It was during a late evening work session about oil-a meeting in Nim's office with the company's Director of Fuel Supply, the Chief of Load Forecasting and two other department beads-that be received a telephone call having nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but which disturbed him greatly.
Victoria Davis, Nim's secretary, was also working late and buzzed from outside while the meeting was in progress.
Annoyed at the interruption, Nim picked up the telephone and answered curtly, "Yes?"
"Miss Karen Sloan is calling on line one," Vicki informed him. "I wouldn't have disturbed you, but she insisted it was important."
"Tell her . . ." Nim was about to say he would return the call later, or in the morning, then changed his mind. "Okay, I'll take it."
With an "Excuse me" to the others, he depressed a lighted button on the telephone. "Hello, Karen."
"Nimrod," Karen said without preliminaries, her voice sounding strained, "my father is in serious trouble. I'm calling to see if you can help."
"What kind of trouble?" Nim remembered that the night be and Karen went to the symphony she had said much the same thing, but without being specific.
"I made my mother tell me. Daddy wouldn't." Karen stopped; he sensed she was making an effort to regain composure, then she went on, "You know that my father has a small plumbing business."
"Yes." Nim recalled that Luther Sloan had talked about his business the day they all met in Karen's apartment. It was the day on which both parents later confided in Nim their burden of guilt about their quadriplegic daughter.
"Well," Karen said, "Daddy has been questioned several times by people from your company, Nimrod, and now by police detectives."
"Questioned about what?"
Again Karen hesitated before answering. "According to Mother, Daddy has been doing quite a lot of subcontracting for a company called Quayle Electrical and Gas. The work was on gas lines, something to do with lines going to meters."
Nim told her, "Tell me that company's name again."
"It's Quayle.' Does that mean something to you?"
"Yes, it means something," Nim said slowly as he thought: It looked, almost certainly, as if Luther Sloan was into theft of gas. Though Karen didn't know it, her phrase "lines going to meters" was a giveaway. That and the reference to Quayle Electrical and Gas Contracting, the big-scale power thieves already exposed and still being investigated by Harry London. What was it Harry reported only recently? “There's a bunch of new cases, as well as others developing from the Quayle inquiry." It sounded to Nim as if Luther Sloan might be among the "others."
The sudden news, the realization of what it implied, depressed him.
Assuming his guess to be correct, why had Karen's father done it? Probably for the usual reason, Nim thought: Money. Then it occurred to him that he could probably guess, too, what the money had been used for.
"Karen," he said, "if this is what I think, it is serious for your father and I'm not sure there's anything I'll be able to do." He was conscious of his subordinates in the room, waiting while he talked, trying to appear as if they were not listening.
"In any event, there's nothing I can do tonight," Nim said into the telephone. "But in the morning I'll find out what I can, then call you."
Realizing he might have sounded unusually formal, he went on to explain about the meeting in his office.
Karen was contrite. "Oh, I'm sorry, Nimrod! I shouldn't have bothered you."
"No," be assured her. "You can bother me anytime. And I'll do what I can tomorrow,"
As the discussion on oil supplies resumed, Nim attempted to concentrate on what was being said, but several times his thoughts wandered. He asked himself silently: Was life, which had thrown so many foul balls at Karen, in the process of delivering still one more?
13
Again and again, sometimes while sleeping, sometimes while awake, a memory haunted Georgos Winslow Archambault.
It was a memory from a long-ago summer's day in Minnesota, soon after Georgos' tenth birthday, During school holidays he I-lad gone to stay with a farming family-he had forgotten exactly why or bow-and a young son of the house and Georgos had gone ratting in an old barn. They killed several rats cruelly, using rakes with sharp prongs to spear them, and then one large rat became cornered. Georgos remembered the creature's gleaming, beady eyes as the two boys closed in. Then, in desperation, the rat sprang, leaping, sinking its teeth into the other boy's hand. The boy screamed. But the rat survived only seconds because Georgos swung his rake, knocking the creature to the floor, then slammed the prongs through its body.
For some reason, though, Georgos always remembered that rat's defiant gesture before its inevitable end. Now, in his North Castle hideaway, be felt a kinship with the rat.
It was almost eight weeks since Georgos had gone into hiding. In retrospect, the length of time surprised him. He had not expected to survive so long, especially after the outpouring of publicity, about himself and Friends of Freedom, which followed the Christopher Columbus Hotel bombing. Descriptions of Georgos had been widely circulated, and photos of him, found in the Crocker Street house, appeared in newspapers and on TV. He knew, from news reports, that a massive manhunt with himself as the objective had been mounted in the North Castle district and elsewhere. Daily since going underground Georgos had expected to be discovered, the apartment hideaway surrounded and invaded.
It hadn't happened.
At first, as the hours and days went by, Georgos' principal emotion was relief. Then, as the days extended into weeks, he began wondering if a rebirth of Friends of Freedom might be possible. Could be recruit more followers to replace the dead Wayde, Ute and Felix? Could be obtain money, locate an outside liaison who would become another Birdsong? Could they resume, once more, Georgos' war against the hated establishment enemy?
He had considered the idea, wistfully and dreamily, for several days. Then, facing the hardness of reality, he reluctantly abandoned it. There was no way. No way a revival of Friends of Freedom could happen and no way, either, that Georgos could survive. The past seven plus weeks had been an unexpected brief reprieve, a postponement of the inevitable; that was all.
Georgos knew he was near the end of the line.
He was being hunted by every law enforcement agency and would continue to be for as long as he lived. His name and face were known; his chemically stained hands had been described; it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere, recognized him. He was without resources or help, there was nowhere else to go, and-most critical of all -the money he had brought with him to the hideaway was almost gone. Therefore, capture was unavoidable-unless Georgos chose to anticipate it by ending his life defiantly, in his own way.
He intended to do exactly that.
Like the rat he remembered from his boyhood, he would make one last fighting gesture and, if necessary, die as he had lived, doing harm to the system he hated. Georgos had decided: He would blow up a critical part of a GSP & L generating station. There was a way it could be done to cause maximum effect and his plans were taking shape.
They were based on an attack be had intended to make-aided by other freedom fighters-before Davey Birdsong's idea of bombing the NEI convention intervened. Now Georgos was reviving the original plan, though he would have to execute it alone. He had already moved part way toward his objective by a daring risk he had taken on the same day he went into biding. The first thing Georgos realized that day, on reviewing his situation, was the need for transportation. He had to have wheels. He had abandoned the red "Fire Protection Service" truck because he could not have used it without being recognized, but a substitute was essential. To buy a vehicle of any kind was out of the question. For one thing, it was too risky. For another, he had insufficient money because the bulk of the Friends of Freedom cash reserve had been in the Crocker Street house. So the only possibility, Georgos reasoned, was to retrieve his Volkswagen van, which might, or might not, have been discovered by the pigs and be under surveillance.