Dragonfly

by Dean Koontz

  "A fail-safe name to keep General Lin honest," Canning said.

  Webster nodded slowly. "So . . . Mr. Sung is not one of ours. He's an innocent."

  "Exactly," Canning said. "General Lin will arrest him. And I'm afraid that Sung will be tortured for several hours. But eventually the general will realize that Sung is no more a CIA operative than he is himself. Then he will be back here, demanding the name of the real third agent."

  "And you'll give it to him?" Webster asked.

  "Oh, sure."

  "But when he has the right name, why should he play by the rules any more than he's doing now?"

  "Because," Lee Ann said, enjoying herself immensely, "he won't be absolutely certain that the next name David gives him is the real article. He'll have to suspect it's another ringer, a double fail-safe. He'll have wasted so much time on Sung that he won't dare waste more on what might be another hoax— expecially not when he's having these nightmares and feelings of imminent disaster. So he'll bring our man here for confirmation, and we won't let him take our man back again."

  "Mr. Canning, you have a splendid oriental mind."

  "I know. I cultivate it."

  "And now what do we do?" asked Webster.

  "How about dinner?" Canning asked.

  "Certainly. But what a letdown after the tension of this afternoon!"

  "I can assure you," Canning said, "this is going to be the tensest dinner of my life."

  SIX

  THE PENTAGON: SATURDAY, 12:30 A.M.

  The office in E Ring belonged to one Lionel Bryson, a full admiral in the United States Navy, one-time lightweight boxing champion of the Naval Academy, father of seven children and one of the twenty most knowledgeable amateur numismatists in the country. None of these achievements, all-American as they were, had earned him a forty-foot-square office in E Ring. He could also captain any nuclear submarine currently in service. But that ability had not won him his very own secretary with her own connecting office. Bryson was a very special kind of engineer-architect, a doctor of marine design. It was his talent for designing magnificent machines of death, rather than his ability to pilot them, that had earned him the wall-to-wall plush carpeting, the leather couch and armchairs, the executive desk, the private telephone line, the mahogany bookcases, the trophy case, the soundproofed walls and ceiling, and the heavy blue-velvet drapes at the window-with-a-view.

  Bryson was not here tonight. Which was just as well. He would not have liked the idea of his office being turned into an interrogation chamber.

  There were four people in the room. An armed marine guard, cleared for top-security matters, was standing to the right of the door; the holster at his hip was unsnapped and the revolver in it looked like a howitzer to McAlister. Major Arnold Teffler, night-duty physician at the Pentagon, was sitting on the couch with his black bag; he was also security-cleared all the way up to eyes-only material. Bernie Kirkwood was slumped in an armchair, his feet propped up on a coffee table, his eyes closed, and his hands folded in his lap. McAlister sat behind Admiral Bryson's desk and played with a scale model of a Trident submarine. No one spoke. They had nothing in common and no reason for being here until the fifth man arrived.

  Rice.

  McAlister still had a bit of trouble believing it.

  The telephone rang.

  McAlister grabbed it. "Yes?"

  "This is the door sergeant at the Mall Entrance," the man on the other end said. "Mr. Rice just came through here."

  "Thank you."

  McAlister hung up, got to his feet, and came around from behind the desk. "Gentlemen, we're about to begin."

  The marine and the doctor remained where they were.

  Bernie Kirkwood stood up and stretched.

  A minute passed. Then another.

  Someone knocked sharply on the door.

  The marine opened it.

  Two other marines stood in the corridor, and Andrew Rice stood between them. Rice came into the office and the two marines stayed in the hall and the marine already in the room closed the door behind the President's chief advisor.

  Rice looked at the doctor and then at McAlister and then around the room. He seemed perplexed. "Where's the President?"

  "He couldn't make it," McAlister said.

  "But he called me less than an hour ago!"

  "He had some important reading to do."

  "What about the Russian—"

  "There is no Russian problem," McAlister said.

  Frowning, Rice waited and said nothing more.

  "Don't you want to know what the President is reading?"

  "What sort of game is this?" Rice blustered.

  McAlister picked up one of Hennings' magazines from the desk and held it out toward Rice.

  The fat man just stared at it.

  Kirkwood said, "There's also a most interesting article in Friday's Washington Post."

  Rice looked at him.

  "Some poor hooker got nearly beat to death," Kirk-wood said.

  At last McAlister had the pleasure of seeing a quick flicker of fear pass through Rice's eyes.

  "I haven't any idea what you're talking about," the fat man said.

  McAlister said, "we'll see."

  THE PEKING RAILROAD STATION:

  SATURDAY, 8:55 P.M.

  Chai Po-han got off the train. Slinging his single sack of belongings over his left shoulder, he walked along the concrete platform, past huge pillars bedecked with political posters, up the skeletal steel stairs, and into the public area of the main terminal.

  His mother, father, brother, and one of his three sisters were waiting for him. They all wore different expressions. His father was smiling broadly. His brother was quite solemn, as if to say, "What happened to you might as easily have happened to me." His beloved mother and lovely sister were crying with joy at the sight of him.

  It was a very Confucian scene, the kind discouraged by the Party. Love of country must take precedence over love of family.

  Chai Po-han began to weep too, although his tears were shed because he knew that once he left China as he planned to do, he would never see any of them again.

  PEKING: SATURDAY, 9:00 P.M.

  At nine o'clock Canning and Lee Ann went up to their rooms, ostensibly to get a few hours' sleep before General Lin Shen-yang came back to them in a rage. But at her door his goodnight kiss metamorphosed into a long, soft, moist battle of lips and teeth and tongues.

  "You aren't really sleepy?" she asked.

  "Not in the least."

  "Me either."

  She got her suitcase, and they went quietly down the hall to his room.

  Inside, she said, "I feel like a high-school girl sneaking off on a forbidden date."

  He held her and kissed her, but that was not enough. His fingers tugged at the buttons of her blouse and slid behind her to unhook her bra. He held her warm breasts in his hands.

  She pulled away from him then and said, "I feel all grimy. Let's have a bath together first."

  "In that ugly tub?"

  "I'll make it beautiful," she said unabashedly.

  And she did: she made it beautiful.

  Later they made love on the four-poster bed while George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln watched.

  At the end of it, while he was going limp but was still snug within her, he said, "When we get back to the States—will you come stay with me?"

  She smiled. "I think that might be good for me."

  "And wonderful for me."

  "I could have a talk with that son of yours."

  "I don't know," he said. "I've been thinking about him. Maybe most people in the world should believe in black and white morality. Maybe they shouldn't ever be fully aware of all the animals ready to prey on them. A handful of people like you and me can do the dirty work to keep the balance. If everyone was aware of the nature of the jungle, not many people would be happy."

  "No more talk," she said.

  They stretched out side by side an
d pulled the covers over themselves.

  He thought of Dragonfly . . .

  But then he thought of Lee Ann and knew that he would always have her, knew it in his bones and and blood and muscle, reached out and touched her, and dozed for a while.

  THE PENTAGON: SATURDAY, 5:00 P.M.

  McAlister felt malarial—worse, cancerous—as if he belonged in the terminal ward of a hospital. Every one of his joints ached. His head ached. His eyes were grainy and bloodshot. He was sweaty and rumpled; his face itched from his beard stubble. His tongue felt swollen, and his mouth was sour. He wanted someone to give him a pill and a swallow of gingerale; he wanted someone to tuck him in and fluff his pillow and sing him to sleep.

  Andrew Rice seemed to be in even worse shape than the director. His puffy face was as white as coconut meat. His lips were bluish. His quick little eyes were still little but no longer as quick as they had been; they were eyes that had seen more than they wanted to see; tears of weariness streamed from them constantly. Rice breathed as if he were inhaling all the air in the room, as if he were causing the walls to expand and contract like a bellows. His stubby-fingered hands were at his sides, palms up, motionless.

  Yet the son of a bitch would not break down!

  For the first time in his life Bob McAlister really knew the meaning of the word "fanatic." Not that he had wanted to really know it. But there it was.

  Kirkwood said, "You can't put it off any longer."

  Furious, too weak to deal with fury, McAlister got up from the couch and walked over to the armchair from which Rice was actually overflowing. "Damn you, we know! We know so much that you can't win! Why not tell us the rest of it?"

  Rice stared at him and said nothing.

  Wiping a hand across his face, McAlister said, "Rice, if you won't talk, I'm going to have to use a drug on you. A very nasty drug."

  Rice stared. Said nothing.

  "It's that drug I found the agency using when I became director. It's barbaric. I outlawed it. It's the drug your men used on Carl Altmüller when they were trying to establish a list of other federal marshals who wouldn't recognize him. I saw the needle mark on the man's arm, Rice. It was swollen up like a grape. This drug is so hostile to the human system that the point of injection swells up like a fucking goddamned grape!"

  Rice was unmoved.

  "And now you're forcing me to use it on you."

  Licking his cracked lips, Rice said, "I suppose that offends your delicate liberal conscience."

  McAlister stared at him.

  Rice smiled. He looked demonic.

  Turning away from the fat man, McAlister said, "Dr. Teffler, please fill the syringe."

  Teffler got up and opened his bag and arranged his instruments on Admiral Bryson's desk. He examined the vial that McAlister gave to him. "What's the proper dosage?"

  McAlister told him.

  "What is it, Pentothal?"

  McAlister snapped at him: "Haven't you been listening? It's a new drug. A damned dangerous drug. Handle it like I tell you!"

  Unmoving, his hands still at his sides, Rice watched Teffler apply a rubber tourniquet to his thick arm. He watched his own vein rise through the fat, and he sighed when Teffler swabbed his arm with alcohol-soaked gauze.

  McAlister forced himself to watch as the needle stabbed deep and the yellow truth serum squeezed out into Rice's system.

  The fat man's eyes rolled back into his head, and almost at once he went into convulsions. He pitched out of the chair and to the floor, where he thrashed helplessly.

  Going down on his hands and knees, Kirkwood tried to pin Rice's shoulders. It was all he could do, however, to keep from being thrown like a rodeo rider from a wild mount.

  McAlister grabbed at the fat man's twisting legs to keep them from being bruised or broken against the furniture. But he took a solid kick in the stomach and was propelled away.

  The marine guard ran over from the door, tried to hold Rice's legs, finally sat on them.

  "He'll swallow his tongue!" McAlister gasped.

  But Teffler was already there, wedging a smooth metal splint between Rice's jaws. With the splint protecting him from a bite, Teffler used his fingers to catch Rice's tongue and hold it flat against the floor of his mouth.

  Gradually, the fat man grew quiet.

  Shuddering uncontrollably, McAlister went out into Bryson's secretary's office and vomited in the wastebasket there.

  Oh God Jesus Christ no Jesus oh shit oh shit no!

  Bernie Kirkwood came in and said, "Are you all right?"

  Braced against the desk, his head hanging over the basket, McAlister said, "Is he dead?"

  "Just unconscious."

  "Coma?"

  "The doctor said it's not."

  "I'll be there in a minute."

  Bernie went away.

  After about five minutes McAlister got up, pulled a handful of paper tissues from the box on the secretary's desk, and wiped his greasy face. He threw the tissues in the reeking wastebasket. There was a water carafe on the desk and it was half full. The water was flat, but it tasted marvelous. He rinsed out his mouth and spat into the can. After all of this he felt no worse than terminal.

  He went back into the room to have a look at Rice.

  "At first," Teffler said, "I thought it was anaphylactic shock, a deadly reaction to the drug. But now I think the dosage was just too large for his system."

  "It was the normal dosage," McAlister said.

  "But as overweight as he is," Teffler said, "he might not react in any normal fashion."

  McAlister watched the fat man's belly rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.

  "What now?" Kirkwood asked.

  "How long will he be unconscious?" McAlister asked the doctor.

  Sitting on the floor beside Rice, Teffler took the patient's pulse. He peeled back an eyelid. "No less than an hour. No more than two or three."

  "We wait for him to wake up," McAlister said.

  "Then?" Kirkwood said.

  "We give him another dose of the serum. Half what we shot into him the first time."

  "I don't know as I like that," Teffler said sternly.

  "Neither do I," McAlister said. "But that's what we're going to do, all right."

  Rice stirred at eight o'clock, opened his eyes, looked around, closed his eyes.

  He was able to sit up at eight-fifteen.

  By a quarter of nine he was nearly his old self. Indeed, he was feeling good enough to smile smugly at McAlister.

  At nine o'clock Teffler gave him the second, smaller dose of the truth serum—and by two minutes past nine Andrew Rice was spilling all the secrets of The Committee.

  But was it too late? McAlister wondered.

  PEKING: SUNDAY, 12:10 A.M.

  The telephone burred.

  Canning woke, rolled over, and lifted the receiver.

  "Guess who is waiting for you down in the drawing room," Ambassador Webster said.

  "He's here already?"

  "Hasn't poor Mr. Sung suffered enough?"

  "I imagine he has," Canning said. "Tell the general we'll be down in ten minutes."

  THE WHITE HOUSE:

  SATURDAY, 11:30 A.M.

  The President was shocked at McAlister's bedraggled appearance. He kept saying how shocked he was all the while that McAlister got the tape recorder ready. He stood behind his desk in the Oval Office and clicked his tongue and shook his head and said he felt entirely responsible for the awful way McAlister looked.

  For his part, McAlister could not tell if the clicks of the President's tongue were expressions of sympathy —or whether the chief was off on another of his shtik. And not knowing which it was bothered the hell out of him. He said, "It's nothing, sir. I'm fine. It's just about all over now. I've sent an urgent message to Canning. I took the liberty of using your name on it For his eyes only."

  "But from what you've told me—do you think he'll get anything we send to him?"

  "Not everyone is involved," Mc
Alister said. "The communications man at the Peking embassy is trustworthy. He'll see that Canning gets it." He ran the tape forward at high speed, watching the white numbers roll around and around on the inch-counter. When he found the numbers he wanted, he stopped the tape, checked them against a list of numbers in his note pad. "You'll want to listen to the entire interrogation later," he told the President. "But right now, I have a few special passages you'll be interested in."

  "By all means."

  McAlister pushed the Start button:

  MCALISTER: But even if the Nationalists manage to seize the mainland eventually, it won't be an easy thing. I mean, the Chinese may not have much, but it is a hell of a lot more than they had under Chiang. He was a real despot. They'll remember that. Even without guidance from Peking, they're going to fight—with guns, clubs, even fists. Do you realize how many people are going to die?

  RICE: Oh, yes. We've done computer analysis, worked it out in detail.

  MCALISTER: And it doesn't bother you?

  RICE: No. I look at it like Mr. West does.

  MCALISTER: How does Mr. West look at it?

  RICE: They aren't people. They're Chinks. Both sides.

  MCALISTER: Have you calculated the Russian reaction?

  RICE: They'll come in from the west. But they'll never keep the territory they take.

  MCALISTER: Why not?

  RICE: Because we have something for them too.

  MCALISTER: Something like Dragonfly?

  RICE: That's right.

  MCALISTER: You have a Dragonfly in Moscow now?

  RICE: We have a dozen of them, all over Russia. It was much easier to plant those than to plant one man in China. Russia is a more open society than the People's Republic.

  The President was stunned at Rice's obvious insanity, stunned that he had been deceived for so long by such a lunatic. His face alternately—and sometimes all at once—registered dismay, surprise, and horror as he fully perceived Rice's lunacy and ruthlessness. But worst of all, in the President's view, was Rice's naïveté, and it was at this that the chief executive winced the hardest. He didn't crack his knuckles once.