Dragonfly

shipping trunk, and take him out of the hotel. By midnight he's lying unconscious on an operating table in Wilson's lab.”

Reaming out the bowl of his pipe with a small gold-plated blade, McAlister said, “So far I believe you've got it right. I can't be sure. Berlinson wasn't in the lab. He wasn't one of the agents who took Charlie out of the hotel in a shipping trunk. But he was a friend of Wilson's. He pieced together bits of information that he picked up from the good doctor. So far you sound like you're his echo. Go on.”

Canning closed his eyes and could see the laboratory where it happened: cool fluorescent light that sharpened the edges of cabinets and cupboards, tables and machines; white tile walls and a tile floor; a yellow- skinned man lying nude on a cushioned operating table; half a dozen men dressed in hospital greens; murmured conversation rich with tension and excitemerit; the stench of antiseptic cleaning compounds and the sharp tang of alcohol like a knife slicing the air… “Wilson makes a half-inch incision in Charlie. Where it won't show. In an armpit. Or in the fold of the buttocks. Or maybe high on the inside of a thigh. Then he inserts the spansule.”

“Only the spansule?”

Canning, his eyes still closed, could see it: a blue-white capsule no more than half an inch in length, a quarter of an inch in diameter. “Yes. Nothing else.”

“Won't there be a mechanism to puncture the spansule and free the microorganisms when the time comes for that?”

“You said this entire thing was of a material that won't show up on an X-ray?”

“That's correct.”

“Then there can't be any metal to it. And any mechanism that was meant to puncture the spansule on, say, the receival of a certain radio signal, would have metal in it. So there's just the spansule, the capsule, that little cylinder of plastic.”

Finished with his pipe, McAlister put it in a jacket pocket and looked for something else to do with his hands. “Continue,” he said.

“The spansule fits less than an inch below the skin. When it's in place, Wilson sews up the incision — using sutures that'll dissolve by the time the healing's complete, a week at most — and places an ordinary Band-Aid over it.” He paused to think, and while he thought he used one finger to draw a Band-Aid in the finely beaded moisture that had filmed the inside of several kitchen windowpanes. “Then I suppose Charlie would be given a second drug to wake him up — but he'd be put into an hypnotic trance before he really knew where he was or what was happening to him. Wilson would have to spend the rest of the night clearing Charlie's memory and implanting a series of directives in his deep subconscious mind. Like… telling him that he will not see or feel the incision when he wakes up in the morning. And he'd have to be told when and how he's to break open the spansule.”

“All this would be done just with hypnosis?”

“Since 1963 or thereabouts, we've had drugs that condition the mind for hypnotic suggestion,” Canning said. “I used them when I was in Asia. The Committeemen would have used them on Charlie Chan. With the drugs it's not just hypnotic suggestion, it's sophisticated brainwashing.”

“You're still echoing Berlinson. But how do you think they'd eventually trigger Charlie?”

“You sound as if you don't know.”

“I don't. Berlinson made a good guess. I've talked with some of the experts in the field, and I have a fair idea. But I don't know.”

“It would have to be a verbal trigger. A key phrase,” Canning said. “When he hears it, Dragonfly will… detonate himself. Or maybe all he has to do is read the phrase in a letter.”

“No good,” McAlister said. “The letter, I mean. You forget that China is a totalitarian society. All mail going into China is opened and read. And most of it is destroyed no matter how harmless it might be.”

“Then whoever triggers Dragonfly will be inside China already, and he'll do it either in person or on the telephone.”

“We feel it'll be in person.”

“One of our agents,” Canning said.

“Yes.”

“How many do we have in China?”

“Three. Any one of them could be a Committeeman.”

“Or all of them.”

Reluctantly, McAlister agreed.

Increasingly excited about the assignment, Canning got up and began to pace. “Let's go back to the laboratory and pick up where we left off. Through a drug-induced hypnosis, Charlie has been programmed with all necessary directives. Next, he is told to fall asleep and not to wake up until his hotel-room telephone rings in the morning. Before dawn, he is returned to his room. He wakes up a few hours later, knowing nothing and feeling nothing about last night. Sooner or later he goes back to China. He lives precisely as he would have done had Wilson chosen someone else. Then one day a man walks up to him on the street, says the key phrase, and walks away. Per his program, Charlie goes home, where he has privacy of a sort. He breaks the capsule. Then he goes about his business as if it's just another day. He still remembers nothing — not the man on the street who triggered him, not Wilson, not the microorganisms that are breeding within him, nothing! In twenty-four hours he'll infect two or three hundred government people, who will pass the plague on to hundreds more, thousands more, before the virus dies out.”

McAlister rose, picked up the ashtray and carried it to the wastecan, where he emptied it. “The spansule won't show up in an X-ray. The petro-plastic lets the rays pass through. There are no metal parts. We've been through this before. There are no inorganic materials other than the petro-plastic. There's nothing implanted with it to puncture it on a given signal. So how does Mr. Chan break it and infect himself once he's been triggered?”

Canning smiled. “Easy. Deep in his subconscious mind he'll know exactly where the spansule has been sewn into him. He'll feel for it and find it in a few seconds; it's less than an inch beneath the skin. He'll take a pin or a needle and prick himself, stab down far enough to pierce the wall of the spansule. Repeatedly.”

Leaning against the counter, McAlister said, “You're good.”

“Every man's good at something.” He went back to the table and sat down.

“But there's something that hasn't occurred to you,” McAlister said softly.

He met the blue eyes. He frowned. Then he scowled. “I must be rustier than I thought. They set this thing up back in January or February. It's now September twenty-ninth. Charlie Chan went home a long time ago. So what is The Committee waiting for?”

McAlister shrugged.

“Is it possible Charlie did realize what was done to him and turned himself in to the authorities the moment he was back in Peking?”

“It's possible.”

“Or maybe he was triggered — and it didn't work.”

“Maybe. But we can't risk it. Now that the Committeemen know I'm on to them, they aren't going to wait much longer. If Charlie is still a viable weapon, he'll be used within the next few days.”

“Which brings us to the last question,” Canning said.

“That is?”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

THREE

Stafford, Virginia

The driver, Roy Dodson, shifted his gaze from the busy superhighway to the nine-inch screen of the electronic scanner that was mounted on the console between the halves of the front seat. A blip of green light, winking like a star, had been at the center of the screen but was now moving rapidly toward the right-hand edge. Every time the light pulsed, the monitor produced a beeping signal. When the light first began to move to the right, the tone of the signal had changed; and it was this new sound that had caused the driver to take a look at the screen. “He's on an exit ramp,” Dodson said.