The Ambler Warning

  “But I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember the psychosis. Don’t remember getting doped up.”

  “They could have combined the anticholinergic with another drug like Versed.” She flipped through the onionskin pages. “Look here.” She tapped a bulleted passage with a finger. “Drugs like Versed interfere with memory formation. There’s a whole warning about ‘anterograde amnesia’—meaning, amnesia of events following the injection. What I’m saying is, with the right drug cocktail, you could have been plunged into an episode of madness, but you’d have no memory of it. You’d be a raving lunatic for a few hours . . .”

  Ambler nodded slowly. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling with excitement.

  “And then they record you while you’re in this state,” she went on. “And make believe that you’re crazy. Try to persuade you that you’re crazy. For whatever reasons of their own.”

  Reasons of their own.

  The larger questions—Who? Why?—yawned like an abyss that would repay those who gazed too deeply into it with destruction. Grappling with the elementary question of What? was exhausting enough.

  Reasons of their own.

  To ascribe reason to madness was only a seeming paradox. The artificial induction of dementia was, in fact, in the counterespionage arsenal of dirty tricks. A method of discrediting someone. A tape could be quietly circulated, which would persuade any interested parties that the subject was indeed stark raving mad. Inquiries would be swiftly put to rest.

  The prospect was horrifying. Then why did Hal Ambler feel oddly exhilarated? Because he was not alone. Because he was putting the pieces together with somebody else.

  Somebody who believed him. Who believed in him. And whose belief helped him to regain his own belief in himself. He might still have been lost in a labyrinth, but Theseus had found his Ariadne.

  “How do you explain about the databases?” Ambler pressed. “It’s as if I never lived.”

  “You know about the things that powerful people can do. So do I. I hear gossip at work, the stuff people aren’t supposed to talk about but do anyway. About creating records for people who never existed. Not that much harder to erase the records of someone who actually did exist.”

  “You know how crazy that sounds?”

  “Less crazy than the alternative,” Laurel said firmly. There was certainty in her voice, a certainty that dismissed Osiris’s hypothesis out of hand. “They’re burying you in the psych system. So they want to put off any casual inquiries. Kind of like kicking away the ladder after you’ve climbed through the window.”

  “What about what I saw in the Sourlands? There was no sign of my cabin, no sign that it ever really existed.”

  “And you think that’s beyond the landscaping skills of somebody able to enlist a powerful government agency.”

  “Laurel, listen to me,” he said, his voice almost breaking. “I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize myself.”

  She reached over and touched his cheek. “Then they changed you.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I’m not a surgeon,” she said. “But I’ve heard rumors about plastic surgery techniques, about how they can change people so the person himself couldn’t even tell he’d ever been operated on. I know that you can keep people anesthetized for weeks at a time. They do it in burn wards, sometimes, to spare patients from a period of agony. There are all sorts of ‘minimally invasive’ surgery they do now. They could have changed your face, then kept you under until you’d healed up. Even if you had conscious intervals, Versed therapy, again, could stop memories from forming. How would you ever know?”

  “That’s crazy,” Ambler repeated.

  She came over to him, stood very close, and placed her hands on his face. She examined the skin along his jaw, his ears, and then felt for scars that might be concealed behind his hairline. She peered closely at his eyelids, cheeks, nose. He could feel the warmth of her own face near his, and then, as she ran her fingertips over his features, something stirred within him. God, she was beautiful.

  “See anything?” the operative asked.

  Laurel shook her head. “Haven’t found any entry scars—but that doesn’t mean anything,” she insisted. “There are techniques I wouldn’t even know about. The scalpel could enter through the mucosa of the nose, the reverse of the eyelids, all sorts of possible surgical portals. It isn’t my field.”

  “You don’t have any evidence for this. You just think it.” Although the words were of skepticism, Ambler was momentarily buoyed by her stalwart conviction.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said heatedly. “It’s the only thing that makes sense of what you’ve experienced.”

  “That’s assuming, of course, that my experience—my memory—makes sense.” He fell silent. “Christ, I feel like such a goddamn victim.”

  “Maybe that’s how they want you to feel. Look, the people who did this to you—they’re not good people. They’re manipulators. I don’t think they put you on Parrish Island because you’re weak. Probably they put you on Parrish Island because you were too strong. Because you’d started to see through something you weren’t meant to see through.”

  “You’re starting to sound as crazy as me.” He smiled.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, almost shyly.

  “Bring it on,” he said.

  “What’s your name?”

  For the first time that day he laughed—a loud, explosive laugh from his belly, from his soul. He extended a hand, mock-formally. “Pleased to meet you, Laurel Holland,” he said. “My name is Harrison Ambler. But you can call me Hal.”

  “I like that better than Patient Number 5312,” she said. She placed both her hands in his short brown hair and then, once more, brushed them lightly over his face. She turned his head in one direction and another, as if playing with a mannequin. Then she leaned forward and caressed his cheek.

  It took him a few moments to respond at all. When he did, it was the way a desert traveler who had been dying of thirst arrives at an oasis. With both arms, he clasped her to him, and she was firm and she was soft and she was all he had in the world and she was enough.

  When they broke off, there were tears in both their eyes.

  “I believe you,” she said, her voice trembling but resolute. “I believe you’re you.”

  “You may be the only one,” he said quietly.

  “What about your friends?”

  “I told you—for the past twenty years, I’ve been pretty much an isolato. Professional protocol. My friends were my colleagues, and there’s no way to track them down—at the moment, they could be at any latitude and longitude you name, depending on the assignment. None of us operatives knew one another’s real names, anyway. That was a basic rule.”

  “Forget that—what about friends from childhood, college?”

  Shivering with the sudden recollection, he told her about his call to Dylan Sutcliffe.

  She was stopped by that, but only for a few seconds. “Maybe he’s got early Alzheimer’s. Maybe he was in a car crash, scrambled his brains. Maybe he always hated you. Or maybe he thought you were trying to borrow money. Who knows?” She stood up, fetched a pencil and a piece of paper, and placed them in front of him. “Write down the names of people you can remember and who’d remember you. A kid from the neighborhood when you were growing up. A roommate at college. Whatever. Go for the less common names, so we don’t get too many false hits.”

  “I’d have no idea of how to reach these people now—”

  “Write,” she charged, with a brush-off gesture.

  Ambler wrote. A dozen random names—from his Camden neighborhood, from high school, from summer camp, from Carlyle. She took the sheet from him, and together they walked to a small nook off the kitchen, where she had a slightly battered-looking computer; it looked as if it had been purchased from an Army surplus store.

  “It’s a dial-up connection,” she apologized, “but
it’s amazing what you can find out online.”

  “Listen,” he said cautiously. “I’m not sure you really want to do this.” He had already brought her more deeply into his own nightmare than he had meant to; he dreaded entangling her further.

  “It’s my house. I’ll do what I want.”

  As he watched over her shoulder, she seated herself before the computer and typed the names into a “people finder” search engine. Five minutes later, she had got half a dozen phone numbers from the dozen names, and she transcribed the phone numbers in neat handwriting.

  Then she handed him the handset of a nearby telephone. “Reach out and touch someone,” she told him. There was certainty in her eyes.

  “No,” he said. “Not from your phone.”

  “Worries about the long-distance charges? That’s sweet. You can leave a quarter on my bureau, like Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

  “It isn’t that.” Ambler paused; he didn’t want to sound paranoid, but he knew that precautions that were second nature to an operative could seem strange to a civilian. “It’s just that I don’t know for sure whether—”

  “Whether my phone’s tapped?” She seemed unfazed by the prospect. “Isn’t there a way to check?”

  “Not really.”

  She shook her head. “What a world you live in.” He watched as she idly typed his name into her search engine. The result now had the aura of inevitability:

  YOUR SEARCH—HARRISON AMBLER—DID NOT

  MATCH ANY DOCUMENTS.

  “I’ll use a cell phone,” Ambler said, taking out the Nokia. “Safer that way.” He took a deep breath and called the first number on the list.

  “Is there an Elaine Lassiter there?” he asked, keeping his voice even.

  “My wife passed away last year,” a whispery voice replied.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ambler said hastily. The phone at the second number, for Gregson Burns, was picked up immediately.

  “I’m looking for a Gregson Burns,” Ambler began.

  “Speaking,” the voice cut in.

  “Greg! It’s Hal Ambler. It’s been a long time, I know—”

  “If this is a courtesy call, please put me on the ‘do not call’ list,” the voice—a tenor, reedy with annoyance—instructed.

  “Did you grow up on Hawthorn Street, in Camden?” Ambler persisted.

  Warily: “Yes.” Ambler made out a woman’s querulous voice in the background: “Who’s that calling?”

  “And you don’t remember Hal Ambler, from across the street? Or anybody named Ambler?”

  “Eric Ambler, the writer, I’ve heard of. He’s dead. Feel free to join him, because you’re wasting my time.” The man clicked off.

  The floor seemed to sway beneath Ambler’s feet. Swiftly he called the next number on the list. Julianne Daiches—or Julianne Daiches Murchison, as she was now listed, still resident in Delaware. Yet there was not a flicker of recognition when the woman by that name finally came to the phone. Unlike Gregson Burns, she was cordial, unhurried, and unsuspicious, seemingly baffled by her caller’s confusion. “Now, you didn’t say your name was Sandler, did you?” she asked, trying to be helpful. “Because I definitely knew a boy named Sandler.”

  By the time Ambler was halfway through the list of numbers, he was having a hard time getting his eyes to focus; cold sweat had broken out on his face. Now he stared at the sheet for a long time and crumpled it into a ball, crushing it in his fist. Presently he sank to his knees and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, he saw Laurel Holland standing over him, her face drawn.

  “Don’t you see? It’s no use.” The words came from Ambler like a groan from deep within him. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Screw it,” she said. “Everybody’s in on it. Or—or I don’t know what. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need to deal with this right now. I shouldn’t have pushed you to.”

  “No.” His voice was husky. “But I’m sorry, I just can’t—”

  “And you’re not going to. Not anymore. Don’t apologize. You’re not going to give them the satisfaction.”

  “Them.” That empty, unpalatable word again.

  “Yes, them. Whoever’s responsible for the whole goddamn charade. You’re not going to give them the satisfaction. Maybe they’re trying to drive you around the bend. Well, screw it. We’re not playing their game. Deal?”

  Ambler shakily rose to his feet. “Deal,” he said, his voice thick with emotions he could no longer control.

  She took him into her arms, and he seemed to grow stronger in her embrace.

  “Look, maybe we’re all an idea in the mind of God. I once had a boyfriend who used to say that our best chance of immortality was the realization that we do not exist. Granted, he was stoned at the time.” She pressed her forehead to his, and he could feel her smile. “I’m just saying, we have to choose what to believe, sometimes. And—oh hell—I choose you. Instincts, right?”

  “But Laurel—”

  “Shut up, OK? I believe you, Harrison Ambler. I believe you.”

  Ambler felt as if the sun, warming and radiant, had suddenly appeared in a midnight sky.

  ELEVEN

  As he drove his rented Pontiac from her subdivision and made a left onto the busy two-lane road it adjoined, he felt oddly buoyed, a damaged vessel dancing on a wave. The relief was real; it was also precarious. Yet he felt uneasy prolonging his visit, as desperately as he wanted to. Laurel Holland had already done so much for him: he could not let her make any further sacrifice.

  At the next intersection, a few miles later, he waited patiently at a red light, adjusting his high beams to low as a van approached the intersection opposite. As the light turned green and he drove through the intersection, he felt a sudden chill and confirmed with his left hand, that warm air was blowing from the vents even as he glanced at his rearview mirror and—

  Oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ—the van! The hatchet-faced driver. A retrieval team.

  Or worse.

  He wanted to veer around immediately in a U-turn, but a procession of cars was now clogging the opposing lane of traffic. He was losing time and had none to lose.

  How had it happened? It’s my house. I’ll do what I want. Laurel Holland’s computer. Her goddamn computer: her searches must have triggered something. Various government agencies had trap-and-trace programs—the FBI’s Carnivore was only the best known—that monitored Internet traffic. These systems used so-called “packet sniffer” techniques to monitor specific nodes and data loci on the Internet. As with the computer he had used at the Dupont Circle cybercafe, Laurel’s machine would have a unique digital address, which could be used to retrieve its registration information—and its owner’s address.

  There was a break in the oncoming traffic, and, tires squealing, Ambler made a 180-degree turn. He heard the blaring horn of the car he had cut in front of, heard its tires skid as it slowed enough to avoid a collision. The light at the intersection was red, which would not have stopped him, but cars were whizzing by from the transverse road. If they had been traveling more slowly, he would have tried to nose through, but with cars sweeping through in both directions, the likelihood of an accident was too great. Better to accept a delay of a minute or two than not to arrive at all. Yet every second seemed to pass with agonizing slowness. Finally, there was a letup in the traffic, and—now now now, a traffic gap, perhaps three seconds’ worth—Ambler shot through the red light, gunning across the intersection while tires squealed and horns blared.

  Moments later, Ambler found himself behind a laggard station wagon, traveling at thirty miles per hour in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone. He leaned on his horn—Dammit, there was no time!—but the wagon maintained its speed, almost defiantly. Ambler veered abruptly across a double yellow line and into the opposing lane, overtaking the wagon with an immense vroom of acceleration. By the time Ambler swerved onto Orchard Lane, he noticed that his shirt was soaked with sweat. Tearing through t
he quiet subdivision street at autobahn speeds, he brought the sedan juddering to a halt in front of Laurel Holland’s ranch house, where—

  oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ—the van had already pulled up to her house, in a hasty diagonal to the driveway, the rear double doors ajar and facing her porch. He heard screams—Laurel’s—and heard her front door crash open. Two large men, muscles stretching their knit black shirts, had somehow trapped her into a canvas stretcher and were hoisting her, a pale, thrashing bundle, into the back of the van. No! Dear God no!

  Just two of them, but—dear God no!—one of them was pulling out a large hypodermic, the needle glinting in the streetlights, preparing to render her insensate with it. What terrified Ambler as much as anything was the look of resolute, professional calm on the men’s faces.

  He knew what would follow. Ambler was never meant to have surfaced from his prison of blinding white, the sterile psychiatric hole where they had buried him. Now that same fate was being prepared for Laurel. She knew too much now. She would never be released to tell her tale. If they were merciful, they would kill her; ifthey were not, she would spend the rest of her existence as they had intended Ambler to spend his. Not interned so much as interred. Buried alive. Experimented upon. Then left to languish, as the traces of her existence were erased from the world of the living.

  No—dear God no! He could not let it happen.

  One of the men, the hatchet-faced driver, started to run toward Ambler.

  Ambler floored the accelerator while in neutral and then, as the engine revved and roared, suddenly engaged the clutch and shifted into gear. The car leaped up, all its power abruptly harnessed by the transmission, and shot toward the van, just forty feet away. The hatchet-faced man was now at Ambler’s left, as if preparing to grab him from the vehicle. At the last moment, Ambler threw out the driver’s side door, heard it smash into the man, walloping him unconscious. Then he ground the brakes and turned the steering wheel all the way to the left. The back of the car abruptly slewed in the opposite direction, slamming into the van, absorbing the impact while leaving Ambler unharmed.