Tal nodded his head and remained deep in thought. “Exactly as one might expect. Rafar knows no frontal attack will work; he’s trying his evil hand at subtlety, at moral compromise.”
“And succeeding, I say!”
“Yes, I agree.”
“But what can we do? If Hogan loses his family, he’ll be destroyed!”
“No. Not destroyed. Knocked down, perhaps. Decimated, perhaps. But it’s all because of the dross in his own soul, which the Spirit of God has yet to convict him of. We can do nothing but wait and let all things take their course.”
Nathan could only shake his head in frustration. Guilo stood nearby, pondering Tal’s words. Of course what Tal said was true. Men will sin if men will.
“Captain,” Guilo said, “what if Hogan falls?”
Tal leaned back against the dank metal wall and said, “We can’t be concerned with the question of ‘if.’ The question we must deal with is ‘when.’ Both Hogan and Busche are now laying the foundation we need for this battle. Once that’s done, Hogan as well as Busche must fall. Only their clear defeat will coax the Strongman out of hiding.”
Guilo and Nathan both looked at Tal with consternation.
“You—you would sacrifice these men?” Nathan asked.
“Only for a season,” Tal answered.
MARSHALL BROUGHT OUT Ernie Johnson’s large packet of pirated records from the Whitmore College accounting office and handed them across the Clarion’s reception counter to Harvey Cole. Cole was a CPA Marshall knew well enough to trust.
“I don’t know what you’ll be able to make of all this,” said Marshall, “but see if you can find whatever Johnson found, and see if it looks crooked.”
“Wow!” said Harvey. “This is going to cost you!”
“I’ll swap you some free advertising. How about that?”
Harvey smiled. “Sounds fine. Okay, I’ll get to it and get back to you.”
“A.S.A.P.”
Harvey went out the door and Marshall returned to his office, rejoining Bernice in their evening, after-hours project.
They were working amid a flurry of notes, papers, phone books, and any other public records they could get their hands on. In the middle of it all, a consolidated list of names, addresses, jobs, and tax records was forming piece by piece.
Marshall looked over his notes from his interview with Harmel. “Okay, what about that judge, what’s-his-name, Jefferson?”
“Anthony C.,” Bernice replied, flipping through last year’s phone book. “Yeah, Anthony C. Jefferson, 221 Alder Street.” She immediately went to her scrawled notes from the Top of the Town Realty. “221 Alder …” Her eyes scanned one sheet in her notebook, then another, until finally, “Bingo!”
“Another one!”
“So check me out on this: Jefferson was bumped by the Network and Omni came in and bought his house?”
Marshall scribbled some reminder notes to himself on a yellow legal pad. “I’d like to know why Jefferson moved and how much he sold that house for. I’d also like to know who’s living there now.”
Bernice shrugged. “We’ll just have to go down the list and check all these Network people’s addresses. I’ll lay you odds it’s one of them.”
“What about Baker, the judge who replaced Jefferson?”
Bernice looked at another list. “No, Baker’s over in the house that used to belong to the high school principal, uh, Waller, George Waller.”
“Oh yeah, he’s the one who lost his house in the sheriff sale.”
“Oh, there are a lot of those, and I’ll bet we might find more if we knew where to look.”
“We’ll have to snoop around the County Finance Office. Somehow, some way, those people’s property taxes never got to where they were supposed to go. I can’t believe this many people would be delinquent on their taxes.”
“Someone diverted the money so the taxes were never paid. It’s dirty, Hogan, just plain dirty.”
“It wasn’t Lew Gregory, the old comptroller. Look at this. He had to resign because of some conflict of interest rap. Now Irving Pierce is in, and he’s Omni-owned, right?”
“You got it.”
“And what was that you had on Mayor Steen?”
Bernice consulted her notes, but shook her head. “He just recently bought his house; the deal looks legitimate except for the previous owner being the former police chief who left town for no apparent reason. It might mean something, it might not. It’s what happened to all those other people that has me wondering.”
“Yeah, and why none of them ever squawked or made a fuss about it. Hey, I wouldn’t let the county just come in and auction off my house right out from under me, not without asking at least a few questions. There’s something else about this that we don’t know.”
“Well, think about the Carluccis. Did you know their house sold to Omni for $5,000? That’s ridiculous!”
“And the Carluccis went poof! Gone, just like that!”
“So I wonder who’s living in their house now?”
“Maybe the new high school principal, or the new fire marshal, or a new city councilman, or a new this or a new that!”
“Or one of the new college regents.”
Marshall scrambled for some more papers. “Boy, what a mess!” He finally found the list he was looking for. “Let’s go through those regents and see what we come up with.”
Bernice flipped through a few pages in her notebook. “I know for sure that Pinckston’s place is owned by Omni. Some kind of trust arrangement.”
“What about Eugene Baylor?”
“Don’t you have that somewhere?”
“One of us does, but now I can’t remember who.”
They both fumbled through their notes, papers, lists. Marshall finally found it among his scattered leaves.
“Here it is. Eugene Baylor, 1024 SW 147th.”
“Oh, I think I saw that here somewhere.” Bernice perused her notes. “Yes, Omni owns that too.”
“Sheesh! Deeding everything over to Omni Corporation must be a requirement for membership.”
“Well, that makes Young and Brummel card-carrying members. It makes sense, though. If they all want to meld into one Universal Mind, they have to do away with individuality, and that means no private ownership.”
One by one, Marshall read off the names of the college regents, and Bernice researched their addresses. Of the twelve regents, eight were living in homes owned by Omni Corporation. The others rented apartments; one of the apartment buildings was owned by Omni. Bernice had no information on the other apartment buildings.
“I think we’ve ruled out coincidence,” said Marshall.
“And now I can’t wait to hear what your friend Lemley has to say.”
“Sure, that Kaseph and Omni Corporation are linked. That’s obvious.” Marshall took just a moment to ponder. “But you know what really scares me? So far, everything we see here is legal. I’m sure they’ve been crooked somewhere to get where they are, but you can see they’re working within the system, or at least doing a very good job of looking like it.”
“But come on, Marshall! He’s taking over a whole town, for crying out loud!”
“And he’s doing it legally. Don’t forget that.”
“But he must leave some tracks somewhere. We’ve been able to sniff him out at least this far.”
Marshall took a deep breath and then sighed it out. “Well, we can try to track down every person who sold out and left town, try to find out why it happened. We can check into what positions they held before they left and who holds that position now. Whoever holds the position now can be asked what connection he or she has with Omni Corporation or with this Universal Consciousness mind-tripping group. We can ask each and every one of them what they might know about the elusive Mr. Kaseph. We can do some more research on the Omni Corporation itself, find out where it’s based, what it deals in, what else it owns. We have our work cut out for us. And then I guess it’ll be time to go directly
to our friends with what we know and get a response from them.”
Bernice could feel something coming across in Marshall’s manner. “What’s bothering you, Marshall?”
Marshall tossed his notes on the desk and leaned back in his chair to ponder. “Bernie, we’d be fools to think we’re immune to any of this.”
Bernice gave a resigned nod. “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about it, wondering what they might try.”
“I think they already have my daughter.” It was a blunt statement. Marshall himself was shocked at the sound of it.
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“If I don’t know that, I don’t know anything.”
“But what kind of real power could they wield except economic and political? I don’t buy all this cosmic, spiritual stuff; it’s nothing but a mind trip.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not religious.”
“You’ll find it’s a lot easier.”
“So what if we end up like—like Harmel, no family left, just hiding in the bushes and talking about … spooks?”
“I wouldn’t mind ending up like Strachan. He seems comfortable enough just being out of this whole thing.”
“Well, Bernie, even so, we’d better see it coming before it gets here.” He grabbed her hand in earnest and said to her, “I hope we both know what we’re getting ourselves into. We may be in too deep already. We could quit, I suppose …”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“I know I can’t. I’m not putting any expectations on you. You can get out now, go somewhere else, work for some ladies’ journal or something. I won’t mind.”
She smiled at him and held his hand tightly. “Die all, die merrily.”
Marshall only shook his head and smiled in return.
CHAPTER 22
IN ANOTHER STATE, in a low-income section of another town, a little panel truck weaved its way down a kid-cluttered street through a housing project. All the little duplexes, except for different color schemes, came from the same mold. As the truck pulled to a stop at the end of an aging asphalt cul-de-sac, “Princess Cleaners” could be seen printed on its side.
The driver, a young lady in blue overalls, her hair in a red scarf, got out. She opened the side door and pulled out a large laundry bundle and some bag-draped dresses on hangers. Rechecking the address, she made her way up one walk to one particular door and rang the bell.
First the curtain of the front window pulled to the side for a moment, and then there were footsteps toward the door. The door opened.
“Hi, got some cleaning here,” said the young lady.
Oh, yes …” said the man who answered the door. “Just bring it in.”
He opened the door wider so she could make her way into the house as three children tried to keep out of her path despite their great curiosity.
The man called to his wife, “Honey, the cleaning lady is here.”
She came in from the small kitchen, looking tense and nervous. “You children go outside and play,” she ordered.
They whined a bit, but she herded them out the door, closed it, then drew shut the one window that still remained open.
“Where’d you get all this laundry?” the man asked.
“It was in the truck. I don’t know who it belongs to.”
The man, a heavyset Italian with graying curly hair, offered his hand. “Joe Carlucci.”
The young lady set down the laundry and shook his hand. “Bernice Krueger from the Clarion.”
He showed her to a chair and then said, “They told me I was never to talk to you or Mr. Hogan …”
“For the sake of our children, they said,” Mrs. Carlucci added.
“This is Angelina. It was for her sake, for the children’s sake, that we—we moved away, we left it all, we said nothing.”
“Can you help us?” asked Angelina.
Bernice got her pad ready. “Okay, just take your time. We’ll start at the beginning.”
AT WHAT AL Lemley called “the halfway point” between Ashton and New York, Marshall pulled the Buick into the parking lot of a little insurance office in Taylor, a small town at the crossing of two major highways with no other real reason for being there. He stepped into the little office and was immediately recognized by the lady at the desk.
“Mr. Hogan?” she asked.
“Yes, good morning.”
“Mr. Lemley is already here. He’s waiting for you.”
She showed him to another door which led to a back office that no one was using at the time. “Now there’s coffee out here on the counter, and the bathroom is right through this door and to the right.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Marshall closed the door, and only then did Al Lemley stand up and give him a warm handshake.
“Marshall,” he said, “it’s great to see you. Just great!”
He was a smaller man, bald, with a hooked nose and sharp blue eyes. He had spunk and sparkle, and Marshall had always known him as a priceless associate, a friend who could come through with almost any much-needed favor.
Al sat behind the desk, and Marshall pulled a chair up beside him so they could both look over the materials Al had brought. For a little while they talked old times. Al was pretty much filling the vacancy that Marshall had left in the City Room at the Times, and he was beginning to have a real appreciation for Marshall’s ability to handle the job.
“But I don’t think I want to trade places with you now, buddy!” he said. “I thought you moved to Ashton to get away from it all!”
“I guess it followed me there,” he said.
“Eh … in a few weeks New York may be a lot safer.”
“What’ve you got?”
Al pulled an 8 x 10 glossy photo from a file folder and let it slide across the desk under Marshall’s nose. “Is this your boy?”
Marshall looked at the picture. He’d never seen Alexander M. Kaseph before, but from all the descriptions he knew. “This has to be him.”
“Oh, it’s him, all right. He’s known and then he’s not known, if you catch my drift. The general public never heard of the guy, but start asking investors on Wall Street, or government people, or foreign diplomats, or anyone else in any way connected with international wheeling and dealing and politics and you’ll get a response. He is the president of Omni Corporation, yes; they are definitely connected.”
“Surprise, surprise. So what do you know about Omni Corporation?”
Al shoved a stack of materials toward Marshall, a stack several inches thick. “Thank goodness for computers. Omni was just a little nontypical in tracking down. They have no central headquarters, no main address; they’re scattered into local offices all over the world and keep a very low profile. From what I understand, Kaseph keeps his own immediate staff with him and likes to be as invisible as possible, running the whole operation from no one knows where. It’s weirdly subterranean. They’re not on the New York or American Stock Exchanges, not by their name, at least. The stocks are all diversified among, oh, maybe a hundred different front corporations. Omni is the owner and controller of retail chain stores, banks, mortgage companies, fast food chains, soft drink bottlers, you name it.”
Al continued talking as he thumbed through the stack of materials. “I had some of my staff digging into this stuff. Omni doesn’t come right out and print anything about itself. First you have to find out what the front corporation is, then you sort of sneak in the back door and find out what interest the Big Mother Company has in it. Take this one here …” Al produced a stockholder’s annual report from an Idaho mining company. “You don’t know what you’re really reading about until you get down here to the end … see? ‘A subsidiary of Omni International.’”
“International—”
“Very international. You wouldn’t believe how influential they are in Arab oil, the Common Market, the World Bank, international terrorism—”
“What?”
“Don’t expect to find any stockholder’s reports on the latest car bombing or mass murder, but for every documented aboveboard item here there are a couple hundred pieces of under-the-table scuttlebutt that no one can prove but everyone seems to know.”
“And such is life.”
“And such is your man Kaseph. I want to tell you, Marshall, he knows how to spill blood if he has to and sometimes when he doesn’t have to. I’d say this guy is a perfect cross between the ultimate guru and Adolf Hitler, and he makes Al Capone look like a Boy Scout. Word has it that even the Mafia is afraid of him!”
ANGELINA CARLUCCI TENDED to spill words more from emotions than from objective recall, which made her story travel in agonizing circles. Bernice had to keep asking questions to get things clear.
“Getting back to your son Carl—”
“They broke his hands!” she wept.
“Who broke his hands?”
Joe intervened to help his wife. “It was after we said we would not sell the store. They had asked us … well, they didn’t ask, they told us we’d better … but they talked to us about it a few times and we wouldn’t sell …”
“And that’s when they started threatening you?”
“They never threaten!” Angelina said angrily. “They say they never threatened us!”
Joe tried to explain. “They—they threaten you without sounding like they are. It’s hard to explain. But they talk the deal over with you, and they let you know how very wise you will be to go along with the deal, and you know, you just know that you should go along with it if you don’t want anything evil to befall you.”
“So just who was it that you talked to?”
“Two gentlemen who were—well, they said they were friends of the new people who own the store now. I just thought at first that they were realtors or something. I had no idea …”
Bernice looked over her notes again. “All right, so it was after you turned them down the third time that Carl had his hands broken?”
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