The elephant would never find him. Never!
From somewhere down below a door slammed; there were noises, voices shouting something unrecognizable, then Carmine’s flat nasal monotone cutting across the hubbub.
“. . . eighty feet off the ramp. Ten people aboard, but we couldn’t have squeezed them off without alerting him. All dead, concussion, heat and suffocation.” There was a note of pleased satisfaction in the flat voice. “We saw them identify Bahr, all right. Any calls while I was gone?”
“No, no calls.”
“Good, three-thirty. I’ve got to call long distance. How are things upstairs?”
“Quiet.”
Bahr nudged Kocek and grinned. Then he crossed silently to the window and flashed a recognition pattern with the infrascope at the Volta parked down the street.
“In five minutes Chard is going to cut the main power line into here,” he whispered to Kocek. “The whole place will black out. We’ll go downstairs then. I think there are seven of them. What’s your count?”
“The same.”
“All right. Chard will come in the front after he cuts the wires. I don’t care about the rest, but I want Carmine alive. I’ve got a few questions.”
They waited five minutes, Bahr checking his watch too often. “Ten seconds,” he said. He squinted, staring into the darkest part of the hall, his hand tightening around the stunner.
Downstairs, the sound of coffee-drinking and staccato conversation, and the steady clack-clack-clack of the cardos. Carmine was on the long-distance line . . . .
“Hey!”
“The lights . . . .”
“Where’s the fuse box?”
In the noise and confusion Bahr and Kocek darted down the stairs and crept into adjacent corners of the main room, letting their eyes focus in darkness.
There was a flicker of movement toward the door, and Bahr’s stunner ripped at full lethal power, the sub-echoes ringing. A scream and a thud. Silence.
A tense whisper. “Somebody’s got a stunner.”
Kocek’s Wesson spat, a dirty tearing sound. There was a gurgle, a thump on the floor, a chair toppled . . . .
“In the corner . . .” Carmine’s nasal voice. There was die snigger of a burp being cranked. Bahr waited, and fired again, his target perfectly picked out in the infrascope. Body and gun hit the floor at the same time.
Three down.
“He’s got a scope.” Carmine’s voice again. A door squeaked, and there were hurried crawling sounds. Kocek fired twice, from a new position. There was a shriek.
Then utter silence.
“Kocek!” Bahr heard a grunt in response. “They went into the cardo room,” he said. Kocek hissed, and Bahr listened. A very faint sound of someone coming into the room.
“Bahr?”
“Over here, Chard. They’re in the cardo room. We’ll have to flush them.” He crawled silently, checking four bodies, guessed at three left in the cardo room. “Kocek! Those concussion eggs.”
Bahr unscrewed the safeties, knelt and tossed one egg right inside the cardo room door. There was a dull crash, and the glass blew out of the windows. The second toss was against the rear wall. A burst of orange light flared and a man came screaming into the hall clutching his ears. Bahr cut him down with the stunner and ducked into the room with Chard at his heels.
They started up the banks of cardos, leaving Kocek at the door with the Wesson. When he was sure he would not be silhouetted, Bahr stood up, took a pile of unpunched cards from the top of a cardo and hurled them against the far wall. A burp spat out reddish flame from behind a sorter three machines away. Chard dropped down, firing. There was a scream of pain.
One left.
“Carmine!” Bahr stood up, stunner ready. There was a scrambling sound. “Don’t shoot him,” Bahr said. A couple of shots scattered around the room as Carmine fired wildly. “I’m coming after you.” There were scurrying noises; if Carmine realized that Bahr was still alive, he gave no indication. Bahr smelled smoke, saw a flare of burning cards across the room. He saw Chard leap across to smother the flame, and cough and reel back as three slugs struck his chest. Bahr fired the stunner once, an off-target narrow beam shot and Carmine screamed.
Bahr hurled himself on the thrashing, half-paralyzed man, tore the gun out of his hand and drove a knee into Carmine’s groin. There was a shrill agonized cry, then retching.
“Bastard,” Bahr said.
“All clear, Chief?” Kocek asked.
“Get that fire out.” Bahr jerked Carmine up by the collar, smashed his fist into his face savagely twice, and hurled him out into the hall.
Then he saw Chard in the growing light of the fire. He squinted into the man’s pain-twisted face. “It’s okay, Julie. I’m hurt. Just get me out of here.”
Bahr saw the red dripping blot on the front of Chard’s coveralls as the whole wall began to flare from the burning cards. He saw the death-white face, the eyes wide with fear. “Just get me to a doc, Julie . . . .”
“You’re a dead man,” Bahr said. “You wouldn’t last five minutes if we moved you.” He shook his head, lifted the stunner. “The breaks, kid.”
One violent, tearing epileptic lunge, and it was over. Silence, the crackling of the fire, waves of heat from the wall. He heard a noise break from Kocek as he turned the power off on the stunner, put it back in the holster. “Get out to the car,” Bahr said. “I’ll get Carmine.”
Kocek bolted through the door. Sick, rotten, depraved Kocek seemed eager to get away from him.
He thought suddenly of the upstairs. There was something . . . He shook his head, his mind blanking. All he could think of now was get out, hurry, get out! It did not occur to him to wonder why he could not go back upstairs. He could not remember what was up there. Upstairs was empty . . . that was it . . . empty.
In the eerie crackling light of the spreading fire, Bahr grinned suddenly, but he did not know why.
The meeting at dawn was short and tense. The principals were Bahr and Kocek, adults, and three celebrities from the toughest of Trivettown’s KMs. The place of the meeting was a two-car garage in the Trivettown residential section. Bahr’s Volta, with Carmine bound and gagged on the floor, filled half the garage. In the other half there was a work bench, and a nondescript array of woodworking tools, hedge clippers, and two disposal cans. The bench was curiously stained.
There was the usual exchange of greetings and explanations. Kocek, who knew the KMs, did most of the talking, with Bahr silent, watching the one called Joel cleaning his carefully trimmed nails with a tiny gleaming knife. Bahr had heard of Joel by reputation. Now, meeting him, he felt an almost irresistible urge to take the pale, smiling youngster by one scrawny ankle and smash his brains out on the floor. It was just amazing how thoroughly he hated him at first sight.
Kocek negotiated with the girl, who was in charge of proceedings, a thirteen-year-old who was noticeably pregnant. Joel would work at so much an hour for four hours, after which the rates doubled at four hour intervals. If those terms were not satisfactory there would be no deal. Joel was a specialist, but the girl was a business woman. The third noteworthy, a stocky, hard-faced bully, kept a hand in a pocket and never took his eyes off Kocek while he talked to the girl.
Joel, of course, was different. He was strange, pathologically strange, and he made Bahr’s skin crawl. His hands were very soft and white, like a girl’s, but his eyes were vulture eyes. Bahr had seen such eyes once or twice before, and he always hated them.
Then the arrangements were completed, and Kocek and the bully dragged Carmine out of the car. Bahr noticed that Joel’s eyes began to brighten when he saw Carmine’s struggling figure; he stood up, studying Carmine’s face, and an odd little professional smile crossed his waxy, almost doll-like face.
Carmine was conscious, his eyes blazing hate at Bahr as he was lifted onto the workbench.
“You can make it easy on yourself, if you want to,” Bahr said. “You know what I want to know.” Behind t
he gag Carmine’s face twisted almost out of shape, his eyes narrowing to slits. Bahr stepped forward, his fist back, but Joel said, “No!” and stopped him cold.
“You’ll have to leave,” the girl said. She and the bully moved between him and Carmine. “Don’t worry. He’s in good hands.”
Behind them, Joel expertly finished wiring Carmine down to the workbench, viewed him for a moment with a clinical eye, and then snapped open a black doctor’s bag and began selecting appliances.
“All right,” Bahr said, suddenly cold. “Let Kocek know when he breaks.”
“You’ll hear from us,” the girl said.
She opened the garage doors, and Bahr backed out. It was almost seven o’clock, and he had to get back to New York through morning traffic. He thought of Carmine and the good hands he was in, and he should have felt good, but he didn’t; he just felt hollow and cold and weary.
“He’ll break,” Kocek assured him as they moved into traffic. “We’ll find out who put him up to it.”
Bahr didn’t answer. Who put Carmine up to it didn’t seem important any more, nor did the interview with Adams that was now facing him in two hours with no sleep to support him. He drove through the gloomy drizzling rain, trying to remember something about a woman whose face he could not see, and a long corridor, and an elephant.
In the darkened room, Harvey Alexander lay immobile, staring fixedly at the ceiling, and he smelled the smoke long before he felt the heat of the fire. He tried to move his arms; the muscles responded, but slowly, sluggishly, and he fell back against the couch, panting at the effort.
There were many things he did not understand, many pieces that did not fit, but the long hours of waiting in darkness, helpless and immobile, had given him time to think, and slowly the picture had come clear. Now he understood things, and it was a wellspring of satisfaction and a bitter defeat at the same time. He had heard the shots and screams of the pogrom on the floor below, and then the silence, and then the smoke and glowing heat, and he realized that understanding, even knowing, was not good enough now that it came too late.
There was no one down below who could help him now.
Slowly, he tried again to flex his muscles. It was a major effort just to breath, an impossible feat to sit up on the couch, but he managed it. He felt the floor with his bare feet. Then he tried to stand, and felt his knees buckle, and fell heavily onto the floor.
It was useless. The place was a smoke-filled oven; already he could see the yellow brightness of the flames in the crack under the door. He knew the truth now, and it was possible that he knew things that nobody else knew, but he would never be able to tell anyone, to use that information. It was useless to fight any more, but he tried.
Slowly, he hitched himself up on his elbows, began inching his way across the room toward the hall.
He had almost reached the window when he blacked out momentarily, choking on the acrid fumes from the fire down below, and he saw the uselessness of it.
He had been running for too long. Now there was no more chance to run.
Chapter Fourteen
There was no chance to run, Libby realized, when she saw Adams’ feet propped up on her desk. Somehow, in her mind, there had always been the idea that at the last moment she would be able to run away, somehow avoid facing it, call it all off and start with a clean slate, but she saw now with a sort of horrified fascination that she had been deluding herself. The elevator had closed behind her and gone back down below. The office secretary had seen her. Adams had seen her.
She couldn’t run now, or ever.
She turned on her most charming smile, her most friendly and sincere smile, her you-don’t-know-how-insanely-happy-(hebephrenic)-I-am-to-see-you smile, with a little sex thrown in, even though, as she looked at him, Adams gave her the same cold sick feeling in her stomach he always did. All she could actually say was, “Good morning, there.”
Adams of course was not taken in, and Libby was instantly angry with herself for trying to fake her way through the opening. Adams was laying for her. He had made up his mind already what he was going to say and think and listen to; any attempt to ignore the fact would simply debase her a little more. She knew her only hope now was to beat him to the punch and keep feeding him answers before he could get the questions out. And Julian was not there. Where in hell was he?
“I guess you’re waiting for Mr. Bahr,” she said. Like a chimpanzee, she thought, just like a chimpanzee, sitting around wisely with his thin pale face framed by the thinning pale blond hair that he never seemed to cut. There were two technicians like chimpanzees, too, practically picking fleas off themselves in an effort to look like Adams.
“Where is Bahr?” Adams asked.
“He had an emergency investigation last night,” she said. “He may be a little late getting here.”
“If he gets here at all,” Adams said.
“He would have notified me if he couldn’t make it.”
I see.
Silence.
There was no clue as to whether she was supposed to sit down, or break down, or what, so she carried out the ritual of hanging up her coat, straightening her hair, deliberately showing off her figure a little because she thought it would make Adams feel uncomfortable.
“I’d like to see your case history on Bahr,” Adams said.
“It’s not quite up to date. I have some notes in my apartment.”
“Obviously,” Adams said.
“His latest Brontok,” Libby snapped, flushing with anger at his insinuation, which was not actually an insinuation but a statement of fact. Of course Adams would know.
“We can probably manage without anything from your apartment,” Adams said acidly. “I want to see what you have here.”
“It’s up to date as of two weeks ago,” she explained, sliding her safe drawer open. “Mr. Bahr has been too rushed at work for scheduled analysis.” Even before she got the drawer all the way open, Libby sensed that something was wrong. Something in the drawer had been changed. Someone had been tampering with her files. She hesitated.
“Would you mind?” Adams said, goading her. She lifted out Bahr’s file, trying to flip through briefly to see what might have been changed, or taken out, but Adams was on his feet beside her, lifting the folder out of her hands.
She started to say something, and then let it pass, hoping that maybe if she played it dumb he wouldn’t realize that she had spotted the tampering.
Adams retired to the chair, leafing through the folder, pretending to study it. Obviously he was stalling. He knew what he wanted to find; he was just hoping to draw some comment from her by the long delay. She did not oblige him.
Finally he looked up. “Are you familiar with the function of a DEPCO therapist?”
“Certainly I am.”
“How would you define it?”
“Helping people.”
Adams gave an impatient shrug. “All right, flood relief helps people, too. Is that what you mean?”
“Helping them to adjust their emotions and thinking processes to living in the world,” Libby countered. “Helping them gain insight into—”
“Miss Allison, you’ve recommended Julian Bahr for six grade changes in the last four years. Do you call this adjustment? When you let a highly questionable individual accrue more responsibility and power with every up-grade? When you put more and more strain on a sick personality?”
“He’s my case. I think the diagnosis is my responsibility. And the treatment.”
“As long as you remain his therapist, yes, but when you become his agent—”
“I’m still his therapist,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Really? I thought this might have changed since his appointment as director of DIA.”
“It’s only a temporary appointment.”
“Temporary. Of course. And he’s still under treatment? Coming along nicely, too . . . am I right?”
It took strength to control herself. “You have the case h
istory there.”
Adams nodded sourly, and glanced back over the report. “No analysis, I see, after four years. Didn’t you think he needed analysis?”
“I wasn’t able to convince the patient until recently.” Adams dropped the folder on the desk with a thud, and her voice trailed off.
It all sounded so weak. Even knowing in advance what Adams was going to ask didn’t improve the story. She had fouled the whole job completely. She had been deluding herself, but she could see it now, coldly, unhappily. She had been used. Even the most impartial witness, reading that case history, could have seen that. She had twisted, bent, and sidestepped every principle, regulation, safeguard and normal channel in DEPCO to do Bahr’s bidding.
Therapist. She had a sour, nauseous feeling, and there was a dull, cramping pain in her thorax. For the first time she saw, in stark, uncolored light exactly what she had been doing. Somewhere, long ago, there must have been a reason, a sane, rational reason, but what was it?
Twelve years of training, six years of hard-earned experience, and she had thrown it all out, a life’s work, to play lover to a sick, ruthless brute.
A Phi Beta Kappa concubine . . . .
The phone was ringing. Adams picked it up. “It’s Bahr. For you. See that he gets here.” Libby took the phone, surprised to find her hands sweaty. She flicked on the local muffler so Adams could not hear.
“Julian? Yes, I know you’re late. All night? You knew you had this interview today.” Damn him, damn him! “I meant what I said, Julian, if you don’t come over for the prelim today, Adams will have an injunction against you tomorrow morning. This is 100 percent under DEPCO jurisdiction. Yes, you’re damned right I’m looking after my own neck; if I lose my rating . . . That’s what I said—by tomorrow morning. All right, I’ll tell him, and Julian . . . .”
The phone went dead. She hung up, and she knew her face was dead white and that she was trembling all over when she turned back to Adams.
“He’ll be right over,” she said.
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 18