'It'll be all right, John. I'll give you the antidote and when I do in thirty seconds you'll be just fine— honestly. And then we can hold each other's hands maybe and watch when the fireworks start and the mountains start to crash down on us. We'll die together. Neither one of us will ever be alone again, John.' He saw her face; it looked distorted to him, like something seen through a tube with the lighting wrong. She was smiling.
'I still have all my husband's drugs, John, so I can bring you out of this very easily when it's time. Just a day
or so, really. You'll just feel like you're very drunk and it won't bother you. It hasn't. And then when I give you the antidote you'll be your old self again.'
She kissed him on the cheek; he could feel it. He tried moving his arms, but they wouldn't move.
'Now, John,' she said with what sounded like a mother's severity to him.
'Even if you should get yourself untied, it won't do you any good. With what I've given you, you can't walk and you can't really think too well.
You're locked in the library basement and I've taken your clothes and those guns of yours. I'll be back in a few hours with another set of shots. Maybe we can get some good soup or something into you after it all wears off. But I think if I fed you now, well, you'd just get all sick again.'
He felt her kiss his cheek again, and then she disappeared from his line of sight.
He heard a door open, shut, and the sound of a key in a lock.
There was nothing else to do, he thought, so he started to move his shoulders and his hips. He kept moving them, throwing his weight to his right; then he rolled.
The basement floor slapped hard against his body and the side of his face.
The pain—it cleared his head. He rolled with much effort, twisting his body and throwing his weight, onto his back. He tried to move his legs; they wouldn't move. He squinted against the light, looking at the ropes on his hands. Ordinary rope—clothesline, he thought. He tried tugging against the rope; his arms didn't respond.
'Muscle relaxant—curare deriv—' He felt the nausea welling up inside him and leaned back his head, staring at
the ceiling. He looked behind him, awkwardly. An end of the clothesline snaked across the floor and was tied to a support post for the basement ceiling. When he moved his head, the rope moved a little; it was the rope that had him tethered by the neck.
Muscle relaxant, he thought. If she didn't know how to administer it, he would stop breathing, just die. She was only giving him enough so that it would wear off every few hours.
The swimming feeling in his head—the nausea, the cold . . . The muscle relaxant wouldn't make him, like she had said, 'drunk.' He closed his eyes a minute against the feelings. . . .
'Mor—' he shouted, the needle jabbing into his arm again. 'Morphine!'
'You've had morphine before, then, John, and you recognize the effects.
Well, then you know it would take an awful lot to addict you, wouldn't it?
And anyway, well—all our problems will be over.'
Hours had passed, he realized. What time was it? Was it Christmas? He felt the second needle going in. 'I have to go now, John. Please try to stay on the bed this time.'
He felt her kiss him again, and then heard the click of her heels on the concrete floor. 'Insane!' he shouted, but he realized then that he'd already heard the door opening and closing, the lock being turned.
'Mor—morphine,' he said with a thick tongue. Thirty seconds, he thought—something about thirty seconds. He would be himself again in thirty seconds. The muscle relaxant had to wear off well before she gave him the morphine. The muscle relaxant would be something . . . 'Morphine,'
he said again. 'Narcan.'
Rourke realized suddenly that if she kept it up, she'd kill him. He could barely breathe—which meant there was a build-up and she was giving the shots too closely spaced.
'Die,' he rasped. Morphine—he couid fight that, with his body. But the relaxant ... He vomited over the side of th< Ј bed and his eyes closed.
Natalia watched as he closed the door. She had been formally reintroduced to Rozhdestvenskiy that afternoon, and now things were less than formal.
But she did &#;wear black, a tight-fitting jump suit, a black scarf tied across her face like a bandanna, a second scarf binding and covering her hair, black tight-fitting leather gloves on her hands. She usually used less tight-fitting, fingerless cloth gloves for work like that she was about to perform, but the fingerless gloves would have allowed her to leave behind fingerprints. That she could not do. Were she discovered raiding the office of the head of the American branch of KGB, she would be tried and executed—and so would her uncle. Likely, her uncle's secretary, Catherine, too, and perhaps, others of her uncle's staff.
Rozhdestvenskiy walked directly under her, and she watched his face through the slats in the air- conditioning vent. She glanced at the Rolex on her left wrist, watching the minutes pass as she waited to make certain he was indeed gone.
She had crawled in through the air-conditioning system on the far end of the floor—through her uncle's
office. She had traveled through the dusty duct for what seemed like miles. Using a needle-thin powerfully magnetized angled screwdriver, she had released the screws holding the vent in place, then waited. No one had come in or out; security was at the far end of the corridor. She knew that routine too well, and decided Rozhdestvenskiy hadn't had the time to change things substantially. It was her dead husband's old office.
She released the little hook that held up the vent, slipping the vent aside and drawing it up into the duct
