But there’d been something different about it this time. The men in the car, the guards and others in the corridors of this carefully unmarked building, all seemed tenser, nervous, taut. At first she thought they had sensed her plan, or had somehow discovered it outright. But she quickly realized it was something else.
As they’d waited to be let into the conference room where the questioning would take place, she noticed two heavily armed guards in front of a door at the far end of the corridor. She saw the covert, worried looks of the others as they glanced in that direction, then whispered among themselves. But she’d had little time to analyze or guess at the cause of their discomfort.
The questioning had begun simply enough, routine questions about surveillance and suspicions that opened each session. Her secured briefcase had been gingerly placed on the table in front of her—the men obviously aware of its intricate booby traps. No one mentioned it throughout the meticulous beginning. It was simply silently acknowledged as her interrogators checked off their lists of the routine Q&A that they lived by.
Finally the preliminaries were over and the main event began.
“Congresswoman, have you retrieved the reports we requested?”
“I have.”
The first man—the German she couldn’t look at without undisguised rage—had nodded toward the briefcase. “If you please.”
“No.” Her voice had been firm but carefully controlled. She must play for the moment, that instant when she had won all she could and not an instant sooner.
The man sighed. “Need I remind you of the consequences to your—”
“You don’t have to say anything, you traitorous bastard! When this is over,” I’m going to see that everyone knows who—
The German looked exasperated. “They will
know
nothing. Not if you care anything for your children, madame. Now
open the case.”
He was barely controlling his anger.
“Not till I get some things first.”
The third man actually smiled. “What do you expect
us
to give
you?
”
It was hard, the hardest moment of her life, but she kept her voice calm and reasonable. “I want my children released immediately. They’re to be taken to the home of Speaker Wilson. I’m scheduled to call there at ten in the morning. If they’re not there, then it’s all over.”
“What, precisely, is over,” Ms. Alvarez?
“All of this!” You get no more from me—not personally, not documents. Nothing. Not till I get what I want.
The man shook his head. “You will not sacrifice your children.”
Valerie took a deep breath. “If they’re not there, then they’re probably dead already.” She paused. “And you’ll have no more hold over me.”
“We’ll have you,” the third said simply. “And we will have the contents of your case. That might well suffice.”
Valerie actually managed a laugh. “Who do you think you’re talking to?
Ratas de cantarilla incontinente sin dientes!”
she sneered. “If the KGB couldn’t ever open one of those without destroying the contents—with all their techno know-how—what the Hell are you second-raters going to do? She laughed openly, fully; in relief and fear
of what might happen next, sure. But also a laughter born of a final freedom of action.”
The laughter shocked the men behind the table, who quickly consulted with each other, then with a bandaged man, Mr. Smith from the last session.
“You
can open it,” Smith finally lisped out from behind swollen lips and a black eye. “And there’s lots we can do to you.” He came around the table toward her.
“You learn slow, Zippy,” Valerie said softly as she evened the weight on her feet, took a more solid stance, gauged the diminishing distance between them, as the man approached.
Smith nodded. “But I do learn.” He seemed to look past her. “Jimmy.”
She never heard the man come up behind her, punching her in the side with a hammerblow that bent her over. The man pulled her arms back, forcing her to bend over the conference table, her face less than a foot from her frowning interrogators.
“Open the case,” Ms. Alvarez, “the German said softly.” “Spare us all this … unpleasantness.”
“Chingatè, enaños!”
She felt Smith come up behind her, tearing at her jeans, pushing the other man away as she flailed behind her; praying to grab a hunk of hair, an eye, anything that would inflict pain.
“Open the fucking case,” Smith spat out in a hoarse leer as he tore her panties off. “Or I’m going to do you ugly and for hours!”
As she heard the man begin to undo his belt, as the men across the table looked on in mild discomfort, her briefcase was pushed in front of her.
“All right!” But her cry seemed unnoticed by the man behind her as he lifted her higher on the table and began to spread her flailing legs.
“Mr. Smith!” the German called out angrily.
Reluctantly the man backed off.
Valerie slowly pushed herself off the table.
“Please cover yourself, Congresswoman,” the second said solicitously. “Then open the case.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Smith angrily panting as she pulled up her jeans.
“This isn’t over yet, bitch, he muttered beneath his breath.”
“Too right, she mumbled back, then turned to the case.”
Standing it on its end, she dialed a combination into one lock, then a different number into the other. There was an audible click, and a wave of relief around the table.
Then Valerie spun around, the handle of the case coming off in her hand revealing two large, pointed spikes. She plunged them deep into the right side of Smith’s face.
The man’s pained screams were more animal than human and they filled the room and corridor beyond. He collapsed on the floor, rolling around, blood covering his face and forming abstract art on the pale yellow carpet.
Valerie was wrestled back onto the table, held painfully in place by two men.
But her interrogators were stunned into silence by her smiling face, bent up toward them, speaking in a quiet, almost satisfied tone.
“Not till I get what I want.”
But that had been ten hours ago. Ten hours spent locked in a small windowless empty office. Handcuffed, gagged, but somehow satisfied. Because she knew that soon the waiting and the planning and the praying would be over, and the end would come.
For all of them.
She looked up as the door was opened. Two of the men from earlier walked in—tense, worried looks on their faces—followed by a big man whose face revealed nothing.
The new man looked her over casually, then shook his head. “Unbelievable, was all he said as he turned to leave. Then he stopped, walking back into the office, crouching by Valerie. He reached over, gently pulling down her gag.”
“So the boss finally shows up,” Valerie rasped out of her too dry throat.
“In a manner of speaking.” He gestured at her cuffs and she was quickly unlocked. “You’re a tough little cow, I’ll give you that.”
Valerie cautiously stretched, then stood, after the big man stepped back. “Have my children been released?”
Canvas smiled. “I bet you’re dying to know.” He stepped toward her, leaning close, whispering in her ear.
“Wonder for a bit longer, sweetheart.”
He easily caught the kick that was aimed at his crotch, held her by the ankle for a moment, shook his head like a parent who’d caught his child in a foolish lie, then simply tipped her over onto the floor.
“I like spirit, Valerie. May I call you Valerie?” As she scrambled to her feet, he spun backward to his left, catching her too-slowly-thrown punch at the elbow and throwing her forward. Again, she ended up in a pile on the floor. “But there’s a time and place for it.” He shrugged as she got up more slowly, more cautiously, this time. “And this is neither the time nor the place, right?”
He reached out so suddenly that Valerie was unable to do anything as she was shoved back against the wall, an iron grip squeezing the life from her throat.
“We’ll talk later,” Canvas said casually after a full minute of her breathless struggling.
Then he was gone, leaving a chilling presence, like bad aftershave, in the air behind him.
“Where’s Smith?” he asked after the door had been locked behind them.
“Lying down,” one of his escorts reported flatly. “One of the meds sewed up his face, shot him with some painkiller and shit. But I figured you’d want to talk to him before we sent him to a hospital.”
“Yeah.”
A minute later they were in the improvised infirmary where Smith—half his face concealed by a bloody bandage—was drinking Dewar’s from the bottle.
“I’ve got to go to the fucking hospital,” he said in a pained mumble when he saw Canvas.
“Well,” Canvas said easily, “that’s not really necessary. Is it, love?” He casually took a gun from the waistband of the man next to him and fired three times into Smith’s forehead.
He handed the gun back and started out. “Where you been getting these guys?”
His assistant merely looked away.
Canvas sighed as they left the room. “All right. He wiped his eyes as if he was exhausted and faced with one final odious job before he could rest.”
“Let’s go pay our respects.”
Xenos had drifted in and out of consciousness for hours. Pain racked his body, nausea roiled in his stomach, and he’d lost all sense of time. He couldn’t move, whether because of the ropes that held him to a ceiling beam or not he didn’t know.
He
hoped
it was the ropes.
So he hung there—five inches off the floor—and waited. The next move belonged to the other guys.
The door opened, and a guard ordered the two interior gunmen out. After casting a nervous look up at the seriously wounded man, the final guard left. A moment later Canvas came in.
“Morning,” Jerry.
“Who’s that? The brighter light from the hallway obscured his view.”
“Has it been that long? Canvas closed the door behind him.”
Xenos concentrated on the man who came a step closer. “Oh,” was all he finally said.
The two men—English and American—sat quietly as their Russian defector instructor finished his lesson.
“Remember, never believe yourself to be smarter, more able or better trained than your subject. It is
leverage,
not experience or talent, that moves mountains.”
The man bowed at the head, then left the small classroom.
“Waste of time,” Colin Meadows said as he closed his notebook.
Jerry shrugged. “He made some points.”
“Granted. But all common sense, really.”
The two young men got up, left the building, and began walking through the landscaped grounds of Schweinfurt Intelligence Annex Beta, only one kilometer from the Wall.
“I think most of this stuff is common sense, Colin,” the American thought aloud. “I mean, think about it. You need something from somebody, they don’t want to give it to you…”
“And physicalizing could just radicalize them. Yeah,” the Englishman said simply. “Like I said, waste of time.”
They sat down on a bench watching a volleyball game between two teams of French and American service-women.
“You really believe in all this Four Phase stuff?”
Jerry yawned. “They believe it, or they wouldn’t have spent the last year and a half training me, I guess.”
“Two years for me.” Colin slicked back his hair. “An’ all they done is convince me of what I knew already.”
“Which was?”
The stocky twenty-four-year-old Brit smiled. “That I
am
different from everybody else.” A spasmodic smile flew across his face. “‘Cept maybe you, Jer. And if they want to make me more different, and I can make a living off it, why not?’”
The lean twenty-two-year-old American nodded sadly. “I always felt it too. But I’m not in it for the money.”
“Why, then?”
Jerry was quiet for a long time. “I want to make things, I don’t know
, better
maybe.”
Colin looked disinterested. “Whatever, mate.” He concentrated on two of the women standing by the side of the game, toweling their firm bodies. “But I say we put some of their bloody awful lessons into practice.”
“What do you have in mind?” Jerry asked as he followed the man’s gaze.
“That we practice a little leverage to see if we can’t get those birds’ legs in the air.”
Jerry nodded enthusiastically as the fledgling Four Phase Men moved toward their first real… targets.
“Game on.”
“Is it morning?”
Canvas smiled warmly. “Always is somewhere,” right?
“I suppose. Xenos studied the man below him. He was unarmed, casual, relaxed, and completely in control.” A bad sign. “How you been, Colin?”
“Fair. And yourself?” How you been?
“You tell me.”
Canvas ignored him, instead pulling up a chair, sitting down, and lighting a cigar. “When my man got taken out so easy,” that should have told me. He laughed. “And I got audiologist bills from what one of your toys did to my listener.” He shook his head. “That’s a new one on me.” He shook his head. “You know, between you and the bitch, the insurance copayments on this thing are going to break me.”
“Pity.”
Canvas looked up sharply. “Not from you, old son. Never from you.”
Xenos wet his lips. Canvas noticed, then gave him a drink of cold water from a pitcher nearby.
“Still chasing rainbows?”
Xenos exhaled deeply. “Ain’t no rainbows anymore, he whispered.”
The sitting man seemed shocked to the core. A wounded look that seemed to say that the blue sky had just been discovered as truly plaid.
“I don’t believe it,” he said quietly. “Not you. Not ever.” Canvas stood and began pacing. “You’re a constant of the universe, Jerry. Like the moon’s orbit or flowers in spring.” He chuckled. “You and me, old son. Sides of a coin.”
He came so close that he brushed Xenos’s chest—almost intimately—as he looked up into the burned-out
eyes. “The White Knight on the side of the demons. The Black Knight on the side of the angels.” He reached up, tenderly wiping sweat out of the hanging man’s eyes. “We defined each other. We
were
each other.”