There were voices coming from behind me. The two men were discussing European- politics in their clipped British accents. I continued to lie motionless.
Someone mentioned tea. There was the sound of a chair scuffing against a hardwood floor, then footsteps. I peered through my lids as the darker man paused beside me, then walked out into the adjoining kitchen to my right. I waited until I heard him rummaging around with the pots and pans, then moaned softly. Again there was the sound of a chair being pushed back, heavy footsteps. The red-haired man loomed over me. He was the man who'd hit me; I opened my eyes and smiled dreamily up at him.
"Hey, Georgie!" the man yelled. "The little bloke's awake!"
The little bloke grunted and kept grinning.
"All right, Peter," the answering reply came from the kitchen, "get him up."
"I don't know. He still looks pretty dopey."
"Well, walk him around. I want to ask him a few more questions."
Peter reached down to shake me. I waited until he had both hands on my shoulders before I gave him another big grin, whispered that he was a son-of-a-bitch, and hit him in the jugular with the side of my hand. His eyes bulged and his hands flew to his throat as his face turned purple. He made a series of staccato choking noises that could barely be heard. My head immediately began to feel better.
I swung my legs over the side of the sofa, stood up, and relieved him of the automatic he had in his belt. I hit him in the gut with it, bringing him down to my level, then rapped him on the back of the head. He hit the floor hard with his face and stayed there.
The commotion brought George, pipe still clenched between his teeth, rushing into the room. He braked, skidded on one foot, and finally came to a halt when he saw me and the gun pointed at him. His swarthy face grew still darker as it mottled with blood. His eyes flashed as he did a double take between me and his fallen partner. He hunched his shoulders and started forward.
"Stay," I said quietly, punctuating the sentence with a loud lead exclamation point just over the top of his head. A chunk of plaster fell from the wall.
George stayed, but he bit through the stem of his meerschaum. The pipe, minus half its mouthpiece, clattered to the floor, and George spat out the rest. "He'll kill you," he stammered, pointing to the gasping redhead. "If he doesn't, I will."
"Oh, shut up, George, and sit down," I said, pointing with the gun toward a chair.
George thought about it for a few seconds. I helped him toward a decision by pointing the gun at his stomach. He sat down. I said something witty about clearing his sinuses permanently if he did anything I didn't like, then went across the room and took the sash cord from the broken Venetian blind hanging beside the window. The landscape outside looked like farmland, and I wondered where I was. It was dusk. Assuming it was the same day, I hadn't been out more than a few hours.
I used the sash cord to tie Peter and George. George moved once, but froze when I snatched up the gun from the floor and pressed the barrel against his spine. Now it was my turn to ask questions. I walked over to the tape recorders and turned one on. It was my own tape. I turned that one off and the other one on. The first question surprised me.
"Who is Victor Rafferty?"
I pressed the pause control and looked over at George. "What the hell kind of stupid question is that?" I said. "Don't you know?"
George glared at me and said nothing. I took my finger off the pause control and listened as the two men took turns asking me questions. Occasionally they played sections of the tape I'd made and asked me questions about statements I'd made. My own voice sounded blurred and indistinct, like a drunk's. There were about ten basic questions, repeated over and over in different variations. The Englishmen didn't seem to know any more than I did, a fact which I found depressing. Still, they'd known about me.
I pressed the gun squarely to George's forehead, directly between his eyes. "Is Victor Rafferty alive?"
"You tell me, you little bastard."
"Maybe I'll just shoot you."
"Go ahead."
"Take some time to think about that answer, George; use the time to try to remember all you know about Victor Rafferty. You can start off by telling me why everybody is so interested in him."
He spat at me. I sidestepped the wet missile and tapped lightly on the top of his head with the gun. He cursed. "We've been working blind, you bloody dwarf! We just do what we're told to do! We don't know any more about Rafferty now than we did last time!"
"Last time?"
"Fuck you!"
Peter was beginning to look fairly normal, although he kept swallowing and wincing in pain. Spittle had dried and caked on his lips. His eyes never left me; they were bloodshot, bright with hate.
"How did you know about the Fosters?" I asked George, not really expecting an answer.
"You're going to be killed for this," George hissed. "This thing is a lot bigger than any of us."
"Are you making fun of my size, George?"
"You bloody----! Untie us!"
"First I want you to tell me all about that 'last time.' I also want to know who did the job on the Pakistani."
George's face became a stony mask. "I'll tell you nothing. You're wasting your time."
He was probably right. I decided to look around the house, and the first thing I found was my gun on a counter in the kitchen. Next to it were the book on parapsychology and the mysterious sheet of paper; I hoped that meant they'd brought my car along with them.
I left everything where it was and searched through the other rooms on the floor. They were barren for the most part, except for a few ratty pieces of furniture that jutted out like bits of flotsam floating in a moldy sea of ratty carpet. Outside, a full moon was rising, bathing the surrounding countryside in a soft, cold glow. I assumed the farmhouse was some kind of meeting place, or intelligence drop point. Or perhaps it was no more than what it seemed: an abandoned farmhouse that George and Peter had commandeered for the purpose at hand.
The lights obligingly came on when I flipped a switch, and I hit the jackpot when I looked in a closet off the main sitting room: there was a large black medical kit. Inside the kit was a pharmacist's delight, with drugs ranging from what I suspected was L.S.D. to the familiar and effective sodium pentothal. I picked up the bag and went back into the big room. George was obviously unhappy with my discovery; his eyes bulged and sweat broke out on his forehead.
"What the hell are you going to do with that stuff?" he asked warily.
"Time for your vitamins, George."
"That's not going to do you any good!" He swallowed, pumped up the volume of his voice. "I'm trained to resist drugs!"
I groped around inside the bag, took out a handful of bottles and three hypodermics. "Well, I think I'll give you a little of this and a little of that, and see what happens."
"Do you have any idea what you're doing?" he said as I picked three vials at random and filled a hypodermic.
"With drugs? Well, I've found I prefer aspirin for the common headache. What about yourself, George?"
"Jesus, you're going to kill me with that stuff! Or turn me into a raving loony! I'm telling you I don't know anything!"
I held the tip of the needle poised over his arm. "It would be a shame for you to get turned into a pumpkin for nothing, wouldn't it? Who pays you?"
He took some time to answer as his eyes stayed riveted to the tip of the needle. Finally he heaved a deep sigh. "Christ, dwarf, use your imagination. M.I.-5."
He visibly relaxed as I took a step backward. "How did you get on my trail?"