She winked at us both, waited for the general to trip the door buzzer and left. "Crazy," I said.
"I never had that when I was young," the general muttered. "Now, Michael, I assume this is not a 'just happened to be in the neighborhood' call."
"Pure business, General."
"Our kind of business?"
"Right."
He flipped a set of switches on a control panel in front of him, then leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. "One more assumption . . . this has to do with the death in your office?"
The old guy was on the ball all right. "That's how it started."
"Okay, shoot," he said. "Tell it your own way."
I gave it to him in detail the way it opened up, setting the stage with the way I found Velda and the mutilated body of DiCica in my office. He knew about the note, but when I mentioned the name Penta, his lips pursed, he took his hands down and wrote out the name on a pad, then sat back and listened again. I ran the whole thing down for him without bothering to tail off into DiCica's initial role. Anything he could give me I wanted to point directly at the killer himself.
Halfway through, the buzzer sounded. Edwina came in with the coffee and Danish, put them down on the desk and went back out again. When we stirred the coffee up, the general nodded for me to continue.
I took him through the details Russell Graves had dug up, the data Ray Wilson had brought out of the computers and the events that led to Harry Bern and Gary Fells being mentioned as cadets the general had in his old unit.
When I finished, the general leaned on the desk and touched his fingertips together. "You're stirring up old memories, Michael. The names you mentioned, I know those people well. Carmody has always been a good career man. If you remember, he was the one who grabbed that bunch hijacking trucks last year. Ferguson spent his early years in the European sector. Speaks four languages, I understand. The last administration brought him to this area. Bennett Bradley was always a good man for State. He had the makings of an operative, you know, but too conservative. His forte, as I remember it, was political science. Too bad they're forcing retirement on him." He stood up, pushing his chair back. "However, before we get to Bern and Fells, let me have a brief consultation." He nodded toward a computer bank. "Want to watch?"
"Sure," I said. "Why not?"
This was the new battlefield now. Nothing dirty, no wild screams of terror or staccato noises of fast-firing guns. No sliding around in muck or taking high dives onto hard flats to get out of a field of crossfiring rifles. No knives or insidious poisons or wire garrotes nearly decapitating a human. Now it was quiet button-tapping sounds and lighted letters and numbers flashing on the screen, being rearranged, rechanneled for new information, positioning themselves into faraway circuits, then returning in seconds.
The general had entered his request for knowledge of the one called Penta. It was caught up in the wizardry of electronics and General Skubal sat back and let the machine take over. While it worked, he said to me, "In case you're interested . . ."
"General, I'm very interested."
"My so-called retirement was not for very long. The idiots who pulled me were dumped at the next election and I was reinstated right where I wanted to be . . . here, and at government expense. These machines are owned and serviced by federal funds and are state-of-the-art equipment. And believe me," he added, "the government is getting their money's worth . . . and I'm living doing what I can do best."
"Tell me, General, how secure are you here?" I looked around at the enormity of the project, knowing that this was the best of miniaturization.
He said, "There are eighty people billeted here. That placid landscape you saw outside is one huge deathtrap of a minefield, each charge being detonated electrically from inside here, or isolated to operate independently. With the electronic sensors we use, no dogs are necessary, no patrols needed, so we look indeed like a quiet retreat in the country."
"How about power?"
"There's a solar collector on the roof. Storage batteries can last two weeks at full power. Of course, this is in addition to regular power supplied by underground cable. Beneath the building is a deep well with reserves for fire-fighting supplies. Our food larder can last a month and if you're a drinking man, those needs are supplied too."
"That's a siege condition, General."
"Yes. But these days, you never know, do you? At least this is what we're protecting." His hand indicated his vast electronic battlefield.
Then the face of the screen that was blank lit up. The name Penta appeared, then the sketch story about the one who appeared as a will-o'-the-wisp on the world scene.
Penta meant nothing. It was a code name assigned by the CIA. There was no physical description. Penta's activities had been linked with the Stern Gang and the Red Brigade. His terrorist actions were noted by certain dictatorship governments, and it is suspected that he often worked on their behalf. Sixteen known assassinations were attributed to him, all of them with various forms of digital butchery done to the victims.
I said, "Digital butchery?"
"Newspeak for finger-chopping."
"Great."
"Interesting note here . . . Penta is suspected of being a mole in the NATO organization. He had to have inside information to accomplish several of his kills. No proof offered, but circumstantial evidence is hard. Now look at this."
Three CIA reports came on-screen with information compiled by Bennett Bradley. Twice he had almost cornered Penta when national police action of one foreign country stymied his move. The third time he was shot in the thigh by Penta and his quarry got away. There was a fourth item suggesting Bradley be removed from the assignment. Now I could understand his last-ditch attitude, wanting to grab Penta before his replacement got into the act.
The words stopped appearing. Two lines of dots went across the screen, then five groups of letters, six letters to a set, appeared, the last group flashing on and off regularly. The general grunted, took a key from his pocket and walked to a safe against the wall. He spun the dial three times, opened the thick door, then used the key on a box inside.
"What are the letters in the last group?"' he called out.
"R T V W Y," I called back.
He closed the box, put it back and slammed the safe shut. When he sat down again he punched a key and the screen went blank. "This Penta person is over here on one hell of a high-level assignment."
"To kill me, General?" Damn, it was starting again, right here.
"You worth killing?"
"Not to anybody I know."
"How about to somebody you don't know?"
I sat down and my teeth were grinding together. I took a couple of breaths, relaxed and looked at the old guy. There was knowledge and patience and wisdom sitting there, and somehow he knew what I was thinking and was trying to direct my own thoughts in a logical direction.
This was one direction that didn't allow for logic. I shook my head. "No way. You can't go through me and locate Penta. The road to that guy is through Bern and Fells. That's the connection. Those two are looking for Penta and if we can run them down, we can get inside the reasoning behind all this. There's a motive, General. It's good enough to kill and destroy for and when we have that, we have Penta."
"I can give you Fells and Bern," he said simply. "You familiar with their history?"
"Somewhat."
"Wild ducks, that pair. Unstable, adventuresome . . . after they left the service, they laid down a pretty greasy trail. Three different countries hired them for covert work and they did a damn good job for them. Libya was their last employer."