Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. (15 page)

“I'm sure I smelt perfume at one time.”

“There was swimming pool — I definitely smelt chlorine.”

“And a garage — there were petrol fumes.”

“And somebody had been smoking outside the first door,” Trina gabbles with the elation of a game winner. “I know because I can always tell when Rick's been to a bar.”

“I smelt cigarette smoke on the hands of the bloke who gave me the robe,” Daphne adds, before concluding, “I don't think this is a monastery at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Look around,” she suggests with a sweep of her hand. “All this furniture looks like standard government issue, there's surveillance cameras and electronic door locks, and there's better security than Buckingham Palace.”

“What're you saying, Daphne?”

“I think it's some sort of top-secret base where they carry out weird experiments on unsuspecting volunteers,” the Englishwoman replies seriously, then adds a cautionary note: “Which means they are probably listening to everything we say.”

“Oh, for Jesus Christ's sake. That's all we need,” a man wearing headphones and a gleaming pair of military-issue shoes sighs, before yelling to his colleague, “Wally! Get in here!”

“Yeah, Steve?” responds Allan Wallace as he races into the surveillance room in the building's basement.

“You remember the two totally harmless old dames we let in just now cuz you wuz worried they wuz gonna freeze to death?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you'd better start praying for divine intervention P.D.Q., cuz they've just rumbled the whole damn scene.”

“What?!”

The raucous dawn chorus of ravens and crows is wasted on Bliss and Trina's anxious husband as Captain Prudenski and the night officers sign off watch at the main police station in Bellingham, leaving them in the hands of a more sanguine officer.

“It's almost daylight now,” says Matt Larson, a straight-backed, no-nonsense captain, once he's paraded his officers and instructed them to keep a lookout for the missing women. “It won't be long before they show up, perky as sunflowers,” he adds with a smile that's supposed to be comforting. “And they'll be asking what all the commotion was about.”

But Rick Button is unconvinced and is becoming frantic. “Trina would not do this. Something's happened to her,” he insists, though Larson is unmoved, and just two minutes later his optimism is vindicated when he's handed a communiqué by a clerk.

“Gentlemen,” he says, beaming with good news. “The Kidneymobile has been found.”

“Where?” demand Bliss and Rick Button simultaneously.

“Back in Canada. Just as I predicted.”

You didn't predict that,
Bliss muses to himself, but he is too thrilled to challenge the man.

“Is Trina okay?” asks Rick, but Larson has no specifics. “They must have recrossed the border last night when they couldn't find anywhere to stay,” is all he can add as he hands Bliss the report. “You'd best check with the Canadian Mounties for more information.”

But disappointment awaits. The machine has been discovered, dumped in a wooded area just north of the U.S. border, but there is no sign of the women.

“We'd better get back there quickly,” Bliss tells Rick Button, and he catches Daisy's arm and drags her towards the parking lot. “They can't be far away.”

Trina and Daphne are considerably closer than Bliss imagines, though they look more like wilted dandelions than perky sunflowers following a sleepless night spent worrying what the morning would bring.

“We're ready to leave now,” Trina calls, as she jumps up and down in front of the surveillance camera, as she has done for the past twenty minutes. But she gets no response and is close to tears as she declares, “I wish I'd brought the guinea pig now.”

“Why?” puzzles Daphne.

“Cuz he'd find a way out. He can escape from anywhere.”

“This reminds me of when I was captured by an East German Stazi officer in Berlin after the war,” Daphne muses as she assesses the situation.

“What happened?” breathes Trina.

“I had to sleep my way out,” she admits sheepishly, without mentioning that she had actually fallen for the strapping
Kapitan
, though she refrains from suggesting a similar course as she ponders a possible escape plan. “I've got an idea,” she says, and motions for Trina to follow her into the bathroom as she surreptitiously slips her penknife out of her handbag, telling herself, “I always knew this would come in handy one day.”

“What're you doing?” Trina starts, but Daphne shushes her with a warning look as she turns on the bath taps and flushes the toilet as noisily as she is able. Then she whispers in Trina's ear, “Create a diversion. I want to see what's next door.”

“Let us out, you bastards! We want to leave now,” Trina rages a minute later as she furiously bangs on the handleless steel door with a metal chair, while behind her, Daphne has slipped under one of the beds and is busily working the pointed nose of the penknife's stone remover into the plaster wallboard.

“Please be quiet. You are disturbing our devotions,” the tinny voice of the intercom cautions as Daphne furiously works at creating a hole.

“Let us out, then!” Trina continues shouting. “Let us out! Let us out!” Then she begins kicking.

“Stop that. You may leave in the morning,” says the voice testily as the gravelly-voiced operative desperately scans the monitor looking for Daphne. “Please stop that noise.”

“It's morning already. Let us out. Help! We've been abducted! I'm going to report you,” Trina screeches as she continues kicking.

“Keep going,” Daphne pushes. “I'm getting through.” But although the first layer of wallboard gives easily enough, her digging tool is too short to penetrate beyond the cavity into the wall of the adjacent room. “Bugger,” she mumbles, then she scuttles from under the bed just as the electronic bolt slides back and the door starts to open.

“What seems to be the problem, ladies?” asks a hooded one, pushing Trina roughly back onto the bed, while a bulky figure blocks the doorway behind him.

“We'd like to leave now, please,” says Daphne as she picks up her handbag and stalwartly makes for the door with her head down, but he firmly grabs her as she passes.

“Sorry, ladies. No can do,” he says. “In fact we're going have to ask for your co-operation for a little while longer.”

“How long?” demands Trina, though she gets no answer as their captor holds out his hand and demands their passports.

Bliss and Daisy are also readying their passports as they follow Rick Button north at breakneck speed towards a small border crossing, and Bliss muses, “I hope they don't want to search me again.” But his British passport carries him across unscathed this time, and a smiling face greets him on the Canadian side.

“As soon as I heard you were in town I knew there'd be trouble,” laughs Inspector Mike Phillips with his hand out.

“Hi,” calls Bliss, as he strolls up to the RCMP officer. “How was Hawaii?”

“Hot,” replies Phillips, then his face drops and he spreads his empty hands in a gesture of despondency. “No sign of the women, Dave.”

The Kidneymobile lies in a small woodland clearing just off the main highway, a few miles north of the border, but the sight of tracker dogs showing more interest in sniffing each others' genitals than following a scent tells Bliss a disappointing story.

“What… No tracks at all?” he asks sceptically.

“Deer, elk and bear,” answers one of the dog-handlers. “But nothing worth following.”

“So where did they go?” Bliss asks, but he is faced with a dozen blank stares. “Look,” he says, “Daphne may be a bit flighty, but she isn't Mary Poppins.”

“So what are you suggesting?” asks Phillips, and Bliss looks back over his shoulder.

“I think that we're being given the runaround,” he says, and his point is proven a short while later when he attempts to return, alone, to the States and is curtly informed by a blonde-haired shrimp of a border guard that his visa has been revoked.

“What do you mean?” he screeches in disbelief.

“Just carrying out orders, sir,” says the diminutive woman.

“That's what the extermination camp guards always claimed,” he mumbles under his breath as he uncurls himself from the car to confront her, demanding, “Why has my visa been cancelled?”

“Suspicion of importing illegal drugs, sir,” says the officer, reading from a prepared script, but now she has a backup in the form of a heavyweight wrestler in uniform.

“It was just tea and you know it,” fumes Bliss, refusing to back down. “It was a bag that Miss Lovelace, the missing woman, put into my suitcase because she'd already locked her own.”

“I'm afraid it's not that simple, sir,” the backup man says, and Bliss quickly gets the message as the female officer makes no attempt to disguise the fact that she's lying when she says, “You see, sir, according to this, it was found to contain a quantity of narcotic substance.”

“In that case, arrest me and charge me with illegal possession,” says Bliss, calling her bluff.

“We've considered that, sir, but in the interests of international diplomacy —”

“What do you know about diplomacy?” snorts Bliss, but the officer's impassive face tells him he's wasting his time.

“I want to speak to the British consul, right now,” demands Bliss.

It takes Bliss three hours, some serious arm-twisting by the consul, and the intervention of the governor to get his visa reinstated, and he's grateful that he'd left Daisy holding Rick's hand in Canada while he's forced to suffer the obvious scorn of the immigration officers when they discover that they've been outweighed.

“You'll have to fill out a new application,” the woman officer spits venomously, then she spends ten minutes checking and rechecking every point before announcing that his new visa will expire in just two days. “At midnight following your scheduled appearance at the conference tomorrow,” she says firmly, and though no one says so directly, it's pretty clear that he can expect to be railroaded out of town immediately thereafter.

Trina and Daphne, on the other hand, are going nowhere and are back in the bathroom with the taps running.

“Did you see his face?” asks Trina, talking of the hooded guard. “He had terrible zits,” she says as a voice calls from the intercom in the bedroom.

“Mrs. Button. Miss Lovelace. Please return to the bedroom.”

“I think I'll call him Spotty Dick,” laughs Daphne.

“Well, I'm calling the other one Bumface,” giggles Trina. “He was all pinched and wrinkled, like some of my old patients. But what are we going to do, Daphne?”

“I did a course on captivity survival during the war,” whispers Daphne, and as she sits on the toilet seat in the cramped bathroom she finds herself dusting off sixty-five years of memories to recall the little psychological warfare officer who'd scared the daylights out of her group of wartime volunteers as he'd swaggered his way around the classroom.

“The h'enemy takes comfort from the fact that they h'are h'in total control,” the major had said, scattering aitches through his rapid staccato speech like a gunner firing tracers. “They'll tie you h'up, blindfold you and gag you. H'anything to stop you moving. Movement is a function of human behaviour. The h'idea is to prevent you from h'exhibiting normal human behaviour. It's h'all part of the dehumanization process.”

“At least they haven't tied us up,” says Daphne as the voice on the intercom becomes more belligerent.

“Mrs. Button. Will you please return to the room immediately.”

“The golden rule is to start escaping from the moment you're captured,” says Daphne, ignoring the voice. “Catch ‘em off balance before they've decided what to do.”

“But how?” Trina wants to know as the voice grows angrier.

“Mrs. Button. Return to the room,
now.
”

“It's all about control,” Daphne continues unfazed as she zips through her memories of similar situations. “Once you roll over, they've got you.”

“Mrs. Button. This is your last chance…”

“And try to make eye contact with them whenever you can,” continues Daphne quickly, as she remembers the final part of the officer's lecture.

“They'll avoid h'eye to h'eye contact whenh'ever possible because they ‘ave to go ‘ome to the wife and kiddies at the h'end of the day, and visit dear old granny h'at the weekend. So h'any action what makes you h'appear human makes it more difficult for them to take the final option.” Then he'd dropped his voice to add, “Of course, there's always the vicious little bastard whose idea of fun is to poke out yer eyes with a knitting needle.”

“What do you do in those circumstances, Major?” Daphne had enquired.

“You prays for an ‘eart attack, luv.”

The sound of the electronic bolt sliding back warns them that their time in the bathroom is up, and Spotty Dick wastes no time before thumping on the door.

“Mrs. Button. Come out now!” he shouts.

“What do we do?” whispers Trina.

“Just pretend everything is normal. It shouldn't take David long to find us,” says Daphne as she coolly opens the door and stares directly at their captor, enquiring, “Can I help you, young man?” as if he's an encyclopaedia salesman.

However, nothing is turning out normal for Bliss at Bellingham's police station, where Captain Prudenski has been tipped off by the Customs Service and has no interest in becoming embroiled with a suspected drug dealer.

“I don't think there is anything else I can do for you, sir,” Prudenski declares with a cold eye when Bliss says he wants to revisit the monastery. “The ladies' contraption was found in Canada, so I've no idea why you are even here. Why aren't you searching there?”