Well In Time Part 25

Father Keat turned from the window with a sardonic smile.

"No one in the twenty-first century is innocent, Miss Searcy. People just have varying degrees of awareness of their guilt."

They took her to a room without windows, one she was sure from its grim and comfortless look must have been a torture chamber during the Inquisition. Father Keat was there with Icepick and a few other of the older men. They allowed Lobo to follow her and he came to lie at her feet. Lone-R stood guard by the door.

One man came forward, wielding a syringe. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with the look of an aging bull. His eyes were hard in a handsome face, beneath a fully shaven head, and they seemed to penetrate into the depths of her own.

"Do you remember me, Miss Searcy?"

She shook her head. "No."

"That's because the last time we met, you were already under the influence of the drug I'm about to administer. My name is Cat, and I am a former interrogator for the CIA. I am about to inject scopolamine, also known as Tree Datura, Brugmansia, Toe, and Devil's Breath.

"This time, the dosage will not cause you to overdose or hallucinate, but it will cause you to speak the truth. When you come out from under its influence, you won't remember anything that has pa.s.sed here. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"There are sociopaths who can lie and still pa.s.s a lie detector test, but no one can outwit scopolamine. Are you ready?"

She was too paralyzed with fear to speak. She squared her shoulders and nodded her head. The man came forward, took her icy hand in his, and plunged the needle into her arm.

When she first became aware of herself again, she was sitting in the armchair by the guest room fire. Lone-R stood by the door holding a shotgun. She glanced dizzily around the room and saw that the shutters were closed and locked from the inside. She was slightly nauseated and she had a cracking headache.

Lone-R caught her eye. "You back?"

She nodded, frowning. "How long?"

"About six hours."

"My vision is blurred."

"Your pupils are still dilated."

"What did they think?"

Lone-R shrugged. "Who knows? They don't share that stuff with me."

Lobo got up and came to stand by her chair, poking her in the arm with his nose. She wafted an insubstantial hand toward him and laid it on top of his head.

"What happens now?"

"We wait. You hungry?"

Calypso thought about it. "Maybe. I feel kind of sick to my stomach."

"Food might help. There're some sandwiches there, on the tray."

Calypso bent to take one and then turned to Lobo. "You hungry?"

Lobo's feathery tail gave an answering swish.

"Okay. We'll share." She tore the sandwich of bologna and cheese in half and dropped the wolf's half into the bowl on the hearth.

"Did I say anything that surprised you?" she asked Lone-R, around a bite of sandwich.

"Ha, yeah!" he said with an ironic laugh. "We. . .none of us had any idea what you went through. Everyone was shocked."

"Really?"

"Well, h.e.l.l yeah. El Lobo drowning. Falling down the cliff. Your house burned down. Your husband probably dead. Finding Lobo." He waved his arm expressively. "s.h.i.+t! You're one tough cookie, lady."

"You think he believed me? Father Keat?"

Lone-R shrugged. "If he didn't, he missed a good chance."

"Why are you guarding me then? Did I say I'm going to try to escape?"

"Nah. It's not that. It's El Lobo's crew. This one cat, Jimmy the Butcher. He heard your testimony but he still thinks you're lyin'. He's threatenin' to kill you."

"So you're here to protect me?"

"Yes, m'am."

Calypso reached dreamily for the second sandwich, split it with Lobo and took a bite, her eyes still gazing, slightly unfocused, at Lone-R.

"Nothing like this has ever happened here before?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"It's hard, you know? Not remembering. And humiliating. Like I could have made a fool of myself and I'd never know."

"You didn't."

"Tell me, will you? Tell me every single thing so I can remember it now. Give me back my memory. Please?"

Lone-R considered Calypso, with her long hair in a wild aura around her haggard face, then looked at his feet and nodded.

"Okay."

He recounted the entire six hours-the questions Cat had asked; her responses; Father Keat's question, whether she simply might be hallucinating everything; and Cat's reply that she would not have been able to give an account consistent with her first interrogation if she were.

"And you cried a lot."

"I did?"

"Buckets."

"But I didn't cry in the cave. At least, not that much. Only in the tube."

"You said that, but Cat said it was because the scopolamine touches down into the subconscious, so you get a person's true responses to a situation."

"So I was really just a big baby."

"No. So you kept goin' in spite of overwhelmin' odds. You gots to remember-these guys have been there and done that. s.h.i.+t! They'll probably make you an honorary Ghost!"

There was a knock at the door and Lone-R called, "Who's there?"

"Me." It was the unmistakable voice of Father Keat.

"You alone?"

"Yes."

"Give the pa.s.sword."

"Holy s.h.i.+t!"

Lone-R lifted the bar on the door. Father Keat bustled in and gestured with his head for Lone-R to close the door fast. He had replaced his ca.s.sock with camouflage and he carried an a.s.sault rifle with a handgun holstered at his side. "We've got to get you out of here," he began without preamble. "All h.e.l.l's breaking loose." This observation was punctuated by a distance volley of shots. "El Lobo's crew is holed up on the third floor. They think you killed him and they want revenge."

"They didn't believe my testimony?"

"Lady, you don't understand. In the bad guy world, if you even imagine that someone has done you wrong, you do them. Otherwise, you lose respect."

"There's a problem. I still can't see very well. And I don't think I can walk down the trail. I'm kind of shaky."

"That's not a problem." He turned to Lone-R. "Get her out to the back courtyard, p.r.o.nto."

"Yes, sir."

Lone-R lifted the bar on the door and Father Keat was halfway through, when he stopped and turned back to Calypso.

"Listen," he said earnestly. "You did a h.e.l.luva thing these last couple of days. And I don't just mean El Lobo."

"All I've done is stir up trouble for you."

"No. You've flushed out the rats. Every organization's got 'em. Now, we do a little rat hunt is all. This place needed a good cleaning up."

He hesitated, then shoved the door closed and strode across the room. Taking Calypso's hand in his, he bent at the waist and laid a courtly kiss on its back. "You're a h.e.l.luva broad. I've had four wives in all and all of 'em put together couldn't make half of you."

He dropped her hand, ran to the door, peered out as he drew his weapon, and was gone, leaving Calypso with her mouth agape.

Lone-R grinned. "What'd I tell you?"

He came across the room to her. "Madame," he said, bowing at the waist, and offering her his arm. She hung onto it and he pulled her to her feet. "Can you walk?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Then let's get you out of here. p.r.o.nto."

11.

Lone-R led Calypso through a labyrinth of corridors, past what were, by obvious smells, the kitchen and refectory. They hurried by a large room where a small cadre of men was practicing tai chi, and out a tall set of double doors at the back of the building.

They were in a courtyard paved in river cobble set on edge for drainage. Across the way, a hundred feet distant, stood another stone building with large, sliding wooden doors.

As Calypso and Lone-R crossed the yard, two men were engaged in wrestling the doors open. Then they ducked inside, and Calypso got a glimpse of some kind of machine, glimmering back in the shadows. In seconds, the men emerged, pus.h.i.+ng a small, sleek helicopter with someone already at the controls.

As Lone-R pulled Calypso toward the chopper, the turbine kicked on with a scream and the rotors began to turn.

"This is it," Lone-R yelled. "Where you and me say goodbye." He yanked open the pa.s.senger-side door.

Stunned by the sudden change of events, Calypso threw her arms around his neck in a brief, fierce hug.

"You're a good man, Lone-R. Don't you ever let anyone tell you otherwise," she shouted over the increasing whine of the turbine.

She stepped up into the chopper and reached down to Lobo, who was cowering in the wind of the rotors, his silver and black fur thras.h.i.+ng.

"Come on, boy. Let's go!"

The terrified animal slunk on its belly to the door, and Lone-R boosted him in and slammed the door. He stepped back and raised his hand in farewell as the chopper immediately began to rise.

The craft took a dip to the right and as it did, the winds.h.i.+eld suddenly crackled into a spider web pattern.

"s.h.i.+t!" the pilot exclaimed.

They were thirty feet off the ground now and as they banked hard right, she saw Lone-R rolling for cover into the stone outbuilding. As they spun up and away, she caught a brief glimpse of faces at the third floor windows of the monastery, saw the muzzle flash of their guns, and heard the ping of bullets. .h.i.tting the fuselage.

Then they were screaming over the terra cotta-tiled roof and the abyss of the canyon fell away underneath them. Red cliffs embraced the small craft parenthetically, the river uncoiled its aqua length, and the entirety looked as peaceful as if none of the foregoing mayhem had happened at all.

"You okay?" It was the pilot, and Calypso, who was still straining to see the last of the monastery, turned to him and was amazed to see Cat at the controls.

"Yes. I think so. Are you?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l yeah. Takes more than that to even get my blood pressure up."