Extraordinary Powers (23 page)

A sudden sharp explosion, a flash of light, that acrid smell. He’d been hit, I saw at once, in the thigh, and he did what came naturally: he dove down. He wasn’t a trained killer; that much I had read earlier, and the information was priceless.

Now I stood over him, the Ruger pointed at his head.

The look in his eyes was a combination of great pain, from the gunshot, and enormous fear. I heard a great anguished rush of words no God no God no he’ll do it please God

—and said very quietly, “If you move, I’m going to have to kill you.

I’m sorry.”

His eyes widened still farther, and his lower lip trembled involuntarily. I disarmed him and pocketed his weapon.

I said, “You stay there quietly. Count to one hundred. If you move before then—if you make one fucking noise—I’ll come after you.” And, stepping out of the room, I shut the door, heard it lock automatically, and I was out in the darkened corridor.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

Crouching down now, I crept along the oak-wainscoted walls of the hallway and quickly surveyed the situation. At one end of the hall glowed a light that seemed to be coming from an open door. Perhaps there was someone there. Just as likely there was no one. The room was, I surmised, used by the guards while awaiting the change in shift, where they had their coffee.

I thought: would there be anything in the room I might need?

No. Unlikely, and not worth the risk.

I continued along the edge of the hall, away from the light.

Suddenly I heard a static crackle, loud and metallic. It was coming from a walkie-talkie that the second guard had left in the hallway when he entered my bedroom. A signal, requesting confirmation. I didn’t know the codes, couldn’t fake it. Not worth trying.

That meant I had maybe a minute or so before someone would come from elsewhere in the house to investigate why nobody was answering his query.

Darkness everywhere, a long series of closed doors. I knew only as much of the layout of the palatial house as I’d managed to garner while they brought me up.

I was walking away from the main staircase now. The main staircase had to be dangerous territory, far too central; but I was convinced there would be a back stairway, for servants.

And there was.

Unlit and narrow, the treads wooden and worn, the servants’ stairs were located at the end of this wing of the house. I descended, walking as lightly as I could, but still the creaks echoed in the stairwell.

By the time I reached the second floor, there were footsteps above.

Running footsteps, then shouted voices. They had discovered my escape much more quickly than I’d hoped they would.

They knew I was in the house still, somewhere, and I had no doubt that all entrances were guarded; all had now been put on alert, and I was trapped.

Looking first up, then down, I knew I couldn’t make it all the way to the first floor.

But what was on the second?

No choice; I had to take a chance. I sprinted out of the dark stairwell and into the second-floor corridor, but this one was not carpeted as the hallway upstairs had been, and my footsteps rang out with an alarming clatter. The voices were growing louder, nearer.

The only light came from the moon outside, shining meekly into a window at the end of the corridor, and I spun around, dashed toward the window, poised to pull it open and jump, dammit all, before I realized that the window overlooked not soft, spongy lawn but asphalt.

An asphalt, or macadam, car-park area depressed into the ground, a good twenty-five feet below me, a suicidal plunge. Nothing to break my fall.

I couldn’t do it.

Then came the alarm, the shrilling of hundreds of bells, deafening, throughout the house, coming from all over, and now all the lights were on, a brilliant halogen blaze illuminating the hall, illuminating everything, flashing on and off and on, and the ringing kept on.

For God’s sake, move! I shouted inwardly.

Move, yes, but where?

Running desperately along the hall, away from the window, toward the main central staircase, I tried door after door, and then, four, five, six doors later, one opened.

A bathroom, small and dark, its window opened a crack, and through the crack came a cool draft. The vinyl shower curtain rustled and fluttered in the breeze, and that was it, of course.

I tore the shower curtain off its hooks, and it fell to the floor.

The alarm’s ringing seemed even louder now, insistent. There was a crash somewhere, the slam of a door, shouts.

Now what?

Break the box!

Only a god damned shower curtain. If only I’d thought to take a bedsheet!

Tie it to something, I thought wildly. Tie it. Hook it somewhere.

Something stable. But there was nothing! Nothing to hold the length of vinyl, to anchor me as I climbed out of the window, and there was certainly no time to mess around, because the footsteps were thundering closer, closer. They had to have followed me to the second floor, and as I looked around desperately, my heart thudding crazily, I heard, not twenty feet away in the hall, “On the right! Move it!”

Raising the window all the way, I found a screen, cursed aloud, and clawed at it, at the god damned release pins at the base, but it was frozen in place, wouldn’t move, and I backed up and dove And hurled through the window, through the screen, and into the night air, my body contorted awkwardly, trying to break my fall.

And crashed to the ground—dirt, not sod, but cold, hard earth, which rose up to meet me and crack against my shoulders and the back of my neck, and I sprung immediately to my feet, somehow twisting my ankle a bit, bellowing out in pain.

Trees ahead of me, a small copse of trees, just barely visible in the darkness, but now illuminated by the flashing alarm lights mounted into the third-floor eaves, now dark, now light.

An explosion of gunfire.

Behind me, to my left, then a whiz of something awfully close, the sting of something against my ear, and I dove down. The gunshots kept up, erratic, close, and I scuttled along the grass and into the trees, thank God. A natural cover, protection. Just feet away a tree trunk splintered, then another one, and I put on one last agonizing burst of speed, running through the dizzying pain in my ankle and my shoulders, and I was at the fence.

Electrified, yes?

A fifteen-foot fence, solid black wrought iron, burglarproof, high security … high tension? Was it possible?

I could scarcely turn around now, couldn’t turn back, couldn’t stop, I had a few seconds’ lead time on them, that was all, but now I heard them coming into the yard, in my direction, many of them, it seemed, and the gunshots were back now, they had located me, but their aim was off; the trees blocked their line of sight.

I inhaled a deep breath and took the measure of the situation. The house is surrounded by nature, set in the rolling Virginia woods, which means trees and animals, squirrels and chipmunks that skitter here and there, up and down fences, and I threw myself toward the fence, grasping a horizontal section as a hand hold, and climbed up, toward the spiked top, up, and, hesitating a mere split second, which seemed an eternity, grabbed the ominous black spears atop the fence And felt the cool, hard iron.

No. Not electrified. Squirrels and chipmunks would wreak havoc on an electrified fence, wouldn’t they? You wouldn’t do it. I spun my legs around carefully, just grazing the sharpened spikes, an dover, and dropped to the moist spongy grass below, and I was out.

Behind me the mansion was flashing, the lights pulsing, the clamor shattering the night’s stillness.

I ran, hearing shouts and running footsteps behind me, but they were on the other side of the fence, and I knew I had them.

I ran, and ran, wincing, probably moaning aloud, but keeping my stride, until the road bent, and I was at a junction that I had noticed as we arrived, and as I dashed up the dark, narrow road, I saw a pair of headlights coming toward me.

The car was moving along at a good clip, not too fast, not too slow, a Honda Accord. I saw it as it approached, and I considered waving it down, but I couldn’t be sure.

It had come from the main highway, but I had to be careful, and as I slowed down, its headlights suddenly went bright, blindingly so, and then another set of headlights came up behind me, high beams, and suddenly I was caught between the two vehicles, the Honda facing me, and behind me, another car, larger, American-make.

I spun, but the cars had hemmed me in, and then two others came out of the darkness, brakes squealing, pulling up alongside the other.

I was blinded by four sets of headlights, and I spun around again, tried to figure a way of escape, but knew there wasn’t one, and then I heard a voice coming from one of the cars.

Echoing in the night. “Nice try, Ben,” came Toby’s voice. “You’re as good as ever. Please, get in.”

I was surrounded by men and guns pointed at me, and slowly I lowered the Ruger.

Toby was seated in the back of a van, one of the last vehicles to arrive. He was speaking through the window. “Terribly sorry,” he said calmly. “But nice try all the same.”

TWENTY-EIGHT.

They drove me in a plain government car, a dark blue Chrysler sedan, to Crystal City, Virginia. We entered an anonymous-looking office building with an underground parking garage. I knew the CIA owned several buildings in Crystal City and its environs; this was certainly one of them.

I was escorted by the driver into an elevator and up to the seventh floor, through a plain governmental-looking corridor painted bureaucrat tan. room 706 was painted in a black curve on frosted glass. Inside, a receptionist greeted me and showed me to an inside office, where I was introduced to a bearded, fortyish, Indian neurologist named Dr. Sanjay Mehta.

You will no doubt wonder whether I attempted to read the thoughts of my driver, the people I passed in the corridor, the neurologist, and so on; and the answer, of course, is yes. My driver was another Agency employee, as uninformed as my last driver. I learned nothing there. The most I learned, walking down the hallway, was that I was indeed in a CIA building where work was being done on scientific and technical matters.

With Dr. Mehta, things were different. As I shook his hand I heard, Can you hear my thoughts?

I hesitated for a moment, but I had decided not to play coy, and I responded aloud, “Yes, I can.” He gestured to a chair, and thought: Can you hear everyone’s thoughts?

“No,” I told him. “Only those who … “

Only those of a particular salience—such as those accompanied by powerful emotions, is that right? I heard.

I smiled and nodded.

I heard a phrase of something, in a language I didn’t know, which I assumed was Hindi.

For the first time, he spoke. “You don’t speak Hindi, Mr. Ellison, do you?” His English was British-accented.

“No, I don’t.”

“I am fully bilingual, which means that I can think in Hindi or in English. What you’re telling me, then, is that you don’t understand my thoughts when they’re in Hindi. You hear them. Is that right?”

“Right.” “But not all of my thoughts, of course,” he continued. “I have thought a number of things in the last two minutes, in Hindi and in English.

Perhaps hundreds of ‘,” if one can so categorize the flow of the processing of ideas. But you were able to hear only those that I thought with great force.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“Can you sit there for a moment, please?”

I nodded again.

He got up from his desk and left the room, closing the door behind him.

I sat for a few moments, inspecting his collection of plastic souvenir paperweights, the kind that produce a snowfall if shaken, and soon I was picking up another thought. This time it was the timbre of a woman’s voice, high and anguished.

They killed my husband, it went. Killed Jack. Oh, God. They killed Jack.

A minute later, Dr. Mehta returned.

“Well?” he said.

“I heard it,” I said.

“Heard what?”

“A woman, thinking that her husband had been killed,” I replied helpfully. “The husband’s name is Jack.”

Dr. Mehta exhaled audibly, nodding slowly. After a long silence he said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“You didn’t ” anything just then, did you?” He gave the word “hear”

the same spin I’d been mentally giving it myself.

“Just silence,” I said.

“Ah. But previously, it was a woman; you’re right. That’s quite interesting. I would have thought you’d pick up only that someone was in distress. But you don’t perceive feelings; you actually seem to hear things, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell me exactly what you heard?”

I repeated it for him.

“Just so,” he said. “Excellent. Can you distinguish between what you hear and what you ”?”

“The I guess the timbre is different, the feel of the voice,” I attempted to explain. “It’s like the difference between a whispered and a spoken phrase. Or … or the way you can remember a conversation sometimes, inflections and intonations and all. I perceive a spoken voice, but it’s much different from the audible voice.” “Interesting,” he said. He rose, picked up a snowball paperweight of Niagara Falls from his desk, and toyed with it as he paced in a small area behind his desk. “But you didn’t hear the first voice.”

“I wasn’t aware there was another one.”

“There was another one, a man, on the other side of this wall, but he was instructed to think placidly, if you will. The second one was a woman, in the same room, who was instructed to conjure up a horrifying thought and think it with a certain intensity. The room is soundproof, incidentally. The third attempt, which you say you also didn’t hear, came from the woman, but this time she was a hundred yards or so down the hall, in another room.” “You said she was ‘ it up,”

” I said. “Meaning that her husband wasn’t really killed.”

“That’s right.”

“Which means that I was unable to distinguish between her genuine thoughts and her simulated ones?”

“You might say that,” Mehta agreed. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

“That’s an understatement,” I replied.