She could not see in the darkness. Somewhere, beyond the music, there was a noise like a furnace or an air-conditioner compressor thumping on.
Yes. Exactly.
She felt sick, her stomach grumbled to her. She was alive and yet she was suspended in a sort of limbo of darkness and the vague, dreadful music, like the music piped into an elevator.
Yes. Exactly.
She realized she did not feel afraid, only curious. She tried to sit up, and managed it with difficulty. With her free left hand, she felt along the edge of the platform she sat on. It was a cot, an ordinary wooden folding cot. She felt the canvas beneath her.
Her shoes were gone, and her stockings.
She pushed behind her and touched fabric. Fabric on the right side as well. Like a tent, the fabric was slippery to the touch, and damp.
She blinked at the darkness all around her and imagined she was beginning to see a shape to it. In front of her was a pole, a tent pole.
Beneath her feet was bare concrete. It felt cold, but the air was warm and stale and sticky.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was cracked and dry.
“Hello,” she said again. “Who’s there? Where am I?”
There was no answer, only the continuing sounds of the music.
She felt overwhelmed by tiredness suddenly and lay back down on the cot. It creaked beneath her weight. She kept her eyes open in the darkness, as though it was less dreadful if she could stare at it.
She slept; or did she only dream that she slept?
Her eyes were open and the darkness pressed around her. And silence. The ethereal music was stopped. And then she heard them.
The sound of a zipper, and the front of the tent was thrown open.
It was a tent, she thought, disoriented by the sudden light and the figures at the entrance.
“Are you all right?”
The same voice she had heard for years, only now tinged with a hardness at the edge of the words.
“Marge! What’s going on?”
“Oh, come on. Little Miss Busybody, you can figure out what’s going on. You’ve just ruined everything. Nearly.”
She stared at the young woman in the embroidered blue sweater and the schoolgirl skirt who was leaning in at the entrance talking to her. Marge, little Marge in computer analysis.
Lydia Neumann understood in that moment, and the puzzle vanished from her thoughts. Of course: Marge would have had to be the final link, the final clue.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Neumann said.
“What do you think we’re doing? We’re playing with Tinkertoy.” She smiled, hideously innocent, her soft features framed in Mrs. Neumann’s eyes by the thought of what she was doing.
“This is monstrous,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“We want something, Lydia, something very important, and since you’re the one who screwed everything up with your source books and logs and your government overtime, you’re going to have to help us.”
“Who are you? Where do you have me?”
“Don’t you know me, Lydia? Is your brain rotted?”
“What have you done to me?”
“Kidnapped you.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days. You were sleeping a very long time. We weren’t sure if we’d end up needing you, but I told Bill we would and so they kept you here. Do you like it? Bill used to use it for camping when we were first married. I hate camping but Bill likes to get out. He goes out to Maryland on the weekends sometimes, alone. You know? Out west of Hancock in the Cumberlands.”
The young woman chattered inanely, as though she were stopping by the door of Mrs. Neumann’s office before going home at four-thirty.
The mundane situation dizzied Mrs. Neumann. She suddenly felt faint, and nearly fell off the cot.
“Don’t do that.” Marge’s voice was sharp, as though she were admonishing a two-year-old. “Sit right up.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re not supposed to know that,” Marge said. “Now, Lydia, I want to talk to you. Everyone in the Section is in an uproar with your disappearance. They brought in a team this morning from National Security Agency to check through Tinkertoy and see what you were working on. So why don’t you tell me and we can erase the evidence and everything will be hunky-dory.”
Lydia Neumann stared at the all-American-girl face, at the soft brown hair carefully feathered at the edges of the face, at the soft brown eyes.
“Who are you?” she said again in a cracked voice. She felt dry, she felt tired, she felt confused by the sudden stab of light behind Marge’s figure in the entry of the tent.
“You know me.”
“You. Terrorists? KGB? Who are you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I want to know,” she said, childishly. Everything in the conversation was surreal.
“We work for a cause,” she said.
“A cause? What cause?”
“Peace.”
“Goddamn you,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“Now, don’t get upset. Would you like some water and food? Better yet, how about a cup of coffee? We only have instant, Bill doesn’t drink coffee that much—”
“We’re in your home? Your home?”
Marge bit her lip and looked annoyed. “That was stupid of me, wasn’t it? I’m just not very good at these one-on-one things, but Bill said I should try you first, in case it would work out. Before we had to…well, let’s not talk about that. I want to talk to you about what you found out. I mean, why were you working so late that night? And when you called your husband—”
“You tapped my phone,” she said. Her voice had grown stronger but now it was weak again, as though she had met too many defeats in too short a time. “How long did you tap my phone?”
“From the beginning,” Marge said.
“You had clearances, the highest security approvals.”
“Well, that just goes to show you,” Marge said.
“How long have you been working for them?”
“For who? You mean for peace? All my life, Lydia. You have to understand that, that I’m really committed. This isn’t just a crush, you know. Can I make that coffee for you? You like cream, right? We have that nondairy, but it’s just as good. If you don’t mind instant. Or would you like tea? I’ve got some ginseng tea and some Lipton. Bill drinks the Lipton, he doesn’t like coffee that much.”
“I want to get out of here. I want to go the bathroom,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“No, dear. That Porta-Potty is going to have to serve for a while, I’m afraid.”
“This is humiliating. How could you do this to me?”
“Really, Lydia, it’s not as though anyone has hurt you. We put you in a tent by yourself and give you a toilet, and I even put some Mantovani on the stereo for you, I thought it would be relaxing.” Her voice took on a tone of annoyance. “We really don’t have that much time, Lydia, I’m sure you can understand—”
“Go to hell.”
“What?”
“Go to hell, all of you.” Quietly.
“Lydia, I really hate that kind of language.”
“Go to hell.”
Suddenly, a male voice came from somewhere beyond the walls of the tent.
“Honey? Is she talking to you?”
“I just started, dear.”
“Well, we don’t have that much time, you know.”
“I know it, Bill.”
Mrs. Neumann listened as they ragged at each other, and again felt a dizzying sense of complete disorientation, as though she had stumbled into a movie comedy and was now on the screen, vying with two-dimensional figures in a plot she did not understand.
“Let me talk to her,” Bill said, and he came around the tent opening. For a moment, both of them were in the opening, half leaning over to speak to her. She felt ridiculous, chained to the cot, talking to two suburbanites who had made the matter of terror mundane.