Voyagers II - The Alien Within (20 page)

“Get Stoner back.”

“What?” She gasped with surprise. “What do you mean? How can I—”

“We know he’s heading south, toward Marseilles. I’ve got people watching every train. I want you to go to Marseilles, and on to Africa if necessary. I want you to find him and bring him back to Paris with you.”

“To Nillson?”

“No. To me.” Madigan’s smile turned sphinxlike, mysterious and strangely self-satisfied. “Bring him to me, not Nillson.”

“But how can I find him? How can I make him return here?”

With a vague wave of one hand, Madigan said, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find a way. We’ll give you all the help you need, of course.”

“If you have so much help, why do you need me?”

His smile turning just slightly acid, the lawyer answered, “I put myself in the man’s place. If I were on the run, whom would I trust? A stranger who is male, or a stranger who is female? Who could convince me to follow her better than you could, darling girl?”

An Linh shook her head. “I can’t do it. I can’t just walk up to the man…”

“You’ll have help, as I said. And if you refuse to do as I ask…” Madigan’s gaze turned toward the unconscious man on the bed.

An Linh felt her jaw tighten.

“I promise that he’ll be well cared for, if you get on Stoner’s trail.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Nillson’s people will find your young friend here. They can be very rough when they want to be. Ev enjoys pain, you know.”

She saw a small flaw in what Madigan was telling her, a tiny inconsistency, a crack in the wall the lawyer was building around her.

“You say Nillson’s people will find him. Aren’t you one of Nillson’s people?”

Madigan’s grin became wider. “Well now, I am and I’m not. So to speak. In the corporation’s organization chart, I work for Mrs. Nillson, the president of the firm. Sometimes she and the chairman of the board don’t see exactly eye to eye.”

An Linh felt suspicion and hope riding side by side within her. “Who are you working for now?”

He actually laughed. “Why, for who else but myself, darling girl? The one all of us works for, every minute of the day. Numero uno.”

“You’re playing off the president against the chairman of the board, for your own advantage.”

“And it could be for your advantage, too, An Linh,” he said, suddenly serious once more. “Play your cards well and you will gain from this. A lot.”

“You’ll see that Cliff is well taken care of?”

“Of course.”

She glanced at the bandaged man lying unconscious on the bed, then looked back into Madigan’s eyes. They had changed to slate gray, ominous, expectant.

“I’ll try to find Stoner for you.”

“You’ll succeed,” Madigan said.

An Linh couldn’t tell, from his inflection, whether he meant those words as a compliment to her abilities or as a threat of the consequences of failure.

By the time the train began slowing down as it approached the station at Avignon, the sun was shining warmly while it sank toward the horizon, casting long, slanting shafts of golden light across the green landscape. Stoner saw fields of gorgeously red poppies and bright yellow mustard flowers gliding past, and he recalled that this area called Provence had been a magnet for painters over the centuries.

Briefly he debated getting out here and seeing the ancient city, walking into the soft hills and letting the hot southern sun darken his skin and warm his soul. Then the train slid into the station, and it was a shabby, tired platform with walls covered by fading advertising posters, like train stations everywhere. He decided to stay aboard the train and go straight to Marseilles, as he had originally intended.

Only a few people got out at Avignon. One of them, he saw, was a strikingly beautiful Oriental woman: she was not tiny, but her delicate features and slim figure almost gave her a doll-like appearance. She carried no luggage, only a largish leather shoulder bag. Her dark almond eyes seemed troubled as she stopped on the platform almost directly before Stoner’s window and looked up and down, as if in confusion.

Three men hurried off the train behind her, an Oriental and two Westerners. The Oriental was big, barrel chest and fat belly bulging the black T-shirt he wore under an unzipped oily leather jacket. His head was shaved completely bald, and his face was so bloated that his eyes were little more than slits imbedded in fat. He towered over the girl as he spoke to her. She turned away from him, but the two others—younger, wearing blue jeans and windbreakers, but also hulking heavyweights—closed in on her.

The big Oriental grabbed the girl’s wrist. She tried to twist away, to no avail. All three of them laughed.

Stoner jumped to his feet and loped to the end of the car, ducked through the door and out onto the platform between cars.

An Linh did not see him. She had realized as the train pulled into the station that she could go no farther. Completely spent emotionally and physically, the sight of the city where she had grown up was too powerful for her to refuse. Something deep inside her told her that safety was there, and the little happiness she had known in her life. Her mother was there, too, waiting for her, waiting for the magic stroke that would bring her back to life so that she could hold An Linh in her comforting arms again.

She had realized as soon as the big Chinese came toward her that Madigan had obviously placed his own team of toughs on the train. She tried to get away from him, but the two other young hoodlums hemmed her in. Desperately, she searched the station platform for someone to help her. No police in sight. Only a few passengers, their backs turned to her as they carried their luggage toward the parking area on the other side of the platform. The train hooted, signaling it was ready to pull away.

“Come on, back on the damned train, don’t make a fuss,” the Chinese said to her. “You’ll only make it harder on yourself.”

His grip on her wrist was painful. One of the hoodlums behind her giggled and told his companion, “I’d like to make it hard on her!”

“You’ll get your chance,” the other said, “after me.”

“Hold it. What’s going on here?”

An Linh looked up and saw a tall man blocking their way. The sun was at his back, lighting his long, tangled hair like a shining halo, making the features of his face impossible to see. She squinted at the apparition.

“I’m taking my daughter home,” said the Chinese gruffly, “whether she wants to go or not.”

“I’m not his daughter!” An Linh was surprised at the sound of her own voice; it was a nearly hysterical scream.

“I think we’d better find a policeman,” said the tall man.

The Chinese made a slight motion of his head toward the two youths. “And I think you’d better get out of my way before my friends scramble your face.”

Stoner looked them over. The Oriental was his own height, and although he looked fat he was probably a formidable man in an alley fight. The other two were younger, no doubt faster. They were grinning at him, eager for action.

The train hooted once again and began pulling slowly away from the platform. Stoner registered it out of the corner of his eye; it did not matter, there would be another train soon enough. He focused his attention on the scene before him.

He could feel his body tensing, every nerve alert, every sense so acute that he could count the wispy hairs of the fat Oriental’s eyebrows.

“Let her go,” he said quietly.

The Oriental tried to push past him, still hanging on to the reluctant girl with one hand. Stoner laid a hand on his chest, fingers outstretched. The Oriental looked into Stoner’s eyes, and his determination began to fade. He looked troubled, almost frightened.

But the two younger men came up on either side of Stoner, and he realized that he could not restrain all three of them at the same time. I won’t be able to avoid fighting them, Stoner said to himself—an explanation for the other presence within his mind. They’re too eager for a brawl, too young and full of testosterone to realize that they might get hurt. All they can think of is showing off their muscles in front of the girl.

Is that what I’m thinking of? Stoner wondered, far back in the part of his mind that watched him laconically, trying to understand why he did what he did.

Without a word, one of the grinning youngsters reached for Stoner’s arm. He took a step backward, and they both moved toward him. Stoner waited, hands dropped to his sides.

“You shouldn’t butt into other people’s business,” said the tough on his left.

“Yeah. It’s going to cost you a lot of pain, friend,” the one on his right added.

They were so sure of themselves that they did not bother with weapons. Stoner knew that they both carried knives. But they advanced on him barehanded.

The Oriental yanked at the girl’s arm and headed off toward the moving train as Stoner retreated a few more steps. The youth on his left threw the first blow, a karate kick aimed at Stoner’s kidney.

He blocked it, spinning and catching the kid with an elbow solidly on his jaw. Ducking under the other one’s charge, he rammed a fist into his groin, then kicked his feet out from under him.

An Linh’s shoulder felt as if it were being pulled out of its socket. She turned as the Chinese yanked on her arm and saw a blur of action. Then the two hoodlums were sprawled on the platform’s weathered boards and the stranger was stepping over their prostrate bodies, heading toward her.

The Chinese let go of her wrist and pulled a length of chain from inside his leather jacket. He squared off, facing the tall man, the chain yanked taut between his two big hands. The train pulled away and disappeared around the bend of the track. Suddenly An Linh recognized the stranger’s face, and a shock raced through her. Her mouth dropped open and her hands flew to her face. It can’t be! I’m having a hallucination.

Stoner eyed the chain in the Oriental’s heavy fists, then looked into his narrow, fat-enfolded eyes.

“You could get killed,” he said. “I’d feel badly about that.”

The Oriental wavered. He looked over at his two unconscious aides, then at Stoner, and finally at An Linh.

“Is she worth dying for?” Stoner asked softly, almost sadly.

The chain sagged. The Oriental opened his left hand, and the chain swung limply from his right. He turned abruptly and walked away.

Keith Stoner, thought An Linh. It really is Keith Stoner.

“What were they after?” Stoner asked her.

“I don’t know,” she heard herself lie. “I was…I was just coming back home for a visit and they came after me.”

His eyes seemed to penetrate completely through her. She realized that she had no luggage, not even a coat with her, and her profession of innocence was totally unbelievable.

But Stoner merely shrugged and said, “There won’t be another train for several hours. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. Do you know a good restaurant around here?”

“Yes,” replied An Linh, thrown off her guard by his seeming ingenuousness. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I know lots of them!”

He smiled at her and offered his arm. She took it happily, and they walked off toward the taxi stand like two children setting out to explore the world.

“It’s the World Liberation Movement,” Madigan was saying. “They’re far better organized than we ever thought they were.”

The lawyer looked tired, Jo thought. I’ve been sending him back and forth across the Atlantic like a volleyball the past few days, she realized. But there was no alternative. She could not risk talking to him by telephone. Even the tightest laser-beamed satellite links could be tapped. Now that she knew her husband was working against her, Jo understood that ordinary security measures were useless. Like her Italian forebears, she was reduced to relying only on those whose loyalty was unquestionably to her personally, not to the corporation.

But is Archie really loyal to me? Jo asked herself as she studied the lawyer’s drawn, sleepless face. Is he telling me everything? Is he working for me or against me? She knew Madigan was ambitious; did he have the courage to try to betray her to her enemies?

The two of them were riding on an electric cart as it rolled noiselessly along a wide, brilliantly lit tunnel beneath Governors Island, in New York Harbor. Ostensibly, Jo was inspecting the nuclear fusion power plant and energy screen that Vanguard had built for the city of New York. She had spent the morning listening to boring briefings by city officials and scientists who fulsomely praised Vanguard’s high technology and public spirit. None of them mentioned the fact that although Vanguard Industries shared the scientific knowledge gleaned from the alien spacecraft with the entire world (at Russian insistence), Vanguard also reaped enormous profits from building the machines that this new knowledge had revealed to the human scientists.

Deep underground, in tunnels and shelters originally built to withstand the impact of hydrogen bomb explosions, Vanguard had built a defense against nuclear attack. Thanks to the knowledge from the stars, New York and most of the other major cities on Earth’s Northern Hemisphere were covered by invisible, impalpable bubbles of energy which could absorb the fury of a thermonuclear explosion and protect the city within its sheltering dome from the blast, heat, and radiation of any number of nuclear bombs.

Jo had given the luncheon speech, there in the underground facility’s sparkling commissary, noting how a shelter originally built in fear of nuclear holocaust now protected the entire city from the threat of nuclear attack. Her audience of politicians and bureaucrats applauded her enthusiastically, while media reporters and photographers duly noted that they were actually applauding themselves. The mayor, a young, handsome, photogenic Puerto Rican with rumored designs on the White House, presented Jo with a plaque machined from the new metal alloy used in building the energy screen generators. It was called Staralloy because the secret of its composition had been wrested from the data banks of the alien’s starship.

Now, luncheon over, photographs taken, news interviews finished, Jo was riding back to the surface with Madigan, who had joined her just a few minutes earlier, after landing at the Harbor Skyport on his rocket plane flight from Paris.

They rode up the tunnel toward the surface in the middle of a regular parade of electric carts. Jo had picked this one at random out of the dozens waiting for the VIPs, assuming that not even her husband would be able to have every cart bugged.

“The World Liberation Movement,” Jo repeated. She kept her voice low. Sounds tended to echo annoyingly off the tiled curving walls of the tunnel.

“That’s right,” said Madigan. “They’re more than just a scattered bunch of terrorists. They’re real, they’re apparently well organized, and they’re trouble.”

The rubber-wheeled cart rolled along the long tunnel, its guidance microprocessor faithfully following the pencil-thin red line painted on the cement floor. Jo mulled over what Madigan was telling her.

“Archie, are you sure you haven’t just stumbled onto some little gang of college kids with delusions of grandeur?”

“I don’t think so. But we’ll find out soon enough. Your husband’s pumping this Baker character for every bit of information inside his skull.”

“Just make sure you don’t kill him.”

Madigan made a sickly smile. “Don’t worry. The interrogation team has had plenty of practice. They’ll squeeze what we want to know out of him.”

They had arrived at the end of the tunnel, a large, circular chamber with a wide stainless-steel elevator door at its far side. The cart in front of them swung over to its designated parking space; attendants in butter-yellow coveralls helped the two elderly VIPs off the cart and escorted them toward the elevator doors. There were more photographers milling around, clicking and whirring. Jo smiled prettily for them as she and Madigan walked toward the elevator.

“Where do they get their money?” Jo asked. “Who’s financing them?”

“We’re trying to find out,” said Madigan.

“Just make certain you don’t kill him, Archie,” she repeated. “He may be our best avenue to finding Stoner.”

The lawyer nodded and said nothing about An Linh Laguerre.

Madigan watched Jo climb into a green-and-white Vanguard Industries helicopter and whirl off from Governors Island toward the corporation’s offices in Greenwich. He waited for almost fifteen minutes as a buzzing airlift of choppers took the various VIPs up and away to their respective offices. The helicopters were noisy despite their electric motors, the big rotors
whoosh
ing through the air like giant scimitars and kicking up sandstorms of grit and dust. The harsh wind blew wildly at his hair. He clutched his suit jacket with one hand and squinted against the blast.

Madigan’s own chopper was small, dark brown, unmarked. He clambered up into the seat behind the pilot and latched his safety belt. The aircraft jerked neatly off the cement landing pad and lifted quickly into the sky. Looking down, Madigan saw that there were only a few people left on the pad.