Jessup stared at him icily. "Do you expect me to consider that a serious question?"
Vince shrugged. "No, I guess not. We both know the answer. It's happened many times, too many to count, but this time it's a friend of yours who did it, a megalomaniac who was gratifying some pretty dark impulses. You may see a difference in terms of morality, but I don't."
"Vince, lay off," said Sammy. It was his turn to look unhappy, for Vince had said the m-word. You don't use a word like morality around people like Jessup and Delaney. For diversion, Sammy rushed into the breach. "Mr. Jessup, what intrigues me most about these assignments is the apparently random nature in which they were made-an unknown girl, an obscure comedian, a tiny college, a run-down rooming house. Do you have any idea how Ogden chose these targets?"
"Not at the moment. We're working on that."
"Any connection between them?"
"Apparently not, but we're working on that, too. Yes?"
Martha had several questions. "What we have here are a set of handwritten notes. Are they copies? Are they memory aids? Were they ever processed? Were the instructions issued orally? Do you know if they were ever actually issued at all?"
"Good questions, all of them, but I can only answer one of them with certainty. These assignments were never processed through any Agency machine, or by Agency personnel. As for the rest of it, we simply do not know, but when it comes to assumptions, we have no choice. We have to assume that the assignments were made, one way or the other. We have to assume that these projects are already in motion."
"What about the time frame?" asked Snake. "Everything goes down between the last day of February and the fourth day of March. Is there any reason for that?"
"Not that we know of." Jessup hesitated. "However, I have a theory of my own. I think that David miscalculated how long he was going to live. Conceding that he was out of his mind, still every madness contains its own interior logic. I think that David wanted his symbols, his sacrifices, waiting for him when he arrived to begin what he called his long, dark journey. He wanted everything to be in place by a certain time."
"But they weren't waiting. There are still two weeks to go."
"As I said, he miscalculated. At least, that's the way I see it. Any other questions?"
"Yeah, one," said Vince. "What's in the right-hand compartment of that box? All we've seen is the left side."
"Nothing important. Some of Ogden 's private papers."
"Could you be more explicit?"
"I'm afraid not. As I said, they're private, and they don't concern us here."
"By private, do you mean intimate?"
"Well… yes."
Vince sighed. "Sammy, do you want to do this, or should I?"
"Go ahead," said Sammy. "Just try to do it without insulting anybody. "
"Not so easy." Vince stood up. He towered. "Mr. Jessup, I don't know yet why you're here, but it's pretty clear that you're going to ask us to do something for you. Which means that sometime soon my ass is going to be on the line because of you. Now I'm not about to risk it without knowing what I'm walking into. You can't feed me half a loaf of information. I have to know everything. And if I haven't made myself clear enough, if you refuse to tell me what's in that compartment I can get the information out of your head in thirty seconds flat."
Vince sat down. Sammy muttered, "Smooth, real smooth. Very diplomatic."
"Yeah, I got the touch."
Jessup's face was set into hard lines. "Very well, since you put it that way. The compartment contains five large envelopes, and each envelope contains… mementoes… of David's relationship with a particular woman. Five women in all." He went on to detail the contents of the envelopes, and he gave us the names of the women: Sarah Brine, Jenny Cookson, Carla MacAlester, Vivian Livingstone, and Maria-Teresa Bonfiglia. He was clearly uncomfortable. When he was finished, he said stiffly, "Does that satisfy your curiosity?"
"For the moment," said Vince. "One more point. Gibraltar Rules. What does that mean?"
Jessup looked surprised. "No contact, no recall, of course."
Delaney, who knew how little attention we paid to formal procedures, said, "Alex, perhaps you'd best explain."
Jessup said patiently, "Under Gibraltar Rules, there is no contact between Control and Field once the assignment is made, and there is no possibility of recall. None at all."
"Are you saying that even if you knew the names of these agents, you couldn't call them off the job?"
"Exactly. Under Gibraltar Rules, the Field is required to ignore any and all orders for recall. Once the project is rolling, it cannot be stopped."
"For how long?"
"For the period of the time frame. Once the time frame expires, the assignment expires as well."
"A five-day frame," Delaney pointed out. "Starting less than two weeks from now."
"Jesus."
I don't know who said it. Maybe we all did. There was silence in the room as the facts sank in. Somewhere out there were four unknown field agents, highly trained and supplied with funds, loyal to the memory of a madman, committed to a series of crimes in his name… and beyond recall.
I could see it coming, and so could the others. Not for the first time, we were going to be asked to pull some Agency chestnuts out of the fire, and what irritated me most was that there was no real need for us to be involved at all. There was a simple course of action for Jessup to follow. Take Lila Simms and Calvin Weiss out of circulation for the period of the time frame by stashing them each in a safe house. Warn the coaches of both college teams, and kill any chance of a fix on the game. As for the rooming house in Florida, request a round-the-clock watch on the property by the local fire department. It was as simple as that. It was, after all, for a period of only five days. The assignments would expire when the time frame expired, and everything would return to normal.
The trouble was, it was too simple. If he played it that way, Jessup would have to tell both Weiss and Simms why they were being protected. He would have to tell both of the coaches, and he would have to tell the people in Florida. Equally distasteful, he would have to bring in squads of Agency people, each of whom would have to know at least a piece of the picture. Cover stories could be concocted, good stories prepared by master deceivers, but the Agency lived in a goldfish bowl these days, and there was always the risk that the cover would fail.
It was a risk that Jessup was unwilling to take, and just the thought of it had frozen his guts with fear. When he and Delaney spoke to us about averting a tragedy, they weren't talking about murder, or arson, or rape. They were talking about public relations and image building. To them, the real tragedy would be if the word got out that the DDO, before he died, had ordered up a series of horrors on a mad caprice. In their worst-case scenario they could see it all laid out on the eleven o'clock news. That, to them, meant true tragedy.
So they were handing it over to us, and that in itself showed how little they knew about sensitives. Either, like Jessup, they thought of us as tricksters, or they jumped to the other extreme by investing us with powers that existed only in their imaginations. If you were to listen to some of the stories that they told around the water coolers up at Langley they'd have you believing that an ace could read minds in the Kremlin from a thousand miles away, lift a two-ton truck by sheer willpower, and think himself from Kansas City to San Diego in the blink of an eye. It was all nonsense, born out of ignorance. A sensitive, because of his neurological imbalance, is highly receptive to the thoughts and emotions of others. He can hear those thoughts as if they were spoken. That is all he can do, and he can do it at a range of two hundred feet at the most. All the rest of the talk is wishful thinking. Delaney knew that, but Jessup didn't. Jessup had started out thinking of us as tricksters, and now, in his desperation, he had decided that we were demigods, and the answer to his prayers. It would have done us no good at all to tell him that we were neither.