The Second Saladin - Страница 68

Now it was the altar boy’s show; now all he had to do was get in there and fish the name out. Then they’d bust the man, and roll it all up and it would all be over.

Chardy looked at his watch again.

Thirty minutes.

Come on, Miles. Come on, priest’s boy. You’re on the bull’s-eye now.

A buzz. Chardy jumped, disoriented. Bennis picked the radiophone off the dashboard.

“Candelabra Control, this is Horsepipe One,” he said.

He listened.

“Yes,” he said, “all right, I understand. Can you get units onto the street? And call metro. Sure, I agree.”

“What’s going on?” asked Chardy, hearing the urgency in Leo’s voice.

“It’s Danzig. They just intercepted an Emergency Code off Miles’s security channel. He’s bolted. Danzig’s taken off. He’s out on his own.”

“Form Twelve?” said Lanahan. “Aw, Christ.” He tried to look hurt.

“Miles, it’s the rule. They had a security shake-up recently. All kinds of new games.”

“You mean I have to go all the way back to Building A?”

How do I play this? he thought. What the hell is a Form 12?

“I’m sorry, Miles. I really am. It’s the rule.”

“Jesus, you got a Russian in here or something?” Bluestein laughed. “You know how they like to brace us up every so often.”

“Sure. Three years ago they tried a fingerprint ID device. It kept breaking down though. Okay, back to Building A.”

“I’m really sorry. You can see my position?”

Is he giving? Miles wondered.

“It’s not your fault,” Miles said, not moving an inch. “I should have checked on the new regs. No problem. The hike’ll keep me humble.”

“Christ,” Bluestein said bitterly, “it’s not as if they do anything with the Twelves. They just sit in Dunne’s office until he throws them out.”

“It’s okay, Bluestein. Really it is.”

“It’s such a stupid, stupid rule,” Bluestein said. “They think them up, up there, just to justify their super-grades.”

“It’s a good rule. You can’t be too careful. Ninety percent of this business is security.”

“How long you figure you’d be on?”

“It depends. Real short — or maybe an hour. I don’t know.”

“Just hustle, okay? It’d be my ass if somebody makes a stink.”

“Don’t you worry about it,” said Miles. “Nobody’s going to make a stink,” and he leaned back, waiting for the man to punch the entrance code.

“Miles. You’re back.”

“I am. Relax, Jerry — not for good.”

“Ah.”

“No, I’ll just be in your hair for a minute or so.”

“What is it?”

Lanahan was in an office off the dark pit called the Disc Vault and the man he addressed was the Disc Librarian. Over the shoulder of the DL he could see the racks of discs, their plastic purity blinding in the brightness of this clean and odorless room.

“I hear you’re doing real well, Miles.”

“Not so bad, Jerry.”

“I never thought you’d do it. I still don’t know how you did it. You just kept pushing and pushing.”

“I’ll teach you my secret some day. I’m looking for a ’seventy-four disc.”

“Fighting somebody’s old war?”

“Something like that.”

“That’s when we were just gearing up on the system. I think it went on-line in late ’seventy-three. That’s so long ago I wasn’t even here.”

“Can you help me dig it out?”

Jerry was florid and bitter, a reddish man of fierce ambition who’d never gotten anywhere. He stank of disappointment. He was plateaued out down here, his career aground in Computer Services. He looked down on Miles with something less than enthusiasm.

“The little priest. You really brought it off. You really got lucky.”

“I never missed mass when I was a kid. That’s why I’m smiled on. Come on, Jer, help me, okay?”

“Christ, Miles.” He fished through some bookshelves behind him and came at last to a metal notebook, the disc index. He opened it, flipping through the pages.

“There’s a lot of stuff here.”

Miles nodded.

“You’ll have to be more specific. Miles, there’s a hundred discs here from ’seventy-four. From Operations — I think they called it Plans back then — from Economic Research, from Cartography, from Satellites, from Security. I assume you want the Operations stuff.”

“What was the first disc archive set up? The very first?”

“Operations — Plans. That was the heart of it. Then later, other divisions and directorates went on-line.”

“Yes, Operations then.”

“Ahhh—”

Goddammit. He’d told them it would never work. A dozen discs — that’s still nearly the entire New York Library system.

“Well?”

“Am I breaking any laws if I ask you how it’s indexed?”

Jerry looked at him.

“It sounds to me like you’re just fishing, Miles.”

“Come on, Jerry. Give me a break.”

Jerry made another face. “Whenever an item is transmitted, it’s automatically recorded in a master directory by slug line. When the master directory reaches a certain level, all the stuff is automatically transferred to tape. But when that happens, at the same time the Extel printer generates this” — the metal notebook — “printout. Then later we index by months of the year.”

“So it’s chronological?”

“Yeah, but the machine gives you other breakdowns too. The idea is to be able to get your hands on something fast.”

“Sure, I realize that.”

“It’s got a listing by target, by geographical zone, by—”

“What about alphabetically?”

“You mean by the code group?”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, it does that. Let me—” He flipped through the thick notebook.

“Yeah, here it is. It’s—”

“Jerry, look for shoe.”

Jerry looked at him. “You’ve got something exceedingly strange going on, Miles. I never heard of—”

“Jerry, when a Deputy Director tells you to check something out, you don’t exactly tell him he’s full of shit.”

“Well, I’ve been here a long—”

“It might not be shoe, S-H-O-E. It might be H-S-U, a Chinese word of the same pronunciation. Or it could be, well, I suppose it—”

Jerry pushed through the printouts. He halted.

Miles bent forward, over the desk. He could smell Jerry’s cheap cologne and the plastic, oceans of plastic, in the calm air. Jerry’s finger pointed to the middle of the page and had come to rest at a designation for the ninth disc. It said, CODE SERIES P-R-O to H-S-U.

“I don’t like it. No, I don’t. I don’t like it at all,” said Leo Bennis, driving tensely through the late night traffic as they turned off Key Bridge onto M Street in Georgetown.

Chardy agreed by inserting the magazine into the grip housing of the Ingram. He’d already checked that the bulky silencer was screwed on tight. He unfolded the metal stock, then folded it again, purely to familiarize himself. The entire weapon weighed less than six pounds, yet it could spit its load of thirty-two.380s in four seconds in almost absolute silence. The Bureau people loved it; Chardy hated it and would have given anything for an AK-47 or an M-16, a piece he could trust.

“There are really only two possibilities,” Leo said tonelessly. “Either Danzig just flipped out and bolted on his own, in which case he’s walking the streets like a madman and will be picked up by morning; or, more likely, the man inside got to him somehow and has lured him out. In which case we’ll find out soon too — find the body.”

“How does the safety work?”

“There’s two. A lever in the trigger guard, just in front of the trigger. And the bolt handle: by twisting it a quarter turn you put the piece on safe.”

Chardy cocked the weapon.

“Be careful with that thing,” Leo said.

“They kick much on you?” he asked.

“Not hardly. There’s not enough powder in that pistol slug. Paul, I think you’re going to have to re-join the operation. You tell ’em you’re out of the hospital, you’re okay. You go back to Danzig’s and see what the hell is going on. You could put some questions to the Security people. Sam’ll probably be there too. Shit, it just occurs to me they’re going to raise hell looking for Lanahan. We can—”

“What’s the trigger? About fifteen pounds?”

“No, it’s much lighter. They vary: some of ’em go off if you look at them. That’s why I said to go easy with it. But it should be about ten pounds unless some hotdog has messed with the spring. I wonder how long he’s been gone? He could have been gone hours and they only noticed forty-five minutes ago. Paul, I’ll head back—”

A Pontiac jumped into the lane ahead, then careened to a halt at the light and Leo had to pump his own brake hard.

“Jerk. Goddammit! Look at this terrible traffic. You can’t drive in this city anymore.”

“It’s okay, Leo,” Chardy said. He opened the door. “Paul!”

“See you, Leo.” He hung in the door as a car swooped by them.

“Paul, they need us back there, they—”

“They want you back, Leo,” Chardy said. “You work for them. I don’t.” He smiled, and stepped into the dark, the machine pistol and a radio unit hidden in his gathered coat.

54

After a long drive they dropped Ulu Beg at a Metro station in a suburb of Washington. It had been a silent trip, through twilight across farm fields, then over a great American engineering marvel, a huge bridge, and then into the city, but now Speshnev turned to him from the front seat.