Once a Spy (36 page)

“Sorry, I don’t see Charlie Clark rubbing his old man’s feet.”

“Why would Charlie have to do it?”

“That’s a very good question,” Fielding said. “For two months, Duck was a zombie. But since Charlie’s entry onto the scene, he’s been Mr. Lucidity.”

Cranch looked away, probably to hide his skepticism. “Are you hypothesizing that a professional horseplayer has become the first person in medical history to discover a means of triggering lucidity in an Alzheimer’s patient?”

Fielding leaped up. “I knew I had a reason for letting him live.”

13

“So how
do you do it?” Fielding asked.

Charlie had reached the same conclusion science had: There was no precise trigger. But if he could convince them he had the silver bullet, he would likely be taken from the employee lounge to Drummond.

“As I’m sure you know, Alzheimer’s sufferers are triggered by family members they haven’t seen in a while,” Charlie said.

Across the table, Fielding shook his head. “Possibly that explains his mild resurgence at the senior center, when he saw you for the first time in two years. But since then, you’ve been old hat, otherwise he would have flickered on every time you opened your mouth. Tonight, when I told him that you were here, all it sparked was, ‘What’s he doing up so late on a school night?’”

“I guess you’re right.” Charlie hadn’t expected getting to Drummond would be that easy. Also, getting to Drummond wasn’t enough. Charlie needed to work it so he could get a weapon to Drummond too, or at least get one within Drummond’s reach. He cupped his chin in his hands now, trying to appear contemplative. “I guess it has been, mostly, random.”

Fielding sat up. “
Mostly?
So then there
is
a kiss that turns the frog back?”

“I’m ashamed to say it.”

“Pretend there’s a gun to your head.”

“Well … I’m a disappointment to him, to say the least. You know, he graduated from MIT with a crateful of awards. I barely made it through a year of college. He’s a patriot and a hero. I play the horses, and not that
well. He’s the fastest gun in the East. I’d never even used a gun until yesterday, and the times I needed to, it was a disaster. At best, I was too shaky to shoot straight. Up on the ridge tonight—or last night, I guess it was—he flickered on and snatched the gun away from me just in time to shoot that meth guy—then he led us down the mountain like a Sherpa. When we were attacked at that battlefield, he was napping. I couldn’t defend us. Suddenly he grabbed the gun from me and figured out a way for us to escape. While I sat there cowering, he said, ‘There’s nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result.’”

“It’s Winston Churchill,” Fielding said. “I’ve heard him recite that one before.” He sat back, interlacing his fingers behind his head—not the posture of a man who had just seen the light or otherwise had been convinced. “I want to share something with you, Charlie. In all of the years I worked for Duck, he mentioned you just three or four times, and all he ever said was that you were good at math. But I knew a few things about you anyway. One was you always avoided the disagreeable or difficult in life, finding refuge at the racetrack, for instance. Another was you considered seeing him one day a year, on Christmas, to be one day too often. Yet now, lo and behold, you’re false flagging Red
Mafiya
thugs, pretending to go to ground at a nowhere fleabag, and blabbing to the
Washington Post
to induce us to capture you, then launching a veritable paramilitary assault on the Manhattan Project complex, all in an effort to rescue your not-so-beloved father. Meanwhile you could have gotten away with a small fortune in cash and diamonds, and millions on top of that if you know where he’s squirreled his stock options hoard, as I suspect you do. So I have to conclude something’s changed.”

Charlie wasn’t sure where Fielding was headed. “Maybe he and I got off on the wrong foot for the first thirty years,” he allowed.

Fielding stood. “He had us fooled all these years. Everyone always thought that all that mattered to Drummond Clark was getting revenge against his crazy pinko parents. But in the past two days, he’s shown something else mattered to him. He showed it with his episodes of lucidity. Each was triggered when his son was in harm’s way.”

Fielding had hit the nail on the head. Charlie felt it. He felt terrible, too, that he’d failed to see it himself. And he suspected he was about to feel a lot worse.

14

Charlie lay
on his back lengthwise atop the conference room table, his wrists and ankles bungeed to its legs. He’d been stripped to his boxer shorts. Most of his skin was covered in goose bumps, and not because he was cold. It was a reaction to the telephone on the chair to his left, a rotary device that could well have been in the complex since the ’40s. The cord was plugged into the wall, not at a phone jack but at an electrical outlet. In place of the usual coil and handset was a rubber wire that hissed subtly, like an asp. The ghoul in the lab coat they called Dr. Cranch loomed over Charlie and dipped the copper mouth of the wire toward his face.

“This will deliver a near-lethal amount of electrical current,” Cranch said to Drummond, who was handcuffed to the chair at the foot of the table.

“A placebo is used as a control in drug experiments,” Drummond said, the fifth time he’d done so since Charlie was brought in, each time with greater distress.

“Sir, we need to hear about Placebo, the operation,” Cranch said, “or, more specifically, whom you’ve told about it.” Repetition had progressively deadened his delivery.

“I just don’t know what else I can tell you.” Drummond sighed.

Charlie wondered whether his rescue effort possibly could have made things any worse than they were now.

“Just a light spray,” Cranch said to Dewart, who sat to Charlie’s right.

Dewart gave a gentle pull at the trigger of a plastic plant mister. The water was warm, yet the droplets caused Charlie’s bare legs to shiver.
Cranch touched the copper tip of the wire to Charlie’s right thigh briefly, as if he were testing the ink in a pen. The tip emitted a buzz no louder than a gnat.

Charlie shot straight into the air. If not for the restraints, it seemed, he would have hit the ceiling. Hot, maddening pain filled his blood vessels, and his body began to convulse. It felt like muscles and tendons were being ripped from bones. An involuntary wail rose from deep within him, unlike any sound he would have imagined he could make, or that any animal could.

A velvety blackness materialized around him. A cool and comfy refuge. Unconsciousness. He welcomed it.

Before he could settle in, his spine cracked back onto the tabletop, and he was again in the fierce glare of fluorescent lights. All his joints felt like they’d been dislocated. He tried to breathe. He retched, then inhaled air hot and heavy with the smell of his own burned flesh. His body settled, but a thrum continued inside his temples. Bells rang in his ears. The worst was the stinging in his eyes. Some sort of lingering electrical current?

Cranch and Dewart looked at Drummond, presumably for his reaction. He stared at his shoes as if he sought to avoid seeing his son suffer.

“Please, just talk to Mr. Cleamons,” Drummond begged Cranch. “I have his home number in my office.”

Cranch looked to Dewart. “Cleamons?”

Dewart shrugged. “We’ll find out.” He gestured at the two-way mirror: Make a phone call.

Charlie knew who Cleamons was but didn’t see how mentioning it would do any good—even if he could move his mouth. Also, they would know soon enough. Lionel Cleamons had been Perriman’s district sales manager. He dropped dead one afternoon in his office more than a decade ago.

15

Charles would
die, Drummond speculated, if the man in the white laboratory coat used the crude stun device a second time. The younger fellow, to Drummond’s left, seemed inclined to do nothing about it. He just sat back sipping Gatorade.

Drummond wondered: Who are these men? Gamblers Charles has fallen in with?

No, something told him. This had to do with his own work.

He recalled passing his office at Perriman Appliances earlier, then being led down the back stairs to this subterranean facility.

The Manhattan Project complex was rumored to extend beneath the Columbia campus as far as West 112th Street, where Perriman was situated.

Or was it on
East
112th Street?

Yes, East, he decided.

He’d worked there a long time.

How long, five years?

No, more than that. Eighteen. No, no, no, twelve.

He demonstrated the appliances in the showroom, then went on-site with building owners and property managers. He ensured that their specifications were met.

The man in the laboratory coat kept asking about “Placebo.” Maybe it was a code for something new in R & D. The new nanotechnology in the wash and rinse cycles? Probably not. Nanotechnology was already trumpeted throughout Perriman’s advertising and promotional campaigns.

Could the Manhattan Project have something to do with it?

Manhattan Project …

At Columbia University.

Columbia University was originally called King’s College. The name was changed for reasons of patriotism after the American Revolution …

Which commenced on April 19, 1775 …

The shot heard ’round the world …

At the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts …

An interesting piece of information about Concord—

Drummond felt his thought process derailing.

It was hard to concentrate to begin with. And Charles’s scream still resonated within him.

It reminded him of another scream.

The memory began with dawn, as if beamed from a old film projector, sputtering through the blinds and into the drafty waiting room in the maternity ward at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital. Drummond was sitting there alone, savoring the silence. For most of the night, the waiting room had been a hive of expectant fathers. Nurses had brought bundles one by one. Each man, seeing his son or daughter for the first time, declared the moment the happiest of his life. Drummond anticipated no such sentiment. He wasn’t bent toward giddiness. But that was only a small factor: 2 percent, he estimated. The other 98 percent was fear.

That he felt fear at all was confounding. Displacing fear was second nature to him.

He’d been timid initially, as a boy, a voracious early reader living a largely internal life. But when his parents fled the country without him and a spinster aunt capitulated and took him in, he commenced a campaign to prove his worth. He drove himself to be first in his class, first in his weight group, first at anything—if he found himself walking parallel to a stranger on the sidewalk, he would be first to the corner. He would even finish his ice cream cone before other children. Winning intoxicated him; the greater the challenge, the greater the high. By his first day at Langley, perilous situations practically whetted his appetite.

On learning Isadora was pregnant, however, he felt standard-issue
fear, like anyone else’s. He was at a loss to explain it. He hungered to succeed as a parent, especially in light of his own parents’ record.

In the ensuing months he sought a remedy. The problem, he theorized, was his lack of enthusiasm for the baby—he couldn’t summon so much as a spark. Attributing this to insufficient data, he read everything on the subject. The only applicable wisdom he found, repeatedly, was
“If he can afford it, the new father is wise to hire a baby nurse.”

Now, with just hours to go, he was scared as a cat.

The squeal of crepe soles in the hallway outside the waiting room momentarily diverted him from his predicament. Probably it was the nurse coming to update him on Isadora’s status. “Another few hours still,” she would say—he hoped.

She entered with a swaddled bundle in her arms. “Mr. Clark, it is my great honor to introduce you to your son,” she said. She had delivered the line to new fathers thousands of times, but the joy was fresh, and augmented by a particularly musical Indian accent—Gujarati, he was certain of it.

He had thought learning that the baby was a boy might stir him. It made no difference. And the squirming, tomato-headed creature itself kindled none of the love at first sight on which he’d pinned his last atom of hope. If anything, the sight validated his fears.

“Would you like to hold him?”

He put on exuberance. “Of course!”

His arms became stiff as shelves, and on contact with them, the baby began a cry that might have been mistaken for an air-raid siren.

“This is just wonderful,” Drummond exclaimed; he could spew lies at a poly and leave examiners swearing he was the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.

Registered Nurse Aashiyana Asirvatham, however, did not appear to be fooled. “It’s time for baby’s bath,” she said, offering Drummond an out.

As soon as the baby was safely away, strangely, Drummond felt a desire to hold him again. Within a few weeks that desire exploded into a dizzying love. Ironically, his challenge became keeping a lid on the sentiment, lest his enemies exploit it.

The memory had the effect of turning night into day in his mind as he sat in Conference Room A at the foot of the table originally crafted for the Jersey City narcotics dealer known as Catman because of his fondness for leopard skin.

Drummond sat up slightly to better get the lay of the land. He maintained the appearance of staring dully. Even if he could get his hand free of the cuff, he would need to grapple immediately with young Dewart, who almost certainly had a sidearm. The guard standing outside the door, onetime IRA heavy Jack O’Shea, would be in the room within five seconds, his own firearm drawn. And of course Cranch had the “helle-phone,” as everyone here liked to call the torture device. Drummond’s own prospective weapons included the chairs and table, though the latter would be too heavy to budge even without Charles atop it. Also within reach were three dry-erase markers, a half-full bottle of Gatorade, and a plastic plant mister, the last item probably purchased at the twenty-four-hour DrugMart at West 110th and Broadway specifically for use with Cranch’s device—to Drummond’s knowledge, the plants in the Manhattan Project complex were all plastic.