Agent Counter-Agent

Six

I was strapped in the chair again, and the room was completely dark. They had given me another injection but this time there were no cajoling voices. There was only the drug working its way into me. Tanya and Kalinin were not even in the room.

They had mentioned something about the "last phase." I'd heard them say it in Russian, and somehow I'd understood, though I had no memory of ever having learned Russian.

As I sat in the chair, an image appeared in the darkness before me. It was the President, and he was giving a political speech. He was just twenty feet away from me, gesturing as he talked. He was saying things that upset me very much. I broke out in a cold sweat. The euphoria gave way to intense anger as the President's words became more and more abusive, louder and louder. His face slowly warped and became hideously distorted. In a minute the face was all that was left of the image. It began expanding, growing larger and uglier as the venom spewed from his twisted lips. The face was so close I thought I could reach out and attack it.

I heard a scream in the room and realized it had come from my own throat. I had reached out savagely for that awful face, trying to tear into the flesh with my bare hands, clawing at it with my fingers.

But I couldn't reach it. The scream had been one of complete frustration and abject despair at not being able to reach the awful face and destroy it. In another minute the voice died away, and there was just silence as the contorted face continued to move in front of me.

Suddenly Tanya's voice came out of the darkness. "This is your enemy. This is the man who stands between your people and freedom. He is a vile, ugly animal, and he feeds on the carcasses of his people. You have always disliked and feared him, but now you are consumed with a desperate, violent loathing. You hate him more than you have ever hated anyone or anything in your life."

I thought my chest was going to explode with the repulsion and hatred I felt for the twisted face. I kept remembering the President's vile words, and I clenched my fists until my nails tore the flesh of my palms.

Finally the image disappeared into the blackness and was replaced by another. This was not familiar to me at first, then I remembered it from the newspaper. It was the American Vice-President. He was speaking in English, but I understood him perfectly. He was explaining that he would work closely with the Venezuelan government, that the United States would offer more economic and military aid to keep the Venezuelan President in power. As he spoke, his face changed. His eyes became more and more evil, and his mouth spewed forth hideous, detestable words.

When the lights finally went on, I was covered with sweat. The technician unstrapped me from the chair and took me back to my room. The drug and the overpowering emotions had completely drained my energy. My legs were so weak that I could hardly walk.

Back in my room, the technician helped me onto the cot and then stared down at me. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"I think so."

"This is all necessary for your mission." He said kindly.

I took a long, deep breath. "Where is Tanya Savitch?"

"She is busy on the project."

"I have to see her."

"I'm afraid that is impossible."

I looked up at him. He was a young Venezuelan, the man called Salgado. His face looked honest. Maybe because of the frankness I saw there, I blurted out a something I hadn't even realized I was thinking.

"Am I really who they say I am? Is all this really necessary for the people's revolution?"

His eyes narrowed on me. "Do you doubt it?" he asked anxiously.

"I… I don't know. I guess not. Sometimes I think I am going crazy."

"You are not insane. In fact, you are quite well now." His voice was soothing.

"How long have I been here in the clinic?" I asked.

He hesitated as if wondering whether he should answer me. "You were brought in by a comrade the night before last."

"And when will I be ready to leave?"

"Today."

I propped myself up weakly on my elbow. "Really?"

"The last phase will be over later today. You will have a few more orientation sessions. The next one will not be very pleasant for you, but it will be over before you know it. It is an absolutely necessary part of your preparation for the job at the conference."

"What is that job?"

"They will tell you later today."

Suddenly the door opened, and Dr. Kalinin walked in. He scowled at the technician. "What is it? Why are you still with señor Chávez?"

"He wanted to talk for a moment." The technician sounded frightened.

"Get back to your work," Kalinin said curtly.

"Yes, of course." Salgado turned and left the room.

I watched Kalinin approach me. I didn't like the idea that the Russians were in charge here and that my own countrymen weren't allowed to speak with me. A Venezuelan should be in control of his own revolution, yet Kalinin had treated Salgado like an inferior.

Kalinin gave me a stiff smile. "I am sorry to take Salgado from you so abruptly, señor Chávez, but he has duties elsewhere. Are you feeling well?"

"Just fine," I answered.

He took my pulse and didn't say anything for a while.

"Very good. You should rest now, and we will come for you after lunch. You have a rigorous session coming up."

"Do I really get to leave this place late today?"

My question took him by surprise. But after a brief pause he answered, "Yes. Tonight you will be ready."

"Good," I said. "I hate confinement."

"So do we all," he said deliberately. "But we must make sacrifices for the good of the revolution. Isn't that so?"

I nodded. Kalinin smiled tightly and left.

I fell asleep for a while. Suddenly I heard my own scream. I sat upright on the cot, soaked with perspiration and shaking all over. I ran a trembling hand over my mouth, staring at the opposite wall. It wasn't like me to be afraid — I knew that much about myself. It must have been the drug they were giving me. I'd had another nightmare.

I'd seen the ugly faces from the dark room and heard the harsh, evil voices. It was all mixed up with images of myself. I was stalking through a dark alley with a Luger in my hand. I turned a corner, and suddenly an enormous, warped face loomed up in front of me. It looked like the President's and yet wasn't his — it was a deformed face hanging suspended in the blackness. I fired the Luger over and over, but the hideous face only laughed at me. The mouth opened, threatening to engulf me. The long, sharp teeth were coming at me. That was when I'd screamed.

After a light lunch I was taken back to the room with the machines — the orientation room, they called it. The technician had warned me that this session would be different, and he hadn't been exaggerating. Tanya met me in the room as the technicians were strapping me into the chair.

"This will be unpleasant," she said. "But it will be over before you know it."

"I thought of you earlier," I said. "I asked for you, but they said you were too busy to see me."

The men finished strapping me in and went over to one of the machines. They hadn't used that one before. It had a small control panel, but there were dozens of blinking colored lights on its counter.

"What they told you was true," Tanya answered.

"Will I see you again after I leave here?"

She looked away. "Perhaps. It all depends on the outcome of the mission."

"I don't know anything about the mission," I reminded her.

"You will shortly."

They used different attachments this time — a wired metal band across my chest and a new headpiece. Tanya saw to it that everything fit properly and then left the room.

They turned the lights out, and I saw more pictures in the blackness. The images were even more real than the ones I'd seen that morning. They hadn't given me an injection this time, but I knew that the effects of the morning dosage still hadn't completely worn off.

The President appeared in the room. He was walking through a crowd, waving and smiling evilly. As soon as the image appeared, the headband began doing something to me. An awful pressure started building up in my head, and the pain became almost unbearable. As I watched the images move, the agony increased. I struggled to get free, opening and closing my mouth and squinting my eyes hard against the pain. It just kept getting worse till I thought my head was going to explode. A scream welled up in my throat. A man separated himself from the crowd and ran toward the President, swinging a huge machete. The blade connected, decapitating the President, and his head went flying into the crowd, spewing blood everywhere. People laughed and jeered.

The pain disappeared, and I felt only the sweet emptiness of physical comfort. The President was dead, and the world was saved from his tyranny.

I hoped the session was over, but it wasn't. Another scene filled the room, with the President making a public speech. The pain came again, and I braced myself against it, coiled inside to steel myself against it. But it overwhelmed me. This time the awful pressure in my head was accompanied by stabbing chest pains, as if I were having a heart attack. I heard myself scream, but the pain didn't go away. A man pointed a pistol at the President and blew the back of his head off. The pain subsided immediately.

But again the room filled with images, this time of the American Vice-President. He was riding in a black Cadillac in an official parade, and I knew that the Venezuelan President was in the car in front of him. The Vice-President was wearing an expensive pin-striped suit, gesturing to the crowd in an imperialistic manner. The pressure came again, but this time there was no tightening of the chest, just the terrible pain in the head. In a sudden explosion of smoke and debris, the Vice-President's car was demolished by an unseen bomb, and everybody in the automobile was killed. A second violent explosion reverberated in the room, and the Venezuelan President's car disintegrated. The pain was gone for good.

I slumped in the chair as they unstrapped me and disengaged the apparatus. Dr. Kalinin was beside me, but I didn't see Tanya.

"The worst is over," he said to me.

When he was through prodding me with his stethoscope, he helped me out of the chair and walked me down a corridor to an ordinary projection room. The far wall had a screen built onto it, and there was a booth at the back of the room for the projector.

Kalinin slapped a loaded Luger into my hand. I looked at it dully, still numb from the brutal session. It was the gun I'd been shooting in my nightmare.

"The drug has worn off by now," Kalinin was saying to me, "and your reactions to the various stimuli during this part of the preparation will be quite natural. You will keep the gun, and you will do whatever you feel like doing."

I just stared at the big automatic. It was a German gun, I knew, but somehow I associated it with the United States. While I was still trying to figure it out, the room darkened and the film began. These were real pictures, probably taken during the last couple of days at the preconference meetings. The film showed the President walking down the path in front of the Palacio de Miraflores, with the American Vice-President beside him. There were cameramen all around them, and the President was talking casually with his American visitor.

As the figures on the screen appeared to move toward me, an overpowering feeling of hatred rose in my chest, and I became aware of an uneasy feeling in my head, a feeling of great discomfort. The pain increased with the feeling of complete revulsion. I didn't see the screen anymore. The men walking toward me became very real. I raised the gun in my right hand and pointed it at the two figures. I aimed at the President first. I was trembling with hatred and pain, and sweat was pouring down my forehead. I squeezed the trigger. The figures kept walking toward me, undisturbed. I was furious. I fired the gun over and over again, and black holes appeared in a tight pattern on the President's chest. In a minute I was pulling the trigger on an empty chamber. Still the two figures kept coming toward me. I hurled the automatic at them, and then in a fit of rage, lunged toward them. I hit something hard and fell heavily to the floor.

The lights came on, Kalinin helped me to my feet. I was breathless and exhausted. Now that the film was over the pain and anger drained away from me.

"Very good," Kalinin was saying in a sugary voice. "Excellent, as a matter of fact."

"I want… out of here," I said to him.

"All right," he said. "We shall not need you until later today, when you will have your final session. You may return to your room."

They took me back to the white room with the cot, and I lay down heavily. It seemed as if several agonizing, sleepless days had passed since I'd gotten up that morning. I fell asleep for a while. But this time there was no nightmare. Instead, I had a very detailed dream of Tanya. She was nude and in my arms. The warm softness of her body was engulfing me, consuming me with desire. Every sense was aroused — I heard her lovely voice and smelled the intoxicating scent of her perfume. And throughout the dream, in the heat of her passion, she kept saying to me, "I am sorry, Nick. I am sorry, Nick."

I couldn't figure out why she was using that foreign name, but I didn't bother to correct her. I didn't care what she called me. Nothing really mattered but the hot, demanding flesh writhing beneath me.

I sat up suddenly. I thought about Tanya and her use of the foreign name. Nick. What did it mean? I'd dreamed about a Luger, then Kalinin had shoved one into my fist. I wondered, as I lay there waiting for them to take me to the final session, whether there wasn't more to these past couple of days than I knew, more than these people were telling me. But they had to be legitimate. They knew all about me, all about my philosophies and my work with the movement. We were all working for the same cause, and I had to trust them.

When they came for me, they told me it was early evening and I would be released within a few hours, after a good meal. They took me to the orientation room but didn't strap me into the big chair. Instead, they asked me to sit in an ordinary chair beside Salgado. After a short time he left and Tanya and Kalinin came in with a third man, a Russian named Oleg Dimitrov.

"Señor Dimitrov works closely with the leader of the movement," Kalinin explained to me.

I looked from the men to Tanya. She was carrying a sheaf of papers under her arm. She smiled uncertainly at me.

"Shall we get started?" she asked impersonally.

"All right," I said. "Let's get started."

They pulled up three chairs and sat down facing me, the men on either side of Tanya. She put the papers on her lap. Dimitrov was staring hard at me, as if trying to assess my innermost thoughts and feelings.

"We are going to ask you to submit to therapy once more," Tanya said. "Then you will be ready."

Kalinin was preparing the syringe. He leaned forward from his chair and gave me the injection. "You will receive only a small amount of the sedative this time," he said, "because we will be releasing you immediately after this session is over." The liquid entered my vein, and he withdrew the needle and pressed a bail of cotton to the tiny wound.

"Now," Tanya said, in her smooth, quiet voice, "you are feeling very relaxed and tranquil." Her voice droned on, caressing my brain, and soon I was in its power. I was completely submissive.

"This time I am going to ask you to open your eyes, but you must not come out of the deep trance. On the count of five you will open your eyes but remain in the hypnotic state."

She counted slowly. When she reached five, my eyes came open. I looked from one face to the other. I was perfectly aware of everything around me, but I was still in a state of supreme euphoria. I was completely relaxed, and I knew I was in the complete power of that voice.

"You have been chosen to carry out the most important mission yet attempted by the revolution," Tanya said gravely. "Day after tomorrow, the Caracas Conference will take place. There will be a morning and an afternoon session. The President of Venezuela, the Vice-President of the United States, and various other dignitaries will be present. The conference will take place at the Palacio de Miraflores.

"You will go to the afternoon session just before the conference is to reconvene. You will be given a water carafe to take into the room. When the conference resumes, a device hidden in the carafe will kill everyone in that room."

A shiver of pleasure passed through me.

"You will not use a gun to kill our enemies, as you tried to do earlier. But you will kill them. Do you understand?"

"Yes. I understand."

"Your face will look different to you when you awake from this trance. We will have made you look like an American spy whose name is Nick Carter."

"Nick Carter," I repeated. Nick! That was what Tanya had called me in the dream. It had been a premonition, like the dream about the Luger.

"You will enter the building as Nick Carter. A member of our group will give you a carafe containing a hidden device. You will take the carafe into the conference room and place it on the table. You will be able to do this because this Nick Carter, whom we have disposed of, has top security clearance at the conference."

"I understand," I said.

"During the next two days you will pose as Nick Carter. I will now begin reading from a file on this agent, and you must remember every single detail so that you will be able to impersonate Carter successfully. Also, you have certain knowledge of this man deep inside you. You may utilize just enough of this knowledge to accomplish your impersonation and no more."

She read from the papers on her lap. The information wasn't difficult to remember. Somehow it seemed very familiar to me.

"It was I who impersonated Ilse Hoffman," Tanya concluded. "After we release you, you will report immediately to Carters boss, David Hawk. He will wonder why you have been out of touch for two days, and he will ask about me, whom he knows as Ilse Hoffmann. You will say that you took a trip to a country villa with me for a few days because you wanted to check on me but that you are now convinced that I am above suspicion."

"Yes," I said. "Above suspicion." The information was indelibly recorded on my brain.

"You will impersonate Nick Carter as cleverly as you know how, doing whatever is expected of you until noon on the day of the conference. You will then ignore any orders they may give you and go to the palace. You must be in the corridor just outside the conference room at exactly one p.m. At that time our man will approach you. He will be wearing a dark blue suit and red tie, with a white carnation in his lapel. He will hand you this carafe, which is the kind that will be used on the conference table." She took a large, ornate carafe from Dimitrov. "Inside it, under the false bottom, will be this device."

She carefully removed an electronic gadget. It looked like a fancy transistor radio.

"The device is operated by remote control. It emits sound in a wide range of frequencies, wider than anything previously devised. At certain frequencies and levels of volume, sound is destructive to central nervous tissue. Very brief exposure results in painful death."

She replaced the gadget in the carafe. "The device will be tuned to the proper frequency by remote control after the afternoon session has begun. Within minutes it will have killed everyone within hearing range, but it will not affect anyone outside the room. After it has done its job, it will emit a much lower sound, which will still sound very high-pitched to your ears. You will be able to hear that sound outside the conference room, where you will be stationed."

"I will hear the sound outside the conference room," I repeated.

"After our man gives you the water carafe, you will go to the guards at the door of the room and tell them that the palace staff has asked you to deliver the carafe so that there will be fresh water for the members of the conference. Since Nick Carter has clearance to enter the conference room, they will allow you to take the carafe inside, where you will place it on the table. You wall leave it there and take the other carafe to the nearest service room in the corridor. You will stay away from the immediate area until you see that everyone has entered the conference room for the afternoon session. Then you will take up your place just outside.

"When you hear the high-pitched sound from the room, you will know the device has done its job. Now, listen carefully." Dimitrov had gotten up and turned a dial on a small machine on a nearby table. I heard a piercing scream that reminded me of the noise some jets make.

"That is the sound you will hear." Her voice paused a moment. "When you hear it," she said slowly, "you will remember everything buried in your subconscious. You will remember everything that I told you earlier not to remember. You will recall all that occurred prior to your coming to this clinic. But you will not remember anything that occurred here. This will reveal truth to you but will result in severe confusion. You will admit to the first person who speaks to you that you planted the death device in the conference room. Is this all clear?"

"It is all clear," I said.

"Also, when our man hands you the carafe, he will say, 'Viva la revolución! These words will reinforce your determination to kill the Venezuelan President and the American and you will feel an irresistible compulsion to take the carafe into the room as I have instructed you."

"Viva la revolutión," I said.

Kalinin got up, went over to a table, and got the Luger they'd given me earlier and a stiletto in a sheath. He handed me the weapons.

"Put the gun on," Tanya said. "The stiletto sheath should be attached to your right forearm."

I followed her instructions. The weapons felt uncomfortable and bulky on me. Kalinin brought me a dark suit jacket and a tie, and Tanya told me to put them on over the weapons.

"The weapons belonged to Nick Carter," Tanya said. "You will know how to use them. The clothes were also his."

Dimitrov leaned over and whispered something into Tanya's ear. She nodded.

"You will make no attempt to return to your apartment on Avenida Bolivar. Nor will you contact the Vigilantes or anybody connected with this mission, not even the personnel at this clinic."

"Very well," I said.

"Now, Rafael Chávez, you will come out of hypnosis when I have counted down from five to one. You will speak fluent English, and that is the language you will use until you have accomplished your mission. You will be eager and ready to complete the mission, and you will follow all of my instructions to the letter.

"I will begin the count now. Five. You are Rafael Chávez, and you will change the course of modern Venezuelan history. Four. Your President and the Vice-President of the United States are your deadly enemies. Three. You have no thought, no purpose, but to kill these two men in the manner we have planned. Two. When you awake, you will not know you have been under hypnosis. You will not recall the names of those here with you, but you will know we are friends of the revolution who have prepared you for your mission."

When she reached number one, the threesome before me seemed to blur for a minute and then come back into focus. I looked from one face to the other.

"Do you feel all right, Rafael?" the lovely young woman asked.

"I feel fine," I answered her in English. Surprisingly, I spoke it with no difficulty.

"Who will you be for the next two days?"

"Nick Carter, the American spy."

"What will you do after you leave here?"

"Report to a man called David Hawk. I will tell him I was with you — with Ilse Hoffmann — during Carter's absence."

"Good. Go look at yourself."

I went over to a mirror. When I saw my face, it looked different. They had altered my appearance, so that I looked exactly like Nick Carter. I reached into my jacket and pulled out the Luger. The name Wilhelmina flashed across the back of my mind. I had no idea why. It didn't seem important, anyway. I pulled the ejector back and slid a cartridge into the chamber of the gun. 1 was surprised at my facility with the weapon.

I turned back to the three of them. "I don't know your names," I said.

The men were smiling with obvious satisfaction. It was the girl who spoke, though. "You know we are your friends. And friends of the revolution."

I hesitated. "Yes," I said. I aimed the gun at a light across the room and squinted along its barrel. It was a fine instrument. I slipped it back into its holster.

"You appear ready," the girl said.

I held her gaze for a moment. I knew there had been something between us, but couldn't remember her name. "Yes, I'm ready." I felt a sudden urge to get out of there, to get on with the most important thing in my life — the mission these people had prepared me for.

The man in the business suit spoke now. His voice seemed quite authoritarian. "Then go, Rafael. Go to the Caracas Conference and kill your enemies."

"Consider it done," I said.