Riley went to bat for him, but DEPCO was immovable. Bahr did not go to Commissioned Officer’s School.
He swallowed the first blow, even though he realized intuitively that he had gone as far as he could go as a noncom in his first two years at Riley, and was not satisfied to stop there. The second blow was even more unexpected. Revised placement tests, again sifted through the DEPCO filters, pulled him from guerrilla-training status. He had blundered unknowingly in the tests; he had tried too hard and done too well, and particularly scored unusually high in electronics and mathematics aptitude sections. The DEPCO sorter, looking for candidates in these priority scientific fields, dropped his card in the hopper, and he, of all Riley graduates, was assigned to Communications Command and sent to Antarctica.
His appeal was immediate, vehement, and futile. Even BRINT, which had been following his career at Riley with interest, was unsuccessful in its subtle efforts to alter the assignment. With the new upgrading of the social sciences resulting from the Vanner-Elling innovations, and the witchhunts against physical scientists and technical people during the crash years, there was an urgent demand for any talent available. And with the signing of the Yangtze semi-truce, guerrilla activities were unpopular. Communications priority was high.
Bahr’s tenure in Antarctica, terminating with his court-martial from the Army at twenty-nine, had seemed to him like the first spadeful of dirt dumped back into the grave he had been digging himself out of all his life. He had taken his new civilian green-card assignment as a maintenance man and wire-jockey in the DEPOP computer center with apathetic resignation, burying old memories and bitternesses under a pile of empty whiskey bottles and long moody silences. Maybe Libby Allison might have broken through the apathy eventually, but even she had almost given up when the past, like the proverbial penny, turned up in the form of Frank Carmine.
Carmine had been a year ahead of Bahr at Riley, and with many other veterans of the 801st, had wound up in DIA after his ten-year tour. McEwen, founder and director of DIA, was looking for a man to keep his field units co-ordinated and working under pressure; he advertised his desires to some of the new people, hoping they might know somebody from the 801st or BRINT who could fill the bill. There were a few reticent suggestions; then one of the veterans of Baker Three said wistfully, “What we really need is a man like Julie Bahr to light a fire under this outfit!”
Carmine was assigned the task of locating and approaching Bahr. Bahr knew little about DIA, but the appeal of the old camaraderie, and the opportunities for control and power rang a bell. With the reorganization of the field units that he demanded, and his political jockeying to get his friends into key positions, Bahr soon began to exert much more power under McEwen than the organizational charts credited him.
McEwen recognized the man’s voracious ambition quite early; he realized that Bahr was, eventually, after his job. Soon McEwen could not sleep, his eyes became sunken and bloodshot, his mind wandered, he complained bitterly to his underlings about anything and everything except Julian Bahr. He took vacations, came in to work late, overslept, muddled and whined, and retreated further and further into himself, with the inevitable result that he was forced, irresistibly, to depend more and more on Bahr to keep his organization running. McEwen feared him, but he did not stop him.
And if Bahr ever realized that it was he who was forcing the change in McEwen, he never showed it. He worked with people, with groups, with scattered individuals. As his power increased, imperceptibly, he found people who were eager, willing, desperate to help him, people who wanted his friendship, who sought his influence, who surrendered their confidences to him, and moved in to his side in loyalty that bordered on blind devotion. In a world of unstable personal relationships and obviously cardboard leader figures—senators, congressmen, and especially chief executives who were put in office chiefly on the basis of appeal, good looks, friendliness and the knack of projecting “sincerity” through the TVs—the segment who wanted someone powerful and confident to identify with gravitated their affections, fixations, and complexes on men like Bahr.
The true extent of his personal contacts probably was not known even to Bahr. People who said they hated him, or ridiculed him, or distrusted him, went out of their way consciously or unconsciously to help him. Rumor was that he had contacts, friends and informants in the fringe-underworld, in BURINF, in BRINT, even in the KMs, and that within DIA itself he had a private power-group of former Riley men who held their grim loyalty to him above dieir contracts, oaths, or national obligations.
Of all these dependables the most loyal, the most devoted, the most unswerving of legmen was Frank Carmine.
Which was why, when Bahr found a discontinuity in his space-plan, coming unexplained and unheralded from a source that would have seemed least suspect, he did not surround himself with other DIA subordinates who were close to him.
It was not by accident that he had not been notified of Harvey Alexander’s capture. And if Carmine could defect . . . .
He moved alone, slit-eyed, the Volta speeding through the vague shallow fogginess of the Jersey flatlands, his mind unraveling threads of contacts, relationships, and attitudes, probing for a motive, preparing himself to inflict the necessary, just, inevitable punishment upon the errant who stood in his way.
The first stop was a southwestern Newark suburb near the Newark Jetfield. Bahr drove into a shabby housing development, parked near the lobby of the main building, hurried inside to the elevator.
The building was silent, the halls dimmed down, the carpet quiet to his footsteps. He picked a door, checked the number, and rang. Inside, some stirring sounds and a muffled answer. A moment later the door opened into a black room, and a brooding, questioning silence yawned at him.
“Julie?”
Bahr stepped into the room, swung the door quietly shut behind him. “Chard? A job. I need help. Are you with me?”
A hand tapped his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. “In a minute, soon’s I get dressed. Say, honey, this is . . . .”
“Better keep her out of it,” Bahr said.
“Oh.”
The man dressed quickly in the darkness, and soon he and Bahr were in the Volta, picking their way through the apparently endless tiers of housing developments, then out on a road strip and into the dark, hostile, run-down fringe area,
still dotted with last-century buildings, that had once been Elizabeth.
“You’ve worked with Stash Kocek before,” Bahr said.
“The nervous one? Yeah. But he makes me . . . you know . . . .”
“I hope he’s in,” Bahr said. “I didn’t call ahead.” He stopped the Volta, motioned Chard to stay inside, and walked across the street to the rooming house that was Kocek’s current residence. He went up two flights of stairs quietly, down the hall, and paused in front of the door with the ribbon of light showing under it.
Bahr tapped a pattern on the door and the light went out instantly. In a minute the door opened a crack. “Bahr?”
“Yes. A job.”
The dimmer went up a little, and a thin, weasel face looked out at him, the eyes dark-circled slits. “Jesus, Bahr . . . .”
“You on that stuff again?”
Kocek shrugged. “What’ll I need?”
“A stunner. Two. Chard’s working with us.”
There was a flash of hostility on Kocek’s face, then resignation. “No stunner.”
“What do you mean?” Bahr said, sudden anger rising. “If you sold that stunner . . . .”
“I’ll get it back, Jule, I just hocked it today, I’ll get it back. I needed some credits fast . . . .”