Single Combat (23 page)

Quantrill could find no words to explain how far that phrase fell short of the truth. He nodded, looked at the ceiling, brushed moisture from his cheeks. He could not yet appreciate that his tears were talismans of human emotions which Control had sought to drive from him, and that Control had failed.

Finally he pointed at the encapsulated solid-states of the critic and said, "Whatever comes of this, we owe to Marbrye." Then with a quick sad smile: "You have no idea what it's like to talk freely after six years with that thing in your head. I can say anything I like, recite poetry, even say, 'I love you, Marbrye.' Only she can't hear it," he finished.

"I think she might," the woman replied, but saw that Quantrill fought bitter tears. "Let's get you back to bed now, Ted Quantrill. You won't be ready to travel for awhile yet. I don't know what you have in mind, but Doc Keyhoe is in touch with some people who want very much to meet you."

"But that's all up to you," Caufield chimed in. "You're in Oregon Territory now and you can do as you damn' please. That's something to sleep on, son"

In time Quantrill did sleep, but only after he had cried for Sanger, and for himself for having lost her. Yet his tears could not wash all his accumulated poisons away; his last waking thoughts were of personal combat against those who were twisting Streamlined America into a daily twenty-four-hour nightmare.

For the record, health service officials announced that Father Matthew Klein died of a particularly virulent form of paranthrax. Off the record, he died from the effects of virulent questioning methods by Search & Rescue after he admitted under torture that Quantrill still lived. The paranthrax cover story became a blanket explanation for inoculation teams that flew into the mining community and, one at a time, hyposprayed two categories of the locals: members of Klein's parish, and patients of the missing Dr. Keyhoe.

As inoculations, the hyposprays were useless. Each patient and parishoner returned home ignorant and safe. Ignorant that they had babbled honest answers to all queries put to them by Howell's rovers; safe because none had guilty knowledge of Quantrill or of any other conspiracy against the system. With Sanger dead and Keyhoe beyond its grasp, S & R had to proceed with what little the priest could tell them. That little was enough.

Lon Salter called his meeting exclusively for top-level staff and eventually found it necessary to send out for sandwiches. The decisions were not reached quickly or easily. But then, their latest data had not come without painstaking legwork and two more missing persons.

At one point, Salter raised a hand to ward off more data. "Stop right there, Reardon, I don't need to know what you did with the teamster's body. If you say he admitted hauling those two into Elko it's good enough for me."

Mason Reardon was a medium man, a man so average in appearance and mannerism that he could move almost unnoticed in a business suit or a coverall. Long before, he had taught surveillance methods to Quantrill, Sanger, and many others. More recently he had moved into the comm center as one of the voices of Control. Very recently he had made a quick trip afield, tracing Quantrill's route.

Old Lasser could afford a more detached view, with his medical restrictions against field ops. "LockLever's harboring a lot of these people, Lon. They're cozying up to the Indys."

Salter: "Exactly why we can't ask White House Deseret to lean on them. We can't afford to let our suspicions show. What we've got to do is find all the terminals of this escape route, this—this underground railroad; emplace bugs on every truck and hoverbus owned by L. L. Produce and Midas Imports; find out how serious our problem is."

A cynical laugh from little Marty Cross, who still wore a sling for his right arm. The most irritating part of his job, thought Salter, was the insolence of Cross and his crony, Howell. Both were nominally his subordinates—and both often justified a charge of insubordination. They knew what Salter knew, i.e., without them Search & Rescue would no longer have a flinty core of sociopathic readiness. In rover terms, they were the last of the best.

Now Cross shared his dark amusement. "Here's how serious the problem is. See me? Pretend I'm S & R; I've got my good arm in a sling because that fucking Quantrill got loose. If he's still alive and out of the country, I can mend. If he links up with rebels
in
this country, I might get both arms in slings and my ass in another one. Cripple me and you cripple the Lion of Zion—and if
he
goes belly-up, not a man in this room will have a hidey-hole deep enough to suit him.

"Look: we've had these Catholics and Masons and liberal Mormons all along—no worse than a bad cold, right? But Quantrill's a bad fracture just waitin' to happen. There's too many ways he could hurt us—"

"All right, all right," Salter interrupted; "get to the point."

"The point," said the whiskey tenor of Seth Howell, "is a top-level effort to find him; take him out. Track him down in Canada or wherever, make an example of him. Pretend we've bought that amateurish yarn about him getting graunched in machinery, keep a sharp eye out in case he tries to turn other rovers—and see to it that we're the machine that graunches him."

"I agree," said Lasser, who knew Quantrill better than any of them. "If he's abroad, we might try talking Smetana out of retirement."

"Negative," Howell rapped. "That's one of the ways he can hurt us! We have other linguists who can pass as foreign, and Smetana's female. She used to have a letch for Quantrill—hell, find a cunt in S & R who didn't! He snuck Sanger right out from under me—"

Lasser, recalling Sanger's admissions: "Now that's just too freudian to let pass, Seth," intended as a jolly reproof.

Howell, his ruddy face blackening with rage, scanned their faces one at a time: Lasser, Reardon, Cross, Salter. "Anybody here think that little turncoat sonofabitch is a better man than I am?" Dutiful headshakes and, from Lasser, an abstention. "Then that settles it. We need a team ready to respond the instant we learn where Quantrill is. The very best S & R team ever mustered. That's
me
—"

"And me," Cross hissed, his eyes glistening.

"And maybe Ethridge," Howell said.

Lasser and Reardon together: "Why Ethridge?"

Howell: "Because in some ways he's a better athlete than Quantrill. And because Ethridge wanted Sanger so bad you could see the hard-on in his face. All we have to do," he smiled, "is to tell Ethridge it was Quantrill who blew her away."

Amid the buzz of discussion, Lon Salter rapped the table for order and called for opinions. He knew it was purely
pro forma
, a sop to his title. The major decision had already been made.

That decision would have varied in crucial details, had they known that the electronic half of Quantrill's critic still existed. But the old priest had described the detonation, and they'd found traces of the event in the surface of a butcher block, verified by gas chromatography. They had not wrenched a vital datum—Keyhoe's recovery of the solid-state module—from Father Klein because the priest had not noticed it, engrossed as he was in Sanger's desperate scrawls.

And why go through the dull formalities of removing access channels into the central computer when the remote terminal in question had been blown into white-hot gas?

In even the simplest of stratagems, one must proceed on the basis of certain assumptions. Yet nothing is more deadly than a false assumption.

Search & Rescue assumed that when the shaped charge of the critic blew, it atomized the solid-state terminal to CenCom.

Quantrill assumed that his enemies thought him dead.

After a week, Quantrill could wake without a rush of despair for Sanger, and of guilty elation in his freedom. Later he might recover his old reticence, but now he welcomed the men who came to Malheur Cave to talk (a little) and to listen (a lot) while he completed his recovery. It pleased him to talk freely after six years of practice at remaining mute with caution, reinforced by the pitiless puppet-masters of Control. Those talks were not
all
pleasant; he learned from Dr. Keyhoe how Sanger had died. He would not accept it as final until Keyhoe, in exasperation, snarled that the poor creature was dead, dead, dead.

Quantrill never made a friend of Keyhoe, sensing the man's dislike for him, unable to pinpoint a reason. The reason was simply this: Quantrill was the catalyst who had precipitated Keyhoe from a life he had enjoyed, a practice and a group of friends he missed. Keyhoe had abandoned his old life to save a young assassin and was beginning to wonder whether his sacrifice would ever have any important outcome.

Precisely because Keyhoe did not want his sacrifice to be pointless, he made careful inquiries through his contacts in and beyond the Masonic orders, giving no particulars that, in his opinion, might identify Quantrill. Because lodge brothers in Streamlined America were increasingly concerned with the country's internal affairs, he got prompt responses from New Denver, Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, and the sprawling new port city of Eureka. And because nations are inordinately fond of finagling with each other's internal affairs, he got responses from New Ottawa, Ankara, Canberra, and, again, Eureka.

The day Keyhoe removed the last bandage he seemed particularly surly. "You'll want to keep a hat on until your hair grows back," he advised. "If your brains haven't all leaked out, you'll head North and talk Ottawa into giving you a new identity as I'll have to do myself. If you have no more sense than a goose, you'll be flying South."

Quantrill tried to make it light: "You have your profession and I have mine. It'll be easier now that I'm a deader."

Tiny wrinkles gathered at the Keyhoe temples, as though Quantrill's face were on some far horizon. Without fondness: "Selling death to the highest bidder?"

"You know better than that, doc. It won't take me long to find a slot with the rebels. I can be useful."

"Money? Contacts? Routing? Have you thrown in with any of the people you've met here?"

A slow headshake.

Now with something like grudging respect, Keyhoe said, "Good. How much do you trust me?"

A grin. Quantrill held up his thumb and forefinger, spaced so that a knife blade might have passed between them. Then he said, "And that's a hell of a lot."

"I know a man in Eureka who buys Oregon wood for LockLever's shipbuilding company. All he knows is that you were a field agent of some sort. You wouldn't be the first man he's filtered back into the system. But you'd have to shell out."

"
So
who foots the bill?"

"Not money; information. But if they suggest drugs for your debriefing, my advice is to say no."

Quantrill appreciated Keyhoe's candor and his caution; agreed to meet the man from Pacifica Marine on neutral ground. Two evenings later he was flown in a creaking underpowered Boxmoth with dacron wingskin, no running lights, and almost no radar signature to an abandoned road near Jacksonville, Oregon Territory. He became one of three thousand strangers inundating the little town during a nocturnal outdoor concert at something called the Britt Music Festival. As advertised, he quickly located the two men sharing the big jug of California wine, and covertly studied them until intermission. Keyhoe had been right: in Oregon Territory, nobody else drank California wine in public.

Quantrill followed the older of the two men to an outdoor toilet and murmured the ID phrase through the polymer back wall. He got the right response, half-lost in a snort of merriment. "You sure have a knack for finding my vulnerable moments," said the man. "You'll be the young buck in the baseball cap behind us, I take it."

Quantrill admitted it. If they'd been enemies, they would've already had time to collect him—or to try. Five minutes later, under the marvelous thud-and-wonder of John Williams overtures, Quantrill again sat in near-darkness just behind the two.

"Call me Brubaker," said the older one, passing the jug back. He indicated the heaveyset younger man at his elbow: "Call him Brubaker too."

Quantrill named himself as 'Conrad', pretended to drink, and complimented the Brubakers for arranging a meeting where Fed surveillance would be hamstrung by white noise and public uncertainties. During the remainder of the program he traded wisps of vital information without mentioning the vacuum-packed device he carried in an armpit pocket of his turtleneck sweater. He did mention that he needed a contact with some group well-versed in electronic countermeasures.

Old Brubaker said there were several ways, all unspecified, to get Conrad in touch with ECM wizards. Nashville, in the Confederacy, was one option, if Conrad had his paranthrax shots. The other ECM center was Corpus Christi, near Wild Country; and in Corpus he would be near the rebel nerve center. Conrad would have to pay his way, of course.

Quantrill wondered aloud how that payment might be made. He expected a long interrogation. Young Brubaker surprised him. Canadian intelligence had collected information on a Chinese device which could apparently synthesize a wide range of substances. That synthesizer—if it had ever existed—was a casualty of the late unlamented war. Yet the giant consortium, IEE, had swallowed up several Chinese scientists and one Frenchman whose specialties might be used to redevelop such a gadget.

Now, IEE was promising Blanton Young an endless, cheap supply of strategic materials from an extraction plant near Eureka. At this point old Brubaker chimed in: "But that's a blind. IEE is outfitting an anchored barge from the air with a delta dirigible, and we've traced its route from a lab 'way the hell and gone out in the central Utah desert. That barge is doing something, all right—but it isn't sucking up enough sea water to yield a hatful of chromium, cobalt, platinum—the stuff that's starting to trickle off that barge.

"There's isn't a commonwealth or a kingdom on Earth that wants to see Young grow independent of foreign trade; Canada sells a lot of platinum here, so you can see why we—uh, they—get nervous when pure platinum starts pouring off that barge. So where's it really coming from? We think it's from that lab—which is the private property of IEE's chief, Boren Mills."