Free Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer by The invaders are Coming

or so out of Chicago.
    He
thought over the hospitals he knew of in the Chicago suburbs. Only two had
psychotic-security facilities: the' George Kelley and the Sister Andrea Farri . The Kelley seemed more likely, especially since the
DIA was involved. And if he were in the Kelley . . .
    Five
years before, three max-security patients had escaped from the Kelley. They
were of course picked up again inside of two hours, but the incident had shaken
the administration, and the entire security system had been revamped to make a
similar occurrence impossible.
    But
Alexander, when he was assigned to the Wildwood Plant, had spent several weeks
studying all the major security systems of note in the world: prisons,
psychotic wards, A-plants, computing centers, the Kingsley mines, the Chinese and Soviet political camps. He had also spent
three months in the Army hospital in Buenos Aires after the Antarctic incident,
where as an esteemed guest he had had the run of the place, and had learned a
certain amount about hospital customs and routines.
    During his Mexican tour he had worked with a
special Army Central Intelligence team that was trying to break up the Qualchi ring of smugglers who were constantly moving
Chinese guerillas, weapons, and supplies into the southwestern United States.
After six weeks of intensive coaching, and with a cyanide capsule adequately
concealed, he was methodically beaten up, flogged, and dumped in a filthy
Mexican bastille where three known Qualchi agents had been incarcerated, after much careful maneuvering, for slugging and robbing
a couple of American touristas (actually CI agents) who were slumming in
Mexicali.
    The
whole affair had been so neatly staged that even the Mexican police did not
know they had Qualchi agents in their jail; the three
agents were completely duped, especially since they were not interrogated, and
cursed their ill luck rather than Army CI.
    Alexander was turned over to Mexican
authorities when he tried to accuse the Army of sweating him over to make him
confess to being a Qualchi agent, instead of merely a
petty thief who was broke and hiding out in Mexico. His charges were of course
denounced as preposterous by the same Army CI Major who had supervised his
mauling. The Mexican police, while they believed his story, were still quite
willing to lock him up anyway, because the Army was good for their whorehouses.
    He
was soon on confidential terms with the three Qualchi agents, who turned out to be part of an isolated cell and had no real
information. They did, however, have certain contacts in Nuevo Laredo, so
Alexander, unable to notify the CI people, planned and executed a breakout from
the bastille that he had thought beyond his
capabilities, taking the three Qualchi men with him,
and heading south.
    For
the next four months Alexander was on the CI report as a deserter and bug-out
(an agent who went over to the enemy camp ); they posted substantial rewards for him or liis cyanided body. He turned up one day in Des Moines, Iowa, and furnished an order
of battle for the entire Texas-New Mexico-Oklahoma-Kansas Qualchi net, having worked himself up to the rank of Supervisor of Local Theft and
staging six still-unsolved supply raids on warehouses in the area for the
benefit of guerilla troops.
    With
twelve other Qualchi agents he was arrested, interrogated
for two days without breaking (before witnesses who were returned to the Qualchi six months later on a prisoner exchange) and then,
like three other top Qualchi agents, one of whom
turned out to be a BRINT man, he simply vanished. In the ensuing roundup, carried out strategically over a nine-month period, 120 Qualchi agents were captured and interrogated, the un-co-operative ones being turned
over to BRINT for unrestricted examination, and over 600 Chinese troops from
the tough Mukden school were trapped and committed suicide. The operation was
considered to be a major coup, even by BRINT. Consequently, as is customary in
intelligence