"Don't malign them," said Britten, sitting up and rubbing his arms. "They are good, loyal G-men. But they sat outside my door too long, and now they do what I tell them to do."
Wolf narrowed his eyes and stared at Britten. "Just what are you?" he demanded.
Britten met his gaze, bleakly, and ignored the question.
"We have a rendezvous to make. The two of you will escort me to a helicopter that Grady will order. I need not repeat that we are prepared to blast our way out of this place. You'll save lives all around by being as inconspicuous as possible."
He indicated that Wolf and Alma Heller would go ahead, while the two agents took up the rear. Out in the main corridor they merged into the confused traffic of the busy hospital, two doctors and two attendants conducting a patient out.
Grady took the controls of the helicopter that waited for them out on the parking lot. As they climbed to a high traffic lane, Jones took care of tying the hands of the two doctors behind their seats.
Britten sat beside the pilot, staring through the windshield. "Head due west one hundred miles," he said. "Then I'll give you further directions."
Wolf looked down through the port next to him and felt his heart constrict as he saw the houses below grow smaller and smaller. One of those houses was his; there was a small figure beside it that could have been his little boy. That was the thought that set his heart beating violently and the adrenalin pumping swiftly through his veins. For himself he didn't care so much, but his son needed a father to come home.
He looked at Alma sitting beside him, her face pale and frightened. He wondered how much time there was before the rendezvous. For this was all the time he had. Beyond that were too many unknown factors to consider.
He leaned over sideways.
"Alma," he said, in a voice not loud enough to carry forward over the roar of the motor. "Tell me exactly what happened when Britten said, 'Now is the time.' My back was turned then. Just what did he look like?"
Alma swallowed. She composed her face and turned her thoughts inward, remembering.
"There was a sudden change," she said. "One moment he was in the trance state, the next moment he was fully aware of his surroundings and in charge of the situation. As though he received a signal at that instant."
A signal, Wolf thought. From where? The implication was shocking.
Look at what we have, he continued to himself. Britten comes to me, under conditioning, ready to act out his part to the hilt. We question him under deep hypnotherapy and he comes forth with a plausible story. We might have stopped right there, but we got curious and began to ask more questions. He brings out another story. Why? Obviously, red herrings to confuse the issue. To stall for time. We apply more pressure, blank out his original conditioning so that he gives us straight answers to questions, and we are getting along fine. Then, suddenly he snaps out of it and into his original, pre-Britten character, all forty years of him. Therefore there must have been another, deeper level to the control over his mind which we did not even touch. A level activated by a new signal which we did not even detect, a signal which came at a crucial time.
"Now is the time" meant that the stalling was over, that the preparations for Britten's escape were completed.
There were still questions to be answered, many blank spaces to be filled in, but at the present instant there was only one question that mattered. The treatment which Wolf had given Britten—had it been at all effective?
Was it still effective?
There was one way to find out.
Morris Wolf leaned forward and called in a loud voice: "Pyotr Fermineyev!"
The man's head snapped around.
"Cooperation is the key word!" Wolf shouted.
Confusion passed over Britten's face as conflict once more knotted his nervous system.
Wolf threw his second punch immediately. "Tell Jones to cut me loose," he demanded.
"Cut him loose," Britten echoed, in bewilderment.
After an interminable interval, Jones laid down his gun, found his knife, opened it, and slashed the cords from Wolf's arms. Wolf's muscles were already tensed. He snatched Jones' gun, lurched forward, and even as Britten's mouth opened to countermand his order, he slugged Britten with the butt of the pistol, hitting him viciously and hard until he lay unconscious on the floor.
Then he said to Grady, "You'd better get us back to the hospital," keeping the gun in his hand.
But Grady and Jones made no trouble. With Britten out of the picture they obeyed the one obviously in command. Poor boys, Wolf thought. Now they were in need of therapy.
As the hospital hove into view, he said to Alma Heller, "We have just seen the real beginning of psychological warfare. Where it took us a whole roomful of equipment to condition Britten's responses to a trigger word, he was able to do it to Jones and Brady single-handed. His method is something we'd like to know. But more than that, Britten himself was conditioned to respond to a signal unknown to us and undetected by us. My God, it could only have been telepathic!"
Alma Heller's eyes closed for a moment.
"I think," she said, "that psychiatrists are going to reach the same position that physicists did during World War II."
Morris Wolf looked dourly out of the window, watching the hospital balloon up under the helicopter.
"That's the most unpleasant thing anybody has said all day," he replied.