She swung the nurse over the bed and pinned her by forcing her elbow down over her throat. Her body half-lay over the other woman’s. She still held the syringe in a firm grasp.
The nurse looked up at her with wide eyes filled with terror.
“Who sent you?”
“Guh … guh … guh …” The injured nurse tried to speak, but the combination of the blows to her throat and the securing forearm made speech impossible.
“We’ll just see what you brought,” Althea said as she plunged the needle through the nurse’s pants into the flesh of her thigh and depressed the plunger.
With the sting of the hypodermic, the woman beneath Althea began to thrash in frantic desperation.
Althea pressed her forearm deeper into the flailing woman’s throat to prevent any outcry. The movement of the other woman’s limbs beneath her began to slow until they became mere flutterings.
The terror stricken eyes closed, reopened, and then the pupils retreated into the skull. The woman lay still.
Althea felt the pulse at the wrist and at the carotid artery. There was none.
The woman was dead.
Althea stripped the uniform from the corpse and slipped it on. She pulled the sheet and blanket up over the dead form and left the room quietly.
Martin had been gone an hour and it had started to rain. Sara sat on the edge of the bed fully dressed, staring out over the darkened motel room toward the window where she had pulled the blinds.
She wondered if he would ever come back.
She sat on the bed nearest the door with her knees clamped closely together. It was the loneliness that was the most difficult to bear. He’d been gone only 60 minutes—3,600 seconds. A short time. The barest flick of an instant in any scheme of things for one who was so well trained in the panoramic sweep of history.
She had no coat, no rainwear, not even a headscarf to ward off some of the downpour, but she had to find him.
Sara pushed away from the bed, opened the door, and then paused. The room key was on the dresser. She quickly stuffed it into her pocket and left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.
No. He might return while she was out. She fumbled for the key, unlocked the door, and quickly found a few sheets of notepaper in the top dresser drawer. She scrawled a note:
“Went looking for you. Be back. Love, Sara.”
It was time to get started and she left the room.
The Ford was still parked around the end of the motel, removed from sight from the street. She started the vehicle, turned on the headlights and windshield wipers, and shivered with chill from the windblown rain.
Which way had he gone?
The end of the motel parking lot exited onto a secondary highway—to the right was the town of Gettysburg, to the left the battlefield and cemetery.
She knew instinctively that he would not have walked to town. He would not want to be around others. He had gone to the battlefield and she turned the car in that direction.
She would have missed him if it hadn’t been for the lightning. The roll of thunder and intermittent flashes that streaked across the late summer sky illuminated the form pressed against the side of the monument.
She drove toward him as far as the vehicle could manage and then got out.
He sat with his back pressed against the monument, his knees drawn toward his chin, as he stared out over the expanse of field that had once held the death throes of so many.
“Martin.”
He didn’t move.
“I … I was worried about you.” She stood over him and he purposely looked away.
A zigzag bolt of lightning struck a tree several hundred feet away and she was suddenly frightened.
“It’s dangerous here. We should be out in the open away from the trees and flat on the ground.”
“I was thinking about a girl I once saw,” he said. “It was ten or fifteen years ago. It’s hard to tell, those days at the school all seem the same. Some guys caught her behind the gym. I guess she was maybe fifteen … I was younger and they were older. They ripped her clothes off and started doing things to her. She was crying and I ran and hid in the shed, the same place where you found me. It wasn’t very pretty, what they did to her.”
She knelt by his side and put her fingers against his cheek. “I’m very sorry about what happened. It was all my fault for being so goddamn dumb.”
For the first time he looked at her. “There’s so much I don’t know. Everything is so new. Everything I do is for the first time.”
“Oh, God, Martin.” She kissed him and felt his body tense. His arms turned rigid, his mouth unyielding.
“Don’t.” It was a strangled cry of protest.
“Yes … yes …” she said and kissed him again and pressed her body against his.
She felt him quiver and then his arms were around her and his lips soft and searching. “My God, Sara. My God.”
They lay together in the rain and did not notice.
Chapter Seventeen
With a brisk motion, J.J. Sperry snapped off the small recorder. He looked at them over tented fingers. Children’s voices from the pool outside the motel room tinkled around them. Sara pulled the drapes and switched on the lamp over the table near Sperry. Martin shifted uncomfortably on the edge of the bed, as if awaiting command.
They had to bend toward the large man in order to hear his measured, nearly inaudible comments.
“You two can’t imagine the uncomfortable circumstances I have had to subject myself to in order to elude my watchers and arrive here alone. Most uncomfortable and most inconvenient. And you dare, you have the audacity, the temerity, the self-indulgence to request that I listen to this drivel.” His voice began to rise as the sound of his own words increased his anger. “I do not know what possessed you to concoct this scheme, except perhaps as some outrageous attempt at self-justification for the crimes you have committed.”
Sara stood and turned her back to the two men. She pushed an edge of the window drape aside and looked out at the sun-drenched swimming pool. Three towheaded children played in the water while an older woman on a chaise longue read a paperback novel. The domesticity of the scene, which was in such sharp contrast to her own dangerous predicament, struck her with a physical impact. She felt scalding tears peak the corner of her eyes.
“Why did you come?” Martin asked Sperry.
“Because it’s my business to listen to harebrained conspiracies. Because for every dozen psychopaths I hear, I can perhaps authenticate one, and the revelation of that one is a service to our country.”
“I’m sorry we wasted your time,” Sara said bitterly without turning.
Sperry extracted a paper from a thin briefcase by the side of his chair. He scanned it quickly. “It would seem that the New York State authorities desire your incarceration for murder, attempted murder, breaking and entering—two counts, car theft, and felonious assault.” He looked slowly from one to the other. “My, my, you two have certainly been busy.”
Sara whirled angrily. “We went through a great deal of difficulty to bring you this information. What you heard is what Martin learned at Camp Mohawk. You must believe it!”
“From two fugitives dressed in what I would classify as ‘early hippy’?”
“If we wore evening clothes, would it make a difference?”
“No. However, I can help to arrange your surrender to the proper authorities under favorable circumstances. I do feel a certain obligation to you two in that I agreed to meet with you. I shall place my law firm at your disposal and we can make the most auspicious arrangements possible.”
“Surrender?”
“But of course. Surely you didn’t intend to run forever?”
Sara was angry. “We felt the information was important to the country.”
“You’re accusing highly respected U.S. senators, military officers, and business executives. You have no corroboration.”
“Martin’s information is specific: map
coordinates, names and numbers of vessels, infinite detail. That in itself is corroborative.”
“You’re manufacturing a conspiracy in the very loftiest places. A plot involving dozens of important people. Such things cannot be kept secret.”
“That’s why we came to you!” Sara nearly yelled at the investigative reporter. “I know there has to be a weak link somewhere. We thought that with your sources you would be able to find it.”
Sperry glanced down at the notes in his hand. “Based on the accusations of an unemployed, perhaps alcoholic woman and a man who’s spent the last two decades in a school for the retarded? Surely, Miss Bucknell, you can understand my reluctance to believe this manufactured whatever-it-is?”
“Martin is not retarded. Ray Heath tested him and found his intelligence to be above average.”
“The testimony of a dead man.”
“Does Martin act retarded?”
“Retarded people don’t always look or act retarded.” J.J. Sperry slowly turned to face Martin directly. He spat questions in a staccato burst. “Who’s the Secretary of State?” Martin looked blank. “Your two senators from New York? What’s hollandaise sauce? What do you call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
Sara rose in a fury. “That’s not fair! You’re not giving him a chance. He’s been locked up in that place for nearly his whole life. Of course there’s a lot of general information he hasn’t been exposed to.”
Sperry turned to her. “But he has the sophistication to recognize a very complex military-political move to give the government justification and legal right to … Come on, little lady, you can’t have it both ways.”
“Martin didn’t realize what he had heard. It was only under deep hypnosis that it came out. Ray and I recognized Operation Barbados for what it was.”
“Hypnosis? Deliver me! Can you imagine how that would look in my columns? I write a very respectable column noted for its veracity, madam. I might point out that I do not, repeat, do not, write for The National Enquirer. Hypnosis! Good God!”
“According to Ray, hypnosis can be a valid clinical tool in many cases,” Sara said. She couldn’t help but notice the rising inflection in her own voice. There was a tint of desperation in her argument with Sperry, brought about by the obvious fact that she was losing.
“It may be, my dear. But the editors of my newspapers won’t believe it or publish it.”
“They would if you put your reputation behind it. It would also stop them from going ahead with Operation Barbados.”
“Yes, that it would—if there were such a thing.” Sperry stood and reached for his London Fog. “You two are amateurs. I have been taken by professionals. In the first place, your primary error was in telling me the whole story before you put the bite on me. The good ones who take me throw out a tidbit or two, something that smacks of a new Watergate, ask for expense money, and hold back the remainder of their so-called tip until I come up with the cash.”
“Make a phone call,” Martin said.
Sperry was adjusting his hat, but turned to look at Martin. “What?”
“I said, make one phone call. You must have many contacts—try one—in the right place.”
For the first time since his entrance into the motel room over an hour and a half ago, Sperry seemed uncertain. He was poised, apparently ready to reach for the door handle, and yet something kept him. “One call wouldn’t prove anything,” he said contemplatively.
“It might,” Sara added, “if you made it to the right person. A person who would have to be privy to Operation Barbados, if what Martin says is true.”
Sperry unconsciously touched his inner breast pocket. The pocket contained the most precious tool of his trade, an article so important that it only left his person at night, and then was locked in a concealed wall safe near his bed. It was a small coded address book and contained a list of informants in government, business, and the military. It was his final arbiter of what was true. “You two are sure of yourselves, aren’t you?” he asked with some hesitancy.
“I know what I heard at the camp,” Martin said.
Sperry shucked off his raincoat and signaled for Martin to move off the bed. He sat near the headboard next to the telephone. His hand hovered over the receiver. A local call did not go through the switchboard and would be on a clear line. The Pentagon was a local call.
J.J. Sperry began to dial.
Maj. Easley Waltham was overage in grade. He knew his placement on the colonel’s promotion list, and often contemplated that outside of all-out war, his name would never move high enough on the list for him to receive his silver leaves.
Perhaps that time wasn’t so far off.
His desk phone rang and he gladly shoved aside a turgid memo and snatched up the receiver. “Major Waltham.”
“Sperry here. Do you know anything about something called Operation Barbados?”
“Jesus God, Mr. Sperry, don’t say that again. Don’t even think that again.”
“I’ll meet you at our usual place and we can discuss this at greater …”
“Good Lord, no.” Waltham hung up the phone with finality. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped the palms of his hands.
J.J. Sperry held the buzzing phone in his hand and then slowly hung up. He stared blankly down at the instrument and at a restaurant menu by the side of the phone. A dozen pieces of unrelated information fell into place. His fine antennae had sensed the cabal of silence that had fallen over Washington. It now became clear that his call had touched a raw nerve in the frightened major’s life. A secret existed that was so important and so confidential that it could not be purchased, discussed off the record, or even hinted at.
Operation Barbados was what they had been keeping from him for several weeks. It was the undercurrent in Washington that he had sensed but could not pinpoint.
He knew with assurance that what Martin Fowler had told him was true.
“This whole thing is just like that bastard Baxter,” he said nearly inaudibly.
“Your call told you something?” Sara asked.
“It’s what my call didn’t tell me that’s so damn important. Your story may be true, Fowler. I still say may be, since there’s a hell of a lot of checking to be done.”
“We don’t have much time,” Martin said. “The schedule calls for the operation to take place in a couple of days.”
“I know. My people will get right on it.” Sperry took a long black billfold from his pocket. “You two have any money?”
“We have a few dollars left,” Sara answered. “Very few.”
Sperry counted out several bills. “All right, this will hold you over a few days. You can sign for your meals in the motel restaurant; and all those bills will be sent to me. For God’s sake, get some decent clothes. You two look like escapees from a convention of ragamuffins.”
“When will we hear from you again?” Sara asked.
“Probably tomorrow. I need corroboration on this. It’s too big to go with without at least three independent sources. Knowing what I know from Martin, I’ll get three to break.” He reached for the door. “Stay quiet and be careful.”
He was gone.
“What now?” Martin said.
“I think we take the man at his word,” Sara replied. “Let’s go buy ourselves a wardrobe.” She counted the money on the bureau. “I think now we can afford it.”
“Snails?”
“Snails.” Sara watched as Martin looked down at the shells glistening in the aromatic garlic sauce. “Escargots.” She tried to put a lilt in her voice. “You said to order you the same as myself.”
He looked up with a small tentative smile edging his mouth. “And to think I could have had a tomato juice as appetizer.”
“Or pâté de foie gras, which is fat goose liver.”
He shook his head and gingerly pried the meat from one of the shells. “I have a lot to learn.”
They ate in silence
. She sensed that he was uncomfortable in the restaurant. Not that he should be. It was a fair-to-average steak house. One of a similar type could be found in every town and city of the country. She knew him well enough now to understand his feelings when she observed the imperceptible tensing of his shoulders as the maitre d’ met them at the entrance, and his hesitance in ordering as he examined the large menu.
As if he knew what she was thinking he looked into her eyes with the same tentative smile. “You see, we never really went to restaurants at the school.”
“I thought they took you on field trips into town?”
“Sure.” The smile deepened, and she was struck with the progress he had made in this short period of time. The mask of emotionless response that was his visage when she first met him was beginning to disappear with the growth of more natural reactions. The gray trousers, navy blazer, white shirt, and maroon tie he had selected gave him an almost Ivy League look.
“McDonald’s was more our style. A Big Mac was a special treat.” He circled a finger slightly. “Never the likes of this.”
The wine steward appeared at Martin’s side and displayed the label of a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that Sara had ordered. She nodded slightly in the affirmative and Martin did the same.
The wine was deftly uncorked and a smidgen tilted into a goblet. Martin was still looking at her, and she looked down at the glass and up to his face twice in quick sucession.
Martin tasted the wine and turned to the steward. “Fine,” he said.
“You’re learning,” she whispered when the waiter moved to another table.
“With your help. You look beautiful in that dress.”
“Why, thank you. Just a little old thing I picked up off the rack with J.J. Sperry’s money. Now that you mention it, you look pretty sensational yourself.”
The meal continued, and occasionally Martin would ask about the use of a utensil or about a dish served at a neighboring table. The nearby production of a Caesar salad fascinated him.
Sara was enjoying herself and they ordered a second bottle of wine. Not only did she feel a release of tension now that they had the backing of Sperry, but her tutelage of Martin into the ways of adult life made her see things with new eyes. She felt as if she were viewing the most mundane of things with childlike wonder.
The Man Who Heard Too Much Page 17