itched from his beard stubble. His tongue felt swollen, and his mouth was sour. He wanted someone to give him a pill and a swallow of gingerale; he wanted someone to tuck him in and fluff his pillow and sing him to sleep.
Andrew Rice seemed to be in even worse shape than the director. His puffy face was as white as coconut meat. His lips were bluish. His quick little eyes were still little but no longer as quick as they had been; they were eyes that had seen more than they wanted to see; tears of weariness streamed from them constantly. Rice breathed as if he were inhaling all the air in the room, as if he were causing the walls to expand and contract like a bellows. His stubby-fingered hands were at his sides, palms up, motionless.
Yet the son of a bitch would not break down!
For the first time in his life Bob McAlister really knew the meaning of the word “fanatic.” Not that he had wanted to really know it. But there it was.
Kirkwood said, “You can't put it off any longer.”
Furious, too weak to deal with fury, McAlister got up from the couch and walked over to the armchair from which Rice was actually overflowing. “Damn you, we know! We know so much that you can't win! Why not tell us the rest of it?”
Rice stared at him and said nothing.
Wiping a hand across his face, McAlister said, “Rice, if you won't talk, I'm going to have to use a drug on you. A very nasty drug.”
Rice stared. Said nothing.
“It's that drug I found the agency using when I became director. It's barbaric. I outlawed it. It's the drug your men used on Carl Altmuller when they were trying to establish a list of other federal marshals who wouldn't recognize him. I saw the needle mark on the man's arm, Rice. It was swollen up like a grape. This drug is so hostile to the human system that the point of injection swells up like a fucking goddamned grape!”
Rice was unmoved.
“And now you're forcing me to use it on you.”
Licking his cracked lips, Rice said, “I suppose that offends your delicate liberal conscience.”
McAlister stared at him.
Rice smiled. He looked demonic.
Turning away from the fat man, McAlister said, “Dr. Teffler, please fill the syringe.”
Teffler got up and opened his bag and arranged his instruments on Admiral Bryson's desk. He examined the vial that McAlister gave to him. “What's the proper dosage?”
McAlister told him.
“What is it, Pentothal?”
McAlister snapped at him: “Haven't you been listening? It's a new drug. A damned dangerous drug. Handle it like I tell you!”
Unmoving, his hands still at his sides, Rice watched Teffler apply a rubber tourniquet to his thick arm. He watched his own vein rise through the fat, and he sighed when Teffler swabbed his arm with alcohol-soaked gauze.
McAlister forced himself to watch as the needle stabbed deep and the yellow truth serum squeezed out into Rice's system.
The fat man's eyes rolled back into his head, and almost at once he went into convulsions. He pitched out of the chair and to the floor, where he thrashed helplessly.
Going down on his hands and knees, Kirkwood tried to pin Rice's shoulders. It was all he could do, however, to keep from being thrown like a rodeo rider from a wild mount.
McAlister grabbed at the fat man's twisting legs to keep them from being bruised or broken against the furniture. But he took a solid kick in the stomach and was propelled away.
The marine guard ran over from the door, tried to hold Rice's legs, finally sat on them.
“He'll swallow his tongue!” McAlister gasped.
But Teffler was already there, wedging a smooth metal splint between Rice's jaws. With the splint protecting him from a bite, Teffler used his fingers to catch Rice's tongue and hold it flat against the floor of his mouth.
Gradually, the fat man grew quiet.
Shuddering uncontrollably, McAlister went out into Bryson's secretary's office and vomited in the wastebasket there.
Bernie Kirkwood came in and said, “Are you all right?”
Braced against the desk, his head hanging over the basket, McAlister said, “Is he dead?”
“Just unconscious.”
“Coma?”
“The doctor said it's not.”
“I'll be there in a minute.”
Bernie went away.
After about five minutes McAlister got up, pulled a handful of paper tissues from the box on the secretary's desk, and wiped his greasy face. He threw the tissues in the reeking wastebasket. There was a water carafe on the desk and it was half full. The water was flat, but it tasted marvelous. He rinsed out his mouth and spat into the can. After all of this he felt no worse than terminal.
He went back into the room to have a look at Rice.
“At first,” Teffler said, “I thought it was anaphylactic shock, a deadly reaction to the drug. But now I think the dosage was just too large for his system.”
“It was the normal dosage,” McAlister said.
“But as overweight as he is,” Teffler said, “he might not react in any normal fashion.”
McAlister watched the fat man's belly rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.
“What now?” Kirkwood asked.
“How long will he be unconscious?” McAlister asked the doctor.
Sitting on the floor beside Rice, Teffler took the patient's pulse. He peeled back an eyelid. “No less than an hour. No more than two or three.”
“We wait for him to wake up,” McAlister said.
“Then?” Kirkwood said.
“We give him another dose of the serum. Half what we shot into him the first time.”
“I don't know as I like that,” Teffler said sternly.
“Neither do I,” McAlister said. “But that's what we're going to do, all right.”
Rice stirred at eight o'clock, opened his eyes, looked around, closed his eyes.
He was able to sit up at eight-fifteen.
By a quarter of nine he was nearly his old self. Indeed, he was feeling good enough to smile smugly at McAlister.
At nine o'clock Teffler gave him the second, smaller dose of the truth serum — and by two minutes past nine Andrew Rice was spilling all the secrets of The Committee.
But was it too late? McAlister wondered.
The telephone burred.
Canning woke, rolled over, and lifted the receiver.
“Guess who is waiting for you down in the drawing room,” Ambassador Webster said.
“He's here already?”
“Hasn't poor Mr. Sung suffered enough?”
“I imagine he has,” Canning said. “Tell the general we'll be down in ten minutes.”
The President was shocked at McAlister's bedraggled appearance. He kept saying how shocked he was all the while that McAlister got the tape recorder ready. He stood behind his desk in the Oval Office and clicked his tongue and shook his head and said he felt entirely responsible for the awful way McAlister looked.
