“Of course, I understand the problem you have with security,” the manager said, warming to the bargain. In the background Bahr could hear the first fragments of ’copter—chatter coming through—his own voice, directing the Unit Seven ’copters toward the strike area. “Still, we do have an obligation to our public to verify newscasts as thoroughly as we can.” Meaning that BRINT knew something was in the wind but hadn’t pinned it down yet. Bahr cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to McEwen and Carmine.
“BRINT wants in. Badly. They must have flushed Project Frisco and—”
He never finished the sentence. Quite suddenly McEwen clutched at his chest and moaned, his eyes bulging. His breath went ragged, his face turning blue.
“The chief!”
McEwen coughed, a strangled sound. Then his arms dropped and his body slumped back, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
“Get a doctor!” Bahr roared, slamming the phone down, the Canadian broadcast forgotten. “For Christ sake get a doctor!” He lifted McEwen onto the desk, stripped off his own jacket and put it over the director’s chest, felt quickly for a pulse.
A doctor arrived in a few minutes, but it was too late. McEwen was dead, diagnosis coronary occlusion precipitated by overwork and sudden shock.
As the white-coated ambulance attendant carried the stretcher out, Frank Carmine put a hand on Bahr’s shoulder. “Well, Julian,” he said, “it looks like it’s up to you, now.”
Chapter Four
Libby Allison, make-up pencil in hand, was trying ineffectually to smooth her dark red hair and paint her mouth back into shape as the small private elevator shot up from the lobby of the New York DEPEX building to DIA headquarters on the eightieth floor.
Julian was up there, she was certain of that, even though his office front-runner had denied it when she tried to contact him earlier. She should have known there was trouble in the wind when Julian didn’t call her when he got back into town last night. She had tried to call him after midnight, and had gotten Frank Carmine instead, pleasantly apologetic but pleasantly firm. No, nothing wrong, just a dozen top-level conferences since he’d gotten back to New York. He’d be in touch with her, she shouldn’t worry . . . .
But, of course, he hadn’t. Instead, there was a visit from Adams that morning in her office at DEPCO. Little, weasel-faced Adams, with his warm professional smile and his cold eyes watching her. Libby shuddered. Everything in her years of psychologist’s training screamed out whenever Adams came near her, and she had wished for the thousandth time that somehow somebody in the whole great, sprawling social-and-psychological Stability Control organization that was DEPCO would break down just once and say exactly what he was thinking in plain unadorned English instead of skirting and backing and filling and muddying up the already muddy waters with psychiatric jargon and fuzzy, suspicious, defensive little ideas.
Not that Adams had mentioned Julian, of course. Not a word about Julian. No request to review her case-work on him, no suggestion that a machine-analysis of her reports on him might be in order . . . nothing as straightforward as that from the DEPCO Director. Instead, a lot of smooth, innocent DEPCO jargon about the threat that an aggressive, unstable, ambitious personality in a position of responsibility presented to the smooth functioning of a Truly Stable Society (she could quote Vanner and Larchmont page and verse); some “thoughts” on her sworn duties as a Department of Control psychotherapist to help identify and weed out such unstable personalities before they could constitute a threat; some very vague and veiled and thoroughly nasty remarks to the effect that fornication and psychotherapy were not precisely synonymous and that the former could not really serve as an adequate substitute for the latter, no matter what the non-professional relationship of the therapist and the patient.
Adams hadn’t said a single word about Julian, but it was there; he had been talking about Julian every inch of the way, and he knew it, and she knew it, and he knew that she knew it.
She hadn’t slapped his face, but she had wanted to, and he knew that, too. There was no voiced threat when he had left her, only the least tangible of implications, and yet Libby knew beyond any shadow of doubt that something had happened last night, something bad, and that Adams knew about it, and hence DEPCO, and that neither Adams nor DEPCO liked it.
The elevator stopped, and Libby stepped across to the DIA reception desk. “I have an appointment to see Mr. Bahr,” she told the girl.
“Do you have a pass?”
“I have an appointment.”
“I’m sorry, Miss. Mr. Bahr has canceled all appointments. You’d need a special authorization.”
So there was something in the wind . . . all that commotion on the Foreign and Eastern news nets about an explosion at Wildwood. “Let me speak to him, then.” She picked up the desk phone, started to dial Julian’s extension.
“I’m sorry, Miss.” The receptionist gave Libby an innocent stare. “Mr. Bahr gave orders not to be interrupted.”
Libby reached into her handbag and set her white DEPCO card on the desk under the girl’s nose. “If I have to get a force-order to talk to him,” she said icily, “Mr. Bahr is going to be very unhappy about it.” She was surprised, and then irritated that Bahr had forgotten their appointment. No, not forgotten . . . his memory was very good. He had ignored it. A moment later the receptionist answered the switchboard, flushed, and nodded to Libby.
“Hello, Julian? Libby.” He answered something, quite abrupt. “But I can’t,” she protested. “Not over the phone. And it’s too hot down there anyway.” She pulled the receiver away from her ear and glanced angrily at the ceiling as the invective grated over the wire, quite audible ten feet away. “All right,” she said finally. “I know you don’t give a damn. On the other hand, I do. We don’t just skip appointments . . .” She put in the knife. “It looks very bad on a Stability Report, you know . . . .”
A moment later she put the phone down and snapped her handbag shut with finality. She smiled warmly at the receptionist. “He’ll see me,” she said.
The long, high-ceilinged DIA headquarters was the center of a storm of subdued but feverish activity. There were half a hundred men there as Libby passed through, and a haze of cigarette smoke rose in the room, sucked upward by the ventilators. Telephones buzzed sharply; at some of the desks men were handling two and three calls at a time, speaking in rapid, hushed voices. For all the activity there was an unnatural hush over the place; a bank of teletypes clattered along one wall, and a dozen unit-dispatchers were speaking into sound-dampened microphones.
Everywhere was a flurry of clerks, division heads, scribes, all so feverishly intent on what they were doing that they nearly tripped over her as she came down the corridor.
Across the dispatching room she could see a huge wall map, with red flags mounted for each DIA field unit alerted—the focal point for all the activity—and Libby felt a sudden sick, uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. There was an air of tension here, a sense of suppressed urgency that suddenly recalled to her the confused, puzzling nature of the morning TV-cast she had seen. A powder keg smoldering, with the DIA working full strength to keep it under control, working so silently and smoothly that no one else sensed it, while the whole country coasted along in its usual indifferent, video-hypnotized, confident, imperturbably stable way.
She had a mental picture, suddenly, of a calm ripple-free ocean surface, with monsters locked in some sort of leviathan death struggle just beneath the surface.