The Alpha Deception

by Jon Land

  Which would lead him to those behind T.C.’s killing. Making them pay was the only thing he could still do for T.C.

  Revenge was no consolation but it would have to be consolation enough.

  Blaine covered T.C.’s body with a bedspread. He knew now what wheels he had to set in motion. For situations like the townhouse, various government agencies jointly operated a cleanup service. The contact number was changed often but was readily available. Always an 800 number. He dialed it.

  “Sanitation department,” said a voice.

  “There’s dirt on 222 East 48th Street in New York City. Operation’s probably on record.”

  “That’s improper coding,” the voice came back.

  “Send a crew.”

  “State your designation please.”

  “Tell them it’s going to be a long night.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  McCracken hung up. He had said enough. He knew they would respond because only someone cleared would have the number. They would check the on-call operations roster and find that the townhouse was active. A crew would be dispatched.

  He returned to East 48th Street, walking slowly to catch his breath and settle his nerves, knowing it would be awhile before the cleanup crew arrived. In fact it was ninety minutes after his return that a nondescript white van double-parked in front of the townhouse. Two men climbed out and moved up to the entrance. Blaine saw one of them pull the steel grating back while the other worked the door with a skeleton key. Took thirty seconds. Too long. They were dressed in dark blue overalls which looked innocuously like uniforms from the gas or electric company. No one would question them.

  At last they had the door open and were moving inside. McCracken waited until the two men were out of sight before drawing close enough to the van to assure himself only the driver remained inside. His elbow was propped into the night air on the open window sill. Blaine came up along the side stealthily, grabbed the exposed arm and yanked it brutally toward him and down.

  The driver’s head struck the door frame hard. By the time he registered the pain, Blaine had him by the throat, squeezing just hard enough.

  “One chance,” he told the man. “Who do you report to?”

  “Don’t know,” the man rasped, straggling to force the syllables out. “Upstairs, they’re in charge.”

  McCracken squeezed harder on the driver’s carotid artery until the man was unconscious. Then he made his way to the front door and pressed his shoulders to the left of the frame. Any second now one of the sanitation crew would return to the van for body bags or, more likely, a crate to remove the corpses. He saw a shadow sliding down the stairs inside and shrank further against the building, not even a flicker of his outline visible.

  The sanitation man barely had time to open the door before Blaine was on him, hand ramming his face and forcing it backward as he hurled himself inside. He slammed the man hard against the wall, making sure he was out before letting him slump. The final team member was upstairs. The answers would come from him.

  After closing the front door, he climbed the stairs and entered the room in silence. The third team member, his back to Blaine, was working on the bodies. Blaine grasped him from behind in a hold that shut off his wind.

  He dragged the man to the nearest upright chair and plopped him down in it, easing up on the pressure enough for the man to breathe. He switched his position to the side so he could meet the man’s eyes and let him see the determination in his own.

  “I’m going to give you a chance not to die,” Blaine said, maintaining a tight grip. “But only one chance.”

  The man regarded him with eyes bulging in terror, proclaiming innocence as well as fear.

  “Which branch were they working for?” Blaine demanded.

  The man caught his breath and seemed surprised by it. “I’ve got a phone number, just a phone number.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “585-6740.”

  “Area code?”

  “Local exchange. New York City.”

  “Very convenient.”

  He tied the men up and left them in the van. He was functioning on automatic now, trying not to think about T.C.

  From the townhouse, Blaine’s next stop was a phone box three blocks down. He needed to learn the address attached to 585-6740 and required only a touchtone phone to obtain it. He still had friends in the CIA who owed him favors, and they repaid their debt partially by keeping him constantly updated on changes in coding and procedures concerning the acquisition of information over lines. He dialed a number in Langley, Virginia, which linked him with the Company data base. Next he pressed out his request code, waited for a beep, and then punched in the number in question as if he were dialing it normally.

  “Hotel National,” a mechanical, synthesized voice told him after twenty seconds. “42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, New York City.”

  Blaine replaced the receiver.

  At midnight Times Square was alive with people, though not nearly as many as the old mythology would have it. Most were simply strolling through the night, looking for nothing more than a bright light to walk toward and then by. The Square offered this, plenty of food stops, and twenty-four-hour movie houses. In addition to pornography and prostitution, it now possessed such developments as the Newsday Building and the Marriott Hotel that aimed at washing the area clean of its traditional reputation. But a number of buildings clung stubbornly to the old ways or at least images of them.

  The Hotel National was among these. Its signs advertised “Newly Renovated” and while this may have been the case, another sign advertising rooms-by-the-hour seemed more prominent. The hotel’s front was well lit, except for a vertical lighted marquee with all its bulbs burned out. As McCracken passed under it he could hear a fizzling electrical current refusing to give up.

  He headed through the glass entrance doors and moved straight toward a glassed-in cubicle directly before him, behind which stood a black man in a white shirt only half-buttoned. The lobby did look good, he had to admit, and he wondered if the renovations stopped there.

  The clerk didn’t acknowledge his approach, and Blaine had to tap on the glass to get his attention. The man slid a section of the partition away.

  “You wanna room?” he asked between puffs on a rank cigar.

  Blaine had his pistol out, chambered, then through the opening and under the man’s chin before he could finish his next puff.

  “Not exactly,” Blaine told him, pushing the gun up enough to force the clerk to his toes. “Don’t fancy this gun myself,” he said. “Not enough control. Need two hands to steady it, but I’m going to spare only one on you. You’re going to cooperate, aren’t you?”

  The clerk struggled to nod.

  “You rented a room tonight to some people who didn’t look like they belonged here, right?”

  Another semblance of a nod.

  “How many?”

  “Four. Only one up there now. Room twenty-four. Second floor.”

  “You sure?”

  “Saw the others go out and they ain’t come back. That over there’s the only door.”

  Three, Blaine reflected, the same number that had perished in the townhouse… .

  He freed a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and placed it on the counter. “Thanks.”

  He sprinted for the staircase, gun still out. One man remained in the room upstairs, a man the cleanup crew would have reported to, a man who would have some answers. For him. For T.C.

  He reached the room in question, the bottom half of the “2” and top half of the “4” missing. He could see the frame’s wood was rotted too much to resist even a slight kick, never mind a full one.

  He threw a full one into it. The door shattered at latch level and flew inward.

  Blaine was through it while it was still in motion, gun raised before the crash against the wall sounded. In the back of his mind he had already recorded that the room was all wrong: too big, spacious, well furnish
ed, even smelled decent. He had recorded all this even before the voice of the lone occupant reached him in the half light.

  “Good evening, Mr. McCracken,” said Ryan Sundowner. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Chapter 8

  MCCRACKEN LOOKED AT THE youngish man in the tattered sports jacket and then at himself holding the gun.

  “I’m Ryan Sundowner,” the man continued. “Head of the Bureau of Scientific Intelligence.”

  “The Toy Factory,” McCracken followed. “I’ve heard of you. The fact that you knew I was coming doesn’t bode well for our friendship.”

  Sundowner gazed at the pistol which Blaine had lowered only slightly. “If that statement was due to the fact that I’m a part of what you’ve become involved in, I accept the responsibility. Trouble is, I’m as confused and scared as you are.”

  “Not quite. You were expecting me, I wasn’t expecting you. What the hell has the Toy Factory got to do with all this?”

  “Long story.” Sundowner stopped. “The gun, Mr. McCracken, you really don’t need it.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “I dismissed my men to avoid any unpleasant incidents.”

  “Lucky for them.”

  “I know what you’ve been through. If it’s any consolation, the three bodies you discovered in the brownstone belonged to my men.”

  “Your men? Then who—”

  “Killed them and killed that woman? I don’t know. But between the two of us, I’m hoping we can find out. I’ve got a car waiting downstairs. I’m heading back to Washington. I’d like you to come with me.”

  “I’ll go with you as far as LaGuardia. The rest depends on how much I learn to love your company. How’d you know about the woman?”

  “Your call into the Sanitation Department was traced to her room.”

  “Next question: why did she have to die?”

  Sundowner didn’t respond until they were in the backseat of the car and the driver had pulled out into traffic. “It starts with those crystals.”

  “Lydia Brandywine works for you,” McCracken realized.

  “Worked. Past tense. They got her, too.”

  “Efficient lot, aren’t they?”

  “This is all new to me, Mr. McCracken. If I sound calm, it’s because I, you, all of us are facing something far more terrifying than a few deaths.”

  Blaine’s eyes flared. “Not ‘just’ a few. You’d best remember that.”

  “I understand how you felt about the woman. I spent much of the night going over your complete file. She was included in it.”

  “That file was sealed after Omega. It was one of my conditions.”

  “I unsealed it. For reasons of national security, a person with authority can do just about anything.”

  “I don’t have a thing to do with national security anymore. Or was that left out of the file?”

  “No, it was quite clear on that point.”

  “Guess I made a mistake giving Lydia my real name. She passed it on to your goons and they passed it on to you before they died. Don’t know enough to keep my big mouth shut.” Blaine looked angry again. “Right now I’d like to shove those crystals down yours.”

  “I’d let you if you had enough of them. That’s how important those crystals are to us. We’ve been looking for something like them for months, years really.” He started to reach into his pocket. “Here. You of all people deserve to see what they look like.”

  Sundowner’s hand emerged with a jagged piece of ruby red crystal, perhaps six inches in length at its longest point. It was filled with grooves and ridges, seemed shiny even in the dull light of the backseat. McCracken took it in his hand. It felt cold, though it wasn’t. He supposed the coldness was in his mind, emanating from the fact that he was now clutching what had led to T.C.’s death. He wanted to fling it out the window but squeezed it tight instead.

  “We call it Atragon,” Sundowner explained. “You are now holding in your hand the greatest natural power source ever known to man. We hope it will be the batteries to run Bugzapper.”

  “Bugzapper?”

  “I’ll give you a complete demonstration once we reach Washington.”

  “I don’t remember agreeing to go. See, I’ve got my own trail to follow.”

  “It’s the same one as mine, unless I miss my guess. Terry Catherine Hayes was killed by men who don’t want us to find further stores of the Atragon crystals. Find the crystals, and you find the men.”

  “Is it really that simple?”

  “In a sense, yes. But in another sense we’re facing the most complicated threat to our very existence we have ever faced.”

  “You have a knack for being melodramatic.”

  “In this case, I’m understating, believe me. Three days ago a small town was obliterated by a particle beam with some rather unique properties. There wasn’t a single carbon atom left. That includes the inhabitants.”

  McCracken looked at him closely.

  “Mr. McCracken, your file emphasizes the fact that you are obsessed with saving the world one piece at a time, that you can’t stand to see innocent people die. Well, over a thousand died in the town of Hope Valley, and that could be just the beginning. The wielder of the beam weapon is blackmailing us. Simply stated, we have three weeks to unilaterally begin the process of dismantling our nuclear arsenal or we will face annihilation.”

  “The Soviets?”

  “The indications are there, too many of them probably. The point is somebody’s got this death beam, and there’s nothing we can do at present to stop it.”

  “I love phrases like ‘at present’.”

  “It’s accurate here, I assure you. In effect, Bugzapper is a shield of energy effectively enclosing the entire country and rendering it invulnerable to enemy attack.”

  “Missiles as well as death rays?”

  “Under the right conditions, absolutely. But the right conditions include Atragon to power the shield. The crystal you’re holding acts as a solar receptor with tremendous storage capacities. A virtual twin of it powered three floors of the Toy Factory last week for over an hour.”

  “Without burning up?”

  “More than that, we had to shut the system down because our circuits were starting to overload.”

  “So it was you who had the crystals stolen from Earnst in the first place.”

  Sundowner nodded. “Yes. Standard procedure, I’m afraid, to avoid drawing attention to our experiments. There didn’t seem to be any rush for completing them at the time.”

  “Until Hope Valley.”

  Another nod. “With the realization that the crystals might be our only shield against annihilation, Atragon became a very precious commodity indeed. I ordered our men to move on Earnst to learn his source for it.”

  “Only they failed, thanks to me. And then they got whacked by a first-class hitter a few hours after these four guys with beards and black coats traded in their prayer shawls for machine guns.”

  “Dispatched, no doubt, by whoever is so determined to stop our search for the Atragon reserves before it gets underway.”

  “And probably this same force is controlling the death ray that Atragon may be able to neutralize.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fine. But you’re asking the wrong questions. How did this mysterious force learn about your sudden pursuit of Atragon? No, let me rephrase that. Who did you tell about the crystals and when?”

  “The crisis committee. Yesterday.”

  “Crisis committee, huh?”

  Sundowner listed the occupants of the Tomb.

  “One of them blew the whistle on you, Sundance. Fucked your plan up big-time and killed a girl I could have loved if she had let me.”

  “That can’t be!”

  “Wanna bet? Believe me, I’ve been there. The only one I’m ruling out is you because if you were the leak, I’d be dead already.”

  Sundowner’s lips quivered. “But what you’re saying, it’s …”
/>   “Welcome to life in the big city.”

  The first signs for LaGuardia appeared.

  “Then if you agree to cooperate, I should keep it between just the two of us.”

  “Don’t bother because too many people already know I’m involved. The mole, whoever he is, will learn soon enough anyway.” Blaine changed his train of thinking. “I gather your operation at that fleabag hotel wasn’t a last-minute setup.”

  “It’s our New York field base.”

  “The clerk was yours then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Another mouth that could talk. Don’t hold anything back about me, because as far as you’re concerned I’m not helping. That’s the way it’s gotta be no matter what. See, Sundance, I took this sacred vow. Sort of like celibacy. The government fucked me too much, and I decided never to let them fuck me again. Somebody killed Terry Catherine Hayes, and if that person happens to know where the crystals for your Atragon shield are, that’s fine. But right now the only use for your crystals I can see is ramming them up the ass of whoever ordered her death.”

  Another sign passed for LaGuardia Airport.

  “Washington, Mr. McCracken?”

  “Call me Blaine. Why not? I’ve got nothing better to do this morning.”

  Hope Valley was just a sample of the awesome weapon we now possess. The United States of America has until midnight of April 21, three weeks from now, to unilaterally disarm and dismantle all nuclear devices or face annihilation from our death ray.

  McCracken read the second communiqué that had come over the Turkish channel after they were en route to Washington by private jet.

  “Mean business, don’t they?” was his initial response.

  “They seem to.”

  “We got any plans to actually capitulate and follow through with the disarming?”

  “No.”

  “Could it be accomplished in three weeks even if we did?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Don’t you think the framer of the threat knows that? Don’t you think he’d never actually believe we’d disarm unilaterally under any conditions?”

  “Not unless he was very naive. What are you getting at?”

  “Something smells here, Sundance. It’s smelled right from the time Hope Valley got zapped and it stunk worst of all when an innocent woman bought it a few hours ago. Why would someone demonstrate a weapon to make us do something we never would anyway?”