Metzger's Dog (6 page)

A
S THE SKY IN THE EAST
began to lose its purple and brighten into a metallic gray, Immelmann stood up and said, “Chinese, I could use a hand with that horse trailer over there.”

“What for?”

“It’s a hell of a disguise, for one thing.”

Kepler nodded. “It is, Chinese. It’ll just about completely change the way the van looks from the air. Here, let’s pull it over and hook it up.” The two picked up the trailer’s hitch assembly and started pulling it out of the line.

“Wait,” said Kepler. “Where are we going? The van’s over there.”

“I always wanted a dog,” Immelmann said.

“Oh no, Immelmann. You can’t. The fucking thing is a monster. It’ll kill you. For that matter, Chinese Gordon’ll kill you.”

Immelmann leaned against the weight, moving the trailer by himself. “It just needs a friend.”

Kepler stalked along beside him, bending down to talk into Immelmann’s ear. “You live in a one-bedroom apartment. An animal like that needs a place to run. Like Africa.”

Immelmann grunted as he pulled the trailer. “I’ve made up my mind. You can get Chinese Gordon into an uproar about it if you feel like standing around arguing until the guy who owns this place comes to work. You could also shut up and help me.”

Kepler moved to the rear of the trailer. In the growing light he could read the two bumper stickers. At one time they’d said, “Have you hugged your horse today?” but someone had changed them to, “Have you hugged your whores today?” and “Have you fucked your horse today?” He decided to remember to tear them off before they drove the trailer onto the road.

They backed the horse trailer to the rear of the bread truck and the dog woke up. This time it didn’t bark, just threw its body against the back door, rocking the truck, then getting up in silence and leaping against the door again.

“I’ll open the truck door, you slam the trailer door,” said Kepler. “The timing has got to be right.”

“Of course.” Immelmann took his position beside the trailer, his hand poised on the open door.

Kepler listened to the sound of the huge dog throwing itself against the truck door, then walked to the front of the truck. The dog’s toenails scratched the metal truck bed as it gathered speed for another leap, and Kepler flung the door open. When he saw the black shape lunge past, he knew he’d miscalculated. The dog’s leap carried it to the roof of the trailer, where it scrambled for a foothold, then whirled and poised to leap down at Kepler. At that moment Immelmann said quietly, “Down, boy,” and pushed the dog’s haunches hard. The dog slipped on the roof and sat down.

In the dim light Kepler could see the sitting dog sliding past with what seemed to be a look of puzzlement on its face, and Immelmann pushing it so quickly it couldn’t stand up. As it went off the edge of the trailer and saw that it was falling back into the bread truck, it writhed and twisted in midair. As it landed, the dog dashed into the horse trailer eagerly, and Immelmann closed the door.

They pulled the trailer up the aisle, but the dog inside was silent. Immelmann beamed. “He’s strong as a man and weighs as much. He’s fast, he’s got teeth like a Rototiller, and he’s not afraid of anything that breathes.”

“All true,” said Kepler. “Hell of a pet for a man who’s afraid his yard will be infested with cows.”

T
HE SUN WAS ALREADY ABOVE THE LEVEL
of the ridge to the east when Chinese Gordon drove past the gate and onto the gravel drive and waited for Kepler to replace the lock. As Chinese Gordon eased the van onto the highway, the sound seemed to grow louder for a moment, then fade into the hum of the engine and the rush of the wind and the more unfamiliar rattle of the trailer. He knew the sound hadn’t gone away. He listened intently, trying to separate it from the other sounds and identify it. There was a high-pitched whine for a few seconds that seemed to go down the scale to a growl. It wasn’t too surprising that a horse trailer in a junkyard needed a grease job, maybe even needed wheel bearings. It was the shaking that worried him. Every ten or fifteen seconds he felt something happen to the horse trailer. It shook as though its weight had shifted suddenly, and that could only be trouble. He was glad when he saw they were getting close to Van Nuys, because by then he’d decided there was something wrong with the way the trailer was mounted to its axle. What it felt like was that the trailer wasn’t empty. It felt as though it had a horse in it and the horse was getting mad as hell.

9
                  
When the telephone rang, Porterfield was awake and alert. His left foot pushed off on the floor and he lifted himself out of the bed carefully to keep from moving the blankets over Alice. There was a slight twinge in the left knee, a stiffness that wasn’t yet a tremor or a pain, but a reminder. Alice stirred slightly in her dream, sighed, and tugged the blanket up to her neck.

He closed the bedroom door and lifted the receiver. “Yes?”

“Please call in.” It was a man’s voice, the toneless, clear, quiet voice.

Porterfield turned on the hallway light and squinted against the glare to dial the familiar number. “Benjamin Porterfield. Any messages?” He waited while the computer, somewhere in the communications center, compared the recording it had just made with the master print of his voice in the memory bank. Then the man said, “Can you be in at six?”

Porterfield’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the light. He glanced at his watch without surprise. It was four-thirty. “Yes.” He hung up and slipped into the bedroom, leaving the door ajar to cast a sliver of light on the closet.

He could see Alice’s shape on the bed, a small, compact lump with the covers clutched around her, her face empty and innocent of thought—a face watching the pretty pictures of a dream. Alice was becoming a little old lady, he thought, a sweet little old lady. She was nearly as old as he was, although time didn’t appear to be using her up as quickly. She seemed to feel his eyes on her and let part of herself come to consciousness to acknowledge him.

“Ben?”

“What?”

“That wasn’t one of the kids?”

“No, baby. Nothing to worry about. I just have to go in early.”

“Trouble?”

“No. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

Alice sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. “I’ll make you some breakfast.” She looked like a child in the dim light. He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

“Thanks anyway. I’ve got to have a breakfast meeting with somebody.” He sat on the bed and put his arms around her, then gently pushed her back on the pillow. “Now go back to sleep.”

He showered and dressed in the bathroom, trying to be as quiet as possible. It made him feel good to think of Alice in the bed, warm and soft, by now sleeping again, her face calm and somehow still beautiful almost thirty years after he’d met her.

When she heard the front door closing, Alice got out of bed and padded quietly to the living room in her bare feet. She stood in silence and watched the car pull out of the driveway and creep up the dark, empty street. Alice stood absolutely still, staring out the window for a long time after the car had disappeared, her face calm and thoughtful. Then she lit a cigarette and went to the kitchen without turning on the lights, and started the coffee. Soon the birds would start singing, she thought, and then the cold, bluish tinge of dawn would warm to yellow, the sun itself appearing first right over the chimney of the house across the street.

P
ORTERFIELD ENTERED THE
C
OMMITTEE
R
OOM
and classified the problem at a glance. There were no junior people scurrying in and out with earnest expressions, which meant the problem hadn’t yet reached the moment when nothing could be done about it—the great flurry of pointless activity hadn’t begun.

He noticed Hadley, who ran the Domestic Operations arm of Clandestine Services. He was predictable enough, and Pines, the Deputy Director, was no surprise. Their presence only certified that the trouble was worth getting out of bed at four-thirty to talk about. Kearns had had some shadowy relationship with the Latin America desk for so long nobody even thought about what his actual job was anymore. When Porterfield saw Goldschmidt he became curious. Goldschmidt was chief of Technical Services. If Goldschmidt was here it meant the problem was serious enough to draw his attention away from all the spy satellites and the research facilities built into Company proprietaries and affiliates, the arsenals, and nobody but Goldschmidt knew what else. Then Porterfield noticed John Knox Morrison sitting at the far end of the table and snorted. Morrison had managed, at this hour, to select a red necktie with a pattern that at first seemed to be white dots, but on second examination were small, perfect copies of the Harvard seal, with even the motto
veritas
legible from eight feet away. If Morrison was here, it was a disaster. Morrison wasn’t someone who’d be called in to discuss strategies or solve problems. His only value was that he was someone who could be placed in positions that required the right family, a certain kind of influence. The fact that he appeared to be a fool was part of his protection as an operative; the fact that he was a genuine fool meant the disguise was impenetrable. Morrison’s tanned, beefy face was looking uncomfortably pink, and his pale blue eyes darted furtively up occasionally to stare in secret alarm, first at Goldschmidt, then at Deputy Director Pines.

Pines spoke to Porterfield. “Hello, Ben. We’ve got troubles. We don’t know what kind yet, but they’re real enough to start figuring the options.”

Porterfield nodded, and glanced at Morrison, who was intently tracing the grain of the wooden conference table with a pudgy forefinger.

“You’re familiar with the Donahue psywar grants?”

“The Director mentioned them the other day,” said Porterfield. “I’ve read most of the reports.”

“Last night—early evening, actually—some kind of terrorist group attacked the campus of the University of Los Angeles. We don’t know much about it yet. It was apparently something on the order of a commando raid. They blew up a parking service kiosk. That points to foreign groups, because if they picked that they probably thought it was a police guard post.”

“Is that it?” asked Porterfield.

“They broke into the Social Sciences Building. That’s Ian Donahue’s building. It was early enough to make the eleven-o’clock news in Los Angeles.”

“Great.”

“Fortunately, they didn’t want this kind of publicity any more than we do. They covered it by breaking into a research lab and running off with—get this—a million dollars’ worth of cocaine.”

“What was that doing there?”

“It’s nothing to do with our projects, just some damned medical research thing that was easier to run from there than from the ULA hospital complex. I double-checked. We’ve got nothing to do with it.”

“What did they get from Donahue?”

“That’s part of the problem,” said Pines. He glared at Morrison. “We don’t know yet. We know something is gone, that they were in the office. That’s all we do know. They went in and got into two rooms in a building that has two hundred.”

Porterfield turned to Morrison. “What could they have gotten?”

Morrison leaned from side to side, staring off at the wall behind Porterfield’s head, deep in thought, as though the question had never occurred to him before. “Oh, that’s hard to say. I would imagine there are copies of his yearly reports to the National Research Foundation, maybe a few grant proposals.” Morrison was becoming more and more uncomfortable under the gaze of the five men around the table. “And then there was his correspondence with NRF. With me, really—no connection with Langley, nothing to worry about, really.”

Goldschmidt looked at Porterfield, his lips pursed and his eyes bulging as though there were an immense pressure behind them.

Porterfield said quietly, “You really don’t know what Donahue had, do you?”

Morrison chuckled, nervously. “No, of course not, not exactly, but—”

“Oh shit,” said Kearns.

Pines said, “Thank you, Morrison.” He glanced at his watch. “Wow! Almost six o’clock. We’d better get you out of here before we blow your cover. There’s a car waiting.”

Morrison seemed about to protest. He looked around the table and for some insane reason settled his gaze on Hadley, as though Hadley would assert Morrison’s right to stay. Porterfield had watched Hadley’s jaw flexing and loosening rhythmically for the past few moments. It was the same unconscious gesture a cat made before it leaped on a bird, while it imagined the feeling of grinding the bird’s fragile bones. Morrison nodded to a spot somewhere near the middle of the table, grinned stupidly, and said, “Good point, thanks,” as he left the room.

“So,” said Porterfield. “Worst case?”

Pines turned to Goldschmidt, who said, “Impossible to say, really. What amazes me most about this is just that. That man”—he paused and looked around the room—“that…man…has been supporting the…research…of this Donahue person for upward of twenty years. He seems to have had some authorization for it.” Goldschmidt’s gaze settled on Pines, and it was a look of hatred. “We have to assume that what these people have is the sum of what Professor Donahue knows, what he has proposed, what he imagines, and what that insufferable moron has let him know. What we’re sure of is an embarrassment. What we don’t know may be a catastrophe.”

Porterfield waited, and Kearns spoke. “We’re pretty sure that what he had in that office included a lot of psywar tactical information that has been used in Latin America. It also probably included a lot of stuff nobody has ever used—some of it so crazy we wouldn’t have considered it, some of it right out of the contingency plans.”

“It may not be that bad,” said Pines. “Ben, you’ve read the abstracts this guy Donahue wrote. It’s really pretty amateurish stuff. He tries to find out what form the bogeyman takes in a country and devises means to make the bogeyman come to life. It’s a mixture of stating the obvious and a pseudoscientific quantifying of things that can’t be measured.”

“Preposterous,” Hadley agreed. “The real problem is that there seems to be a pretty sophisticated team of terrorists capable of operating in L.A. We don’t know what they are, where they came from.”

“Sounds right,” said Porterfield, but he was watching Goldschmidt and Kearns as he said it. They were both staring hard at Pines. Kearns was blowing short breaths of air out through his nose like a bull. Goldschmidt’s face had assumed an empty expression, as though he had never seen Pines before and wondered what he was doing there. Porterfield understood. “Who used the Donahue reports?”

“Used them?” Pines repeated. “Why, nobody.”

“Ridiculous,” said Hadley.

Porterfield ignored them and turned to Goldschmidt. “Who?”

Goldschmidt sighed. “It seems that’s true, Ben. They weren’t used operationally. But from what I’ve been able to gather, my distinguished predecessor ran some tests.”

“Where?”

“One in Argentina in the early sixties, one in Zaire about ten years ago, once”—he paused and stared at Hadley—“it appears he tried it in Tennessee. There were at least three experiments in Mexico. There may be more, but that’s all I’ve found.”

“How did it work?”

“Perfectly, of course. It scared the hell out of people who already had plenty to worry about, and in most instances the teams seem to have been able to focus the panic to make large segments of the population fulfill the predicted behavior. For the psywar teams it was just target practice. The problem is that the whole idea was to give Donahue a chance to compute reliability coefficients, play with real statistics to see how many variables could be plugged into his equations and accounted for.”

“So he had to do his predictions in advance,” said Porterfield. “I suppose they let him figure his own results.”

“You see it,” said Goldschmidt. “He wrote the program the field teams followed, then got the statistics on each of the variables he was interested in. Then he’d come up with empirically tested validity figures and report those back.”

Hadley was impatient. “We don’t know at this moment whether anything about that was even in the office, and it’s damned unlikely that the people who broke in knew about it or would recognize it if they found it. For Christ’s sake, they blew up an empty parking shelter. Chances are they don’t even speak English.”

“That’s a good point, Bill,” said Pines. “They may really have been after the cocaine. It costs a hell of a lot of money to get far in the armed lunatic business these days, and cocaine is better than money. If they were after documents in Donahue’s office, they’d have photographed them, maybe copied them on the office machine.” He looked satisfied with himself, his head moving rapidly to look first at Porterfield, then at Kearns, a lock of hair displacing itself to remind them that he was one of the new ones, the young geniuses who seemed to appear from nowhere with impossible records of achievement in some totally irrelevant endeavor—advertising or investment banking or the stock market.

Kearns said quietly, “Very true. At the same time, they picked two offices out of two hundred, the only two that contained anything worth stealing, probably. Then, if I remember the tape of the interview with the parking man correctly, it was only after they’d driven past the campus gate that they blew up the kiosk. They had driven past, and he decided to make a run for the telephone in his kiosk. What’s it sound like, Ben?”

Porterfield considered, then shrugged. “Most likely a hand-held rocket launcher. The Russians have a little beauty they’ve been passing out like candy, and of course there’s no guarantee our own disposable one they used in Viet Nam isn’t coming back to haunt us. God knows enough of them were left there in ’73. What’s it called again?”

Goldschmidt answered wearily, “Mark-360. In any case, there is no homemade aimable weapon that will disintegrate a building from a distance of fifty or sixty yards. The point is established. We’ll know the exact nature of the armament used in an hour or two. The Los Angeles Police Department has asked for federal assistance on that portion of the case, and they’ve received more than they know.”

Kearns continued. “Okay, so they did all this, then disappeared. That was…” he glanced at his watch, “…at least eight hours ago. I say we have to assume that they have enough to make us damned uncomfortable, maybe worse, and that they are funded and guided by some power capable of giving them military weapons, a power that won’t have any trouble figuring out what to do with the Donahue papers.”