“Captain! Blue Team’s pinned down. They can’t flank.”
“Get air support on station. For God’s sake don’t let them hit the wrong end of the IR.” [a]
“Yessir.”
“And tell Forest to get the rest of his men off that #$% road!”
-
Doc’s eyes popped open.
He sat up, but slowly.
Everything was complicated because his head hurt.
That one again, he thought. Deep breaths.
After a groggy attempt to relax his jaw and neck, his head cleared, and he didn’t recognize the room. What was it? He glanced around. …It was a sitting room …that smelled like vanilla, of all things.
The room measured about five meters by six and felt vaguely familiar. Its furnishings were the sort of things he preferred; they appeared modest, well-made, and comfortable—and coordinated if you ignored the exercise walking machine in the corner.
There were two doors, and he eased off the sofa to try them. The one ahead was locked. The one to the right opened into a clean bathroom.
Listening carefully, he heard muffled sounds—carpenters, possibly. Gentle breath from the HVAC had that hint of vanilla. He couldn’t decide whether the air was heating or air-conditioning, so it was ventilation.
Stooping for a look in the mirror, at last he saw something he expected. That ruddy brown face with a touch of gaunt had gotten easier to look at, and his children, now grown, loved it as interesting. He wiped off the sweat.
The medicine cabinet had a bottle of pills; the label called them aspirin. If they were poison instead, he might die.
He could live with that chance and took one with a handful of water.
He thought about calling out but resisted. More reconnaissance first.
Surveying the sitting room from the doorway, the exercise machine was to his right. Next were the locked door, a wardrobe and, in the far corner, an armoire. At his left hand stood an end table sporting an ornamental lamp, and then the sofa angled toward a TV in the armoire.
Pressing his better ear against a wall, he heard two workmen, maybe more, and one of them laughed easily.
The walls felt too solid to be in a home or non-commercial building. He fetched the lamp and scratched one. It showed drywall beneath paint that seemed dry but fresh. He put the lamp back.
“Good morning, Doctor Little.”
The thin, raspy voice startled him, and he knocked the lamp. “I’m sorry,” the voice added. “I wanted to avoid that, but I suppose giving you a start was inevitable. How’re you feeling?”
Doc replaced the lamp. The rasp sounded male and came from a stuffed but empty easy chair in the far-left corner of the room. He ambled toward it.
A small table stood between the sofa and the stuffed chair. He stopped to look it over and decide what to say. Walnut. Very nice—perhaps even expensive—and suitable for playing bridge or supporting dinner for two. A used microwave oven disgraced its top.
That voice… It was… He had an easier time deciding what it wasn’t.
It wasn’t family. It wasn’t from TLC, or MTM, or any other place he had worked. How about his military past? A name might emerge eventually. No. A voice like that he would remember instantly.
He played along, but with his own twist. Casually canting his head and staring at the chair, he moved just enough to tell whether the voice stayed put. “Where am I?” he asked, faking a yawn that turned into a real one. “Who are you? What’s going on?”
“We’ve not been properly introduced,” said the voice, still from the chair, “but we can talk, and you can ask me any question. Let’s start with ‘Where am I?’—or rather: ‘Where are you?’ The answer is: ‘I can’t say.’
“As to ‘Who am I?’—that’s not important. And ‘What’s going on…?’ You are in protective custody. Consider this a safe house.”
Doc didn’t buy it. For one thing, he didn’t feel safe. He gauged the wall, looking for a spot that was most likely between two studs, and banged it hard with his fist. The blow left a faint imprint of knuckles, not a dent or hole as one would expect. “With only a room and a half and no windows,” he growled, massaging his hand, “it seems more like a cell than a house.”
“Windows wouldn’t be safe,” said the voice. “But we’re working at giving you another room. It won’t be long.”
“How long?”
“Another rich question,” the voice answered in a tone suggesting a smile. “Probably about—”
A muffled pause followed, as if the owner of the voice had covered the phone and looked at someone else for the answer of: “Two or three days. It’s more difficult than you might think. You’ve been here for about… I’m embarrassed to say how long. And how long you stay is dependent on you, but on others as well.”
“Does it depend on you?” Doc asked, striding to the chair.
“I don’t think so. I could be wrong, but probably not.”
The voice didn’t sound like anyone he knew, but what about TM3—or TM2 for that matter? His inquiring mind suggested those two possibilities, and there was a sure way to find the truth. Both TMs were artificially intelligent machines his company had built. They could not lie.
“Are you Timothy?” he asked, plopping into the stuffed chair.
“No. Timothy who?” The voice came from beside the locked door.
Chasing it around started to feel like dancing a pas de deux with a ghost. Instead, he clarified: “Are you TM3? Or TM2? Or Robey?”
“No.”
As he decided what to do next, the voice added, “Books and magazines you might like are in the end table cabinet. There’s food and drink in the armoire, and changes of clothes in the wardrobe. We’ll talk more soon.”
Little stalked around the room calling out unanswered questions.
Then it came to him: …This is an interrogation. They must want my secrets. Which ones? Doesn’t matter. They’d have to kill me first—though torture might be in their plan, and I don’t know if I’d stand up to that. But what kind of a life would I have if I cracked? I’d have lost my dreams too…
Suck it up, soldier. This is an interrogation. That was the Approach, or the first steps of it. But what kind of approach? [b]
He let that question cook as he inspected the armoire, keeping its doors open to see the TV screen the next time the voice spoke. Then he began a detailed search for audio and surveillance hardware that must exist.
[a] IR, i.e., Infra-Red light. IR beacons identify friendlies. IR lasers paint targets.
[b] Dear Diary: Here and elsewhere Doctor Little recalls parts of US Army FM 34‒52, a manual on interrogation techniques current when he was in military service. Maynard Little was a line officer, not an intelligence officer. His recall of approach techniques, and of rapport and other protocols is fuzzy, but is correct as far as he refers to them in this book.