Metzger's Dog

Not rat-tat-tat. More like Woooooow.”

Kepler was sprinting back toward them, shouting and hooting. “You’re a genius, Chinese. A genius! What was that?”

“Fifty rounds of high-explosive incendiary,” said Chinese Gordon. “Ball ammo would have done it, but we don’t have any.”

Immelmann stood up, threw his beer can, and said, “A nasty weapon, Chinese. You’re not the sporting gentleman you once were—you’re a fucking mad scientist. What do you say we stop in Palm Springs for a drink before we pick up your Nobel Prize?”

“Okay,” said Chinese Gordon. “It’ll give us a chance to look at some banks.”

4                   The office of the president of the Seyell Foundation was a room fifty feet long and forty across, with a vaulted ceiling eighteen feet above. The room was dominated by an antique desk of reddish maple with a hand-rubbed surface so vast that Porterfield had at first glance mistaken it for a billiard table that had unaccountably been flooded with blood.

The office had been perfectly reconstructed to look as it had when Theophilus “call me Ted” Seyell had sat at the desk to fire three hundred employees on New Year’s Day, 1932. The furniture, the old Persian rugs, even the leather-bound books that lined the walls had been moved from the old Seyell Building in New York before it had been demolished in 1946 and set down intact here in Washington. It was as though the shrine to the personality of Theophilus Seyell must remain inviolate or the immense fortune he’d amassed would no longer cling to the bank accounts that bore his potent name. Seyell had begun the Just Perfect Toy Company in 1904, making wooden cutout toys with a jigsaw at night after working as a bank teller all day, then hired an immigrant laborer after a year to help him. Soon there were salesmen, more laborers to work a day shift, and the J.P.T. Company began to grow. Through the early part of the century it flourished and diversified until the average person didn’t remember what J.P.T. stood for, although employees continued to refer to it as “Just Plain Ted” long after it ceased to be possible that many of them could ever have seen Theophilus Seyell. J.P.T. retooled to make rifle parts for World War I and distilling equipment at the end of Prohibition. It was investigated after World War II for war profiteering, but by then Theophilus Seyell had died and the entity that had been J.P.T. was already undergoing its final transformation to the Seyell Foundation. Its board of directors had become trustees and executors, its assets were converted to numbers in account books of the philanthropic and scientific foundation that Seyell had described in his will. There were no stockholders to buy out, no relatives to consult: J.P.T. had always been Just Plain Ted.

BENJAMIN PORTERFIELD SAT AT THE DESK examining the weekly financial statement. He felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew he’d get used to sitting in old Theophilus Seyell’s throne room. The names and titles the Company had invented over the years had brought him to worse places, but at the moment the size of the empty space around him seemed to create a vacuum that must inevitably by natural laws be on the verge of being filled. Every few seconds he found himself looking up toward the distant oak door to see who had come. The aspect of this assignment that worried him most was that it was too easy. It had been represented to him as an emergency. He was the most appropriate agent in place who could credibly move into the presidency of a major research foundation in a month’s time without some sort of publicity. He was an expert in moving Company money. When the word had come through that many of the Latin America projects must be made to disappear from government budgets, he’d been the obvious one to handle the transition. The Company had been preparing the Seyell Foundation for years, placing votes on the board of trustees, tinkering with its portfolio, waiting for the day when the Foundation would quietly become a Company asset.

When the day had come they had picked Benjamin Porterfield, and that annoyed him. The choice made too much sense, fit the pattern too well. Most of Porterfield’s contemporaries were chiefs of station somewhere or even running regional desks at Langley. That part didn’t bother him. He’d always been a field man, beginning in Special Operations in the fifties and then moving into Domestic Ops in the seventies. His last three assignments had been like this one—a quick meeting with one of the bespectacled innocents who stepped off a commuter flight with nothing but an empty briefcase, gave orders in the Director’s name, and caught the next flight home. Porterfield would be appointed president of a small airline in Miami, vice-president of the Canadian subsidiary of a large food corporation, and now president of a foundation. Always it was an emergency, always he was to head the transition team. They were pulling him closer and closer to Langley, using his gray hairs to build him a deeper and deeper cover, putting him in charge of operations so large and crucial that he couldn’t possibly move without Langley’s logistical and technical support. Having Langley’s support was like being encased in cement. In the old days the Company had been different. In 1953 he’d been given a suitcase full of currency, an airline ticket, and a list of telephone numbers to memorize. A year later his little army of mercenaries was in the Guatemala jungles. That had been another time, a different world.

The telephone didn’t ring, just lit up. He picked up the receiver.

“Mr. Porterfield, it’s Mr. Bartlett of Crabtree and Bacon to speak to you about the audit,” said Mrs. Goode.

“Tell him I’ll call him back,” said Porterfield. It was another annoyance, but only a temporary one. Until the communication between the Foundation and Langley could be moved to a safe wire of its own, he’d have to follow the procedure. In fifteen minutes he’d call back from a telephone booth in the neighborhood.

“He says it’s very important and he’s got to leave his office to catch a flight this afternoon,” said Mrs. Goode.

“Right,” said Porterfield, and pressed the button on his telephone. “Porterfield.”

“It’s okay now,” said the voice. “The wire is installed.”

“Good. Is that all?”

“No. We’re calling about one of the projects Morrison has passed to you.” The “we” was perfect, thought Porterfield.

“Which one?”

“It’s a Professor Ian Donahue at ULA. The Director himself read the grant report and ordered the whole operation placed under the highest classification. Since three this morning we’ve had someone writing a replacement report. The Director called for Morrison to be here by ten-thirty,” the voice said smugly.

“What about me?”

“You’ve got until eleven.”

5                   Kepler read aloud, “‘UFO REPORTED IN DESERT. Two residents of the community of Cottonwood Pass, California, have reported finding what they believe to be the site where a flying saucer made a crash landing. David Greeley, sixty-two, and his wife Emma, sixty, came upon a shallow crater with bits of burned metal wreckage in Fried Liver Wash, a remote area east of the San Bernardino Mountains, last Tuesday while on a rock-hunting expedition. In an interview Mr. Greeley predicted that an analysis of the wreckage would reveal that it was made of a metal not known on Earth. He further stated that a second spacecraft must have landed nearby to rescue survivors and salvage the critical components of the wrecked saucer, including its precious power source. “If only we’d been there on Saturday,” said Mr. Greeley, “we might have solved America’s energy problems forever. But it wasn’t meant to be.” Officers of the California Highway Patrol dispatched from Palm Springs to the site reported that it was the wreckage of an old pickup truck which had apparently been set afire by vandals.’”

“Vandals?” said Immelmann. “I guess so.” He stared out the car window.

“Where are we going, Chinese?” said Kepler. “You’re getting to be a pain in the ass, always driving us around to—” he read from the newspaper, “‘a remote area east of the San Bernardino Mountains’ or some damn place like it was a scavenger hunt.”

“Nothing remote today,” said Chinese Gordon. “Just over to East L.A. to see a guy.”

“Who?” said Immelmann quietly. “What kind of guy?”