your assets, which are a little precarious, if you know what I mean, into substantial holdings in land and stock.”
“You know,” said Kepler, “if you just took it to Las Vegas and played blackjack you’d have a little less than a fifty-fifty chance of making more.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?” asked Margaret.
“I’m not doing anything except drinking up some of the interest until I hear what you two have to say,” Kepler said. “Chinese told me how to get it. Maybe I’ll let him tell me what to do with it.”
“I don’t think we’re going to need much money for this,” said Chinese Gordon. “I just don’t want to see you sink into inactivity, moral degeneration, and premature senility.”
“Not more night classes?”
“I’m thinking about it. By the way, Immelmann, if you moved to a ranch in Canada you’d be able to take that big mutant—”
“Chinese!” said Margaret.
“Right. Yeah. It’s an idea Margaret had, and we wanted to see what you thought.” He leaned forward and spoke quietly. “All that paper I got Sunday night turned out to be some stuff the professor was doing for the CIA. Most of it’s kind of long winded, but there’s enough of it that’s readable to make pretty good headlines.”
“Blackmail them?” said Immelmann. “And you’re afraid of a dog?”
“It has certain advantages. Secrecy is their middle name.”
“No,” Immelmann interrupted. “Intelligence is their middle name.”
Kepler held up his hand. “I get it. I see what you’re saying. They’d be more worried than anybody about keeping things secret. And because they’re secret, they can pay off.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” Chinese Gordon said. “If you try to hold up the mayor of Los Angeles, he can’t pay even if he wants to because he—”
“They’ll just kill us all,” Kepler said. “Until now I was wondering who took that professor out.”
“That just proves our point,” said Margaret. “What we’ve got is important enough to be worth something to them.”
“Get rid of it, then,” Immelmann said. “Pretend you never saw it, Sunshine. Free yourself of this maniac and come with me to the land of the midnight sun.”
“Isn’t that Sweden?” Margaret asked.
“Who cares?”
“Shut up,” Kepler said. “It is an interesting idea. Is the paper good enough to work with?”
“Within limits,” Chinese Gordon said. “I figure if we don’t ask much more than it would cost to hunt us down, we might have a deal.”
“What price range, roughly?” Kepler asked.
Margaret said, “I read in the paper it costs about five million dollars each time the President spends a weekend in Los Angeles, with the security and servants and things.”
“I’d say in the ten-to-twenty range,” said Chinese Gordon, holding his drink up to the light as though he were scrutinizing it for impurities. “No sense in pricing yourself out of the market.”
“Let’s go over to the shop and do some reading,” said Kepler, tossing a sheaf of bills on the table.
They all stood up and began moving through the crowd. Margaret turned to Immelmann and whispered, “I thought you weren’t interested.”
He leaned down and answered, “First they’ll get you, but it won’t matter because your birth certificate has already disappeared so you don’t exist. But then there may be people like me who think they might remember there was such a person. Only they couldn’t be right, because pretty soon their birth certificate disappears and they don’t exist either.”
Margaret edged past a man who seemed to be wearing the skin of a woolly animal as a vest. “I suppose you think what you’re saying makes sense?”
“No, I just think I’d better come along in case you need somebody tall.”
“Tall?”
“Pretty soon you’re going to be in deep trouble.”
Utilization of Latent Terror Research and Analysis. 825074. The current phase of ULTRA is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to test the application of modern techniques of directed psychophobic behaviors. By implementing a plan developed by the Central Intelligence Special Operations Division, it will be, for the first time, possible to test with classic empirical methodology the validity of the psychometric predictions developed in the early phases of the ULTRA project.
Background: In 1978 the government of Mexico released previously secret geological reports concerning the Chicontepe Field, a strip of land seventy-five miles long and seventeen miles wide along the Gulf of Mexico between Tampico and Poza Rica. This area, it was revealed, contains potential petroleum reserves double the size of those on the Arabian peninsula. Because of the obvious economic and strategic importance of this Chicontepe Field, the Central Intelligence Agency was asked to develop tactical proposals for securing it.
Porterfield tossed the sheet on the table and rubbed his eyes. “This Professor Donahue had clearance to be given a contingency plan for the takeover of Mexico?”
The Deputy Director raised his eyebrows and shrugged, a gesture he might have practiced before a mirror. He was able to do it without disturbing the expertly fitted shoulders of the blue banker’s suit. “As nearly as I can tell, he helped develop at least two alternative plans for that objective. He seems to have been in on the ground floor, and the clearances grew up around him and his research.”
“Did Morrison know about these Mexico plans? Was he cleared?”
“I doubt it. At least not beyond the theoretical stage.”
Porterfield froze, his hands still over his eyes. Slowly he opened his fingers and peered between them at the Deputy Director, his eyes cold and alert.
The Deputy Director sat in silence. He glanced around the room as though he’d never noticed it before, and was impressed. Then his eyes settled on Porterfield and widened in a pantomime of meeting an old friend far from home. “Of course there are plans, Ben. There are always plans, you know that. There are plans for everything.”
Porterfield nodded, his hands folded now in front of his mouth.
“When I left my job with the brokerage to come here, do you know what the Mexico plans looked like? One of them was actually based on Woodrow Wilson’s landing of marines at Veracruz. I guess they figured, ‘Hell, it worked once.’” He chuckled.
Porterfield leaned forward. “So you and the Director decided—”
The Deputy Director held his hands out in a gesture of modesty. “Not me, Ben. I was just one of many people who suggested that the Company had better get moving or some fine morning the only option we’d have would be to let the Russians take over the biggest oil field in the Western Hemisphere or blow seventy-five miles of Mexican coastline into the Gulf.” He tapped the table with his forefinger. “You’ve got to remember what the situation has always been down there. In 1961, when everybody else broke off relations with Cuba, Mexico didn’t.”
“Okay,” said Porterfield. “Now the plan, or enough of it, is in the hands of foreign terrorists, and has been for a couple of days now. It’s blown. Now what?”
“That’s what the Director wants you to tell him. It’s a fumble, Ben. I’m not denying that. We’re on our own fifteen-yard line, and this Professor Donahue fumbled the ball. It’s up to you to pick up the ball and do whatever you can with it.”
“What arrangements have been made for getting people out who might be compromised?”
“A couple of the division chiefs seem to have panicked and begun rolling up their own networks, but we’ve countermanded the orders. We’ve even met a few of these nervous Nellies at airports and turned them around.”
