A War of Shadows

TWENTY

John Braden was nervous. He’d had to use his real ID to get Sandra O’Connell from the RCMP ahead of the Buffalo office; he was now very hot and he knew it. There had been very little choice in the matter, though; when the RCMP request for information had been transmitted to Washington, it went through a long series of chains of command and, at one point, came up on more than Edelman’s computer. Braden had gotten the call with very strict orders: get there ahead of the Buffalo office or else. With the aid of a helicopter and direct information, he’d managed it, but he had no sense of victory.

Just a hundred kilometers or so southwest of Buffalo were a series of small islands in Lake Erie. The helicopter put down on one long enough to get Braden and O’Connell off, then took off again.

Sandra O’Connell still had no idea that she hadn’t been rescued. She stood there on the island watching dawn come up and wondered why she was there.

“This is what, in the FBI, is known as a ‘safe’ house,” Braden explained, and it was the truth. “That means the place has a reputable non-government cover and an official owner who pays property taxes and uses it for recreation. Nothing odd or unusual, just an old family resort gone to seed. Nobody can be traced here, and only inspectors and above can even find out where it is, and then only on a need to know basis. No computer files, nothing. A small list. It’s the kind of place we take witnesses against big crime figures to hide ’em out, and to prepare them for new identities.”

She looked around. She was feeling much better, more in control. Things were coming easier for now, and she felt that she was working out the aftereffects of the drug.

“But why am I here?” she persisted.

He sighed. “Dr. O’Connell, somebody had you snatched. Somebody really high up. That somebody now knows that you’re alive, that you’ve escaped from Martha’s Lake VA Hospital, that your story is now on file with the RCMP. They didn’t want to kill you, you know. Just keep you out of the action until whatever they want to do gets done. Now they probably would.”

She accepted that, and they walked up to the house.

It looked old, semi-Victorian, and not in very good repair. It was sheltered from view from the lake, but you could tell it was there, the upper story roof peeking through the trees.

The place was a lot nicer inside. Nice rugs, early American furniture, a modern kitchen and a large number of neatly made bedrooms. The place had at one time been a resort; the kitchen and dining room were truly huge, and the living room could seat almost two dozen people.

There was a staff, too. An ordinary looking bunch of what appeared to be hotel-like personnel, except that they all obviously wore pistols. Sandra guessed that there were a half-dozen total, four big men and two women with strong, serious faces, all no more than in their late twenties.

“You’re the only guest at the moment,” Braden told her. “You go upstairs, take a shower, freshen up, whatever you want, before we have a big breakfast. Meg, there, is close to your size I think, at least for casual wear.” He called to the women. “Hey! Meg! See if you can find something to fit our guest.”

The woman smiled, nodded, and said, “Follow me,” to Sandra O’Connell. She followed the woman up the big old oaken staircase.

Braden walked back into the living room, then to the dining room, where he spotted one of the men. “Alton!” he said.

“Sir?”

“I’m going into the office and call in. You make sure she’s watched at all times.”

The big man nodded. “We’re well prepared. You know that.”

Braden should have felt secure and satisfied, but he couldn’t. This prisoner had gotten away from them once, and now his career was going up the creek because of her.

A small den was off the dining room. He entered, closed the door, and went to a phone on a desk there. He picked up the receiver and dialed. One-500-555-2323.

There was a click and a ring, then silence. “Braden,” he said into it, hung up the phone, and waited.

The phone rang inside of a minute. He picked it up anxiously.

“Braden? You have her?” asked a man’s voice on the other end.

“Oh, yes, sir. Tight as a drum. She still thinks she’s been rescued. Want us to just wipe her?”

There was silence for a moment, as if the man on the other end were thinking hard. Finally he said, “No, not exactly, anyway. We have the medical information from Diefenbaker, as much as they did, anyway. Is she improved?”

“Yeah, pretty good,” Braden said. “She still stumbles over some big words and she can’t seem to read, but otherwise you’d hardly know it.”

Again the silence, then, “Okay, I’m going to send Conway over to run some tests on her. We can excuse it as a routine physical exam. I think she’ll be cooperative. He’ll have several alternatives depending on what he finds. We may just have to zap her and be done, but we had pretty good reasons for icing her. We weren’t going to do it until the sixteenth, but maybe we can advance it a bit. Just sit tight.”

“Ah, sir?” Braden said hesitantly. “Ah, what about me? I mean, I can’t go back, not now.”

“You’ll have to ice yourself until after the sixteenth,” the man told him. “You know that. Cheer up. There are worse places to be iced. We won’t forget you, Braden.”

“Thank you, sir,” was all he could say, and he heard the other end click dead. He hung up himself and considered it for a moment. There were worse places to be iced, and worse ways. He ought to know. He got up and went back into the dining room to join the others for dinner.

Late the next afternoon Dr. Peter B. Conway arrived by small boat, along with some equipment. They helped him unload and used a hand truck to get it to the big house.

Sandra O’Connell had slept most of the day, and was feeling as good as she had since her kidnapping. She was, as the man on the phone had predicted, delighted to take a physical examination and discover just what had, in fact, happened to her.

The equipment was of the relay type. Conway could conduct a complete physical here by using phone lines connected to his monitors and to big medical computers in Cleveland.

“I’m not going to kid you,” he told her. “You’re a doctor yourself, so I’ll give you nothing but the facts.”

The exam was thorough and took over two hours. It included blood tests, trace injections and monitoring, everything. They also did a psych profile under mild and proven medication, the best way of determining just what was wrong and where. Not incidentally, it gave Conway the additional information he needed on her present state of mind.

Finally, it was finished, but it was the next morning before everything had worn off enough for her to meet with the examining physician over a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and pancakes.

“Mitoricine,” Conway told her. “Ever hear of it?” She shook her head. It sounded similar to hundreds of other names.

“It’s a synthetic and a powerful hypnotic,” he told her. “It was all the rage several years ago among the drug counterculture, but it didn’t last too long. For one thing, some of the chemicals involved are hard to get, so manufacture was limited. Also, while just exactly the right dose will produce almost any pleasing effect you want, that effect is determined by the programmer, the person who gives it to you. If you underdose you’ll be awake but in a trancelike state, open to every single suggestion. That was popular among the wealthy for its orgy potential. Overdose, however, causes the same thing as long-term usage. There is always some minor brain dysfunction. In the usual counterculture uses, it took months of use to show up noticeably. It affects different people in different ways at first, of course, depending on age, body weight, dosage accumulation, whatever. But, slowly, it was obvious to people that users were getting slower—motor, nervous system, memory, basic skills, all deteriorating. You had three or four heavy doses, and that’s what you felt and still feel to an extent.”

“But it is reversible,” she said hopefully. “I mean, I’ve already gained back a lot.”

He sighed. “Well, it is and it isn’t. The more you have, the longer it takes to get rid of the effects. The brain works around the problem areas, forges new linkages. I think you got out just in time. Two or three more doses like those they were giving you, or one big overdose, and it might have been beyond your body to repair.”

That shook her up. “What—what would be the result if that had happened?”

He shrugged. “As I said, it varies. But let’s say you woke up much like you did originally, only slightly worse. No reading, no math, no significant use of vocabulary, unable to tie your own shoelaces, but, locked inside, you’d be at least dimly aware of what happened to you. But, unlike now, where it’s wearing off faster and faster, this one would never wear off. You’d be like that for the rest of your life.”

It was a sobering thought. In fact, she felt slightly sick. She remembered her inability to tie those knots in the woods, her frustration at the still effective reading skills block, her inability to even order a hamburger by name or count and recognize the change. It was a horrible thought to be like that, or worse, forever.

Forever.

A living death.

“Excuse me,” she said nervously, and got up and left the room. Alton rose to follow her but Conway said, “No, let her be. She’s just going outside to think about it.” His tone left no doubt that that was what he wanted.

Braden’s voice lowered. “Okay, I can see you working on her. Mind telling me what this is all about?”

Conway hesitated a moment, then said, “You saw how she took to the horror story when she thinks she’s safe. Suppose it came true? At least, suppose she thought it had?”

“My god! She’d kill herself!” Braden’s voice rose slightly, and Conway put a cautionary hand to his mouth.

“No she wouldn’t,” the doctor said. “She’s had a good, strong parochial Catholic upbringing. She might hole up and barely exist in misery, but she would not kill herself. And that, of course, is what she must do.”

Braden was intrigued. “You mean fake it? Then why… ?”

Conway shook his head. “No fake. A cumulative combination of things. There must be no question of her suicide so they will not question the incomplete suicide note.”

Braden had it in a minute. “Oho! But—she’s hot. She’s going to start asking questions about Edelman, about NDCC, everything. Particularly when we don’t get her clothes and effects to her.”

“We managed to get some of her stuff,” Conway said. “I’ll brief you and the others before leaving. Now, you keep her happy as long as possible, but never let her forget. I’m going to leave some pills which contain small amounts of mitoricine. This will keep her slightly off, inhibit recovery but very slightly. Hold her until the fifteenth if you can. If you can’t, well, whenever it becomes impossible, do it.”

Braden nodded. “You want her found on the sixteenth.”

It was now the first of the month.