I could see that he was a neat man, a man who liked things to be in their proper places. All right then, drop the mail off, then straight to the bedroom, hang the coat in the closet. Likewise for the suit, maybe use the bathroom, then back to the living room for the mail, turn on CNN or C-SPAN, maybe then the kitchen for something to eat. Fine.
I went back to the storage closet and took out the stun gun. I had already tested it on the drive from D.C. and it had worked as advertised, sending out a satisfying blue arc of electricity between its electrodes at the push of a discreet side trigger. I laid out some of the plastic along the closet floor, removed the other items from the briefcase, took off the windbreaker, folded it, and placed it and the briefcase items on the plastic. I didn’t want any carpet particles on my clothes. The galoshes, which I was already wearing over my shoes, would protect my feet. Then I sat on one of the leather chairs and waited.
The room lit up briefly as the sun set outside the picture window, then gradually darkened as night came. I turned the closet light on. Night vision mode wouldn’t be useful for this; Crawley would turn the lights on when he came in and I didn’t want to have to adjust.
Every half hour I stood up and moved around to stay limber. The coffee was making its presence known, and three times I had to urinate. I used the bathroom sink for this purpose, letting the water run as I did so, avoiding the possibility that the toilet might still be running when Crawley came in and alert him to the presence of an intruder. Failing to flush would be unacceptable for similar reasons.
At eight o’clock, just after one of these quick trips to the bathroom, I heard the sound of a key in the lock. I got up noiselessly and moved to the closet. I held the door open a crack and turned off the light, the stun gun ready in my right hand.
A moment later I heard the apartment door open. The lights went on. Soft footfalls on the carpet. There he was, moving past me. Noting the curly, wheat-blond hair, the thin features I had seen in the photos Dox had taken, I watched him walk into the living room. He tossed the mail on the coffee table. I smiled. Call me psychic.
He shrugged out of an olive trench coat, grabbed a magazine, and made his way past me again, toward the bedroom. A minute passed, then another. And another.
He was taking longer to return to my position than I had expected. Then I realized: he was on the can, probably reading the magazine. I had planned to wait until he was back in the living room, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up. I picked up the spare sheet plastic and the duct tape and moved out of the closet.
I eased inside the bedroom and stood just outside the open door of the bathroom. I saw the trench coat, a suit, a dress shirt, and a tie on the bed. I set the plastic and duct tape down on the carpeting.
Another minute went by. I heard him stand up. The toilet flushed. I held the stun gun in my right hand at waist level, my thumb on the trigger. I breathed shallowly through my mouth.
I heard footsteps on the tile, then saw his profile as he emerged from the bathroom, wearing only a white tee-shirt and matching boxer shorts. I stepped in. His head started to swivel toward me and his body flinched back in surprise and alarm. I jammed the unit against his midsection and depressed the trigger. His teeth clacked shut and he jerked back into the doorjamb.
After four or five seconds, enough time to ensure that his central nervous system was adequately scrambled, I released the trigger and eased him down to the floor. He was grunting the way someone does when he’s taken a solid shot to the solar plexus. His eyes were blinking rapidly.
I laid the plastic out on the floor and rolled him onto it. I placed his arms at his sides, then I wrapped the plastic around his body and secured it with duct tape, first at wrist level, then the ankles. He started to recover, so I zapped him again with the stun gun. By the time the effects were wearing off for the second time, I had him pretty well mummified in plastic and duct tape. Other than his head and toes, he was immobilized.
I grabbed a pillow off the bed and propped it under the base of his skull so he could see me better. Also so that, if he started thrashing, he wouldn’t bruise the back of his head. My concern had less to do with consideration for him than it did with what might show up in a forensic examination.
I squatted down next to him and watched his eyes. First, they blinked and rolled. Second, they steadied and regained focus. Finally, they bulged in terrified recognition. He tried to move, and, when he found he couldn’t, he began to hyperventilate.
“Calm down,” I said to him, my voice low and reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Which I supposed was the literal truth, after a fashion.
The hyperventilating went on. “Then… then why have you tied me up?” he panted.
Not an unfair question. I decided to level with him, at least partly. “You’re right,” I told him. “Let me amend what I said. I’m not going to hurt you, if you tell me what I want to know.”
He swallowed hard and nodded. His eyes were still wide with terror, but I could see he was making an effort to pull himself together. “Okay,” he said. “All right.”
I paused to give him a moment to more fully appreciate his new reality. This guy was obviously no hard case. Sure, he was Agency, but the college-boy type, not one of the paramilitaries. The last violence he’d seen firsthand had probably been on the grade-school playground. And now, suddenly, he was tied up and helpless, with a known killer squatting next to him, looking at him like he was a frog about to be dissected. Of course he was terrified. And that was good. If I managed his terror correctly, there was a reasonable chance that he would tell me what I wanted to know.
“Well, Mr. Crawley,” I said, “I guess what we need to talk about is why a nice guy like you would want to have me killed.”
He pursed his lips and swallowed again, his breath whistling in and out of his nose. I could see that he was trying to decide how to handle this. Deny everything? Blame someone else? Confess and beg for mercy? Something in between?
Watching him trying frantically to make up his mind, weighing the pros and cons of the feeble set of options before him, I sensed he understood that I knew what he was thinking, that I had seen it all before and would know just how to handle him regardless of which route he decided to use. So he would probably know enough not to outright deny everything. No, he looked savvy to me, even shrewd. At some level, he was probably thinking, Don’t deny it, he wouldn’t be here if his information weren’t good. And if you don’t deny it, if you confess up to a point, he’ll be more inclined to believe what follows. It would be a variation of the galoshes game I had just played with the old lady with the walker. And he’d probably do a good job, too. A lot of these government guys are pretty adroit when it comes to lying.
Let’s see, I thought, making a mental bet with myself, probably it’ll be something like, “I was only following orders.”
“It’s not me,” he said, unintentionally winning me the bet. “It’s someone else.”
“Who’s that, then?”
“It’s… look, Jesus Christ, I can’t tell you these things!”
“But it’s not you.”
Hope flared in his eyes. “Yes, that’s right.”
I sighed. “Is there another Charles Crawley running around who looks and smells just like you?” I asked.
“What?”
“A twin. You don’t have a twin?”
“What? No, no I don’t.”
“I didn’t think so. But see, that’s strange. Because a guy who looks exactly like you, and also named Crawley, although he called himself Johnson, went to a special operator recently and offered him a hundred thousand dollars to take me out. Went to him personally.”