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understand," he said. "Thanks for the file, anyway. We'll be going now."
"I really don't like him," I said when Kit and I were heading back to the car.
"I hate how he talked down to you. Same for Warshaw. Do you trust them?"
Kit looked right at me. "At this point I trust you and the kids. Nobody else.
I figure that everybody else is trying to kill us."
I stared at him. "That sounds like something Max would say."
"She did."
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73 EVERYBODY ELSE is trying to kill us. What a concept. Chilling, and possibly
true.
It was late afternoon when we arrived back at Kit's place in Washington. I was
anxious, hyper, and flat-out scared. So were the children. We spent the rest
of the day nervously peering out of Kit's windows, watching office workers and
tourists browse the tony galleries and restaurants around Dupont Circle.
But as the saying goes, it isn't paranoia if people really are after you.
When the offices and shops closed for the night and the street darkened, we
made our break.
One by one, the children slipped out the bathroom window that faced away from
the street.
Six times, the flurry of their wing beats echoed against the brick and
concrete of the back courtyard. I held my breath [247] and thanked God that
there were no gunshots, no screams. I was beginning to think like Kit about
this whole scary nightmare. At this point I trusted him and the kids, nobody
else.
"I'm shaking some," I finally admitted once the last of the kids was gone.
"Don't worry, it will probably get worse. No, we're okay. So far, anyway."
Kit and I waited half an hour before we left the building, then we walked to
the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and caught a taxicab. I felt as if we were
characters in a movie, a really scary one, the kind I don't go to.
We rode in silence as the cab took us south on Massachusetts Avenue for a
couple of blocks, past several small embassies and the like. Then Kit hopped
out at a red light and disappeared.
I stayed in the taxi as it turned left onto Sixteenth Street at Scott Circle
and continued on to P Street, where I got out. Real spy stuff.
Kit's Subaru was still parked where we'd left it earlier. After a few minutes
Kit came ambling up with the car keys.
He gave me a hug. "You okay?"
"Hugs help. But, nope."
We took off to the west, looping and turning, passing right by his apartment
again, then heading out toward the zoo. We collected the children from their
hiding place behind a Safeway, four blocks northeast of Kalorama Park, and
quickly loaded them into the car.
Mission accomplished. So far, so good.
"Buckle up," Kit said. "I mean it."
He carried on with his expert driving maneuvers for losing a tail-just in case
there was one. This thrilled the kids [248] no end but scared me half to
death. We zipped around cars at racetrack speed, backtracked, got off ramps
and onto other ones. By the time we had finally eased off the main roads and
checked into an idyllic and rustic motel called Alma's Valley Rest, in the
backwoods of Maryland, we'd surely shaken anyone who might've been following
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us.
Or so I prayed.
Alma's was another funky, bungalow-type motel. We had our own
four-hundred-square-foot cabin in the woods, and it was actually much nicer
than our bungalow at the Pines. There were two double beds covered with
matching powder blue spreads, plus some folding cots and a cable-powered TV.
To top it off, there was a little brook out back shaded by the spreading
branches of several elm trees. What more could a girl ask for?
I was even starting to like sleeping with all of us in one room. It was
crowded, but very nesty, and as sweet as a spoonful of molasses.
Then daybreak arrived and my storybook fantasy of Princess Frannie, her
handsome Prince Kit, and six magical children burned off with the morning fog.
The hunters were out there somewhere. There was no doubt about it.
Somehow, we had to stop them before they stopped us.
But how?
74 IN THE END, it was simple, really-we had to hunt the hunters. We had to get
them before they got us. There was no other way out of this.
Kit had managed to cast a spell over the FBI. Maybe he did have connections in
the Hoover Building. Anyway, somebody was instrumental in getting us an
interview at the Hauer Institute inside Liberty General Hospital.
Half the kids were fast asleep and the others were watching the Cartoon
Network while drinking milk and digging in to a heaping pile of Krispy Kreme
donuts when Kit and I left for Liberty Hospital, which we already knew was
beyond reproach.
Once we were on the road, Kit said, "Man, this is one beautiful day," and it
was gorgeous, all golden yellows and soft blues.
[250] October breezes puffed at the fluffy clouds, sounds of the sixties
bebopped from the radio, and Kit sang along with Bobby Darin: "I want, a girl,
to call, my owowown..."
Kit has a pretty good singing voice and was giving Walden Robert Cassotto a
real run for his money. We were remembering how much we liked each other and
forgetting for a little while that this wasn't the first day of summer
vacation.
Unfortunately, we were headed straight into Max's nightmare. If not at Liberty
Hospital, then somewhere else out there in rural Maryland.
I couldn't begin to imagine what these experiments might be like, but if they
were anything like what I'd seen at the School in Colorado, maybe I didn't
want to.
The very "well-respected" Liberty General Hospital was in Carroll County,
about thirty-three miles northwest of Baltimore, not far from the Liberty
Reservoir. The hospital was so hidden in a cleft between the gently rolling
hills of Maryland that we overshot it at first.
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On the second pass, I spotted the discreet bronze sign that directed us off
the main road to a narrow lane, then to a wide gravel drive that wound through
mature plantings and beautifully manicured grounds.
"It looks almost too good to be true," I said to Kit. "Maybe your pals at the
Bureau are right for a change."
"I don't have any pals at the Bureau. Not anymore. They all think I'm Mulder,
remember?"
The hospital appeared to be made up of two wings set at sixty-degree angles to
each other, like the halves of an opened book standing on end. The
three-story-high buildings were [251] made of white stone and had lots of wide
windows opening out to a magnificent view.
I had to admit, it looked totally benign.
So why did my hackles rise at the first sight of the place?
75 AND WHY DID my hackles stay up? Why did every instinct tell me to run from
this place as if I were at the gates of eternal damnation? And why didn't I
run?
Kit lightly touched the small of my back as we walked through the automatic
sliding doors that led to a large, open reception area. I needed to be touched
right then, to be reassured.
"I'm okay," I turned and whispered. Liar. Big fat liar.
"I'm not," he said. "I get funny around places where they might be doing
experiments on humans."
"Not at Liberty Hospital," I said. "The president and vice president come here
for their checkups."
"You think this is the place that Max found out about? The Hospital? The
Unholy of Holies?"
"For some totally crazy reason," I said, "I do. It's just a feeling, Kit."
[253] "Now I'm scared," he said.
Morning sunlight blazed across the terrazzo floor and seemed to light the way
to a circular granite information desk. There, an extremely helpful and nice [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]