Kessler nodded. “It could be Worldtalk’s people, Charlie.”
Charlie shook his head. “I saw the guy in the outer office. He’s one of ours.”
“Yours, Charlie,” Kessler said. “Not mine.”
They were in Detective Bixby’s office, sitting wearily in the plastic chairs across from Bixby’s gray metal desk. The overhead light buzzed, maybe holding a conversation with the console screen on the right of the desk, which hummed faintly to itself. The screen was turned to face away from them. On the walls, shelves were piled high with software, cassettes, sheaves of printouts, photos. The walls were the grimed, dull green such places usually are. Bixby had left them to confer with the detectives in the new Cerebro-kidnapping Department—the department that handled illegal extractions. The door was locked, and they were alone.
“At least here we’re protected,” Julie said, digging her nails into her palms.
Charlie shook his head again. “I called Seventeen, he said Worldtalk could still get at us in here.”
“Who the hell is Seventeen?” Kessler snapped. He was tired and irritable.
“My NR contact—”
He broke off, staring at the desk. The console was rotating on a turntable built into the desk top, its screen turning to face them. Bixby’s round, florid face nearly filled the screen.
“’S’okay,” Bixby said. “CK’s taking your case. Your video statements are filed, and your bail is paid. That’ll be refunded soon as we get the owner of the building to drop the charges on the blown-out wall. Should be no problem. If you want protective custody—maybe not a bad idea—talk to the desk sergeant. Door’s unlocked.” As he said it they heard a click, and the door swung inward a few inches. They were free to go. “Good luck,” Bixby said. His face vanished from the screen.
“Come on.” Charlie said. “Let’s do this fast before the fucking door changes its mind.”
The basement room was dim and damp, and old, cracking apart. A man was waiting for them there. The man was sitting on a cracked, three-legged wooden chair, just under the single light bulb; he sat with the chair reversed, resting his arms on the back, one leg extended to compensate for the missing chair leg. He smiled and nodded at them.
Kessler looked at Charlie, and Charlie shook his head.
“Is he from Worldtalk?” Kessler asked.
Julie’s voice was hollow. “I don’t know him. I don’t know. Maybe they hired him.”
The man said, “I work with Worldtalk. I work with the SA. And I work with Steinfeld,” he said. “Not in that order.” He was a big, soft bodied man, and he was too smug. He had an executive’s neutral blue-gray hair tint, with just a streak of white, indicating he’d “risen in the ranks.” Maybe he’d started as an accountant, or a typing-pool supervisor; he was entitled to wash the tint out, but some executives kept their early rank marks as a kind of warning: I fought my way up, and I’m still willing to fight, so don’t fuck with me… He wore a dove gray suit, a real one, and the choker that had replaced ties in the upper classes.
“Man, you took out of place here,” Charlie said.
The man in the gray suit chuckled.
The basement was empty on one end, the other dominated by a pile of detritus, accumulated junk from the old tenement above, including a lot of torn up carpeting gone mildewy gray, looking like The Thing That Lived in the Cellar.
“I’m Purchase,” the man in the gold choker said.
He extended his hand and they shook all around. But no one else gave a name. Purchase’s hand was warm and moist.
Charlie shrugged. “This must be the guy.”
Purchase looked at his watch. “You were expecting a guy who looked like John Reed, maybe?”
Kessler looked at Charlie. “Isn’t there a password or code phrase or something?”
Purchase answered for him. “The meeting place is the password. Who else would be down here?”
Kessler stared at Purchase. “I don’t like anything ambiguous. You say Worldtalk, you say SA, you say Steinfeld. I mean, for all I know, I’m not really seeing you. Maybe they came in last night, maybe they treated me and Charlie and Julie so we share the same hallucination. Maybe they’re trying to propagandize—that revolutionaries are really a lot of fat cats. Like the IRA and PLO chiefs who used to make fortunes off the black market. Maybe you’re not here and I’m talking to an empty chair.”
Purchase nodded. “That’s not impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely. You stood watches, last night, I presume. Anyway—I’m not a revolutionary. Never said I was. I’m an employee. I work for Steinfeld, while pretending to work for the SA, while pretending to work for Worldtalk. SA thinks I’m their man in Worldtalk; but I’m Steinfeld’s man in the SA. Only, I’m not a radical. Not unless it’s radical to want the United States to stay the United States. I’m a patriot—and I’m a mole, planted in Worldtalk. And I’m placed to keep an eye on the people who want to make the United States the Fascist States of America. Is that explicitly enough? Two days ago I got the Worldtalk memo about Mr. Kessler’s program. I happen to know that Steinfeld is working up something similar. He wants you with us. By God this is stupid. It’s cold in this dump. Do we have to go into this here? There’s a van upstairs, big and comfortable, right across the street. We’ll talk on the way.”
Kessler hesitated. Maybe he should still go to the ACLU.
But Charlie and Julie had insisted they had to go into hiding. “This Steinfeld will help me get my work back? My life?”
“He’ll help you. If you help him.”
Kessler took a deep breath, and nodded.
They went upstairs.
Part Three:
SWENSON
• 11 •
Ellen Mae Crandall stood at the head of the table, in Conference Room B, seventieth floor of the Worldtalk Building. It was an oblong table in an oblong room, a room with the usual imitation-wood-paneled walls and thick umber rug. There was just a trace of the shabbiness—a smutching of the transparent table, a fade in the color of walls and carpet—that such new places acquire after a remarkably short usage.
Sitting to her right, watching her without staring at her, John Swenson was thinking that Ellen Mae Crandall resembled her brother to an unfortunate degree. What were pleasingly masculine features on her brother were coarse on Ellen Mae. She had the heavy eyebrows; the deep, intense brown-black eyes; the wide, flashing grin showing a piano-keyboard spread of teeth, perfect and spotless, all the black keys missing…
Swenson smiled at the thought. There were no black keys in the Second Alliance. But some of the piano’s hammers were black. They used whoever they had to use.
Ellen Mae wore a black shirt-suit with a lacy white collar. She looked pale, and her eyes were sunken even deeper than usual.
Swenson, conscious of his youth and good looks and trying to de-emphasize them—the last thing he needed to contend with was envy-seeded suspicion—sat across from Colonel Watson.
The Colonel was one of those ageless outdoorsmen who might be as young as forty-five and as old as seventy—he was closer to the latter. His florid face, weathered by the tropical sun during a hundred campaigns to suppress black independence, was British resolute, and British classic. His smoky-blue eyes flickered up and down the table, filing reactions, attitudes, levels of competence. Swenson considered him the number two power in the SA.
Sitting beside Watson was corpulent, nervous Sackville-West, head of Internal Security, breathing noisily through his mouth, scribbling notes which he screened with one cupped, doughy hand, like a priggish schoolboy who suspected his neighbor of cheating on exams.