7 Steps to Midnight (38 page)

It hadn’t been a drug though. It slowly sank in that the shot had been exactly what the doctor said it was.
I’m not used to things being what people say they are
, Chris had thought.

He’d asked the doctor and nurse if they knew anything about Alexsandra but they didn’t know what he was talking about.
No wonder
, he’d thought.
I’m asking about someone who’d never really existed anyway. How could they possibly know about her?

After they’d treated him, they gave him a sandwich and a cup of tea. He’d barely touched them as a wave of drowsiness had overcome him and he started slipping away. It had been at that moment that he was most convinced he’d been drugged again.

An hour later, Wilson had woken him and they’d left the waiting room, walking out to a Learjet.
Are we going back in this?
Chris had wondered. Then he’d asked.

“You’re entitled,” Wilson had told him.

Now they were inside the jet, the door was closed and they were sitting across from each other in luxurious armchairs as the
jet taxied down the runway, then picked up speed and soared into the air. Chris looked out the window.
Alexsandra
, he thought, torn between the hope that she really existed somewhere down there and the dark conviction that she’d never been real from the start. It defied logic to believe that; she’d felt completely real. Still…

He looked at Wilson.

“Are you feeling better?” Wilson asked.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, his tone lifeless. He cleared his throat slowly. “Do you know what’s happened to me in the last seven days?” he asked.
7 steps to midnight
, he thought. Was there any connection?

He hadn’t heard Wilson’s answer. “Sorry?” he murmured.

“Of course I know,” Wilson repeated. “I was in charge of it.”

***

Chris stared at him. Wilson was in
charge
of it?

That seemed the most insane reality of all.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“If you weren’t so modest you might have figured it out,” Wilson explained. “But you’ve never seemed to have the slightest inkling of how important you are to the project. How absolutely indispensable.”

I should be feeling pleasure at this praise
, Chris thought.
Why don’t I?

“I can see that you’re still not sure of it,” Wilson continued. “Just take my word for it, Chris. Without you working on the turbulence problem it would have taken years more to reach the point we’re at now.

“Unfortunately, your brain was in a rut, tired, stagnating. We needed something to break up the logjam in your thinking.”

“Are you telling me—?” Chris began, a sudden sound of appalled disbelief in his voice.

“Let me finish,” Wilson interrupted. “Then I’ll answer any question you want to ask.”

Chris stared at him. He couldn’t be saying—

“We consulted a well-known psychologist,” Wilson went on,
“head of his department at a famous Ivy League university in New England. We asked him what we could do to get you out of the rut you were in.

“He examined your psychological profile and told us that he thought there was a possibility. A remote one, but a possibility.

“Noting that you devoured a huge variety of action, suspense, espionage, science-fiction and occult novels, he suggested—”

“You’re telling me it was all a
trick
?” Chris demanded. He felt cold fury rising in his gorge.

“Well, we thought it was,” Wilson answered. “Unfortunately, it got more complicated than that.”

“At any rate,” Wilson continued, “this psychologist suggested that we contrive to involve you in what seemed to be a real adventure the like of which you’d only read about. He felt that, in this way, your mind might be stimulated in a fresh way and be able to—”

“
You’re telling me it was all a trick?
” Chris repeated sharply.

“I
told
you, Chris,” Wilson replied. “It became more complicated than that.”

Chris slumped back against the chair, stonily looking at Wilson.
I’ve been a dupe
, he thought.
A pathetic
dupe
.

“Do you want to hear about this or not?” Wilson asked.

Chris wearily exhaled and gestured with his right hand as though to say
Sure, why not? Rub in the salt as deeply as you can.

“The psychologist discussed it with a committee,” Wilson said.

“A
committee
,” Chris muttered in disgust.

Wilson looked at him in silence for a few moments, then went on.

“They decided that you needed certain outside stresses which would divert attention from your work. Intriguing stresses, the sort you read about.”

Gotcha
, Chris thought.
Do go on.

Wilson took a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket and, unfolding it, began to read.

“What is required is that the patient’s environment—with its attitudes and rigidities of personality—be discarded and the patient
be placed in a less enforced and restrictive environment in order to re-open his creative channels.”

Chris said nothing. He only gazed at Wilson, his expression flat.

“So they devised a scenario,” Wilson went on. “The disappearing car. The couple in your house. They thought it would be more intriguing if the man looked exactly like you but we couldn’t find or produce a duplicate on short notice, so we let it go. They thought it might be more provocative if he didn’t look exactly like you anyway.”

“And Veering?” Chris asked.

Was that a smile on Wilson’s lips? “Ah, yes, Veering,” he said. He was amused, Chris thought, tightening.

He reacted as Wilson picked up a telephone receiver and pushed a button on its base. Wilson listened for a moment, then spoke, “You can come back now.”

Chris twisted around and looked toward the front of the cabin. A door there was opening.

He tensed involuntarily as he saw the man approaching.

Veering.

He shivered, watching as the small man neared him. The old clothes and the baseball cap were gone, replaced by an expensive three-piece suit.

“This is Dr. Albert Veering of the Princeton Psychology Department.” Wilson introduced the man.

“I know how angry you must feel,” Veering said. “Betrayed. Cheated. But, believe me, it
was
necessary if your mental state was to be improved.”

Chris didn’t want to speak to the man but he had to know: “Why all the unreality shit?” he asked.

There was a faint stirring of Veering’s lips as he repressed a smile. “Simple,” he said. “You’re too intelligent a young man. You would have begun to see through the overall artifice if it had been confined to an espionage adventure. It was my suggestion that we add the larger dimension of the wager in order to give your intellect more to cope with.”

“I see.” Chris’s eyes were dead as he regarded Veering. “And that included Rome, and Alexsandra?”

“It did,” Veering answered. “A recognition of your taste for novels dealing with the occult and the supernatural.”

“I see.” Chris’s voice was barely audible. He felt a heavy weight in his chest and stomach and couldn’t tell if it was rage or sickened despair. “I presume, then, that Alexsandra isn’t her real name.”

“Her real name is, I believe, Jane Malcolm.” Veering told him.

It was rage he felt; he knew that now. Rage at being made to look like a total fool. At being made so vulnerable. At being terrified again and again.

“At any rate,” Veering continued, “exclusive of that, the remainder of the ‘adventure’ was relatively simple—”

“Except for the complications,” Wilson broke in.

“Yes.” Veering nodded gravely. “They were most unfortunate.”

What complications? Chris wondered. He felt too bound up with resentful fury to ask.

“The initial mysteries were, as I say, relatively simple to orchestrate,” Veering told him. “The missing car, the couple and the changes in your house. The two so-called agents. Unfortunately, the first one had a rather vile temper, not to mention an old knee injury incurred while playing football. He disliked you intensely and rather overplayed his part.”

“Speaking of overplaying the part—?” Wilson began, amused.

“Yes,” said Veering with a smile, “The other agent, Nelson, didn’t dislike you but he did have some difficulty getting you to wrestle him for the gun and ‘kill’ him.”

“
Twice?
” Chris asked.

“That’s what Mr. Wilson meant about overplaying,” Veering said. “Nelson—” He turned to Wilson. “That
is
his name, isn’t it?”

“Carter,” Wilson replied.

“Ah.” Veering nodded. “Well, at any rate, the man apparently does quite a bit of work in little theaters. He’s a real ham. Couldn’t get himself offstage, as it were.”

Wilson chuckled. “Served him right to break his shoulder bone when he fell from the car.”

Glad you two are enjoying this
, Chris thought. Thank God he didn’t have a gun in his hand right now.

“Of course there were contingencies all along the line,” Veering went on. “Nothing was left to chance. If you hadn’t picked me up on the highway, or if you hadn’t believed that you were responsible for Nelson’s—Carter’s—death, we would have had an alternate method to get you on that flight to London. That was a must.”

Chris felt cold and empty now. He wanted to be out of there but obviously that was impossible. And his brain persisted in being curious.

“What about my sister?” he asked. “My mother?”

“That wasn’t your sister you spoke to,” Veering said. “We had a cut-in line to her telephone. We didn’t tell your sister or your mother what we were planning to do, on the logical assumption that they probably would have refused to help. As it turned out, your mother’s behavior was most helpful to us.”

So they made a fool of her too, Chris thought. He could not recall ever experiencing such poisonous hatred before.

“And Gene Wyskart?” he asked.

Veering got a grim expression on his face. “That was where the complications began,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Chris asked.

“We didn’t realize, at first, that there was an information leak in the project,” Wilson told him. “Your friend Wyskart was actually the one who found out about it. After he’d agreed to help us, he phoned some insiders he knew in Washington and they found out that at least one group already knew you were coming to London and was preparing to pick you up there. Wyskart tried to stop you before you left, the group got wind of it and killed him, to make sure you’d leave the United States.”

“
You knew it wasn’t all your game then
,” Chris said.

“The word was out before your bus reached California,” Wilson said.

Chris leaned forward in his chair. “
And you let me go anyway?
”

“We were into it too deeply by then,” Wilson told him. “Moreover, the need was still there—to get your mind operational again.”

“Even though my life might not be,” Chris responded.

“We took the risk that we’d be able to protect you,” Wilson said coolly. “And we
did
have our British and French allies to help. Since they’d share the benefit of the turbulence solution, they were more than willing to—”

“In essence then, my friend Gene died so you could play a trick on me,” Chris interrupted.

“That isn’t the way I’d put it,” Wilson said.

“He wasn’t the only one to die, Mr. Barton,” Veering added.

Chris answered through clenching teeth. “I
know
that,” he said. “I
saw
them die.”

“If we’d known how bad it was going to get, we would, of course, have terminated the project,” Veering said.

Chris looked at the little man.
The project
, he thought. Veering might have been discussing an unsuccessful chess game.

“So the game went on,” Chris said. “The tickets and money left on my car seat. The overnight bag in the airport locker. The man on the airplane. What happened to him anyway; was the bathroom rigged?”

“Of course,” Wilson answered.

Chris nodded, smiling coldly. “So I got to London and you had me taken to a hotel.”

“As a matter of fact, the taxi that was supposed to pick you up was bypassed by a regular cab. It was fortunate you weren’t picked up by one of the groups waiting for you.”

“Yes, fortunate,” Chris said. “So what then? The cassette in my room, my Blue Swan adventure? Was that man really drugged?”

“He was,” Wilson said. “Probably by Modi or one of his associates.”

“Who
was
Modi anyway?” Chris asked. He didn’t want to keep talking with these two bastards but curiosity kept him at it.

“We don’t have all the details,” Wilson said, “but, apparently,
there were
two
groups after you. Modi worked for one, Cabal headed the other. The first group was interested primarily in what you knew. The second group was only interested in killing you—until Cabal realized, toward the end, the value of what you knew. His group was the one that chased you in London, and outside of it; you were, of course, in our limousine.”

“The dream I had in that hotel suite,” Chris said.

“Not a dream,” Veering told him. “Induced by drugs and suggestion. To embellish your experience.”

“Thanks, that was good of you,” Chris replied. “I suppose you were the one who slapped me on the Hovercraft as well.”

“I was.” Veering nodded.

Chris smiled bitterly. “You had it all figured out, didn’t you? A little evening in the theater, a high-speed chase with a gorgeous female agent…”

“The chase was genuine, as I’ve said,” Wilson replied. “She saved your life.”

“And added romance to my little adventure, of course,” Chris said.

“Unfortunately—” Veering began.

“
Unfortunately?
” Chris broke in. “Hell, it was perfect. Even the two groups added to the game. Of course, they might have ended the game by killing me but what the hell.”

“Chris—” Wilson started.

“So on it went.” Chris cut him off. “Romantic Paris. Reunion with the mysterious Alexsandra. Sorry I almost fouled things up by not following the plot you’d arranged and going to Montmartre by mistake. Losing my passport on the train, refusing to give up the microfilm in Lucerne. What was on it anyway, a shot of Sleeping Beauty’s castle?”