Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Thrusting my bandaged arms up in the air, I yelled: “Let me out of here! My God! Oh, my God ! Let me out!”

“What is it?” Molly shrieked at me.

Virtually all the passengers in the first-class cabin had turned toward us. They stared in horror. A flight attendant ran down the aisle toward me.

“Oh, Jesus,” I shouted. “I’ve got to get off — now !”

“Sir, I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said. She was tall and blond, with a plain, mannish, no-nonsense face. “We’re not allowed to let passengers deplane at takeoff. Is there anything we can do for you—”

“What is it?” Molly asked me.

“Let me out!” I stood up. “I have to get out of here. The pain is incredible!”

“Sir!” the Swiss woman protested.

“Get our bags!” I commanded Molly. My arms still thrust in the air, moaning and keening, I began to shove my way into the aisle. Molly quickly grabbed our bags from the overhead compartment, and somehow managed to wriggle the shoulder straps of two of the valises over each of her slight shoulders and, at the same time, grab the others with her hands. She followed me down the aisle, toward the front of the plane.

But the flight attendant blocked our way. “Sir! Madam! I’m terribly sorry, but regulations stipulate—”

An elderly woman screamed out in terror: “Let him out of here!”

“My God ,” I shouted.

“Sir, the plane is about to take off!”

“ Move! Out of our way!” It was Molly, ferocious in her anger. “I’m his physician! If you don’t let us off of this plane at once, you’ll have a goddamn huge lawsuit on your hands. I mean you personally , lady — and you’ll take the whole goddamned airline down with you, do you understand me?”

The Swiss woman’s eyes widened as she backed down the aisle and then flattened herself against one row of seats to let us pass by. With Molly in tow, struggling mightily with our luggage, I ran down the service stairway, which was, thank God, still bolted to the side of the plane.

We ran across the tarmac and reentered the terminal. There, I grabbed all the bags from Molly — it was painful, but I was certainly able to do it — and pulled her toward me as I ran to the Swissair ticket counter.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Quiet... Just — quiet for a while!”

The Swissair ticket agents, fortunately, hadn’t seen where we had come from. I pulled out a wad of cash (courtesy, too, of Toby) and bought two first-class tickets to Zurich. The flight was leaving in ten minutes.

We would just make it.

Although the Swissair flight from Milan to Zurich was pleasant and uneventful — I’ve always preferred Swissair to any other airline — I found myself in almost constant physical agony.

I nursed a Bloody Mary and tried to make my mind a blank. Molly was fast asleep. Before getting on the plane, even before the whole business with switching flights, she’d complained of feeling ill, queasy. She dismissed it as insignificant, though: some bug she’d picked up on the flight over to Italy in what she called a “toothpaste tube” and a “Petri dish” of a 747. She obviously didn’t much like to fly.

I had decided that it would be folly to trust Toby at this point. Perhaps I was being overly suspicious. But we could no longer take chances, and if Toby were the serpent in the garden...

Hence my telling him that I was headed to Brussels. No, Orlov had not thought “Brussels,” but only I knew that. In an hour or so, I was sure, CIA personnel in Brussels would realize that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Osborne had not arrived from Milan, and alarms would go off. So this was at best a temporary diversion; but it was better than nothing.

Follow the gold , Orlov had called out to me a few seconds before his gruesome murder. Follow the gold.

I knew now what he had meant. At least I thought I did. He and Sinclair had transacted their business in Zurich. He hadn’t told me the name of the bank, but he had thought something, thought a name. Koerfer: it had to be a name. Was it the name of a bank? Or an individual? I would have to locate the bank in Zurich where the two spymasters had met.

Follow the gold meant follow the paper trail, which was the only way to learn the nature of the beast that had killed Sinclair. And most likely, the only way for Molly and me to remain alive.

I tried to relax. One of the first questions he’d asked me, after we had finished the debriefing, was whether my... ability , as he delicately put it, had survived the fire intact. And the truth was, I didn’t know what to answer then; I didn’t yet have the strength, or the will, necessary to concentrate sufficiently.

Now, however, I gathered my resources, and as Molly slept, I tried. My head ached — worse now, it seemed, than any headache I’d ever had before. Was this related to the injuries I’d sustained in the fire?

Or, more ominously, did it have something to do with the power I’d acquired in the Oracle Project’s laboratory? Was something beginning to degenerate, to go wrong? Who was it — Rossi? Toby? — who had mentioned, ever so casually, that the only person on whom the protocol had worked, the Dutchman, had gone crazy? The clamor in his head had driven him to suicide. I began to understand the impulse.

Yet at the same time I worried that this damned telepathic ability, which had gotten me into all this, after all, might no longer be with me.

So I furrowed my brow, squinted my eyes, frowned, tried to make my mind receptive, and found it difficult. I was surrounded by sound, which made it maddeningly difficult to separate out the ELF waves. There was the noise of the plane’s engines, muffled and droning and lulling; the mostly indistinct chatter of nearby passengers; a loud, whooping laugh from somewhere back in the smoking section; an infant wailing a few seats behind us; the clatter and clink of the serving carts moving down the aisle, loaded with miniature bottles and cans.

Asleep next to me was Molly, but I didn’t particularly want to violate my pledge to her. The nearest fellow passenger — this was first class, after all — was a good distance away.

Furtively, I bent my head toward Molly, focused, and heard her murmur something aloud. She shifted suddenly, as if she’d detected my proximity, and opened her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Checking on you,” I said quickly.

“Oh, yeah?”

“How do you feel?”

“Lousy. Queasy still.”

“Sorry.”

“Thanks. It’ll pass.” She sat up slowly, massaged her neck. “Ben, do you have a clear idea what you’re going to be doing in Zurich?”

“Fairly,” I said. “The rest I’ll play by ear.”

She nodded, touched my right hand. “How’s the pain?”

“Subsiding,” I lied.

“Good. I mean, a nice try at playing the macho man, but I know how badly it hurts. Tonight, if you’d like, I’ll give you something to help you sleep. The nights are the worst, when you can’t stop yourself from rolling over on your arms.”

“Won’t be necessary.”

“Just let me know.”

“I will.”

“Ben?” I looked at her. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Ben, I had a dream about Dad. But you probably know that.”

“I told you, Molly, I won’t—”

“Never mind. This dream I had... You know all those places we lived when I was growing up — Afghanistan, the Philippines, Egypt? From as early as I can remember, I felt his absence. I guess that’s pretty common among CIA brats — Dad’s always gone, and you don’t know where, or why, or what he does, and your friends are always asking why’s your dad never there, you know? It always seemed like Dad wasn’t around — it wasn’t until much later that I understood why — but I remember thinking that if I were just nicer to Mom, he’d spend more time at home playing with me. When I got older, and he told me he worked for the CIA, I took it okay — I think I’d pretty much figured it out, and a couple of my friends had already speculated as much to me. But it didn’t make it easier.”