Vertical Run (14 page)

The woman went through her rituals, licking a finger, peeling each eyelid back, tilting her nose at the ceiling, and then popping the contacts in. Dave found the practices of contact lens wearers just slightly less distasteful than those of people who pick their noses in public.

She jerked a tissue out of a box on her desk and dabbed at her eyes. The paper went purple with mascara.

“Get something in your eye?” Even as he asked the question, Dave knew he shouldn’t have.

“No.” She gulped and sniffed and blotted up a tear. “I was … I was …”

He loathed being made the confidant of people whom he did not know.

“… crying.”

On the other hand, he needed the woman’s help. Trying hard to sound sympathetic, Dave sighed. “Oh. Is something wrong?”

Ten minutes later, Dave knew more than he wanted about the receptionist’s life history. At the end of the eighties, she had earned an MBA from one of the better business schools, gone to Wall Street as an investment
banker, been let go during the most recent wave of financial industry layoffs, and remained hopelessly unemployed until, in desperation, she applied for and obtained the position of receptionist at American Interdyne Worldwide.

Dave made soothing sounds.

“And so the only place I can get a job is in a dump like this
(sniff)
, and I’m still paying off my student loans
(sniff)
, and I can barely feed my cat
(sniff)
, and my ex is out of work too and can’t pay child support
(sniff)
, and I’d make more money as a dental assistant
(sniff)
, and my landlord is on my case
(sniff)
, and … and …”

Dave touched her hand. “What? You can tell me.”

“I got patted on the butt again.”

“Who, Greg?” Dave swallowed. That had been a mistake. Fortunately the woman missed it.

“Him too. All of them! From the lousy Chairman of the Board of this lousy company whenever he’s in this lousy town all the way down to the lousy office manager!”

Dave folded his arms and closed his eyes.

First Marge, now this woman. There seems to be a distinctive corporate culture at American lnterdyne
.

“She’s a bitch, too.”

“Pardon?”

“The office manager.”

Later, after he had calmed her down, Dave asked for what he wanted. She smiled trustingly, and gave it to him. He had been so understanding, so helpful, that she didn’t even think about it. Besides, he still had a telephone repairman’s tool belt around his waist. All she asked was his promise that he return it to her when he was done.

A key.

Dave, lying through his teeth, promised. She glanced at her watch. “Will you be through before 5:00? I go home at 5:00.”

Dave smiled at her one last time, saying, “Probably
not. But I’ll just slip it beneath the blotter on your desk. Will that be okay?”

“Oh, sure. Or drop it in the center drawer.”

“Certainly. Oh, one last thing, do you know a woman named Marge Cohen? She works down in the computer department.”

The receptionist nodded.

“You might want to give her a call. She’s good people, and I think she knows something about dealing with harassment.”

“I’ll call her at home this evening.” She brandished the American Interdyne corporate telephone directory.

Dave turned to leave. “You said the telephone room’s on this floor?”

“Right down the hall and to the left.”

“Thanks. See you later.”

“See you later.”

She’d given him the master key to American Interdyne’s utility and supply rooms. With any luck, it would fit
every
utility room in the building. Telephone rooms. Janitor’s closets. The little nooks and cubbyholes wherein the building manager, the electric company, and a fair number of other organizations stored this, that, or the other thing.

The key was just what he needed.

Dave was inventorying the contents of AIW’s supply room when Ransome did, at long last, the unforgivable.

The radio in Dave’s shirt pocket hissed alive. Ransome’s hauntingly familiar Appalachian drawl came through the speaker. “Mr. Elliot, I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Dave’s jaw tightened. Now what? Another cheap trick. A little psychological warfare to unbalance your prey. Something to destroy his self-confidence or make him question …

“I know from your record that loyalty is not one of your personal values. Not to your flag. Nor to your comrades. Nonetheless, it is my hope that you feel a certain bond to your own flesh and blood.”

What!

“Dad?”

No!

“Dad, are you there?”

Mark, his son. His only child. His and his first wife’s. His and Annie’s.

“Dad, it’s me, Mark.”

He was a junior at Columbia, lived in a dorm on West 110th Street, came down for dinner with his father at least once a week. Jealous Helen never joined them. She knew that Mark was the most important person in Dave’s life.

“Dad, listen to me.”

The boy wanted to be a philosopher. In his freshman year he’d taken the introductory course. Something in it had touched his soul. He found meaning in Plato, relevance in Kant, and joy in Hegel. On his own, with no prodding from his professors, he had, during his second year, read Martin Heidegger’s
Being and Time
from cover to cover, all five hundred densely worded pages of it, and written a critical article that,
mirabile dictu
, had been accepted for publication.

“Please, Dad. This is important.”

Oh, Ransome, you sonofabitch, how dare you drag my boy into this? I will see you pay for this. Well and truly shall you pay.

“You’ve got to listen, Dad.”

Dave, who doubted if he himself had even used the word “philosophy” since his undergraduate days, enthusiastically encouraged Mark in his studies. If other fathers might look askance upon a son’s desire to invest his college years in a subject not renowned for its relevance to commercial pursuits—well, the more fool they.

“I’m downstairs. Mom is on a plane. She’ll be here in a couple of hours.”

I’m going to kill you, Ransome. I am going to kill you and wash my hands in your blood.

“Dad, you’ve got to listen. Agent Ransome told me everything. He’s shown me the records, Dad.”

What gruesome lie is this?

“It’s happened to other people, Dad. You’re not the only one. There were twenty or twenty-five of you. They gave you drugs. In Vietnam, Dad, before I was born, they gave you drugs.”

I will cut you with my knives. I will brand you with my fires. Oh Ransome, Ransome, you thing of evil, there will be no end to the tortures I will inflict on you.

“It was an experiment, Dad. They didn’t know what would happen. But the drug, Dad, the drug has long-term effects. Even after all these years, people get flashbacks. They can go nuts, Dad. They can go nuts even after all this time. The Army is trying to keep it quiet. They are trying to round up everyone who was given the stuff. They say they can treat it. They say …”

What? What do they say? This is going to be the worst. This is the one that Ransome hopes will drive me right over the edge.

“… Dad, they say there are genetic effects. They say that they have to test me too. They say that it’s probably why Mom … what made Mom have those problems.”

Angela. College sweetheart. June bride. One son. Two spontaneous abortions. Deep depression. A bout with the bottle. Divorce. Then psychiatric care, remarriage, two charming daughters, and a life of goodness and grace with another man.

“Dad, you’re seeing things, but it’s not your fault. It’s drugs, Dad. It’s bad stuff that’s been in your system all of these years. They showed me the records. They showed me the other guys’ records, too. It’s happening to all of you. Something happens to your body when you get close to being fifty years old. It sets it off. You start imagining things, seeing people come after you
with guns and knives and stuff. You begin to believe that everyone is out to get you. So you start trying to get them before they get you. You start trying to get everyone. It’s all in your mind, Dad, but they can cure it. If you’ll come in, they can cure it. If you don’t, it’s going to get worse. And fast, Dad, real fast. You’ve got to let them treat you for it. It’s making you see things that aren’t there. It’s making you want to hurt people. Dad, for God’s sake, let Agent Ransome help you. That’s what he’s here for, Dad. He’s your friend. He’s here to help.”

The gun felt good in his hand. The rake of the butt was comforting. His finger caressed the trigger. It was smooth to the touch. He slid his thumb across the safety and pushed. He moved the select switch from semiautomatic to automatic. He was feeling better with each passing moment.

“Can’t you feel it, Dad? The rage? Can’t you see that what you are feeling is absolutely out of control rage?”

Goddamned right.

He wanted to kill and kill and kill.

“In the end, gentlemen, it is eminently more useful to destroy an enemy’s spirit than it is to destroy an enemy’s body.”

He could barely wait for the shooting to start.

Good old Professor Robert-call-me-Rob said that
.

He was on the third floor.

The other thing he said was, “Do the one, and the other becomes a vastly less complicated task.”

He’d traveled there through a crimson fog.

It’s what Ransome wants, pal
.

The fog was clearing.

You’re tying it up with a ribbon and giving it to him in a box
.

Soon all would be visible, bathed in a pure light of great clarity.

Christ! Can’t you see what he’s doing to you?

Dave ejected the magazine from the pistol, and checked it. Full.

Ransome’s lied to your wife, he’s lied to your son, he’s lied to you. It’s bait! It’s a trap!

He jacked the clip back into the butt, pulled back the slide, and chambered a round. Killing these people was going to feel good.

You’re walking straight into it. They’re going to be waiting
.

Dave wanted them waiting. He was looking forward to it.

“An enemy whose mind is distressed is an uncommonly vulnerable enemy. The demoralized are most easily defeated, the disheartened most readily destroyed. Such is the first principle of psychological warfare, and the first commandment of our honorable profession.”

Our honorable profession? Which honorable profession might that be? Ransome’s? Mamba Jack’s? Sergeant Mullins’s? Mine?

His hand was tightly around the banister. It was metal, painted battleship grey, and cold.

Cold. Concentrate on the cold. Don’t think about anything else. Just the cold
.

Dave stopped. He held himself perfectly still.

Good. Now breathe. Take it long and slow
.

He forced himself to inhale as deep as he could, so deep it hurt. He held it until he saw spots before his eyes, then let it out slowly. He blotted sweat off his brow with his shirttail.

That’s better, pal
.

He held his right hand out. It was trembling.

That’s the idea. Guys with shaking hands aren’t the best marksmen in the world
.

It had been close. Ransome had almost gotten him.

“He who overcomes his enemies by stratagem, is as much to be praised as he who overcomes them by force.” Machiavelli said that. Remember? Remember Professor Rob used to quote him all the time?

Dave snapped the safety on and reset the pistol to
semiautomatic. He tried to slip the gun back into his belt. It took him three tries.

Hell do it again. Hell do anything to mindfuck you
.

Dave’s knees went weak. He collapsed on the stairs, motionless and shivering, until his fury ebbed.

It had to have been Ransome’s best shot. There was nothing more guilefully evil that the man could do than calling Mark, persuading him to try to seduce his father into a death trap, lying to him …

You’re sure it was a lie?

No, he was not. That was the special hell of it. Someone—one of his own people—
might
have given him an experimental drug. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the intelligence crowd had pulled that particular trick. At least one hapless CIA contractor had been surreptitiously fed a dose of LSD and committed suicide as a result. It took twenty-five years before the Agency admitted to the episode and grudgingly recompensed the man’s family.

There had been other incidents as well. During the 1950s, the Army secretly sprayed the skies over San Francisco with an aerosol-borne microbe,
Serratia marcescens
. A decade later a group of covert warfare researchers filled glass bulbs full of moderately nasty germs, dropped them on the tracks of the New York subway system, and then monitored the spread of the resulting sniffles and runny noses. Around the same time, out in Utah, herds of sheep had died when something unspecified got loose from a classified laboratory. Elsewhere there were rumors of biologists, immunologists, and genetic engineers who took an unhealthy interest in the results of prison camp experiments performed by the Axis powers during World War II. Then too there were the American penitentiary inmates who had been injected with infectious viruses, untested medicines, and, most notoriously of all, syphilis spirochetes. Add to that the Army’s horrific testing of radioactive substances on members of its own ranks, and it
wasn’t hard to believe that some dirty tricks specialist might feel motivated to feed a mind-bending drug to a few of his colleagues.

The intelligence establishment had been a law unto itself, more than capable of performing ill-conceived experiments on soldiers and civilians alike. It was, after all, being done in the ultimate best interest of American national security, and thus a necessity if you believed, as everyone did, that the Soviets were doing precisely the same. If a few lab rats, imprisoned felons, or men in uniform suffered along the way—well, was that too high a price to pay for insuring the preservation of democracy? Indeed, when during the 1970s Senate investigators first learned of the operations and voiced their horror, no small number of the people responsible were more than merely indignant.
What’s all the uproar about? We’re just doing the job you pay us to do. You can’t blame us—we’re the good guys!