Keith Thomson: Once a spy

Fielding stabbed his cigar into the ashtray. “Good, now we have a Plan D.”

“There are other, more conventional methods,” Cranch said with enthusiasm, but it felt synthetic. “We can try making him comfortable. Playing music has been shown to reduce stress hormones in the blood, which has a tranquilizing effect on the limbic system. Reflexology can-”

“Sorry, I don’t see Charlie Clark rubbing his old man’s feet.”

“Why would Charlie have to do it?”

“That’s a very good question,” Fielding said. “For two months, Duck was a zombie. But since Charlie’s entry onto the scene, he’s been Mr. Lucidity.”

Cranch looked away, probably to hide his skepticism. “Are you hypothesizing that a professional horseplayer has become the first person in medical history to discover a means of triggering lucidity in an Alzheimer’s patient?”

Fielding leaped up. “I knew I had a reason for letting him live.”

“So how do you do it?” Fielding asked.

Charlie had reached the same conclusion science had: There was no precise trigger. But if he could convince them he had the silver bullet, he would likely be taken from the employee lounge to Drummond.

“As I’m sure you know, Alzheimer’s sufferers are triggered by family members they haven’t seen in a while,” Charlie said.

Across the table, Fielding shook his head. “Possibly that explains his mild resurgence at the senior center, when he saw you for the first time in two years. But since then, you’ve been old hat, otherwise he would have flickered on every time you opened your mouth. Tonight, when I told him that you were here, all it sparked was, ‘What’s he doing up so late on a school night?’”

“I guess you’re right.” Charlie hadn’t expected getting to Drummond would be that easy. Also, getting to Drummond wasn’t enough. Charlie needed to work it so he could get a weapon to Drummond too, or at least get one within Drummond’s reach. He cupped his chin in his hands now, trying to appear contemplative. “I guess it has been, mostly, random.”

Fielding sat up. “ Mostly? So then there is a kiss that turns the frog back?”

“I’m ashamed to say it.”

“Pretend there’s a gun to your head.”

“Well… I’m a disappointment to him, to say the least. You know, he graduated from MIT with a crateful of awards. I barely made it through a year of college. He’s a patriot and a hero. I play the horses, and not that well. He’s the fastest gun in the East. I’d never even used a gun until yesterday, and the times I needed to, it was a disaster. At best, I was too shaky to shoot straight. Up on the ridge tonight-or last night, I guess it was-he flickered on and snatched the gun away from me just in time to shoot that meth guy-then he led us down the mountain like a Sherpa. When we were attacked at that battlefield, he was napping. I couldn’t defend us. Suddenly he grabbed the gun from me and figured out a way for us to escape. While I sat there cowering, he said, ‘There’s nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result.’”

“It’s Winston Churchill,” Fielding said. “I’ve heard him recite that one before.” He sat back, interlacing his fingers behind his head-not the posture of a man who had just seen the light or otherwise had been convinced. “I want to share something with you, Charlie. In all of the years I worked for Duck, he mentioned you just three or four times, and all he ever said was that you were good at math. But I knew a few things about you anyway. One was you always avoided the disagreeable or difficult in life, finding refuge at the racetrack, for instance. Another was you considered seeing him one day a year, on Christmas, to be one day too often. Yet now, lo and behold, you’re false flagging Red Mafiya thugs, pretending to go to ground at a nowhere fleabag, and blabbing to the Washington Post to induce us to capture you, then launching a veritable paramilitary assault on the Manhattan Project complex, all in an effort to rescue your not-so-beloved father. Meanwhile you could have gotten away with a small fortune in cash and diamonds, and millions on top of that if you know where he’s squirreled his stock options hoard, as I suspect you do. So I have to conclude something’s changed.”

Charlie wasn’t sure where Fielding was headed. “Maybe he and I got off on the wrong foot for the first thirty years,” he allowed.

Fielding stood. “He had us fooled all these years. Everyone always thought that all that mattered to Drummond Clark was getting revenge against his crazy pinko parents. But in the past two days, he’s shown something else mattered to him. He showed it with his episodes of lucidity. Each was triggered when his son was in harm’s way.”

Fielding had hit the nail on the head. Charlie felt it. He felt terrible, too, that he’d failed to see it himself. And he suspected he was about to feel a lot worse.

Charlie lay on his back lengthwise atop the conference room table, his wrists and ankles bungeed to its legs. He’d been stripped to his boxer shorts. Most of his skin was covered in goose bumps, and not because he was cold. It was a reaction to the telephone on the chair to his left, a rotary device that could well have been in the complex since the ’40s. The cord was plugged into the wall, not at a phone jack but at an electrical outlet. In place of the usual coil and handset was a rubber wire that hissed subtly, like an asp. The ghoul in the lab coat they called Dr. Cranch loomed over Charlie and dipped the copper mouth of the wire toward his face.

“This will deliver a near-lethal amount of electrical current,” Cranch said to Drummond, who was handcuffed to the chair at the foot of the table.

“A placebo is used as a control in drug experiments,” Drummond said, the fifth time he’d done so since Charlie was brought in, each time with greater distress.

“Sir, we need to hear about Placebo, the operation,” Cranch said, “or, more specifically, whom you’ve told about it.” Repetition had progressively deadened his delivery.

“I just don’t know what else I can tell you.” Drummond sighed.

Charlie wondered whether his rescue effort possibly could have made things any worse than they were now.

“Just a light spray,” Cranch said to Dewart, who sat to Charlie’s right.

Dewart gave a gentle pull at the trigger of a plastic plant mister. The water was warm, yet the droplets caused Charlie’s bare legs to shiver. Cranch touched the copper tip of the wire to Charlie’s right thigh briefly, as if he were testing the ink in a pen. The tip emitted a buzz no louder than a gnat.

Charlie shot straight into the air. If not for the restraints, it seemed, he would have hit the ceiling. Hot, maddening pain filled his blood vessels, and his body began to convulse. It felt like muscles and tendons were being ripped from bones. An involuntary wail rose from deep within him, unlike any sound he would have imagined he could make, or that any animal could.

A velvety blackness materialized around him. A cool and comfy refuge. Unconsciousness. He welcomed it.

Before he could settle in, his spine cracked back onto the tabletop, and he was again in the fierce glare of fluorescent lights. All his joints felt like they’d been dislocated. He tried to breathe. He retched, then inhaled air hot and heavy with the smell of his own burned flesh. His body settled, but a thrum continued inside his temples. Bells rang in his ears. The worst was the stinging in his eyes. Some sort of lingering electrical current?

Cranch and Dewart looked at Drummond, presumably for his reaction. He stared at his shoes as if he sought to avoid seeing his son suffer.