Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. (29 page)

“I know!” she says, and seconds later she has upended her bed and is making a flamboyant show of dismantling the metal frame using a table knife.

“I thought so,” muses Daphne a few minutes later when there is no reaction from the guards. “Give me the knife,” she says, and she makes her way to the door and starts sawing through the adjacent wall. “If we can get to the door-lock control panel we should be able to create a short circuit,” she explains as she hacks away lumps of plasterboard.

“How do you know all this stuff?” asks Trina incredulously.

“I've been very lucky,” Daphne laughs. “I've never had a husband.” Then she turns to the younger woman. “You used to kick-box, didn't you?”

“Yes. I still do.”

“Okay,” says Daphne, already feeling a glow of victory as she digs deeper into the wall and strikes the electronic locking mechanism. “It's time we took the upper hand. This time we'll go out fighting.”

“That's about it, sir,” says Dawson, arriving back at the surveillance room after leading Station Chief Montague in an innocuous circle. Then the security head smiles as he adds in relief, “See, no little green men. Just like I told you.”

“It's not the green ones I'm worried about, John,” says Montague, refusing to be humoured, and he takes another thoughtful look at the patients on the surveillance monitors, wondering why he'd not bumped into any during his tour. “Just how many inmates do you have here, precisely?”

“You make them sound like prisoners,” laughs Dawson. “Look at them,” he adds, tapping a screen where the happy-faced mah-jongg players are bantering over their play. “They're all very willing volunteers.”

“Then why all the razor wire and armed goons?”

“The place is like a concentration camp,” Bliss warns his Canadian counterpart as they turn off the highway and drive the forested road into the foothills.

“Another reason why I still think we should ask the locals for help,” answers Phillips.

“Mike!” exclaims Bliss in exasperation. “I already tried that — remember? — and all I got was the bum's rush. Anyway, now that we've nicked a CIA motor, Prudenski and his mob wouldn't need an excuse to bang us up.”

“We've only borrowed it, Dave,” Phillips reminds him. “But I still don't see how we're going to get in.”

“We'll just have to keep our heads down,” replies Bliss. However, he's praying that the transponder stuck to the windshield will open the gates and clear a path through the minefield of tire shredders and armed guards, although he does have an insurance policy. “Pull over there,” he says to Phillips as he spots the bar where he'd met the amused woodsman the night the Kidneymobile disappeared.

“Give us exactly two hours,” he tells Daisy as he settles her in the saloon with a coffee and he hands her a list of phone numbers headed by those of CNN, the CBC and the BBC that he'd had Phillips draw up before leaving the border. “If we're not back, call Roger Cranley and the television people first,” he tells her. “Then call the British and Canadian embassies in Washington.”

“
Daavid,
” she says worriedly. “Please be careful.”

“I will…” he starts, but she grabs his shirt and hauls him to her lips.

“
Daavid,
” she whispers, barely breaking her kiss.

“Yes…” he sighs as he drinks in the sweet warmth of her breath.

“Please throw zhat jacket away.”

Martin Montague is on his way out through the front doors, although he's still uneasy with the spotty information he's received and the fact that, despite his desire to talk to patients and staff, Dawson has managed to
head him off with darkly worded admonitions about the need for secrecy.

“I hope for your sake that this place is on the level,” Montague says in a final warning as Dawson begins to close the door on him. But then the visitor stops and peers downs a lengthy corridor lined with closed doors. “What's down there?” he questions. “You didn't take me down there.”

“It's just patients' rooms,” shrugs Dawson. “You saw them on the monitors.”

“Show me,” insists Montague, turning down the hallway.

“Sorry — I can't,” explains Dawson, pointing to the security keypad by the side of each door. “I don't have the codes. And we could jeopardize an entire program if we introduced a virus.”

“Yeah, right,” says Montague, but he keeps walking anyway.

The true extent of Daphne Lovelace's electrical engineering experience may be the replacement of a blown fuse in the cupboard under the stairs of her tidy house in Westchester, but she is undaunted as she beavers away at the wallboard until she has exposed all of the wires.

“Now what?” whispers Tina as she leans over the elderly saboteur's shoulder and peers at the myriad of coloured strands snaking to and from the control unit to various locks and sensors.

“It's very interesting,” says Daphne, as if she knows exactly what she's looking at and merely needs a moment to decide what action will best achieve the desired outcome.

“You
do
know about these things?” questions Trina, with a touch of concern.

“Oh, yes, of course,” lies Daphne, then she confidently wriggles a bunch of the wires, adding, “I learnt how to defuse land mines and make fertilizer bombs during the war, you know.”

“Wow!” says Trina, taking a step backwards as if expecting the panel to explode.

However, the computer-controlled electronic sensing and locking mechanism is a world away from the primitive devices Daphne had worked on during her training as a resistance fighter in 1942, and even with an instruction manual she would have difficulty sorting out the multitude of wires.

“When in doubt…” she muses to herself, then firmly grasps half a dozen wires and calls to Trina, “Are you ready?”

“I think so,” says the other woman, as she limbers up with a few high kicks.

“Okay,” says Daphne with her eyes closed and her grip tightening. “Get ready.”

The sound of a lock clicking open spins Montague towards the women's door. He turns just as the door flies open, and Trina lets out a scream as she kick-boxes her way into the corridor.

“What the —” starts Montague, but he is totally off-guard as Trina leaps into the air and slams a foot into his face.

“Oh, Christ,” mutters Dawson as he bends to help his falling comrade, but Daphne is also in fighting mode. She rushes out of the room and slams him over the head with a chair.

“Run, Trina!” yells Daphne, but Montague's beefy henchman acts as a backstop and, with the element of surprise gone, the two women are powerless.

“Okay… So, shall we start again, Mr. Dawson?” says Montague with twists of blood-soaked Kleenex stopping up his nose.

Resigned, Dawson deflates into his chair in the surveillance room. “Yes. All right.”

“What the hell were you planning on doing with them?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?!” screeches Montague.

“All right — we were going to liquidate them,” admits Dawson.

“Brilliant strategy,” scoffs Montague. “No wonder half the world thinks we're a bunch of cowboys.”

“Look, sir. We screwed up, okay? But we had it under control until that English cop slipped his leash and started mouthing off to the press.”

“Anything can happen when an agent goes rogue,” agrees Montague, though he has his eyes on Dawson, not Bliss.

“Maybe we could do a deal with them — get them to sign something and let them go,” suggests Dawson, brightening.

“You might have been able to in the first few hours. You should have just put them in a car and driven them to a hotel.”

“I know that
now,
” cries Dawson. “The trouble was that the old bird caught on right away.”

The shrill ringing of the hotline from the gatehouse alerts Dawson to the possibility of more bad news, and he is tempted to let it go, but Montague picks up the phone and hands it to him, then watches the junior man's reaction.

“Well?” asks Montague when Dawson has taken the brief call.

“It's nothing, sir,” he says, controlling his face.

“Just one of our delivery drivers hasn't reported in on schedule, that's all. His van's probably broken down.”

Buzzer's van appears to be working perfectly, though Bliss and Phillips are unaware of the radio protocol that the CIA operative would have followed had he still been with his vehicle.

“It's only about a mile from here,” says Bliss as he pulls off the road into a clearing from whence they can finalize their assault. “I just hope that Daisy doesn't jump the gun.”

“She seems pretty sensible,” says Phillips, trying to ease the tension.

“The best I've ever met,” admits Bliss. “And if I get out of this mess in one piece — well, who knows.”

“So. How do we get out?” questions Phillips, hoping Bliss has a plan, but beyond slipping through the gates in Buzzer's guise, Bliss is as much in the dark as his colleague.

“We'll just have to play it by ear,” he replies. “I'm just hoping that they rely on the perimeter defences for security. Once we're inside, we should be safe.”

“Until we try to get out,” adds Phillips ominously.

“Oh, well. Here goes,” says Bliss, turning the key. But nothing happens.

“Shit!” he mutters, and both men immediately know the problem.

“It's got an ignition cut-out switch,” suggests Phillips, and he's not at all surprised when, milliseconds later, a piercing security alarm sends a murder of raucous crows into the air above the surrounding forest.

Half an hour later the two detectives are still tinkering under the hood of the van, while, not far away, Daphne
and Trina have been elevated to a new world. Dawson has squeezed a gathering of surgeons out of their private lounge, and, while Montague's right-hand man might be standing sentinel at the door, the station chief is, in his own words to the women, “determined to establish who is responsible for this unfortunate situation, and taking every possible step to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion as soon as circumstances permit.”

“That was a mouthful,” Daphne had muttered under her breath as Montague left.

“I wish I hadn't kicked him so hard now,” says Trina as she tucks into a plate of smoked-salmon sandwiches. “He looked kind'a pathetic with that tissue stuck up his nose.”

“Well, I wish I'd hit the other one a damn sight harder,” confesses Daphne.

It may be nearing midnight Friday across the Atlantic in London, but Montague is high enough up the ladder to have yanked a U.S. Embassy cultural attaché out of a West End strip club. The man, a CIA plant with more connections than the Internet, had only taken minutes to report back.

“What do they know about her?” asks Dawson, once Montague has put down the phone.

“You're not going to like this,” says Montague, and Dawson's headache worsens when he discovers that, thanks to Bliss's outburst at the morning press conference, Daphne has taken on celebrity status. “Apparently, she's some kind of hero.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you idiot. That woman you and your clowns locked up has the Order of the British Empire for intelligence work.”

“Christ! She must be at least eighty.”

“Maybe nearer ninety, from what I hear. But don't knock it. She's the one who infiltrated your supposedly impenetrable establishment.”

“Yeah, but —”

“And disabled a sophisticated security system.”

“Okay. But who the hell is she?”

“She was some kind of special agent during the Cold War.”

Dawson exhales a breath of deep understanding. “So that's how she got Allan eating out of her hand.”

“Allan?” questions Montague, still ignorant of another agent's involvement.

“One of the guards,” says Dawson, sloughing off his injured junior without explanation.

“Let's face it, John, the fact you were taken by a geriatric foreign agent is not gonna look good in your annual report.”

However, his annual report is the least of Dawson's concerns. “Look, sir. Can't we keep this quiet?”

Montague gives Dawson a cagey look, and leads him sideways. “And how would you propose to do that, John?”

“There are drugs…” he starts, and Montague plays along.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Just enough to screw their memories up. Then we could ditch them in the forest somewhere. What d'ye think?”

“I think you need some psychological adjustment, mister. Now, do they know what you're doing here?”

“They guessed —”

“No. You're not listening to me,” warns Montague. “Do they know?”

“No… not as far as I know. Not specifically.”

“Good,” says Montague, starting to rise. “In that case, have my man get my car. We'll take the ladies home.”

“You can't —”

“Mr. Dawson, I don't have the authority to relieve you of duty…” starts Montague, eyeing the junior man fiercely. “But I'm certainly authorized to shoot you as a dangerous lunatic. So I suggest you get my car.”

“But they'll talk.”

“Well, I'm gonna ask them real nice on behalf of the president not to. But then I'm coming back for a discussion with you. By which time, I'm sure you'll have some answers —
capisce?
”

“Got it,” says Phillips, having rewired half of the van's ignition system, and the engine bursts into life as Bliss turns the key.

“Thank God for that,” mutters Bliss, then he checks his watch. “We've still got nearly an hour before Daisy starts phoning.”

“We'd better get moving, then,” says Phillips as he slams the hood and leaps into the passenger seat. “Although I still think we must be crazy.”