“Some time is right, mate. I’ve been on duty for four hours. What guard?”
“Why, that gentleman over there,” Eric informed him, pointing down the hall. When the guard turned to look, Eric hit him on the back of the neck. Not too hard, he hoped, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. At the moment he wasn’t feeling very charitable.
The guard caved in and dropped silently. He wasn’t carrying a weapon—a precaution in case any of the hospital prisoners managed to get this far. Eric rushed to the next barrier and hit the call button set alongside the door. This one didn’t even have a window mounted in it.
“What is it, Harris?’' asked a voice through a speaker. The opto pickup overhead and out of reach swiveled to focus on Eric. “You’re not Harris.”
“Of course not.” Eric smiled politely at the pickup. “I’m Dr. Williamson.”
“No Williamson on my list,” said the speaker.
“I spent the night with a seriously ill patient. Check with the night watch, or if you prefer. I can show you my identification.” He made a show of reaching for his inside pockets.
“Why isn’t Harris with you?”
“You mean the guard?” Eric nodded down the short hall. “I think he’s asleep. I didn’t want to disturb him.”
“Be hell to pay. Never mind, Doctor. I’ll check your ID myself.” There was a buzz and the heavy metal door slid aside. Eric stepped through.
He found himself confronting a man holding an armed stungun. It was pointing at his belly.
“I don’t know who you are, mate,” said the guard warily, “but I’m going to damn well find out.”
Another guard seated behind a desk squinted, raised his voice excitedly. “Hey, wait a minute, I know this one. That’s the import from bed seven.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Eric told him. “I am Dr. Matthew Williamson. I know the prisoner to whom you refer. How could I possibly be confused with him? He’s tied down.”
The shorter guard hesitated a moment, rubbed at his forehead. "Well, sure, he’s tied down, but you sure look like …” He reached for the phone on his desk.
“I know.” Eric took a step forward. “These credentials should take care of everything.”
The man seemed very light, but nothing surprised Eric anymore. He threw him at the other guard. The stungun went off only once. Eric’s shoulder tingled, but he’d ducked most of the blast.
Then he was racing down the busy corridor, pushing white-clad doctors and nurses and startled visitors aside. Minutes later the alarms began to go off. He forced himself to slow to a walk as he turned a corner. In a prison a running man is as conspicuous as a frog at a heron convention.
Shouts and yells sounded behind him and eventually the inevitable, “There he goes!” Then the sounds of weapons firing, and this time not all of them were stunguns.
He started running again. A guard appeared in his path and tried to swing the muzzle of his rifle around. Eric straight-armed him, a little harder than he meant to. The man went flying over a desk and slammed into a window. Reinforcing wire woven through the glass kept him from falling through, but he couldn’t continue the chase. Eric’s hand had crushed his sternum.
He saw open doors and rushed through them. The sunlight, filtered through the low rain clouds, was a warm shock to his system. Ahead lay the main gate to the compound, the only exit through a high wall—another shock. Men on the platform above the gate were trying to aim something long and metallic down into the grassy courtyard between wall and hospital. Others on the grass clustered together in front of the gate and engaged in animated discussion. They hadn’t spotted him yet.
Oddly, his thoughts as he turned and ran to his left were centered on the climate. What a wet, sorry country. Where was the England of innumerable flowers and singing birds he’d read of so often? As he accelerated he saw several men hurrying toward him on a three-seat cycle. They were yelling something at him, but words no longer held meanings.
There was nowhere for him to go. Pursuit was closing in from both sides and behind. Ahead lay only the wall, a much less ambiguous opponent. Putting his arms across his face, he lowered his head and clenched his teeth.
A dull explosion sounded in his ears. He staggered, found himself suddenly beyond the wall in open country, running across a field toward a nearby wall of trees. He steadied himself and began to cross the open country in long, effortless strides.
Behind him his closest pursuers, the three guards riding the cycle, ground to a halt and dismounted. Instead of hurrying after their quarry, they slowly approached the gap in the wall. Thick at the base, it tapered to a sharp cement ridge crowned with three high-voltage wires. The hole was ragged and uneven. Cement dust still fell from the upper part of the gap. Gingerly, they felt the inexplicable opening.
“Well, come on,” the oldest said, holding his weapon more tightly than usual. “Let’s get after him.”
“You get after him, Max.” The speaker was running a hand over the raw edge of the hole.
“Let’s go, I said. We’ve got an escaped prisoner out there.” He pointed toward the nearby woods. The third man shook his head and spoke with unaccustomed solemnity.
“That’s not quite right. Max. There’s an escaped something out there all right, but it ain’t no prisoner. Have a seat and think about it some.”
The corporal named Max hesitated, found himself eyeing the hole uncertainly. “Somebody on the outside was helping him. They planted some kind of bomb and timed it to go off as he was making his run for it. A bomb, or a mine."
The third speaker shook his head. “It weren’t no mine, Max. And it weren’t no bomb. There was no explosion before he hit the wall.”
“We would’ve heard it,” said his companion.
“It went off just as he reached the wall,” the corporal suggested lamely.
“No way, Max. If that were the case he’d have died in the blast, and here we all three of us saw him crossing the field like a damn marathoner. Put me on report if you want to.” He turned and strolled back toward the idling cycle. “I ain’t going after whatever that was that went through here for nobody. Not for the warden, not for the PM, not for the bloody King himself.”
Corporal Max stood in the hole in the wall and considered how to proceed. Twenty years of experience did not offer up any suggestions. At that point he determined the best thing to do would be to wait for someone who ranked him. Yes, wait and let someone else give the orders. Wait and hope that one and all decided to ignore whatever had smashed its way through a solid concrete wall.
The sirens had long since faded behind him as Eric emerged from the trees. Ahead lay a picturesque little village. A steady drizzle was beginning to fall, making him wish for the umbrella he’d bought back in Nueva York.
The town was too small to rate a tubestation. He settled gratefully for the shuttle bus which picked him up. No one on the bus gave him a second look, and he slumped into the rear seat. Now if he could just get to a tubestation, his pursuers would have the devil of a time trying to track him. .
If he’d known how poorly that pursuit was shaping up, he would have relaxed. A prisoner had escaped from the hospital: that much had been accepted. What was causing all the confusion was the manner of his escape. Tarragon wouldn’t have been confused, but Tarragon wasn’t at the hospital to explain the impossible to the badly unnerved administration.
The bus let him off in a larger town. At the local tubestation he was relieved to discover that it was only a three-minute tube ride to downtown London. He had the money he’d changed at the airport prior to leaving Nueva York, and sooner than he’d dared hoped he found himself making the crossover at Hammersmith Station. The tube took him to Picadilly, and he made still another precautionary switch to St. James before he risked riding up to the street.
Not daring to use his credit card unless absolutely necessary, he took surface transportation to the National Gallery. He spent an hour researching artist’s supply stores before settling on one, moved from it to an electronics hobby shop, and before evening had replaced the tools they’d taken from his breast pocket.
