JUNK

Chapter One

Dr. Sam Beckett, in his years of time-traveling, had been less comfortable and more confused, but he could not, offhand, remember when. He couldn't angle a look in the rear view mirror and his arms, fast beginning to ache, looked to him like his own arms, and always would. He wouldn't be able to check for needle-tracks until a mirror became available to him. He understood that he'd leapt into a fugitive of some sort, and was now in custody; he wasn't certain that was a bad thing altogether, but on the other hand he was worn out from his hastily lost battle and wasn't looking forward to roughing his way through an interrogation, at least not before he'd been briefed - and he'd seen neither hide nor hair of Al. He sighed loudly enough for the curly-haired man in the passenger seat to move threateningly toward him again; when he flinched, though, the man's scowl was softened by a flicker of... not exactly sympathy - perhaps concern?

"Bodie," said the man, "I think Kojak's going to be sick."

"Christ," said Bodie, pulling over in front of a lorry and turning onto a side street before its driver'd had a chance to shout more than half an epithet. "You get him, Ray."

Ray Doyle was out of the Rover and disengaging Sam from the metal ring before the scientist could decide how best to take advantage of this new wrinkle. He wasn't ill, but he didn't dare to contradict the man who was impatiently pushing him to the kerb. He lurched forward, obediently bending over the gutter, glad to feel the blood rushing down his arms and, rather painfully, into his fingers. Doyle held him by the shoulders as he stood panting unproductively. Suddenly Sam's legs buckled, surprising him more than it did Doyle, who simply said "Hey," and circled his waist with a not-ungentle arm.

"Sorry," murmured Sam, straightening.

"Well?" called Bodie from the car. He hated to watch people puke; it was so undignified and, though he was loath to admit it, so evocative. He could feel his gorge rising, just imagining it. He looked away and was rewarded: two miniskirted Londoners were in the middle of the busy street, attempting to cross, and one was actually bending toward Bodie. He stared down her blouse and felt much better.

"He's all right." Doyle walked Sam back to the car and then, instead of opening the door for Sam, shoved him back against it, one strong arm against Sam's chest and the other raised as if to strike the prisoner, who managed, this time, not to flinch. "You made me lose my temper," said Doyle. "I don't like to lose my temper."

"Sorry," repeated Sam.

"I'm not going to need to do that again, though, am I?"

"No, sir," said Sam, emphatically, his eyes never leaving Doyle's.

"All right, then," said Doyle, not at all sure it was all right. The agent helped Sam into the back seat and left him there, still shackled but not cuffed to the ring.

Sam said "Thank you" to the door slamming in his face.

"What gives? asked Bodie, starting them up again.

"Never mind," grumbled Doyle, in worse mood than before.

"This will come from your salary, Bodie!" roared the smallish Scotsman who had eased himself, as best his bad leg would allow, from behind the nondescript desk to bestow upon the agent the glare Bodie had withheld from Sam.

Doyle smirked as his partner cried, "Why mine? Doyle here was just as responsible..."

"Silence!" Cowley sat back down and settled into his hard wooden chair, grinning most annoyingly at Sam, who was standing between Doyle and Bodie, neither of whom was touching him at the moment. He wasn't going anywhere. He lifted his eyes to meet Cowley's and could not help smiling back. Cowley's grin broadened. "I suppose you expect me to dock him." It occurred to Sam then that his own smile had to appear supremely foolish to the chief of CI5, and he attempted a sober expression; no good: he practically beamed.

"Your name," said Al, startling the smile right off of Sam's face (he gasped and each agent grabbed an arm to steady him), "is Luther Allbright. You're all of eighteen and you've been a heroin addict for four years."

"Shakes already," pronounced Bodie, triumphantly. "Permission to question the suspect, sir."

"Who the devil is stopping you?" demanded Cowley, no longer grinning. "And don't you look so smug, Doyle. He bested you too."

"Yes, sir." Doyle brushed dismissively at his torn pants leg, then turned to follow Bodie, who had already shoved the hapless Sam out into the ill-lit hallway. Al rematerialized just ahead of the party, walking backwards, stabbing at the hand link with a handful of half-smoked cigar.

"When is the Cow going to get a permanent office?" grumbled Bodie, still pushing Sam ahead of him.

"Soon's you pay up for the head lamp," retorted Doyle. "You know not a penny of that comes from his own pocket. Company car!"

"They're all company property," said Bodie, morosely, "just like us. That's all we are."

"Just hang in there, Sam," advised Al, unnecessarily. "Ziggy is a little behind here. We have to access British records... Did I mention you're in London?"

"I figured that out, Al," mumbled Sam, trying to cover his outburst (if it could be called that, muffled as it was) with a cough and earning himself a shove in the small of the back.

"Well these records are not exactly on public display at Scotland Yard next to the Jack the Ripper files. Whatever you've got yourself into, kid, it's top-secret all the way."

They all waited for the lift (Bodie impatiently kicked at the doors), rode down two floors and emerged into a dim hallway that looked exactly like the other one, marched past the same nameless, numberless doors and finally stopped in front of one, which Doyle unlocked and pushed open. They entered the dark room, first Sam, then Bodie, and at last Doyle, who flipped the switch that lighted the place. Sam, blinking, found Al waiting there for him. The walls, of pale green plaster, were absolutely bare. Not quite in the middle of the room there was a puce metal table with a mock-wooden top and a matching puce metal chair with a mock-leather seat. The floor was of dirty puce tile and Bodie gave Sam one last push, a hard one, that flung him face-down onto it. The hologram stepped forward in protest but could offer nothing but his anger: "Nozzle!" he pronounced. "Wait 'til Ziggy tells me who you are!"

Doyle set a hand on his partner's shoulder. "Enough, Bodie," he said, softly.

"He's Bodie," said Al, helpfully, rudely pointing his cigar to illustrate. Sam managed to sit up; he looked from Al to the agents and back again, tired of being pushed around without a clue as to why, or what now was expected of him. He hoped the agents (or Al) knew a bit about him and would let him in on it soon. He hoped no one would hit or shove or even shout at him again for a while, and he was also beginning to hope someone planned eventually to feed him.

"I could use some coffee," said Bodie, staring down at Sam.

"So could I," said Doyle, stubbornly. "You sit there," he said to Sam, indicating the chair, and Sam stood up gracefully, considering the cuffs, to obey.

"Good cop, bad cop," warned Al. Sam sat, leaning on the table, ignoring the cuffs that chafed his wrists when he rested them there, and tried not to look at Al. This was difficult, since the Observer was wearing a teal silk suit with a tomato-red silk shirt, teal-and-lavender silk tie and a sequined silver vest, all with still wet rubber boots. His hair was damp. None of this had quite registered with the scientist before; now, once more, he had a great deal of trouble chasing the silly grin from his lips. "It's not funny, Sam. If the good cop goes for coffee, the bad cop's gonna knock the crap out of you."

"I'm not thirsty," said Sam.

"Who asked you?" Bodie turned impatiently to his partner. "Ray, please?"

"Don't go, Ray," said Sam, and held his breath. This earned him a sharp look from Bodie, admittedly not the first in a short while but enough sharper that Sam could not, for a moment, remember how to release the breath he held, and when he did release it, he choked and his eyes watered. He felt that if the sharp look didn't lie, then as unpleasant as a drubbing might be it would be preferable to what Bodie had in mind. He did not take his stinging eyes from Bodie's as he repeated, softly, "Please don't go, Ray." Bodie turned to his partner and raised an eyebrow. Doyle cocked his head toward the door. Bodie shrugged, bestowed a final glare upon the sniffling junkie with the streaming eyes, then silently left. Al and Sam exhaled deeply together. Al shoved the cigar into his mouth and inhaled again almost immediately, but Sam's relief was such that his breathing came out in little jerks and he was in danger of choking once again.

"Easy, Kojak," said Doyle, settling on the table, looking down at Sam with open curiosity.

"Thank you," said Sam; he took a few deep breaths and felt better.

"How long since your last shot?"

"Oh, that's a good question, Sam," said Al, "but we haven't a clue."

"I don't know," said Sam. Doyle frowned. No junkie ever didn't know. He picked up Sam's left arm, unmindful that the right followed soon after, dragged by the shackles, and further rolled up the half-rolled sleeve of the filthy plaid flannel shirt Sam hadn't realized he was wearing. Doyle ran his fingers deftly up Sam's inner arm.

"You do stink," he remarked.

"Needle tracks," said Al, grimly. He could see them, even if Sam could not. Sam, on the other hand, could feel them.

"I'm all right," was all he could think of to say. Doyle let go of Sam's arm and Sam rubbed where he'd been touched.

"Why'd you run, Luther?"

"I... I was scared," said Sam, truthfully.

"Scared why?" Sam couldn't answer that. Al just shrugged. Doyle snorted, sounding a little like Bodie, and leaned back away from Sam. "Where's Billy is what we really want to know. Come on, Luther. Just spit it out. Where is he?"

"That's your brother," said Al, suddenly alert and poking at the hand link again. "William Harris Allbright, age 22, uh-oh."

"Uh-oh?"

"What?" said Doyle. Sam didn't immediately hear him and Doyle frowned. Was the little junkie mentally ill? His attention seemed to be focused somewhere between him and the door; Doyle turned to have a brief look, but saw nothing.

"It seems," explained that nothing, "on January 22, 1986, Luther Allbright was convicted of raping, torturing and murdering four small children in London. One of them was a boy. The... crimes were all committed at different times during 1984 and 1985. It's Thursday, November 28, 1985.

"Luther was tried as an adult and hanged. That's weird. They haven't hanged anyone since nineteen sixty-four, and that was Ruth Ellis." Al fidgeted further with the handlink. "Make that hangs himself. In prison. Only they were never sure. Child molesters are not the most popular people in prisons. Sam, are you all right?"

"You need a shot?" asked Doyle.

Sam had winced at the description of the crimes, and now his head was bent as he tried to sort out the anger, pity and downright terror which were taking turns having at him. It was a very soft, trembling "oh boy" that stopped Doyle from repeating his question.

"Look, mate, I can't get you a shot. You know I can't do that."

"I... I don't want a shot," said Sam. "Did... did Billy hurt someone?"

Al shook his head. "We don't know that, Sam, but it's a good bet you wouldn't have leapt into Luther if he had..."

"You just tell us where he is and let us do the rest."

"... unless..." Sam looked at Al again and Doyle pounded the table.

"Look at me, Luther! Where the hell is Billy?"

"... unless you're here to get Luther locked up before he kills the fourth child. Not that that'd change anything for Luther..." The cigar dangled forgotten in Al's hand; his face a mirror of Sam's anguish. Doyle let out an exasperated growl, jumped up and strode right through Al to the door before turning; he gave the door a smack for good measure, then was surprised when it opened immediately, knocking him off balance. A second later Bodie was in the room, steadying his partner with a strong arm and shaking a fist in Al's face. Al tipped invisible ash onto the fist.

"Le'go of me," growled Doyle, shrugging him off.

"Ya banged me with the door, ya big lug." "What'dya want?"

Bodie wasn't about to apologize in front of the little junkie who sat smirking at them. In fact Sam was doing nothing of the sort but Bodie wasn't about to admit that either. "Nothing," said Doyle, pushing Bodie aside. This time Al stepped politely out of the way.

"I think he needs a shot but he says no. You trying to kick, is that it, Luther?"

"No," said Al, consulting the hand link.

"Yes," said Sam, simultaneously, then tried not to take his eyes off of Bodie, but failed, because Al was shaking his head emphatically and repeating,

"No!"

"See, Bodie, there's something wrong with him" whispered Doyle. "He keeps looking away..."

"Sam, you can't take a chance going cold turkey when we don't even know how much of Luther's... Uh-oh."

"He needs a fix," said Bodie. "He's seeing things. Much as I'd love to watch him sweat, I don't think we'll get anything out of him 'til he's all fixed up." Doyle's reproachful silence and Sam's strangled effort not to repeat the Observer's "uh-oh" were his only answer. "Hey, sunshine, it's not like we've never done it before."

"Hang in there, Sam. Be right back..."

"Not like this."

"Al..." Both agents stopped to stare at Sam, who rubbed, then scratched, the arm Doyle'd inspected and murmured an unconvincing "ow."

"He needs a hospital or will do," insisted Doyle.

"Nah," said Bodie, sauntering to the table and yanking upward on Sam's cuffs, dragging him abruptly to his feet. "You're fine, Kojak, aren't ya?"

"Fine," agreed Sam. "I don't need a fix. Honest." He hadn't even heard the imaging chamber door rattle shut; all he knew was that his friend was gone and whichever CI5 agent had his way there was big trouble coming and no end in sight. He thought he'd prefer Doyle's trouble to Bodie's, but he also believed he wasn't going to be offered a vote.

Bodie kept his grip on the cuffs, twisting them slightly. "Ray," he said, "if I don't get a cup of coffee pretty soon I'm going to pass out. You get me? So why don't you run down to the commissary, quick like a bunny, and get us a cup, eh? And take your time." He twisted the cuffs a little more; Sam, who'd opened his mouth to plead with Doyle to stay, instead let a gasp escape. Doyle was gone in less time than it had taken Al to vanish.

Sam closed his eyes. He relaxed his stomach muscles, thinking, it will hurt more now but less later this way; he really had no idea where he would be hit but could think of no other way to prepare, and certainly no way to escape. Mistaking the small sigh that accompanied this minute movement for a sign that his captive was on the verge of collapse, Bodie pushed Sam back down into the chair and snorted in disgust. He sat on the table, much as Doyle had, and watched Sam open first one eye, then the other, not quite believing he wasn't being beaten up.

"Here's how I see it," said Bodie. "Maybe your brother did those kids. He's a bad'un, your brother is, and he could've. You know where he is, and if you tell us where he is, we find him, and we take him, and if he did 'em, we put him away. No harm done and all the world of good." He stopped to suss the effect of his words. Sam said nothing. "On the other hand," Bodie continued, "I, personally, think you did those kids. You're scum and you did 'em and you won't tell us where Billy is because you're plain stupid, too. You put shit in your veins and shit in your brains and in between you harm little children, and if there is one thing you must never do..." Bodie leaned over until his face was inches from Sam's. Sam closed his eyes again. "... you must never harm little children."

"I didn't," whispered Sam, his eyes still closed. Now, he thought. He tried to relax but the slap caught him by surprise anyway and he would've slid off the chair had Bodie not grabbed him by his flannel collar and held him up to slap him again, this time scratching him slightly just under the left eye.

"I'll tell you something," hissed Bodie, into Sam's face, "I don't care where Billy is. I've got you right here and my money's on you. But my boss wants to know where Billy is and my partner wants to know where Billy is and for all I know the bleedin' Pope wants to know where Billy is, and you're gonna tell me. So where the hell is Billy?"

Sam opened his eyes and tried to focus on the face that was too near. He was fighting back anger now, more than anything else, because he knew, despite Al's guess, that Luther hadn't harmed any little children. He wasn't sure how he knew, but he knew.

"If I knew where Billy was," he said, "I would tell you. But I don't know where he is. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry," said Bodie, letting go of Sam's collar. "Are you sorry for Mandy Chartress?" He stood up lazily and stretched. "She was six years old. You probably knew that." He walked slowly behind the chair and stopped there. "Are you sorry for Paul Kramer? He was only five." Bodie jerked the chair out from under Sam, dumping the unhappy scientist to the cold tile floor. Sam clumsily untwisted his legs from under him and used a table leg to draw himself more or less into a sitting position. He licked a little blood from his lip.

"I don't know where Billy is," he said, as calmly as he could, "and I never hurt those children. I don't know whether Billy did it, but if he did, he deserves what he has coming to him. All I know is that I had nothing to do with..." He was interrupted by a kick to the stomach that toppled him; his head hit the table leg. He had forgotten to relax. He groaned. "Please, I can't tell you what I don't know."

"Please, is it?" Bodie's laugh was ice cold. "Was it please, then, from Marcia Bowers, age seven? What did please earn little Marcia Bowers, if you will?" Sam edged his aching body fully under the table, but the next kick caught him in the chest before he could curl up to protect himself. It felt at first like a heart attack. Then he could breathe again and the room spun less and he forced himself to curl, though Bodie was already dragging him out from under there, intending to inflict more damage.

"Bodie," said a voice some distance away, and Sam was released. He drew his knees in and tucked his head down and covered it with his cuffed hands, the linking chain scraping through his hair. "Bodie, no."

"Ray..." Bodie's voice was trembling.

"No, Bodie," said Doyle, softly, one hand on his friend's shoulder. "It's not worth it. It gets us nowhere and believe it or not it won't even make you feel better."

"I feel much better," said a clearly miserable Bodie.

Sam soon felt much worse. The two agents took turns questioning him; Al came back once to say that Ziggy had no idea where William Allbright was and another time to growl at Bodie, who did not touch Sam again except to shake him awake whenever he seemed about to doze off. There was no window in the room; Al told Sam, before departing the second time (to sleep, he said; he'd been questioning the real Luther Allbright in the waiting room, and had been getting nowhere, but at least found out how much heroin the lad was wont to inject; "I don't want any," murmured Sam, causing Bodie to shake him) that it was nine p.m., Greenwich Mean Time, and that Sam had now been under interrogation for 32 hours. A long time had passed since then, with precious few bathroom breaks, during all of which one or the other of the agents had accompanied him and, to his chagrin, had watched. He tried not to ask to go too often, and as a result his bladder was nearly always full.

Doyle, trying not to look almost as haggard as Sam, was sitting back, legs crossed, arms behind his head, in a chair he'd brought in from another room. "You finish school, Luther?"

Doyle was running out of new questions, but it didn't matter, because Sam didn't know the answer to any of them. He could say "I don't know" and be thought uncooperative or dim, or he could make something up and be caught in a lie or two, which might or might not be more dangerous. "No," he tried, dully, since he had a 50 percent chance of being right.

"Pity," said Doyle, and without realizing it, meant it.

"Yes," said Sam, closing his eyes.

"Don't go to sleep, Luther," said Doyle, sharply. Sam opened his eyes. The scratch by his left one was scabbing nicely and his cheek was purple.

"I don't know anything. Why don't you let me sleep?" He scratched himself almost compulsively but couldn't get rid of the itch.

"Can't do that, sunshine." Ray yawned. Why indeed! Uniforms were searching high and low, in vain, for the junkie's big brother, Cowley had already got the paperwork and had Murphy and Bodie search the brothers' flat, also to no avail, the smashed Jag had turned up nothing and the interrogation of the hapless Luther was going badly, very badly. He should've been climbing the walls for a fix by now and all he was doing was itching and nodding off, almost as if he were loaded and mildly strung out at once. Worse, now Doyle found himself feeling bad for the boy, who obviously hadn't the stomach to pursue the wickedness he and Bodie'd seen.

And seen it they had. Not the first one, the year before, the little boy, and for that Doyle was profoundly grateful. Never a churchgoer like his Mum, Doyle still operated on a strange, vague faith that was challenged almost hourly by what his work showed him of the world: pimps, terrorists, slain innocents... Doyle had slain quite a few of the less innocent and would not let himself dwell on the possibility of his having been responsible for less justifiable deaths. (The concept of a justifiable death theoretically made him nervous too; in practice, however, he had no compunctions against pulling the trigger to save his own life or the lives of others.) A passionate young woman under their protection had stood up to take a bullet so that Doyle and Bodie could live. They never had understood her passion, though they had admired it. Tommy, crazy Tommy, had done his kamikaze bit to save them too, and after all the times they'd mocked him! And the girl who had shot Doyle had herself been shot, and nearly died; Bodie, who'd wanted to kill her, had ended up holding her hand in the ambulance. Tiny slip of a thing, Bodie'd said, marveling, and for once it hadn't been hormones talking. By far the worst was anything to do with children. Children shooting one another, children on smack, children who happened to be in the way of the violence that flourished at random on the rubbishy streets. Anyway, the boy had been a police matter, not CI5's concern.

Bodie had seen the little girl from March quite by accident. The boy's family had been an ordinary-seeming middle class one, but Marcia Bowers' father was an M.P., a friend of Cowley's and, at the time of his daughter's disappearance, the object of Doyle and Bodie's contemptuous surveillance, though he'd turned out clean after all. Bodie and Doyle were not the team assigned to retrieve the missing girl. Doyle had been up in York, following the M.P. to what turned out to be an innocuous enough weekend engagement to speak at a university there; someone hadn't checked Bowers' agenda thoroughly enough and Doyle fumed for the duration of his stay in the chilly hotel, not to mention the dreary ride back in the black and white Escort, whose front seat decided halfway home that it would no longer straighten properly. For nothing, less than nothing, he'd broken a date with Ginger Canby, who had promised him a meal and a massage. Ginger was a good listener, too, though most of what Doyle longed to speak of had to remain confidential. He'd told her he was a civil servant - true enough but if only she knew!

Bodie, though, had stayed with the M.P.'s family in Surrey, sleeping in his car and noting license plates and such. One license was sufficiently interesting to call in immediately, because it was attached to a gorgeous white Jaguar driven by a gorgeous black woman. She was the darkest person Bodie had seen since leaving Africa (Bodie did his best to put Africa out of his mind) and possessed the most exquisite beauty he'd seen since... perhaps that he had ever seen. She was dressed in white so that she seemed to be a part of the car. This appealed to Bodie immensely. He liked cars. He liked women. He liked women who liked cars. She stopped in front of the driveway that led to the Bowers estate. She did not consult any maps. She stared for several long moments at the house, then glided away. Bodie called the plates into HQ. and was told that the Jag was registered to a Marcus Finnegan of London, address in the region of Pimlico. Cowley told Bodie to take a break and as soon as Spalding arrived to replace him he headed for Pimlico. He had no real idea of there being anything amiss. He just wanted to see the lovely car and the lovely woman again. The last time he'd seen such a nice white Jag it had been transformed, thanks to a clever little explosive device, into a smoking shell, and his partner had been transformed as well, into a quivering wreck. It was a pleasure to see a whole one, and with a driver who looked so little like Doyle. Bodie was, however, unable to get his relatively humble silver Capri anywhere near the address he'd been given, as there was a bit of a police block. He parked and ran, no flew, to the scene. Paramedics were removing the mutilated body of the child from a dumpster not far from the address Bodie sought. They hadn't yet covered it. This wasn't the kind of neighborhood where one would park a Jag, and the homes there had no garages; it wasn't the kind of place where one would expect to find a woman like the one he'd seen, either. He roamed the area but discovered nothing there that bore any resemblance to either. At any rate, the charm had worn off; he could barely remember the woman's face. Replacing it in his mind was the image of what once had been little Marcia Bowers.

Doyle had watched Bodie, hawk-eyed, for weeks after the Bowers incident. His ordinarily sunny, smirking face was a never-ending scowl. "I can't get it out of my head," he kept saying. "I've never seen anything worse, not even in Africa." Doyle knew it was serious then because Bodie never mentioned Africa.

Sam sighed loudly, waking himself from a much-needed doze and distracting Doyle from his reverie. "Wake up, sunshine," said the latter, automatically, noticing then that the youth's lips were cracking from thirst. He fetched his R.T. from the floor, where he'd left it in order to sit more comfortably. "Four-five here, love," he said into it. "Could you send up some tea to room eleven? That's an angel. Um, that's two, please." After a moment's hesitation, he added, "and if you can scare up some soup, that'd be lovely too, eh? That's a good lass. Four-five out."

Sam said, not for the first time, "How long are you going to keep me here?"

"Oh, that depends, sunshine."

"Depends? On what?"

"Depends on how long it takes for us to get a straight answer out of you."

"I've been giving you nothing but straight answers. What can I do to make you believe me?" Sam shivered, then could not stop shivering. He tried to hug himself but the cuffs prevented him from warming more than his stomach.

"Dunno, mate. Maybe you'll think of something."

"I want a law... a solicitor."

"Sorry, no solicitor. You're not technically under arrest, you see. We're not cops. We're bigger and badder than cops and we have the small print to prove it." He sprang up, suddenly energized and annoyed. "Come on, Luther! What's it gonna be, another couple of days in this godawful room or the truth and you're back on the streets doing what you usually do? Don't you want to go home, Luther?"

The imaging chamber door banged open and Sam's head jerked up at the sound. Al smiled at him, then frowned. "Oh, Sam. This isn't good. Oh, no, this isn't good at all."

"Oh no," echoed Doyle, "not again. Look this isn't a setup for an insanity plea, is it?" Sam worked his dry lips but couldn't respond to either man. He had a million questions for Al but couldn't ask them; he had a million things to tell Doyle, too, but not one of them would be believed. (Time travel, holograms... was he here to make sure Luther pled insanity after all?) He wasn't even sure which forbidden communication felt more urgent. Somehow he couldn't help thinking, quite irrationally, that if only Doyle knew his true identity, everything would be okay.

"I'm not crazy," he finally said, "and I've been telling you the truth."

"What truth?" asked Al, suspiciously. "What truth have you been telling him?"

"I don't know where my brother is, I don't know what he has done, and I haven't done anything wrong myself," summed Sam, for Al's benefit.

Doyle, exasperated, went to answer the timid rap on the door and came back with a tray, which he set down on the table. "Tea," he said, pouring two cups from an old blue and white cylindrical teapot. "Sugar?"

"Well, that's very nice," Al pointed out. "Where's the other bozo?"

"Yes, please," said Sam, who also took cream but was not about to press his luck.

"It's hot," said Doyle, handing it to him in a pretty flowered cup on a matching (though cracked) saucer. "Be careful." Sam's hands shook as he took the delicate things, but he managed not to spill the tea.

"Well, this is all very charming," said Al, lifting a pinkie away from the hand link to indicate his extreme level of refinement, "but we're in big trouble here, Sam." Sam avoided looking at him. "Luther is having some serious withdrawal... troubles, and we're not sure whether we should give him a shot and risk your having a reaction, or advise you to take one and hope it affects him. For some reason, Ziggy is suggesting the latter. She's still calculating some kind of compromise between what Luther would ordinarily take and what you... Sam, I don't think you have a choice here!" Sam was shaking his head very slowly, staring unhappily into his teacup. He lifted it slowly, sipped from it and burnt his mouth. Al and Doyle both winced in sympathy.

"I warned you!" Doyle had poured himself some tea as well and was now blowing on it. He'd added no sugar. "I asked for soup too but I guess they didn't have any. Sorry, mate."

"Sam, if you don't do it, Luther could die. And for all we know, you could, too!" Al glanced at the hand link. "Sam, I'm sorry I can't stay. You don't need me now anyway. What you need is to hang in there, and get a shot as soon as possible, okay? Methadone would probably be okay too. Ziggy's calculating that, only Sam, you might not have a choice about how much methadone you got, and they like to give you a nice strong one the first time... I hate to say it, but you're better off with the heroin at this point. Ask for a balloon. Okay? Oh! Or maybe some morphine! I've really got to go now, Sam. I'll be back as soon as I can..." Light briefly enveloped him, then he and it were gone.

Sam put the cup and saucer on the table and pushed them away. He let his head droop until his forehead rested on the table, and then he gently hit his forehead there four or five times. He exhaled an exasperated groan. Doyle had him by the hair in an instant and dragged him back up. "None of that, now!" Sam leaned back against the chair and looked up at Doyle. The expression on his face caught Doyle off guard; it was almost as if there were another person sitting there, one older, stronger, more confident and yes, even more sentient than Luther Allbright. At the same time, none of this belied the exhaustion and fear in the little junkie's eyes.

"I need a shot," said Sam.

"I told you," said Doyle, walking away, "we can't do that."

"Bodie said..."

"Bodie," snapped Doyle, turning back, "wants to twist your neck for you. You'll do better to talk to me, mate."

"Why does he hate me so much?" Doyle hadn't been expecting this question and he was irritated that he, himself, didn't have the answer.

"Dunno, mate. Maybe 'cause he saw her."

"Her?"

"The Bowers girl." Sam was silent. "Luther, we know you know where Billy is. Angela said you were on your way to see him, to bring him something. She told us, Luther. You're wasting your time and ours here. Come on, Luther!"

"Angela?"

"Oh, Christ. Now we're going to play dumb again, are we?" The R.T. beeped and Ray went to retrieve it from the floor. "Maybe Bodie was right... four-five. Yes? Oh Christ. Oh Christ. Yes, all right. No, I can't leave here until three-seven gets back. Have you heard from him? Where the devil is he?" Sam smashed the teapot over Doyle's head, burning both of them with the still-hot tea that splashed everywhere. Before Doyle could recover from the sheer audacity of this, never mind being stunned, Sam had brought his cuffed hands down in a karate chop to the neck. Doyle was down, just conscious enough to murmur in pain.

"I'm sorry," said Sam, meaning it, taking the R.T. and mumbling "four-five out" before briefly fumbling to switch it off. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" he added, finding the key in Doyle's jeans pocket. He freed himself from the cuffs and with them fastened Doyle's wrists to the table, which he dragged over to Doyle rather than vice versa. Pocketing the R.T. and murmuring "sorry" once more to the semiconscious agent, he fled the horrible room. He glanced fearfully up and down the hall and, seeing no one, ran to the lift and punched the down button. He prayed that the lift carriage would be empty. It was. He learned then, from the lit panel, that he'd been on the first floor all along, and he almost got back out again until he remembered that the first floor, in England, was not the ground level. He pressed the "G" and the doors closed. The lift was slow; the ride was torture. Finally the doors opened and although he'd been dreading emerging into a busy lobby there was none, only a tiny glass double-doored entrance, through which he exited into cold, dark, death-hour London.