Keith Thomson - Once a spy

“How about this?” Drummond asked Cranch. “By ‘placebo operation,’ is it possible that your people mean a medical operation performed more for the psychological benefit of the patient than for any physiological effect?”

Cranch sighed.

“Can you at least give me some sort of hint?” Drummond pleaded.

Cranch gestured and Dewart pumped the plant mister five or six times. Charlie’s chest glistened. Cranch moved the tip of the wire toward Charlie’s heart.

Charlie tried to will himself into unconsciousness.

Drummond sat upright in his chair, abruptly, as if he had been shocked. Cranch jumped in surprise. Dewart nearly lost hold of his Gatorade. Like Charlie’s, their eyes flew to Drummond.

Drummond took in the room with unmistakable sharpness. “Ernie, why are we interrogating my son?” he asked Cranch. His voice was ragged, like he’d just risen from a long slumber.

Each time he’d flickered on before, Charlie recalled, it was with an awareness of the immediate past. So the Rip van Winkle act was almost certainly an act. But to what end?

Drummond tried to rub his eyes. The cuff snapped his hand back into place. “Or should I be asking, ‘Why are you interrogating me?’”

“First, allow me to say that I’m flattered you remember me, sir,” Cranch said.

“Dr. Ernest Cranch, you come happily to mind every single time I look in a mirror to shave and see no scar whatsoever from that Croatian hooligan’s blade. Now, what is going on here?”

“There’s an urgent need that we know whether and to what extent Placebo has been compromised.”

Drummond seemed shaken. “Placebo has been compromised?”

“If you could tell us what you last recall of it?” Cranch said.

“Yes. Of course. Tell me, what’s today’s date?”

“The twenty-eighth.”

“Forgive me. Of which month?”

“Forgive me, I should have begun there. It’s December 28,2009.”

“Good Lord,” Drummond exclaimed. “The last I remember, the leaves had just begun to fall.”

Cranch’s eyes drifted to the rotary telephone, leaving Charlie with a fresh coating of goose bumps. “Mr. Clark, please,” Cranch said. “You’ve had several clear-cut and extensive episodes of lucidity since autumn. Per my clinical experience with Alzheimer’s patients, I would expect-”

He stopped abruptly as Dewart slid from his chair, fell hard to the floor, and didn’t move.

Charlie supposed either the pain or the painkillers had gotten the better of Dewart. Then the Gatorade bottle rolled from Dewart’s hand, and Charlie had a better idea of what had happened: Drummond had just pretended to suck his finger as a means of pacifying himself. Really he tripped the spring-loaded release on his molar and, with incredible sleight of hand, while feigning focus on his shoes, he deployed his L pill. Once Dewart sipped the Gatorade, Drummond stalled until the saxitoxin took effect!

Cranch too eyed the rolling Gatorade bottle, possibly thinking the same thing. The thickest part of Drummond’s iron seat back flew into the interrogator’s head, crushing his skull from the sound of it.

With the cumbersome chair still cuffed to his wrist, Drummond dove at Dewart’s body and snatched the Glock from the dead man’s waistband. Bouncing up, he swung the chair as hard as he could into the mirror. The glass exploded like a bomb, spraying thousands of bits into the adjoining observation room.

From his seat in one of the recliners there, Karpenko rushed to take up his big AK-74. Two thunderclaps from Drummond’s Glock and Karpenko keeled over, spouting a rooster tail of blood. He fell into the recliner, flipped it over, then came to rest onto its upturned swivel base, almost certainly dead.

A third report from the Glock and the fair-haired guard, surging into the conference room from the hallway, fell as if clotheslined. Blood streamed from his forehead, turning the front of his powder-blue rugby shirt maroon. He was definitely done for. Still Drummond pounced on him. He retrieved a set of keys from the guard’s pants pocket, freed himself from the handcuff, then hurried to unbind Charlie.

Incredulity acted as a pain remedy for Charlie. “Good thing I came to the rescue,” he said.

The observation room preoccupied Drummond. Charlie followed Drummond’s gaze to the smoldering cigar in an ashtray on the arm of one of the empty recliners. The door was open.

“Fielding?” Charlie said.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t he shoot back?”

“In his mind, what happened here is a positive step. Now the real inquisition can begin.”

Drummond took the slain guard’s pistol and, leading with it, inched out of the conference room. With leaden limbs, Charlie followed, still clad only in boxer shorts-there hadn’t been time to locate the rest of his clothes. The chill of the cement floor bit into his bare soles and shot up his shinbones.

“We’ll sneak out through the old east tunnel, to the university campus,” Drummond said. “Less chance of running into guards.”

The corridor was still and quiet, save the drone of the ventilators. The bare concrete walls meant no recesses or shadows in which an adversary could hide; a mouse would have stood out.

“I need you to cover me,” Drummond said, passing back the Glock.

“I’ll try,” said Charlie. He took the gun with both hands, judging just one frail hand inadequate.

If Fielding or his remaining men were to shoot, they would likely position themselves at one of four corners-there were two corners at each end of the corridor. Charlie pivoted on his numb heels, swinging the gun barrel from one end of the corridor to the other, a motion like a metronome’s. He wasn’t sure whether it was a good system.

Drummond ran west, or so Charlie thought; his bearings had been scrambled along with the rest of him. He was certain, though, that the tunnel to campus was to the east.

Drummond beckoned from the corner, and Charlie sprinted. Concern that they were headed in the wrong direction took his mind off the pain.

Nearing Drummond, he asked, “Isn’t the campus the other-?”

Drummond shot a finger to his lips. “I said that in case anyone was listening,” he whispered. “Really we’ll go out through the tunnel to the Perriman subbasement.”

Again he was on the move, with Charlie left to supply cover fire. The next corridor was identical to the last, with the exception of a six-foot-high metal canister imbedded in the wall. Drummond stopped at it and signaled Charlie.

As Charlie reached him, Drummond pressed his right eye into the scanning module mounted on the wall beside the canister. A laser hummed within it.

Charlie wondered whether the Cavalry had taken Drummond off the guest list. Perhaps while shooting at him throughout the woods and mountains of Virginia all day and night, they hadn’t considered the chase would wind up back at the office. The answer came with a hydraulic hiss, as the canister rotated, presenting a compartment like that of a revolving door.

Drummond ushered Charlie in, then crammed in alongside him. The cylinder began to rotate again, groaning beneath their weight. The compartment was sealed by the circular wall, plunging them into total darkness. Halfway around, it reopened onto a galaxy of luminous dials, gauges, and displays. When the compartment was completely open, the conveyance stopped with a mechanical grunt.

Drummond reached out and swatted at a wall panel. Rows of lamps high overhead tingled on, revealing a white rubber-walled laboratory the size of a gymnasium. “For reasons that will become apparent straightaway, this is known as the laundry room,” he said, at normal volume.

Charlie followed him into a cityscape of gleaming machines and ducts. He recognized centrifuges, condensers, incubators, and robotic arms; there were exponentially more gadgets whose functions he couldn’t guess. On the back wall was a garage door big enough to allow through the motorized pallet truck parked beside it. By Charlie’s reckoning this door opened onto the tunnel to Perriman’s subbasement. He assumed the door was their destination.