Not from the pain. Dreams. His dreams, I’ll bet, are terrible.

They were worse than terrible. They were the loneliness multiplied by the longing, the betrayal multiplied by a desperate trust.

He was not dead, he thought in one lucid moment, for hell would have been easier.

Moses dreamed.

He was in the cell they calledel Cuarto del Diablo. The Devil’s Room. He was naked, strapped to a wooden apparatus they called the Devil’s Bed. His nose was filled with the odor of vomit and blood and excrement that had soaked into the wood.

The filthy guard the prisoners had nicknamed La Cucaracha stood near the barred window. The sky beyond was full of gray clouds. The guard held a long black stick. A Paralyzer shock baton. Eighty thousand volts in his hand. La Cucaracha turned from the window and began to walk toward Moses on the Devil’s Bed. His dark eyes traveled the length of Moses’s naked body, looking for the right spot. He grinned as he gazed at the shriveled testicles. His mouth was like a dark cemetery, his gapped teeth like gravestones. Moses felt his jaw go rigid as the baton descended toward his genitals. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying in the dark of this awful dream to will himself awake.

He’s screaming again. What if someone hears?

There’s no one to hear. Keep him sedated. Keep him restrained.

Christ, I hate his screams.

Just be glad you don’t have his nightmares.

When he finally awoke, it was with a sudden tensing of his whole body. Moses lurched from unconsciousness and snapped instantly alert. In seconds, he’d assessed his surroundings.

He was in a small room. No windows. One door. The room was lit by a low-watt bulb in a brass standing lamp a few feet away. He lay on a hard cot with a mattress so thin he could feel the iron webbing beneath it. His hands and his ankles were shackled to the cot frame. A tube fed into his left arm. The tube ran down from a nearly empty fluid bag hung on a mobile IV unit. Near the cot was a metal table on which lay a syringe and several capped vials. The dim lamplight illuminated stained green walls and a cracked plaster ceiling. In the corner where two walls and the ceiling met, a spider had spun a web. The spider must have successfully captured all the flies, for there was not a sound in the room. The smell of mildew came off the walls, but the scent of the sheet that covered him was clean and fresh.

He made an inventory of his body, moving first his legs. His left thigh throbbed. His left hip was sore. His lower back ached. There was a sharp pain in his chest when he breathed deeply. His hands and arms seemed all right, but when he moved his right shoulder, he nearly cried out in agony. His right eye was swollen almost shut.

Good, he thought. Feeling in all my limbs. I’m not dead and I’m not paralyzed.

From beyond the only door crept the sound of music, very faint. The Beatles. “Penny Lane.”

He began to consider his situation. The last thing he remembered was the struggle on top of the bluff at Wildwood. He remembered teetering at the edge, and he realized he must have fallen. That would account for all the damage to his body. In fact, as he considered it, he figured it was a miracle he’d lived.

So, where was he? Obviously not in a hospital. The mildewed walls and cracked ceiling suggested someplace less officially sanctioned. Someplace isolated, he assumed. Someplace hidden from prying eyes.

Who was hiding him? Not the police. In America, the police operated in a glare of public light. But there were other agencies in the States whose standard MO was covert operation. And one in particular with which he was well acquainted.

He tested the cuffs that shackled him hand and foot to the cot. No give. He scanned the room. It was empty except for the lamp, the IV unit, and the table with the syringe and vials. The single door, undoubtedly guarded, presented another challenge. He began to contemplate a weapon. The syringe and vials were a possibility. The iron webbing of the cot might provide the metal for a shiv. He could always use the standing lamp, swinging it like Davy Crockett did Ol’ Betsy at the Alamo. Contemplating the image of his own last stand, going down wielding a floor lamp, gave him a moment of amusement.

The door opened and let in a slice of daylight. The music was louder then. The air that came in smelled of honeysuckle. Two figures stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the daylight. The door closed. One of the figures slowly crossed the room and entered the drizzle of light near the cot. It was a man. He was smiling. Moses recognized him immediately.

“Hello, David,” Kingman said. “It’s been a long time.”

Kingman carried a tray of food. The man behind him brought a gun. Kingman set the tray on Moses’s lap and unlocked the cuffs. He left Moses’s legs shackled to the cot. Kingman stepped back and said, “I’ll take it from here.”

The other man nodded and left the room.

Moses looked at the food. Dry, burned toast. Scrambled eggs that could have used another two minutes over the fire. Mandarin orange slices from a can.

“You never learned to cook,” he said.

“Another talent you had that I could only envy,” Kingman said.

Moses began to eat, carefully. Almost any movement hurt him.

“I’ll give you more Demerol if you’d like,” Kingman offered.

Moses declined with a shake of his head. The pain was better than the fog of the Demerol. The pain kept him focused.

“Breakfast,” Moses noted of the food. “Must be-what? — around sevenA.M.”

Kingman returned to the door and leaned against it. He crossed his arms and scanned the windowless room for what might have given Moses a clue to the time. “What makes you think so?”

“You used to get up every day at five-thirty to work out for an hour. You’re in good shape, so I’d bet that’s still your routine. You’ve shaved. I can smell that damn Old Spice you use. And your hair’s still wet from the shower. What time is it?”

“Seven-ten.” Kingman smiled. “You’re some piece of work, David.”

“You had your moments, too, Walter. Still do, apparently. I’m impressed that I’m here. Wherever here is. They’re not looking for me?”

“We’ve taken care of that. What do you remember?”

“The hand-to-hand with that Secret Service agent.”

“Thorsen.”

“The next thing I know, I’m here.”

“You took a pretty nasty tumble. Fell at least fifty feet. You were lucky you didn’t die.”

Moses looked up from his eating. “How long’s my luck going to hold?”

Kingman didn’t answer.

“Was it luck you found me?”

“A little luck, a little careful planning.”

Kingman left the darkness near the door and stepped into the dim light of the lamp. He wore a white linen sport coat over a black T-shirt. Gray had replaced most of the brown in his hair. He looked a lot older than when Moses had seen him last.

“When you skipped out of that mental hospital,” Kingman said, “I asked to lead the team the Company sent to track you down. Picked my own people. We couldn’t find a trace. Then this Thorsen shows up, asking a lot of questions. When I realized the Secret Service was interested, and that the First Lady was in town, I put two and two together. I didn’t know what your interest in the First Lady was or even if Thorsen was on the right track, but it was all we had to go on. I put a man out front of Wildwood. I got myself a launch and watched from the river. That was the planning part. The luck was that I was there when the shooting started. When you fell off that cliff, I figured you for dead. Next thing I know, you’re crawling into the river, trying to swim away. You’re one tough bastard. You always were.”

“Wasn’t that why you recruited me?”

Kingman smiled. “I was surprised when I heard you were killed at Agua Negra.”

“The report of my death was greatly exaggerated.”

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