There wasn't anything I could do about anything, because I was handcuffed to the back of the seat in front of me. My first long-distance flight in one of those new big Boeing four-engine jobbers should have been a real thrill. What it was was a pain. I mean, real pain. I was aching from being in that same seat for eleven hours, and two intermediate stops, and God knows how many hundreds, or even thousands, of miles; but the big ache had been with me even before they put me on the plane in the first place, wobbling up that ladder with my hands cuffed behind me and that ugly FBI man, Moe Something-or-other, threatening all kinds of doom if I spoke, or tried to get away, or tried to take off the hat and veil they'd made me wear so nobody would know who I was. He knew all about those aches too. He'd given me most of them.
I will say for the FBI boys and girls, they really know how to hurt you without leaving marks.
Across the aisle, the other prisoner was awake inside his own hat and veil. I could see his head moving. His guard was snoring as lustily as my own as we bumped interminably along runways that seemed to go nowhere.
At least I was out of the holding tank in the Chicago headquarters, where I'd spent most of the last—what was it? Days, for sure, though nobody would tell me how many. It had been pretty bad, in there with that bunch of social undesirables—muggers on the way to the concentration camps, currency speculators held for trial—but it was better than the times they took me out to ask me more questions. I hadn't told them anything, of course. I hadn't had anything to tell—but, my God, how I wished I had!
And then Moe had come in, waking me up, and dragged me out. And we'd wound up in this plane, going God knew where.
No. Both God and I knew where, now, because through the veil and the tiny window I could see a gaudy, foreign-looking terminal, with a big sign that said:
WELCOME TO
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
ELEVATION 5196 FEET
New Mexico, for heaven's sake! What in the world did they want with me in New Mexico?
Of course, Moe wasn't going to tell me. The stewardess came by and tugged his shoulder to wake him, and he leaned over to wake the other guard, but all he said to me was, "Remember what I told you!" I remembered. He made us wait until all the other passengers had got themselves out of the plane. Then he made us wait some more, while mechanics came out to turn the big propellors around a few revolutions and a truck backed up with 100-octane gasoline to refill the tanks.
Then somebody waved to us from the terminal door.
Moe unlocked my handcuffs and we left, me trying not to stumble as we clambered down the steep aisle to the stairs, and then down the stairs. The other prisoner followed behind us with his own guard; and they whisked us through an airport terminal that looked as though it had been built as a set for some Latin-American musical comedy. People stared. The overly curious were pushed roughly out of the way—there weren't too many of them, because the FBI goons weren't hard to recognize, and most people turned the other way fast. Into a car, me and Moe on the jump seats, the other prisoner and his guard behind us. A city police car pulled out ahead of us, and we went blasting away, God knows how fast, through city streets and out onto a two-lane highway that snaked away up into the hills.
We drove for nearly an hour. We wound up at a crossroads, two empty highways stretching to the compass points, and a filling station with a motel behind it. The sign over the office said "La Cucaracha Travelers Rest," which was not a name I would have given to a motel.
I also wouldn't have put armed guards in the driveway.
The guards were, however, a little decorative touch that I had begun to get used to. So there were good signs and there were bad signs. The bad sign was that I was still under arrest. The good sign was that I wasn't being taken to Leavenworth or one of the camps, where I would disappear from sight until they got good and ready to let me out—if ever. This was a permanent island in the FBI archipelago. They could not mean to keep me here for very long. They might even let me go.
Alternatively, what part of me might come out of the Cucaracha Motel might be only enough to send home to bury.
I wasn't given enough time to worry. My silent colleague and I were hustled into one of the cabins and ordered to sit on the edge of the bed and keep quiet, while Moe stood inside the door, glaring a us, and the other one stood right outside. We didn't have long to wait, though. The door opened from outside. Moe moved out of the way without looking to see who it was.
Nyla Christophe strode in, her hands clasped behind her.
She was wearing a sun hat and dark glasses. I could not see her expression, but I could tell that she was gazing at us thoughtfully—I could feel the burning, like acid, where her eyes raked across my face. But her voice was only normally unpleasant when she said, "All right, you guys, you can take those dumb veils off now."
I was glad enough to do that, because I was stifling inside that thing in the desert heat. The other fellow moved more slowly and unwillingly; and when the veil was off his expression was scared, resentful, unhappy—all the things I would have expected; but what I hadn't expected was that the face that wore the expressions belonged to Larry Douglas.
What I was absolutely certain of was that Larry Douglas was at least in part responsible for the last four or five days of misery. How, I didn't know. Why, I couldn't even guess. So I was not in the least sorry to see him caught in the same trap he'd helped me into . . . only that just made it all even more confusing! If he had passed on to Nyla Christophe all the things I'd told him when he dragged me down to see that beat-up old movie actor downstate, why was he a prisoner too? And what were we doing in New Mexico?
The good part of that was that Douglas seemed as baffled as I. "Nyla," he said, his voice unsteady with anger he was trying not to show, "what the hell is this all about? Your guys come and grab me, drag me out of bed, won't tell me a word—"
"Sweetybumps," she said cheerfully, "shut up." Even with the dark glasses on he could read enough of her expression to swallow hard. He shut up. "Better," she said, and, over her shoulder, "Moe?"
Rumble from the apeman: "Yes, Miss Christophe?"
"Is the mobile lab here yet?"
"Parked right behind the cabins, all ready to go."
She nodded. She took off hat and glasses and sat in the one lumpy armchair the room possessed, extending a hand without looking. Moe put a cigarette into it, and followed with a light. "It is possible," she said, "that you two guys are in the clear on this particular matter. We need you to check some things out."
"Oh, good, Nyla," cried Douglas. "I knew it was just some mistake!"
And I managed to say, what I am ashamed to admit I hadn't really been thinking about for some time, "What about my fiancee and those others, Miss Christophe?"
"That depends, DeSota. If the tests come out the way I think they will, they'll all be released."
"Thank heaven! Uh—what tests are we talking about?"
"The ones you're going to have right now," she said. "Get on with it, Moe." And she left the cabin, while the other goon came in with an armload of stuff, followed by a man in a white jacket and another armload.
I couldn't help cringing, but it turned out that not even Moe was going to beat me up again. What they had in mind took longer, but was nowhere near as unpleasant—well, it wasn't exactly fun. They took my fingerprints and my toe prints. They measured my earlobes and the distance between the pupils of my eyes. They took blood and saliva and skin samples, and then they made me pee into a bottle and move my bowels into a paper cup. It took a long time. The only thing that made it less obnoxious was that my obnoxious fellow prisoner—the mystery-man Larry Douglas, my co-conspirator from the Carson coffee shop and fellow traveler to the Reagan place in Dixon, Illinois—was doing the same.