Alternities (42 page)

“So I hear,” Bayshore said, pulling a chair back and sitting down. “Ray, I’m hoping that you’ll give me a boost on a couple of little puzzles that are bothering me—”

“I don’t do crosswords.”

“I need to know who you are, and what you’re doing here.”

“You brought me here. If my being here bothers you, you can always send me back.”

Bayshore showed a hint of a tolerant smile. “That might actually be in the picture, Ray, if you’d be more helpful. When you lie to us, or just turn to stone, it’s hard not to think that you’re hiding something we really ought to know.”

There was no point in embracing the hope of freedom; he could never tell them enough to satisfy them. “I can’t help what you think.”

“Not true, Ray,” Bayshore said, leaning back in his chair and dropping his folded hands into his lap. “I’d love to hear something from you that proved out to be true. Nothing has so far. Nothing you told us—nothing you told Shan.”

Wallace looked away, trying to hide the anger and the hurt under an ambiguous scowl. The bitch. The goddamned whore. Why did you do this to me, Shan? Why did you have to do this?

“Something wrong, Ray?”

“No,” he said curtly.

“I’m glad. If I were sitting where you are, I might be feeling a little hung out, a little short of friends.”

The man sitting across the table suddenly felt dangerous to Wallace. “Why don’t you leave me alone?” he flared. “I’m not going to answer any more damned questions. I don’t have anything new to tell you.”

“You don’t mind if I say my piece, do you?” Bayshore said, his patient voice and presumptuous familiarity unchanged. “I have a feeling that you’re a stranger here. So much of a stranger that you don’t even realize how much you stand out.”

“I don’t even know where ‘here’ is, so you’re probably right. How about sharing the secret?”

“Do you remember your school pictures, Ray? Standing in line in the gym, waiting for your teacher to comb your hair? Downstairs we have something called an image indexer. It contains photos of everyone who’s gone to school anywhere in this country in the last ten years, and a lot of other people besides. Like everyone who gets an entry visa. Do you remember being fingerprinted when you got your driver’s license? We have a computerized gadget that catalogs the fingerprints of everyone in the country who holds a driver’s license.”

Wallace looked up. “What, a stamp collection wasn’t enough for you?”

Bayshore chuckled under his breath. “It might surprise you to hear it only takes ten minutes to do a look-up. But you’re not going to be the least bit surprised to hear that you’re not in either system. Your license is a forgery, and I’m half-tempted to say that you are, too.”

“Say what you like.”
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Goddamn it, they didn’t train me for this—

“I don’t like it, Ray. Don’t make that mistake. I wouldn’t have cared whether you were king of the prom or king of the pack, so long as we’d found you. But we’ve been to Wayne County. We’ve checked every Wallace or Wallach family, and a few other things, too. They don’t know you. In fact, as near as we can tell the only person in the county who does know you is a certain state trooper. You probably remember meeting him.”

He paused, but Wallace answered only with sullen silence.

“You do, I see,” Bayshore went on. “Do you understand why this business bothers me, Ray? Do you see why I can’t even think about letting you leave here until I know who you are?”

“I have nothing to say.”

Bayshore nodded absently. “Yeah. So you’ve said. I guess you think you’ve got friends out there who are going to be able to do something for you. Or maybe you’re just protecting them. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to do that. Somebody leased that car for you, and I guess I don’t take it too seriously that she reported it stolen this morning. Not when we know you were driving it a month ago.”

It was a jolt to hear that the Section wasn’t supporting his cover, and Wallace scrambled for plausible explanations which would not mean they’d cut him free.
They must think I skipped, he decided. They want the police to help them find me.
Though it meant they did not know where he was, at least it meant they wanted to know.

“I had a fight with my boss,” Wallace said offhandedly. “She was jealous, you know?”

“Of Shan,” Bayshore prompted.

“Yeah.”

“Which I guess explains using a different name with her.”

“Right. That’s why.” Maybe the cover was salvageable, after all.

“But it doesn’t explain why you used a phony name for work, too, or why your real one didn’t come up out of the indexer. And it doesn’t help explain that oddball record album. You want to tell me about that?”

Wallace slumped back in his chair. “No.”

“You want us to ask your boss—former boss, now, I guess—you want us to ask her about it?”

“No,” Wallace blurted. “I mean, she wouldn’t know anything.”

“Maybe you just don’t want her to know anything,” Bayshore said. “I get a picture that says you’re not at the center of this. Forged license—dummy product—you didn’t do those yourself. I see some saltbacks, brought over the border, maybe from Canada, to run bogus goods for somebody. Is that where we should look for your family, Canada?”

“I don’t have anything to say,” he said, wrapping his arms around himself.

“We can protect you, Ray. Even get you back home safe when it’s all done.”

I wish
, Wallace thought plaintively.
I wish you could
.

“Get fucked,” he muttered.

“Very kind of you,” Bayshore said, pushing back from the table and standing. “But I have other business to see to first. Just remember, Ray—you’re all alone in this because you want to be. If you decide you want to change that, tell the warder you want to see me.”

Wallace stared at his feet, which were propped on the seat of the chair beside him, and said nothing. He sensed, rather than saw. Bayshore turn away from the table and head for the door. Drawing a deep breath, Wallace used it to clear the poisons trapped in his lungs during the long tense minutes of the interview.
Let go. It’s over
, he told himself.
No more picking and probing
.

But even as Wallace was relaxing, Bayshore whirled, two steps from the door, and barked one last question. “Ray—why was Gregory O’Neill murdered?”

Wallace’s head came up. “He was?”

Inexplicably, Bayshore smiled slightly. “Thank you, Ray,” he said. And then he was gone.

Releasing an animal cry of frustration, Wallace came flying up out of his chair, fists clenched, body jangling. He did not know what it meant for O’Neill to be dead. He did not even understand exactly what he had given away. He only knew that Bayshore’s smile meant that he had given away too much.

Bayshore leaned over Willa Stanton’s shoulder as they watched the replay of the interview together. “There. Right there,” he said. “How did you read that? Surprise or confusion?”

She considered. “Both. Surprise first.”

“Which means—”

“I’d say he knew the name, but he didn’t know about the murder.”

Nodding, Bayshore straightened up. “That’s how I read it.”

“I don’t understand—”

“How many people knew O’Neill before his death hit the papers?”

“Maybe it’s a different O’Neill,” she pointed out.

“Maybe,” Bayshore said. “But I don’t think so. I told you this worried me. Now I think I know why.” He clapped her on the shoulders. “We’re going to have to get you back home.”

Stanton remained dubious. “If he’d been part of some sort of conspiracy to kill Colonel O’Neill, wouldn’t he have known the job was done?” she asked, twisting in the chair to look back at him.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “Willa, there’s something I learned thirty years ago when I was a green-as-grass just-off-the-boat OSS agent: The world is not tidy. There’s always some detail doesn’t fit the picture you’re building. Sometimes you have to ignore them and just go on building.”

He shook a finger in the direction of the room where Wallace was guard. “He’s connected somehow with the O’Neill murder. They’ve got the same smell. I just don’t quite know what the smell is yet.”

A fierce sun enveloped in a halo of white fire dominated the cloudless morning sky over Washington. Long-banked snowdrifts were sagging, and streets and driveways running with the melt. The sunlight loosened coat collars, bared heads, and thawed smiles.

Inside Gregory O’Neill’s E-ring office, the intense sunlight streaming through the windows transformed a portion of the carpet from cocoa to tan and splashed jewel-bright reflections from the steel window frames across the ceiling.

O’Neill sat in a comfortable chair just outside the glare, balancing a thick pressboard binder on his lap. Between the covers of the binder was the thousand-page report of the Defense Procurement Office auditor on the Barracuda-class SSK hunter-killer program, delivered to him just that morning.

Compared to the almost uniformly upbeat missives originating from the shipyards in Groton and Camden, it was a joyless document. The auditor foresaw another fifteen percent cost overrun and a further three- to five-month slippage in the delivery schedule for the first of the three hulls already laid. More than thirty instances of mismanagement, substandard construction, and design blunders leading to expensive orders had surfaced during the investigation.

What made it more frustrating was that O’Neill had seen it coming. Looking at the troubled histories of the Rogers-class DE’s and the carrier
Liberty
, O’Neill had lobbied for the Barracuda class to be built the Navy’s own yards in Philadelphia and Boston, under contract management.

The suggestion was doomed by the high front-end cost of bringing the Navy’s facilities up to grade. But now he was left with little leverage against the contractor, giant New York Shipbuilding Co. O’Neill wondered if the Justice Department would countenance a threat to nationalize the company and replace the top management with DPO staff.

His ruminations were interrupted by his secretary entering the office. “Gregory—I just got a call from the gate. The President is in the building. I don’t know why we didn’t get any notice.”

He nodded absently. “Thank you, Marilee.”

“Do you want me to try to find out why he’s here? I have a contact or two on the White House staff—”

“No,” O’Neill said, turning the page. “That’s not necessary.”

“You can’t let him treat you this way,” she said with motherly insistence. “People had to know he was coming. They must have been told to black us out or we’d have heard. You have to defend your turf.”

He looked up and smiled ruefully at her. “When the President starts talking to the generals directly, a Secretary of Defense doesn’t have much turf left to stand on. It’s all right, Marilee.”

“But—”

“You are a treasure, my lady, and your loyalty means a lot to me. But the fact is my role has been redefined.” He hefted the report. “This is my turf now—budget, readiness, procurement. The President has reserved policy to himself Let it go.”

“Yes, sir,” she said unhappily.

Smiling, he sought his place in the volume. But instead of the door closing, he heard an “Oh!” of surprise.

“Secretary O’Neill?” she said. “The President is here.”

O’Neill set aside the binder and rose uncertainly from his chair as Robinson entered.

“Gregory,” Robinson said, offering a hand.

O’Neill took the hand. “It’s good to see you, Mr. President, if something of a surprise.”

“I want you to come up to the War Room, Gregory. There’s going to be a bit of excitement this morning, and I want you to be there.”

“You don’t mean—”

“Mongoose?” the President interrupted, fingering the model of the B-55 which stood on a pedestal near the door. “No, I made you a promise, a promise that we’d test the Russians first.”

“You made your plans without me. I don’t see why you need me now.”

“I don’t need you, Gregory,” the President said. “But I would hope you’re open to discovering you’re wrong. This is for you, Gregory. Come and learn.”

To judge by the activity in the War Room, the Joint Chiefs had been expecting Robinson, O’Neill thought. Several senior officers—including Admiral Rogers, the new Chief of Naval Operations—were gathered at the War Room’s huge main table. A dozen or so aides and advisors had taken positions on the risers along the west wall.

Staff officers and noncoms manned the consoles and telephones connecting the room with the major commands or stood by one of the teleprinters where routine reports from the various intelligence bodies were received.

General Rauche, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, came out of a small cluster of uniforms to greet O’Neill and Robinson. “Mr. President,” he said, stopping two steps short and saluting. The arm came down, and he nodded in O’Neill’s direction. “Mr. Secretary.”

“Good morning, General,” Robinson said. “How do we stand?”

“We just received the latest sitsum from Reykjavik. There’s nothing unusual in the Soviet alert status, no short-term increase in signal traffic, no cryptographic change. Several Russian second-echelon divisions are conducting a fairly major exercise in the Rhine highlands, but there’s no reason to think that that’s anything more than routine training. Atlantic Fleet intelligence shows only routine traffic out of the Soviet naval centers at Kola and Tallinn. In a word, things are quiet.”

Robinson had continued walking as he listened, and now he stopped before the floor-to-ceiling electronic maps on the east wall and looked up. “And what about our side?”

“We are at Defcon 1, high readiness. There’s been some intermittent land-line trouble in the net between here and our Central American bases, probably related to a minor earthquake overnight in Mexico. But we still have high-band clear-channel radio to both G2 Cristobal and G2 Mazatlan.”

“Is Molink hot?” Robinson asked, referring to the direct Washingon-Moscow cable. The Molink teleprinters, manned around the clock by Russian linguists on the Joint Chiefs staff, were located in a smaller room adjacent to the War Room.