Watchers

lush vegetation. Twice during the drive, Haines had begun to regain consciousness, but Vince had quieted the doctor by thumping his head against the dashboard.
    Now, he dragged the unconscious man out of the Ford, through a gap in the brush, and deep under the trees, until he found a shady clearing floored with hairy moss. Cawing and trilling birds fell silent, and unknown animals with peculiar voices moved off through the underbrush. Large insects, including a beetle as big as Vince’s hand, scuttled out of his way, and lizards scampered up tree trunks.
    Vince returned to the Ford, where he had left some interrogation equipment in the trunk. A packet of syringes and two vials of sodium pentothal. A leather sap weighted with lead pellets. A hand-applied Taser that resembled a remote-control device for a television set. And a corkscrew with a wooden handle.
    Lawton Haines was still unconscious when Vince returned to the clearing. His breath rattled in his broken nose.
    Haines should have been dead twenty-four hours ago. The people who had employed Vince for three jobs yesterday had expected to use another freelancer who lived in Acapulco and operated throughout Mexico. But that guy had died yesterday morning when a long-awaited air-mail package from Fortnum & Mason in London surprisingly contained two pounds of plastic explosives instead of assorted jellies and marmalades. Out of desperate necessity, the outfit in Los Angeles had given the job to Vince, though he was getting to be dangerously overworked. It was a big break for him, for he was sure this doctor must also be connected with Banodyne Laboratories and could provide more details about the Francis Project.
    Now, exploring the rain forest around the clearing where Haines lay, Vince found a fallen tree from which he was able to pull off a loose, curved section of thick bark that would serve as a ladle. He located an algae-mottled stream and scooped up nearly a quart of water in the bark vessel. The stuff looked foul. No telling what exotic bacteria thrived in it. But, of course, at this point the possibility of disease would not matter to Haines.
    Vince threw the first ladle of water in Haines’s face. A minute later he returned with a second scoopful from which he forced the doctor to drink. After a lot of spluttering, choking, gagging, and a little vomiting, Haines was at last clearheaded enough to understand what was being said to him, and to respond intelligibly.
    Holding up the leather sap, the Taser, and the corkscrew, Vince explained how he’d use each of them if Haines was uncooperative. The doctor—who revealed himself to be a specialist in brain physiology and function—proved more intelligent than patriotic, and he eagerly divulged every detail of the top-secret defense work in which he was engaged at Banodyne.
    When Haines swore there was no more to be told, Vince prepared the sodium pentothal. As he drew the drug into the syringe, he said, conversationally, “Doctor, what is it with you and women?”
    Haines, lying on his back in the hairy moss with his arms at his sides, exactly as Vince had told him to lie, was not able to adjust quickly to the change of subject. He blinked in confusion.
    “I been following you since lunch, and I know you got three of them on a String in Acapulco—”
    “Four,” Haines said, and in spite of his terror a visible pride surfaced. “That Mercedes I’m driving belongs to Giselle, the sweetest little—”
    “You’re using one woman’s car to cheat on her with three others?”
    Haines nodded and tried to smile, but he winced as the smile sent new waves of pain through his ruined nose. “I’ve always . . . had this way with the ladies.”
    “For God’s sake!” Vince was appalled. “Don’t you realize these aren’t the sixties or seventies any more? Free love’s dead. It’s got a price now. Steep price. Haven’t you heard about herpes, AIDS, all that stuff?” Administering the pentothal, he said, “You must be a carrier for every venereal disease known to man.”
    Blinking stupidly at him, Haines at first looked baffled and then was deep in a pentothal sleep. Under the drug, he confirmed all that he had already told Vince about Banodyne and the Francis Project.
    When the drug wore off, Vince used the Taser on Haines, just for the fun of it, until the batteries wore out. The scientist twitched and kicked like a half-crushed water bug, back bowed, digging at the moss with his heels and head and