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"Did the technicians at Fort Derrick come up with anything?"

His eyes gave me an unrelenting stare.

"Come on, Pat. There's nothing really new about our chemical-biological warfare program being centered there."

"What could they come up with?" he asked me softly.

"Like nuclear physics, problems and solutions seem to be arrived at simultaneously. When that agent was planted here that bacteriological program would have been developed to a certain point. Now it's twenty-some years later, so they should be able to guess at what he had as a destructive force."

"Nice," Pat said. "You're thinking. They can make a few educated guesses, all right, but even back then, what was available was incredibly destructive. Luckily, they worked on antibiotics, vaccines and the like at the same time so they could probably avoid total contamination with a crash immunization program."

I looked at him and grinned. "Except that there isn't enough time to go into mass production of the stuff."

Pat didn't answer me.

"That means only a preselected group would be given immunization and who will that group consist of ... the technicians who have it at hand, a power squad who can take it away from them, or selection by the democratic method of polls and votes?"

"You know what it means," Pat said.

"Sure. Instant panic, revolution, everything gets smashed in the process and nobody gets a thing."

"What would you do, Mike?"

I grinned at him again. "Oh, round up a few hundred assorted styles of females, a couple of obstetricians, a few male friends to share the pleasure and to split the drinks, squirt up with antibiotics and move to a nice warm island someplace and start the world going again."

"I never should have asked," Pat said with a tired laugh. "At least now I'll be able to get some sleep knowing the problem has been solved." He yawned elaborately, then stifled it. "Unless you got another one."

"Just one. Did ballistics get anything on those shots in Lippy's apartment?"

Pat moved a coffee cup aside and tugged out a stained typewritten sheet of paper. "They dug a .38 slug out of the floor. The ejected cartridge was a few feet away. The ring bands on the lead were well defined so it was either a new piece or an old gun with a fresh barrel. My guess would be a Colt automatic."

"You check the sales from local outlets?"

"Peterson did. Everything turned up clean since the new law in the state went into effect, but prior to that there were thousands of sales made outside the state that would be almost impossible to run down. Anybody intending to use a gun illegally is going to be pretty cagy about it,

especially buying one through a legitimate source. I wouldn't pin any hopes on tracking that job down unless you locate the gun itself. Or have you?"

"Not yet."

"I wish I had the time or inclination to nail your pants to a chair," Pat said. "Right now I couldn't care less. Incidentally," he added, "I might as well give you a little fatherly advice. Although several people in rather high places who seem to know you pretty well have vouched for your so-called integrity, the skeptics from the bureaus in D.C. decided a little surveillance wouldn't hurt. They didn't like the contact between you and Eddie Dandy this morning."

"I didn't have any tail on me."

"Eddie did. He works in a more sensitive area than you do. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if he went into custody until this thing was over."

"They wouldn't be that stupid."

"Like hell they wouldn't. He tell you about that business in Kansas City?"

"He mentioned it."

"Plain luck we stopped it this time."

"It'll get a lot stickier if anybody really wants to get Inquisitive," I said. "How about some lunch?"

"Thanks, but I'm too bushed. I'm grabbing some sleep. Tonight I got a detail covering the reception at that new delegation building they just opened. The Soviets and their satellite buddies are throwing a bash and everybody's got visions of fire bombs and bullets dancing through their heads."

"Crazy," I said. "Can I use your phone?"

"Go ahead."

I dialed my office number, waited for the automatic signal, held the tone gimmick up to the mouthpiece and triggered it. Four faint musical bleeps came out, there was a pause and a voice with a laugh hidden in it said, "Please, Mr. Tape Recorder, inform your master that his cultivator is available for an afternoon drink. He has the office phone number."

I felt myself grinning and hung up. "Has to be a broad," Pat said. "It has to."

"It was," I told him.

"Just how many broads you figure you collect any given month, pal?"

"Let's put it this way," I said. "I throw away more than most guys get to see."

Pat wrinkled his face and waved for me to get the hell away from him. Some perennial bachelors are different from others.

The bar at Finero's Steak House was packed three deep with a noisy crowd fighting the martini-Manhattan war, the combatants armed with stemmed glasses and resonant junior-executive voices. A scattering of women held down the barstools, deliberately spaced out to give the stags room to operate, knowing they were the objects of attention and the possible prizes. The one on the end was nearly obscured by the cluster of trim young men jockeying for position, but for some reason the back of her head and the way her hair tumbled around her shoulders was strangely familiar to me. She swung around to say something and laugh at the one behind her who was holding out a lighter to fire up her cigarette when her eyes reached out between the covey of shoulders and touched mine.

And Heidi Anders smiled and I smiled back.

The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant there was something in their faces that didn't belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know.

Could.

From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of.

So I made a little wave with my forefinger and Heidi Anders said something to her entourage, put her glass down on the bar and came to me through the path they opened for her and when she reached me said, "Thank you, Mike."

"For what?"

"Yelling at me. I looked in the mirror. It's worse than the camera. It tells you the truth without benefit of soft lighting, makeup men and development techniques."

"Sugar," I asked her, "when did you last pop one?"

"You were there."

"And it was cold turkey all the way? Kid, you sure don't look like you're in withdrawal."

A flash of annoyance tugged at her eyes and that beautiful mouth tightened slightly. "I had help, big man. I went for it right after you left. Dr. Vance Alien. You've heard of him?"

I nodded and studied her. Vance Alien wasn't new to me. He was a longtimer in the field of narcotic rehabilitation. Some of his measures were extreme and some not yet accepted into general practice, but his results had been extremely significant.

"Hurt any?"

"At first. You're looking at an experiment with a new medication. In a way I'm lucky. I wasn't hooked as badly as you thought."

"Who put you on it?"

"That's one of those things I'd rather not talk about. In time it will be taken care of. Meanwhile, I'm working at being unhooked."

I shook my head and looked past her. "Not yet. Right now you're nibbling at another line."