A War of Shadows

TWELVE

A tall, good-looking man in a business suit entered the room and looked at the unconscious forms of Sandra O’Connell and Joe Bede. He turned to the other men who’d done the deed; the chloroform smell was still in the air.

“Give ’em each a hypo to keep them out,” he said. “Harry, go get a laundry cart. Phil, call Baker Control and get a laundry truck of ours over here. Then get back here.”

The others nodded and went to their tasks. He turned to the remaining ones in the room. “Edelman’s people are watching the building, so we have to move fast,” he warned them.

Harry came back with a large laundry cart, complete with laundry. They removed a lot of it, all medical whites and other standard uniforms used internally by the R D and lab departments. Joe Bede, who was large, they put in first, then the smaller and lighter Sandra O’Connell. Neither stirred, although they had some problem getting them both in so that they didn’t harm each other. Both would be bruised and battered by this, but finally the leader was satisfied that they wouldn’t die on him. Some of the laundry was piled loosely on top, allowing breathing space, with a single loose crumpled cloth hiding the faces.

Within five minutes the one called Phil reentered the room with a small and mousy-looking white-clad man. The two men got behind the cart and started pushing. It was heavy going, uneven and unbalanced, and they were straining. It looked extremely suspicious to be laundry.

The sentries at several checkpoints noticed the problems, but at each point the high-level IDs of the men and their passes got them through unquestioned. Soldiers are trained to obey higher authority; once the authority of the men was established, it was none of their affair what was in the cart.

Finally they got the cart into the truck and it started off into midday Washington traffic. After an extraordinarily long and complex route through the streets and clearances at dozens of military checkpoints, they were satisfied that they had not been tailed or spotted and relaxed. The state of emergency helped them; the normally congested streets were nearly empty of vehicles, and a tail would have been pretty obvious.

Now the driver made for the Capital Beltway, also nearly deserted and with military checkpoints at each entrance and exit ramp. They cleared the first, got on, and went around until they reached Andrews Air Force Base and cleared two more checkpoints. They drove onto the base, down to the airfield itself, and to a small hangar off to one side. There the two were unloaded, and the little laundry truck rumbled off to its pickup points. As it actually was the Andrews area truck, it followed its routine with no trouble. Later the driver would report some mechanical problems that had delayed him, and there would be a motor pool sergeant with appropriate paperwork to back him up.

Two small planes were inside the hangar, and a crew of efficient technicians placed Sandra O’Connell’s still unconscious form in the back of one, tying hands and feet and gagging her just in case, and the equally limp form of Joe Bede in the other.

Two military-garbed men got into each plane, and, one by one, they rolled out and took off. One man made certain the passenger stayed unconscious, the other flew the plane.

As they disappeared into the afternoon sky, one of the men came over to the leader, now visibly relaxed and smoking a cigarette.

“I don’t get it,” he said to the smoker. “Hell, why not just wipe ’em and be done with it?”

The other man smiled. “They’re both useful people. Better to ice them than wipe them if you can. You can always wipe ’em if the icing doesn’t take.”

The small plane circled and landed at a private field in upstate New York. An ambulance was waiting for it, and they made the transfer at the far end of the field. Few words were exchanged; the plane was off again in moments, ready to make seven scheduled stops on minor errands so that no one would ever know that anything was out of the ordinary.

The ambulance carrying Dr. Sandra O’Connell travelled back roads for close to an hour. During that time a technician monitored her, making certain that she remained out. Finally it pulled up to a gate, where the driver said a few words to a guard and then entered and drove up to what appeared to be a cross between a hospital and a rest home.

Sandra was wheeled in, taken to a special room, undressed and then redressed in a hospital gown, then placed in a bed with sensors attached to her skin monitored by a technician outside. As soon as she started to come out of the drug-induced state of unconsciousness, they would know it. When the first signs showed, he punched a button.

A man dressed as a doctor and another wearing nursing insignia responded almost immediately and went in to her. The doctor checked her over. She shifted, mumbled, and groaned. Not completely out of it, but emerging.

“The usual dosage?” the nurse asked.

The doctor nodded. “Standard. Remember, this stuff’s dynamite. I want her on the B schedule, twenty ccs every thirty-six hours, like clockwork. No slips.”

The nurse nodded and prepared the syringe. “You worry too much,” he told the doctor.

“I don’t like using the stuff,” the doctor said. “Just a little too much and you kill them. A little under and they come out too quickly. I wish we had a better way.”

The nurse put down the syringe and picked up a little chart, glancing at his watch. “Sixteen twenty?” he asked.

The doctor nodded. The nurse picked up the syringe again, waited until his digital watch clicked over, then plunged the needle in. Sandra O’Connell started, seemed to come awake, then sank back down as if asleep once again. The doctor checked her nervously, waiting a few minutes for full effect.

“What’re you gonna use on her, Doc?” the nurse whispered as they waited.

“Regression. I don’t know enough about her to do much else. It’s as good as any.”

He made some more checks, then seemed satisfied. The unconscious woman was breathing deeply and regularly, and did not respond when he thumped her in a few places and even partially opened an eye. The pupils were heavily dilated. He seemed satisfied, and pulled up a chair close to the head of her bed.

“Just relax,” he told her soothingly. “You are in a deep, deep sleep but you can hear me, you can hear only the sound of my voice, hear and understand me and even talk to me although you will remain in that deep, ever deepening sleep.”

He kept it up as a trained hypnotist would for several go-rounds, then seemed satisfied.

The drug, a derivative of several compounds used both legally and illegally, had been developed as a truth serum, a chemical hypnotic of the strongest sort. It hadn’t worked; there was a kind of euphoric effect that sometimes produced the same sort of falsehoods as scopolamine and the other so-called “truth” drugs. But it was found that anyone under its influence was tremendously susceptible to hypnotic-type suggestion, not merely while under but for almost two days after.

Behavioral scientists and the CIA both found it useful.

“How old are you, Sandra?” the doctor asked her.

“Forty,” she said. He sniffed. A lie already.

“All right, but now you feel yourself drifting, drifting in time and space. You are not forty any more or in your forties at all. You are thirty years old now, but you are still drifting back. Now you are twenty-five. Now you are twenty. Now you are fifteen.” He paused.

“How old are you, Sandra?” he asked again. “Fifteen,” she answered. Her voice seemed slightly different tonally.

“I see. And you go to school?”

“Urn. Hum.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Sacred Heart of Mary High School for Girls,” she said.

’’All right,” he said. “But now you are drifting again. You are not fifteen. Now you’re fourteen… thirteen… twelve… eleven… ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four. Now you are four years old.”

Her face and positioning changed as he said this. She seemed to curl up, her face showed an almost childlike gleam, and, slowly, she brought her thumb up and put it in her mouth.

“A good subject,” the nurse whispered. “The bright ones usually are the best.”

The doctor nodded and turned back to Sandra O’Connell.

“Now, how old are you, Sandy?”

The thumb came out, and she drooled slightly. She tucked the thumb in and weakly held up four fingers. “This many,” she lisped, and back the thumb went.

He nodded. “Now, listen to me, Sandy. You are four years old, and no matter what happens don’t you forget it or think otherwise. You will see yourself as four years old, you will act as if you are four, you will believe you are four, and you will react to other people as if you were four. You are away from home, in a hospital, but that’s okay. You’re not scared, and you’re not really sick. You like it here. It’s fun. Now, when I say ‘four’ again you will go into a normal sleep and sleep really nicely, and when you wake up you’ll feel real good and you’ll be a four-year-old little girl and if you ask nice the man who will be here will give you a lollipop. Okay?”

Her head nodded yes but the thumb stayed in.

“Four,” he said, and sighed and got up. He and the nurse walked outside to the hall and shut the door.

“You sure this’ll be okay?” the nurse asked, worried. “I mean, why four?”

“Literacy and vocabulary,” he replied. “She’s a doctor. Lots of stimulation around here. Three’s too parent-dependent, five’s a little too old. It’s only for a while. Maybe after I study her records a bit and come up with a profile I can get a better and more useful set. Right now this’ll have to do.” He turned to leave and the nurse turned to go back into Sandra’s room. Then the doctor stopped, turned, and called, “Oh, Jerry?”

“Yeah, Doc?”

“Next cycle integrate her with the rest of the Baby Brigade so she can play with them.” He frowned as if trying to remember something. Then he had it. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a large lollipop, and threw it to the nurse who caught it and pocketed it.

She awoke several hours later and looked around. It was a strange room, and for a few minutes she was scared; then she remembered she was in the hospital for something, and hospitals were fun places. When she grew up she wanted to be a doctor.

There was a grown-up dressed all in white sitting by the door reading something. “Hi!” she called out, removing her thumb from her mouth to do so, then putting it back.

The man put down his book, got up, came over to her and smiled. “Hi, yourself, big girl!” he responded warmly.

“You have a lol’pop?” she asked playfully.

He grinned. “It just so happens I do,” he replied, and took it out.

She had some trouble until she finally figured out that she couldn’t fit both her thumb and the lollipop into her mouth at the same time. She settled for the latter and lay back, contentment on her face.

Hospitals were such fun!