Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (9 page)

battalion
with a new name, a new identity, and a blacked-out memory.

He
looked out the window of his room. The hospital was surrounded by a ten-foot
brick wall, with guards at the gates. He had only a limited view of the
building itself. He was undoubtedly in a maximum-security wing that could be
reached only by elevator, or by passing guards. It was, surprisingly, a
suburban hospital. From the rows of dingy apartment flats spreading out beyond
the wall, he guessed it was probably twenty miles or so out of Chicago.

He
thought over the hospitals he knew of in the Chicago suburbs. Only two had
psychotic-security facilities: the' George Kelley and the Sister Andrea
Farri
. The Kelley seemed more likely, especially since the
DIA was involved.
And if he were in the Kelley . . .

Five
years before, three max-security patients had escaped from the Kelley. They
were of course picked up again inside of two hours, but the incident had shaken
the administration, and the entire security system had been revamped to make a
similar occurrence impossible.

But
Alexander, when he was assigned to the Wildwood Plant, had spent several weeks
studying all the major security systems of note in the world: prisons,
psychotic wards, A-plants, computing centers, the Kingsley mines,
the
Chinese and Soviet political camps. He had also spent
three months in the Army hospital in Buenos Aires after the Antarctic incident,
where as an esteemed guest he had had the run of the place, and had learned a
certain amount about hospital customs and routines.

During his Mexican tour he had worked with a
special Army Central Intelligence team that was trying to break up the
Qualchi
ring of smugglers who were constantly moving
Chinese guerillas, weapons, and supplies into the southwestern United States.
After six weeks of intensive coaching, and with a cyanide capsule adequately
concealed, he was methodically beaten up, flogged, and dumped in a filthy
Mexican
bastille
where three known
Qualchi
agents had been incarcerated, after much careful maneuvering, for slugging and robbing
a couple of American
touristas
(actually CI agents) who were slumming in
Mexicali.

The
whole affair had been so neatly staged that even the Mexican police did not
know they had
Qualchi
agents in their jail; the three
agents were completely duped, especially since they were not interrogated, and
cursed their ill luck rather than Army CI.

Alexander was turned over to Mexican
authorities when he tried to accuse the Army of sweating him over to make him
confess to being a
Qualchi
agent, instead of merely a
petty thief who was broke and hiding out in Mexico. His charges were of course
denounced as preposterous by the same Army CI Major who had supervised his
mauling. The Mexican police, while they believed his story, were still quite
willing to lock him up anyway, because the Army was good for their whorehouses.

He
was soon on confidential terms with the three
Qualchi
agents, who turned out to be part of an isolated cell and had no real
information. They did, however, have certain contacts in Nuevo Laredo, so
Alexander, unable to notify the CI people, planned and executed a breakout from
the
bastille
that he had thought beyond his
capabilities, taking the three
Qualchi
men with him,
and heading south.

For
the next four months Alexander was on the CI report as a deserter and bug-out
(an agent who went over to the enemy camp
);
they posted substantial rewards for him or
liis
cyanided body. He turned up one day in Des Moines, Iowa, and furnished an order
of battle for the entire Texas-New Mexico-Oklahoma-Kansas
Qualchi
net, having worked himself up to the rank of Supervisor of Local Theft and
staging six still-unsolved supply raids on warehouses in the area for the
benefit of guerilla troops.

With
twelve other
Qualchi
agents he was arrested, interrogated
for two days without breaking (before witnesses who were returned to the
Qualchi
six months later on a prisoner exchange) and then,
like three other top
Qualchi
agents, one of whom
turned out to be a BRINT man, he simply vanished. In the ensuing roundup, carried out strategically over a nine-month period, 120
Qualchi
agents were captured and interrogated, the un-co-operative ones being turned
over to BRINT for unrestricted examination, and over 600 Chinese troops from
the tough Mukden school were trapped and committed suicide. The operation was
considered to be a major coup, even by BRINT. Consequently, as is customary in
intelligence work, all the credit was given to a few CI and DIA figureheads who
were military-looking,
telegenic
, and willing to
accept the risk of assassination that accompanied such notoriety. Alexander, like
the other CI main links, had his face altered slightly by surgery and was given
a new assignment halfway around the world, with his Army records adjusted to
cover the five month lapse.

The
only records of the affair were in the central CI files where his name had been
replaced by a meaningless cover number. There was no decoration, commendation,
record of service, or even mention of his CI experience after that. Most of the
CI people who had worked most closely with him did not know his real identity,
and the trail of Agent C451933 ended as abruptly as if he had never existed, as
was customary in intelligence work.

But
Alexander had never forgotten the experience, particularly the breakout from
the
bastille
, which he had considered a maneuver
with overtones of brilliance. As a result of his intimate acquaintance with
intelligence operations, he always, in any new assignment, imagined himself in
the role of an intelligence agent and/or prisoner, and studied the existing
security system for loopholes.

This
was not merely a hobby or diversion; he had no way of knowing when the dead
trail of Agent C451933 might be reopened by a chance recognition, or when he
might have to worry about getting people into places or getting himself out.

The
fact that he was confined in an American hospital in the outskirts of Chicago,
rather than in a Chinese or satellite compound, was slightly irrelevant under
the circumstances. There was no question in his mind that his neck at the
present moment depended upon his finding out what had actually happened at the
Wildwood Plant, and he was satisfied that Bahr's DIA henchmen were at least as
dangerous an enemy, to him personally, as a dozen
Qualchi
knife-men.

But the Kelley Hospital was a break. He had
studied the Kelley system—modeled on the
Bronstock
system used in the Eastern European "rehabilitation" centers—when he
had developed the Wildwood plan. He had found no noticeable weakness in the
Kelley system at that time, but then he had been on the outside, not inside.

And
that, he decided, made a very great deal of difference.

Moving
out of his bed, he put his ear to the door. There was no sound in the corridor.
He opened the door a crack, ear pressed against the aluminum sill, listening
for the telltale vibrations of the alarm gongs used in the Kelley. There was
nothing. No ringing, no pounding of feet. Somewhere below, he knew, a
master-panel lit up any time a patient's door was opened, but it was nearly
dinner time and most of the personnel would be occupied. A blue light might go
unnoticed for a while. Even the hall TV scanners were dim, though he knew the
slightest alarm would throw the hallways and rooms under surveillance in ten
seconds flat.

Out
in the hall he padded across to the men's lavatory and ducked inside. There were
commodes, a urinal, and sinks. He collected all the toilet paper rolls and hand
towels he could find and crossed swiftly back into his room again.

It
took only moments to crumple the paper and towels, wrap them in a sheet from
the bed, and stuff them under the sponge-plastic mattress. There was a
bed-light on the wall; he pulled out the plug, ripped the lamp off the wire,
and bent the naked copper ends into a neat pair of lobster claws.

Finally,
he dropped the three metal toilet-paper rollers into a pillow case stripped
from the bed. Pulling all his clothes off, he plugged the lamp cord back in the
wall socket and touched the lobster-claws together near the nest of torn paper.
There was a shower of sparks, and the fuse blew, but he blew gently into the paper
nest and was rewarded by a tiny flame.

The
power came back immediately on an emergency circuit. He heard a buzzer down
the corridor summon the maintenance men. The smoke was already beginning to
pour from the heated sponge mattress, stinking and acrid. Choking, Alexander
threw the door into the hall open and peered out as smoke began to billow out.

As
he had expected, there was a
tumoff
at the end of the
corridor, with a civilian guard just settling back to his magazine after the
buzz for the blown fuse. Alexander waited until the smoke in the corridor grew
thick enough to haze out the nearest TV scanner. Then he screamed,
"Fire!"
and began running toward the guard, with the
pillow-case blackjack held out of sight.

The
guard jerked up in surprise, staring incredulously at the man running at him
stark naked down the corridor. Instead of blasting at him with the stunner he
was wearing, the guard stood open-mouthed, as Alexander had anticipated,
expecting that the last thing a naked man fleeing a fire would do would be to
slug him. On the dead run, Alexander swung the pillow case, and the three metal
rollers slammed into the guard's head.

As
soon as the guard hit the floor Alexander unzipped the front of his light blue
duty coveralls. Then he hoisted the limp form to his shoulder and hurried back
to the room. Smoke was billowing out the door, and in the distance he heard the
fire gong clanging. He held the coveralls and let the guard slide out of them
like an egg yolk. Once into the coveralls, he shoved the guard's body into the
smoke-filled room.

At the end of the corridor there was a sudden
burst of noise . . . undoubtedly the fire squad. Alexander took a deep breath,
and plunged into the smoke. He seized the guard's ankle and began to back out
slowly, coughing noticeably as the first of the emergency crew arrived.

Eager
hands assisted him to get the guard, face down, out of the room. Someone
started artificial respiration, and Alexander coughed into his hands and
backed away as more people and equipment began to arrive. An extinguisher began
to spray the smoldering mattress, which threw up great clouds of acrid black
smoke. In twenty seconds Alexander was walking slowly away, past several
interns who were hurrying toward the noise, and into the main-wing corridor of
the George Kelley Hospital.

With the first step behind him, Alexander
moved swiftly toward the service elevator which had brought up the
fire-fighting equipment. It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed
that the victim in the smoke-filled room was a guard and not a patient; he had
to get beyond the hospital walls before the security alarm went off.

He
had long since discarded the idea of posing as a
dischargee
,
impossible because discharge hours were over for the day; or as a guard or even
a doctor, impossible because the fingerprint-check would stop him cold at the
gate. He knew the hospital used plastic sheets and gowns which were sterilized
and remolded after use, so no laundry trucks ever left the compound. Food
cartons and supplies came in from outside on standard conveyor strips, X-ray
checked as they entered. Garbage and trash were similarly conveyed out in
sealed drums.

But
in Buenos Aires, Alexander had noticed a curiosity in that hospital's security
procedure which he thought should be present in the Kelley's system as well.

He
found the morgue in the basement, adjacent to a loading platform in the rear
of the main part of the building. He reached it through an employee's stairwell
and a concrete tunnel leading past the power pile.

Chicago,
like all major cities, had a central autopsy room; and the Kelley, like other
hospitals in the city, shipped all its cadavers there on a day-to-day basis.
The transit was usually made at night to avoid traffic on
Wahanakee
Drive. Now Alexander saw that the truck was still waiting, backed up to the
loading platform while the drivers were in the cafeteria for coffee. There were
four wheeled stretchers, with sheets covering the bodies, loaded into the back
of the refrigerated truck.

Alexander
scrambled up the tailgate, peering into the truck. Back of the stretchers the
undomed
gyro was spinning, an almost inaudible high-pitched
hum coming from the flywheel. Back of the gyro unit was a two-foot work space
with a spare wheel and half a dozen plastic sheets.