Keith Thomson - Once a spy

“Please, just talk to Mr. Cleamons,” Drummond begged Cranch. “I have his home number in my office.”

Cranch looked to Dewart. “Cleamons?”

Dewart shrugged. “We’ll find out.” He gestured at the two-way mirror: Make a phone call.

Charlie knew who Cleamons was but didn’t see how mentioning it would do any good-even if he could move his mouth. Also, they would know soon enough. Lionel Cleamons had been Perriman’s district sales manager. He dropped dead one afternoon in his office more than a decade ago.

Charles would die, Drummond speculated, if the man in the white laboratory coat used the crude stun device a second time. The younger fellow, to Drummond’s left, seemed inclined to do nothing about it. He just sat back sipping Gatorade.

Drummond wondered: Who are these men? Gamblers Charles has fallen in with?

No, something told him. This had to do with his own work.

He recalled passing his office at Perriman Appliances earlier, then being led down the back stairs to this subterranean facility.

The Manhattan Project complex was rumored to extend beneath the Columbia campus as far as West 112th Street, where Perriman was situated.

Or was it on East 112th Street?

Yes, East, he decided.

He’d worked there a long time.

How long, five years?

No, more than that. Eighteen. No, no, no, twelve.

He demonstrated the appliances in the showroom, then went on-site with building owners and property managers. He ensured that their specifications were met.

The man in the laboratory coat kept asking about “Placebo.” Maybe it was a code for something new in R amp; D. The new nanotechnology in the wash and rinse cycles? Probably not. Nanotechnology was already trumpeted throughout Perriman’s advertising and promotional campaigns.

Could the Manhattan Project have something to do with it?

Manhattan Project…

At Columbia University.

Columbia University was originally called King’s College. The name was changed for reasons of patriotism after the American Revolution…

Which commenced on April 19, 1775…

The shot heard ’round the world…

At the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts…

An interesting piece of information about Concord-

Drummond felt his thought process derailing.

It was hard to concentrate to begin with. And Charles’s scream still resonated within him.

It reminded him of another scream.

The memory began with dawn, as if beamed from a old film projector, sputtering through the blinds and into the drafty waiting room in the maternity ward at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital. Drummond was sitting there alone, savoring the silence. For most of the night, the waiting room had been a hive of expectant fathers. Nurses had brought bundles one by one. Each man, seeing his son or daughter for the first time, declared the moment the happiest of his life. Drummond anticipated no such sentiment. He wasn’t bent toward giddiness. But that was only a small factor: 2 percent, he estimated. The other 98 percent was fear.

That he felt fear at all was confounding. Displacing fear was second nature to him.

He’d been timid initially, as a boy, a voracious early reader living a largely internal life. But when his parents fled the country without him and a spinster aunt capitulated and took him in, he commenced a campaign to prove his worth. He drove himself to be first in his class, first in his weight group, first at anything-if he found himself walking parallel to a stranger on the sidewalk, he would be first to the corner. He would even finish his ice cream cone before other children. Winning intoxicated him; the greater the challenge, the greater the high. By his first day at Langley, perilous situations practically whetted his appetite.

On learning Isadora was pregnant, however, he felt standard-issue fear, like anyone else’s. He was at a loss to explain it. He hungered to succeed as a parent, especially in light of his own parents’ record.

In the ensuing months he sought a remedy. The problem, he theorized, was his lack of enthusiasm for the baby-he couldn’t summon so much as a spark. Attributing this to insufficient data, he read everything on the subject. The only applicable wisdom he found, repeatedly, was “If he can afford it, the new father is wise to hire a baby nurse.”

Now, with just hours to go, he was scared as a cat.

The squeal of crepe soles in the hallway outside the waiting room momentarily diverted him from his predicament. Probably it was the nurse coming to update him on Isadora’s status. “Another few hours still,” she would say-he hoped.

She entered with a swaddled bundle in her arms. “Mr. Clark, it is my great honor to introduce you to your son,” she said. She had delivered the line to new fathers thousands of times, but the joy was fresh, and augmented by a particularly musical Indian accent-Gujarati, he was certain of it.

He had thought learning that the baby was a boy might stir him. It made no difference. And the squirming, tomato-headed creature itself kindled none of the love at first sight on which he’d pinned his last atom of hope. If anything, the sight validated his fears.

“Would you like to hold him?”

He put on exuberance. “Of course!”

His arms became stiff as shelves, and on contact with them, the baby began a cry that might have been mistaken for an air-raid siren.

“This is just wonderful,” Drummond exclaimed; he could spew lies at a poly and leave examiners swearing he was the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.

Registered Nurse Aashiyana Asirvatham, however, did not appear to be fooled. “It’s time for baby’s bath,” she said, offering Drummond an out.

As soon as the baby was safely away, strangely, Drummond felt a desire to hold him again. Within a few weeks that desire exploded into a dizzying love. Ironically, his challenge became keeping a lid on the sentiment, lest his enemies exploit it.

The memory had the effect of turning night into day in his mind as he sat in Conference Room A at the foot of the table originally crafted for the Jersey City narcotics dealer known as Catman because of his fondness for leopard skin.

Drummond sat up slightly to better get the lay of the land. He maintained the appearance of staring dully. Even if he could get his hand free of the cuff, he would need to grapple immediately with young Dewart, who almost certainly had a sidearm. The guard standing outside the door, onetime IRA heavy Jack O’Shea, would be in the room within five seconds, his own firearm drawn. And of course Cranch had the “helle-phone,” as everyone here liked to call the torture device. Drummond’s own prospective weapons included the chairs and table, though the latter would be too heavy to budge even without Charles atop it. Also within reach were three dry-erase markers, a half-full bottle of Gatorade, and a plastic plant mister, the last item probably purchased at the twenty-four-hour DrugMart at West 110th and Broadway specifically for use with Cranch’s device-to Drummond’s knowledge, the plants in the Manhattan Project complex were all plastic.

The Gatorade had promise.

“You’ve left me with no choice but to increase the voltage to a level he may not survive,” Cranch told Drummond.

Charlie craned his neck-the simple act felt like being choked-and glimpsed the interrogator tweaking the rotary dial on the telephone.

Drummond’s eyes were glassy and rimmed red. He sucked a finger, as if to pacify himself. He’d never done that before, and, Charlie reckoned, never would, given the unsanitary nature. So maybe he had something in the works. Also, albeit slightly, he had sat up. But where the flicker of hope should have been, Charlie felt nothing. What could Drummond Clark, even at the height of his powers, do to get out of this fix?