Shoot It Again, Sam Read online

  "Go on. Why are you stopping, Ed?"

  "Nothing—I was just trying to think—"

  "Of what? Why are you sweating, Ed? Look at you. Your face is turning white as a sheet."

  "Stop it, for Chrissakes, stop it. Stop sticking pins in me!"

  "I'm sorry, Ed. This is necessary. It is necessary that you accept everything. All the truths. No matter how awful they may seem to your normal mind. You must reject nothing, no matter how bad a light it puts you in. You understand?"

  "Yeah—go on."

  "All right. The right shoe of your set of Oxfords was very cleverly needle-tipped as a secret weapon. Those needles contained a sufficient quantity of KCN—cyanide to you—and once you were alone with the President you went after him. Trying to kick those deadly needles into him."

  "I didn't—I didn't!"

  "You did but it wasn't your fault. You had been programmed for a very long time, at very great expense and trouble, to do just that. Face it, Ed. Face it. Don't shut it out. Enemies of the United States had transformed you from a patriotic citizen into a mindless assassin."

  "Crap! What is this—James Bond? Cut it out, will you?"

  "All right, Ed. We'll drop that for now."

  "Thank God."

  "Just the same it is a fact you on built-in command tried to assassinate the President of the United States."

  "No—no matter what you say or what you do—you'll never make me believe that. Nobody can."

  "No, I can't. Not unless I use the same cruel methods that your friends did. The nice people who played with your brain. But we don't work that way, Ed. For which I thank God. Yours and mine. All right, let's drop that line of questioning. Ready for some more questions?"

  "Yeah. Sure."

  "Good. I want to see how well oriented you are now about yourself."

  "All right."

  "What high school did you go to?"

  "Theodore Roosevelt in The Bronx."

  "Did you graduate?"

  "Yes. January of '42."

  "Go to college?"

  "Yeah. U.S. Army for three years."

  "Who is Michael Monks?"

  "Cop. New York City. A Captain and the best friend I've got."

  "Fair enough. Do you think you can tell me who won the Academy Award for Best Male Actor in say—nineteen forty six?"

  "Too easy. Fredric March. The Best Years Of Our Lives . . ."

  "Fine, Ed. Fine. I see that vaunted movie memory of yours is functioning as well as ever."

  "Yeah? I wish I remembered Claire Bloom's unlisted telephone number, Doc . . ."

  There were a lot more transcripts. All pretty much the same. Slowly, I took stock and collected all the flying bits and pieces and assembled the jigsaw puzzle. From the nightmare of the train to the confrontation in the Situation Room. All the hospital rooms and the quiz sessions and chin-chins with the doctor that looked like Peter Lorre and those movie sound-track voices giving me a third degree of sorts and the pleasant sessions with handsome Dr. Dayton all ran together in my mind like an unbroken string of beads. But at least I had them all in position, now. I had fixed the positions of Before and After. All I didn't know was what it all meant. All I wouldn't fess up to, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, was my attempted murder of the Man.

  That was still too big a truth to swallow.

  And something else went down pretty tough, too.

  Counting all the days and measuring a calendar and bringing everything up to date, it had been exactly five whole weeks since Dan Davis had popped up out of his coffin-on-a-train. The middle of June had become fairly late July. And I had been out of circulation and almost out of touch with the world and life. A man walking around imagining he was someone else, trying to do something with no conscious will of his own. A walking assassin. A puppet. A monkey on a string. A poor sap and dupe being maneuvered from backstage.

  Also I had lost twenty one pounds, grown a mous-tache and short, unkempt beard and I didn't even look like myself anymore.

  Dreamboat Dr. Dayton had had no part of the question-and-answer sessions in the Camp David grill mill.

  So the morning he showed up with a grim smile on his handsome kisser and the wheelchair was just a contraption taking up space in one corner of my comfortable glass cage, I was genuinely glad to see him. If that boy had ever gone into private practice he would have made a fortune on Park Avenue. His sunny smile lit up the room.

  "What's the good news, Handsome?"

  "One hundred percent recovery. I don't promise you won't have a bad dream or two, maybe even a lapse into nightmare sometime when an incident might trigger you off—but at least you're ready for your day in the sun."

  "Meaning?"

  "The President. He's waiting to see you."

  "Here?"

  Dr. Dayton nodded and tucked his hands, characteristically, into the side pockets of his short white coat.

  "You'll be seeing him in about five minutes, Ed. He made a special trip down. We have a special room we use for confrontations between VIPs and senior citizens like you."

  "Thanks, kid," I said but it was the best news I'd heard in a long, long time. The Man would know what it was all about. The Man would tell me. Only he could, it seemed to me.

  Then maybe I could really get back to being my own man again.

  Instead of a nickel version of a paper shamus who had lived only once on the pages of a book and walked in flickering celluloid down through the moors of Memory Lane. With smoke and a tight grin.

  I had brains, yes, I had.

  And I wanted them back, desperately.

  ". . . when a king misrules, he changes the people.

  When a presidente misrules, the people change him . . ."

  Paul Muni as Juarez. (1939)

  CLUE

  □ Maybe I was all cured but they obviously weren't taking any chances with me. Not at the given odds nor considering the risk involved. Presidents still come at a pretty high premium. Which is the way the status should be quo. Special operatives are a dime a dozen compared to the training and lifetime of men who become the leaders of countries not by virtue of being born into the job.

  Two steely-eyed, silent men in plainclothes led me from Dr. Dayton and the glass cage into the corridors of the complex they call Camp David. A succession of hall turns and corridor changes and then an elevator ride down about two floors and that was it. About fifty feet to the left of the elevator was a sober green door. My two guides didn't speak to me at all. I had nothing to say to them, either. But I wasn't kidding myself. They were armed to the teeth. They had to be. Or everybody connected with this project was crazy. As for me, I was still wearing hospital slippers, plain pajamas of drab cotton color and the cocoa bathrobe which didn't even have a belt cord in case I wanted to try to strangle myself or anybody else with same. I wasn't carrying so much as a comb or a nailfile. Except for the freedom of my hands and feet, I was weaponless.

  One of the men knocked softly on the green door, waited only a second or two and then pushed the door inward. The other man gently poked the small of my back. I went into the room, aware that my escorts were not going in with me. It didn't seem to matter to me one way or the other. When the door closed just as softly behind me, I remained where I was. About three paces into the room, staring almost foolishly straight ahead. The President, a conservative grey suit decking his familiar body, was waiting for me. Sitting at a round maroon deal table which had two camp chairs arranged to both sides of its position in the heart of the room. It wasn't much of a room. There was the table, the two chairs and a floor-to-ceiling mirror on the rear wall which threw back a vivid reflection of two Presidents, two mes and two of everything else. My mind wasn't completely layered in wool. I knew the mirror was a two-way job. The Isinglass kind where the people on the other side of the mirror can see you but you can't see them. I wasn't at all surprised. Nor were my feelings hurt in any way. I had it coming.

  "Sit down, Ed," the President said. His voice was very
warm and very friendly. I sat down.

  Stiffly, a little helplessly. My brain, as well as it was, was trying to push away terrible pictures of me chasing him around the Situation Room, trying to kick him into the graveyard.

  Our eyes met over the circumference of the deal table. His were that candid kind of blue that makes it hard for a man to be a fink. Or play a good game of poker. I'm brown-eyed but just as bad in the same department.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  He nodded but a faint smile clung to his mouth. And still, the eyes were frank and honest and very, very serious.

  "We're running out of time, Ed. We have to talk. They tell me you've just about put everything together in your mind. Want to talk about it?"

  "There isn't anything else I'd rather do, Chief. I've been to Hell and back. Look at me—"

  "You look just fine. A little thin, maybe, but in no way affected permanently. Now, let's get cracking on this. How much do you remember? It's important, Ed —how much?"

  I held back a shudder. My mouth felt dry, suddenly.

  "You must have read the reports. You saw my answers. I can go all the way back to my first pair of rollerskates. And I remember getting your telegram, taking the train. I can see that conductor and something that looked like Dan Davis coming back from the dead and climbing out of that coffin. And then I go blank. A complete washout. Thanks to your people here, I can remember the rest of it. Thinking I was Sam Spade, being contacted by a woman I thought was Spade's girl and that Chinaman and the Washington Monument—" I had begun to blurt, to pour it all out in a steady stream. I checked myself and looked at him, sheepishly. "Can you top that? Me . . . Noon. Making like a guy out of a book or a movie, being used like that—"

  "Take it easy, Ed. Brainwashing is nothing that new."

  "I know, I know—but how the hell did they ever decide to line me up for that operation? Me—a Manhattan cowboy?"

  The Man leaned forward in his chair, earnestly, folding his arms on top of the deal table. The blue eyes frosted over.

  "Stop it. You're feeling sorry for yourself. And you're close to whining. Pull yourself together. Better men than both of us have had their time in the opposition's torture boxes. Now, hear me out and hear me good. It's over, done with. You pulled out of it. You responded to drugs and curative processes and thanks to that particular thing in you that makes your motor run, you managed to stay your own man. If I could tell you of the cases in our files of men whose minds have been permanently damaged by the sort of thing you've gone through—well, take my word for it. That nasty phase of it is over. You tried to kill me but it wasn't you. It was them talking and working through you. But now we've got you back the way you were and from here on out it's as it was before. Understood?"

  I got hold of myself and swallowed hard.

  "Understood."

  "Check." His cold look went away. "I don't want to hear you apologize anymore. Or say you're sorry. We've got work to do. And it's got to be quick, it's got to be expert and it's got to be good. Fair enough?"

  "Fair enough."

  He relaxed a little and leaned back in the chair. The blue foulard tie at his throat matched a Legion of Honor slice of ribbon on his left lapel. His eyes swept over me, slowly, keenly.

  "Before I launch into the Davis assignment, Ed, it will be only fair to tell you exactly how they did it to you. It's important that you should know that much. From what we've been able to piece together from the answers we've gotten from you, what you've remembered enough to tell us, at any rate, it all seems to add up. The shock, that doctor in that bogus Richmond rest home whom you seem to remember lucidly, the woman, of course. And the Chinese killed by two of the S men. Important strings, Ed. Tied together, they make the pattern add up. As well as what we already know—"

  I was impatient. I cut in:

  "It wasn't anywhere near upstate New York, that place, was it?"

  "Of course not. It had to be somewhere here in D.C. We didn't locate it yet but it was somewhere here. We're sure of that much. A private residence or some such rigged to look like a sanitarium."

  "So they hijacked me off a train close to L.A. and brought me all the way back here—telling me I cracked up in New York—"

  "That's it," he agreed, a wan note in his voice. "It's a top priority job killing American presidents."

  I looked at him. "I won't interrupt again. I promise. Just tell me one thing. Whose pie-in-the-sky solution was this one this time?"

  His smile could have been put on a statue. Or a coin.

  "How's Red China for openers?"

  I sat back in my chair and did no more than stare at him. From that point on, he began to talk very formally and very carefully and succinctly and within maybe ten minutes, I had the entire nightmare unraveled for me. My five weeks in the darkness and how they grew.

  The master stroke, for that's what it was, and it would have worked if the man sitting across from me had even been remotely silly or stupid for as much as five seconds in the Situation Room, was a masterpiece of subtlety, ingenuity and espionage oneupmanship.

  What it all amounted to was—some modern day versions of Fu Manchu had glommed onto my very special occupation and my very special hangups. The sheer accident of the traumatic experience of seeing Dan Davis go jack-in-the-box from an expensive coffin had temporarily sent me off the rails. When I woke up, wherever and whenever that was, some genius, with a savvy far beyond the expediencies of politics, war and dirty-pool espionage had seized upon the opportunity and made the most of it. Even as the President very quietly intoned the news of the day for me and all the details, some known and some assumed in the name of logic, all fell into place, I could see very clearly how it had all come about. A chance in a million converted to a thousand-to-one shot. And it could have worked too. It could have come off a whopping smash hit. Something extraordinary in the occult history of men who make war with all the methods and weapons they could command.

  It would have put Machiavelli to shame.

  When the President had finished, I stared at him.

  "And that's it? All of it?"

  "That's it. A bit neat no matter what side of the fence you're on, I would say."

  "So would I. And it gives me the screaming-meemies."

  "I told you. We're not going to discuss that anymore. Though I know how you feel, Ed. Believe me, I do."

  "Do you?" I almost glared at him.

  "I think I do."

  "It's not the same thing." I shook my head angrily. Mirror or no mirror, President or no President. "It only could have happened if there was a doublecross somewhere. A joker in the deck."

  His eyes narrowed. His head cocked, warningly.

  "And that means?"

  "Somebody in your camp," I said, "or on that train who works for us had to be in on it for it to even have gotten started. And until you tell me exactly what Operation: Dan Davis really means all I can really believe is that I was a clay pigeon from the very beginning."

  The Man squirmed a little in his chair. He wagged his head, almost sadly. His blue eyes were very honest, again.

  "That's a little too fast, Ed. Even for me. I'd have to think on that."

  "Do that," I agreed, keeping a tight rein on my nerves and my anger. "I have to think too. All about how they wiped out my whole mind and made me almost do something I would have regretted to the day I died. No, don't scold me or try to slap me down again. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. I'm sore, now. Good and sore. Let me think awhile now, too. I want all the cards in my hands before I ask for some new ones. You owe me that much at least."

  The color that had started to rise in his face went away just as swiftly. He relaxed and nodded, looking down at his hands.

  "Okay, Ed. You do that. Think. Maybe you can come up with some better answers than we have. Then I'll tell you what you need to know about the Davis business."

  Even as he granted me a few minutes of his presidential grace, my brain was flying.

  Back to the train
, back to the facts, back to what he had told me about how they had worked the whole scheme on me.

  Somewhere in that madness had to be an answer for me.

  Or for him.

  Either way, it was all I had left to fight with.

  ". . . fasten your seat belts. It's going to

  be a bumpy night!"

  Bette Davis as Margo Channing in

  All About Eve. (1950)

  PLAYBACK

  □ Goethe once said that anyone who didn't understand the past was doomed to relive it again. The old Teuton phrasemaker was dead right, of course, as he was about most things. Sherlock Holmes by way of Arthur Conan Doyle put it another way. When you rule out all the possibilities, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, has to be the truth. Or the answer.

  So it was with the recent past.

  I had been scrambled by experts. Oriental tricksters and just plain hoodoos. And they must have had a file on me all the way back to kindergarten to be able to swing the hat trick they did with my mind. The President and his S boys and IBM professionals were sure of that much. Or else the whole thing never would have been started in the first place. The first place being me.

  Noon. Private detective from New York, spy-to-a-First-Man, unofficially, without anyone else knowing it. Oh, yeah. It says here.

  What about Noon?

  Strong, tough, Manhattan cynical but underneath still a small boy. A movie lover. Cried when dogs got run over, helped little old ladies across the street, works for principle and integrity. Not an anti-hero. He believes the home team will win the old ball game in the ninth, that nice guys will not finish last and when the climax comes, the Good Guys will always beat the Bad Guys. He grew up that way, through the Depression years, a second World War and all the time he dreamed in a million darkened movie houses. He embraced the word Hero; he believed there was no other way for a man to be. The current generation gap and the unattractive symbols of modern times, don't win him over. He remains corny, sentimental and fairly gullible, still thinking it will all come out right. In spite of a hardboiled occupation and a world of bums, losers and cheats, he stays the same. The same man who took a bust in the Army in France because he bucked a sadistic and stupid second lieutenant is the very same man who has worked on some of the worst murder cases in town sans fee, prestige or prizes. Damsels in distress are also his specialty.