by John Boyd
Slade turned his gaze forward and sat in stony silence as Laudermilk steered onto the freeway. Breedlove was perplexed by Slade’s reference to a Mexican stand-off. He had not consciously maneuvered the Texan into an impasse. And why was the firing or hiring of Fawn now academic?
His perplexity deepened when they pulled into the motel parking lot and Turpin’s voice sounded in the car’s radio, “Little Dick to Big Ben. I released the penned rabbits. The meat has been shipped. Delay conference until I get there.”
“Wilco,” Slade answered.
It was past midnight. Any conference at this hour would have to be a crisis meeting. Apparently some crash program was afoot to get Kyra off the planet, which would account for her confidence at dinner. Kyra’s meeting with Slade at the pool this morning was probably the genesis of the late conference. Breedlove was beginning to feel like a puppet.
They entered the lobby and were moving toward the elevator when an agitated night clerk called from the check-out desk, “Mr. Slade, may I show you something?”
Slade went to the desk, where the night clerk opened the register and pointed. Slade’s jaw tightened, his face set, his eyes narrowed, then inexplicably he grinned. Turning back to the group, he strode up and gave Breedlove a complimentary slap on the back.
“Son, you didn’t intend it that way, but you’ve pulled off the security coup of the century. While you were out dancing with the dolly, Huan Chung hit the motel and found zilch. Mr. and Mrs. Huan Chung checked out of the bridal suite at midnight with no baggage.”
Slade was elated and Breedlove was shaken, not by Kyra’s narrow escape but by the implications of Huan Chung’s visit. Kyra’s theory had been wrong. The insidious Chinese was not Slade’s creation. The center pole of Breedlove’s lodge snapped, bringing his sense of reality crashing around him. First the incident at Pierre’s, and now this. The insane world of Ben Slade was real.
“Don’t look so horrified, Breedlove,” Slade said. His tone was now convivial and consoling. “Signing the register is one of the fillips that make the little bastard famous. It’s as much his calling card as a black lotus. He’ll coil and strike again, but the next time he strikes, our fair visitor will be hauling it past Uranus.” Slade paused for dramatic effect, lowered his voice, and said, “Tomorrow, we’re springing Kyra.”
Slade’s consolation was the worst he could have offered Breedlove, and his casual air of triumph did little to mitigate Breedlove’s sudden horror at the emptiness awaiting the woman he loved and the emptiness she would leave behind her.
“Does Washington know?”
“No, but I’ve got assurances from the highest sources that any successful attempt to rid the President of this hot potato without his knowledge will be appreciated.”
“Those words sound familiar,” Breedlove said as they stepped from the elevator.
Inside the suite Slade stalked to the balcony and told the two guards, “All right, you bums, you can knock off and go home. The woman you’ve been guarding all evening has been out painting the town.”
Entering the room, the two guards looked at Kyra in amazement, and one hung back to apologize. “When we relieved the watch she was asleep in bed.”
“Out!” Slade snapped.
“Aren’t you being a little harsh, Ben?” Kyra asked. “After all, Fawn fooled you too.”
“My anger was a put-on,” Slade said. “I want their dismissal on the record for their own protection, and I want them out of hearing distance when we start talking. You’d better awaken your decoy and get her out too.”
Kyra went into the bedroom to awaken Fawn and called, “Ben, come here!”
Panic in her voice brought Slade quickly to her side. Glancing into the bedroom, he doubled up with laughter, slapping his knees in appreciation of the comic scene inside. Behind Slade, Laudermilk glanced in and grinned. Turning to Breedlove, he said, “Huan Chung kidnapped the wrong woman.”
It was no laughing matter to Breedlove. Fawn Davies was a friend and the sister of a friend. He walked to the door and looked in. Where Fawn had lain, the bedcovers were folded back to leave an expanse of white sheet. Centering the whiteness, so sinister it filled the room with its evil, lay a black-petaled lotus blossom.
Slowly he walked into the room, leaned over the bed, and picked up the bizarre flower. Apparently Fawn had offered no resistance. Nothing in the room indicated a struggle. Even the pillows were fluffed and neatly in place. Only the grotesque flower testified to the crime.
Actually it was not a black lotus, Breedlove noticed. It was a magnolia blossom whose stem had been dipped in ink, and the bloom had darkened itself through osmosis. But its menace as a symbol was not lessened, and Fawn Davies was gone.
He turned to Kyra, standing distraught at the foot of the bed. “If you’re willing to take me with you off this crazy, mixed-up planet, I’m willing to go.”
“What will they do to Fawn?” Kyra asked dully.
“Nothing.” The emphatic answer came from Slade in the doorway. “By now she’s on Air China’s midnight flight from Vancouver to Peking. He gave her a whiff of zombie gas to make her obedient to his commands. As soon as she’s alert enough to answer his questions, he’ll discover his error and she’ll be on a return flight to Seattle, but by then she will have given us the breathing space we need. She’ll never remember seeing him. He’ll hypnotize her, give her posthypnotic suggestions, and when she. steps off the plane Monday, she’ll have a detailed memory of a weekend in Seattle.”
“Huan Chung must have read The Manchurian Candidate,” Breedlove commented.
“You might say he ghosted the book,” Slade agreed. “It was based on facts he put into the CIA files.”
“She’ll be safe,” Laudermilk said. “We never kill anyone but ourselves.”
Breedlove wanted to believe them. Fawn Davies was on his conscience, as she was no doubt on Kyra’s. He glanced toward Kyra, who nodded reassuringly, and her nod did more to relieve his anxiety than their assurances.
Slade slapped his hands together, rubbed his palms, and said, “Let’s get the show on the road, boys. Graves, go down to my office and bring up the floor plans. Breedlove, help me set up the conference table.”
Laudermilk left. Breedlove tossed the black magnolia blossom into Kyra’s waste basket and turned to join Slade, when Kyra spoke: “Ben, Breedlove’s tired and should be in bed. I’ve had him out dancing all night.”
“If it concerns you, Kyra, I want in,” Breedlove said.
“We’re planning a bag job on a hospital,” Slade said to him, “to heist enough radioactive cobalt to fuel Kyra’s ship, and she’s afraid if you know too much you can be indicted for conspiracy after she’s gone. I told her this morning the conspiracy laws won’t apply unless we’re caught in the act. If we succeed, the caper becomes a part of Project Fair Visitor and will be cloaked by national security.”
“I’ve heard that song before,” Breedlove said, thinking this could be a conspiracy directed at Kyra. “What assurance has Kyra that you’re not setting her up for a jail cell to simplify your own security problem?”
“I’m Kyra’s assurance,” Dick Turpin said from the doorway. He had entered the suite unobserved. “Three of us will be going into the hospital, and if only one comes out it will be Kyra.”
“But why are you taking Kyra in?”
“We’re heisting the core from a cobalt-ray machine in the Seattle General Hospital’s radiology lab,” Turpin said, “and we need her to carry the bag with the nuclear shield. She can handle the cobalt, and a bag’s less conspicuous when a woman carries it.”
“There’s little danger of our being apprehended,” Slade said. “We’re not Cuban patriots. We’ve been trained to make surreptitious entries. We’ll be organized and we’ll have the advantage of surprise. Who’d expect anyone to heist the core from a cobalt-ray machine?”
“Will cobalt do the job?” Breedlove asked Kyra.
“Better than uranium,” she answered. “I
researched the problem. I’ve been a nuclear physicist since Thursday.”
“Then this is your plan?”
“It was my idea. The plan was set up by the Three Musketeers.”
Meanwhile Laudermilk had returned and unrolled a set of plans onto the extended dining table. Breedlove moved over and looked down at the architectural drawing of a complex warren of corridors and compartments marked by dotted lines made with colored felt pencils. He glanced at the caption in the lower right corner of the drawing: BASEMENT FLOOR PLAN—SEATTLE GENERAL HOSPITAL.
“Where did this come from?”
“I stopped in at the Hall of Records this afternoon,” Slade said, “and did a little one-man bag job on it.”
Never having served in a war, Breedlove had never participated in a tactical planning session before where the high courage of each participant was taken for granted, where the risks were foreseen and planned for with such cold detachment and each perilous step outlined in detail. They seemed to have covered all the facets of a “hit” that would certainly be the most spectacular burglary in the history of breaking and entering. On Sunday the radiology laboratory of the hospital would be closed, and it would be guarded by a single security guard. Wearing a dark suit and carrying a briefcase, Slade would approach the basement clinic in company with Kyra and Turpin.
“Anyone walking down a hospital corridor with a briefcase and wearing a suit is assumed to be a doctor. Little Richard will wear a green smock and Kyra a nurse’s uniform with a cape to conceal her figure from the interns on Sunday duty,” Slade explained to Breedlove. “Dismantling the machine’s simple if you have the right tools, which I’ll carry in the briefcase. Actually the theft won’t hold up the clinic’s operation more than an hour Monday morning. The hospital will simply requisition another core.”
Apparently Slade had even considered the moral aspects of the burglary. He continued briefing Breedlove, his voice carrying the peculiar elan of a man of action functioning in a role he liked best.
“After the hit you’ll escort Kyra back to her ship, and she must be delivered. Once the core is in the spaceship, the heist goes under a security blanket and we’re all home free. After Kyra’s aloft, call Peterson on your walkie-talkie and report, The admiral is on the high seas.’ I’ll relay the word to Washington, and the book on Kyra will be closed—for the next one hundred years. Afterwards we’ll all be recognized as heroes, posthumously.”
No deviation from the motel’s security schedule would occur until after dinner Sunday evening. Then Breedlove would take his hired car back to the rental agency, and at 8:32 he would stand on the sidewalk before the agency, where he would be picked up by Turpin, who would be driving a car stolen from the commuter parking area at the airport.
Breedlove would drive Turpin to the hospital and return to the motel, where he would find Kyra waiting on the sidewalk in a nurse’s uniform. She would be under the covert surveillance of Laudermilk while waiting. “In the vernacular,” Laudermilk commented, “I’ll be crouched in the shrubbery, prepared to waste any masher who tries too hard to pick up Kyra.”
Breedlove would drive her to the hospital, which she would enter alone, meet her confederates in the cafeteria, and from there they would descend to the basement clinic. After the cobalt was lifted, all four would drive to the airport, where Breedlove would park the car in the slot from which it had been stolen and board the eleven-thirty flight to Spokane.
“From the Seattle airport on she’ll be your responsibility,” Slade told Breedlove, “and you’ll be unarmed, since you can’t get past the air passengers’ checkpoint carrying metal. We’ll reserve a Jeep for you at the rental agency in Spokane. Now show me your route to Jones Meadow.”
On a road map Breedlove pointed out the shortest way to the area which avoided the ranger station: along Route 2 to Priest River, due north through the Kaniksu Forest, then east along an old sawmill road over the mountains and into the meadow from the west. It would be wrong, they agreed, to implicate Peterson before the plot was an accomplished fact, and the regulations-conscious chief ranger might conceivably imperil the mission before Kyra’s liftoff. Breedlove’s estimated time of arrival at the space vehicle was nine Monday morning.
Each man on the strike force was assigned the task that best matched his skills, and Laudermilk’s role, though the least risky, impressed Breedlove most. On early Sunday afternoon the major was to date a nurse he had met at the Navy clinic, a woman whose proportions were similar to Kyra’s, and persuade her to lend him her uniform, cape, and identity papers to be used in Kyra’s cover. Laudermilk was to bring the uniform to Kyra’s suite and take over the interior guard duties from Breedlove while Breedlove drove downtown to return his rented car and pick up the new one from Turpin.
It was two in the morning before the conference broke up, and each participant knew precisely what he was to be doing tomorrow, at precisely what time. Exhausted by an evening of joy and tenderness, violence and sudden death, the kidnapping of a friend and the planning of a burglary, Breedlove went immediately to bed and quickly to sleep to arise to a bright Sunday morning, which was nonetheless gloomy because of Kyra’s imminent departure.
At breakfast Kyra comforted him with aphorisms: “Leave-takings are always sad, Breedlove, because life’s great beauty lies in its ephemerality. Else we’d prefer wax flowers to real roses.” And, “Never envy the romantic hero, Breedlove, because he is the paragon of the average, seeking the happiest means to please both Polly and Patty.”
After breakfast, telling Breedlove she wanted to bid her guardsmen good-bye, Kyra called Turpin on the house phone and invited him to meet her at the poolside. Then, wearing her bikini, she dove from the balcony for the last time. Breedlove took the Sunday paper onto the balcony, now divested of guards, but he could not read. His gaze kept drifting to Turpin and Kyra, below and across the pool, who were lounging in adjacent patio chairs. Turpin leaned toward her and listened to her last words to him with reverence. After a quarter-hour she touched her fingers to his lips in some private ritual of farewell, and Turpin arose and left her.
Apparently he carried a summons to Laudermilk, who came in turn for his final private meeting with Kyra, and the major’s usual exuberance had been replaced by an air of gravity. Unlike Turpin, Laudermilk talked more than he listened, and the always gracious Kyra was attentive to his words. Finally she put her fingers to his lips, and Laudermilk arose and left her.
Slade came last, bringing with him a restlessness and unease, but his disquiet left him as he talked with her, and he was smiling at the end of his audience. After Slade arose and left her, the strange devotionals were over, and Breedlove wondered what each man in his turn had heard her say.
“I have bidden them all a formal farewell” was all the information Kyra volunteered when she returned, “but I’m saving my farewell to you for tomorrow on the meadow.”
Her promise lightened the gloom of the day and made Sunday’s long prospect brighter. Expectancy softened the Sunday tristesse that habitually came to him at twilight, and Kyra’s last dinner arrived in an atmosphere of sorrow touched with joy. Not a man at the table wanted to see her go, but the goal they had all worked for was soon to be achieved. Characteristically Turpin put the dinner in a religious context. From this Last Supper, he averred, would come no Crucifixion. Kyra would go straight to the Ascension, for this time the disciples would confound the Pharisees. But the ever-cautious Breedlove wondered if a Judas sat at the table.
None of the tension Breedlove expected pervaded a group intent on committing a crime that very evening whose scope and novelty would put it on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Though the monolithic pile of the Seattle General Hospital loomed large in Breedlove’s thoughts, his companions seemed intent only on Kyra.
Slade was optimistic about Kyra’s chances of finding a home. “The Rand Corporation estimates six hundred million habitable planets in the Milky Way alone, and that’s in spitting distance for you/�
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“If there’s any real estate out there,” Kyra promised, “I’ll find it.”
Although he made an effort to fall in with the mood at the table, Breedlove felt a growing apprehension about the burglarizing of the radiology laboratory. Why had Slade insisted on Kyra entering the basement of the building? Because the exits from it were limited? This afternoon Laudermilk had successfully charmed the panties, bra, and uniform off a Navy nurse for Kyra’s use,—why had he not charmed the nurse into going all the way and doing the job for Kyra? It was true that Kyra might have more savvy about handling the cobalt and getting the core into the sphere, but Turpin would have done it for her with his bare hands. Why hadn’t Slade recruited one of his black-belt holders from the kitchen or scullery to play the feminine role in this caper?
Even apart from Kyra, for every reason Breedlove could summon to justify these three men’s actions in taking part in an illegal scheme, he could think of a better reason why they shouldn’t. All three were government agents and sensitive to their careers, which were being jeopardized by this act. On the other hand, they were intelligent game players who could spot the promotional advantages that would accrue from the betrayal of their own kind.
Kyra sensed his trepidations. After dinner they sat on the balcony alone together, waiting for Laudermilk to bring in Kyra’s uniform and to take over the interior watch on her while Breedlove delivered his car to the rental agency. It was then Kyra remarked, “Don’t worry about anything, Breedlove. Once I have the cobalt in the bag, it’s mine. You know I can outrun anyone on earth, and I have you to rely on.”