"Alone?" I asked.
"Yes, alone. He insisted on that, and I didn't want to risk losing him again."
"Didn't you think that was rather dangerous?"
"Despite what had happened, I did not consider Rafferty a dangerous man," Lippitt said quietly. "I believed that the killing of the guard was an accident; there was nothing in Rafferty's past to indicate that he could suddenly become a killer. Now I can see that I was right: He never intended to kill me."
"He was backed into a corner," Tal said softly.
"True, but I still don't think he ever intended to kill me. He had a plan, but killing me wasn't a part of it."
"But you were prepared to kill him," I said.
"Yes," he said. "If I had to. Those were my orders, and I agreed with them. There would have been no need to kill him if he could have been persuaded to come with us. We'd have given him an entirely new identity. He would have undergone plastic surgery, voice training; even his mannerisms could have been altered. When we were finished, no one"-he nodded in Mrs. Foster's direction-"including his wife, would have recognized him. Then we would have made arrangements for his wife to join him."
"After undergoing the same… 'adjustments'?"
"Yes. Naturally."
"Christ, Lippitt," I said, feeling a chill, "you live in an ugly world."
The agent's eyes glinted for a brief moment. "Don't you dare patronize me, Frederickson. I know of too many brave men who have lost their lives; our 'ugly' world exists so that you may continue to live in your rather comfortable, relatively free world." He paused, raised his eyebrows inquiringly. When I didn't say anything, the fire in his eyes cooled and he went on. "In any case, I went to the building and found the door open. Rafferty was waiting for me with a gun, and he got the drop on me as I was going in. He told me he'd finally made up his mind what he was going to do: He was defecting to the Russians."
Elizabeth Foster made a strangled noise. Her husband started to rise, but Lippitt ignored him. Foster clenched and unclenched his fists, then abruptly sat down again. Foster knew-we both knew-that what Lippitt was saying had a ring of truth to it, and fists were no defense against it. He'd found out what he wanted to know, and now he and his wife were going to have to live with the knowledge.
"Actually," Lippitt continued, "Rafferty's reasoning was quite sound, and I respected him for it; it was a practical, rather than an ideological, decision. No state could better guarantee his safety and his wife's than one which was authoritarian. Since he could not be free anyway, he would ally himself with the system that could afford him the best protection."
"Victor never said anything about defecting!" Mrs. Foster cried. "He just wanted to be left alonel"
Lippitt smiled thinly and continued. "He indicated to me that his decision was irreversible. He then forced me to go with him up on a catwalk above the foundry floor. He said that he intended to shoot me, then drop my body into one of the furnaces."
"No!" Elizabeth Foster cried, springing to her feet. "Victor would never say anything like that! You're lying!"
Mike Foster gently but firmly gripped his wife's arm and pulled her back down onto the sofa beside him. She broke, burying her face in her husband's shoulder and sobbing. "Let him tell his story," Foster said to his wife. "That doesn't mean we have to believe him."
"I knew that I'd have to kill him," Lippitt resumed in a low monotone. "I tried to reason with him right up to the last moment. Then, I simply… beat him. We both fired at the same time; I was lucky. He was hit and… he fell over the railing into the furnace."
The agent suddenly paused and licked his lips. Lippitt now seemed unusually agitated, and I didn't think it was for the obvious reason that he was admitting to Mrs. Foster that he'd killed her first husband. Something else was bothering him.
"I thought that was the end of the… problem," Lippitt continued with a catch in his voice. "I then took certain steps; I reported Rafferty's death through the same channels Dr. Llewellyn had used. I knew the report would be monitored, and I assumed the pressure would ease off. Mrs. Foster, at least, would be safe. It worked." He quickly glanced in my direction. "Then you began asking questions, Dr. Frederickson, and it started all over again." He walked back to the window, as if trying to cleanse the dark business of the past in the wash of bright sunlight. "I shot him," he continued in a clipped voice. "I saw him clutch at his stomach and fall over the railing into the furnace. . But now I understand that it didn't happen. It was an illusion. One more trick. My God, he made me see what he wanted me to see."
"C'mon, Lippitt," Mike Foster said, scorn and incredulity in his voice. "You're trying to tell us that you saw Victor fall into the furnace, but he didn't actually fall?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying. It's the only explanation. And it means that his powers are far greater than even I knew." He paused, turned, and looked at each of us. He must have seen more than a little skepticism; he grew very pale. "You still don't believe me. He did have the power to enter men's minds. You know that, because Mrs. Foster has confirmed it. But there were other things he could do, things I haven't told you about. Perhaps if you knew-"
"He did something else to you, didn't he?" I said, certain I was right. "Why don't you tell us about that?"
Lippitt abruptly folded his arms across his chest and turned his back to us once again. His voice became stronger, matter-of-fact. "I was captured during the Korean war and tortured with ice baths."
Lippitt shuddered, as I had seen him do once before. He quickly clenched the muscles in his body, and that brought the shaking under control; it had been a spasm, no more, but it had chilled everyone in the room. I remembered the pictures of Lippitt in his overcoat in summer, and I felt cold myself.
"I'm sorry to say they extracted the information they wanted in a very short time," he continued. "I managed to survive, but the ice baths had affected my mind. It seemed to me that I could never be warm. I constantly wore a coat, because I was cold all the time. There was nothing I could do, nothing any doctor could do. I didn't want to retire, and I was of sufficient value to get my way on that… but I suffered." He looked over his shoulder at Elizabeth Foster. She glanced up at him, and their eyes held. "We talked for some time," he said, slowly turning, his gaze still locked with the woman's. "Actually, Rafferty did most of the talking. He spoke of the way he thought his powers should be used, in the manner Mrs. Foster has already mentioned. Then he gave me a demonstration."
"He cured you, didn't he?" I said slowly.
Lippitt nodded, swallowed hard. "He knew everything. He talked about it so casually; every thought in my mind. He knew all of it, despite the nail."
"What nail?" I said, looking up.
Lippitt held up the palm of his left hand to reveal a jagged scar running from the mount of Venus to the base of the little finger. "I'd been gripping a sharpened nail treated with acid. I didn't want Rafferty to know what I was thinking-or that I had a gun. I thought I could mask my thoughts with pain. I assumed it had worked; for five years I've been congratulating myself on how clever I'd been. Now, of course, I see that it didn't work at all. Rafferty had known about the gun all the time, right up to the moment when I made the decision to draw and shoot." He passed a hand across his eyes; then he continued in a softer, yet still anguished voice. "But while we talked he was working on me; he told me how my suffering was psychosomatic. Then he went into my mind, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I could feel his mind in mine, probing, comforting, making me understand … making me well again. He convinced me in less than a minute that there was nothing wrong with my body. Suddenly… I wasn't cold anymore."