The whole affair had been so neatly staged that even the Mexican police did not know they had Qualchi agents in their jail; the three agents were completely duped, especially since they were not interrogated, and cursed their ill luck rather than Army CI.
Alexander was turned over to Mexican authorities when he tried to accuse the Army of sweating him over to make him confess to being a Qualchi agent, instead of merely a petty thief who was broke and hiding out in Mexico. His charges were of course denounced as preposterous by the same Army CI Major who had supervised his mauling. The Mexican police, while they believed his story, were still quite willing to lock him up anyway, because the Army was good for their whorehouses.
He was soon on confidential terms with the three Qualchi agents, who turned out to be part of an isolated cell and had no real information. They did, however, have certain contacts in Nuevo Laredo, so Alexander, unable to notify the CI people, planned and executed a breakout from the bastille that he had thought beyond his capabilities, taking the three Qualchi men with him, and heading south.
For the next four months Alexander was on the CI report as a deserter and bug-out (an agent who went over to the enemy camp); they posted substantial rewards for him or his cyanided body. He turned up one day in Des Moines, Iowa, and furnished an order of battle for the entire Texas-New Mexico-Oklahoma-Kansas Qualchi net, having worked himself up to the rank of Supervisor of Local Theft and staging six still-unsolved supply raids on warehouses in the area for the benefit of guerilla troops.
With twelve other Qualchi agents he was arrested, interrogated for two days without breaking (before witnesses who were returned to the Qualchi six months later on a prisoner exchange) and then, like three other top Qualchi agents, one of whom turned out to be a BRINT man, he simply vanished. In the ensuing roundup, carried out strategically over a nine-month period, 120 Qualchi agents were captured and interrogated, the un-co-operative ones being turned over to BRINT for unrestricted examination, and over 600 Chinese troops from the tough Mukden school were trapped and committed suicide. The operation was considered to be a major coup, even by BRINT. Consequently, as is customary in intelligence work, all the credit was given to a few CI and DIA figureheads who were military-looking, telegenic, and willing to accept the risk of assassination that accompanied such notoriety. Alexander, like the other CI main links, had his face altered slightly by surgery and was given a new assignment halfway around the world, with his Army records adjusted to cover the five month lapse.
The only records of the affair were in the central CI files where his name had been replaced by a meaningless cover number. There was no decoration, commendation, record of service, or even mention of his CI experience after that. Most of the CI people who had worked most closely with him did not know his real identity, and the trail of Agent C451933 ended as abruptly as if he had never existed, as was customary in intelligence work.
But Alexander had never forgotten the experience, particularly the breakout from the bastille, which he had considered a maneuver with overtones of brilliance. As a result of his intimate acquaintance with intelligence operations, he always, in any new assignment, imagined himself in the role of an intelligence agent and/or prisoner, and studied the existing security system for loopholes.
This was not merely a hobby or diversion; he had no way of knowing when the dead trail of Agent C451933 might be reopened by a chance recognition, or when he might have to worry about getting people into places or getting himself out.
The fact that he was confined in an American hospital in the outskirts of Chicago, rather than in a Chinese or satellite compound, was slightly irrelevant under the circumstances. There was no question in his mind that his neck at the present moment depended upon his finding out what had actually happened at the Wildwood Plant, and he was satisfied that Bahr’s DIA henchmen were at least as dangerous an enemy, to him personally, as a dozen Qualchi knife-men.
But the Kelley Hospital was a break. He had studied the Kelley system—modeled on the Bronstock system used in the Eastern European “rehabilitation” centers—when he had developed the Wildwood plan. He had found no noticeable weakness in the Kelley system at that time, but then he had been on the outside, not inside.
And that, he decided, made a very great deal of difference.
Moving out of his bed, he put his ear to the door. There was no sound in the corridor. He opened the door a crack, ear pressed against the aluminum sill, listening for the telltale vibrations of the alarm gongs used in the Kelley. There was nothing. No ringing, no pounding of feet. Somewhere below, he knew, a master-panel lit up any time a patient’s door was opened, but it was nearly dinner time and most of the personnel would be occupied. A blue light might go unnoticed for a while. Even the hall TV scanners were dim, though he knew the slightest alarm would throw the hallways and rooms under surveillance in ten seconds flat.
Out in the hall he padded across to the men’s lavatory and ducked inside. There were commodes, a urinal, and sinks. He collected all the toilet paper rolls and hand towels he could find and crossed swiftly back into his room again.
It took only moments to crumple the paper and towels, wrap them in a sheet from the bed, and stuff them under the sponge-plastic mattress. There was a bed-light on the wall; he pulled out the plug, ripped the lamp off the wire, and bent the naked copper ends into a neat pair of lobster claws.
Finally, he dropped the three metal toilet-paper rollers into a pillow case stripped from the bed. Pulling all his clothes off, he plugged the lamp cord back in the wall socket and touched the lobster-claws together near the nest of torn paper. There was a shower of sparks, and the fuse blew, but he blew gently into the paper nest and was rewarded by a tiny flame.
The power came back immediately on an emergency circuit. He heard a buzzer down the corridor summon the maintenance men. The smoke was already beginning to pour from the heated sponge mattress, stinking and acrid. Choking, Alexander threw the door into the hall open and peered out as smoke began to billow out.
As he had expected, there was a turnoff at the end of the corridor, with a civilian guard just settling back to his magazine after the buzz for the blown fuse. Alexander waited until the smoke in the corridor grew thick enough to haze out the nearest TV scanner. Then he screamed, “Fire!” and began running toward the guard, with the pillow-case blackjack held out of sight.
The guard jerked up in surprise, staring incredulously at the man running at him stark naked down the corridor. Instead of blasting at him with the stunner he was wearing, the guard stood open-mouthed, as Alexander had anticipated, expecting that the last thing a naked man fleeing a fire would do would be to slug him. On the dead run, Alexander swung the pillow case, and the three metal rollers slammed into the guard’s head.
As soon as the guard hit the floor Alexander unzipped the front of his light blue duty coveralls. Then he hoisted the limp form to his shoulder and hurried back to the room. Smoke was billowing out the door, and in the distance he heard the fire gong clanging. He held the coveralls and let the guard slide out of them like an egg yolk. Once into the coveralls, he shoved the guard’s body into the smoke-filled room.
At the end of the corridor there was a sudden burst of noise . . . undoubtedly the fire squad. Alexander took a deep breath, and plunged into the smoke. He seized the guard’s ankle and began to back out slowly, coughing noticeably as the first of the emergency crew arrived.
Eager hands assisted him to get the guard, face down, out of the room. Someone started artificial respiration, and Alexander coughed into his hands and backed away as more people and equipment began to arrive. An extinguisher began to spray the smoldering mattress, which threw up great clouds of acrid black smoke. In twenty seconds Alexander was walking slowly away, past several interns who were hurrying toward the noise, and into the main-wing corridor of the George Kelley Hospital.
With the first step behind him, Alexander moved swiftly toward the service elevator which had brought up the f
ire-fighting equipment. It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed that the victim in the smoke-filled room was a guard and not a patient; he had to get beyond the hospital walls before the security alarm went off.
He had long since discarded the idea of posing as a dischargee, impossible because discharge hours were over for the day; or as a guard or even a doctor, impossible because the fingerprint-check would stop him cold at the gate. He knew the hospital used plastic sheets and gowns which were sterilized and remolded after use, so no laundry trucks ever left the compound. Food cartons and supplies came in from outside on standard conveyor strips, X-ray checked as they entered. Garbage and trash were similarly conveyed out in sealed drums.
But in Buenos Aires, Alexander had noticed a curiosity in that hospital’s security procedure which he thought should be present in the Kelley’s system as well.
He found the morgue in the basement, adjacent to a loading platform in the rear of the main part of the building. He reached it through an employee’s stairwell and a concrete tunnel leading past the power pile.
Chicago, like all major cities, had a central autopsy room; and the Kelley, like other hospitals in the city, shipped all its cadavers there on a day-to-day basis. The transit was usually made at night to avoid traffic on Wahanakee Drive. Now Alexander saw that the truck was still waiting, backed up to the loading platform while the drivers were in the cafeteria for coffee. There were four wheeled stretchers, with sheets covering the bodies, loaded into the back of the refrigerated truck.
Alexander scrambled up the tailgate, peering into the truck. Back of the stretchers the undomed gyro was spinning, an almost inaudible high-pitched hum coming from the flywheel. Back of the gyro unit was a two-foot work space with a spare wheel and half a dozen plastic sheets.
He heard the drivers returning, and crouched down behind the gyro, half-covering himself with a sheet. Heavy footsteps came to the back of the truck; then the tailgate squeaked up. The doors closed with a clang, and he was locked in with four bodies in a black and freezing coffin.
The blackness took him by surprise; he hadn’t counted on it, and for a moment he fought down a rising wave of panic. In spite of the sheets he began shivering with cold. He heard the driver rev up the motor, and the truck gave a lurch and began moving.
There were three stops, the last one accompanied by the noise of the exit-gate swinging open. Then they were rolling . . . outside.
He waited until his teeth were chattering with cold, and he was certain the truck was on open Throughway. Then he groped forward in the darkness until his hand touched the gyro mount. The gyro was one of the air-driven Robling types, very simple, very reliable, the flywheel driven by a tiny stream of air impinging on the peripheral turbine blades. Once it was in motion, very little energy was needed to keep the heavy rotor turning at a high enough speed to stabilize the truck. The flywheel and turbine blades were shielded, but directly under the pressure nozzle there was a slot to let the air out. The air stream produced the hum, and Alexander felt around the rim of the turbine casing until he felt the cool steady jet.
He moved his fingertip up gingerly until he felt the turbine blades nick the tip of his fingernail like a buzz saw. Then he pulled one of the toilet paper rollers out of his pocket.
Wrapping his hand carefully in one of the plastic sheets, he rammed the metal roller up against the spinning turbine.
There was a shower of hot sparks, and the turbine screamed and shuddered. The metal rod began to heat up as the turbine blades ground down the soft metal. Suddenly the whole truck bucked and lurched, throwing him down onto the stretchers; the flywheel dropped below critical stability RPM, and the truck tipped and fell over on one side with a long skidding crash, wrenching the doors open and dumping three corpses out on top of him on the ground.
There were curses from the cab, and the drivers piled out. “Musta been the gyro. What in hell went wrong with it?”
“Oh, my God. Look at the stiffs all over the place.”
“Never mind the stiffs, what happened to the gyro? Where’s the flashlight?” Together the drivers shoved the corpses and Alexander unceremoniously out of the way and crawled into the truck with the flash. Neither one noticed that one of the corpses had coveralls on.
There were headlights coming down the road, and Alexander slid hastily into the shadow of the truck as the car roared by. Then he crouched low and ran over to the shoulder of the road. He slithered down into a drainage ditch as two more cars approached, slowed, and stopped.
He knew he was on Wahanakee Drive, but he didn’t know where. There were apartment buildings nearby, and now people were running down the road toward the wrecked truck. In the distance he heard the first faint rising whine of a siren.
Alexander hurried down the drainage ditch, then climbed up and crossed the highway as the steady trickle of people grew into a crowd and jammed the traffic, their voices rising on the excitement. He walked slowly away, fighting the urge to run, staying out of the way of people who kept hurrying flown to the road, expecting at any moment that the drivers would discover what had happened to their gyro and begin to wonder how four naked corpses had managed to wreck it so completely.
He was out.
He found an apartment building with the door wide open, the tenants out on the highway sharing in the excitement. He picked up the lobby phone, dialed a suburban Chicago number. Three long rings, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
“BJ?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Harvey.”
There was a moment’s silence, then a cool, deliberate answer. “Oh . . . .”
“Listen to me, BJ,” he said urgently. “This is very important. I’m over on Wahanakee Drive, at the Kingston Apartments. Can you pick me up at the parking lot by the north entrance?”
“Can’t you take a cab over?” The voice was distant, noncommittal.
“No,” he said, “I can’t. I’m in trouble.”
“I’ll be right over.” There was a click, and Alexander put the phone back on the hook. He wiped his prints off it and then walked out of the back exit into the parking lot. He could hear more sirens on the highway, and a police ’copter roared overhead, sliding down toward the wrecked truck. It was only a matter of time, now, he realized, whether BJ got to him before the police did.
Harvey Alexander knew Chicago, at least suburban Chicago, fairly well, having spent three of his Christmas vacations here during his West Point days, courting his now ex-wife, Betty Jean Wright. From her apartment to this part of Wahanakee Drive was about twenty minutes, he estimated, if the driver was in a hurry. He hoped the police would start searching the buildings before throwing up road blocks. That might give him time enough.
If they blocked the roads it would be bad, but it seemed more likely that the people at Kelley would make a thorough search inside the hospital before assuming that he had gotten through their foolproof security system.
He smiled wryly to himself. Amazing how natural it was for a man who developed a security system to assume it was foolproof.
Still, the Kelley would certainly notify the police and the DIA about him as soon as they heard of the wrecked truck. And he didn’t want to get BJ in trouble with the police and DIA, smashed-up marriage or no.
He remembered another parking lot behind the old Oak Park Country Club. Back in ’94, he had been a third-year man at the Point, captain of the chess and judo teams, and lie had very matter-of-factly started to change a flat tire on her father’s new Electro two-wheeler which they had borrowed for the dance. He hadn’t understood the techniques for capsizing the car by cranking the gyro around, and had tried to topple it with a borrowed jack. After much muttered profanity and sweat he wound up with one end of the car high in the air and began straining to make it fall over on one side so he could get at the wheel. BJ doubled over and screamed with laughter, and the Competition, a physicist from Chicago U., offered carefully baited suggestions in his sarcastic
midwestern drawl.
He didn’t remember the exact move and countermove, but somehow BJ had talked the Competition into changing the tire, with accompanying lecture on the scientific method and the principles of gyro mechanics, while they quietly climbed into the Competition’s British four-wheeler and drove off. They ran the car out of gas somewhere along Lake Michigan at four AM, and hitched a ride back on a milk truck, coming up the front walk toward the anxious parents and sulking Competition at six-thirty, and squelching all criticism and admonitions by announcing their engagement.
He graduated from the Point the next year, three months early because of the crash, and he and BJ got married the next day in the barbed-wire-enclosed Church of the Redeemer in New York against the advice of parents, relatives, and their own common sense.
The crash . . . dirty, stinking, bloody crash . . . that knocked the whole world face first into the dirt, knocked their marriage around, too. He saw BJ twice in the first three years. The second time, when he had the two weeks leave they had planned on for ten months, he was ordered back on active duty the second day and sent to China because of the sudden Yangtze truce. BJ blew up then and told him she was sick of it. He blamed her parents, and told her she was selfish and childish and a lot of other stupid, angry things, and left.
When he came back from China two and a half years later, she told him she was divorcing him. The Competition, quickly switching his field of work from physics to sociology, along with the more agile of the intelligensia of the country, had fallen into a cushy, high-stability-rating job in DEPCO, the new Department of Economic and Psychological Control that had taken over the shattered government while he was in China. The Competition had been most attentive, and convincing. BJ married him as soon as the divorce papers came through.
When Alexander saw her some eight years later, on his way through Chicago to Mexico, he learned that the second marriage had folded too. Of course any marriage lasting over five years in those days was a minor miracle, but BJ was bitter and disappointed about it. They got drunk together for old time’s sake, but she was all walled off by then, and there was nothing between them any more.
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 7