Talons of the Falcon

by Rebecca York

  First she did a global search that would pull out references to psychological literature on brainwashing, torture and hostages. After saving the reference material to a file, she began drafting what looked like an innocuous message to the author of one of the articles. However, its destination was an electronic mailbox that could only be accessed from the Aviary.

  She and the Falcon had agreed that certain signals would be embedded in the messages. The word clarification, for example, would indicate the start of her real communication. Any reference to treatment or treated would actually refer to herself. The word patient would be a code word for Mark.

  Eden had put considerable time into composing her initial message. She wanted desperately to ask about Walker. But there were no agreed-upon code words for the purpose.

  She began to type.

  Dear Dr. Goldstein, I read with interest your discussion of conversion reactions among returning hostages. There are a few points I would appreciate some clarification on:

  1. Do any of the subjects you have treated still feel their life is being threatened in bizarre ways?

  2. How do you deal with patients who are almost completely uncommunicative?

  3. What do you do when treatment time must be limited by major complications?

  “Major complications” were, of course, Maj. Ross Downing.

  Eden shot a quick glance toward the other computer terminal. Yolanski appeared to be editing his text.

  Quickly she risked one final question, knowing that anyone who looked over her shoulder might wonder about the odd capitalization in the text.

  4. What are the additional problems involved when a patient is confined to a Wheelchair or needs to use a Walker?

  She had no idea whether the Falcon would be able to decipher that last bit of subterfuge. But at least she had to make the attempt.

  Eden also wanted to ask what to do when the record—read: Falcon—has omitted certain important facts about the patient’s history. But Yolanski had begun stacking his papers. Quickly she keyed in the sequence that would send the message to the Aviary.

  Yolanski stood up and ambled in her direction. “Find anything interesting?” While the question was innocuous enough, the look he gave her was assessing.

  “Oh, quite a bit. I’m going to ask for the full text on a couple of these,” she returned, striving to keep any sign of nervousness out of her voice. “I assume I’ll be able to browse through them tomorrow on-line.”

  As Eden walked back toward the main house, she sighed. Probably she’d gotten her messages across, but she found no satisfaction in the one-way monologue. She longed to be able to discuss her concerns and fears with someone. But there was no one here she could trust.

  Ross Downing, she knew, would have jumped at the chance to hear her inner debates. But that was simply too dangerous. She couldn’t even ask what progress he was making on the damn hair dryer investigation.

  The whole incident was making her imagination run wild. Did someone know the real reason why she was on Pine Island? Or was just the eventuality of bringing Mark Bradley out of his unresponsive state so threatening that it called for drastic measures? Had one of the men here actually tried to kill her? Was she simply being warned? Or had someone tried to throw her off-balance so that she wouldn’t be able to work effectively with her patient? She wasn’t even able to discount the possibility that Walker, under orders from Downing, had lied about the hair dryer in order to observe her reaction.

  It didn’t help that the coded message she received the next day from the Falcon was disappointing. He simply acknowledged the receipt of her communiqué and mentioned that he’d be sending along draft copies of some pertinent papers over the next few days. There was no mention of Walker.

  Eden had hoped for a lot more. She had never felt more alone than when she switched off the terminal for the second time. But she was here for the duration. If she had to rely on her own resources, so be it. She couldn’t afford to let uncertainty drive her crazy. So she turned her thoughts and efforts to her primary mission—Mark Bradley.

  The patient, however, like everyone else at Pine Island, was doing nothing to make her mission easy. At the first session after Marshall had held them at gunpoint, she’d tried to get some reaction from Mark.

  “I was frightened,” she began, letting him hear her own vulnerability. “How did it make you feel?”

  She saw his lips draw together in a thin line, but he didn’t answer.

  She tried again. “Have you ever been in a situation like that before?”

  She watched as he settled his dark gaze on a point somewhere behind her head. She had the impression that he was tuning her out completely, as though he had mentally switched off a television broadcast.

  It was no better at the next session, or the next. Even though she was seeing him twice a day, once before his morning physical therapy and again in the late afternoon, she was making virtually no progress. Techniques that had worked in other cases got her nowhere with Mark. No matter what verbal tack she took, he refused to do more than passively listen. Sometimes there was no indication that he was even aware of her physical presence in the room.

  She tried springing random questions on him. “Did you ever have a dog when you were a boy?” she asked one afternoon. Long ago, in another life, they’d talked about their childhood pets. She’d made him laugh with stories about the succession of alley cats she and her brother had adopted. He’d told her about his family’s dogs. His favorite, a golden retriever named Ginger, had been run over on the morning of his tenth birthday. He had canceled his party and spent the day at the vet’s. In the afternoon he’d helped make the decision to put the animal to sleep. The puppy his father had brought him the next week had never quite replaced Ginger in his heart.

  Now his fingers worried at the place where his class ring had been, but beyond that he gave no indication that her question had any personal meaning.

  “So what about your friends?” she tried the next morning. “Are there any you wish you could talk to now?” Again she remembered vividly the stories he’d told about Jerry Jennings and the feeling of bucking the crowd the two of them had experienced back at Ohio State. They’d been in ROTC together in the days of campus protests against the war. And it had almost been a relief to graduate and go into the service, where most people had respect for the uniform.

  Apparently Mark Bradley didn’t want to—or couldn’t—share those memories with her. Despite herself his resistance made her angry and frustrated. She had promised Downing a psychological report in ten days. Was she going to have to make the whole thing up?

  Maybe she could simply turn in a statement of her own reactions to the patient. She had certainly spent enough time staring at him.

  At first the scars and the silver hair at his temples had been a shock. But as she’d become accustomed to the changes, she had to admit that she was fascinated—perhaps obsessed—by the new Mark Bradley. The lingering traces of his injuries only added to the air of danger and mystery that clung to his silent presence. But it was more than that. While he said nothing, it was as though he impelled her to be conscious of him as a man.

  She told herself that she was simply looking for evidence to verify his identity. But that really couldn’t justify all the time she spent studying the dark eyes fringed with thick lashes, the firm yet cynical line of his lips, the rigid profile, the strong jaw that still threatened to dominate his face.

  Outside of therapy hours she continued to be haunted by him, but that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, she was living right next door to him. Through the bathroom door she heard Marshall get Mark up in the morning and help him into the shower. Late at night, as she hovered between waking and sleep, the edges of fact and recollection would blur. Her mind would fill with warm memories of an ardent, responsive Mark Bradley, and she would long to feel his arms around her. More than once she awoke from sleep knowing that in her dreams she had crossed the short distance that separated
them.

  By the end of the week her daytime exasperation made her feel as though she were going to explode. Ironically, she was beginning to understand some of Major Downing’s irritation. In a month of concentrated effort, he hadn’t been able to pry a thing out of Mark Bradley. And she could see why. The man who sat so calmly in front of her had an iron control over his immediate environment. The harder you pressed him, the more he was able to exercise his will against you.

  “What is it going to take to get you to cooperate with me?” she questioned, barely able to keep a very unprofessional edge of annoyance out of her voice. If she were the kind of person who relieved tension by swearing, she would be turning the air blue by now. Jumping up from the chair she had been occupying for the past half hour, she began to pace back and forth. But her patient was too busy playing statue to notice her agitation.

  “You’re afraid of making contact with another human being, aren’t you?” she goaded, aware as she spoke that her words would probably garner no more response than Marshall’s taunting gibes. “You don’t trust anyone, do you? But you’ve got to start somewhere or you’re going to destroy yourself.”

  Still the figure in the easy chair remained silent. Eden felt something inside her chest tighten painfully. She wanted to pour out a torrent of assurances that he could trust her. She wanted to explain that the Falcon had sent her here to get him out of this mess. She couldn’t offer that frank an explanation yet. There had to be another way to get through to him.

  Crossing the room, she knelt before Mark as she had that first day. For a long moment she searched his face. Then, before she could change her mind, she reached out and covered his hand with hers.

  His skin was warm and dry. Now that she was so close to him, she was suddenly aware of the clean smell of soap and water mingled with the indefinably masculine scent of his body. All at once she was forced to ask herself whether she had made this contact for her patient or for herself—or for both of them.

  Closing her eyes, she stroked her fingers along the back of his hand, feeling the ridge where a line of recently healed scar tissue met normal skin. It was another reminder of the ordeal he had gone through, and how he was coping with the aftermath.

  “Mark,” she whispered. “Mark, please let me in, let me get through to you.” And then, clasping his hand more tightly, she lifted it and pressed it against her cheek. She had told herself she was making a bid for his trust, just as she would with any former captive. But the emotions involved were infinitely more complex.

  She hadn’t known what would happen, but she hadn’t been prepared to feel the hand she held against her cheek tremble slightly. For several heartbeats the man in front of her didn’t move, and she sensed some inner struggle raging within him. Then, finally, his fingers began to move against the soft skin of her face. He might have been a blind man memorizing her features, except that the stroking caress held a much more sensual quality.

  Eyes still closed against the harsh reality of her surroundings, Eden swayed forward slightly.

  “Eden.” Her name was the barest of whispers. But she heard, and her heart leapt inside her chest. When two of Mark’s fingers found her lips and traced slowly along the upper curve, she trembled with reaction. From someone else, it could have been a small acknowledgment of their past. From this man, it might be everything. Moving her head slightly she kissed his fingertips.

  The gesture seemed to bring him back to the here and now. As though the pads of his fingers had been burned by her lips, he snatched his hand away.

  At the sudden movement, Eden’s eyes snapped open. For a dizzy moment, she found herself trapped in the intensity of Mark Bradley’s midnight gaze, and she had to steady herself with one hand on his knee to keep from falling forward. Need, anguish, confusion and anger all seemed to battle in the ebony depths of his eyes. And then, as on that first day in the hall, those eyes seemed to close her off as though a heavy drapery had been drawn across his emotions.

  * * *

  IF THE INCIDENT had been disturbing to Eden, it was far worse for her patient. That night, after Marshall had finally left him alone, his thoughts went back to what had happened in the therapy session that afternoon. In a way he had been waiting an eternity for somebody to come and tell him whether or not he was Lt. Col. Mark Bradley. And now that someone had arrived who might be able to do that, he was terrified.

  He fought the emotion with the iron will that had kept him going all these months through the physical agony and the interrogations—and the terrible uncertainty. But it wasn’t enough anymore. Before Eden had come to Pine Island, something inside him had been cold and lifeless, as though he were apart from the rest of humanity. A normal man would have felt buried alive. He had simply been relieved that he could cut himself off from the grim reality of his situation. That bastard Downing had brought in all his artillery. But he had held him off. And Marshall’s cunning little tortures? He hadn’t succumbed to them either. He had them all beat. Until some clever SOB had thought to bring in Eden Sommers.

  She had meant something to Mark Bradley. After the initial shock of her arrival, he had tried to tell himself she meant nothing to him. But the very act of denial had been the first chink in his carefully constructed armor. His memories of Eden were too warm, too vivid, too full of longing to be denied.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head violently, as though that would dispel the betraying images from his mind. They were no comfort. Like a rodent circling an exercise wheel, his thoughts kept coming back to a science-fiction movie he had seen called Blade Runner. It was about artificial human beings—androids who had been cheated out of both a past and a future by their makers. But one of them, a beautiful young woman named Rachel, had been given synthetic memories of childhood. They were so tangible and vivid that she had thought they were the truth.

  In a way he was like Rachel. The memories were there. But did he have a right to them? Did they belong to him—or to a dead man?

  Chapter Five

  The day of reckoning had arrived. But judgment would have to wait for Maj. Ross Downing, and he was late.

  Though Eden sat quietly across the table from the rest of the security team—Price, Walker and Yolanski—her mind was anything but calm. She had half expected—dreaded, actually—that Dr. Hubbard would be present for her little performance. But luck was apparently on her side. The man who was best able to see through her trumped-up report was conspicuously absent.

  To keep from thinking about the trial by fire ahead, she reviewed her assessments of the three men who waited with her. Though she’d kept her dealings with them coolly professional, over the past week and a half she had gotten to know them a bit better.

  Lieutenant Price was a yes-man, an extension of his commanding officer. She’d bet that he didn’t have a thought—official or otherwise—that hadn’t been filtered down through the chain of command. Even his knit polo shirts were the same brand as Downing’s. Probably if he’d thought he could get away with dyeing his light brown hair blond, he would have. He seemed to be into physical fitness, Eden noted. Despite the muggy Georgia heat, she’d often seen him doggedly jogging along the beach, or completing lap after lap in the once-elegant swimming pool.

  Yolanski was decidedly less athletic. Eden had become accustomed to seeing him relaxing during off-duty hours in the garden with a book from the library in the main house. His reading interests seemed to range from detective fiction and computer manuals to chess puzzles.

  Walker, the lone black man at the facility, seemed to fit in least well. She’d sensed his discomfort in the hair dryer inquisition with Downing. The impression had only grown stronger as she’d gotten to know him better. Next to the chief of station, he was probably the most intelligent of the security staff. But Eden noted that he was always quick to defer to the others when a point of discussion came up, even though he didn’t seem to approve of this particular assignment.

  Eden had learned that he came from a Georgia
sharecropper family. Apparently the air force had been a way to escape the poverty of his background. And he wasn’t going to take any chances by incurring any demerits on this billet.

  Her thoughts were interrupted as Major Downing opened the door and took his seat at the head of the table.

  “So what is your psychological evaluation of Colonel Bradley?” he asked, getting right down to business.

  Eden had carefully rehearsed her answer to the question. There was no way she was going to discuss the afternoon when she had, for a few minutes, forged a very meaningful bond with Mark. And for that matter, she wasn’t going to mention what had happened after that, about the way he had shut her off again. If anything, after that brief but intense encounter, her patient had become even more resistant to her efforts to get through to him. But she had learned to look for subtle clues to his inner feelings in the way he sat, the way he held his hands, the way he handled eye contact. And she could tell that his control was being stretched to the limit. It seemed to take more and more effort for him to remain indifferent.

  Opening her notebook, Eden glanced down at the detailed evaluation she’d prepared over the past few days. It sounded plausible, but in actuality it was made up of half-truths, evasions and more than a few prevarications.

  In the first place, what Eden thought she’d learned about Mark wasn’t verifiable in any measurable sense. She simply had a set of feelings and impressions that wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. And more important, she didn’t want to share with Downing what she had learned about Mark’s iron control.

  Yet she knew she was walking a tightrope. She had to hold out hope that she could help the security team get what they needed.

  “Well, I’ve identified a number of Colonel Bradley’s problems,” she began. “He’s definitely paranoid, but not entirely without justification. And he’s suffering from the severe depression one would expect after an experience like this.”