Kennedy looked nervous. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, as you may know, the way the Company makes sure its people are its own people is by implanting a tiny little encoder in the body. Brandy and I got ours a few days ago. It’s painless. But you can also stick a code in there that will make the Labyrinth a mess to you. Your friends won’t pull you out, because you blew it in spades; but even if they did, and you got to a flag stop and got in, it still wouldn’t matter. The Labyrinth would kill you. You better get used to the idea that you’re going to spend some time in Atlanta, Kennedy.”
“Yeah,” Brandy added. “About twenty years, but probably a lot less, since that place is just full of busted drug kings. You might even have sent some of ’em there. They’re gonna just love you.”
I had to laugh, and she looked at me oddly. “What’s so funny?”
“Ever since I became a cop I had this fantasy of lining up a bunch of folks in one place and explaining the case and the pleasure of unmasking the guilty party. This isn’t exactly a drawing room, but, you know, that’s just what we did.”
“I’m glad you got to fulfill your ambition before you died, Sam,” said a voice behind us. We all turned, and there was Jamie holding a semiautomatic rifle, an Israeli job we’d brought along in the car just in case. “Everyone just drop your guns on the ground—now!” Guns dropped.
“Jamie! Thank God!” Kennedy sighed, and made to move over to her.
“Hold it, Kennedy! You stay with them!” she ordered.
If anything, Kennedy looked more stricken now than he did when we turned the lights on him. “Jamie—what? We can still do it! Don’t you see? These two pests, Whitlock, all out of the way. We can still win!”
“You idiot!” she snapped. “We lost our chance the moment Whitlock escaped. Who do you think we’re fighting? Some little mob brain? It’s the Company, you fool! This only had a chance of working if everything seemed to happen naturally. Whitlock going bad and skipping, Big Tony getting sent to prison by straight testimony of a middle-level hoodlum, all that. I don’t think it ever had a prayer, considering that idiotic but effective drag-queen masquerade. These two are ten times the detective you are! You didn’t even know about that business until it was already in motion, and then you couldn’t penetrate well enough and quickly enough in two weeks to determine what these two could in forty-eight hours. We can’t have this, Kennedy. You know too much.”
“The last of the players in this particular little game,” I said. “Good old Jamie. Too bad, Jamie. I was getting to like you.”
“I was getting to like both of you, but that’s neither here nor there. This isn’t a time for friendships, Sam. This is strictly business, and I’m assigned to clean up this mess. This should do it. A mob hit where Whitlock was about to turn himself in to the feds. Sorry, everyone, I’m on a schedule.” She pulled the trigger, and the night was filled with two seconds of horrible bursts and a tremendous amount of smoke that made the scene look eerie as it reflected the headlights. Kennedy dived for the ground, screaming in terror. The rest of us just stared at her as she pulled the trigger.
We were still staring when the clip ran dry, only Frank and Georgio had their own guns back, although it wasn’t really necessary.
“They wanted me to bring an empty gun,” I said, “but I figured you might notice an empty clip. You’re good at that. So I had them find me some blanks. A whole box worth. It made better theater, anyway.”
“You bastard!” she screamed.
“Hey! Do you know how tough it is to find a box of blanks for an Uzi semiautomatic?” I noticed her glancing about. “I switched the ones in your handgun, too, so don’t try for the bag. Besides, even if you did, it wouldn’t make any difference. Bill Markham has boys all over here, including the only exit.”
She dropped the gun. “I should have known,” she said. “I wondered why you didn’t tell me about this until it was under way enough that I couldn’t do anything but ride along.”
“I didn’t want you tipping Kennedy. If he’d been a good boy, though, we’d have fed you something and seen who you ran to. Still, I can’t take all the credit. Philadelphia is my turf, Jamie, and I already knew you were with them even before we left Georgetown.”
“What?”
“I had to do something, just lying there in the hospital. My arm still hurts, by the way, thanks to you. So I thought, and I had it figured, particularly after Markham filled me in on the background of the Company wars. The plot I had mostly figured when we talked to Nkrumah. What didn’t make sense was why the opposition would want to kill him, and the girls. He was worth more to Kennedy, here, alive than dead. He was better dead for the Company, but in that case I was the Company. Then it hit me. So long as we were talking, exchanging information with Little Jimmy, nothing happened. Nothing. But when we started fingering those girls, and talking two of them into maybe switching over to our side—then the lights went out. Then when Bill and Tod sprung both of you, and Brandy complained that the cops had kept you in your bathing suits and that you had been wet, it fell right into place. I got Bill to insist on a full autopsy on the third girl, Suzy, the alleged shooter. With five big holes in her, and a coroner’s office like they got in Georgetown, the cause of death was too obvious to be worth looking twice at her. You counted on that. But she hadn’t died from gunshot wounds. That’s why there wasn’t tremendous bleeding. She’d been strangled. Strangled maybe fifteen minutes, maybe more, before she allegedly shot me and the others.”
“As soon as that autopsy report came in, I had no trouble runnin’ with Sam’s logic,” Brandy added. “When an operation this big goes bad, the only thing you can do is minimize your losses. Take out everybody who knows somethin’ they shouldn’t, leave a mess but a tidy mess, and get out.”
Suzy had been in the bow for some reason when I’d come aboard, and she’d stayed there when Mike fired that shot, going below for her pistol and coming back out on top. Jamie had spotted her there and moved her sailboat close in. Suzy hadn’t noticed, since her attention was entirely on us. Jamie was quick and agile. She had gotten up on the boat silently and caught Suzy by surprise, and swiftly and silently strangled her with some professional hold, then took her gun and remained. Nkrumah was irrelevant, but when the girls had not only begun to come over to our side, but had brought up Gritch and others they didn’t know but had met, she knew she had to act, and fast. She emptied the clip through the windshield, hoping to get all of us, but the angle was wrong and the gun unfamiliar. Then she had to be convincing. While I was creeping forward, she lowered Suzy’s body into the water, then took her own gun and shot it five times. She couldn’t shoot it on deck because it would make holes and a bloody mess. Then she dived into the water to make the falling-body sound, and shouted back up to us.
“You got all but Nan, I have to give you that,” I told her. “And Nan you planned to take care of, if and when possible, but the cops were too tight, too quick, and too strict. It all didn’t matter, because both Brandy and I survived and we already had some of the information. That meant a total clean-up. When we headed back for Philadelphia, you just waited, contacting Kennedy and alerting him that we were there. We were on your list, but last, since we were doing the dirty work of unearthing your victims for you.” I looked off in the darkness. “Bill, you want to come in and take charge now?” I shouted.
To be perfectly frank, I almost expected another double cross, another hail of bullets, this time real, but it didn’t happen. Markham and his people were right there and very professional.
We sat around a posh office on the fourteenth floor of one of the newest office buildings in Philadelphia. The one office we were in was bigger than both our old office and our old apartment combined, and was only part of a complex that went two floors down and two floors further up. This was the eastern regional office of G.O.D., Inc. The irony was that most of the people who worked here knew nothing more about the Company than that it sold mail-order merc
handise by phone and that it had large investments in other areas worldwide. Still, the remarkable thing was that almost everything that went on here was totally legitimate, and exactly what would be done if it were just the company it pretended to be. Only a very few knew the truth here, and, most remarkably of all, there were none here that were not native to our own version of Earth. Only in Oregon and, we were led to believe, in Japan and Mongolia, were there any permanent party personnel who were not natives.
Bill Markham sat there, along with Dr. John Koken, the vice president of the eastern office. Koken ran the legitimate side, while Whitlock ran the darker side of the business from his bank. Whitlock, too, was there, along with Brandy and myself. Curiously, in the hierarchy of the Company, Koken was senior and set policy for the whole region; Whitlock was in effect his deputy, while Markham was one of the top men running the eastern security apparatus on both sides.
“It was quite audacious, really,” Koken noted, sipping coffee. “We have a lot of weaknesses, the greatest being our sheer size, but we tend to forget that they have weaknesses as well. They are far fewer than we, and that is their major problem. Like the terrorist, they can cause a disproportionate amount of trouble and tie up resources, but also like the terrorist they have few clear-cut victories. I think they needed a clear victory, if only to energize the others who must labor in slower and less productive mischief. The only way a small group gains that sort of victory against a major force is by sheer audacity.”
“But it failed,” Brandy noted. “It was so much of a mess, I just can’t see how it could have succeeded.”
“It almost did succeed,” Whitlock pointed out. “It still almost worked. They managed to remove me and indict Big Tony, as well as cripple Big Tony’s business and foul up ours. The truth is, you two really turned it around. It was sheer luck, in the end, that kept things from going bad.”
“I can’t believe we were the decider here,” I responded. “I mean, this thing was blown from the start when they couldn’t replace Mr. Whitlock, here, with their man. They missed killing him, and they failed to trace him or to figure out that crazy ruse. The other Whitlock figured that at the start; and so, really, did Kennedy, who ordered them to stiff Little Jimmy and pressure him to turn over Big Tony. The trouble was, they picked a slick but greedy bastard, and, thanks to seeing double, an unreliable goat. It fell apart from that point. The most they had was a temporary victory. They had nobody to make the charges against Big Tony stick, and if Norton tried to muscle in while Big Tony was fighting this, the whole council would have crushed Norton. The ones behind this knew it, too, the moment they got the real picture, and that’s when they decided to send Jamie in to clean up the mess and get out before you went too far and learned too much.”
“What’s gonna happen to her?” Brandy asked. “Or is that better not said?”
Bill Markham sighed. “Information is more critical than examples and lives to us at this stage. Over the years we’ve learned that, and we’ve established a consistent policy. Anybody who’s caught and can deliver really substantive new information of real value to us, higher-ups and the like, and is totally cooperative, can buy his or her life. I don’t care if it’s Hitler or who, it’s absolute. We don’t promise a rose garden, but we promise life and integration into some society. Jamie’s been very cooperative. Very cooperative. She was simply young and very, very ambitious and very impatient about climbing the ladder. Our system was slow and she thought she was underused and underappreciated. They look for ones like that, and they offer them more adventure, more thrills, and more automony and authority. Instead of being a resident agent on a series of worlds, she willingly became a free-lance assassin and clean-up artist. She has absolutely no loyalty to anyone but herself. She’s buying a future.”
“Yeah, what kind of future?” Brandy pressed. “Alone in the Garden or something like that?”
“No. Right now we’re thinking of a world that’s been more or less culturally and technologically stuck in the tenth century since, well, the tenth century. In that world, the Islamic empire wasn’t stopped at the gates of Vienna, and overran Europe and much of Asia as well as Africa. It’s an old-line, old-time fundamentalist Islam that keeps a rigid system and breeds its conquered opponents out of existence. There’s a sheik, a prince, deep in the Songhai Empire on the Niger River to whom we owe a minor favor. He finds white-skinned women exotic, and he has a pretty good harem. We’re inclined to ship her there and treat her with a blocking code so she’s stuck there. If she can make her way in that world, fine. We think she’ll be in hell for a while, then crack and accept it. That’s only fair. She has a lot of blood on her hands and she was pretty cold about it. Even now, her only remorse is that she failed.”
“And Gritch?” I asked.
“We haven’t got him yet, but we have enough information now that we’ve identified the world they’re using. It’s only nine away from this one, which means it’s pretty damned close to ours. I think, once we have some of the major players in the game there reined in, we’ll find the network and how it works, and take it over.”
Brandy licked her lips nervously. “Are—we there? Sam and me?”
Markham cleared his throat. “It’s not always a good idea to know those things.”
“I want to know,” she replied.
He sighed. “All right. You’re there but Sam’s not. He was killed in a riot in the Phillipines when in the Air Force.”
I felt a chill. That scene was always with me, in my dreams, my nightmares, and even awake. All those white bastards stood back, not willing to risk their lives for a Jew, and that one black sergeant took control and saved my ass. How everything turned on little things. Had somebody given that sergeant trouble? Had somebody in that world who was white inflicted a serious psychic wound that was not delivered here? One that stayed his hand, kept him from risking his own neck to drag me out of there?
“What am I—there?” Brandy pressed. She was really adamant. “Are my parents still alive? Did I finish school, or what?”
“All right, then, here it is. Your mother died, same as here, same way and same problem. You were even wilder there than here, but when your father found out he gave you an ultimatum to shape up a hundred percent or get out and never come back. You went across town at age seventeen and became a hooker on a pimp’s string. You still are, with a big heroin habit to feed.”
“My daddy woulda killed me if I did that!”
“No, ma’am,” Markham replied. “He killed himself, instead.” He paused a moment while an extreme pall set in over the room. “I told you it’s best not to know. Somewhere, somewhen, almost everything that might have happened did. Somewhere, too, your father, maybe even your mother, are still alive, have a successful agency, and you’re a college grad with a career, husband, and maybe kids.”
That cheered her a little. “What about Sam and me? How many worlds do you think we got together on?”
“Very few. I can say that without checking. The odds are just astronomical against it. More than one, sure, but I’d be surprised if it was a dozen out of hundreds or more where both of you are alive. The funny thing is, Kennedy says he actually called for a switch team on you two, but then you showed up trim, lean, different looking from the time on the siding. There was no match; and since you had nothing here, and the real you were with the Company, there was no percentage and no way to do it, even if they could have recruited and briefed a pair in that length of time. They had doubles for most of the others prepared, but nobody figured on Nkrumah hiring you, not even Nkrumah Two. It wouldn’t and couldn’t, because in that world everybody else was the same, but Sam was dead and you were a hooker, so there was no detective agency to think about going to. See?”
I did see. “Variables,” I said. “Too many variables. All the big shots were the same, or real close to the same, but we were the one thing in this world that related to them that they didn’t have. Our presence hadn’t affected their development up to
then; we were zilch. We only took on any importance when Little Jimmy came to us here.”
“Even then, who knows what woulda happened if that old switchman or whatever he was hadn’t sent us to the Garden?” Brandy mused. “I mean, a lot of these things are dead ends, right? We coulda rotted there. Only ’cause we happened to be there and I happened to wake up and hear it when they opened up that Labyrinth gateway, did we get out at all.”
“That, in fact, is what we’re here to discuss,” Markham told us. “It was no accident, Brandy. You were meant to hear it, see it, and escape in it. That ‘garden,’ as you call it, is a dead-end siding.”
I sat up at that one. “Now, hold on. Who was that seven-foot snow-white girl in the kimono, then?”
“That was when you were back on the main track. It’s a short siding. You see, they needed you. They looked over the mess and they decided it was going down a failure, and the only thing they could do was send somebody in to take out those who knew too much, protect Kennedy if possible—waste him, too, if his cover was blown—and make sure nobody went any further than here. For that, they needed a way to get Jamie here, as a company agent, so she’d have the resources and cover to track these people down and know what we knew. The old switchman’s report was filed with the nearest full station, as is procedure, so immediate action could be taken if need be. Otherwise, the station is supposed to send the report on down the line. They didn’t. Instead, they arranged for one of their own to work the nearest switch set and convincingly send you to them with no record being filed.”
The Labyrinth Of Dreams Page 25