The attack came as we were crossing F Street.
Cautious habit, reinforced by my apprehension about this job and crystallized by my first look at the address inside Stafford's envelope, had taken me on a route that was both indirect and very different from the one I'd followed to National Airport earlier. After crossing over into the District, I did a half circle around the Lincoln Memorial and turned right onto Constitution Avenue. As we passed the Ellipse, with the Washington Monument to our right and the White House in the distance to the left, "Miss Smith" gave me a look of arch inquiry, but held her tongue. I affected not to notice as I drove on past the National Archives and turned left on Seventh Street. I intended to continue north past Chinatown, maybe as far as Mount Vernon Square, before turning left again and looping around.
I was silently congratulating myself on my cleverness when the nondescript delivery truck came careening into the intersection from the left, seemingly out of control, and capsized with suspicious precision directly in front of us.
I slammed on the brake, managing to bring us to a screeching stop a few feet in front of that overturned truck . . . which, I could now see, had no driver. I could also see the inconspicuously dressed figures emerging purposefully from behind the buildings at the corner of F Street. Their purposefulness was of a particular kind, which I had learned to recognize: that of armed men. They circled around toward each side of us.
As I brought my raging thoughts under control, one of them would not be suppressed: How could they have known? There was no way to predict I'd take this route.
I turned to "Miss Smith" and met her dark brown eyes. They held none of the shocked panic they should have. All I could see there was a resigned, slightly exasperated Oh, shit.
I dismissed all of this from my mind as I unlocked the door on my side and opened it a crack. Then I reached under my jacket with my left hand and grasped the Colt. It was awkward as hell, but I'd had practice.
As the first of the nondescript figures approached my side of the car, I kicked the door open, to slam into him. As he reeled back into the man behind him, I grabbed "Miss Smith" by her upper left arm and pulled her behind me as I flung myself out of the car. Simultaneously, I whipped out the Colt and got off a shot that entered the first man's head under the chin and blew off its top in a pinkish-gray shower.
The crowd of sightseers that a traffic accident always attracts began to scream.
I was too busy to notice. I hit the street rolling, still pulling "Miss Smith" behind me. Out of a corner of my eye, I noticed that she was still clutching her overnight bag. I got to my feet, pulling her up with me. In life-and-death situations, you don't pause to worry about trivia like a dislocated shoulder. But she had the feel of a woman in good condition . . . and, praise be, she wasn't screaming hysterically. As she staggered to her feet, I fired off three rapid shots that didn't hit anybody but made all the attackers take cover behind the overturned truck. Taking advantage of that moment, I pulled her around behind the car.
There were no shots. I shifted the Colt to my right hand and risked a peek over the car.
Shots rang out, and bullets whined off the car. But that wasn't what bothered me. As I snatched my gun hand back, something happened to that arm—it felt as though the arm had instantly gone to sleep, but with an added numbness. Unpleasant as hell. I cried out in shock and dropped the Colt.
"Miss Smith" seemed to recognize my reaction, and she went pale.
"Paralysis beam," she gasped. "It must have brushed your arm only fleetingly. They're actually using something like that right here on a city street!" That aspect clearly concerned her more than my well-being.
I scooped up the Colt with my left hand while trying to shake some feeling back into my right arm, and glared at her. "Listen, whatever-your-name-is, I want to know just exactly what the hell is going on here, and who these people are, and how they knew where we'd be, and—"
"There's no time for that now," she snapped. "We've got to get in there." She pointed to a narrow alley between two buildings on the right-hand side of Seventh Street.
"What?" A renewed fusillade of shots sent us crouching deeper, and elicited new screams from the bystanders who still huddled behind whatever shelter the sidewalks afforded, too terrified to run. I didn't return fire, not wanting to risk a repetition of what these guys had just done to my arm. Besides, I wanted to conserve the four rounds left in my magazine. It was, I reflected, one of the reasons the police continued to prefer revolvers: in a situation like this, you could spend your spare time "topping up."
"Look," I told her, "what we need to do is sit tight and hold them off. The cops will be here in a couple of minutes."
"No! You don't understand. I can get us to safety—I have the means. I just can't use it here, in public, where there are witnesses."
To this day, I'm still not certain why I let her take the lead, when I was supposed to be the professional in charge. Maybe I was just very rattled at encountering things that I didn't understand but which she evidently did. Whatever the reason, I reached down and drew the Beretta.
"Do you know how to use one of these?" I asked.
"Not really. You, uh, pull the trigger, right?"
"No, you squeeze it." I released the safety and handed it to her. She took it gingerly. "It doesn't have much kick. Just hold it in both hands like this." I demonstrated with the Colt, for the feeling was returning to my right hand. "Empty the magazine in the direction of the bad guys while you're running. Ready?"
She nodded jerkily.
"All right. . . . Run!" As I shouted the last word, I rose up and started shooting.
She sprinted gamely toward the alley, firing away. She hadn't a prayer of hitting anything . . . but they didn't know that. Also, they must have been stunned by the sheer unexpectedness of this move. They kept their heads down until we'd almost reached the alley. As the shots finally began to ring out behind us, I anticipated the same tingling numbness I'd felt before, only worse. But then we were around the corner and into the alley. "Miss Smith," gasping for breath, dropped the empty Beretta and started getting something out of her bag.
I detached a fresh magazine from the holster belt and slammed it into the Colt's butt. Then I positioned myself between "Miss Smith" and the alley entrance, in firing stance.
That was when the world abruptly went blurry and gray and silent.
I didn't even know how to react. It was too unexpected, and too foreign to ordinary experience. I turned to face "Miss Smith," who was standing very close behind me. She, at least, was still in sharp focus and full color. She was holding an odd-looking device about the size and shape of a paperback book. She clasped it to her belt to free her hand. When she spoke, her voice was the only sound in the universe.
"It generates a field, large enough to encompass both of us, which—" she began. Then the first of our attackers was around the corner of the building, moving like a figure in a silent black-and-white movie in poor focus. I started to raise my gun, but she gripped me by the arm. "No! They can't see us or hear us. Just stand still, close to me."
My jaw dropped. Clearly, she was nuts. And yet . . . the ghostly figures were running past us, looking frantically around. One of them faced me, unseeing, from just a few feet away. Then their leader mouthed some inaudible command, and they regrouped and proceeded on down the alley, checking doorways as they went.
"As I was starting to say," she resumed, "the field bends light around itself a hundred and eighty degrees, thus conferring invisibility. In theory we shouldn't be able to see out of it, either, but a partial compensating feature is built in. Actually, it's two fields. The second one blocks sound waves, both ways."
"Who are you?" I managed.
"That's not important at the moment. What is important is that we get moving. Anytime now, they're going to pull themselves together and start looking for us with sensors against which this device is useless. Fortunately, we have a shielded command post nearby—it was lucky you picked this route."
"'We'?" I queried.
She ignored me. "Come on, and remember to stay close to me." She took my hand to emphasize the last point—a gesture totally devoid of affection—and led the way back out onto Seventh Street.
A sheer sense of unreality kept me inarticulate as we proceeded north past the National Portrait Gallery and then worked our way to the right through side streets, moving in a silent world composed of fuzzy shades of gray, past dim people who could neither hear nor see us as we wended our way into Chinatown.
The Friendship Archway, that exercise in wretched excess, hadn't been constructed yet. There was just a squalidly picturesque district of exoticism and sinister menace that was largely—though not entirely—bogus, the whole effect comfortably cushioned by the knowledge that you were only about ten blocks from the White House. We passed invisibly through alleyways behind restaurants you'd never find listed by the AAA, where the by-products of their kitchens were disposed of. (No, you don't want to know.) As soon as we were inarguably alone, "Miss Smith" touched the little device on her belt. With a suddenness that was vertiginous for me but clearly no novelty for her, colors and sounds beat in on us as the universe returned to normal. She matter-of-factly returned the device to her bag and motioned me to follow her.
She led me to a laundry. (Yes, a laundry. I wouldn't dare make that up.) As we entered, the old Chinese guy behind the counter met her eyes. She approached him and said something I couldn't catch. He nodded. She motioned me to follow her to the right, behind a rack of hangers, rich with that freshly laundered smell. We worked out way around behind it, walking sideways to fit through the narrow spaces. She stopped in front of a segment of wooded wall that was distinguished only by a wooden carving of a Chinese ideograph . . . or what looked like one. I'd had some exposure to the Kai, Tsing and Tao scripts in the Army, but I couldn't place this one. She ran the palm of her hand over it. I spotted a faint greenish glow around the edges of her hand.
Soundlessly, a rectangular segment of the wall, large enough to admit one, moved back a couple of inches and slid aside. She passed through. I followed. The wall closed again.
We were in what looked like an empty closet, barely large enough to accommodate the two of us, lit by a dusty forty-watt bulb.
I was trying to frame a question when I felt a very faint vibration through the soles of my feet, followed by an equally faint sensation of descending, like an unusually slow and soundless elevator.
"Miss Smith" turned to face me. She held a small tubular gizmo, pointed at my midriff.
"Sorry," she said, without any deep conviction.
The next thing I remember was awakening on a cot.
It was a very nondescript cot in a very nondescript room—windowless, walled with some material I thought of as "plastic" in my inability to identify it. The door had a perfectly ordinary knob.
I got to my feet, and almost fell back over. It wasn't nausea, or vertigo, or anything except a stiff sensation of having lain unmoving for too long. I established my equilibrium—Special Forces training has its uses—and walked carefully to the door. I tried the knob. It was locked, of course, but I'd had to try.
I looked around more carefully. There was an obvious—if advanced-looking—video pickup near the ceiling, in the corner to the right of the door. I had no objection to that. Indeed, the ability of whoever I was dealing with to observe me offered some hope that they wouldn't just leave me to rot, now that they knew I was awake. Just to hasten the process, I made a rude gesture with the middle finger of my right hand in the direction of the pickup.
I was considering the pros and cons of mooning the pickup when the door finally opened.
"Miss Smith" entered, dressed exactly as she'd been when I'd last seen her. (Or at least I think she was. I've never been a particularly insightful observer of women's clothing, as all the women in my life have made clear to me.) A youngish man followed her, but stayed in the background, keeping his hand close to the opening of his jacket. I didn't even bother trying to calculate my chances of taking him—not when I had no idea of where I was, or how to get out of it.
"How are you feeling?" asked "Miss Smith" in a tone that passed for cordial with her.
"Never better. And now that we're among your friends, and I'm completely helpless, could you please tell me your real name?"
She blinked with surprise. "Well, I suppose it can do no harm. I'm Renata Novak. And I'm as human—and as American—as you, in case you'd wondered."
"Actually, I hadn't." This was true—surprisingly, inasmuch as I was something of a science-fiction fan. If I'd been a real hard case, maybe my mind would have strayed into wild speculations. Fortunately, the completely prosaic aspect of everything about Renata Novak except her hardware had kept me anchored securely in what I still fancied to be reality.
She resumed briskly. "At any rate, Mr. Devaney—"
"Ah, so you know my name."
"Of course. As I was saying, we find ourselves faced with the problem of what to do with you."
"You seemed to know just what to do with me, in that elevator."
"Do I detect a note of resentment? I should think you'd be more appreciative. I could have simply activated the privacy field for myself in that alley, after you had gotten me safely to it, and left you behind to deal with those who were following us."
There seemed no good answer to this, so I contented myself with my best glare. Irritatingly, she seemed not to notice, but continued without a break.
"So you see, Mr. Devaney, we're not without some concept of ethics. But you've seen things you have no business seeing, and become involved in matters whose importance you can't possibly imagine."
"Oh, I think I can imagine the importance of the Presidential succession."
This brought her up short. "What makes you say that?"
"It has to have something to do with the fact that Lyndon Johnson has abruptly become President. Remember the address I was originally supposed to take you to? Besides, something has got George Stafford on the verge of wetting his pants. What else could be involved, at this particular time?"
"Very clever, Mr. Devaney. You're even right, as far as you go. That is the reason for my presence in Washington—and, by extension, for the attack on me. There are, you see, certain things that Mr. Johnson needs to be made aware of. But the problem is the nature of those 'things'—secrets that must be kept. The importance of this is such that the assassination of one American president and the accession of another becomes a trivial matter by comparison."
So I can just imagine the triviality of an individual life, I thought. Mine, for instance. "You mean," I asked aloud, "the stuff I saw you use?"
"Again, Mr. Devaney, that's just one facet of the secret of which I speak. You shouldn't have seen that 'stuff,' and wouldn't have had it not been for the attack on us. But, through no fault of your own, you did see it."
"Hold that thought about 'no fault of your own.'"
"Unfortunately, that alters nothing. Now," she continued briskly, "our options are limited. There are techniques of memory erasure by which you could be made to forget everything that has happened to you since just before Stafford approached you about this job. This, however, has at least three disadvantages. First, it isn't absolutely foolproof; some residue of memory might remain. Second, some kind of cover story would have to be devised to account for the loss of a couple of days from your life. And third, the procedure is not entirely without risk of permanent brain damage, possibly leaving the subject in a vegetative state."
I got the distinct impression that she had listed the disadvantages in descending order of importance, from her standpoint. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that she'd just dug the hole I was in even deeper, if possible, by telling me about this memory erasure business—something else I had no business knowing.
"You mentioned 'options,' plural," I said carefully. "That's just one option. There must be at least one other."
Renata Novak didn't reply. And her dark eyes, usually so direct, didn't meet mine.
There was, I realized, no need to go into details about the second option.
In spite of everything, I sensed that this woman wasn't evil or bloodthirsty or anything like that. But she had the ruthlessness of someone in the service of an absolute: a cause whose importance transcended all ordinary social rules and moral standards, an end that justified any means.
She seemed to reach a decision. I had a pretty good idea of what that decision was. She opened her mouth to speak.
"Who are you people?" I blurted.
She looked surprised. "We're called the Prometheus Project . . . not that that will mean anything to you. And now, Mr. Devaney—"
The door opened. Novak turned with an expression of annoyance at the interruption. That expression smoothed itself out at the sight of the late-middle-aged gent who entered—a tall, lantern-faced guy with slightly receding gray hair and blue eyes whose mildness was, I thought, probably deceptive. He motioned Novak to join him in a corner. They spoke in undertones for perhaps two minutes, while the young guy watched me with a degree of concentration that decided me against attempting any funny business. Instead, I tried to eavesdrop on the conversation in the corner. But I only caught two words, because Novak pronounced them with a startled rise in volume: "Mr. Inconnu."
Finally, she turned back to me. "It seems, Mr. Devaney, that you've suddenly acquired a new option. Actually, it's not even an 'option'; it's simply what's going to happen. You are to be recruited."
"Recruited?" I echoed faintly.
"For the Prometheus Project," she explained, in the tone one uses with a not-terribly-bright child. "That is the decision of an important—a very important—individual who has somehow become aware of your case and for some unaccountable reason taken a personal interest in it."
"Mr. Inconnu?" I ventured.
My shot in the dark evidently connected, for she gave me a look of concentrated and distilled venom. "You have an instinctive affinity for things that are none of your business. But then, I suppose it is your business now, isn't it? And yes, he evidently insists on it. Very well; you will be transported to—"
"Wait just a goddamned minute! What if I don't want to be recruited? Ever think about that?"
"Are you sure you don't want to be?" she asked silkily. "Considering . . . ?"
This, undeniably, was food for thought.
The elderly man stepped forward and spoke into the silence. "I tell you what, Mr. Devaney: suppose we take you to the destination Miss Novak was about to describe to you, and there explain to you what the Prometheus Project is all about? If, after hearing what we have to say, you don't wish to participate, then we will make every possible effort to devise a solution that enables you to keep both your life and your sanity, while maintaining inviolate the secret we exist to keep." He raised a forestalling hand as Novak appeared ready to erupt with indignation. "This is Mr. Inconnu's wish. In fact, I'm almost quoting him verbatim." He turned back to me. "Well, Mr. Devaney?"
Did I believe him? To this day, I'm not sure. But, as Novak had put it, my options were limited.
Within twelve hours, I was on the first of a series of planes to Alaska.
o