Ben Bova: Voyagers

“We got him. Picked him up this afternoon. They’re driving him to the safe house.”

“Good.”

“I hope so. This isn’t the old days, you know. We’re out on a limb with nothing but your say-so.”

“Did he offer any resistance?” Tuttle asked.

“No.”

“Then technically, he went voluntarily.”

“I hope that holds up in court.”

“It won’t go to court.”

“You can’t holler National Security and do whatever you feel like anymore.”

The Sacred Rock Singers began to beat out a heavily amplified gospel song. The crowd immediately recognized it and began clapping in rhythm to it.

“I’ll back you up,” Tuttle yelled over the noise. “It was doggone important to get Stoner before he ran off at the mouth.”

The man beside him said something in reply, but it was lost in the music and clapping.

“What?” Tuttle yelled.

The man shook his head in disgust, got up and pushed his way out of the crowd.

Dazedly, Keith Stoner sat on the bed of the room they had put him in. It was a comfortable bed with an old-fashioned tufted white coverlet spread neatly across it. The room was small but snug. An unused fireplace in one corner, a single wingback chair covered with a design of blotchy flowers. The bed table, one lamp, a digital alarm clock, a bureau, doors that led to a closet and a bathroom.

And the door that led into the hallway. Locked.

The two men who had identified themselves as Naval Intelligence agents had bundled Stoner into their unmarked black Plymouth without giving him a chance to say a word to anyone. Only Jo Camerata knew what had happened to him.

They had driven for hours, until Stoner felt they were deliberately trying to confuse him, to make certain he could not retrace their route. It grew dark and still they drove through the New England countryside, mainly along back roads.

“Where the hell are you guys going?” Stoner demanded.

“Just relax,” said the agent sitting beside him on the rear seat of the car. He called himself Dooley. The bigger one was up front, driving, his massive bulk hunched over the steering wheel.

Stoner tried to keep track of the road signs, but they were swerving and lurching along back roads in complete darkness. They could have been passing open fields, or huge buildings, or even the ocean. The sky had clouded over and there were no lights along the roadside.

Finally they pulled onto a crunching, bumpy gravel driveway. Stoner saw thick boles of venerable trees leaning close in the dim light of the car’s headlamps. A house loomed up ahead of them: big and old and boxy. The shingles were unpainted cedar. The car slowed, and in the headlamp glow Stoner could see a garage door swinging up automatically for them. They drove into the lighted garage and stopped.

“Wait a minute,” Dooley said.

Stoner sat still and heard the garage door swing down again. Then the car’s door locks clicked open.

“Okay.”

The driver was out of the car before Stoner could get his door open, and stood waiting alongside as he climbed out.

“You guys don’t take any chances, do you?” Stoner said to them.

Dooley let a slight smile cross his lips. “Against a black belt? We watched you working out.”

Poor scared pigs, Stoner thought. All they’ve got is guns and bullets.

They led him into the house, an old Yankee farmhouse that had obviously been remodeled by a millionaire. The original rooms were small, with low ceilings that sagged so much the timber beams almost touched Stoner’s head. Fireplaces in each room. And radiant baseboard electrical heating units. Thermal windows. A sparkling ultramodern kitchen, and another small kitchen just off the living room that served as a wet bar. The living room itself was all new, wide, spacious, with a high slanted cathedral ceiling. Beyond it were sliding glass doors that looked out onto a sunken swimming pool. Not quite Olympic size, but big enough.

They led him up a narrow staircase to the second floor.

“This will be your room, Dr. Stoner,” Dooley said, opening a bedroom door. “There’s some clothes in the closet that should fit you. Bathroom with shower through there. Socks and stuff in the bureau.”

“How the hell long am I going to be here?” he asked. “Don’t I get a phone call or something?”

Dooley gave another tight smile. “We’ll bring dinner up to you. Somebody will be here to talk to you in the morning. No phone calls.”

So Stoner sat on the bed and watched raindrops start to spatter on the dark window, listened to the rain drumming against the old house.

This must be how they felt when the Nazis bundled them off to Dachau, he thought. Stunned…confused…totally off balance.

There could be only one reason for it, he realized. They wanted to keep him quiet, to prevent him from telling the world what he had discovered.

Which meant he was truly a prisoner.

“Professor Markov, you are a Party member?”

Markov nodded at the woman.

“But you have never been admitted to the Academy?”

“Not yet,” he answered with a frosty smile.

They were sitting in a tiny interrogation room, a cramped, blank-walled windowless chamber. One of the fluorescent lamps in the ceiling was flickering; Markov could feel it tapping against his brain like a Chinese water torture. Deliberate? he wondered. Part of the interrogation? Or simply the usual sloppy maintenance?

The woman sitting across the small wooden table wore the tan uniform with red tabs and insignia of a lieutenant. She could not have been more than twenty-two, and she was taking this interrogation very seriously.

Markov decided to be charming.

“My dear young lady, you have my entire life story in those papers spread before you. It hasn’t been a very colorful life, I admit, but if there is any special part of it that you want me to relate to you…”

She glanced down at the checklist on which her left hand rested. She held a chewed pencil in her right.

“You are married?” she asked.

She’s going to go through the whole damned list, Markov groaned to himself. This will take hours.

“Yes. My wife is Maria…”

“Not yet,” the lieutenant said, diligently making another check mark in the appropriate box. “Children?”

“None.”

“Wife’s first name?”

“Maria.”

“Maiden name?”

“Kirtchatovska.”

It made no impression on the lieutenant. She apparently had no idea that Major Markova had the power to make a lieutenant’s life very uncomfortable.

“How long have you been married?”

“All my life.”

She looked up sharply. “What?”

Markov smiled at her. It’s really quite a pretty face, he thought. I wonder what she would do if I leaned across the table and took a nibble of that luscious lower lip?

“Twenty-four years this January,” he said.

She looked down again and wrote on the checklist. Then her eyes rose to meet his. “Twenty-four years and no children?”

“I suffer from a sad malady,” Markov lied cheerfully. “The result of a war trauma, the psychologists say.”

“You’re…impotent?” She whispered the last word.