Agent Counter-Agent (6 page)

This might be my only chance to escape. There was no guarantee that I'd be in any condition to try five minutes from now. We turned and walked toward a door near the far end of the corridor. It was then that I made my attempt.

I stopped suddenly and stepped back into the stocky man, the one who had enjoyed the physical part of my capture. I stepped down hard on his left instep and heard a crunch and a loud cry of pain. I rammed an elbow into his broad face and felt his nose flatten. He thudded against the wall beside him.

The tall man was swearing and going for a gun in his jacket. He got the gun out, and it looked like the same one he'd aimed at my head in Washington. The familiarity didn't give me any feeling of comfort. I grabbed at the gun hand and caught it. With the other hand I stabbed at his eyes. He blocked the blow and quickly raised a knee sharply to my groin. As it connected, I felt a hideous pain and an violent attack of nausea. I grunted and lost my hold on the gun hand. My reactions were slower because of the aftereffects of the drug, and that gave him a substantial advantage.

I swung a hand at his throat, and he partially deflected it. But it caught him a glancing blow on the Adam's apple. He gasped and fell against the wall. I turned and made for the door at the end of the corridor. I had to leap over the slumped form of the stocky man, who was just trying to get back on his feet. I hoped the tall man would take a minute to recover, but my expectations were short-lived. I was only halfway to the door when the revolver exploded.

"Stop, Carter. Or the next bullet will go through your brain."

It was a persuasive threat. I stopped and leaned against the wall, not looking back at him. My chance for escape was gone. In a minute the tall man had reached me and pushed the revolver into my ribs.

"You are a very nasty fellow, Carter," he said breathlessly, holding a hand to his throat.

The other KGB agent limped toward us. "If it were not for them," he said in fast Russian, jerking his thumb toward another part of the building, "I would kill him right here and now. Slowly and painfully."

The stocky man drew his own revolver and raised it to strike my head and face.

"No!" the tall man said. "Think of the mission."

The stocky one hesitated, a wild look in his eyes. Blood was running from his nose over his lips to his chin. The nose was already swelling across his face. I looked at him and wished I'd been able to kill him. It would have taken only a minute longer, and it would have given me great satisfaction.

The stocky man lowered the gun.

"Come on," the tall one said. "They are still expecting us in the laboratory."

They had strapped me to a large wooden chair. I was in the lab. It was a large room that reminded me of an operating room in a large American hospital, except there was no operating table in sight. Perhaps the chair I was bound to served an equivalent purpose. There were several pieces of electronic machinery in the room, with colored lights blinking on control panels. Two technicians were working at the machines, but otherwise I was alone. The agents had left the room after tying me to the chair.

That chair was a machine in itself. It looked like an electric chair, but the wiring was much more complicated. There was even a headpiece with electrodes sticking out of it. At first I thought that it was some land of torture device, but that didn't seem to make any sense. Even the Russians didn't go to such lengths just to torture a man, not even to get top secrets. There were more primitive ways, which could do the job just as well as any machine. Anyway, agents aren't keepers of deep state secrets, not in Russia or in the West. I was no exception. In fact, AXE agents had less reason than most to carry classified information, since AXE assignments ran more toward specific physical action against the other side than investigation and collection of data.

While I was still trying to figure it all out, I heard a door open behind me, and three people came into the room. Tanya was one of them. She was wearing a white smock and horn-rimmed glasses. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, and she looked very grim and determined. She met my eyes and looked into them for a long moment before speaking. I think she was trying to tell me she was sorry about all this but that duty came first.

"How are you feeling, Mr. Carter?" she asked impersonally.

"Not bad, considering," I answered.

Two men flanked her. One was familiar to me because I'd just read his file before I left Washington. He was Oleg Dimitrov, the resident operator for the KGB in Caracas and the man in charge of whatever was going on here. He was of average height, with graying hair and a large mole on his right cheek. His eyes were hard and cold.

"So you are the infamous Nick Carter," Dimitrov said.

"I suppose it would be useless to deny it," I answered.

"Yes, useless. I am Oleg Dimitrov, as you probably already know. This lovely girl who helped us capture you is Dr. Tanya Savitch, Russia's most brilliant behaviorist. And this gentleman is her colleague, Dr. Anton Kalinin."

The white-coated, gray-haired man on the other side of Tanya looked at me over his spectacles and nodded. His stare made me feel like an amoeba under a microscope. I looked from him to Tanya.

"Behaviorist?" I asked.

"That's right, Nick. I hope you don't mind if I call you Nick."

I listened to her voice and realized now why it had not sounded quite German. It was a Russian voice trying to imitate German-accented English. It hadn't been perfect, but it had been good enough to keep me guessing.

"You can call me any damned thing you want," I said. "I don't see that it matters much. It would be nice to know what you intend, though. My curiosity has gotten the better of me. Have you three formed a KGB witch coven or something?"

Tanya smiled, but the men remained stony-faced. Dimitrov spoke first, in a tight, high voice. "The classic American hero, eh, Mr. Carter? The brash joke in the face of danger."

I glared at Dimitrov. "It beats the hell out of crying," I answered angrily.

"We will handle this now, Oleg," Dr. Kalinin said to him.

Dimitrov grunted and left us. I heard the door of the lab open and close again as he left. The two technicians at the machines weren't paying any attention to us. Kalinin came and stuck one of those penlights into my eyes. As he worked, he spoke to me in a quiet voice.

"Dr. Savitch specializes in behavior control," he said slowly, peering into the backs of my eyes. "She is one of Russia's foremost authorities on narcotic mind control, hypnotherapy, and general behavior-control techniques."

He put the light down, and I looked over at Tanya.

"It's true, Nick," she said. "We've been experimenting with human behavior control for years. I've done a lot of research in the field. Dr. Kalinin has worked closely with our group, recording and analyzing the physical effects of the treatments on our subjects. He is an eminent physician in our country."

"You're planning to conduct behavior experiments on me?" I asked.

"You are going to be the first man to be controlled by our perfected techniques," she answered, her voice revealing her uncertainty. I was sure now that Tanya hadn't known she would be forced to apply her knowledge and skill in such horrifying activities. Her blue eyes hid behind the horn-rimmed glasses.

"You're going to… use me somehow?"

Tanya looked quickly into my eyes and then away again.

Kalinin came to her rescue. "We're going to destroy Nick Carter," he said. "For a time, at least. You will no longer exist as Nick Carter."

I just stared at him. Maybe I'd been right — one final bullet in Tanya's apartment might have been better for me in the long run.

"No longer exist?"

"We're going to perform a personality transplant," Kalinin went on. "You will become a completely different person. And that person will be programmed by us, Mr. Carter. As a computer would be programmed by a technician. Do you begin to understand?"

I looked from him to Tanya. "My God, Tanya," I whispered.

The blue eyes met mine. She had hardened her beautiful face against me and picked up a vial from a nearby table.

"This is nambulin," she said in a businesslike way, "a drug developed only recently by our laboratories. It is what you would call a mind-altering drug. It has properties similar to LSD, but the effects of our drug are narrower and more limited."

"I can hardly wait to hear," I said sarcastically.

She ignored the remark and continued. "When nambulin is administered, the thought processes are interrupted on a basic level, and the personality is altered. The recipient of the drug becomes very submissive, and he experiences a heightened suggestibility."

"Suggestion," I mused. "So that's it."

"Part of it," Tanya said. "While under the influence of the drug, you will be extremely receptive to suggestion by a trained hypnotherapist. And to behavior-control techniques developed in our years of research."

"To what end?" I asked.

Tanya looked away.

"There would be little point in going into details," Kalinin said, taking the vial from Tanya and filling a syringe with the liquid. "You will remember nothing we've said in this conversation, anyway."

Something about the smug look on his face made me very angry. "Goddamn you," I shouted at him.

His eyes flashed up to meet my gaze, and I thought I saw a tiny flicker of fear in them when he looked at me. "No dramatics, please, Mr. Carter. You will only make it more difficult for yourself."

Tanya had left the chair and gone over to speak with one of the technicians. Kalinin was holding the syringe up in front of his face, pushing the plunger to clear the apparatus of air bubbles.

A violent desperation rose in my chest. It was the closest thing to panic I'd ever experienced. I'd never really feared physical pain or death, but this was different. What they were going to do, in effect, was kill me, destroy my identity, and then use my body for their own ungodly purposes. Just thinking about it made chills run up and down my spine. And I knew now that the threat to humiliate AXE hadn't been an empty one. This plan — whatever it was — must have taken them months or even years of preparation. And with a top AXE agent to carry it out, they were almost home free.

A technician came over to assist Kalinin. Tanya turned and looked toward us from across the room. The technician tied a rubber tube around my upper arm and rolled up my shirtsleeve. I saw the veins standing out in my forearm. The nambulin was going directly into a vein.

My heart pounded wildly. When Kalinin came toward me with the needle, I started struggling desperately against the leather straps, trying with everything I had to break them. If I could get out of that chair, I could easily take care of these men. But the bonds were too strong.

There is no need to struggle, Mr. Carter," Kalinin said smoothly as he grasped my forearm. "Escape at this point is quite impossible."

The needle came down, and the technician held my shoulders so I couldn't move. There was just a small hint of pleasure in Kalinin's face as he jabbed the needle into an enlarged vein, then pushed the plunger on the syringe.

A feeling of euphoria was coming over me. Then I began to get numb. My breathing slowed down markedly, and I felt perspiration dripping from my forehead and upper lip. I didn't even care that I'd been drugged, and the awful feeling of panic had disappeared. I could still remember everything they'd said to me, and I knew they were going to use me in some horrible experiment in terror, but I was no longer concerned about it. I knew I should be, but I simply didn't care about anything. For a few minutes I fought the feeling, trying to rekindle the rage I'd felt inside me, but there was none left. Whatever they did, whatever they said, was all right with me. It was silly to fight it, to worry about it. I was in their power, and their power was enormous. I would submit to it, and maybe somehow I would survive. After all, that was what really counted in the long run.

Their faces warped in front of me — Tanya's and Kalinin's — and they were staring at me as they would stare at a guinea pig in a cage, but I didn't mind. They had their job to do, and I'd let them do it.

Kalinin reached toward my face and lifted my eyelids. He nodded to Tanya and then he left us. Tanya brought a straight chair up and faced me. She sat very close. I stared into her brilliant blue eyes and found a dimension I'd missed before.

"Now you are feeling very relaxed, very much at ease," she said to me in a soft, sensual voice. The voice, the inflection, increased my feeling of well-being.

"Yes," I said, gazing into the deep blue pools of her eyes.

"As you look into my eyes, your own eyes are becoming tired. Your eyelids are becoming very heavy, and you want to close them."

My eyelids fluttered.

"It is a struggle to keep your eyes open now. When I count to five, you will close your eyes because you want to. You will feel greatly relieved when you close your eyes. After you close them, you will slowly slip into a deep trance. One. You are very sleepy. Two. Your eyelids are very heavy. Three. You are deeply relaxed and submissive. Four. When your eyes close, you will let my voice guide you in your responses and actions. Five."

My eyes seemed to close of their own volition. I knew that I couldn't keep them from closing, but I didn't even want to try.

"You are now in a hypnotic trance, and you will respond to my voice."

She was speaking in a soft, quiet monotone that was somehow extremely persuasive. I found that I felt tremendous affection for the lovely sound of her voice — that sensual, cajoling voice — and I wanted to do whatever it asked of me.

"Do you understand?" she asked.

"Yes, I understand."

"Good. Now we are going to place this ring device onto your head and attach the electrodes." I felt someone moving the piece of equipment onto my head. It fit like a headband, and I remembered the maze of wires that had run from it.