Metzger's Dog

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