“I’m sorry,” the woman said quietly as Veil dragged the man up over the curb and shoved him toward the entrance to his building. “The man in green said he would—”
“You don’t have to explain,” Veil interrupted. “I know you meant me no harm, and I know you didn’t agree to act as a lure out of concern for your personal safety. I promise you they won’t threaten your family again. You’re free to go. There’s a subway station a few blocks north of here, and you’ll be safe walking there.”
The woman nodded, then turned and disappeared into the night. Veil pulled the man through the doorway into his building, then shoved him hard against the doors of the freight elevator in the small foyer. He closed the entrance door behind him, then turned to the man, who had slumped to the floor and was still holding his stomach. The expression on his face was a mixture of fear and wonder. He had fiery red hair, green eyes, and thick fields of freckles on his cheeks and forehead. Veil estimated him to be in his mid twenties, although he could have passed as a teenager — a potentially dangerous teenager who, for some reason, was prying into some very dangerous secrets.
“My God!” the young man said excitedly, shaking his head and licking his lips. “It’s true! You recognized what she was! The two of you must be able to com—!”
“Stop jabbering, or I’ll smack you again,” Veil said curtly. “Who the hell are you?”
The young man with the red hair and green eyes swallowed hard, then removed his headphones, which hung askew around his neck. A single droplet of sweat had appeared in the center of his forehead. “I... won’t tell you anything. You can’t make me.”
Veil grunted. “Really? You look awfully young to be working in the field for the CIA, but when you reach middle age just about everybody starts looking young.”
“I said I wouldn’t—” The young man stopped speaking and cried out as Veil abruptly grabbed the lapels of his overcoat and yanked him to his feet, once again slamming him against the slatted elevator doors. “Are you going to torture me?”
“Nah,” Veil replied evenly. “I hate torture. I don’t mind torturing torturers, but you don’t look like one of those. But I will show you a trick your chiropractor probably doesn’t even know.”
Veil jerked the other man around and cupped his chin with his left hand. He twisted the man’s neck at the same time as he pressed hard with the heel of his right hand against a precise point on the man’s spine. There were sharp popping sounds in the man’s neck and back, and he collapsed to the floor.
The man in the overcoat sat on the floor with his legs splayed and his weight balanced on his hands as he stared up into the glacial blue eyes of the rangy man with the shoulder-length, gray-streaked yellow hair who stood over him. What he saw there was death, or worse. He glanced down and began to cry when he saw the puddle of urine forming between his legs. “I’m peeing myself and I can’t even feel it,” he sobbed. “You’ve paralyzed me.”
“Incontinence is the least of your worries, sonny. Right now you’re at least a candidate for a wheelchair. If you don’t give simple, straight answers to my questions, you’re going to end up being wheeled around on a hospital gurney for the rest of your life. As you may have noticed, I don’t bluff, and I rarely even bother to threaten. Now, if you don’t want me to shut the rest of you down, stop slobbering and tell me your name.”
The young man cut off a sob, breathed, “Denny Whalen.”
“All right, Denny Whalen, you work for the CIA, of course. Ops?”
“Yes and no.”
“Give me the no part first.”
“We don’t do... nasty stuff. No covert operations. We’re organized under Operations, but we’re strictly research.”
“What’s your outfit called?”
“Department of Human Possibilities.”
“I make it my business to keep up with these things, and I’ve never heard of you. You need another spinal adjustment?”
“We used to be called the Bureau of Unusual Human Resources.”
“Ah yes,” Veil said, and sighed. “BUHR. The ‘chill shop.’ I thought the dwarf put you people out of business last year.”
“We’ve been... reorganized.”
“Right. Just what the world needs now: a reorganized ‘chill shop.’ If you’re not a field operative, what were you doing with eavesdropping equipment outside my building tonight?”
“It was an experiment. The woman was wired, and I would have heard anything you said to her. I had to see for myself if it was true that Lazarus People recognize each other and are capable of some degree of telepathic communication. I wanted to see if you’d come down — which you did. You two didn’t have a real conversation, but you did recognize what she was.”
“You’re a damn fool, Denny Whalen. How the hell did BUHR find out about Lazarus People? The Lazarus Project was a decade ago, and all the records were destroyed.”
“The Lazarus Project was mentioned in KGB files. A lot of their people are working for us now, and they brought a lot of their records with them.”
“If you’ve got reports on the Lazarus Project, then you should know it was a complete bust. You can’t get to where they wanted to go from here.”
“The files are incomplete and spotty. You killed the two KGB operatives who were at the institute and on the army base.”
“So I did. You’re holding Dr. Solow?”
Denny Whalen again swallowed hard, nodded.
“Kidnapping sounds like nasty business to me, Denny, and it was a very, very bad idea. Where have you got her?”
“A safe house on the Upper West Side. The address is—”
“I know where it is. Has she been harmed?”
“No.”
“How lucky for you. How is it that the director of Ops authorized a kidnapping by a bunch of research scientists?”
“Ops has given top priority to finding out exactly what happened with the Lazarus Project. You must have really rattled some cages in the past, because nobody wanted to mess with you. That’s why we approached Dr. Solow first. But she wouldn’t cooperate. We needed you. Then it was decided that the best way to get both of you to cooperate would be to take Dr. Solow into our... temporary custody. The director gave us a field operative for that, and I was given permission to run my experiment before we contacted you.”
“How many of you are there at the safe house?”
“Three. Two researchers and the field operative.”
“Where are you keeping Dr. Solow?”
“In a bedroom on the second floor, at the rear. We have an operations center set up in the basement. Look, why don’t you let me try to—?”
“Shut up,” Veil said, then bent over the other man and searched through his pockets. He found a cellular phone, smashed it. Then he dragged the helpless man into a corner of the foyer before opening the doors of the freight elevator and stepping in. “Your paralysis will wear off in about forty-five minutes, Denny,” he continued. “If I were you, I’d just stay put and wait it out. If it does occur to you to try to crawl out of here and look for help so that you can phone ahead, remember the neighborhood you’re in. The vultures around here would like nothing better than to find a nice, well-dressed young fellow like you helpless on the sidewalk. How are you on double negatives?”