George Chesbro: Shadow of a Broken Man

"I knew that I'd have to kill him," Lippitt resumed in a low monotone. "I tried to reason with him right up to the last moment. Then, I simply… beat him. We both fired at the same time; I was lucky. He was hit and… he fell over the railing into the furnace."

The agent suddenly paused and licked his lips. Lippitt now seemed unusually agitated, and I didn't think it was for the obvious reason that he was admitting to Mrs. Foster that he'd killed her first husband. Something else was bothering him.

"I thought that was the end of the… problem," Lippitt continued with a catch in his voice. "I then took certain steps; I reported Rafferty's death through the same channels Dr. Llewellyn had used. I knew the report would be monitored, and I assumed the pressure would ease off. Mrs. Foster, at least, would be safe. It worked." He quickly glanced in my direction. "Then you began asking questions, Dr. Frederickson, and it started all over again." He walked back to the window, as if trying to cleanse the dark business of the past in the wash of bright sunlight. "I shot him," he continued in a clipped voice. "I saw him clutch at his stomach and fall over the railing into the furnace. . But now I understand that it didn't happen. It was an illusion. One more trick. My God, he made me see what he wanted me to see."

"C'mon, Lippitt," Mike Foster said, scorn and incredulity in his voice. "You're trying to tell us that you saw Victor fall into the furnace, but he didn't actually fall?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying. It's the only explanation. And it means that his powers are far greater than even I knew." He paused, turned, and looked at each of us. He must have seen more than a little skepticism; he grew very pale. "You still don't believe me. He did have the power to enter men's minds. You know that, because Mrs. Foster has confirmed it. But there were other things he could do, things I haven't told you about. Perhaps if you knew-"

"He did something else to you, didn't he?" I said, certain I was right. "Why don't you tell us about that?"

Lippitt abruptly folded his arms across his chest and turned his back to us once again. His voice became stronger, matter-of-fact. "I was captured during the Korean war and tortured with ice baths."

Lippitt shuddered, as I had seen him do once before. He quickly clenched the muscles in his body, and that brought the shaking under control; it had been a spasm, no more, but it had chilled everyone in the room. I remembered the pictures of Lippitt in his overcoat in summer, and I felt cold myself.

"I'm sorry to say they extracted the information they wanted in a very short time," he continued. "I managed to survive, but the ice baths had affected my mind. It seemed to me that I could never be warm. I constantly wore a coat, because I was cold all the time. There was nothing I could do, nothing any doctor could do. I didn't want to retire, and I was of sufficient value to get my way on that… but I suffered." He looked over his shoulder at Elizabeth Foster. She glanced up at him, and their eyes held. "We talked for some time," he said, slowly turning, his gaze still locked with the woman's. "Actually, Rafferty did most of the talking. He spoke of the way he thought his powers should be used, in the manner Mrs. Foster has already mentioned. Then he gave me a demonstration."

"He cured you, didn't he?" I said slowly.

Lippitt nodded, swallowed hard. "He knew everything. He talked about it so casually; every thought in my mind. He knew all of it, despite the nail."

"What nail?" I said, looking up.

Lippitt held up the palm of his left hand to reveal a jagged scar running from the mount of Venus to the base of the little finger. "I'd been gripping a sharpened nail treated with acid. I didn't want Rafferty to know what I was thinking-or that I had a gun. I thought I could mask my thoughts with pain. I assumed it had worked; for five years I've been congratulating myself on how clever I'd been. Now, of course, I see that it didn't work at all. Rafferty had known about the gun all the time, right up to the moment when I made the decision to draw and shoot." He passed a hand across his eyes; then he continued in a softer, yet still anguished voice. "But while we talked he was working on me; he told me how my suffering was psychosomatic. Then he went into my mind, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I could feel his mind in mine, probing, comforting, making me understand … making me well again. He convinced me in less than a minute that there was nothing wrong with my body. Suddenly… I wasn't cold anymore."

"And then you killed him," Elizabeth Foster whispered. "That was your way of thanking him."

"He made me think that I'd killed him, Mrs. Foster. He created and forced the situation, and now I understand why. I heard him pull the hammer back while I was standing at the edge of the catwalk. I did the only thing I could do, and that was what Rafferty wanted me to do. I spun around, drew, and fired at him."

It was clear to me now why Lippitt had been willing to risk his life, along with a good number of government secrets, to get Elizabeth Foster and her husband out of the Russian consulate. He'd felt he owed Victor Rafferty at least that; he'd been motivated by guilt. I suddenly felt a great deal of compassion for Lippitt. He was a patriot, and in the cause of patriotism he'd traded one form of mental torture for another.

But it was Rafferty who'd made the supreme sacrifice, I thought. Ironically, in the cause of freedom; his wife's, and his own. He'd given up everything: his wife, his work, his life as he'd known it. Now that sacrifice had been wiped out. Rafferty had betrayed himself with a doodle on a scrap of paper.

"So Rafferty set you up," I said to Lippitt. My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the sudden quiet. "He made you think you'd killed him. That was an alternative you hadn't considered."

"Then Rafferty is not working for the Americans," Tal said, placing the pencil he had been rolling back in his pocket. "Or the Russians. Assuming that Mr. Lippitt is at last telling the truth… where is Rafferty, and what has he been doing for the past five years?"

"We know he was at the U.N., at least at the time of the housing seminar," I said. "The drawing proves that."

"It begins again," Lippitt said bitterly.

"The hunt?" Something in my voice-probably disgust- caused Lippitt to look at me sharply. There was a brief glint of pain in his eyes, and then it was gone.

"I have no choice, Frederickson," Lippitt said quietly. "It is a hunt. The others will be after him, and you should hope that I find him before they do."

As far as I was concerned, he had a point. I knew where Lippitt was, because I was with him. But there were still the Russians, the British, the French with their mysterious agent, and God only knew how many others, all beating the bushes for Rafferty. I had no way of knowing how close they were.

"Let him alone!" Mike Foster said, emotion twisting his voice and features. "For God's sake, haven't you done enough to the man? He's shown that he means no harm to anyone!"

"Has he?" Lippitt said. "He's proved nothing of the kind, and I'm not waiting for a nuclear attack to find out whether our defense network has been penetrated; neither will any other country that knows about him."

"What about Mr. and Mrs. Foster?" I asked. "You plan to lock them away someplace?"

Lippitt looked at Mrs. Foster. "They should come with me for their own protection."

Elizabeth Foster shook her head and moved even closer to her husband. "Go to hell, Lippitt," Mike Foster said evenly.

"The Fosters will be taken care of," Tal said. "And you too, Mongo. There are a lot of people, I'm sure, who will want to ask you questions."