Kaznakov was on his feet now, writhing, banging me against the wall, struggling to get me off his back. I grabbed his shirt collar and yanked; the shirt and jacket tore open. Still gripping his midsection with my legs, I pulled the pin on the grenade and dropped it down the back of his shirt. Then I jumped off and started hobbling toward the door where I'd come in. When I didn't hear footsteps behind me, I stopped and looked back.
Kaznakov was standing where I'd left him, a dazed expression on his face as it slowly dawned on him that there was a live grenade inside his shirt. He began to dance and claw at his shirt and jacket, trying to get at the small, deadly sphere that was ticking against his flesh. But he knew he was finished; at the last moment he stopped his wild dancing and stared at me. I thought I saw tears in his eyes.
A fountain of flame suddenly shot up from his back. There was a loud whooshing noise, and Kaznakov, without a sound, disappeared into that red fountain. He stayed on his feet a few more seconds, the shadowy outline of a giant petal in a huge crimson flower that was spreading through the corridor; then he sank down. The air was filled with the stench of gasoline and roasting human flesh.
I ran for the exit, pushed through the door, and froze.
Someone was racing up the stairs. I had no gun and no place to hide. I backed up against the wall of the stairwell and crouched, ready to spring if I ever got the chance. The man rounded the bend in the stairs just below me.
"Tal!"
Tal stopped and looked up at me. There was blood streaming from both his nostrils, bright crimson stains on flesh the color of chalk. He swiped at the blood with the back of his hand, then yelled at me. I couldn't hear him above the din of the alarm bell, but I could read his lips: "Follow me! Hurry!"
I scrambled off the landing and down the stairs after Tal. Despite the beating I'd taken, I felt vital and alive, powered by a terrible excitement: I'd killed Kaznakov.
We met Lippitt, his gun drawn, between the first and second landings. His eyes were wide, face flushed. "What the hell?" he shouted at Tal. "I was only gone a minute! How the hell did you get in?"
"The door must have opened automatically when the fire alarm went off!" Tal shouted back. "I just pushed on it and it opened!"
"Why didn't you wait for me?" Lippitt demanded.
"No time! There's no time now! Every second counts!"
Lippitt nodded curtly, turned, and led the way down toward the basement. He paused in front of the basement door.
Tal stepped forward. "Wait here," he said.
"No," Lippitt said. He was looking at Tal suspiciously. "I go where you go."
Tal glanced at me. "Will you wait here, Mongo?" There was a note of impatience in his voice. "Fire or no fire, there'll probably still be a guard standing in front of the Fosters' room. I may be able to bluff him, but certainly not if you're along."
I nodded. What Tal said made sense. Still, Lippitt was right on Tal's heels as they went through the basement door. I waited ten seconds, then pushed the door open a few inches and peered down the corridor. The hallway looked the same as the one on the third floor-except that there was a guard standing in front of a door fifty feet down the hall in these, the "living quarters" indicated on the schematics.
Tal walked quickly, with an air of absolute assurance, even when the guard raised his rifle and challenged him. Lippitt was walking a few feet behind Tal, using the taller man's body to shield the automatic in his hand.
Tal spoke rapidly to the guard, in fluent Russian. I felt a little chill up my spine. I could understand Lippitt's sudden nervousness. The discussion quickly degenerated into an argument, with Tal maintaining, from what I could gather from his hand gestures, that the Fosters would have to be taken out of the room because of the fire. The guard was apparently insisting that Tal and Lippitt produce some kind of credentials. Tal made a show of going through his pockets while Lippitt ended the discussion by hitting the guard over the head with the butt of his gun.
Lippitt immediately went to his knees in front of the door and began to pick the lock. I pushed through the door and ran down the hall, arriving just as Lippitt finished his work and opened the door.
The Fosters were standing in the middle of the room. Mike Foster had his arms wrapped tightly around his wife. Both were still in their nightclothes. "Mongo!" Foster shouted when he saw me. "Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!"
Something in Foster's voice caused his wife to push his arms away from her shoulders. She turned slowly to look at us. Elizabeth Foster was a beautiful woman, even without makeup and numbed by sleep. But now her thin lips were compressed by terror, her violet eyes muddy with shock. She gasped when she saw Lippitt.
"You!"
"Hello, Mrs. Foster," Lippitt said softly.
Foster's mouth opened and closed without making a sound. He kept staring at me, as if he couldn't believe I was there. I knew how he felt.
"Let's go," Lippitt said.
It was Tal who led the way out. "This way," he said, turning to his right and motioning for us to follow.
Lippitt abruptly stopped in the doorway, blocking our way. I watched the gun in his hand swing up and point at Tal. "Hold it," Lippitt said. "That's not the way out. We go out the way we came in. That's the plan!"
Tal's eyes flashed angrily. "We can't make it that way, Lippitt. They'll be waiting for us! You tripped an alarm when you opened the door."
"How the hell do you know that?"
"Look at the doorjamb!"
Lippitt and I looked in the direction where Tal pointed; there was a thin, almost invisible wire running the length of the jamb.
Lippitt hesitated. "The way you want to go leads right up to the lobby; there'll be a lot of firepower there."
"There'll be more at the other exits," Tal replied. "It's our only chance; the last place they'll expect us to show up is the main entrance! Think, man!"
Lippitt's gun was still firmly pointed at Tal's chest. "You know too goddamned much about this place to suit me," Lippitt said tensely.
Foster turned to me. "Who do we follow, Mongo?"
"Tal," I said quickly, without really knowing why.
Ignoring Lippitt's gun, Foster brushed past me and pushed the agent to one side. Gripping his wife's hand firmly, he started after Tal, who was already walking toward the open stairway at the far end of the corridor. Lippitt and I exchanged glances.
"You'd better have guessed right, Frederickson," Lippitt said ominously. His gun started to swing around, stopped just short of my forehead.
There didn't seem to be much sense in stopping to argue the point, so I ducked under the gun and started after Tal and the Fosters. Lippitt's footsteps came up quickly from behind me as a contingent of guards suddenly appeared on the stairs just above us. Tal grabbed the Fosters and pulled them to the floor while Lippitt squeezed three quick shots over our heads. The three men fell dead, each with a bullet hole placed precisely in the middle of his forehead.
As Elizabeth Foster started to scream and tremble, her husband scooped her up in his arms and ran up the stairs after Tal. Lippitt followed, and after grabbing a pistol from one of the dead guards, I brought up the rear. I almost bumped into Lippitt as I rounded a curve in the stairs. Tal, Lippitt, and the Fosters were crouched down, backs against the wall, while someone poured shots down the stairwell.
"Two of them," Lippitt barked. "Machine pistols. They've spotted us!"
I was still filled with the giddy, drunken feeling I'd been carrying with me since I'd left Kaznakov's charred, crackling corpse up on the third floor. I lunged up the stairs, leaped, twisted in the air, and pulled the trigger on my own gun. I fired blindly, both hands on the weapon. It must have been a red-letter day on my astrological chart, because I knew even before I landed hard on my back that I'd hit both of them. Tal suddenly appeared beside me. He finished the job with a gun he took from one of the guards, then motioned for the others to follow him. I saw that he was holding his left side.
"You all right?" I asked. Tal nodded. "Go!" I shoute
d as Foster paused beside me. "Get your wife out of here!"
It was Lippitt who stopped and yanked me to my feet. "Are you hit?"
"No," I gasped, sobbing for breath. "Just knocked the wind out of myself." With Lippitt dragging me by the sleeve, I struggled up the steps and through the pneumatic door above into a mass of milling, shouting bodies.
The wail of police and fire sirens was very loud now, almost drowning out everything else. The main entrance was perhaps sixty feet away, separated from us by a throng of Russians and firemen. The air was thick with smoke that was billowing down the elevator shafts and stairways.
Someone shouted in Russian, and two burly men who had been standing around as if awaiting orders craned their necks, saw us and drew their guns, started in our direction.
Tal and Lippitt stepped forward, and I joined them as Foster pushed through and a semicircle was formed around his wife. Foster had no gun, but he had his fists; he jabbed and feinted in the air as we inched forward.
I was staring up the barrel of a Russian gun as a red-faced fireman with an American flag sewn on his sleeve and a fire ax in his hands suddenly squeezed into the semicircle between Lippitt and me.
"Man, I don't know what you people are up to," the fireman said in a thick Brooklyn accent, "but anybody who's trying to get away from the Russkys has my help."
More firemen joined the circle, and our group began to move forward. The Russians, unwilling to shoot down New York firemen, backed away. In a few seconds we were at the main entrance. A human corridor of firemen's bodies was formed, and Elizabeth Foster went through it, followed by her husband, Tal, Lippitt, and me.
We were out of the consulate.
19
The street was filled with smoke, sparks, and heat. Flames had eaten through the outer walls of the second and third floors; their light cast a small circle of artificial dawn that vied with the real thing. We'd made a journey of thousands of miles merely by stepping through a doorway; it was a journey of the mind and spirit. The New York street was our homeland.
Lippitt cleared a path through the police lines with his credentials, and we walked quickly to the car. Tal slipped behind the wheel and Lippitt got in on the passenger's side next to him. I sat in the back with the Fosters. A fire chief cleared the way, and Tal pulled away from the curb, navigated the obstacle course of vehicles, then turned uptown. The mad energy that had been fueling me had evaporated. I felt weak and nauseated, and I was trembling slightly. I hurt all over; my entire body felt like a bruise, which it was.
At the U.N., Tal drove through a series of linked underground garages and security gates, then parked. Finally he led us into a locked private elevator, which took us to the top floors of the building.
Lippitt was looking more unhappy and distracted by the minute. I didn't trust him. More important, Elizabeth Foster didn't trust him, and I knew why: if Lippitt had his way, the Fosters probably would have been squirreled away someplace else, as incommunicado as if they'd stayed with the Russians. As far as Mike Foster's wife was concerned, Lippitt was but one of several enemies.
Elizabeth Foster was walking around under her own power now, but she never moved an inch from her husband. She was pressed against him, one arm wrapped tightly around his waist.
The elevator door sighed open and we stepped into an apartment that I assumed was Rolfe Thaag's. Sunlight was streaming in through a bank of windows that reached from floor to ceiling and offered a giddy, panoramic view of Manhattan. It was going to be a hot, cloudless day. Somewhere out in that day, the vast resources of many armies were being marshaled: We were into the end game.
A telephone rang. Tal disappeared for a few moments into an adjoining room. When he returned, his face was ashen. "Rolfe Thaag has had a heart attack," he said in a low voice as he came close to me.
"Jesus."
Tal shook his head. "He's being taken care of in a private clinic. He's expected to recover, but he can't be disturbed. I think it's best if we don't mention it to the others."
Across the room, Mike Foster blinked back tears. "I just want you to know… I just want to thank all of you."
"He's alive," Elizabeth Foster said distantly in a voice that could barely be heard.
The room was suddenly very still. I wasn't sure I'd heard her correctly. She turned to her husband and repeated it. "He's alive. Victor is alive, darling."
Lippitt wasn't facing the window, but his eyes were half-closed, as if to shut out some bright light only he could see. He suddenly shifted his gaze to me, and our eyes held.
"How do you know, Mrs. Foster?" Tal said gently.
"He called." She slowly looked around the room at all of us. Her eyes were wild, drugged with horror. "They told us he called."
"It's true," Foster said, stepping into the center of the room. "I don't think they were lying; they were too damn happy about the whole thing. They said Rafferty was going to turn himself in this morning." He paused, touched his forehead. "Christ, I hope he knows we're out of there."
"I'm betting he knows," I said directly to Lippitt.
Tal slowly shook his head. "It could be a phony. Something the Americans cooked up to buy a little time."
"No," Lippitt said. He looked pale and shaken. A single drop of perspiration had appeared in the center of his forehead. He made no move to wipe it away as it ran down into his eyebrow. "The Russians must have voiceprints."
"How?" Foster asked.
"From the last time. Radio, television. Rafferty was a celebrity, remember?"
"You insisted you'd killed him," I said to Lippitt.
The American agent looked through me as if I weren't there, then abruptly wiped away the streak of moisture on his forehead and walked to the window.
I turned to the woman. "Mrs. Foster, what did your husband know?"
"Know?" Her voice was faint, like a frightened child's. Her violet eyes, paler now in the daylight, slowly came into focus on my face. "What do you mean?"
Tal put his hand gently on Elizabeth Foster's elbow. "You and your husband should sleep now. Try to rest. You can talk to us when you wake up, if you want to."
Elizabeth Foster swallowed hard; her words came in a forced whisper. "It's starting all over again."
I pressed. "What, Mrs. Foster? What's starting all over again?"
Lippitt suddenly turned from the window. "Mrs. Foster, I am going to ask you not to say anything. This is a matter of national security. Does your husband know anything?"
"I don't know beans, pal," Foster said, clenching his fists. "And I don't like your tone of voice. I've got a funny feeling you're the son-of-a-bitch who started this whole thing."
"No, Mr. Foster," Lippitt said evenly. "Whoever hired Frederickson to investigate Rafferty is the person responsible for what's happened. Was that you?"
Foster blanched and looked away from his wife's startled gaze. "It was the museum," he said weakly. "I had … to find out what it was. I had to find out I love you so much, Beth."
The woman spat her next words at the bald man standing by the window. "Why couldn't you just leave Victor alone? That's all he ever wanted!"
"We couldn't do that, Mrs. Foster." There was real anguish in Lippitt's voice, and it surprised me. "Others knew about him. If I hadn't gone after him, he would have been found by someone else. Apparently, that's what happened. God knows where he's been and what he's been doing for the past five years."
Lippitt seemed sincere. If he was telling the truth, it meant the Americans didn't have Rafferty after all.
Elizabeth Foster wheeled around and spoke to me. "Victor could read minds!" she said in a clear, defiant voice. It was clear that she was punishing Lippitt. Her eyes were smoky now, bursting with memories that had been bottled up and festering for five years. "He could read minds just as easily as the people in this room can read books and newspapers. It destroyed him."
Lippitt shrugged in resignation, clasped his hands behind his back, and stared at the floor.
"My God,
" Mike Foster whispered. "But I still don't under …" His voice trailed off.
"You don't have to talk about it, Mrs. Foster," Tal said soothingly.
She shook her head defiantly. "I want to talk about it," she said. "I thought it was all over. I thought Victor was dead and it would all be forgotten… by everyone except me. When I… saw that picture of the museum, I knew he was alive. I just knew." She looked at Lippitt with hatred in her eyes. "He was supposed to be dead! You said he was dead!"
"I honestly thought he was, Mrs. Foster!" Lippitt said. "I'm still not convinced he's alive; I don't understand how he can be."
"It was the accident," Elizabeth Foster said, her voice steadily gaining strength, a small tic in her left eye the only evidence of the tremendous emotional strain she was under. "A part of Victor's brain was severely damaged. In most people that would mean death, or life as a vegetable. But with Victor… something else happened. Arthur couldn't explain it. The accident didn't debilitate Victor mentally; it just left him with this terrible, growing power, this terrible … energy."
She started to cry, stifled it. She waved Mike Foster away when he started to move toward her. "God knows he didn't want the gift," she continued. "Victor was not an easy man to understand. His work was his whole life, but I loved him and tried to understand." Now she paused, reached out, and squeezed her husband's hand. He moved closer and put his arm around her shoulders. "I suppose I was never really happy until I married Mike," she said, looking into her husband's eyes. "But I was terribly proud of Victor, and if our marriage took second place to his buildings, I didn't complain. The point is that all Victor ever wanted to do was design his buildings. After the accident"-she gave Lippitt another hate-filled glance-"that became impossible."
She heaved a deep, trembling sigh. She couldn't hold back her feeling; it escaped from her in sighs and shudders like air hissing from a balloon. "I could see the pain in his face," she continued quietly. "Apparently there was a great deal of pain associated with the things he could do. He thought he was going mad. He couldn't stand to be physically close to people; that was when it hurt the most. I didn't understand. I thought he was repelled by me. It wasn't that at all; he just couldn't stand to be… close. When he finally did tell me, it was … too late.
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