Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “How’s that?”

  “There was a time when I would have leapt at the opportunity to head CIA. I would have given anything for the directorship. But now—now that I have it—it feels like a death trap. The long knives are out for me. Far too many powerful people don’t want me in there. It just feels like a death trap.”

  * * *

  “Were you able to read Orlov’s thoughts?” Toby asked as soon as I had hung up.

  I nodded. “But there was a wrinkle,” I said. “Orlov was born in the Ukraine.”

  “He’s a Russian speaker!” Toby objected.

  “Russian is his second language. When I realized that Orlov thought in Ukrainian, I was convinced I’d been defeated. A cruel twist. But then it came to me: That Agency fellow who tested me, Dr. Mehta, had speculated that I was receiving not thoughts per se but extremely low frequency radio waves emitted by the speech-producing center of the brain. I could, in effect, listen in on words as the brain readied them to speak—or not to speak. So I switched our conversation back and forth between English and Russian, since I knew Orlov could speak both. And that enabled me to understand what he thought, since his mind was now putting English words to his Ukrainian thoughts.”

  “Yes,” Toby said, nodding. “Yes.”

  “And I asked him several questions, knowing that whatever he chose to speak aloud, he would at least think the replies.”

  “Very good,” Toby said.

  “At times,” I said, “he was trying so hard not to reply that he was thinking the English words he didn’t want to say.”

  The painkiller had begun to overwhelm me, and I was finding it hard to concentrate. I wanted nothing more now than to fall back asleep for a few days.

  He shifted in his wheelchair, then moved it a few inches closer by flicking a lever. It responded with a quiet whir. “Ben, a few weeks ago a former colonel in the old Securitate”—the Romanian secret police under the late dictator Nicolae Ceauçsescu—“contacted a backstopper well known to us.” He was telling me that the Romanian had contacted a document forger who prepared bogus cover identity papers for freelance agents. “Who in turn contacted us.”

  I waited for him to continue, and after a minute or so, he did. “We brought the Romanian in. Under intensive interrogation it developed that he knew of a plot to kill certain highly placed American intelligence officials.”

  “Whose plot?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Who was targeted?”

  “We don’t know that either.”

  “And you think it’s connected to the diverted gold?”

  “It’s possible. Now, tell me this: Did Orlov tell you where that ten billion dollars was stashed?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he knew and didn’t want to say?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He didn’t give you an access code or anything?”

  He was visibly disappointed. “Isn’t it possible that Sinclair, in effect, pulled off a grand swindle? You know, told Orlov that he was going along with this scheme to remove ten billion dollars in gold, and then—”

  “And then what?” Molly interjected. She gazed at him with a ferocious intensity. Two tiny red spots appeared on her cheeks, and I knew she had heard more than she could stand. She whispered, almost hissed: “My father was a wonderful man and a good man. He was as honest and as straight as they come. For God’s sake, the worst thing you could say about him was that he was too much of a straight arrow.”

  “Molly—” Toby began.

  “I was in the back of a cab with him in Washington once when he found a twenty-dollar bill wedged into the seat and gave it to the driver. He said maybe whoever lost it would realize it and contact the cab company or something. I said, Dad, the cabbie’s just going to pocket it—”

  “Molly,” Toby said, touching her on the hand. His eyes were sad. “We must consider every possibility, no matter how unlikely.”

  Molly fell silent. Her lower lip quivered. I found myself trying to tune in on her thoughts, but she was a little too far away, and I couldn’t summon the mental energy. To be honest, I had no idea whether this strange gift was still with me. Maybe the experience in the burning rat house had knocked it out of me as suddenly as it had appeared. I think I wouldn’t have minded very much if it was gone.

  Whatever she was thinking, she was thinking with great passion. But in any case, I could imagine the turmoil she was going through, and I just wanted to leap out of bed and put my arms around her and comfort her. I hated seeing her like this. Instead, I lay there in the bed, arms bandaged, my head fuzzier by the minute.

  “I don’t think so, Toby,” I said musingly. “Molly’s right: it doesn’t fit what we know of Hal’s character.”

  “But we’re back to where we started from,” he said.

  “No,” I replied. “Orlov did supply me with one lead.”

  “Oh?”

  “‘Follow the gold,’ he said. ‘Follow the gold.’ And he was thinking a city name.”

  “Zurich? Geneva?”

  “No. Brussels. There are ways, Toby. Since Belgium isn’t known as a major gold center, it can’t be all that difficult to figure out where in Brussels ten billion dollars worth of gold might be hidden.”

  “I’ll take care of your flight arrangements,” Toby said.

  “No!” Molly exclaimed. “He’s not going anywhere. He needs at least a week of bed rest.”

  I shook my head wearily. “No, Mol. If we don’t track it down, Alex Truslow is next. And then us. It’s the easiest thing in the world to arrange ‘accidents.’”

  “If I let you leave this bed, I’m violating my Hippocratic oath—”

  “Screw the Hippocratic oath,” I said. “Our lives are in danger. An immense fortune is at stake, and if we don’t find it … you won’t be around to live up to that goddamned oath.”

  Almost under his breath, I heard Toby say, “I’m with you,” and with a high-pitched electric whine he began slowly to wheel away.

  * * *

  The room was quiet and peaceful. In the city, we become so habituated to the city’s noises that we no longer hear them. But here, in a remote part of northern Italy, there was no noise outside. From the window I could see, in the pale Tuscan afternoon light, a field of tall, dead sunflowers, shriveled brown stalks bowing in pious rows.

  Toby had left Molly and me alone to talk. She sat on my bed, absently stroking my feet through the blanket.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “I accept your apology.”

  “I hope it’s not true about your father.”

  “But in your heart—”

  “In my heart I don’t believe he did anything wrong. But we have to find out.”

  Molly looked around the room, then gazed out the window at the spectacular view of Tuscan hills. “You know, I could live here.”

  “So could I.”

  “Really? Could we, do you think?”

  “You mean like, I open the Tuscany office of Putnam & Stearns? Come on.”

  “But given your talent for making money…” She smiled wryly. “We could just move here. You quit the law, we live happily ever after…”

  A long silence, and then she continued: “I want to go with you. To Brussels.”

  “Molly, it’s not safe.”

  “I can be of help. You know that. Anyway, you shouldn’t travel unless accompanied by a physician. Not in your condition.”

  “Why aren’t you objecting anymore to my traveling?” I said.

  “Because I know it’s not true about Dad. And I want you to prove it.”

  “But can you deal with the possibility—even the likelihood—that if I find anything, it may not make your father look good?”

  “My father’s dead, Ben. The worst has already happened. Nothing you find’s going to undo that.”

  “All right,” I said.
“Okay.” My eyelids were beginning to close, and I couldn’t gather the strength to fight it any longer. “But now let me sleep.”

  “I’ll call ahead and find us a hotel in Brussels,” I heard her say from a million miles away. Fine, I thought; let her do that.

  “Alex Truslow warned me of snakes in the garden,” I whispered. “And … and I’m beginning to wonder … whether Toby is that snake.”

  “Ben, I found something. Something that might help us.” She said something else, but I couldn’t make it out, and then her voice seemed to fade away.

  A little bit later—perhaps minutes, perhaps seconds—I thought I heard Molly slip quietly out of the room. I heard the bleat of lambs from somewhere far away, and very soon I was fast asleep.

  FORTY-TWO

  Toby Thompson saw us off at the entrance to the Swissair terminal in Milan’s international airport. Molly gave him a kiss, I shook his hand, and then we passed through the metal-detector gate. A few minutes later came the boarding call for Swissair’s flight to Brussels. At the same moment, I knew, Toby was boarding a flight to Washington.

  The painkiller that had kept me afloat for the last two days had begun to wear off (though I still felt too woolly-headed to “read” Toby). I knew it was better to get off the stuff if I wished to remain alert. Now, my arms, particularly the insides of my forearms, felt as if they were on fire. They throbbed, each pulse sending knives of pain all the way to my shoulder. And on top of it all, since the painkiller had worn off, I’d had a terrible, unceasing headache.

  Still, I was able to lift my two carry-on bags (neither of us checked any luggage) and make it to my seat without too much pain. Toby had purchased first-class tickets for us and provided us with fresh passports. We were now Carl and Margaret Osborne, owners of a small but prosperous gift shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

  I had a window seat, as I’d requested, and I watched closely as the Swissair maintenance crew on the tarmac bustled here and there, completing their last-minute checks. My body was taut with tension. The front entrance to the plane from the Jetway had been closed and sealed a few minutes earlier. The first-class area afforded me an excellent vantage point from which to watch. Just as I saw the last crew member leave the cockpit area and descend the service steps toward the tarmac, I began to scream.

  Thrusting my bandaged arms up in the air, I yelled: “Let me out of here! My God! Oh, my God! Let me out!”

  “What is it?” Molly shrieked at me.

  Virtually all the passengers in the first-class cabin had turned toward us. They stared in horror. A flight attendant ran down the aisle toward me.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I shouted. “I’ve got to get off—now!”

  “Sir, I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said. She was tall and blond, with a plain, mannish, no-nonsense face. “We’re not allowed to let passengers deplane at takeoff. Is there anything we can do for you—”

  “What is it?” Molly asked me.

  “Let me out!” I stood up. “I have to get out of here. The pain is incredible!”

  “Sir!” the Swiss woman protested.

  “Get our bags!” I commanded Molly. My arms still thrust in the air, moaning and keening, I began to shove my way into the aisle. Molly quickly grabbed our bags from the overhead compartment, and somehow managed to wriggle the shoulder straps of two of the valises over each of her slight shoulders and, at the same time, grab the others with her hands. She followed me down the aisle, toward the front of the plane.

  But the flight attendant blocked our way. “Sir! Madam! I’m terribly sorry, but regulations stipulate—”

  An elderly woman screamed out in terror: “Let him out of here!”

  “My God,” I shouted.

  “Sir, the plane is about to take off!”

  “Move! Out of our way!” It was Molly, ferocious in her anger. “I’m his physician! If you don’t let us off of this plane at once, you’ll have a goddamn huge lawsuit on your hands. I mean you personally, lady—and you’ll take the whole goddamned airline down with you, do you understand me?”

  The Swiss woman’s eyes widened as she backed down the aisle and then flattened herself against one row of seats to let us pass by. With Molly in tow, struggling mightily with our luggage, I ran down the service stairway, which was, thank God, still bolted to the side of the plane.

  We ran across the tarmac and reentered the terminal. There, I grabbed all the bags from Molly—it was painful, but I was certainly able to do it—and pulled her toward me as I ran to the Swissair ticket counter.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Quiet … Just—quiet for a while!”

  The Swissair ticket agents, fortunately, hadn’t seen where we had come from. I pulled out a wad of cash (courtesy, too, of Toby) and bought two first-class tickets to Zurich. The flight was leaving in ten minutes.

  We would just make it.

  * * *

  Although the Swissair flight from Milan to Zurich was pleasant and uneventful—I’ve always preferred Swissair to any other airline—I found myself in almost constant physical agony.

  I nursed a Bloody Mary and tried to make my mind a blank. Molly was fast asleep. Before getting on the plane, even before the whole business with switching flights, she’d complained of feeling ill, queasy. She dismissed it as insignificant, though: some bug she’d picked up on the flight over to Italy in what she called a “toothpaste tube” and a “Petri dish” of a 747. She obviously didn’t much like to fly.

  I had decided that it would be folly to trust Toby at this point. Perhaps I was being overly suspicious. But we could no longer take chances, and if Toby were the serpent in the garden …

  Hence my telling him that I was headed to Brussels. No, Orlov had not thought “Brussels,” but only I knew that. In an hour or so, I was sure, CIA personnel in Brussels would realize that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Osborne had not arrived from Milan, and alarms would go off. So this was at best a temporary diversion; but it was better than nothing.

  Follow the gold, Orlov had called out to me a few seconds before his gruesome murder. Follow the gold.

  I knew now what he had meant. At least I thought I did. He and Sinclair had transacted their business in Zurich. He hadn’t told me the name of the bank, but he had thought something, thought a name. Koerfer: it had to be a name. Was it the name of a bank? Or an individual? I would have to locate the bank in Zurich where the two spymasters had met.

  Follow the gold meant follow the paper trail, which was the only way to learn the nature of the beast that had killed Sinclair. And most likely, the only way for Molly and me to remain alive.

  I tried to relax. One of the first questions he’d asked me, after we had finished the debriefing, was whether my … ability, as he delicately put it, had survived the fire intact. And the truth was, I didn’t know what to answer then; I didn’t yet have the strength, or the will, necessary to concentrate sufficiently.

  Now, however, I gathered my resources, and as Molly slept, I tried. My head ached—worse now, it seemed, than any headache I’d ever had before. Was this related to the injuries I’d sustained in the fire?

  Or, more ominously, did it have something to do with the power I’d acquired in the Oracle Project’s laboratory? Was something beginning to degenerate, to go wrong? Who was it—Rossi? Toby?—who had mentioned, ever so casually, that the only person on whom the protocol had worked, the Dutchman, had gone crazy? The clamor in his head had driven him to suicide. I began to understand the impulse.

  Yet at the same time I worried that this damned telepathic ability, which had gotten me into all this, after all, might no longer be with me.

  So I furrowed my brow, squinted my eyes, frowned, tried to make my mind receptive, and found it difficult. I was surrounded by sound, which made it maddeningly difficult to separate out the ELF waves. There was the noise of the plane’s engines, muffled and droning and lulling; the mostly indistinct chatter of nearby passengers; a loud, whooping laugh from somewhere back in the
smoking section; an infant wailing a few seats behind us; the clatter and clink of the serving carts moving down the aisle, loaded with miniature bottles and cans.

  Asleep next to me was Molly, but I didn’t particularly want to violate my pledge to her. The nearest fellow passenger—this was first class, after all—was a good distance away.

  Furtively, I bent my head toward Molly, focused, and heard her murmur something aloud. She shifted suddenly, as if she’d detected my proximity, and opened her eyes.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Checking on you,” I said quickly.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Lousy. Queasy still.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Thanks. It’ll pass.” She sat up slowly, massaged her neck. “Ben, do you have a clear idea what you’re going to be doing in Zurich?”

  “Fairly,” I said. “The rest I’ll play by ear.”

  She nodded, touched my right hand. “How’s the pain?”

  “Subsiding,” I lied.

  “Good. I mean, a nice try at playing the macho man, but I know how badly it hurts. Tonight, if you’d like, I’ll give you something to help you sleep. The nights are the worst, when you can’t stop yourself from rolling over on your arms.”

  “Won’t be necessary.”

  “Just let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “Ben?” I looked at her. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Ben, I had a dream about Dad. But you probably know that.”

  “I told you, Molly, I won’t—”

  “Never mind. This dream I had … You know all those places we lived when I was growing up—Afghanistan, the Philippines, Egypt? From as early as I can remember, I felt his absence. I guess that’s pretty common among CIA brats—Dad’s always gone, and you don’t know where, or why, or what he does, and your friends are always asking why’s your dad never there, you know? It always seemed like Dad wasn’t around—it wasn’t until much later that I understood why—but I remember thinking that if I were just nicer to Mom, he’d spend more time at home playing with me. When I got older, and he told me he worked for the CIA, I took it okay—I think I’d pretty much figured it out, and a couple of my friends had already speculated as much to me. But it didn’t make it easier.”