He looked back across the quad at the office. Verna stood up, nodded, and placed the portable phone on its stand. She took her purse and left the office. Vulpes turned the microcomputer on and typed MODEM. It hummed for a second and then ENTER appeared in the small screen. He typed in a phone number and waited. The numbers blinked out and after a few seconds the word CONTACT blinked three times. He began typing.
ARE YOU THERE, HYDRA?
YES, FOX, AS ALWAYS.
IT IS TIME.
OH, THANK YOU, FOX.
ARE YOU READY?
YES, FOX, ALWAYS READY.
HAVE YOU RESEARCHED THE LIST?
ALL FOUR OF THEM.
AND?
TAKE YOUR PICK.
EXCELLENT, AS USUAL, HYDRA.
THANK YOU, FOX. WHO SHALL IT BE?
DO YOU HAVE A CHOICE?
WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY, FOX.
I THINK…
YES?
I THINK FT WILL BE TONIGHT.
OH, FOX, TONIGHT! THANK YOU. THANK YOU, FOX.
HYDRA?
YES, FOX.
YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO AFTER?
OH YES, FOX, I KNOW WHAT TO…
SOMEONE COMING. DO NUMBER THREE.
NUMBER THREE! YES, YES, FOX, YES!
SOON…
Vulpes typed END on the screen and the screen blinked off. His heart was beating in his mouth. His penis was erect. He sat down, leaning forward so his face was hidden by the VCR cover. He was panting. And then suddenly he was released. He gasped, blew out a long breath, and finally sat up straight. He took several deep breaths and hummed very slowly to himself, reducing the tempo of his humming until it was a mere rattle in his throat. His heart slowed to normal. He sighed.
He disconnected the small box and removed the tray from his toolbox. He wrapped the minicomputer and the transmission box in lead foil and placed them in the bottom of the chest, covering them with tools.
The pilot put the twin-engine plane down on a grass strip in a little town called Milford in southern Indiana. There was no Tony in a Cadillac to greet him, so Vail and St Claire rented a car at the small airport and drove six miles south across the Flatrock River to the Justine Clinic. The hospital was a pleasant departure from the Daisy. It was shielded from the highway by a half-mile-deep stand of trees, at the end of a gravel road. As Vail and St Claire burst out of the miniforest, Justine spread out before them, looking more like a collective farm than a mental hospital. A cluster of old brick buildings surrounded a small lake. A tall, brick silo stood alone and solitary, like a sentinel in the middle of the sprawling field that separated the facility from the woods. A tall chain-link fence behind the buildings on one side of the lake formed what appeared to be an enormous playground. Several children were hanging on a spinning whirligig, while a woman in a thick red jacket sat nearby reading a book. A boat dock with a tin-roofed boathouse at its end stretched out into the lake and a floating raft drifted forlornly about twenty yards from the shore. It was a pleasant-seeming place, unlike the cold, foreboding penal-colony atmosphere of the Daisy.
'Looks like a summer camp I went to once when I was a kid,' St Claire said.
'Somehow I never thought of you as a kid, Harve,' Vail said.
'I was about nine. Damn, I hated it. We had to swim in this lake, musta been forty below. M'lips were blue the whole two weeks I was there.' He paused to spit out the car window. 'What's this guy's name again?'
'Lowenstein. Dr Fred Lowenstein. He's the director.'
'Sound like a nice-guy?'
