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
'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
'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
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?
CHAPTER 43
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.
CHAPTER 44
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.
