“THE O.G. LIVES IN THE FUTURE,” PATCHEN SAID. “ALL GREAT PRACtical jokers do. He can’t wait for Sis to find the frog in her bed or the pan of water balanced on the door to spill on Cousin Oscar’s head. That’s why he likes your idea—it’s a terrific prank.”
“But you don’t like it,” Christopher said.
“I didn’t say that,” Patchen replied. “But it doesn’t answer what you say is the important question: ‘Why?’ “
“No. All it does is put you in a position to ask the question of somebody who knows the answer.”
They were walking home together after Patchen’s birthday supper. They had stayed late at the O. G.’s, trapped by his enthusiasm for Christopher’s idea.
The O. G., who had always insisted that all good ideas can be expressed in a single sentence, was captivated by the simplicity of the plan: get the kidnapper out in the open by isolating him on a single target. “That’s the stuff!” he had cried. “Tie up the goat in the moonlight, climb the tree, wait for the tiger to come.”
Now, walking past the hushed mansions of the 0. G.’s hidden neighborhood, Patchen discussed the proposal more calmly. “How, exactly, do we lead the enemy to the target of our choice?” he asked.
“By removing every target except the one you want him to hit,” Christopher replied.
“I understand the principle,” Patchen said. “But you’re talking about a lot of people. We have stations, bases, and deep-cover operations in every country in the world. Tell me more details.”
Christopher did so, tersely: clear the embassies of Outfit people, break contact with every agent in the world, explain nothing, create unbearable curiosity. Then put somebody out in the open—one in each danger zone, the Middle East, Europe, Washington—and wait for the kidnappers to strike.
“You mean bait the trap with real Outfitters who know real secrets?”
“They’d have to be genuine to stand up under the drug. But they don’t have to be in on the details. You’d falsify them—give them something to confess that they believed was true, something” … he spoke the next words in an imitation of the 0. G.’s ardent tones … “that would keep the tiger’s attention on the goat until Jim Corbett got in his shot.”
Patchen was not amused. “You mean lie to our own people, set them up?”
Christopher did not bother to smile. “If you want them to lie effectively under this drug,” he said, “they will have to believe that they’re telling the truth.”
“The voice of experience,” Patchen said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Wasn’t that what happened in China? Didn’t you hold out under their interrogation till the end by telling nothing but the truth, as you knew it?”
Christopher stopped in his tracks. “Yes,” he said. “I never thought of it in quite that way. But that’s what I was doing. Otherwise there would have been no hope.”
“No hope?”
“I thought I was never going to get out,” Christopher said. “If I had lied to please the people who had me in their power, what would I have had left?”
They were in a dense man-made forest in which every grand, sepulchral house stood in a clearing, hidden from its neighbors and disjoined from the life of the city; the silence was eerie—deeper, even, than the silence of Manchuria, where Christopher in his prison cell had always heard the wind blowing or the rain falling or a guard hawking and spitting outside the bars.
After a short pause, only a step or two, Patchen broke the tension with his own little joke about the 0. G. and his mordant opinion, which they both shared, of the double-tongued courtesans of Washington.
“Circumspice,” he said in the old man’s fractured Latin. “Look around you.”