A War of Shadows

TWENTY-FIVE

Alton stood on the stairway, frightened and undecided. His first impulse was simply surrender to overwhelming forces, but he glanced back up toward where Braden’s body lay and knew there was no escape from that. Capture meant death in any case; The Man wouldn’t spare anything to keep him and his agents from talking.

“Head for the boat!” he yelled to the others. “It’s pretty fast—you might still make a getaway in the dark!”

The woman nodded. “What about you?” “Don’t worry about me!” he called back. “Move!”

The three agents made their way out the back. The mini-invasion was still in progress, but troops and FBI field personnel were already on shore. Some Coast Guardsmen made immediately for the boat landing to secure it, while a small cutter broke off and headed for the pier.

The man and the two women, still cloaked in the shadows, saw they’d never make it. They were about to turn back when two shots came at them from behind. They returned fire, attracting the attention of the beach personnel who also opened up.

Alton, who’d fired the shots at them, now made his way to the shrubbery just outside the house and waited silently. When a group of men, a couple of whom had on suits instead of uniforms, ran by, he let them clear, then bolted after them on the run, catching up to them in a matter of seconds. There were so many people running around now that his action wasn’t even noticed.

“There goes one!” he shouted, seeing a form running across from the beach side to a grove of trees. They hesitated, unsure of who was who in the dark, but the figure turned and fired back at the pursuers, and the group Alton had joined poured it into the figure.

It was overkill.

Bob Hartman ran toward the house just behind a phalanx of agents. They entered cautiously, checking out every room on the ground floor first. In the den, a small fire was still going from the phone explosion, but it had failed to ignite much else and was burning itself out. They were able to smother it quickly.

Now Hartman’s squad ran up the stairs. He stopped, by the body of Braden while the others searched the bedrooms on this and the third floor.

Carefully he turned the blood-soaked man over, saw it was Braden, and was surprised to hear a groan of anguish.

“Hey! Get a medical team—quick!” Hartman yelled. “This guy’s still alive!”

Blood was running from Braden’s mouth as well as his wounds. He opened his eyes, tried to speak, and coughed.

“Just take it easy,” Hartman cautioned. “Medical help’s on the way.”

Braden shook his head slowly and with difficulty, coughing some more, but managed to speak in a hoarse, blood-choked whisper.

“Don’t care,” he said. “Sons of bitches shot me. Alton.”

“How many were there here?” Hartman asked. “Six—no, four. Other two… helicopter. Took the Doc…”

Hartman felt triumph slipping out of his grasp with the dying man. Gone! “Where did they take her?”

Braden was having trouble, fading in and out. Hartman had to yell the question to him several times. Finally he got it, coughed again, and said, “Coney Island… 944 Pritchard… 3A…” Again a cough. “Shot her with mitoricine… Told her she had the live germ… S’posed to kill herself…”

The medical people were there now, but Hartman waved them away. Until he got what he needed, he wasn’t going to let Braden go. The younger agent looked up at one of his assistants. “Get that?”

The other agent nodded. “Nine forty-four Pritchard, 3A,” he repeated. “Want me to get on it’?”

Hartman shook his head. “No. Get Edelman up there—fast. He’s the only one she’ll trust now. Move!”

He turned back to the man whose hatred of those who betrayed him was keeping him alive—that, and a possible hatred of himself, too.

“Who’s behind this, Braden?” he pressed. “Give me names.”

Braden seemed to smile strangely. “Dunno… call 1-500-555-2323. Ask The Man who he is…”

Braden collapsed. Hartman let the medics take over, and watched as they worked. “Dead?” he asked.

The Coast Guard medic shook his head. “This guy’s got a constitution like a bull ox. But the odds aren’t good.”

“Do what you can,” he told them, and went downstairs. A Coast Guard captain entered, and he asked, “Captain Grimes! How many did we get?”

“Three,” the commander of the operation told him. “That seems to be all there were.”

Hartman shook his head. “No, Braden said there were four. We’re missing one.”

“Unless he had a hiding hole someplace, I don’t see how,” the commander said.

Hartman thought a minute. “Hmmm… Braden was with the Bureau. This is a Bureau safe house. Makes sense the other four were Bureau, too. If you were with the FBI, Captain, and you were being attacked by your own people, where would you hide? Suppose, say, you were a Coast Guardsman in full uniform.”

Grimes saw what he was getting back. “I’d join the hunters at first opportunity.”

The agent nodded. “Come on. Let’s check out my people.”

It took some time to sound them up. Hartman had them in a semi-military formation, and he knew his count. He had only one name from Braden, but it was the right one.

“All right, people!” he called to them. “Now, we can go through processing, or ugly shootouts, or like that—but why not make it simple? Agent Alton, why not just step forward and save us a lot of trouble?”

Alton, several rows back, felt a shock go through him at the mention of his name. Everything seemed to just drain out of him; it was all over now. There was no more use.

He pushed through the crowd and walked to Bob Hartman. “I’m Alton,” he said softly.

“Who’d you work for, Alton?” Hartman asked him, an almost casual tone in his voice.

The renegade agent shrugged. “We never knew. Somebody big. Somebody who had access to all the computer files. Somebody who knew where all the bodies were buried on people like me.”

Hartman nodded. “Blackmail, huh? Well, Alton, it’s all over now.” He turned to the Coast Guardsmen. “Take him.”

Sandra O’Connell awoke and looked around. She knew the feelings she had now; she’d awakened much like this once before.

It took considerable effort to get up and sit on the edge of the bed. Yes, it was a bed. It was a little efficiency apartment, old, with a lot of roaches and bad smells. Outside, all around, came the sounds of people, children mostly.

She tried to clear her head, to think. It was hard. The pictures were there but the words wouldn’t come.

She was nude, but some clothing lay draped over a chair near her. It looked familiar.

There was a small table in front of the chair, and on it was a ty—ty—she couldn’t think of the word “typewriter” to save her life. She stared at it.

She got up, dizzily, unsteadily, and made her way over to the chair. There was paper in the machine, and some words had been typed on it. At least she thought they were words.

She couldn’t read the words. Even the letters, the symbols, made no sense to her now. Just so many funny lines. Several balled-up sheets of paper were around on the floor. She ignored them, sat down on the chair, and tried to get hold of herself.

That bad man, what was his name? He gave her some stuff to make her dumb. For always, they said.

But they also gave her stuff to make people sick.

She tried to get dressed. It was a simple pair of underpants, a simple bra, a simple button-type flowered shirt and zip-up skirt.

It took her over half an hour to get it on right. She kept getting the shirt sleeves on wrong, and she couldn’t fasten the bra and finally gave up on it. It took a long time to figure out how the buttons worked, and she misbuttoned them time and again, finally giving up and leaving them that way. The skirt was on backwards, but she didn’t care.

The sneakers were a challenge, too. Try as she might, they wouldn’t fit, and it was some time before she realized that she was trying to put the right one on the left foot and vice-versa. When she did get them right, the laces were beyond her, and she finally gave up in frustration.

There was a basin there, and she went over to it, turning handles until the water came on. She grasped an old ceramic cup with both hands and filled it with water to overflowing, then drank from it. It spilled and dribbled all over.

In the cracked mirror above the basin she looked at herself. It was hard to see close-up, and she backed away a little.

It was a drooling, misdressed idiot she saw. The sight frightened and fascinated her at the same time. That’s me, she told herself. That’s me for always. She sat down on the floor and started crying, and for the longest time she couldn’t stop. Finally she wiped her face on the pillowcase and looked around.

There was some money on the table, too, she noticed. She reached up for it, pulled it down to her, and at the same time knocked another object off. It fell to the floor with a clatter and she stared at it.

It was a big, long, sharp knife.

She looked back at the money. Except for it being green, it made no sense to her. She couldn’t tell one bill from another, nor recognize any of the portraits or place them with their proper denominations.

She tried to count how many there were, but she got lost after “five.”

She was hungry, and there was nothing to eat here. She knew she was in a city, a place with a lot of people. Out there she could get something to eat. There was this money.

But—she would make people real sick if she did, she remembered. Anybody she saw or touched. She didn’t like that. She wanted to make people feel good, not sick.

They said they would make her dumb and they had. They said she’d be so dumb she’d go out and make people sick. Well, she’d fool them. She remembered that much. She wasn’t all dumb. She would fool them. She would sit right here, that’s what she would do.

It didn’t take very long at all for her to get bored sitting there, and she finally got up and made her way unsteadily to the window, which was open. She almost tripped over her own feet doing so.

She looked out. It was day time, and there were lots of buildings and lots more people. Lots of shops and stores and people walking all over. Music was coming from somewhere, and it sounded nice. She started trying to hum it, but even as it continued to play she got all mixed up.

She’d drank more water. A lot more. She was soaking wet now, and the water was going through her like a sieve. She had to go to the bathroom and there was no place to do that.

Her eyes went back to that knife. If she wasn’t going to make other people sick, she couldn’t stay in the room forever. She sank down on the floor, tears welling up in her, eyes on that knife, wishing she knew what to do.

Bob Hartman beat Jake Edelman to New York; a swift Air Force executive jet had sped him from Whiteoaks in under an hour and a quarter, getting him in about 10:00 A.M. He hadn’t slept a wink in almost three days and looked it, but he was running on adrenalin. After being frustrated by this case for so long, things were finally breaking all over and he couldn’t rest.

Jake came in by shuttle at 10:20; New York police and the local Bureau office had prepared for him He bounced off the plane and hurried to a waiting black car.

“Hello, Bob!” He greeted his associate and they got in with a quick handshake. The car took off, ant Edelman looked over at the younger man.

“You look like hell,” he said.

Hartman smiled. “Well, I take after my teacher.’ The Chief Inspector got down to business. “She’ in there? You’re sure?”

Hartman shrugged. “Who knows? We’ve had units around the place for a couple of hours. The neighbors know nothing, of course, except that the apartment was rented a couple weeks ago, furnished, but as far as they knew never lived in. They have one john to the floor up there in that project, and nobody’s run into anybody else taking a crap. Our sensors heard someone moving in there, but we decided not to move until you got here. Considering Braden, we’d all be the enemy to her.”

Edelman nodded. “I checked with Dr. Romans at Bethesda about mitoricine. It’s an ugly drug but it can be treated. The real question is whether or not she really was infected with the Wilderness Organism.”

“No way,” the younger agent assured him, grinning a bit evilly. “Braden died on the operating table, but we had Alton and probed him—and it was simple to pick up the other two who brought her here. None of them would touch the germ with a ten-foot pole. They’re scared to death of it.”

Edelman seemed satisfied. They sped through streets clogged with pedestrians but strangely devoid of cars. Soldiers were everywhere, along with a lot of New York police cars. When the emergency had cracked down, this city was one of the few with real resistance, and it still wasn’t completely under control. The rioting and arson had been pretty well stopped, though; they had simply shot the legs off anybody violating the curfew. Still, there was more potential for trouble here than almost anywhere else in the country; you could almost smell the seething resentment.

The apartment house was a dingy, ancient, crumbling structure, the remains of some long-ago project for the very poor. The squalor, filth, and smell of the place was more animal-like than human. People shouldn’t have to live this way, Jake Edelman thought.

Up the stairs to 3A; the door was so warped it looked off its hinges, and there were only the ghosts of where the numbers once had been, slightly cleaner than the surroundings. The other residents had been cleared out by this time; most were grumbling and protesting behind police barricades in the street outside.

Edelman put his ear to the door. There was no sound, and for a moment he feared that she was dead. Then, suddenly, he heard a noise, a shifting of a body.

“Dr. O’Connell?” he called, as calmly as he could. “Dr. O’Connell, this is Jake Edelman. Are you in there?”

Suddenly her voice came back at them, its sound strange, almost terrible to hear, its inflection reminiscent of a hysterical retarded person. “Stay away! Don’t come near me!”

“I’m coming in,” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you, only help you.”

“No!” she screamed. “I’ll make you sick, I will!” “They lied!” he said. “You don’t have the disease! They lied to you! Now, let me in!”

“No, no! Keep out! I’ll—” There was the sound of someone getting up, moving away, then the sound of something dropping on the floor and the person struggling to pick it up.

Jake Edelman acted. The landlord’s passkey was already in the lock and now he twisted it suddenly and pushed open the door.

She screamed wordlessly and ran to a far corner of the room, standing there, a little hunched over, like a cornered and frightened animal. She had the knife in her hand.

Edelman looked at her and found it almost impossible to believe that it was the same woman he’d known. There was a sadness mixed with outrage at the sight of her, but he kept it inside.

“Give me the knife, Doc,” he urged gently. “It’s all over now. No more drugs. No more pain. No more double-crosses. No more fear. Just give me the knife.”

She looked at him wildly. “Go away!” she said. “I’ll kill m’self!”

He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No, now, don’t do that. That’s what they want you to do, and you don’t want to do anything they want you to, now do you?” He slowly started toward her as he talked. Finally he was just two meters from her, but she raised the knife, awkwardly, to her own throat. He was afraid she might do it without meaning to.

“They lie, Doc,” Edelman told her. “They said you had the germ. You don’t. That was to make you kill yourself. The drug was to make it hard for you to think, to figure a way out, and to make it easier for you to kill yourself. They did this to you. Don’t do what they want you to do now.” He held out his hand, his voice calm, gentle, and steady. “Let me help you. Give me the knife.”

Her eyes were wild, her expression afraid and confused. The knife shook a little, but it touched her throat, scratching her.

“For the love of God, Sandra, give me the knife!” he said, more a prayer to himself than a statement directed to her. She wavered; the knife moved away a little. There was a tiny trickle of blood on her throat.

“I talked to Bart Romans at Bethesda,” he told her. “The drug you got can be treated, Sandy. It can be treated!”

Again there was that frozen tableau for a few seconds; all seemed suspended in time. None of the people just outside the door moved or breathed; even the street sounds and the air seemed stilled.

Suddenly the knife dropped onto the floor and she pitched forward. Edelman caught her, and she pressed into him, sobbing uncontrollably. He put his arms around her and hugged and soothed her.

Now the others came into the room, slowly, carefully, led by Bob Hartman. He walked over first to the typewriter, looking at the sheet still in it.

It broke off.

Another agent reached down, picked up a balled-up piece of paper, flattened it out and handed it to Hartman.

Jake, still gripping the sobbing woman, walked out with her as they uncurled more of the balled-up papers. There were lots of them, each apparently a false start on a suicide note. Joe Bede, who’d been abducted with her, was implicated in some, in others there was an almost insane mixture of leftist radical rhetoric and Catholic moralizing.

“I woulda been convinced,” one of the agents said to Hartman. “But the autopsy would have showed the mitoricine, wouldn’t it? Made it obvious she couldn’t write these notes.”

Hartman nodded. “I’d think so. But they must have prepared for that somehow. Find out how long traces remain in the body, and also check with the city medical examiner’s office. An autopsy shows only what a coroner says it does.”

The agent nodded. “Okay, we’ll work on this end. You?”

Bob Hartman sighed. “I think it’s time for me to go back to D.C. and get a good twelve hours’ solid sleep, then see what your field boys came up with.” Counting the hour on the plane, he managed to get seven hours’ sleep before they called him back in.