A War of Shadows, page 13
She turned and walked deeper into the forest, toward the small but fast-flowing stream she could hear, still clutching her teddy bear and suddenly preoccupied with other things a four-year-old would find fascinating on a warm summer day: flittering butterflies, pretty flowers, and a babbling brook.
The brook itself looked inviting, and she managed to get her sneakers off and wade in. The water was real cold, and she got out fast. The sneakers wouldn’t slip back on, though, and she didn’t know how to untie the laces to get them on, so she left them. The adult Sandra O’Connell would have followed the nearby road; the four-year-old Sandy followed the pretty if cold brook.
* * *
The chief of security was furious. “Crofton! Damn it! How could you have let this happen?”
Crofton, the attendant bowled over by his charges, looked sheepish.
“Jeez, boss, I was just sittin’ there, lookin’ at ’em, you know, when all of a sudden, pow! They all give a big yell and charge right at me! Hell, I didn’t know what was goin’ on until they hit me full and spilled me! Even so, it was only one of their kid’s games, you know, nothin’ serious.”
The security man stared at Crofton hard. “You have them all back in their rooms now?” he asked softly.
Crofton looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“Well, no, not exactly. A couple got all the way past the ward desk and out into the lobby. They were hell gettin’ back, let me tell you. We got all but one now, though. Looks like she managed to lose herself in the shuffle and got into the main hospital, but it’s only a matter of time, you know. After all, she’s only four in the head, you know.”
“Name?”
“O’Connell,” the attendant replied. “Nice-lookin’ broad, you know? A little older than I like ’em, but—”
“Can the evaluation,” snapped the security man impatiently. “You sure she’s still in the hospital? No chance of a breakout?”
“You know the exits are all guarded, and there’s the main gate, too. She didn’t get through there, so she must’ve got into the other wings.”
The security chief was dubious. “Show me where you lost her,” he ordered, getting up from behind his desk.
* * *
Eight attendants were still searching the “Children’s Wing” and many more the rest of the hospital when the chief of security and the hapless Crofton walked down the hall from his office to the exit to the playground.
All his life John Braden, now the security head, had played hunches. He was in a powerful position here, and he meant to keep it. Things had gone sour many times in his thirty-two-year government career, but never irrevocably so. He was good, and he knew it. Mistakes couldn’t be avoided in any situation; the trick was in making sure they didn’t get you.
The playground seemed innocuous enough. The fence itself was ten feet high, double-braided chain-link, not something you could easily climb. At the top were sharp barbs at the termination of every strand.
His eyes followed the fence all the way around, until it came back nine or more meters away to meet the brick side of the building. From any angle except almost on top of the juncture, it didn’t appear there was an opening.
Still, there was something that caught his eye, something that felt wrong. He walked down to where the fence met the building, Crofton following silently.
Braden spotted it almost immediately. Shards of light blue cloth were caught on the edges of the fence, and the ground dug up in the area of the opening.
“Jeez! You mean she got through there?” Crofton gasped. “But—that’s so small! She ain’t no big woman, but she’s got enough up front to—”
“Nevertheless, that’s what she did,” his boss said. “Back when I was with the federal prison system we had a guy over eighty-two kilos get out through a vent shaft less than three-quarters of a meter square.” He picked at the torn remnants of cloth.
“Let’s get going,” he told the attendant. “I want to see the outside here. You notify Region Security Command that we’ve had a break, then get Dr. Ahalsi to run a check on every one of the patients in the kiddie ward. I want to know if this was a planned break or not. I want Region to know if they’re dealing with a retard or a fully functioning adult.”
Crofton hesitated. “Jeez! Either way, she must be dirty and bruised and half-naked, with no money or nothin’. She sure shouldn’t be hard to spot and pick up.
“Get going, Pollyanna, before I commit you to this place!” Braden snapped acidly.
Crofton got going.
Following the water, Sandra O’Connell came to Lake Martha—not a big lake, but a nice, pretty blue one used by a number of people for trout fishing. It being mid-week, though, there was no one around when she got there.
She stood there for a moment just staring at the picture postcard scene, the girl-woman entranced by this new place. After a moment she went down to the lake, testing the water first this time to see if it was warm. It felt cool, but not cold, and she waded in a little, sat down in the water, splashed around and had a good time although Mr. Jinks got as wet as she did.
Soaked and sloppy, she started walking around the lake, just a meter or two from the shore. Her more adult common sense seemed subconsciously to keep her from walking out into the deep center.
A thousand meters or so brought her to a partially submerged boat-house. The double doors were locked, but by going under the part that was angled just out of the water she found a number of missing boards. It was an old place, neither used nor fixed up in a decade or more.
Feeling suddenly very tired, she crawled into the boathouse from underneath and pulled herself wearily onto a fairly flat dry section smelling of oils and paints. It didn’t matter to her; she was sleepy and it was a nice place to stretch out just for a few minutes.
Just a few minutes…
“Mitoricine,” the psychiatrist told Braden, “is a funny drug. I’ve never liked our using it, and its effects and aftereffects are extremely unpredictable. Enough constants are there, though, to tell me that I would not like to be on the stuff myself, ever.”
Braden nodded. “Tell me, when is her dose going to wear off?”
The medical man looked at a chart and shrugged. “Hard to say. She was due for it today at two, and repeated early doses at a larger rate were administered, so the last shot, to be on the safe side—this stuff can kill you or turn you into a vegetable if you blow it—was a low to medium dose. Assuming vigorous exercise, which will aggravate the drug condition, she should just about pass out within a couple of hours, maybe sooner, maybe later—it varies with the individual. She’ll sleep a good long time, the body fighting the remnants of the drug, then wake up uncomfortable and lethargic. It’ll take a long time to get her back to normal, and it’ll come gradually.”
“So you mean she’ll still be a retard?” the security man asked eagerly.
The psychiatrist shook his head. “Not in that sense. Reaction time will be down, things will be foggy, like that. She’ll be jumbled, confused, have some trouble behaving normally. It’s much like an adverse reaction to pentathol, only much longer.”
“So she’ll still be no problem to catch,” Braden said hopefully.
The other man shrugged. “Who knows? All I can tell you is that she might have a hell of a time convincing anybody she was a doctor.”
Military men and State Policemen combed the area with bloodhounds. They quickly followed her to the stream, found the abandoned sneakers, and picked up the trail. They were all convinced that they were after a severely retarded woman, and that intensified their search.
Within minutes they made the lake, and were stopped dead. A complete circle of the lake was made with the hounds, but there were no signs of Sandra O’Connell coming out of that lake. More than once they passed the old, broken-down boathouse, but it was obviously padlocked and there were no signs of any sort of forced entry. Once or twice one of the searchers would duck under and shine a light around, but saw nothing.
They decided then to drag the lake, and it took time for the local fire department’s rescue equipment to arrive. It was past six in the evening before they started dragging; the sun went down a little over two hours later, and they were forced to call it off for the night.
They had found two badly decomposed bodies in there, a lot of junk, and an entire automobile the New York State Police had been looking for as a getaway vehicle for over three years.
They didn’t find Sandra O’Connell, and patrols that ringed the lake farther out found no sign, either. They concluded that she had to be in the lake when they knocked off for the evening. They felt sorry that they hadn’t found her, but weren’t in much of a rush any longer.
During this entire period, Sandra O’Connell slept in a drug-induced comatose state inside the boathouse, unmoving and barely breathing.
They were all gone by ten; most had been out in the field for many hours, through suppertime and beyond. They left their equipment and went home. An all-points bulletin was issued for her, however, on the off chance that she had indeed escaped. Phony name, of course. But they weren’t finished with her, no, not finished.
Braden needed a body to preserve his own neck.
SIXTEEN
Jake Edelman checked the funny-looking greenish box that was now attached to his phone. It was a little larger than a cigar box. A three-pronged plug connected it to a nearby wall outlet, but the only sign of power was a dully-glowing red LED in the middle of the box’s faceplate.
There was a recess in the top of the box containing a number of copper-clad conductors. From his pocket, Edelman removed what appeared to be a small pocket calculator with a series of copper bars on its back that corresponded to those in the recess atop the box. He placed it in the recess and pressed down, only to fume when it wouldn’t go in.
Cursing, he glanced at his watch to see that it was approaching midnight. This thing had to be working by then. Finally he admitted defeat and buzzed for his secretary, an older woman named Maxine Bloom who’d been with him over ten years. She smiled that infuriating smile, grasped the calculator, turned it upside down, and put it in the recess. It snapped into place with a satisfying series of clicks.
He glowered at her to cover his embarrassment, sighed, cleared his throat, and nodded to her.
“You might as well be here anyway, Maxine,” he said. “I can’t take any notes or written records on this and I’ll need a good backup memory.”
She nodded and took a chair to one side of his desk. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d been there or not, he knew. Maxine was the best spy any office ever had. He was just thankful she was on his side.
He looked at her. “You checked the bug detector?” he asked.
She nodded. “Used the hand-held one, too. You know the department’s computer missed two of them?” She didn’t seem at all surprised. “The only leak’s the phone, now—I guarantee it.”
He shook his head in satisfaction. “The phone and box were installed and checked by the best,” he said. “And then I uninstalled it and had Fred do a number on both. It’s clean.”
“Let’s have at it, then,” his secretary suggested.
He turned and stared carefully at the calculator. It really wasn’t one, of course; the numbers were more on the order of a touch-tone phone faceplate, with an additional two rows of symbols. He held his breath nervously as he punched the laborious thirty-two digit combination of numbers and symbols that would connect him with the party he wanted. One mistake and it would clear. Three mistakes and, on the third clear, it would short out.
Despite his nervousness, he didn’t make any mistakes.
He put it on the speakerphone turned to low volume, then set up an additional desktop debugger nearby that would let out a squeal if there were any last-minute attempts to eavesdrop. The debugger was the best there was; it was programmed to detect just about every known device except a person in the room or leaning against the door. He had other precautions against that old-fashioned kind of stuff. He was certain that if the device didn’t go off no one else would hear him except those to whom he was talking.
A decade of counterespionage work was behind that confidence.
It was amazing, the number of clicks and funny phone-like noises the thing went through. First, anything going through his phone would pass through the incrediby sophisticated scrambler circuits in the green box. Unless you knew the entry key, there was simply no way to decipher the oddball digital scramble that came out the other end. Quite a number of government phones all over the country did know the key, and at midnight had punched the proper codes into their decoder boxes and waited for the phone to ring. All of those locations were also carefully debugged, and most would listen, not talk.
Additionally, the decoder slightly altered the received signal. In fact, it could make the speaker sound like anybody the programmer determined. A number of isolated military units using similar devices had given gruff-voiced muscular male sergeants high-pitched, sexy, feminine voices to relieve the boredom.
Jake thought this one made him sound like Mickey Mouse.
Finally the clicks and whirs stopped, and, one by one, lines were connected. He watched a little LED readout on the “calculator” tell him the number of connections being made. It was hoping too much that all would get it, but all but three checked in. Those three would later let him know, circuitously, who they were and why.
He locked the talk bar on his voice amplifier down.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for all the time and trouble you have undergone at my instigation and your discomfort. What we are dealing with here, I believe, is something of such magnitude that such measures may, in fact, still be inadequate.
“Know, however, that all of you have undergone extensive mind-probes, so your headache is not a lonely one, nor connected to any one department. Those of you who underwent that ordeal should appreciate the fact that people like me, heading up this extraordinary organization, also underwent the same checks. In the process, we found twenty-six people—twenty-six!—who were, quite simply, on the wrong side. Two of these particularly amazed me, as they were people who had been with my department for years. I knew them personally, and would have trusted them with my life. This should be a warning to all of you. Trust no one, absolutely no one, unless you have personally cleared that person through our methods. And that means husbands, wives, children, you name it, as well as the partner who once saved your life.” He paused to let the words sink in, grumbling slightly that so stern a warning should be delivered in Mickey’s high-pitched tones.
“Now I will tell you what we are dealing with,” he continued. He began with a recap of the history of the Wilderness Organism, sparing little. “And so, you see, the fact that the basic blueprints, as it were, for the Wilderness Organism were in the NDCC computer bank means that the disease is of domestic, even government manufacture. The killing of Spiegelman in an absolutely secure place and the kidnapping of O’Connell and Bede from NDCC itself just after they made the same discovery shows just how pervasive all this is.”
He paused again for effect, about ready to drop the bomb. “Despite the use of those overage radicals and the tacit cooperation of some rather oddball Third World dictatorships, it is apparent that we are dealing with a plot that is basically domestic and reaches to the highest levels of government. CIA and FBI have striven in vain to find the source of the enemy, the brains behind it. We believe now that we have been looking too far afield, that this is a plot, carefully planned and prepared for years, perhaps decades, from within. There is a massive conspiracy here, and none of us is safe. We are currently under a state of quasi-military dictatorship, and this is hardening. Those within the government behind this plot can use this dictatorship, which is bureaucracy-supported, to do practically anything they wish, including kill me or you if we get in the way. There is only one way to wage a war against a shadow in your own house, and that is to create and deploy an organization as shadowy and tenuous as the enemy’s. That’s what you are, ladies and gentlemen. Soldiers in a war of shadows. Whichever side shines the bright light on the other first will win. We will use the computer data bank as our weapon, too. We will use the bureaucracy. And where a shadow is found, we will expose it to the glare of sunlight, extinguishing it. In three minutes this conversation will be automatically terminated; after that, you will be called by your own unit heads for instructions. Good luck and God bless you all.”
He sighed and tapped the bar, then looked over at Maxine, herself a veteran of the nasty mind-probing techniques used to gather this squad.
He sighed. “Well, there it is, Maxine. A pep talk to the troops. Somehow I never expected to be a general.”
She grinned. “Jake, you make a fine one, even if you do sound like a mouse. You going to brief the Bureau people personally?”
He shook his head negatively. “No, I’ll leave that to Bob. Give him forty minutes, then tell him I want to see him in here.” He sank in his padded chair, looking suddenly tired, worn out.
“How long has it been since you’ve had some sleep?” his secretary asked.
“Two, three days, I guess. I tried a few times, but I just can’t. The nightmares are too real.”
She understood. “Jake, we’re both Jewish. Our people have undergone every kind of horror known to history. We’ve always won in the end, Jake. Remember that.”
“But at such a cost!” He sighed. “Six million in the Holocaust, God knows how many in the Israeli wars—and before that, back to the diaspora. You know what we were in the Middle Ages, Maxine? Balebatishkeit. Property. Walled in at night, trotted out when convenient, to get around Christianity’s anti-usury laws or when they needed a scapegoat for something. For over fifteen hundred years, Maxine. This republic of ours has gone on for what? Two and a quarter centuries, more or less. A blink of the eye in history. And now—we have over two million people in concentration camps in the Southwest and Alaska, Maxine. Two million! And more coming as soon as they can build them. No trials, no questions. How many more are disappearing forever without anybody even knowing it? Gas controls so nobody can drive. Electricity controls, so nobody can ride. ID cards and lots of paperwork to take a plane or bus anyplace. A soldier on every street corner. How can we fight that? A totally controlled press. You remember Sonny Deiter, with the Post?”
