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.
"The pain kept getting worse as his powers increased. He didn't know what to do about it, didn't know whom he could go to." She smiled wryly; it was an ugly, pained grimace. "He knew instinctively that he shouldn't tell anyone, but he finally went to Arthur when he couldn't stand it any longer. Suddenly, everyone seemed to know. I don't understand how Arthur could have betrayed Victor like that."
"I'm not sure he did," I said. "My guess is that he called in a colleague without telling your husband. That person's name is Mary Llewellyn, and she was the source of the first leak." I watched Lippitt stiffen slightly and I knew I was right. "I think Dr. Llewellyn felt it was her patriotic duty to inform someone that there was a man who would make a formidable agent-really an incredible intelligence-gathering machine. Dr. Llewellyn saw the implications from the beginning: Give Rafferty a change of appearance, send him into the diplomatic corps; he goes to a Washington cocktail party, chats with some visiting Russian general, and walks out with more strategic military information than a team of C.I.A. agents could gather in a year. The Ultimate Weapon. The only problem was that there was only one of him, and he couldn't be duplicated."
Elizabeth Foster nodded her head in agreement. "Victor once gave me a demonstration," she said thickly. "He asked me to think of a series of numbers. I did and he… rattled them off as soon as they popped into my head. Then he started on my other thoughts. He wouldn't stop; he kept on and on, telling me everything that I was thinking! You can't imagine how that feels! I had to scream to make him stop. I… oh, God, I called him a monster."
Mary Llewellyn, I recalled, had called him the same thing. She had thought it perfectly reasonable that this monster, Victor Rafferty, give himself up to service in the government for the rest of his life. I was beginning to understand the dimensions and horror of Victor Rafferty's situation: A builder, an architect, Victor Rafferty had suddenly, through a quirk of nature, found himself alone, trapped in a lonely city of the mind, with no one to understand, much less keep him company. He was alone, listening to the baying in the darkness beyond the city's outermost limits.
"I… I hurt him so much," Mrs. Foster continued. "It crushed him when I said that; I'll never forget the look on his face. That was precisely what he'd been so afraid of: He didn't want people to think of him as a… freak."
Or a weapon, I thought.
"Victor never understood," she said, slowly turning to look at all of us. "He never could understand why other people couldn't appreciate what things he might be able to do in medicine, psychiatry… even criminal law." She started to laugh and it came out a wracking sob. "You wouldn't have to ask a person where it hurt; Victor would know. He'd have been able to diagnose symptoms that patients might not have been able to fully articulate. In trials, he would know who was guilty, and-more important- who wasn't. He believed scientists could study him in a laboratory and learn more about mankind; maybe, through him, others could have learned how to do the things he did. But of course, they wouldn't let him do that kind of work."
Lippitt winced, as if he could feel the woman's pointing finger jabbing into him. "It couldn't be helped, Mrs. Foster," Lippitt said softly. "When Dr. Llewellyn contacted us, she used lines of communication that are routinely monitored by foreign agents. They found out about Victor Rafferty virtually the same time as we did. It became a race against time. We wanted your husband to work for us, yes; in fact, it was imperative that he do so. A less free society, if they'd caught him, would have been able to force him to work for them. We couldn't allow that."
I glanced at Tal, who appeared to be deep in thought.
He was sitting in a straight-backed chair, staring at the floor and rolling a pencil between his palms.
"One morning, Mr. Lippitt came to our door," the woman continued in an icy voice. "He wanted to talk to Victor. Victor made me leave, but I know what they talked about. Mr. Lippitt gave Victor an ultimatum: Victor would have to work for the United States Government, and we would have to be relocated. Both Victor and I would have to undergo plastic surgery. No one-not family or friends- would ever see us again. We would be required to live like virtual prisoners for the rest of our lives while Victor did … whatever was expected of him."
"There are prisons, and there are prisons," Lippitt said. "Some are a good deal worse than others."
Elizabeth Foster wasn't really listening to anything Lippitt had to say. "Victor knew what was in Mr. Lippitt's mind," she continued, taking a deep breath and drawing her shoulders back. "He knew others would be coming for him, so he decided to run. He told me he'd find a safe place and then send for me. After all, we had plenty of money in the bank. Victor planned to use the money to buy new identities, new lives somewhere where they couldn't find us.
"He left the house. There were two men waiting for him. I saw what happened, but I still don't understand it." She wrapped her arms around her body as she shuddered. "I was standing on the stoop when one of the men jumped out at him. Victor swung his suitcase at the man, but Victor was still very weak from the operations; he didn't really have much strength to begin with, and the other man was so big. The man ducked around behind Victor and grabbed Victor's arm. Victor was struggling to get away, and then … the man just seemed to go down. His knees buckled and he fell to the sidewalk. He was holding his head and moaning, as if he were in pain, and then… he just lay still. Then another man came running at Victor. I thought Victor was going to be killed, so I ran inside and called the police.
When I came back out, both men were lying on the sidewalk and Victor was gone. I started to scream again. . I couldn't stop screaming."
Elizabeth Foster's voice trailed off, and there was silence in the room. I didn't think she would speak again, but she did.
"I knew I'd never see him again," she whispered. "And I didn't." She blinked back tears. "Two days later Mr. Lippitt called and told me Victor had been killed. The day after that, I saw a report in the newspaper that Victor had died in an accident in his laboratory. Now the Russians say they've talked to him on the phone. I just don't understand how that can be."
She looked at Lippitt, who stared back at her for a few moments, then glanced quickly away.
Tal spoke quietly to Mrs. Foster. "Do you have any idea how your first husband managed to escape from the two men?"
The woman shook her head.
It was Lippitt who answered. "He killed one and he knocked the other unconscious," Lippitt said into the stillness. He paused, then added: "And he did it with his mind. Victor Rafferty could kill with his mind."
Tal gestured impatiently. "That's insane."
"Nevertheless, it's true," Lippitt replied calmly. "You see, Victor Rafferty could do much more than just 'read minds.' He discovered through a series of accidents that his mental powers were growing. First, he found out he could kill by willing it when he was attacked by my men. I don't believe Rafferty meant to kill, but he panicked; he saw himself being captured. He literally reached out with his mind into the other man's brain. I don't know what he did there, or how he did it-an autopsy showed that my man died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. But Rafferty knew, because he was able to control it within the space of a few seconds; remember that the second man was only knocked unconscious. Can you see the implications of this power, Dr. Frederickson?"
"Assassination," I said quickly. "The same general or diplomat Rafferty leached his information from could suddenly die of a cerebral hemorrhage."
"Without anyone having laid a hand on him," Lippitt said tightly. "It wouldn't have to be a general; it could be a president, a vice president, a cabinet member. Victor Rafferty would be able to kill anyone he could get close to, and never be caught."