The man stopped typing in midsentence, staring up in alarm, because Alexander had slouched into the place with the shifty, cautious manner of his Mexican cover identity. Now suddenly he stiffened and barked out his orders in the voice of a very tough and very impatient CI lieutenant.
The man hardly looked at the card. “I . . . I . . . we don’t have that information here, Lieutenant.”
“You have it,” Alexander said, stepping past him to the files and yanking the first drawer open.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . Ill look.” The man fell over himself to get to the files. “The filing system is . . . er . . . kind of complicated . . . special . . . with the company . . . .”
“You use alphabetical chronological,” Alexander said, “or else you’ll have misfiling charges to answer for.”
“Maybe it’s in the other cabinet. I’ll look in the other cabinet,” the man stammered. It might have been a stall, but the man seemed genuinely scared.
“You’d better find it if you don’t want to log some poly time,” Alexander said. “We might throw in a few questions about where you get the Playschool contraband over there. That’s you; that’s not Magdisco.” Unregistered contraband and interfering with the Playschool conditioning programs could mean recoop and very probably a new identity in a labor battalion. The man fairly tore into the files while Alexander ransacked his desk, pulled out a much-thumbed copy of Playschool Champ, a standard authorized porno that had been written ten years ago when such things were sensational rather than commonplace everyday fact. The writing, by one of the best BURINF copywriters, had been inspired virtuosity, and the book, widely distributed, had entered into the thinking of the public and paved the way for the family-disassociation theories of the Playschools.
“There’s nothing here,” the man said, dusty from the files.
“Let’s have a copy of the book,” Alexander said.
“They’re all sold out. They’ve been sold out for months.”
“You’re lying,” Alexander said. “You wouldn’t be out of anything that’s selling that fast.” He saw the man look around wildly, ready to make a break, and he moved in fast, clamping a wristlock on him.
“I don’t have any. Please! I don’t have any . . .” Alexander jerked his arm, and he twisted and groaned, and then said, “Okay, okay . . . .”
“Fast,” Alexander said.
“I was just told not to give any to investigators, that’s all.
I just had orders,” the man whimpered, pulling a book out from beneath a stack of glossies. The cover was a masterpiece of the art, the tide fairly screaming out Alien Invaders: How Soon? The byline was Diff Rarrel, the imprint Squid Pubs.
“Listen, you won’t tell anybody I gave it to you, huh? Just say you found it here. I just get orders, that’s all.”
“Who gave you the orders?” Alexander said, dropping the book in his pocket. The man didn’t answer. “They don’t publish anything like this in Squid. They just do glossies and comics. Who was the source publisher?”
The man made a break for the door. Alexander thrust out a foot, tripped him, and fell on him hard. He pulled the man’s arm up behind him, and then noticed the small variously aged scars and realized what caused the desperate silence. Whoever was supplying him was also giving the orders.
Alexander stabbed in the dark. Drug traffic took size and power. Only one publishing house had that kind of power, and the ruthlessness to go with it. “Was it Colossus Books?”
The man just groaned as his shoulder ligaments began to tear a little more.
“We can find out under a poly . . . .”
The fight went out of the man, and he started blubbering. Alexander hacked him sharply across the neck, left him unconscious on the floor and made his way down the narrow steps. It was Colossus that the book came from, the same as Playschool Champ had ten years before.
At the street level his old Qualchi experience made him cautious; he covered the street quickly with a glance, then walked with a swift, shambling pace toward the man-strip at the corner.
When he had gone ten paces he knew he was right. All the fumbling at the files had been a stall after all; there was a two-wheeler moving slowly down the street a hundred yards behind him, with two men in it.
Still sweating from the physical workout upstairs, his heart pounding in his throat, Alexander was pretty sure he could handle two men if they didn’t use stunners. He estimated the distance to the man-strip, and decided that they wouldn’t dare use stunners with all the traffic on the street, so he didn’t rush.
He felt a little sick; every step took him farther from the law, deeper into violence. He hadn’t physically attacked a man for years, and he had thought that he never would again. But then he realized he was fighting now, fighting for his life, and he felt a wave of elation drive the sickness away. Odd that even with the car following slowly behind him he felt safe, as safe as a man fleeing recoop could feel. But he was also puzzled.
Were the stalkers DIA men?
Aliens?
Who?
Chapter Ten
It was a dodging, running game, trying to shake a tail in a crowded city when he didn’t know how many of them there were, nor who they were, nor what they wanted. The alarm had been out for him on open police channels for eighteen hours, he was certain, and on public broadcasts for at least six. But DIA did not normally stalk their prey, particularly in a city where there was a large field office and plenty of local support. They moved fast, struck hard, and disappeared with their quarry.
Alexander tried to think clearly, to recall some past association with St. Louis that might afford cover at least for a while. It was the desperateness, the hopelessness that probably did it, dredging up from the past all the cunning and energy of his Qualchi days, when he had played the nerve-racking game of dodging and hiding without using any of the standard devices so the Qualchi would not realize that he was outrunning them.
Bombardment was the technique he had used then. He didn’t know if it was used by DIA or BRINT; he had gotten the idea from some super-slow cloud chamber movies he had watched in his Army training. The idea was simple: to start branching trails so the pursuit would become confused as to whether to stick with him alone or follow the other trails as well.
He set up a couple of dummy branches first. He stopped in a mylebar dealer’s and bought a raincoat and hat, then into a bookstore, haggled with the book dealer for a while and gave him the book back, but only after tucking the receipt for the raincoat into the book.
Then he took a whirler up a few blocks, detoured through a mag stand dealing in second-hand mags, into a urinal, then out again when the vendor was busy, ducking quickly around a comer. He ripped open the package with the raincoat and hat, slipped the coat on, pulled the hat low, and walked off at right angles with a couple of late-lunching business men. He stepped into a movie house, and right out a side exit, raced down the side alley, slipping out of the raincoat and hat and jettisoning them in a trash can. He jerked his jacket off, even though it was a little cool, and mingled with a knot of people on a man-strip, carrying his jacket and faking a conversation with a dumpy housewife.
The next stop was real, a hotel lobby. He flashed a half-credit note at a very young bellhop.
“Blonde or brunette?”
“Information,” Alexander said. The boy stiffened, his hand dropping too quickly into his pocket. Alexander felt a little glow of satisfaction. He could always spot a KM contact. He knew what was in the pocket, too. He let a little more of the half-credit note show. “I want a KM cutout man.”