The Second Sight, page 52
“What a pity,” Christopher said, knowing that one of Yeho’s team in Geneva had managed to plant a listening device in Hassan Abdallah’s apartment, a tiny transmitter that slipped into one of the holes in an electrical outlet but was powerful enough to pick up conversations two rooms away. Yeho’s collaborator inside the laboratory had been induced to plant another transmitter in the wall plug in Hassan’s office.
“So,” Yeho said. “How would it be if I come down for the weekend?”
“We can accommodate you easily. Just you, or will you bring friends?”
“My friends are still making up their minds, but I’ll keep you informed of their plans. Oh, I almost forgot. I’ll bring the pictures from the beach. Some of them came out very well.”
They repeated the code words to signal that all was well:
“Wunderschön!”
“Lebe wohl!”
9
BEFORE LUNCH, CHRISTOPHER MET PATCHEN AND ZARAH IN THE archeological museum at Cimiez, the site of a Roman settlement at Nice. As he arrived Christopher saw Ja’wab and Dimya drive by in opposite directions; another pair of Ibal Iden, too far away to identify, wandered through the ruins of a Roman arena. Inside the museum, at this hour and season, the three Americans were quite alone with a single elderly guard and the dusty displays of Roman pottery, coins, and jewelry. They paused before a marble statue said to be that of Antonia, a niece of Augustus.
Christopher told them about “Patrick Graham Live” and his telephone conversation with Yeho Stern.
“Where is Hassan Abdallah?”
“According to Yeho, still in Geneva. Of course he may have helpers, coming from someplace else, that we don’t know about.”
“When is Yeho estimating contact?”
“He isn’t. Not yet. But if the pattern holds it will happen Thursday or Friday.”
“Do you think the pattern will hold?”
“No. I think it will happen very soon, and very suddenly.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I have a feeling.”
“A feeling?” Patchen said. “This does seem like old times.” He had always made fun of Christopher’s intuition.
Christopher shrugged. “Be logical, then. They won’t want to take a chance on missing you. If you know what was on the Graham show, you’ll leave the country immediately. That’s what any sane man in your position would do. And then there are the French. If they saw the show, with that shot of the milestone at the end of your driveway, they’re going to flood the neighborhood with cops. That means they can’t afford to wait.”
“You don’t think they’re going to spot Zarah’s schoolmates and suspect a trap?”
“That won’t stop them.”
“You have the Ibal Iden scattered one to a car. They’re vulnerable.”
“That’s true. On the other hand, if the opposition decides to attack they’ll have to catch them and kill them one at a time, and I doubt that they’ve got the manpower or the time for that. They’ll snatch and run. We have to observe the snatch, follow you to your destination, watch the place where they take you, and wait for Hassan to show up. Then all we have to do is get you back.”
“Good summation,” Patchen said. “Good luck.” He uttered a short laugh and walked to the other side of the room, leaving Zarah and Christopher in privacy.
Zarah linked arms with her father. He could feel the life in her body. They could see their reflections in the glass of the showcase, and Patchen’s charcoal figure in the background.
“How strong is this feeling of yours?” she asked.
“Very strong,” Christopher said, tasting nausea again. “I don’t like it.”
“I think we’d better trust it anyway,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
“You’re sure of that?”
She looked directly into his eyes and smiled. “Absolutely,” she said. “As sure as if I’d seen it all happen before.”
She kissed him, something she had never done before in real life.
10
THE EYE OF GAZA TOOK PATCHEN AND ZARAH THIRTY MINUTES LATER just beyond Vence, where the road descends through the gorges of the River Loup in a series of sharp switchbacks. It was very professionally done, with one car pulling out in front of Patchen, causing him to brake, and another, proceeding in the opposite direction, swerving wildly to avoid a collision and ending up crosswise to the road so that Patchen was blocked front and rear. The drivers of the other two cars leaped out, shouting excitedly in the fashion of outraged French motorists. As they approached, Patchen punched himself in the chest, breaking the ampule of amphetamine inside the implant. Less than a second later the terrorists smashed the windows and injected them, painlessly, at the base of the skull with what they knew must be Versed. The terrorists stepped back and smiled, waiting for the drugs to take effect. Patchen and Zarah, awash in chemical happiness, smiled back cheerfully and opened the doors themselves.
Christopher, in position behind Patchen’s car, observed all this from the next higher switchback. By the time he reached the scene, Patchen and Zarah were already in the other cars and one of the terrorists was driving off in their car. Both wore the same look of wonder and delight as all the other Beautiful Dreamers. The road was still half-blocked; Christopher blew his horm impatiently while glaring at the terrorists from behind his rolled-up window. Above them, Kbira took advantage of the diversion to photograph the scene with a miniature Japanese video camera identical to the one Dorcas had used. Christopher drove on.
The Ibal Iden, strung out along ten kilometers of mountain road at all the key intersections, had no difficulty in following the kidnappers through the Clues Haute de Provence and the gorges along the River Var to a stone mas built into a mountainside at the end of a gravel track far back in the Maritime Alps. As soon as it was dark Ja’wab and the other males drifted down the mountain and surrounded the house, keeping watch while Kbira and Dimya rigged radio-controlled bombs and homing devices on each of the terrorists’ cars. Then the girls sank into the ground, too. They had no trouble operating in this steep, parched country with its snowcooled winds. It reminded them of the Idáren Dráren.
THREE
1
AS HE RECEDED INTO HIS OWN PAST ON THE WINGS OF THE DRUG, Patchen grew younger and younger and smaller and smaller. He felt that this rewinding of his life must end at the moment of conception, when sperm penetrated egg and created the microscopic Patchen. This event and its meaning were blindingly clear to him. He had been unwounded then, perfect, the receptacle of all information about himself, an infinitesimal being that was all mind.
This marvelous speck of pure intelligence, traveling down the Fallopian tube, possessed the secret of its own unique genetic nature and fate. Because it was already Patchen and could not be anything but what it was designed to be, it immediately set about transforming itself into his body. Patchen’s rudimentary heart appeared by the fourteenth day; his spine, brain, eyes, ears, alimentary canal, and the buds of his limbs by the twenty-first, and then, day by day and organ by organ, all the rest of his parts sprang into being. Floating in the fragrant amniotic fluid, Patchen heard voices from outside, saw light filtered through membranes, heard the beating of an enormous heart above his head, felt his mother’s emotions coursing through his own body and so learned that there were others like himself.
Was it possible to go farther back than this, beyond the muted rosy light inside the womb, was it possible to break in two again and rise up through the blood vessels and cells of his parents’ bodies, to swim into their very brains and find the storage places of their own original memories of themselves, in which, surely, he himself was already present along with all his ancestors and all his descendants that he would never have? Was it possible to go farther back, even, than that, possible to know everything by crossing the brilliant constellation of these innumerable generations of tiny minds like stepping-stones to their source, the Original Mind? Was knowing what Patchen had known in the first microsecond of physical being, before he set about manufacturing himself and forgot the secret of life in the travail of breaking its code, the same as knowing everything? Was this knowedge the bliss of Samadhi, satori, salvation, Martha’s Inward Light? Was he on the threshold of understanding the infinite?
Even under the influence of the Versed that was dripping into his arm and the amphetamine that was being released into his bloodstream by the implant in his chest, Patchen could not bring himself to think so. If he was traveling through the infinite, how was it that he remembered things about the nature of the infinite that the speck-mind of the fertilized egg could not possibly have known and had no need to know? His bedtime reading flooded his memory with what he now recognized as false data—verses from the Upanishads, the arithmetical formula based on the Ceylon Chronicles for computing the dates of Gautama Buddha’s birth and death, passage after passage from Genesis and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica poem about ghosts written in Vietnam by Paul Christopher. He fought to bring his brain back to equilibrium. His conscious mind began to function again. A brilliant light shone into his eyes. No longer deceived, he knew it was a camera light. He saw strange figures moving through the glare and knew they were his captors. But what had happened to him before he began to think again? Where had he been? Had he gone farther back than he knew? Was he not where he thought he was now, but somewhere else? Where was his dog? Where were the Marines of his patrol, Corporal Bobby Poole and all the others? Where was Zarah? Where was Christopher? Where?
“You’re home,” a kindly voice said. “You’re among friends. Everything is already known about everyone here; that’s why we’re so close. Nobody has any secrets. You can talk about anything to us. Anything.”
It was an Outfit voice, female. Patchen thought he recognized it, but he could not place it. He hadn’t heard it in years. To whom did it belong? He tried hard to visualize the face that went with the voice, but it was like a forgotten name.
“Don’t try to remember anything in particular,” the voice said.
“Particulars are not important. Relax. You can talk about anything. Anything at all. Start with a name. Any name. Tell me someone’s name.”
Patchen’s head cleared as one drug momentarily overcame the other, and in this moment of lucidity he recognized his questioner. He was astonished. It was a face from the far past. How could this be? Was he hallucinating? He knew that he was not, that the face he saw before his eyes, though much older and more disappointed than the one he remembered, was the face he thought it was.
He said, “Joshua.”
“Joshua?” the voice said. “Joshua who?”
“Joshua Josephson,” Patchen replied. The amphetamine was helping at last. He was no longer dreaming. The heart he had heard beating was his own, accelerated by the drug. It pounded in his ears and temples. A thrill of pure energy coursed through his whole body, so strong that he had the brief illusion that he could use his left arm and leg or see out of his left eye if he wished to do so. His glass eye was still in place; he could feel it, or, rather, not feel the toothachey movement of air on the empty socket.
“Tell us about Joshua Josephson,” the familiar voice said. “Is that a funny name or a real name?” The enunciation was not quite flawless, as happens with people who live too long abroad. He remembered that, too. He now remembered everything about this person in a long string of memories.
“Joshua was an unwitting asset,” Patchen said. “We were having trouble with the priests.”
“Where?”
“In Joshua’s country. They were a threat to our authority. We wanted to put them under an obligation, make them easier to handle. So we sent in an agent to recruit this Joshua and run him against them. It was a political action operation. The objective was to put a thorn in their side, make them come to us for help getting rid of him.”
“What was your agent’s name?”
“Judas.”
“I mean his true name. Please don’t use cryptonyms.”
“That was his true name. His father had been executed by the imperialists for underground activity; the son belonged to the same secret underground his father had, twenty years earlier. He built a cell around Joshua, eleven assets besides himself. They weren’t much as revolutionaries go. It was low-grade agit-prop—street-corner speeches about bribery and corruption in high places, demonstrations and rabble-rousing, nothing serious. But it was enough to alarm the priests. Joshua was beginning to have a following. So they came to us for help. We set Joshua up, asked the local police to arrest him. Judas was supposed to finger him for the cops, who didn’t even know who he was, but he had the case officer’s disease, he loved his agent more than he loved the operation. He tried to warn him. Joshua wouldn’t listen; he wanted to be arrested, he wanted to be a martyr to the cause; it happens. He got his wish, and after he was arrested and executed, Judas hanged himself. We planted some money on the corpse to make it look like he had been bribed by the police to turn in his leader. Everybody bought it; he was branded a traitor, a police spy. Nobody suspected us. The op was a success. We had the priests where we wanted them, they owed us. And we had ten assets under discipline for future reference. But the problem was, what might Judas have written to give the game away before he died? He was twice as smart as any of the others, and he was the only one who knew we were involved. We had to discredit his version before it was published, assuming it even existed. So we got the others to write reports of the operation making Judas the villain. That was the end of it.”
“Very funny, David,” the voice said to him, patting him maternally on the cheek. “But it won’t work.” And then to somebody else who was concealed behind the lights, the voice said, “He’s resisting the drug.”
“But he’s talking.”
“Yes. And telling us the story of Jesus Christ as a Roman spy thriller. Step up the dosage. I’ll go talk to the girl.”
2
NEARBY, YEHO SAID, “WE LOST HASSAN ABDALLAH.”
“Lost him?” Christopher said. “How can you lose somebody on a road that has no crossroads?”
It was well after midnight. They were standing in a light snowfall on an unpaved road in the Alpes de Haute Provence. The ground was beginning to be dusted, and the dark coat of Patchen’s Doberman, quivering at Christopher’s knee, was also turning white.
“We should get into the car,” Yeho said. “Otherwise we’ll leave tracks.”
Inside the automobile, Yeho continued his narrative. Abdallah and three companions had vanished. Yeho’s team, who had followed their car all the way from Geneva, had bracketed it with vehicles of their own, two in front and two behind. Because of the switchbacks it was impossible to stay completely out of sight and still maintain contact, but they had maintained a considerable distance so as to allay suspicion. After all, where could they go? There was not so much as a gravel pit into which to turn, much less hide. But when the lead car reached the bottom of the mountain just after dark and pulled off the road to let the next vehicle to take its place, it was observed that the terrorists’ car was empty except for the driver, Hassan Abdallah’s French girlfriend. She continued on, under surveillance, and checked in, alone, at a mountain hotel a few kilometers away on the Italian side of the Lombard Pass.
Christopher said, “That means Hassan and two others got out of the car and continued on foot.”
“But which way?” Yeho said. He began to unfold a large-scale topographical map of the area.
“Did anyone try to follow them?”
“What was the point? They were already gone. Besides, the tag team were not Ibal Iden. Like you and me, they’re too old to go scrambling over Alps. They did the correct thing—continued on their way and reported. So we can assume Hassan Abdallah doesn’t know he was being followed.” Yeho shone a flashlight on the map. “The Nazi and his friends got out somewhere in here,” he said, drawing a circle with the beam. “They could either go east to Italy, where they have absolutely no reason to go, or they could go over the top of this hill to the mas, which is here.” He switched off the torch. “They can’t get inside without being seen by the Ibal Iden, so what have we lost?”
“Certainty,” Christopher said. “That’s all.”
The mas, a stone farmhouse, was built into a steep hillside. From the top it looked like a shepherd’s hut of uncut stone, but seen from the bottom it was a three-story structure cut into the living rock and finished with stone and mortar. From the military point of view it was an almost impregnable position, because the tall side of the house commanded a clear field of fire along its entire front, and there was no other visible way in except through the back, which could be defended by one armed man, or even sealed with a small explosive charge if the defenders were willing to die inside.
“I’ve told the boys and girls to let Hassan and his men go inside in peace,” Yeho said.
“You’ve told them?”
“I know you’re in charge of them, but there was no time to go through channels.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Over two hours. One of them is supposed to report here at fifty-five minutes after midnight.”
It was now 12:50. Exactly five minutes later Ja’wab appeared, his parka covered with snow. The road was white with it. Yeho rolled down his window.
“They haven’t approached the house,” Ja’wab said. “I think we should start hunting them. We can take Hassan before he goes in, then go into the house and get the others.”
“No,” Christopher said.
“No?” Ja’wab said. “How long do you think Zarah will last after she starts talking under the drug?”
Christopher, who had got out of the car, looked down on Ja’wab, surprised again at how small he was, and by the worry in his face. He said, “If you didn’t see them, Ja’wab, they’re inside by now.”
