Dean Ing - Quantrill 2

by Single Combat(lit)

  He thought, Sanger, the bitch! I love you; trust me. Su-u-re. What kind of game had she been playing? And what worthless ribbon would she get for playing him out on such a long leash for S & R? Well, that was her job-he could even grudgingly admire her. And love her. Well, fuck that. You see where it got you.

  On the table: steel basin, towel, and holy God in heaven, a disposable razor! The holo monitor? Nowhere to be seen but that proved nothing. When he moved, it would have to be with no wasted motion. And if the door wouldn't open for him? He would wait, and whoever did open it would harbor only the briefest of regrets.

  He saw no clothes, no shoes. A sheet for a toga would only impede him and in any case he didn't expect to last long enough to need clothing. He peeled back the torso restraint and had the razor before he reached the door. Stupid assholes; didn't even lock it!

  Down a corridor wearing only his briefs, sheet wrapped around his right arm for a pitiful shield that might parry an edged weapon, the razor in his lethal left hand. He would have fallen had the corridor been wider, a limp staggering parody of himself. All color, then shades of gray, began to fade. Whiteout: he had no choice but to kneel and tuck his head, or faint dead in his tracks.

  Jesus, every footstep was a thump behind his ear. He had a bandage there too. Running footsteps behind him compelled him to try again, and he turned with the corridor as a woman cried, "Sir! Sir, omigod, the man's gone crazy! Mr. Caufield!!"

  He slammed out of the corridor, missed his footing in enveloping blackness, fell headlong into some yielding stuff. Now two voices clamored behind him. He found a carpet of wood chips beneath his fingers, reeled up again, saw that the trail led through a smooth-walled tunnel in solid rock. In the far distance, the faintest suggestion of a glow. He ran toward it, more by the feel of wood chips than by the light ahead, keeping his bare feet off the cold hard stone.

  Behind him, a heavy masculine shout, echoes booming: "Mr. Quantrill! It's okay, we're friends! Let us help you." Oh yes indeed, he'd heard that one before.

  Unbelievably, he thought, they were letting him get away. If boxed at the end of this nightmarish stone intestine, he could turn on the two behind him and retrace leaving a couple of deaders in his wake. They weren't gaining on him, but the man couldn't be more than twenty meters behind.

  Quantrill could pull a rolling one-eighty if his head didn't fall off in the process.

  He tripped as the tunnel swerved to the left, rolled against a rounded stone outcrop. The pain in his head and the internal sunburst that accompanied it beggared the distant oval of sunlight. But it was sunlight, pouring into the oval mouth of a tunnel with no bars, no door, without any hint whatever of a secure facility.

  The entrance was less than three meters high and nearly ten wide. Quantrill zigzagged in sudden sunlight to avoid marksmen, labored up the rock pathway. He welcomed the loose stones underfoot because they were better ammo than anything he had on him, but stooping to fill his hands with them he lost the razor, snatched dizzily at it, fell hard. Near collapse, he lacked the coordination to use his body as a killing machine. He would be lucky even to draw blood.

  The man was still shouting as he emerged into the bright morning sun, hands out and innocent of weapons, the woman saving her breath as she followed. Quantrill tossed one stone in high trajectory, part one of the rockfighter's one-two punch, the one they were supposed to watch while he bifurcated the nearest sucker with number two, a bullet of stone hurled as though from a pitcher's mound.

  He missed, nearly grazing the woman's head with number two, and saw her mouth grow round in anger and astonishment. He scrabbled for more rocks, heedless of pain, watching the man who made no move to gather stones but raised his hands aloft instead. Then he paused to listen.

  "Will you stop? Can't you understand, for God's sake? If you keep on like this you're going to hurt yourself, you stupid idiot!"

  He might hurt himself, the man said. An incomparable jest under the circumstances. But the circumstances were no longer clear to Quantrill. No one else approached. The entrance to the tunnel was a natural one, and carefully painted on its stone brow was, of all things, a weathered Masonic emblem.

  Faint traces of an unsurfaced road undulated in grass across the brown prairie nearby, and the velvet breeze off the hills above was softly pungent with scents of dry weed and sage.

  Through the pounding in his head, Quantrill tried to fit pieces of his puzzle together. He had gone down in the kitchen of a Catholic Church in arid coal country, and come up in what was evidently a natural lava tube in open range country. Central New Mexico? He gestured at the ancient pathway, managed to croak, "Where does that lead?"

  "To Route seventy-eight. In a couple of days, if you're up to it, I'll take you there."

  "I'm up to it now!"

  The woman, heavy-bodied and sunbaked like the man, strode near with folded arms. "I wouldn't be barking out demands if I were you, sonny," she said, dull anger smoking in her face. "You managed to survive getting a hunk cut out of your skull, you nearly got meningitis from an infection in what's left of your mastoid, you're all but mother-naked, and all you can think of is throwing rocks at us. Now I know what I agreed to do for the Masonics but as far as I'm concerned, you throw one more fit like that and you can go to hell. Wander back to Streamlined America for all I care."

  Back? What was left of his mastoid? Quantrill's puzzlement must have shown in his face. The man said, "He's still confused, Claire. Mr. Quantrill, a young woman cut a tiny radio out of your head over a week ago, and managed to explain who you were, and naturally the Masonic brotherhood was interested in helping. This is Malheur Cave, Mr. Quantrill. You're in Oregon Territory. You're a free man." Oblivious to thistles and to the two strangers, Quantrill sat down, hugged his knees, and let the storm of tears overtake him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Ted Quantrill wasn't entirely convinced of his freedom until an hour later as he sat in one of the small rooms far back in Malheur Cave. He would never learn who had taken his signet ring, but focused on something far more important. He held the clear plastic container between thumb and forefinger and peered through light cotton packing at the device inside. "Doesn't look very potent now. How can we be sure my critic isn't listening to us?"

  "I only know what Doc Keyhoe told me," shrugged Ed Caufield, a thirty-second-degree Mason who knew a little veterinary medicine but little of high-tech electronics. "This came out of your head and half of it blew up a minute later. They put it in cotton inside this vacuum vial to make sure it wouldn't receive conducted sound. And to make double-sure, somebody in Elko wrapped the vial in metal foil. Anyway, we're under thirty meters of rock here. I reckon it's pretty safe."

  "I'd like to grind it to powder," Quantrill growled. "S & R won't rest 'til it's back in their hands."

  "I don't think so." Claire Connor had spent long days and nights tending Quantrill, had listened carefully to the men discuss their unconscious patient. "Doc Keyhoe knew he'd have to abandon his practice once he got involved with you, so he risked his skin and rigged some false evidence. Even conked a poor old priest and tied him up so the good Father wouldn't seem part of it." Supposedly, she added, Quantrill had fallen into the machinery that fed pulverized coal into the steam plant after his head burst open from detonation of the critic.

  Haunted by his earlier fury at Marbrye Sanger, Quantrill asked, "And you're certain the woman didn't make it?"

  "We weren't there," said the Connor woman. She'd needed half an hour to overcome her anger at Quantrill but found herself warming to him. He reminded her of her youngest boy, lost during the Bering Shoot before Oregon became a Canadian protectorate peppered with U.S. Army deserters.

  "Doc Keyhoe was there," said Caufield as if apologizing. "I think it was seeing, um, well, seeing her die that got his dander up. Close friend, was she?"

  Quantrill could find no words to explain how far that phrase fell short of the truth. He nodded, looked at the ceiling, brushed moisture from his ch
eeks. He could not yet appreciate that his tears were talismans of human emotions which Control had sought to drive from him, and that Control had failed.

  Finally he pointed at the encapsulated solid-states of the critic and said, "Whatever comes of this, we owe to Marbrye." Then with a quick sad smile: "You have no idea what it's like to talk freely after six years with that thing in your head. I can say anything I like, recite poetry, even say, 'I love you, Marbrye.' Only she can't hear it," he finished.

  "I think she might," the woman replied, but saw that Quantrill fought bitter tears. "Let's get you back to bed now, Ted Quantrill. You won't be ready to travel for awhile yet. I don't know what you have in mind, but Doc Keyhoe is in touch with some people who want very much to meet you."

  "But that's all up to you," Caufield chimed in. "You're in Oregon Territory now and you can do as you damn' please. That's something to sleep on, son"

  In time Quantrill did sleep, but only after he had cried for Sanger, and for himself for having lost her. Yet his tears could not wash all his accumulated poisons away; his last waking thoughts were of personal combat against those who were twisting Streamlined America into a daily twenty-four-hour nightmare.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  For the record, health service officials announced that Father Matthew Klein died of a particularly virulent form of paranthrax. Off the record, he died from the effects of virulent questioning methods by Search & Rescue after he admitted under torture that Quantrill still lived. The paranthrax cover story became a blanket explanation for inoculation teams that flew into the mining community and, one at a time, hyposprayed two categories of the locals: members of Klein's parish, and patients of the -missing Dr. Keyhoe.

  As inoculations, the hyposprays were useless. Each patient and parishoner returned home ignorant and safe. Ignorant that they had babbled honest answers to all queries put to them by Howell's rovers; safe because none had guilty knowledge of Quantrill or of any other conspiracy against the system. With Sanger dead and Keyhoe beyond its grasp, S & R had to proceed with what little the priest could tell them. That little was enough.

  Lon Salter called his meeting exclusively for top-level staff and eventually found it necessary to send out for sandwiches. The decisions were not reached quickly or easily. But then, their latest data had not come without painstaking legwork and two more missing persons.

  At one point, Salter raised a hand to ward off more data. "Stop right there, Reardon, I don't need to know what you did with the teamster's body. If you say he admitted hauling those two into Elko it's good enough for me."

  Mason Reardon was a medium man, a man so average in appearance and mannerism that he could move almost unnoticed in a business suit or a coverall. Long before, he had taught surveillance methods to Quantrill, Sanger, and many others. More recently he had moved into the comm center as one of the voices of Control. Very recently he had made a quick trip afield, tracing Quantrill's route.

  Old Lasser could afford a more detached view, with his medical restrictions against field ops. "LockLever's harboring a lot of these people, Lon. They're cozying up to the Indys."

  Salter: "Exactly why we can't ask White House Deseret to lean on them. We can't afford to let our suspicions show. What we've got to do is find all the terminals of this escape route, this-this underground railroad; emplace bugs on every truck and hoverbus owned by L. L. Produce and Midas Imports; find out how serious our problem is."

  A cynical laugh from little Marty Cross, who still wore a sling for his right arm. The most irritating part of his job, thought Salter, was the insolence of Cross and his crony, Howell. Both were nominally his subordinates-and both often justified a charge of insubordination. They knew what Salter knew, i.e., without them Search & Rescue would no longer have a flinty core of sociopathic readiness. In rover terms, they were the last of the best.

  Now Cross shared his dark amusement. "Here's how serious the problem is. See me? Pretend I'm S & R; I've got my good arm in a sling because that fucking Quantrill got loose. If he's still alive and out of the country, I can mend. If he links up with rebels in this country, I might get both arms in slings and my ass in another one. Cripple me and you cripple the Lion of Zion-and if he goes belly-up, not a man in this room will have a hidey-hole deep enough to suit him.

  "Look: we've had these Catholics and Masons and liberal Mormons all along-no worse than a bad cold, right? But Quantrill's a bad fracture just waitin' to happen. There's too many ways he could hurt us-"

  "All right, all right," Salter interrupted; "get to the point."

  "The point," said the whiskey tenor of Seth Howell, "is a top-level effort to find him; take him out. Track him down in Canada or wherever, make an example of him. Pretend we've bought that amateurish yarn about him getting graunched in machinery, keep a sharp eye out in case he tries to turn other rovers-and see to it that we're the machine that graunches him."

  "I agree," said Lasser, who knew Quantrill better than any of them. "If he's abroad, we might try talking Smetana out of retirement."

  "Negative," Howell rapped. "That's one of the ways he can hurt us! We have other linguists who can pass as foreign, and Smetana's female. She used to have a letch for Quantrill-hell, find a cunt in S & R who didn't! He snuck Sanger right out from under me-"

  Lasser, recalling Sanger's admissions: "Now that's just too freudian to let pass, Seth," intended as a jolly reproof.

  Howell, his ruddy face blackening with rage, scanned their faces one at a time: Lasser, Reardon, Cross, Salter. "Anybody here think that little turncoat sonofabitch is a better man than I am?" Dutiful headshakes and, from Lasser, an abstention. "Then that settles it. We need a team ready to respond the instant we learn where Quantrill is. The very best S & R team ever mustered. That's me-"

  "And me," Cross hissed, his eyes glistening.

  "And maybe Ethridge," Howell said.

  Lasser and Reardon together: "Why Ethridge?"

  Howell: "Because in some ways he's a better athlete than Quantrill. And because Ethridge wanted Sanger so bad you could see the hard-on in his face. All we have to do," he smiled, "is to tell Ethridge it was Quantrill who blew her away."

  Amid the buzz of discussion, Lon Salter rapped the table for order and called for opinions. He knew it was purely pro forma, a sop to his title. The major decision had already been made.

  That decision would have varied in crucial details, had they known that the electronic half of Quantrill's critic still existed. But the old priest had described the detonation, and they'd found traces of the event in the surface of a butcher block, verified by gas chromatography. They had not wrenched a vital datum-Keyhoe's recovery of the solid-state module-from Father Klein because the priest had not noticed it, engrossed as he was in Sanger's desperate scrawls.

  And why go through the dull formalities of removing access channels into the central computer when the remote terminal in question had been blown into white-hot gas?

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  In even the simplest of stratagems, one must proceed on the basis of certain assumptions. Yet nothing is more deadly than a false assumption.

  Search & Rescue assumed that when the shaped charge of the critic blew, it atomized the solid-state terminal to CenCom.

  Quantrill assumed that his enemies thought him dead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  After a week, Quantrill could wake without a rush of despair for Sanger, and of guilty elation in his freedom. Later he might recover his old reticence, but now he welcomed the men who came to Malheur Cave to talk (a little) and to listen (a lot) while he completed his recovery. It pleased him to talk freely after six years of practice at remaining mute with caution, reinforced by the pitiless puppet-masters of Control. Those talks were not all pleasant; he learned from Dr. Keyhoe how Sanger had died. He would not accept it as final until Keyhoe, in exasperation, snarled that the poor creature was dead, dead, dead.

  Quantrill never made a friend of Keyhoe, sensing the man's dislike for h
im, unable to pinpoint a reason. The reason was simply this: Quantrill was the catalyst who had precipitated Keyhoe from a life he had enjoyed, a practice and a group of friends he missed. Keyhoe had abandoned his old life to save a young assassin and was beginning to wonder whether his sacrifice would ever have any important outcome.

  Precisely because Keyhoe did not want his sacrifice to be pointless, he made careful inquiries through his contacts in and beyond the Masonic orders, giving no particulars that, in his opinion, might identify Quantrill. Because lodge brothers in Streamlined America were increasingly concerned with the country's internal affairs, he got prompt responses from New Denver, Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, and the sprawling new port city of Eureka. And because nations are inordinately fond of finagling with each other's internal affairs, he got responses from New Ottawa, Ankara, Canberra, and, again, Eureka.