My thoughts alternated between anger and despair on the helicopter ride. Another day and we'd have been safe. Our captors put hoods over our heads, a needless and degrading treatment. The helicopter landed and we were herded into a jet. Within minutes the engines turned over and we were airborne. I suspected it was a Learjet, the same model as mine, a suspicion that was confirmed as we took off and the flight computer called out V1 and V2 in the same voice and at the same speeds my own uses. I didn't know if the information would turn out to be important or not, but I made a mental note of it in case it did. My future had suddenly become very uncertain, and the only weapon I had left was my brain.
We were in the air maybe two hours, or maybe three—it was difficult to keep track of time—and when we landed they loaded us into a van. I could tell it was a van from the step up into the back and the slam of the doors when they sat us down. We'd flown a long way. The air was hot and humid. Where were we? Guantanamo Bay? Mexico? Canada? If I was right about the distance we'd flown we could be a lot of places. We were side by side at least, and just that much contact with my wife was reassuring. We were still together, we would beat them yet. The ride from the airport was another hour, maybe. We were taken up a set of steps, into an air-conditioned building, then down more flights of stairs. I tried to keep track of the twists and turns but was quickly disoriented. When they finally removed the hood I was in a bare cell, eight by six, with a bed, a toilet and a sink, nothing else. The heavy metal door had an open slot at the floor and another, covered by a metal slider, at eye level.
I sat on the bed, exhausted, but not for long. Soon they came to get me. I was hooded again, taken up a flight of stairs to a windowless room where I waited, still handcuffed. After about five minutes a heavyset, jowly, balding man came in.
"Mr. Watson. I'm pleased to meet you at last." He didn't sound pleased.
I recognized the voice. "Burbridge." He was carrying a nasty-looking rubber truncheon, which did nothing for my sense of equinamity.
"What happened to your eyebrows?" He tried small talk.
"It's a long story." I kept the answer short and bitter. "I have to say, the SEC has overstepped its authority pretty drastically, don't you think?"
"Not the SEC, Mr. Watson. This branch of the government doesn't have a name." I considered suggesting a name for him, but thought better of it. He smiled a nasty smile. "So suppose you tell me all about your nuclear fusion work."
I was taken aback. "What do you mean?"
"What, did you expect me to ask about Dynacore? That's an issue beneath my notice. McCool provides us convienient cover, in return for some quiet -assistance from time to time. So tell me about the fusion project."
I shrugged, confused as to the purpose of the question. The details were confidential but there was certainly nothing even vaguely illegal about it. "We're trying to build a fusion drive for interplanetary travel."
"Why?"
"To explore the possibility of mining asteroids."
He laughed. "Yes, I heard your conversation with Douglas Straughn. We know all your cover stories." He leaned forward. "It was clever, but it didn't fool anyone. We know that you know we've been watching you. What you didn't know is that we knew you knew." I tried to make sense of that and failed. "Now suppose you tell me what you're really doing?"
"That's what we're really doing."
"Don't play games, Mr. Watson. You really aren't in a position to."
"What else can I tell you?" I was genuinely perplexed now.
"We know what you've been doing. We know about your secret lab in the countryside." He let me look blank for a long minute, then prompted me. "Wild Oaks. The Grafton plantation."
"Holmes' place?" I was incredulous. "That's hardly a secret."
"No, it isn't." He smirked as though he'd put one over on me. "We've had it under surveillance for some time. You almost had us convinced it was innocent. If you hadn't blocked out our electronic intercepts we would have been."
"Blocked out your . . ." I remembered Holmes' chicken wire, and the couple Pandora had chased through the peach orchard. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
"It made no difference. We know everything important." He spread his arms wide to show how much he knew. "We know you're planning to conquer the world."
"What!?" Genuine shock raced through my system. Nobody knows that except Julie. Had he somehow scanned my brain? If he had—why did he need to ask me any questions at all?
"We know everything Mr. Watson." He leaned in closer, smacking his palm with the truncheon. "We know you're researching fusion weapons that don't require fission triggers. We know you're developing magnetically driven directed energy weapons. We know you're developing genetically engineered combat creatures."
"Genetically engineered combat creatures?" I stared at him in stunned amazement, then horrified realization began to seep into my brain. Death rays and mutant monsters. They had been listening to Brian, spying on him. And the only part of his technobabble they'd actually been able to understand was the B-movie based disinformation he'd fed them to keep them from finding out about the asteroid plan. He didn't know I intended to rule the world, he only thought he knew because Brian had made up some wild-eyed story along that line.
Burbridge ignored my shock. "We know someone is funneling a lot of money to you through Douglas Straughn to do the work. We just need to know who."
"Listen, you've got it all wrong . . ." If someone tells you a lie that turns out to be the truth is it really a lie? And do you then really know the truth?
"Is it the Chinese or the Russians?"
"It's not a weapon, it's a rocket engine." I could tell he didn't believe me. "You've got to believe me," I added, as if it would make a difference. "We're developing it ourselves."
"For asteroid mining?" He gave a contemptuous smirk and without warning smacked me across the face with the rubber truncheon. Pain exploded through my head and I saw stars. When I looked up he had his eyes locked on mine. "Next time choose a cover story that's a little less far-fetched." He leaned close, his gaze locked on to mine. "Now tell me the truth. Is it terrorists?"
I looked back at him, saw the insanity behind his eyes. He really believed what he was saying. I could of course have given him the bigger story—that I planned on building an asteroid mining empire as a necessary prerequisite to world domination. That story would probably play better with his warped psychology, but it really wouldn't advance my cause. I just hoped he wouldn't use the truncheon anymore. It didn't seem like a reasonable hope.
We stared like this for a while, then he turned away." Understand, Mr. Watson, that we have all the time in the world. We're letting your little lab run for now, but we're watching it. Sooner or later we'll get the evidence we need, and you'll be right here when we do."
He left and I breathed out in relief, still shaky from the suddenly violent turn things had taken. After a while a guard came to put my hood back on and take me back to my cell. I was stunned and felt horrible. Throughout the whole experience I had deluded myself into believing it wouldn't—couldn't, last long. There are people the government can harass with impunity, and people it can't. I was—or had believed myself—very firmly in the can't category. Even in the midst of evading their pervasive searching I had felt I was only playing business hardball, making sure I kept the upper hand. Burbridge had effectively disabused me of that notion. His agency, whatever it was, was perfectly capable of making Julie and me vanish quite completely. And he was just nuts enough to do exactly that. How he would react when he finally learned that we weren't growing Godzilla in Brian's basement was a question I didn't want to learn the answer to. I needed to get the hell out.
I waited until we were back inside my cell and the guard was taking the hood off again. He was a beefy man, red faced, wearing a blue uniform shirt with no insignia on it, a clip-on radio and microphone, with a nasty-looking baton, a set of cuffs and a spray can of mace on his belt. I smiled my best smile. "What's your name
?"
"No talking allowed." He didn't even look at me.
"Do you know who I am?"
"No."
"I'm John Watson, Baker Technologies. They arrested me yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama." I almost added "USA" just in case I was in Panama—how long had the flight been? "Look it up in the papers, they'll have my picture." Time to use all that dramatic press coverage to my advantage.
"So?"
"So I'm one of the top-ten richest men in the world. Look it up, talk to me again tomorrow, there's a million dollars in it for you."
"Oh." He seemed to have cornered the market on monosyllables. The heavy door clanked shut behind him. I smiled. He didn't believe me, but he was going to check anyway.
Dinner that night was some kind of pasty stew, slid through the slot on the bottom of the door. I sat on the bed and thought about Julie. She probably wasn't far away; the cell space didn't seem very large. I didn't like to think of her being pushed around by Beefy and Burbridge. It wasn't that she couldn't handle herself—I just didn't like to think about it.
In the morning—or at least, I thought it was morning, under the constant artificial light it was impossible to tell, I had another interview with Burbridge. This one was longer and more intense, but the theme was the same. Who was paying us? What weapons were planned? What were the targets? Who were the contacts? Where were the weapons being built? How large were the combat creatures? Over and over we covered the same ground, with Burbridge alternating between ice cold and raging hot, good cop and bad cop in the same porky body. He didn't learn anything, mostly because there was nothing to learn, but from the questions he was asking I gradually came to learn how truly out of contact with reality he and his agency were. As I said, paranoia goes with megalomania, and I am well acquainted with both, but his knew no bounds. He grilled me about biological warheads launched from Mexico, control of citizen's minds through subliminal messages etched into grooves on interstate highways, microrobotic spies, fusion plasma weapons—and yes, an army of mutated salamanders grown to -tyrannosaur-like proportions and sent out to terrorize the civilian population. The questions were interspersed with liberal applications of the truncheon. I ground my teeth and wished Brian's imagination hadn't been quite so vivid—and that Burbridge's wasn't either. They had obviously been watching Wild Oaks plantation for quite some time, failed to understand anything they'd seen or heard, and fed it all into some institutional delusion of a resurgent international communist conspiracy. There was no nation, no group they did not suspect of plotting against America—more specifically against their control of America. They had access to millions of pieces of information under the Personal Privacy Act, and they assembled the entire puzzle by hammering those pieces in to place until they had some Daliesque approximation of the conspiracy they needed to continue to justify their own existence. It explained, at least, the bizarre use of FISA rules by the SEC. I had thought Burbridge was just McCool's strongman, but no, McCool was just Burbridge's patsy.
I endured it for hours that grew steadily blurrier, and there was a different guard when the interview ended. I didn't talk to this one. Either the first one had been caught, in which case the second one would have been warned, possibly even bugged, or the first one was still getting his message through, in which case I could only wait.
The next day, the original guard was back, beautiful to my sight in his beefy, red-faced way. He was silent in the cell, but on the way up the stairs for another interview he said, "I read about you in the news."
"Do you want your million dollars?"
He didn't even hesitate. Every man has his price. This specimen I probably could have bought for ten thousand.
"You have to contact the law firm Megan and Boyd in New York, and Mark Stuller in Birmingham, tell them where I am, tell them what this place is. You get your cash when I'm out. Will you do that?"
"Yah, I'll do it." He was practically salivating to do it.
"Good." He took me in for another session of fun and games with Burbridge. This time he presented proof linking me to the Chinese intelligence service, insisting I admit to my complicity. I tried to ignore him and thought about Julie.
Clever prisoners keep track of the days and nights by making some mark in their cell, but I didn't think of that until the second or third day, and after that I was always too glad to simply fall in bed and go to sleep after Burbridge's fanatical questioning. I was tempted to make things up just to add some kind of interest to the endless sessions, or at least to spare myself another head-spinning smack with the truncheon, but I knew I'd live to regret it if I did so I just stuck to the tiny array of facts that were actually true. Yes we were building a fusion drive, no it wasn't a weapon, yes Douglas Straughn was involved, no the Chinese weren't, yes I had talked to the Russians about the use of their boosters, and no, most certainly it was not so I could launch biological weapons at Washington, yes I had a deal going with Georgi Stanislaski, no I wasn't aware he dealt with Azerbaijani rebels, yes I was building a unique launch facility in Mexico, and no, it wasn't for launching biological weapons at Washington either. I had no idea where the obsession with bio-terror came from—Baker Technologies did nothing that even the most paranoid mind could twist into a biological weapon—but Burbridge and his shadowy organization didn't need anything as messy as evidence to feed their fantasies. It was the same thing day after day, and around day six or ten I got fed up and suggested to him that if I were really interested in covering the Capital with bio-engineered Ebola then a secondhand crop duster would be a more effective tool than a surplus Russian rocket booster. He just launched into a tirade about eternal vigilance being the price of American freedom. Probably unwisely I asked him what the price of my freedom was going to be. He stared at me coldly for a moment long enough for me to realize that he had yet to put real muscle behind the truncheon. I waited for the inevitable, but he just turned and walked out.
Some long time after that a guard came to take me back to my cell. I never saw the guard I'd bribed again. Had he been busted? Had the message gone through? It was impossible to know. The other guards worked in a fairly predictable rotation. I didn't dare approach another one until I found out what happened to the first. I gradually forgot what he'd even looked like and began to question whether the exchange had ever taken place. Isolation does strange things to the mind.
On the fourteenth or the twentieth or the fiftieth interrogation Burbridge was going over the Pacific Rim connection for the hundredth or thousandth or millionth time when there was a brilliant flash and the lights went out, all of them. I was getting used to that, but usually it was because I'd been smacked with the rubber truncheon again. Have you ever been in real darkness? At first you think your eyes will adjust, and then they don't and they start to play tricks on you. There was only artificial light in this hole, and with it gone there was nothing, period. I could hear people blundering around out in the corridor, shouts and curses and people fruitlessly flipping switches and yelling about emergency lighting. They needn't have bothered. I don't know fact number one about electricity, but I know enough to recognize that this was not a power failure. The lights had flashed because there was a power surge, one big enough to burn them all out at once.
On the other hand the emergency lights had been switched off when the power spiked and they shouldn't have been affected. They would be running on a completely separate system—which was what they were for of course, so they would still work no matter what happened to the main power.
So okay, I didn't know what was going on any more than anyone else did. I told you I know nothing about electricity. Maybe there was a point to flipping switches up and down and yelling about emergency power. Whatever the point was though, it didn't seem to be resulting in any light.
That was an opportunity. I got up quietly. Burbridge had gone out to the corridor and was blundering around with the rest of them. I felt for the door, taking small steps to avoid tripping. I got there, found it unlocked. I slippe
d through, put my hand on the wall and started walking, trying to remember the internal layout of the building. The cells were in the basement—concrete floors, pipes overhead. The interrogation room was up one floor with linoleum flooring and offices, but I'd never seen any windows—possibly there were two basement floors, or maybe more. So when I found stairs, I had to go up. The elevators wouldn't be working of course.
I made my way down the hall, nobody stopped me. It hadn't occurred to them that a prisoner would get so far out of their control. I took a deep breath. If it was daylight upstairs I might find myself in trouble—but I had nothing to lose.
I made it to the stairs, went up one flight, went through the door. That floor was completely dark as well—no windows. I was about to try up another flight when a loud British accent cut through the commotion. "Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock."
Mark Stuller! "Sherlock" was the Baker Technologies kidnap code, and all of a sudden I understood the power surge and the failure of the emergency lights. I was being rescued.
"Sherlock!" I called back.
"Stay there! I'll find you." And ten long seconds later he had. A hand on my shoulder. He handed me something. "Here, put these on." Thermal—imaging goggles.
"You got my message?"
"We got part of it. Your messenger wanted half his cash up front before he'd tell us where you were. They must have been watching him—he just vanished before we could set up the exchange."
How had they found us then? It didn't matter at the moment. I fumbled on the night-vision goggles, found the switch, and the world lit up in weird tones of grainy green. A few of the agency's agents were blundering around in the dark, feeling their way up through the corridor, their bodies luminous in the thermal spectrum. Mark had a tight group with him—a woman from his security team and two men. I only knew the woman because I knew her figure, their features where unrecognizable behind their goggles. Unlike the government agents blundering around they were dark on the thermal image—their jumpsuits must have been made of infrared suppressive fabric. They carried backpacks and grenade launchers, headset radios and ammunition bandoliers. Mark keyed his radio. "Base, this is Mobile 1, we have him, extracting now, out." He turned to me. "We're leaving, follow me."
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 28