That would be enough to blast apart a good percentage of this complex.”

  “Sounds good to me, unless it’s at all hard to arm a nuclear weapon.”

  “Yes and no.” Drummond popped open the top-loading lid of a Perriman Pristina model.

  Inside, where clothing would go, was a cluster of electrical components. Unlike the nuclear weapons Charlie had seen in movies, this one had no display panel with illuminated digits that ticked down to 00:00. There was just a cheap, battery-powered alarm clock, held in place by what appeared to be wadded bubble gum.

  Leaning into the machine, Drummond rummaged through a jungle of wires and tubes and cleared a path to three numeric dials, like those on safes. “These are permissive action links,” he explained. “In the Soviet Union, this sort of weapon would have been armed by three men, each knowing just one third of the code.”

  “What if, hypothetically, you’ve forgotten the code?”

  “If I input the wrong code more than twice, a capacitor will fry, leaving the system unable to detonate,” Drummond said. “But we don’t need to worry about my memory for once.” He pointed to a card adhered to the washer’s instrument panel, listing make, model, and energy usage information. From its base he peeled a strip of yellow ta
pe imprinted with a sequence of one- and two-digit numbers. “This serial number’s not the actual serial number.” Carefully he maneuvered the first dial into place, then began on the second.

  Charlie’s eyes bounced between the cylindrical entryway and the garage door, anticipating Fielding and company would at any second send one or the other blasting inward.

  “Okay, done, except for the clicker.” Drummond jogged toward a tool cabinet across the room. “While I find it, why don’t you put on a uniform?” He indicated a hanger rack of royal blue Perriman Appliances repairmen’s coveralls. On the floor were pairs of rubber boots. “You’ll be conspicuous in it once we’re out of the complex but not as much as in what you have on now.” He meant Charlie’s boxers.

  As Charlie dressed, a staccato movement sucked his eyes back to the bomb. The second hand on the alarm clock was ticking counterclockwise. Every hair on his body shot up.

  “Dad!”

  “Sorry, should have mentioned that. I’m intentionally running the timer down to about ninety seconds-too little time for them to retrieve the PAL sequence from the computers and dial in the numbers in reverse, to disarm the device.” Drummond crumpled the strip of yellow tape with the “serial number” into a ball no bigger than a pea, then dropped it through a drain grate. “But it will be plenty of time for us to trigger the device, if it comes to that, then get out of harm’s way.” From the tool cabinet, he dug out what appeared to be a TV remote control. Aiming it at the washing machine, he pressed a button. The conic bulb on the gadget’s head glowed red.

  The second hand on the alarm clock ticked to a stop at the 6. The hour hand was slightly left of the 12 and the minute hand pointed halfway between the 10 and the 11.

  “Ninety seconds on the nose,” he said with satisfaction.

  Charlie mopped perspiration from his brow. “After all we’ve been through, it would be a shame to die of a heart attack.”

  Drummond smiled. “Well, what do you say we go for a boat ride?”