Page 202 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

uncooperative when confronted, I would get out of her way. In less
than a minute I was out of the office and down the hall to the fax
machine. And there it was: in not beautiful English, except to me, the
words I was longing to see.

<< 5 >>

Hannibal had played a dangerous game in that Russian hospital.
Going free was not an option, considering he had been caught red-
handed. Being found a common criminal would land him in prison
for decades; but if judged mentally incompetent, owing to the trauma
of having his life hanging in the balance for an extended period, he
would soon be traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway with a one-
way ticket to an asylum north of Lake Baikal. His strategy was to
present himself as a loyal Soviet atheist who had been recruited by
American evangelists via smuggled religious tracts and Cyrillic bibles;
after serious study of this theological material he had rebelled against
the patently false bourgeois ideology it concealed.
That, he declared, was his justification for looting the church: not
defacement for profit, but to destroy a lingering symbol of the old
religion. He was, therefore, a good citizen who wanted nothing more
than to denounce and destroy Christianity whenever and wherever
possible. The furtiveness of his nocturnal vandalism was intended to
hide his identity from informers for the Western missionaries; they
still considered him a trusted believer. Given the chance, he told his
interrogators, he would like nothing better than to infiltrate those
foreign groups at their source and report their activities and
intentions to the KGB. Somehow he sold this to the authorities, and
he was officially expelled from the country. No acrophobia, but a hell
of a talent for lying. No doubt many of the Simulians had resorted to
deceptions of equivalent ingenuity to gain their exile.
Well, that capped it for me. I ate my Sloppy Joe in the basement
cafeteria in absolute contentment, not even the slightest notion of
needing antacid relief in the very near future clouding my enjoyment
of a normally forbidden food. Perhaps it is the fantasy of untroubled
digestion, not pride, that goes before a fall.
My next stop was Captain Nimeau’s office. I blithely informed him
that I had broken Hannibal’s alibi and would now arrest him on four

201