Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  Toward what? Toward some destination and purpose of Wellington’s, or toward Peking?

  Lunch in Stockholm, a heavy meal that lay undigested in her stomach for hours afterward. She craved sleep, but she was afraid to go to sleep in the terminal—even if a place could be found for a non-VIP—for fear she would wake up and find Bradford gone again, this time for good.

  But she couldn’t seem to sleep in any of the planes. Bradford took cat-naps or longer snoozes during the flights, but Evelyn’s nerves seemed rubbed raw the entire time she was aboard an airplane, German woman or not.

  The time in Copenhagen, when they arrived, was three-thirty in the afternoon. Evelyn, out of a morbid desire to know just how badly she was faring, had set her watch back to Eastern Standard Time, and it was now nine-thirty in the morning, and she still hadn’t slept.

  The contact at the Copenhagen terminal was a young lady dressed as a stewardess, though it was impossible to tell what airline she was supposed to represent. She handed over the inevitable envelope to Bradford with a plastic stewardessy smile—Evelyn bitterly resented the smile; it made her feel old—and this time the tickets were for an Icelandic Airlines flight to Reykjavik. In Iceland. Leaving at quarter past five, meaning another delay, this one of almost two hours.

  There was no possible meal to eat during this layover, not by anybody’s watch. Bradford found some English-language newspapers and magazines for sale, laid in a supply, and the two of them sat down together unobtrusively on a bench. And now at last Evelyn did get some sleep, fitful and troubled, with her head on Bradford’s shoulder.

  They were traveling, it seemed, in every possible direction. East from Washington to Paris, then north from Paris to Stockholm, then south again from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and now west from Copenhagen to Reykjavik. Was there a purpose for all this? And if there was, was it Wellington’s purpose or Peking’s?

  The flight to Reykjavik took three hours. She had no idea how many time zones they were re-crossing now, she only knew that the short winter period of day was already ended this far north, and that when they circled down over Iceland her watch read shortly after 2:00 P.M. Which meant it was probably five or six o’clock here, and already night.

  Because of the nap she’d managed to take in the Copenhagen terminal, it now belatedly became possible for her to think about her situation and to realize what she should have done. Either in Stockholm or Copenhagen she should have slipped away from Bradford—briefly, the risk would have been worth it—and phoned Edward Lockridge in Paris, telling him where she was and what she knew of the situation, and asking him to pass the word on to Wellington, just in case all of this was not his doing.

  But it had to be his doing, didn’t it? She went over and over the meager evidence she had, clutching at straws because straws were the only things available to her, and the plane circled down over Iceland in darkness.

  She would make the phone call from here, from Reykjavik. Surely there would be another delay, before yet another flight. Where to this time, Shannon, Ireland? Lisbon? Labrador? Wherever it would be, she’d call Edward from here and tell him about it, and at the next stop Wellington could either manage to confirm that this was another of his operations or—if it wasn’t (she prayed it was)—he could arrange for their rescue.

  Except that it didn’t work that way. They got off the plane, into bitter cold, and walked with the rest of the passengers toward the brightly lit terminal building. But suddenly a man in some sort of brown military overcoat, brown leather boots, brown officer’s hat, stepped forward with the by-now-familiar two finger salute to hat brim and said, “Mr. Curtis? Miss Curtis?”

  Evelyn would have said no again, though this time she knew who was meant, but Bradford said, “Yes?”

  “This way, please.”

  A jeeplike vehicle was parked nearby. That is, the front looked like a jeep, but the vehicle was larger, enclosed, and had four doors. It was to this that the man in the brown uniform led them; he held the door open while they got into the back seat, and shut it again behind them.

  Evelyn moved in a state of helplessness and fear. It would do no good to shout now, to try for rescue; the wind was blowing, the other passengers were already moving away, there was a great feeling of emptiness and silence all around them. If these were not Wellington’s people—oh, let them be!—they didn’t yet know she was opposed to them. She should remain silent, and hope for a better opportunity.

  The brown-uniformed man slid behind the wheel and drove them out around the tail of the plane they’d just debarked from and off across an expanse of open concrete. Lights defining the borders of runways and taxiways made an abstract pattern all around, and in their episodic glow she could see low mounds of snow that had been cleared away to the sides.

  A plane was ahead, a medium-sized two-engine jet. She recognized it as the sort of plane owned by large American corporations, a business jet with a speed and range only slightly under those of the large commercial airliners. This one was painted gray—it would be hard to see against a cloudy sky—and except for its required identification numbers on the wings it bore no inscriptions.

  The driver stopped beside the plane and immediately stepped out and opened the rear door, saying, “If you will, please.”

  They got out, Bradford eagerly, Evelyn reluctantly, and the side door of the plane was just opening. A metal set of stairs was lowered, and the driver took Bradford’s arm—in a helpful way, not a menacing way—and escorted him up the stairs and into the plane. Evelyn followed—let this be Wellington, she was thinking, let this be Wellington—and another brown-uniformed man pulled up the steps and shut the door behind her.

  The first man, the one who had driven them here, was saying to Bradford, “We’ll take off almost at once, sir. It will be a fairly long flight, with one, stop-over at Prince Rupert for refueling. For security reasons, I’m afraid you won’t be able to leave the plane there.”

  “I understand perfectly,” Bradford said. He seemed very happy.

  “We’ve arranged things as pleasantly as we possibly can,” the man said. The other man, having shut the door, had departed toward the front of the plane. “As you can see, this is your sitting room or lounge.”

  It looked, Evelyn thought, like the living room of a mobile home, though she had never actually been inside a mobile home. But the clean functionalism of the built-in sofas and tables evoked the comparison, as though the room had been put together by a man whose primary job was designing diner interiors.

  “Now, this way—Mrs. Canby?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “Yes?”

  “This will interest you,” he said. “The galley. You’ll be able to prepare meals for your grandfather and yourself in the course of the trip. We’ve tried to give you as broad a stock of foodstuffs as we could, in the circumstances.”

  The galley was off a narrow corridor which ran toward the tail of the plane from the lounge. On the other side of the corridor, through a brushed chrome door, was what the man called “the latrine.” And at the end of the corridor was a fairly narrow room containing two single beds, one against either side wall, with a vaguely Danish-modern dresser at the rear.

  The man said, “You can arrange your sleeping accommodations however you wish. The one sofa in the lounge converts very readily to a comfortable bed.”

  The floor jerked beneath Evelyn’s feet, and she put a hand out to the sloping side wall to brace herself. The wall vibrated beneath her palm, and she said, “We’re moving!”

  “Yes,” said the man. “Now, we can’t offer you television or radio, not even in-flight films, but we do have—shall we go back to the lounge, Mrs. Canby?”

  She didn’t move till he tentatively touched her elbow, and then she walked obediently back to the lounge and just stood there. Bradford was sitting on a padded chair near a window, looking out with a pleased smile on his face.

  The man said, “Mrs. Canby, it would be better if you sat down during take-off.”
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  “Yes,” she said, and backed into a sofa, and sat down. She watched Bradford’s happy profile as the plane gathered its strength and ran up into the sky.

  v

  A JOUNCE AWOKE HER, and she sat up in the bed, instantly aware of everything that had happened and disgusted with herself for having been able to sleep.

  After the plane had taken off, she had continued to sit there in the lounge for a while, unable any more even to hope that Wellington was responsible for all this. Bradford and the brown-uniformed man—beneath his overcoat he wore a military-type brown jacket, but without insignia—had chatted about advances in aeronautics and similar topics, and when Evelyn reached the point where she was sure she was going to start screaming she forced herself to totter to her feet instead and to say, her voice scratchy and uncertain, “I’m going to take a nap.”

  “Poor girl,” Bradford said, smiling at her, “you haven’t had much sleep, have you? Have a good long rest, I’ll see you later.”

  But she hadn’t expected to sleep. She’d come back here only to let her tautly held nerves do whatever they wanted to do, and what they’d wanted to do, it turned out, was express themselves in weeping. She had, in effect, cried herself to sleep.

  And now a jouncing had awakened her. She looked out the small round window beside the bed, and they were on the ground again. Was it Reykjavik once more? No, it wasn’t, there was more snow and fewer lights; whatever this place was, it was smaller than Reykjavik and probably farther north.

  She got up as the plane taxied toward distant low buildings, and spent a futile time trying to smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. Finally she gave up and moved forward into the corridor.

  There was only a tiny hand-sink in the latrine, so she washed her face and hands at the galley sink and reconstructed her makeup with the aid of the small mirror in her compact. She then looked at her watch, which said seven-thirty. What would that be now, morning or evening? Evening, she thought. Seven-thirty in the evening in Eustace. God alone knew what time it was here, but it had taken nearly six hours to get here.

  She went out to the lounge, and Bradford and the brown-uniformed man were sitting across from one another at one of the built-in tables. There were maps spread out on the table. Bradford looked up cheerfully and said, “They’re refueling. We’ll be here about half an hour.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Come take a look.”

  She sat down beside him, and he showed her on one of the maps, a Mercator projection of the world. They had started from Iceland, in the North Atlantic, and they had flown over Greenland, over Hudson’s Bay and over all of northern Canada. They had now landed at Prince Rupert, a small city on the Pacific coast of Canada, just south, of the Alaskan border. And from here? There was one last lap of the journey to go, approximately as long as the one they’d just completed; when they took off, thirty minutes from now, they would cross the North Pacific, keeping just south of the Aleutians, would turn to a somewhat more southerly course just before reaching the Kamchatka Peninsula (an extension of the Soviet Union), would cross Hokkaido (the northernmost island of Japan) from northeast to southwest, would fly over the Sea of Japan and a segment of North Korea, and then would have a quick run inland over China to Peking. “We’ll be there in seven hours,” Bradford said. He was smiling from ear to ear. “Perhaps six.”

  I’m going to die, Evelyn thought. I am going to scream, and lose my sanity, and die.

  “I’m starved,” Bradford said. “Evelyn? Would you mind?”

  “Not at all,” she said. She got to her feet and went to the galley and began to look over the available foods.

  vi

  THERE WAS NO MORE sleep. There was no more hope. There was no more anything. The plane traveled through high darkness, nothing to be seen outside the window but her own haggard reflection, and she thought, I’ll maneuver Bradford to the doorway, I’ll get the door open, I’ll put my arms around him and push us both out. But she did nothing.

  She could tell when they were over land again at last; occasional lights glittered below. Whether they were so few because it was late at night in China or because there were clouds frequently in the way she couldn’t tell. What time would it be in China now? According to her watch, it was after midnight in Eustace. Unless that was confused, too, unless her watch was trying to tell her that noon had just been passed on the east coast of the United States.

  She couldn’t think any more, she didn’t even want to think any more, and when the plane began at last to circle, when she could feel that they were making their landing approach, she felt nothing but the kind of hollowness, despair, that comes on the heels of a total defeat.

  Airport lights are the same all over the world, strings of white lights intersected by strings of blue or red or amber, all making a non-representational pattern in the dark.

  The pattern rushed suddenly closer, the plane bumped, it hurtled along the runway and gradually slowed.

  There were low buildings far away across the strings of lights, but the plane didn’t move in that direction. Nose high, wings cumbersomely spread, it walked the other way instead, toward the outer edge of the pattern of lights, where there was nothing but darkness.

  The man in the brown uniform was saying, “You understand, of course, that you’ll have to be under total security for at least the time being. The United States government undoubtedly knows by now that you managed to elude them, and I doubt they’ll waste any time dispatching assassination teams.”

  “That’s unfortunately true, I suppose,” Bradford said. He looked momentarily grim, but then brightened. “But we hope to be able to change all that eventually, don’t we?”

  “Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said soberly.

  “We can put up with a little inconvenience meantime,” Bradford said.

  The plane came to a stop. The other man reappeared from the front of the plane, and opened the door. He put the metal steps out, and turned to extend his hand toward Bradford’s and say, “I want you to know I’m proud to have had a part in this, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Bradford said, smiling, shaking his hand, while Evelyn thought, Proud? To turn against your own country, your own people?

  They stepped down out of the plane, Bradford first, Evelyn behind him, and she was suddenly reminded of that other plane ride at the beginning of all this, when they had flown together to California, when they had arrived at Harrison’s fake little town in a business jet very like this one (but somewhat smaller, and much less elaborately laid out), and Bradford had gone out to sunlight and scattered cheers and his first cerebral attack. A poster-bedecked hansom cab had been waiting for them that time, at the foot of the steps.

  This time? A black truck, its windowless rear doors open. And half a dozen uniformed Chinese soldiers, bulky in their quilt like coats, carrying rifles in their hands.

  The chill that Evelyn felt had nothing to do with the breeze that came through her cloth coat.

  They went out onto the blacktop, and a Chinese officer, an older man with no rifle in his hands, came forward to welcome Bradford, in heavily distorted English, to the People’s Republic. Bradford rose to the formality of the gesture—Evelyn was reminded again of the California trip, and how Bradford then had treated a small scattered disinterested crowd as though it were a mob of thousands—and when the officer apologized for the nature of the transport they were asking him to accept, Bradford assured him he understood the security problems involved in his arrival and would cooperate in every way he could. And then he got into the truck.

  Evelyn hung back. She hung back so long that the smiling officer, his hand politely extended to assist her, began to look puzzled. “You are not feeling well?”

  They mustn’t know what I really think, she told herself. There will still be something I can do, somewhere, sometime. “I’m fine,” she told the officer, and even managed a smile. “The trip has left me a little groggy, I think.”

 
; “Yes, of course. Very comfortable quarters coming, I promise.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and took his hand, and stepped up into the truck.

  A kind of sofa was fixed on one side of the interior, so that anyone sitting on it would be facing sideways. There were no windows, but there was a dim light bulb in a fixture in the roof. Evelyn sat down beside Bradford, the door was closed from outside, and a second later the truck jolted forward.

  Bradford put a hand on Evelyn’s forearm. “Don’t be nervous. They know we want to be their friends.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  vii

  THEY HADN’T BEEN TOLD how long the truck ride would take, but it was just an hour by Evelyn’s watch—from one-forty to two-forty, Eustace time—when the truck stopped, backed up, stopped again, and they heard the engine switch off.

  Bradford too had started to get nervous as the truck had gone on and on; he hadn’t said anything, but Evelyn hadn’t needed words, she could tell by the way he sat hunched beside her, by the expression on his face in the dim light inside the truck.

  But the instant the truck stopped he became cheerful and optimistic again, sitting up straighter, saying, “Well, here we are.” And the doors opened.

  More Chinese soldiers, or perhaps the same ones. The same officer, in any case. He helped Evelyn out onto bare ground, and she looked around to see that they were in some sort of wooded area, but with a low pale building directly in front of them.

  “This way,” the officer said, and Bradford took Evelyn’s arm and walked with her behind the officer as he led the way into the building.

  Inside, it seemed to be virtually nothing but a fluorescent-lighted corridor, with rooms leading off it on one side only. All the doors were shut, but the officer opened one, and inside was a narrow elevator.