Extraordinary Powers (22 page)

One of the things I learned in my Agency days was when to persist and when to quit. I was outnumbered —not just by the two guards, but by whoever else they had in the house, and I knew there had to be others.

I’d calculated the odds of an escape, and they were against me ten thousand to one, a hundred thousand to one.

“You’re putting us in a difficult position,” Toby said to my back.

I turned around slowly. “So much for caged animals.”

He was looking at me with just the slightest trace of anxiety.

“We—I—do not want to resort to compulsion. We’d much rather appeal to reason, to duty, to the basic decency I know you have.”

“And to my desire to see my wife again,” I said.

“There’s that, yes,” he admitted. Nervously, he closed his fingers into a loose fist and then opened them, closed and opened.

“And, of course, you’ve already told me quite a bit,” I said. “I ‘ too much,” right? Isn’t that the expression? So I have the absolute right to walk out of here, but I probably wouldn’t make it to the gate.” Exasperated, Toby said: “You’re being ridiculous. After what we’ve told you, why in the world would we want to do anything to harm you? If for no other reason than scientific—”

“Did the Agency arrange the freezing of my money, too?” I asked bitterly. I felt the muscles in my legs tense, begin to cramp. My stomach was queasy; beads of perspiration sprang to my brow. “That fucking First Commonwealth thing?” “Ben,” Toby said after a long silence. “We’d much rather keep things positive, appeal to reason. I think once you hear us out, we can come to some agreement.”

“All right,” I said at last. “That much I’m willing to do. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s late, Ben,” Toby said. “You’re tired. More to the point, I’m tired, but then, I tire easily. In the morning, before you’re brought to Langley for tests, we’ll all talk again. Charles?” Rossi murmured his assent, gave me a quick, penetrating glance, and left the room.

“Well, Ben,” Toby said when we were alone. “I believe the housekeeping staff has put out everything you’ll need tonight, a change of clothes, toiletries, and whatnot.” He smiled gently. “A toothbrush.”

“No, Toby. You’ve forgotten one detail. I want to see Molly.”

“I can’t let you see her yet, Ben,” Toby said. “It’s just not physically possible.”

“Then I’m afraid we’re not going to come to any sort of agreement.”

“She’s not in the area.”

“Then I want to speak to her on the phone. Now.”

Toby assessed me for a moment, and then gave another hand signal to the security men. One of them left the room and returned with a black touch-tone telephone, which he plugged into a jack near me, placing the phone on the adjacent end table.

Then the guard lifted the handset and punched a long series of numbers.

I counted: eleven digits, which may have meant long distance, and then another set of three. An access code, probably. Then two more digits.

The guard listened impassively for a moment and then said, “Ninety-three.” He listened again, and handed the phone to me.

Before I could say anything, I heard Molly’s voice, high pitched, anguished.

“Ben? Oh, God, is it you?” “I’m here, Molly,” I said as reassuringly as I could.

“Oh, God, are you all right?”

“I’m I’m fine, Molly. Are you ?”

“Okay. I’m okay. Where did they take you?” “A safe house somewhere in Virginia,” I said, watching Toby. He nodded, as if in confirmation. “Where the hell are you?”

“I don’t know, Ben. Something a hotel or an apartment, I think. Outside Boston, not too far.”

I felt my anger rise once again. Addressing Toby, I said, “Where is she?”

Toby paused. “Protective custody in the Boston suburbs.”

“Ben!” Molly’s voice came out of the receiver urgently. “Just tell me these people are “

“It’s okay, Mol. As far as I know. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

“It’s all connected,” she whispered, “connected with that with that ” “They know,” I said.

“Please, Ben. Whatever the hell is going on, why am / involved? They can’t do this! Is this legal? Can they ” “Ben,” Toby said. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to disconnect the call now.”

“I love you, Mol,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry about it?” she said incredulously.

“Everything will be under control soon,” I said without believing it.

“I love you, Ben.”

“I know,” I said, and then I heard a dial tone.

I put down the handset. “You had no business scaring Molly this way,” I said to Toby.

“It was for her protection, Ben.”

“I see. The way I’m being protected.” “That’s right,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm.

“Maximum security,” I persisted. “We’re as safe as any two prisoners can be.”

“Come on, Ben. Tomorrow, after we’ve talked, you’ll be free to walk out.”

“And now? What about now?”

“Tomorrow,” he replied. “Tomorrow, hear us out. If you want to leave then, I promise you, I won’t stand in your way.”

With an electric hum he guided his wheelchair across the long expanse of Persian carpet toward the door. “Good night, Ben. They’ll show you to your room.”

It was at that point that an idea occurred to me and, thus preoccupied, I followed the two guards out to the main staircase.

TWENTY-SIX.

The room they had provided for me was large and comfortable, furnished in the style of a Vermont country inn, spare and elegant. Against one wall was a plump, king-size bed draped in a white chenille spread. After this long, exhausting day, it looked supremely inviting, but I couldn’t sleep yet. There was a dark walnut armoire and matching end tables; I noticed after brief inspection that they were immobile, somehow bolted down. The adjoining bathroom was spacious and elegant as well: green Italian marble floor, the walls tiled in white and black porcelain, the fixtures of 1930s vintage.

The floor, which creaked reassuringly as I walked, was covered in pale wall-to-wall carpeting. A few paintings had been placed, tastefully, here and there: oil paintings of nautical aspects, done in a nondescript style. Those, too, were fastened to the wall. It was as if they were expecting a violent animal who might at any moment decide to fling objects around the room.

A set of heavy floor-length drapes, striped in broad bands of maroon and gold, concealed a set of windows, finely leaded. I saw at once that the windows were reinforced with a fine, almost invisible, metallic webbing, which no doubt made them at once shatterproof and electronically alarmed.

I was a prisoner.

This particular room in this “safe house,” I decided, was probably used to keep intelligence defectors or other agents with whom they couldn’t be too careful. That category obviously included me.

For all intents and purposes, I was a hostage, despite Toby’s gilded rhetoric. They had caught me here, like an exotic laboratory specimen, to be run through a set of extensive tests and then pressed into service.

But everything about this setup smacked of improvisation. Usually, when an operation is preplanned, every angle is covered, every detail thought through, sometimes ridiculously so. Often, of course, things still go wrong—shit happens, as’ the bumper sticker says—but not for want of planning. But I sensed that arrangements here had been hasty, ad hoc, jury rigged, and that gave me hope.

They held Molly captive, but I would be able to negotiate her release much more readily if I were free. I had to move at once.

Even then, as I changed out of my ripped, soiled suit (a casualty of the shootout on Marlborough Street) I knew that Molly was going to be all right. It was quite possible that they were indeed protecting her—in addition to which, of course, they wanted to keep her separated from me as a means of suasion. You know, tie the girl up to the railroad tracks so that you’ll change your mind, right? Well, there wouldn’t be any express train coming, and the worst that would happen from this was that Molly would have subjected her captors to a severe tongue-lashing. I knew how the Agency liked to apply pressure.

As for me, however—well, that was another story. Ever since I had acquired this extraordinary talent, my life was in danger of one sort or another. And now I had the simple choice of cooperating, or … Or what?

Hadn’t Toby spoken the truth—why would they want to take out the only living, successful subject of their top secret project? Wouldn’t it be like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Or would the need for secrecy take precedence over everything else?

Perhaps, though … perhaps I could take matters into my own hands.

For I had an unquestionable advantage over other human beings, at least as long as it lasted, and it showed no signs of diminishing. And—this was what told me that my incarceration was hastily, even sloppily, arranged—I had been able to acquire some useful information from one of my guards.

Toby, or whoever was running this operation, had taken the precaution of requisitioning guards who were absolutely unin formed about me, or about the project itself. But naturally, they had to be fully briefed about the details of their own security operations.

As one of the guards Chet, his name was took me upstairs to the third-floor bedroom in which I was to be kept, I walked beside him, as close as I could. He had evidently been ordered not to engage me in discussion, and to keep a good distance from me.

But he had not been instructed not to think, and thinking is one of the few human activities over which we have no control.

“I’m concerned,” I said to him as we mounted the first staircase. “How many of there are you?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Chet said with a brusque dip of his head. “I’m really not permitted to speak with you, sir.”

I raised my voice in mock anger. “But how the hell do I know I’m safe!

How many of you are going to protect me? Can’t you at least tell me that?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Please step back.”

By the time he had ushered me into my bedroom, I had learned that there would be two stationed in front of my room throughout the night, that Chet was on the first shift, that he was glad of it, and that he was insatiably curious to know who I was and what I had done.

I spent the first hour or so carefully inspecting the room, looking for the transmitting devices (they had to be there, but I couldn’t locate them) and such. Beside the bed was a clock radio which was a likely candidate for a bug.

But the radio was a mistake.

At about half past one in the morning I knocked on my bedroom door to summon the guard. The door opened after a few moments to reveal Chet.

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “It’s just that my throat is parched, and I wonder whether you can get me a glass of seltzer.”

“There should be a little refrigerator in there,” he said tentatively, but he was tense, his body as tightly coiled as a clock spring, his hands at his sides, as he’d been taught.

I smiled sheepishly. “All gone.” He looked annoyed. “It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, then closed the door. I expected that he would call downstairs on the walkie-talkie, since he had been given instructions under no circumstances to leave his post.

About five minutes or so later there was a soft knock on the door.

By now I had the clock-radio on full blast, an AM rap station, raucous and rhythmic. And the shower was running, filling the bathroom with steam. The bathroom door was open, and steam billowed into the bedroom.

“I’m in the shower,” I yelled. “Just put it anywhere, thanks.”

A different uniformed guard entered, bearing a tray, on it a bottle of French mineral water nice touch, I thought and looked around the room appraisingly for a few seconds, trying to decide where to put it down, and that was when I lunged.

He was a professional, well trained, but so was I, and that two or three seconds that I had on him was just enough to take him by surprise. I tackled him to the floor, the tray and water tumbling noiselessly onto the carpet. He recovered with impressive speed and reared up, knocking me aside momentarily, his left arm smashing into my jaw, a painful, wounding blow.

That old glacial calm came over me.

The radio blasted on and on, stridently: “DOWN she gotta go DOWN now I really gotta … ” and the white noise of the shower drummed and above this racket very little could be heard, of course, and The tray was a terrific weapon, and with my right hand I swept it off the floor and chopped it back toward him, toward his throat, toward the vulnerable cartilaginous area that shielded his jugular, and with great force smashed the wooden tray’s narrow edge into his adam’s apple, winding him, and he groaned as his legs scissored upward to pin me, and I heard, suddenly … can’t … shoot … mustn’t shoot … fucker … And I knew I had him, I knew what he wouldn’t do. This was his real vulnerability, the reason he wasn’t reaching for his gun, and just as his fists formed themselves into cudgels, I managed to get my arms into a locked wedge, crashing into his abdomen, toppling him backward against the massive oak arm of the stolid overstuffed armchair, the back of his head cracking audibly against the wood, and with a who of the air came out of his lungs, and he suddenly slackened, his mouth open, and slid to the floor.

Unconscious. He was hurt, but not badly. He would be out for ten, maybe twenty minutes.

And over it all the radio voice was ranting, ranting.

I had, I knew, maybe a few seconds before the backup guard entered, suspicious about the delay.

The unconscious guard had a gun in his shoulder holster, an excellent Ruger P90 .9mm semiautomatic, which I had trained on though rarely had occasion to fire in action. I pulled it out, inserted the spare cartridge, released the gun’s safety, and Looming over me was another guard, not Chet, but another one, on the early morning shift, and his gun was pointed at me.

“Drop it,” he commanded.

We faced each other, both frozen.

“Easy,” he said. “No one’s going to get hurt if you drop it. Lower it slowly to the floor, let go, then—”

I had no choice.

I stared at him blankly and pulled the trigger.

Aimed to hurt him only, not to do any serious harm.