Flashbacks of his torture experience skittered across Ruppert’s vision, along with, oddly, the image of his pet dog from childhood.
“Guppy was a great dog,” Ruppert said.
“Excuse me?” Smith asked.
“Nothing. What happened?”
“I’d hoped you would remember,” Smith said. “We’ll have to repeat this process. Twice a day until you remember everything.”
“What am I supposed to remember?” Ruppert asked.
“That you’re a hit man,” Lucia said.
Ruppert looked at her with disbelief.
“I’m just as shocked as you,” she said. “You’d think they could find someone more qualified.”
“Is she serious?” Ruppert asked the doctor.
“Yes, and far more so than I believe healthy,” Smith said. “But that is beside the point. Daniel, they programmed you to kill a man, if that word can be applied to Hollis Westerly.”
“They want me to kill the Nazi guy?” Ruppert blinked several times. He felt like his brain was stuttering. “But is that really so bad? I mean, he’s a wicked man. Just look at him.”
“The exact words spoken by your programmer,” Smith said.
“Who was it? The Captain?”
“That is how you referred to him.”
“They’ve got the whole thing figured out,” Lucia said. “We can’t do this. We should eliminate him.”
Ruppert understood the “him” to mean him.
“Not necessarily,” Dr. Smith said. “We have many advantages here.”
“Like what?” Lucia snapped. She stalked back across the room, still holding an unopened issue of Architectural Digest in one hand. “They know everything.”
“No,” Dr. Smith said. “They want to give the impression of omniscience. Don’t buy into their image. And, please, try to relax for one minute. Or even an entire hour. Would you like me to hypnotize you?”
“Forget it.”
“The first thing we have,” Smith said, “Is their assassin working with us. You are still working with us, correct, Daniel?”
“If Lucia doesn’t kill me first,” Ruppert said.
She scowled at him and flipped open her magazine.
“The second thing we have is knowledge of their intentions,” Smith said. “What can we deduce, Lucia? Consider it from a counterintelligence perspective.”
“Fuck.” Lucia sighed and slapped the magazine closed. “All right. So the psychos program Danny boy here to kill Westerly. We know why.”
“Why?” Ruppert asked.
“Later,” Smith said. “Lucia, why program an assassin? Are they lacking in hired killers?”
“No, they’ve got plenty of those,” Lucia said. “Usually it’s because they want to keep their hands clean, right? Like if they assassinate a prime minister or president somewhere.”
Smith nodded. “But…”
“But Hollis Westerly is not rich or famous or powerful,” Lucia said. “He’s about as nobody as you can get.”
“So why not just send in the Terror men, or a Freedom Brigade? Or even a couple of Hartwell cops, in a pinch?”
“Because…they sent in this guy as poisoned bait instead. So we’d take him to Westerly ourselves. And that means…” Lucia bit at her lip for a moment, then broke into a smile. “They don’t know where Westerly is. They must not have a clue, if they’re going to this much trouble.”
“That’s the only reason I can see,” Smith said. “If they just wanted him dead and they knew where he was, they would just send someone after him. And we know they just want him dead. So…”
“Did I mention yet that I wanted to know why the psychos are trying to kill Westerly?” Ruppert asked, but nobody seemed inclined to answer him.
“So we’re still on course, aren’t we?” Lucia asked.
“For the moment,” Smith agreed.
TWENTY
They repeated the hypnosis again in the afternoon, and then twice the next day. Time passed slowly in Dr. Smith’s cave, but the doctor gave him something to read, a crumbling paperback copy of George Orwell’s 1984. Ruppert tore into it with enthusiasm. It had been one of the first books blacklisted by Terror, and he’d never gotten around to reading it before it was outlawed.
As the hypnosis sessions progressed, memories began floating up to the surface of his mind like icebergs in a dark ocean. He recalled the powerful, hallucination-inducing drugs the Captain had injected into him day after day. Ruppert’s memories of his imprisonment had been disordered and murky, but with the missing stretches of time gradually filling in, his recollection grew more linear and logical. Of course the Captain had instructed him to kill Westerly. How could he have forgotten?
He also remembered how George Baldwin, the terror agent at GlobeNet, had put him under a couple of times to confirm his instructions. Baldwin didn’t have to drug or hypnotize Ruppert, though-he just had to speak one code word programmed by the Captain, Racca, and Ruppert would drop right into a trance.
In his memories of Baldwin, a second person began to take shape, someone else who’d been in Baldwin’s office. This man wore the black-on-black suit of a Terror man, and he was much older than Baldwin, even elderly, though his lean, rigidly straight figure indicated he’d not gone soft in old age. He’d said very little, mainly just watched Ruppert with blue eyes as pale as water.
The third night, Lucia invited him for a smoke outside. He declined the cigarette but went up with her anyway. He was itching to get outside the cave, spacious as it was, but mainly he felt relieved to see she was no longer so intent on murdering him. Then again, maybe she was going to kill him right now, and just didn’t want to get blood on the floor. He let her lead the way and kept an eye on her as they climbed the steep slope up to the ground.
She sat on the trunk of his car beneath the overhang, looking out towards the night sky, and lit a Marlboro.
“Bad habit,” Ruppert said.
“I’m down to one a day. All you can afford these days, anyway.”
“You want to walk outside?”
She shook her head. “Sky drones patrol the desert. Thermal sensors. We’re okay under here, though.”
“How much longer are we staying?”
“Till Doc says.”
“And then?”
“We move on.”
“I’m feeling a little underinformed here.”
“It’s fine. It’ll be good for your mission.”
“You’re just like Baldwin.”
“What? Your Terror handler?”
“He said the same thing. They were keeping me in the dark because it was good for the mission. It would help keep me believable.”
She didn’t say anything, just looked at him over the burning tip of her cigarette. Flecks of starlight glimmered in her black eyes.
“You never told me how you got involved with all of this,” Ruppert said after an uncomfortable silence.
“Why do you want to know?”
