Second sight, p.51
Second Sight, page 51
“But if you accept the risk, how would you do it?”
“Ideally, by intravenous drip, being super-careful to balance the two drugs against each other in minute, scrupulously measured doses.”
“That’s impossible if you’re trying to conceal what you’re doing from the people who are administering the Versed. How else?” Patchen had already been considering this problem. “What about an implant,” he said, “one of those things they put under the skin of diabetics to release timed doses of insulin?”
“If, as I say, you’re willing to take the chance of killing the subject, it might work,” the scientist replied. “But it would be imprecise—and I say again, very, very dangerous.”
“How is the dosage of Versed decided?”
“Like everything else. By body weight and the effects desired.”
“Then you could calculate that dosage and balance it with an anti-dosage of amphetamine in the implant.”
“In theory, yes. But as far as I know, no one has ever tried anything resembling this on a human subject.”
“That’s not a problem,” Patchen said. “We’re dealing with a volunteer. How long would it take to run a test on an animal and prepare an implant on the basis of the results?”
“Not long. But I wouldn’t do it, David. Really I wouldn’t.” “The subject weighs a hundred and seventy-three pounds,” Patchen said. “I need the implant, fully loaded, by this time tomorrow.”
Patchen went to New York and took the elevator to the top floor of a building on Park Avenue. It was Saturday morning, and most of the offices were closed. He walked down the corridor until he found the number he was looking for on a door marked PRIVATE, then knocked. Red Conaghan opened the door at once. He was white-haired now and fleshier than he had been as a Navy surgeon. He was dressed for golf in bright pastels.
“Cary Grant,” he said. “I’d have known you anywhere.”
“You haven’t changed all that much, either, Doc,” Patchen replied.
They sat down, Conaghan behind a desk crowded with photographs of his many children and grandchildren, Patchen in the patient’s chair. The office was brilliantly lighted—an aid, Patchen supposed, to Conaghan’s first impression of candidates for cosmetic surgery. According to Patchen’s research, he specialized in breasts, backsides, and bellies. They had made him rich.
“I’ve read about you in the papers over the years,” Conaghan said. “Christopher, too. Even I was young in those days. ‘That is no country for old men. The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees …’ Christopher knew his Yeats. Does he still read poetry?”
“Writes it, even.”
“I suspected him of something like that way back in Hawaii. However, I didn’t foresee the exciting careers the two of you have had. You never can tell about the future. What can I do for you?”
“Some minor surgery.”
Patchen told him what he wanted, displaying the implant as he spoke. It was designed to dispense medication on a timed basis, and could be activated by breaking a glass ampule.
“What are you going to do, bang yourself on the chest, mea culpa?” Conaghan asked.
Patchen explained; Conaghan listened without expression. When Patchen was through he asked a question.
“How’s your health? As a kid you had an amazing heart. It just wouldn’t stop. Otherwise you’d be dead and buried on Okinawa. Is it still pumping away like old times?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re going to need it if you go through with this.”
Patchen handed him an envelope. “I’ve brought you this. It’s a complete medical history.”
Conaghan put on reading glasses and scanned it. It was many pages long. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Go through that door. Take off your shirt and lie down on the table. I’ll be in as soon as I finish reading.”
In the examining room, he looked Patchen over at length, listening to his heart, taking his blood pressure, fingering his scars. No one had touched them since the last time Conaghan himself had done so, more than thirty years before.
“Funny, I remember the whole topography,” Conaghan said. “I wish you’d come to see me after the war. We could have done something about this. You say you want the squirter in your chest about there?” He touched Patchen.
“That’s right,” Patchen said. “Can you hide it under an old scar?”
“In your case, that’s no problem.”
“Do you have any other problem with all this?”
“No. It’s your body. But don’t you guys have your own secret doctors?”
“I’d rather have this done by an outsider. Will you do it?”
Conaghan looked down at Patchen’s ruined face and torso. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? It’s the least I can do, considering what I wasn’t able to do for you forty years ago in Hawaii.”
“You understand that lives depend on your taking this secret to the grave with you?”
“To the grave?” Conaghan, filling a hypodermic needle, glanced toward Patchen and grinned delightedly. “Jesus, is that the way you guys talk?” he said. “This is better than the movies.” He jabbed Patchen with the needle. “The answer is, you don’t exist,” he said, in Jimmy Cagney accents. “You never come here; I never seen you. Relax, copper. You won’t feel a thing.”
The procedure took only a few minutes. Patchen, wide awake and lucid, watched in a mirror.
“I’ve never seen anything like this rig before,” Conaghan said, examining the implant. His eyes danced behind the goggles. “Diabolically clever,” he said, slipping the device through a tiny incision.
5
ON THAT SAME SATURDAY MORNING, LESS THAN EIGHT HOURS BEfore air time for his show, Patrick Graham received another Beautiful Dreamers tape. The network refused to let him use it on the air.
“Why the hell not?” he asked the vice president in charge of the news division.
“Because we’ve been burned once.”
“That’s Outfit disinformation and you know it.”
“I know we’ve got a hundred million dollar lawsuit to settle with a one-armed Mormon war hero. Besides, it’s boring.”
“Boring? It’s a trip through the belly of the beast.”
“Beast? What beast?”
“The Outfit. The whole rotten Establishment.”
The vice president sighed theatrically over the car phone. They were talking Mercedes to Mercedes while Graham raced to the studio on the outskirts of Washington and the vice president drove to his tennis game in Westport, Connecticut. “Patrick,” he said, ‘the Cold War is over; it’s yesterday’s news.”
“You may think so. I don’t.”
“I know you don’t. The audience knows it, too. Once in a while you should ask yourself if that’s good.”
“Until a minute ago nobody ever said it was bad.”
“They pay me to be impolite. Even your audience doesn’t like terrorists who kidnap Americans. Neither do sponsors. This is not ratings-positive material. The answer is ‘no.’ No more mysterious tapes. No more one-armed Mormons. No more heroic Arabs. No. No. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
“Clear as a bell. You’re saying you’re afraid of the popularity of that dim-witted Republican in the White House. You’re asking me to sell out. I won’t do it. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
“Oh, Patrick, spare me. You’ll do what you’re told. Have a nice day.”
The vice president broke the connection. Dorcas, who had been listening in and making notes, said, “What will you do?”
“Say ‘too bad’ and bide my time,” Graham said. “Like the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls. La guerre n’est pas finie until we say so.”
6
THE O.G. CAUSED DISCREET INQUIRIES TO BE MADE UNTIL HE DISCOVered someone who had invited the Grahams to a cocktail party on Sunday afternoon. The hostess was happy to invite the O. G., too, when a mutual friend called and asked for the favor.
At the party, held in a plywood-and-stone-veneer facsimile of a French manor house in McLean, Virginia, the O. G. sipped his usual plain tomato juice and chatted easily with any number of strangers while confidently waiting for Patrick Graham to approach him.
“Patrick Graham.” The firm handshake.
“By golly, so it is,” said the O. G. “I thought that looked like you talking to Justice Corash over in the corner. Splendid fellow, Corash; fine American.”
Corash was a conservative member of the Supreme Court who consistently voted against Graham’s beliefs.
“If you like pterodactyls,” Graham said.
The O. G. went on as if he had not heard this witticism. “How are you?” he asked. “How is your lady wife?”
“Charlotte will be disappointed to have missed you,” Graham replied.” She’s got a touch of the flu tonight.”
“Bad luck. What does an announcer do when he gets flu? How do you keep from coughing and sneezing on the air?”
“The network has vets who fix us up with shots before we go on, like race horses or professional football players.”
“ ‘Vets?’ That’s a bitter one, my lad.”
“It’s a bitter world when it comes to bosses and workers,” Graham said. “Loyalty up and loyalty down are things of the past. Even your man David Patchen was telling me that he’d swap the crew he has for the staff of the Washington Post anytime.”
“Did he? Jehoshaphat! That’s quite a statement.”
“I don’t think he’d have too many takers. What about you? Would you have made a trade like that if life were baseball?”
“In my day? No, I don’t think so. Back then, of course, we were getting most of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed types out of the best schools that now apply to places like the Post. As you say, times change.”
“So do perceptions of what constitutes honorable employment.”
“How true. When did you last catch sight of David?”
“Not long ago. Right after I broke the story about the Outfit kidnappings. There’s been more than one. Did you know that?”
“More than one of those tapes? By George, I hope not. One was enough. David was pretty upset, but I suppose he told you that.”
“Upset? Really? He didn’t say anything to me about that.”
“He didn’t?” the O. G. said. “That’s funny. You drove him right out of town with that broadcast of yours.”
“I did?”
“Yes. Poor fellow went on vacation. Shocked them out of their socks over at the Outfit. It’s the first time he’s taken a day of annual leave since he came to work more than thirty years ago.”
“Good Lord, I had no idea. Where did he go?”
“What? I have a hard time hearing at these things with everybody chattering in the background. Can’t smell or taste or feel a pretty knee at full power anymore, either. That’s what they mean when they say you’re losing your senses. Don’t grow old, Patrick, that’s my advice. But I guess you don’t have to worry. One of those vets can fix you up with an elixir. Nice to see you.”
The O. G. started to turn away. Graham caught at his sleeve. “I said, ‘Where did he go?’ “
“Who?”
“David Patchen.”
“Oh, David. He went to the south of France. Borrowed a house up in the hills near Grasse. Lovely country. The French eat larks in country restaurants at this time of year.”
“Do you know where, exactly? Clive Wilmot has a place in that neck of the woods, in a great little village perché called Spéracèdes. Did he borrow Clive’s place?”
“Clive’s place? No, I don’t think he’d do that.”
Graham looked to left and right to make sure others weren’t listening; there were other journalists in the room.
He leaned closer to the O. G. “Did he take Christopher’s daughter with him?”
The O. G., visibly shocked by the question, took a step backward. “Well,” Graham said. “Did he or didn’t he?”
The O. G. shook his head. “You’re a rum fellow, Patrick,” he said. “Very rum. Got to go. It’s been a treat talking to you.”
7
GRAHAM, KNOWING THAT HE HAD HIT HOME WITH THESE UNANSWERED questions, left the party, too. He called Dorcas on the car phone.
“It says on your resume that you speak French,” he said. “Do you?”
“Sort of.”
“Do you or don’t you?”
“Yes, but not like a native. I took four years of it at Dartmouth and spent half my junior year in Grenoble.”
“Good. Pack a bag for a week. Bring your passport. Bring them with you to the house. We’ve got work to do. And then you’re going traveling.”
Four days later, after many frustrating interviews with locals who spoke French with what sounded to Dorcas like an impenetrable Italian accent, she wandered by chance into the market place in Grasse and saw David Patchen and Zarah Christopher shopping. They bought twelve spéciales de portugaises oysters, a small sea bass, string beans, strawberries, a whole goat cheese, and half a dozen bottles of ordinary Provençal wine. They behaved like lovers, holding hands and making jokes.
Dorcas, while pretending to take pictures of the market scene, recorded their every action with the small video camera Graham had given her. She then followed their car over winding country roads to a secluded house below a town called Saint Vallier. Dorcas could see Zarah kissing Patchen through the rear window, and when the two of them got out of the car, they kissed again, passionately, with the groceries crushed between them. Dorcas taped this, too, panning to the sign on the driveway, “LA CADÈNIÈRE,” to the house itself, and all around the horizon to show the magnificent view of the Mediterranean below and the quaint hilltop village above; she even photographed the red-and-white milestone showing the rural route number and the number of kilometers to Grasse.
All this took some time. While she photographed, Dorcas blocked the narrow road with her car, but the people in the car behind her, a handsome man about her own age accompanied by two girls, all of them small and dark and exotic looking, did not seem to mind. She waved an apology; the others smiled forgivingly as if to say, “How charming! A pretty American madcap with a video camera, recording the beauties of Provence!” She almost photographed them: the man had the most startling green eyes set in a hawk’s face.
Two nights later Patrick Graham ran Dorcas’s footage, edited and enhanced, on his Saturday show. It was, he said, taken by a tourist with a home video camera who happened to recognize Patchen in the market of this small French city named for the counts and marquises of Grasse-Tilly, one of whom had commanded the French fleet at the Battle of Yorktown. (This historical reference, he thought, provided an almost subliminal patriotic note, in case the vice president for news had anything to say on that subject.) In order to explain who Zarah was Graham had to rerun some film from an old show about the Christophers. With excerpts from the Beautiful Dreamers tape spliced in, a couple of interviews with academics who specialized in intelligence matters, and a chat with a former Outfit clerk who had written an exposé of his old organization and then taken up residence in a Scandinavian country that Graham did not identify, it made an interesting twelve-minute segment.
That night Graham brought a magnum of Dom Perignon champagne with him when he got into bed with Dorcas. They replayed the show on tape while they drank the wine.
“How do you like being a spy of the people?” Graham asked. He poured a full glass of Dom Perignon, which cost a hundred dollars a magnum, between her breasts.
“It’s not boring,” Dorcas replied. “Definitely not boring.”
8
BECAUSE THE CLOCK WAS SIX HOURS LATER IN THE MARITIME ALPS than in Washington, “Patrick Graham Live” came on the satellite at two o’clock in the morning. Christopher taped the show in the farmhouse in the Préalpes de Grasse that he was using as a command post. Half a mile down the mountain, Zarah and Patchen were asleep inside another farmhouse. Chistopher stepped onto the terrace and whirled the child’s noisemaker that Yeho had provided; the Ibal Iden who were guarding the house replied in the same manner. The others were deployed in cars along the Route Napoleon to watch the highway approaches. He went back inside, leaving the door open, and waited in the dark. Patchen’s Doberman slept contentedly at Christopher’s feet. He knew the animal, and in the last week it had been trained to obey him—up to a point. It would come, stay, find, sit, and lie down at his command, but it would only attack on Patchen’s orders, or to protect Patchen if he was unconscious. After a moment it lifted its head and growled. Ja’wab, smiling as usual, stepped through the open door.
“They should have no trouble finding us,” he said, after watching the tape.
“No,” Christopher said. “I want to talk to Patchen and Zarah tomorrow morning in Nice. Keep up your watch on the house until morning. Then get everybody in the cars and string them out to cover their car. Make sure everybody has a full tank and ten liters extra in a can. You know the rules.”
The cars, six of them, were changed every other day at rental agencies in Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. On the following morning, Monday, Christopher drove to the Nice Airport and turned in his car, then took the bus along the beachfront and rented another with one of the false driver’s licenses and national identity cards Yeho had provided; one of his Geneva retirees was a forger. A mile from the rental agency, Christopher parked the car at a meter, walked through narrow streets for fifteen minutes, and, finally, dialed a number in Annecy from a pay phone on the street. Yeho answered on the first ring, speaking German. They exchanged the false names and the meaningless phrases which were that day’s recognition code. Christopher had not gone through these motions in more than twenty years, and like a victim of seasickness stepping aboard a docked vessel, he tasted the acid memory of other voyages.
“I’m in a terrible mood,” Yeho said. “Last night the man in the next apartment was watching television so I couldn’t sleep. You could hear it through the wall.”
