“Dark hair?”
“No, ahead of that one. He’s blond, has a moustache.”
“Got him. What about him?”
Cat had started to move through the crowd. The moustache had made him wonder for a moment, but suddenly he had no doubt.
“Hang on, Cat!” Meg said, struggling to keep up with him through the mass of bodies. “Who is he?”
“It’s Denny!” Cat called over his shoulder. “Our volunteer crewman on Catbird! The one who shot me!”
Cat pressed harder through the crowd. There were twenty people between him and Denny, but he kept the back of the blond head in sight. “Excuse me... pardon me,” he was saying to ruffled people as he pushed past them. Now there were a dozen people between them. Meg had fallen hopelessly behind, trapped by a fat peasant woman with two large baskets. The crowd was thickening as it approached the bottleneck of a security checkpoint. Cat forgot courtesy and began fighting his way through the throng, closing inch by inch on the pale blue suit and blond hair. There, just ahead of him, was the one man in the world who certainly knew what had happened to Jinx, and Cat was not going to let go of his throat until he knew, maybe not even then. Denny passed the checkpoint and now, on the other side of the bottleneck, began to move faster.
“Get out of my way!” Cat was yelling, yanking himself past startled and angry travellers. He, too, would be at the checkpoint in a moment and free to move. He forcibly drove his shoulder into a large man and pushed ahead of him past the security men. As he did the world seemed to explode. A loud bell began to ring, a red strobe light started flashing, and a tan-uniformed figure lunged at him and got hold of an arm.
“Let go!” Cat was shouting at the man, trying to free himself. Ahead of him, he saw Denny glance unconcernedly over his shoulder at the disturbance, then continue walking on toward a gate. Another policeman came at him from the other side now, shouting in Spanish.
“I’ve got to get to that man,” Cat was trying to explain to the policeman, but the man on the left was tugging at Cat’s clothing and shouting, too. Finally, Cat gave up any hope of convincing the policemen and began to fight with the desperation of a drowning man. Thirty yards ahead of him, he could see Denny turning into a boarding gate.
Cat, with an enormous effort, got swinging room and brought an elbow into the midsection of the officer on his left. Half free, and fighting as hard as he could, he was about to break free of the cop on his left.
Then something hard and heavy came down on his neck where it joined the shoulder, knocking him to one knee. He struggled to regain his feet under the weight of what now seemed like half a dozen policemen, and the club struck him again. His limbs seemed to melt, and he pitched forward toward the floor. His head struck a black shoe, then came to rest with his cheek against the cool marble floor. As he faded into unconsciousness, he felt, as if from a great distance, a boot making repeated contact with his back, accompanied, in Spanish, by what seemed a great deal of swearing.
20
At first there was just the pain. then the cold crept in, and the cold became more pain. Then, before he was fully conscious, the shivering started, which increased the pain, which finally jolted him awake. He opened his eyes, then quickly closed them again. The light was too harsh. With some difficulty, he got to one elbow, opening his eyes for brief moments, allowing his pupils to close down to where he could bear the light.
He was lying on a rough concrete floor, entirely naked, in a small space enclosed by two walls of concrete and two of chain-link fencing. There was no furniture of any kind. He sat up and started rubbing his upper arms rapidly, trying to dispel the chill. The door must be behind him, he reckoned, but when he tried to turn and look at it, he got a thunderbolt of pain in his neck and left shoulder.
Down the hall a door opened and footsteps rang on the concrete, accompanied by a low conversation in Spanish. The door behind him rattled open, but he still could not turn to see who was entering. A baldheaded man in a blue suit appeared in his vision and spoke some words to someone behind Cat. A blanket was thrown over his shoulders, and hands pressed him to lie down on the floor. The man in the blue suit produced a small flashlight and shone it into Cat’s eyes, one at a time. He felt Cat’s limbs and turned his head gently. Cat coughed out a yell.
“What is your name?” the man said in heavily accented English.
“My name is Ca... ah, Robert Ellis,” Cat managed to croak.
The man spoke rapidly to the people behind Cat, and someone responded in what seemed to him slower and more awkward Spanish. He found himself being expertly lifted, laid on a stretcher, and covered with another blanket. He was wheeled rapidly down a hallway, through another door, and through a larger room. Another door opened, they were briefly outside, then the stretcher was put into an ambulance and an attendant climbed in beside it. Shortly, the ambulance began to move.
Cat closed his eyes and tried to relax, hugging the blanket to him. Eventually, the chills stopped and, in spite of his overall soreness, he fell into a light doze. He was aware of fast driving, of traffic, and of the silence of the man who sat next to him. He wondered if the man spoke English, but he didn’t feel like conversation, himself, so he said nothing. He reckoned that wherever he was going was better than the place he had just left.
He woke as the ambulance stopped, then started again. Through a crack in a curtain he saw the top of a heavy iron fence as the ambulance drove through. The doors to the rear of the vehicle opened, and two men, one of them in a suit, rolled the stretcher out and through a door. They were in another hallway for a moment, then in an elevator, going down.
Another man shone another flashlight into his eyes and probed his body. Cat answered with loud grunts when the probing became painful, as it rather frequently did. Then the stretcher was wheeled into what Cat recognized as an X-ray room, and he was lifted onto a cold table where pictures were made. He felt relieved to know that he was in a hospital instead of a jail. The doctor and nurse, both Latino, sat him up and got him into a hospital gown, then he was placed back on the stretcher and wheeled down a hallway to a room and lifted onto a bed. The nurse tucked him in, but nobody said a word, and as soon as he had been made comfortable, he was left alone.
Cat lifted his head and tried to look around the room, but the effort defeated him. The room was small, but though sparsely furnished, it seemed to be in a real hospital and not in the medical ward of a prison. He closed his eyes and tried to rest without thinking. He was not ready to confront his situation, to try and figure out what to do next. He was aware of a murmured conversation outside the door.
A few moments later someone entered the room. Cat was too weary to raise his head, but there was a clanking noise, and the bed lifted him into more of a sitting position. A man in a gray, pin-striped suit stood at the end of the bed, looking at him with an expression of distaste, even disgust. He had closely cropped crew-cut hair, thick eyebrows, a square jaw, and a nose that had once been broken and had healed badly.
It had been, twenty-five years, but Cat knew him. “Jesus, Hedger,” he said, managing a small laugh, “you still getting your haircuts at Quantico?”
“Catledge,” Barry Hedger said. He managed to make it both a greeting and an accusation.
“Am I in a hospital?” Cat asked.
“You’re in the staff infirmary of the American Embassy, and damned lucky to be. You’re lucky to be alive, too, You don’t wear a pistol through a metal detector in any airport in the world, don’t you know that? The cops down here would just as soon shoot you for that sort of thing.”