The Last Manly Man (26 page)

We stopped off at ANN, so I could pick up the undercover camera, Purse-Cam as we knew it in Special Reports. It was a big women's purse containing a small camera with a fish-eye lens and a rechargeable ni-cad battery pack.

When I got home, my neighbor Sally was in the foyer. She was damned surprised to see me.

“You're okay!” she said.

“So far,” I said.

“You got away from the men?” she said.

“What men?”

“Mrs. Ramirez saw some men grab you on Avenue B tonight.”

“It wasn't me. It must have been my doppelgänger.”

“But Mrs. Ramirez said she was dressed like you, in the pink suit.…”

“I gave her that suit,” I said. “It's a long story.…”

“Ramirez called the cops about it,” Sally said.

Unfortunately, the cops were unlikely to believe Mrs. Dulcinia “Cry Wolf” Ramirez, so I called the precinct on the cell phone I borrowed from Sally, let them know about the abduction of Miss Trix by unidentified thugs. How ironic that our alleged resemblance caused more trouble for Miss Trix, a convicted drug dealer and exploiter of small handicapped immigrant children, than for me. Miss Trix had some serious bad karma to clear. I halfheartedly hoped she was safe, though I didn't really have time to waste feeling sorry for Miss Trix right now.

After I fed my cat, I read over the highlighted sections in the booklet number twenty had given me.

“You must pack a duffel bag in advance and keep it with you at all times, until you get the signal that the raid is to begin,” it said. “Wear clean, comfortable clothes, and quiet shoes or boots. Over these, you should wear a clean jumpsuit, which can be discarded after a raid. Dark colors are best. You will need gloves. If you will be using wire cutters or other such tools, bring work gloves, or wear two or three pairs of regular gloves.

“All tools must be thoroughly wiped clean, first with soap and water, and then a dry cloth, to make sure there are no fingerprints in case a piece is dropped at the scene of a raid.

“Flashlights should be covered with colored plastic to dim their light.

“It is often a good idea to carry some sort of anti-mate, the kind used by hunt saboteurs to put hounds off the scent of game. Apply liberally every time you cross a road or a stream.

“Arrive two to three hours beforehand and hide out in a wood or other sheltered area.

“After a raid, all clothes must be thoroughly washed immediately to remove all traces of the raid scene.”

There were a few other interesting tidbits, such as the information that wearing a mask for long periods can cause dry throat and coughing, so lozenges and water should be brought along, and spraying water on masonry can quiet the sound of a saw. When cutting through barbed wire, only the bottom wires should be cut, because if you're pursued in the dark, your pursuers may not see the uncut top wires, and they'll get caught in them.

These people had put a lot of time, energy, and effort into rescuing lab animals. I was damned glad of it, even though I didn't necessarily support them in all their causes and still thought they were loons.

I packed my duffel bag, arranged for Sally to keep Louise for the next couple of days, left a message at work on the voice mail saying I was going to be out for the day on a personal emergency and delegating more work, and fell into bed to get some sleep.

It was a fitful sleep, never quite gelling into a dream, and my alarm went off far too early. I was a bit dazed from lack of sleep, and without thinking, I hit the snooze button. When the alarm went off again, I awoke with a start. Now I was running late and had to rush around to get it together to meet Blue downstairs at 5:30
A.M.
, as we'd arranged when he'd dropped me off the night before.

I got downstairs early. There was a white van parked in front of my building. I poked my head out the front door to get a better look. When I did, the interior light flicked on and off.

I ran out, thinking Blue had again changed vehicles.

In a split second, I realized I'd made a mistake. But it was too late. Two men jumped out of the van, grabbed me, threw me in the back, and squealed away.

As one thug duct-taped my mouth, another tied my hands. The man in the front, on the passenger side, turned around.

“You've been so much trouble, Ms. Hudson,” said Benny Winter.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“We've been waiting for you for two hours,” Winter said. “I'm so glad you obliged us by coming down early to go to work. Tie her up.”

One of the goons took my duffel bag. My feet were tied and my eyes covered with more duct tape, which the idiot taping me wrapped around my head mummy style. After that, a bag of some sort was put over my head. My mouth was ungagged.

“What have we here?” Winter said. “It's some kind of camera, in a purse.”

“Yeah, and look at this, dark clothes, flashlight,” one of the goons said. He was listing the contents of my duffel bag. “Oh, and get a load of this, a book on liberating lab animals.”

“Where was this operation going to take place, Miss Hudson?” I heard Benny Winter ask.

“I don't know.”

“Where were you meeting the others involved in this?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I missed my ride thanks to you. He knew where we were going. That's how it works on an operation. A person only gets as much information as she needs.”

“Who was your ride?”

“I don't know his name. You know, people are going to be looking for me.”

“I don't think so,” Winter said. “We're taking care of that.”

“How?”

“Can't tell you that. You only get as much information as you need from me too,” Winter said. “I believe you know more than you're letting on.”

A gun was jammed into the side of my head.

“Where were you headed today?” Winter asked.

“Oh, just shoot me,” I said, knowing he wouldn't until I talked.

“Perhaps we will,” Winter said. “But not right now. We'll get the truth out of you, later, at the lab. Tape up her mouth too.”

Mandervan. Sure, in hindsight that made a certain sense. Benny Winter had seen the address, seen the hat, known I'd run into Hufnagel. I had asked Mandervan, via Winter, about Mandervan's book on the Man of the Future, about what it meant to be manly, as I had asked all the potential interview subjects. Benny Winter may have learned from Morton, a former employer of his and Mandervan's, that I was going to be on the Morton estate on Sunday. Mandervan, in his paranoia, must have suspected I knew something about the Last Manly Man Project.

They were shrewd, he and Benny, promising Solange the future exclusive with Wally Mandervan to throw her and Reb off their trail.

It had never occurred to me before that my crazy hero, Wallace Mandervan, could be this crazy, though it happens to visionary-type people now and then—they become too confident in their own vision and go mad, get messianic.

I don't know how long we drove, but we eventually stopped. Someone grabbed me and hauled me outside, into the open air. My feet were untied and I was led down some sort of wooden platform—the hollow sound of it made me think of a pier—and then down another, creaking wooden platform that sloped downward. Water was sloshing against wood.

“Sit,” a man commanded. A short time later, a motor started up and we were moving. We were on a boat.

“I'll be glad when this job is done,” I heard one of the goons say in a muffled voice. “I'm ready for a vacation.”

“Where you gonna go?” asked another goon.

“Florida. See my mom, do some fishing. Relax. What are you doing for vacation?”

“I'm going to Vegas. I feel a hot streak coming on.”

“You like roulette?”

“I like craps.”

“This has been a tough job, Benny,” the first goon said. “We oughta get some hardship pay or something.”

The goons were quiet for a while. The grinding of the engine, the smell of gasoline and salt water, the rocking of the boat made me feel queasy, and I worried I was going to throw up behind my duct tape and choke on my own vomit. Instead, I fell asleep, and slept until the boat stopped.

I was hauled up a plank and down another wooden pier. A metal gate creaked open.

“Thanks. Take her into the bunker,” said an unfamiliar man's voice.

I was taken down some stairs, through a tunnel that smelled like peat, into some kind of space, and was cuffed to a chair.

“Take the tape off her,” yet another man's voice said.

Someone held me, while someone else ripped the duct tape off my face and head, taking chunks of hair and probably my eyebrows with it.

“Yee-ow!” I screamed.

“Pipe down, woman. What do you need?”

“Water,” I said hoarsely. My eyes wouldn't focus.

Water was poured into me, too quickly. I almost choked.

When my vision cleared, I was sitting across from Wallace Mandervan.

The stories were true. He was a bearded, twitchy recluse with neatly trimmed fingernails.

“You've made a terrible mistake …” I said.

“Oh, I don't think so,” he said.

A door opened behind him. Gill Morton came in, followed by a man in a white lab coat.

“You got her, huh? I knew she was snooping around the Adam project,” Morton said.

“Give her the shot.”

A man in a white lab coat came at me with a needle.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Sodium pentothol. Truth serum,” Mandervan said. “We'll just give it a little time to work.…”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Miss Hudson, someone has to restore the natural order so people can be happy, so men and women can get along again. That's all we want to do, make people happy,” Mandervan said. Jarringly, his voice was kind and gentle.

“We don't expect you to understand, because you've been brainwashed,” Morton said, in his dubbed foreign movie voice. “But sometimes, sacrifices have to be made in order to move history forward. That's something women don't understand.”

Ah, it was for the good of
man
kind.

As the drug worked its way through my already exhausted system, a weird feeling of relaxation came over me, followed by a feeling of detachment. Time lost all meaning. Suddenly, I was speaking involuntarily, but my own voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. The truth came spilling out of me.

“You're all nuts,” I said. “You can't get women to do what you want, despite your money and power, so you have to fuck with the entire gender. You're a bunch of assholes. And I think you're latently homosexual.”

With whatever faculties remained, I kept myself alert enough to just keeping talking, just keep telling the truth, any truth but the truth they wanted, and loud enough to drown out their questions.

Onward, I spewed forth my stream-of-consciousness rant.

“My sort of boyfriend is sleeping with a trapeze artist. He is dumping me for her. I've been sleeping with another guy, Gus, but he's mad at me now. I like him a lot. When he was a kid he had this pet salmon, Harry. Harry was hairy. I just farted. I really do like Hanson.…”

“Shut up!” Morton yelled at me.

“My nose is itchy. I'm not a very good reporter. I screen my phone calls. My favorite Monkee was Davy Jones. My second favorite Monkee was Mike Nesmith.…”

I was winding down. The energy was draining from me. My voice grew faint.

“Tell us about the liberation,” Morton shouted.

I couldn't help myself. Everything I knew about the diversion squad, the liberation squad, and the saboteurs came spilling out in a river of increasingly slow, quiet sentences.

After I had finished, Mandervan said, “How did you know about the Adam project? Why did you start asking Morton and me about the Man of the Future?”

“A coincidence,” I said feebly. “I was doing a series on the Man of the Future. Jack Jackson suggested I use Gill, and when I found out Gill knew you, I asked him to help me out.…”

“Who knows about this?”

“Just the people involved in the liberation tonight,” I said.

I couldn't speak anymore. I was hoarse and spent.

“Take her away,” Morton said.

The goons uncuffed me, helped me to my feet, and half-dragged, half-carried me out, down a hall, and into another room lined with jail-like cells, all empty. The goons threw me into one and locked it.

I passed out.

When I came to, I heard a man's voice.

“Robin Hudson?” he whispered. “I hear you've been looking for me.…”

In the next cell was Harris Hufnagel. The man in the hat.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Hello,” I said. “What …”

“Speak quietly. There's a guard posted outside this door. I am assuming you know why I gave you the hat.”

“Yeah, the map, the formula, found 'em. You could have made the map more detailed.”

“I wasn't sure where we were. When we were given liberty for a day or two and left the island, on land we were transported in the back of a van with blacked-out windows, let off in Montauk, took the train in from there.”

“So how exactly did you and I end up here together?”

In breathy bits and pieces, halting every time we heard a noise in the hallway, Hufnagel gave me his story.

During a bad time in his life, due to a gambling problem, Mandervan's people had approached him about working for them on a pheromonal project involving bonobo chimps. Not knowing what he was getting into, wanting to escape the mistakes of his past and avoid prosecution for embezzling research funds, Hufnagel agreed. He found himself in this bunker, working with other scientists like Bondir, who thought they had escaped their pasts by working for Mandervan and Morton, only to find themselves in a different kind of prison.

The plan, he told me, was to devise some chemical that could be secreted into air fresheners, cleaning products, grooming products, and ventilation systems, a chemical that would return women to contented submission and make men stronger and more aggressive. Morton then planned to cut his prices to get those products into even more households around the world and get women hooked on the chemical, cleaning, and resurgent male domination.