“Can I have some time to think about it?”
“What is there to think about?”
“Dignity. Allow me the dignity of believing I still have some freedom of choice.”
Mr. Lippitt looked at Victor strangely for a moment before drawing a card from his pocket and handing it to him. “You can reach me at this number, any time of the day or night. Call me when you’ve … reached your decision.” He paused at the door, turned and looked at Victor in the same odd manner. “I meant what I said, Mr. Rafferty. I am sorry that it has to be this way.”
“So am I.”
The door clicked shut behind Victor with a terrible certainty, muffling Pat’s sobs, punctuating a decision Victor knew could not be reversed. There was no turning back once he had begun running. Never again could he be trusted, but he would be free.
Somewhere in the United States there had to be a place where he and Pat could lose their identities and start over, perhaps a small town in the south or the west. Victor knew he must find that place and find it quickly. Then he would send for Pat. Perhaps it was, as he suspected, a futile gesture, but it was something he had to attempt, the only alternative to imprisonment in a world of uniforms, security checks and identity cards. He knew, too, that he must conserve his strength; already his arm ached from the weight of his single suitcase.
He knew there was something wrong the moment he stepped down from the porch. Victor felt the man’s presence even before he spoke.
“Please stop right there, Mr. Rafferty.”
Victor froze; he knew there was no sense in trying to run. Even without the suitcase, which he needed because it contained his bankbook and credit cards, he realized that his physical condition would never enable him to outrun the guard. He turned and stared into a pair of cold, gray eyes. The man was short and stocky, very well dressed, with close-cropped blond hair. Victor felt the man’s mind coiled like a steel spring.
“Who the hell are you?” Victor snapped, his frustration forming meaningless words. He already knew the answer: Lippitt’s man.
“I’m sorry, sir. I must ask you to come with me.”
“Your boss told me I’d have time to think things over.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have my instructions. I was told to bring you with me if it looked like you were trying to leave. Will you follow me, please?”
Victor shifted his weight back on one foot and then lurched forward, sending the suitcase swinging in an arc toward the man’s head. The guard stepped easily aside, allowing the weight of the suitcase to carry Victor around until he was off balance. He moved with the grace of a dancer, stepping behind Victor, knocking the suitcase to the ground and twisting Victor’s arm up behind his back gently but firmly, so that the responsibility for any pain would be Victor’s if he attempted to struggle.
Victor acted instinctively, throwing back his head and closing his eyes in fierce concentration. He probed, ignoring the blinding pain, searching for some fear or anxiety in the guard’s mind that he could touch and grab hold of with his own. There was something there, dark and shapeless, rough and rattling with death. Victor strained, probing harder and deeper, obsessed with the need to escape. Now the guard was making strange, guttural sounds deep in his throat. Victor felt steel-hard fingers at his neck, pressing, searching for the nerve centers at the base of his skull. He was inside the guard’s mind and there was pain there that he was causing; still the man would not let go. Victor probed still deeper, wrenching the sensations, magnifying the pain.
Then the fingers were no longer around his neck. Victor turned in time to see the man sink to the ground. The guard was moaning softly, writhing on the ground and gripping his head in his hands. The moaning stopped. The guard twitched and then lay still.
Victor knelt down beside the guard and was immediately aware of yet another presence. He threw himself to one side and missed the full force of a blow delivered by a second, larger man who must have been positioned at the rear of the house. The second man tripped over the first and sprawled on the flagstone walk.
This time it was Victor who attacked, swinging around and stepping close to the second guard who was just springing to his feet. There was already pain in the other man as a result of his fall, fear and uncertainty at the sight of his prostrate partner. Victor seized on both thoughts and concentrated, thrusting deep. The man slumped to the sidewalk without a sound.
Victor reached for his suitcase and looked up into the face of Pat, who had run out onto the porch at the sounds of the struggle. Her eyes wide with fear, the woman had jammed her knuckles into her mouth so that only her mind screamed in terror and ripped at Victor’s consciousness. Victor threw aside the suitcase, turned and ran, away from the fallen men, away from the horror in his wife’s mind.
Roger Burns was certain he’d turned off the lights in his office and laboratory. Even if he’d forgotten, the cleaning woman would have remembered. He’d had no way of knowing that sleeplessness and excitement over the Rafferty file would bring him back here to his office in the middle of the night. Now, someone had broken into the building. There was no other explanation for the shaft of light that leaked out from beneath his office door into the darkness.
Roger’s hand rested on the doorknob. He knew he should call the police, yet the only phone was the one on the other side of the door. He could not wake up a neighbor at three o’clock in the morning, the nearest pay booth was three blocks away, and he did not want the intruder to escape. He was outraged at the thought of someone rifling through his highly confidential files, if that was it.
Anger triumphed over reason. Roger burst into the room and then stopped short, frozen into immobility by the sudden realization that the two men in the office were no ordinary burglars and that he had stumbled into a situation he was totally incapable of handling.
The light came from the fluoroscope. One man, an individual Roger had seen a few times at Washington cocktail parties, was taking photographs of Victor Rafferty’s X rays. The other had been microfilming files that Roger knew must also be Victor’s. This man now had a revolver in his hand. The long, thick silencer made it seem ridiculously out of proportion, like a toy rifle.
Roger raised one arm and the gun kicked. There was a soft, chugging sound and a small, round, white hole opened in Roger’s forehead, then quickly filled with blood.
Victor sat in a booth at the rear of the coffee shop, toying nervously with a cup of muddy-brown coffee and staring at the front page of the newspaper he had spread out before him. He felt numb, dazed with guilt; the stories seemed to leap from the page, stabbing at his senses with twin fingers of accusation. So, Victor thought, I am responsible for the deaths of two men.
He was sure Roger had been murdered because of him; the guard, a man who had merely been doing his job, he had killed himself.
Some enterprising reporter had outwitted the dozen policemen outside his home with a telephoto lens. The picture showed the dead man on the walk. The second guard was just rising to his feet. Mr. Lippitt was standing off to one side, obviously unaware that the photograph was being taken. The picture had been captioned with a single, large question mark.
The waiter, an elderly man with dirty fingernails and a soiled apron, kept glancing in his direction. Victor wearily signaled for another cup. The waiter came to the table and wiped his hands on his shirt.
“Coffee,” Victor said, not looking up.
The waiter pointed to the unfinished cup on the table. “You don’t look so good, pal,” he said. “Maybe you oughta get some food in your stomach.”
“I’m all right,” Victor said, aware that he sounded defensive. “You can get me some bacon and eggs. And orange juice.”
The waiter swiped at the table with a damp rag and then shuffled off, mumbling to himself. Victor reached out for the sugar bowl and began rolling it back and forth between his hands. With the suitcase gone, he had little money and no place to go. In any case, Mr. Lippitt would have all the airports and bus term
inals watched. It was too late to do anything and so it didn’t bother him that he was too tired to think clearly; there was nothing left to think about. He wondered if they’d shoot him on sight.
He could still feel the texture of the guards’ minds as he had entered them to twist and hurt; he could see their bodies lying on the ground. Most of all, he remembered the expression of sheer horror on Pat’s face.
Victor stopped spinning the sugar bowl. He had been staring at it and it had suddenly come to him that he was seeing the object in an entirely different way, with more than his vision. He saw the glass he was touching with his hands; at the same time he could feel the mirror image of the bowl somewhere in his brain, elusive, ephemeral, and yet seemingly real enough to be grasped.
Victor slowly took his hands away from the bowl and touched the image in his mind.
The pain was greater than any he had ever known. Victor immediately released the image and gripped the edges of the table in an effort not to lose consciousness. The pain passed in a few moments, gradually ebbing away. He opened his eyes but did not have enough time to evaluate what had happened. The waiter, approaching his table with a tray of food, tripped over a loose linoleum tile. The tray and its contents came hurtling through the air. Victor reacted instinctively in an effort to protect his only set of clothes; he reached out and pushed at the tray with his mind. At that instant Victor felt his body bathed in searing fire. The walls and ceiling tilted at an odd angle and the floor rushed up to smash into his face.
The waiter stared, dumbfounded. His startled gaze shifted rapidly back and forth between the unconscious man on the floor and the egg stains on his apron. Something was wrong, he thought, something besides the man on the floor; there was something out of place. The old man’s slow mind struggled with the problem of the flying tray and food as he hurried to call the police and an ambulance.
Now only the memory of the pain remained, like the lingering, fuzzy morning taste of too many cigarettes. Victor’s mind and senses were clear at last, cleansed of their blinding crust of panic by the shock of coma. The sour, antiseptic smell in his nostrils told him he was in a hospital; the dull throb in his skull told him he was not alone. Victor kept his eyes closed and lay very still.
He recalled the incident in the coffee shop very clearly and he knew what had happened. He had seen the word in the textbooks: telekinesis, the theoretical ability to move objects by the intense focusing of thought energy. Except that telekinesis was no longer theoretical; he could do it. No matter that the crippling pain made it highly improbable that he could ever use it effectively; the very fact that he had exhibited the power made him that much more desirable, or dangerous, in the eyes of Mr. Lippitt and whoever had killed Roger Burns. Perhaps they had already decided that the risks of using him were too great. He had run. He had killed a man. He was a criminal. They could easily shut him away in some prison for the rest of his life to make sure, if he didn’t work for them, he wouldn’t work for anyone else.
In the meantime, Pat was in terrible danger. Whoever had killed Roger would be after her next; Mr. Lippitt had said as much. They would torture her; kill her, if they thought it could lead them to him. Victor was sure Mr. Lippitt had assigned men to guard her but that couldn’t last forever. No, Victor reflected, he was endangering Pat by the very fact that he was alive.
The guard testified to the fact that he was caught. Probably the police or the hospital had called his home, and Mr. Lippitt would certainly have the phone tapped. Victor was surprised the thin man in the overcoat wasn’t already at his bedside.
His was a prison with no doors and windows, a killing trap that was sucking his wife in to die with him, a problem with no solution—except one; only one. It was, as yet, only the embryo of an idea. First, he must escape the hospital.
“I’m feeling very well now,” Victor said loudly, sitting up quickly and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Maybe you can tell me where my clothes are.”
The policeman sat up as if stabbed with a pin. Startled, he fumbled for his gun and finally managed to point it in Victor’s direction, but the asking of the question had been enough to implant the answer in the policeman’s mind. Victor probed gently; the policeman was very tired; and his clothes were in the white closet at the far end of the room.
“You might as well just lay back there, mister,” the policeman said, releasing the safety on his pistol as an afterthought. “I’m not even supposed to let you go to the head without keeping an eye on you.”
Victor crossed his legs on the bed. His lungs ached from the tension but he managed to feign innocence. “Well, do you mind telling me why?” He must put the policeman off guard and there wasn’t much time.
The policeman eyed Victor suspiciously. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
Victor began to probe deeper and then stopped, sickened by the memory of the man he had killed outside his home. In that moment he knew he would not kill another innocent man, even if it meant his own death. Then, how?
“… damned silly,” the policeman mumbled.
“What’s that?” The policeman hesitated, and Victor probed, gently magnifying the frustration he found in the other man’s mind. He smiled disarmingly. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I didn’t say … Oh, hell, this whole thing is silly. Some little guy claims you turned a plate of eggs around in the air without touching them. Before you know it, I’m pulling this extra baby-sitting duty.”
“That does sound pretty silly.”
Then he knows for certain, Victor thought; Mr. Lippitt knows I am telekinetic.
“Mind you, I was just on my way out the door when I pull this duty. As if that wasn’t enough, I’m catching a few winks and this creep comes in and belts me in the mouth! He hits me, mind you! Weird little guy in an overcoat. Must be eighty degrees in here and this guy’s wearing an overcoat! I’d have killed any other guy did that and this creep’s a little guy. But his eyes; I never seen eyes like that. Crazy, if you know what I mean. Man, you don’t mess with a guy that’s got eyes like that.” The policeman sneezed and Victor sat very still. “Anyway, this guy says he’ll have my job and my pension if I fall asleep again. Just like that! No, sir! You don’t mess with a guy like that. And get this, he takes the key and locks me in here! He’s got to be some kind of big shot or he wouldn’t dare do something like that. Says he’s got to go someplace and he’ll be right back.” The man rubbed his nose and lips with an oversize, red handkerchief, then blew hard into it and repeated the process. “I think he’s some kind of spy,” the policeman continued, studying Victor through narrowed eyelids. “I think maybe you’re a spy too. Spies are always making up screwy stories. Call ’em cover stories. See it all the time in the movies.”
Victor choked back the strained, hollow laughter in his throat. “Did this man say where he was going?”
The hand holding the gun had relaxed. Now it tightened again and the gun barrel leveled on Victor’s stomach. “You ask too many questions,” the policeman snapped. “I ain’t even supposed to talk to you. Maybe you’re a spy. Yeah, for all I know you’re some kind of terrorist.”
“It’s all a mistake,” Victor said very quietly, eyeing the gun. “I asked where the man went because I’m anxious for him to get back. I’m sure everything will be straightened out when he gets here. It’s just too bad you had to get dragged into it, particularly when you didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Hey, how’d you know I didn’t get much sack time?”
“Your eyes look tired. You were probably out playing poker with some of your friends.”
“Son of a bitch, you know you’re right? Dropped twenty bucks and my wife’s going be screaming at me for a week!”
Victor began to concentrate on a single strand of thought. “You must be very tired,” he said, accenting each word, caressing the other man’s weariness. “You should sleep.” The policeman yawned and stretched, and Victor glanced toward the door. Mr. Lippitt co
uld enter the room at any time, and he’d have other men with him. “It’s all a mistake. You’re free to go to sleep, to rest.”
“I … can’t do that.” The man was fighting to keep his head up. The gun had fallen on the floor and he looked at it with a dazed expression.
“It’s all right. You can sleep. Go to sleep.”
The policeman looked at Victor with a mixture of bewilderment and fear and then slumped in his chair. Victor quickly eased him onto the floor before going to the cabinet and taking out his clothes. He dressed quickly and stepped close to the locked door. He bent down and looked at the lock, breathing a sigh of relief; it was a relatively simple, interlocking bolt type with which he was quite familiar.
Victor knew he must not think of his fear or the pain that was to come, but only of the consequences of failure. He sat on the floor and closed his eyes. He rested his head against the door, summoning up in his mind an image of the moving parts of the lock, each spring, each separate component. He knew he must duplicate his feat in the coffee shop; he must control the image in his mind so as to move the tiny metal bars in the door. Pat’s life, and probably his own, depended on it.
The pain came in great, sweeping, hot waves, as it had in the coffee shop, and Victor recognized the wet, dark patches behind his eyes as the face of death. He could feel his fingernails breaking and bleeding as he pushed them into the wood, defying the agony. The lock must turn. His blood surged through his body, bloating the veins and arteries in his face and neck to the point where Victor knew, in a few seconds at most, they must burst.
Strange Prey Page 4