Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  She caught his tone of voice. “Is something happening?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “I need to be here if it does.”

  Bob never actually talked to Millie about his work in detail, but somehow or other she always seemed to know almost as much as he did. It bordered on the telepathic. She was silent for a while. “It’s them, isn’t it? They’re trying to hurt us again, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” he told her.

  “All my life they’ve been trying to hurt me and my family, from the time that nigger swaggered into our house in Chicago and tried to take me away. They never give up, do they?” she said almost conversationally.

  “No,” he said. “They never give up.”

  “I’ll put your dinner in the microwave,” she said.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  Bob considered calling out his copter again and flying up to the Lost Creek site, just to be doing something, but it was risky in the dark and was probably pointless in any case. So here I am again, just sitting on my ass waiting for death and horror to happen, he thought to himself bitterly. Let’s hope the result is a little better this time.

  At about ten thirty the phone rang. “Colonel Campbell?” said a voice. “This is Major Hampton Parry from the Ninetieth ADA at Ellis Field in Helena. I’m calling to let you know that ten minutes ago a missile of undetermined type was fired from what we presume to be a mobile launcher in the Deer Lodge National Park over on the American side. It came in low and really fast, supersonic speed.”

  “Were you able to intercept?” asked Campbell, his mouth dry.

  “Yes, sir. Goop gun got it about twelve miles outside Anaconda. It was heading toward Lost Creek, all right. There was one hell of an explosion. Not nuclear, no radiation detected, but we’re talking CL-20, DNAF warhead, something like that. Looks like there was only minimal damage on the ground, but there’s debris scattered over a huge area. Local firefighters and NDF personnel are on the scene, and we’ve got recovery teams on the way out there to scavenge up whatever bits and pieces we can. Looks like you were right, sir. If not for your warning we might not have been able to react in time and it might have hit Lost Creek. Thank you, and congratulations.”

  A few minutes later the phone rang again. It was Captain Tom Horakova. “We got him,” he said.

  “Scorpius?” demanded Campbell.

  “Well, he wasn’t wearing a name tag or a Zodiac ring, but yeah, pretty sure.” Horakova was silent for a bit. “Bob, it was Arne Wingard.”

  “What?” yelled Campbell, stunned. “I thought we’d ruled him out?”

  “He ruled himself back in,” said Horakova. “I took a long shot that a pro like we believed Scorpius to be wouldn’t be satisfied with just calling in co-ordinates for a missile launch. He’d want to make sure, especially considering what lousy shots the Americans are. He’d want to plant a radio beacon somewhere on the site for the missile to home in on. I took some men and I sealed off the site, then we started searching the whole place from top to bottom as unobtrusively as we could, which wasn’t hard since they’re all down there at the longhouse absolutely glued to that ancient burial site and the kid who’s in it. We eventually found the beacon in a storage box in the Shack, bleeping away. About that time Wingard appeared on the exit road in his car, and tried to talk his way past the two Guards on duty. When they politely informed him that State Security had closed the site and he wasn’t allowed to leave, he made a break for it. He shot one of your men. Guardsman Benjamin Poprilovich.”

  “Is Ben okay?” asked Campbell.

  “Wounded twice, one cracked rib from a hit to the vest and a bullet in the face. He’ll have a scar, but it’s not fatal. The second Guardsman shot and killed Wingard. It was Bobby.”

  “Oh,” said Campbell. “Is he all right?”

  “Fine,” said Tom.

  “You heard that the Air Defense Artillery knocked down an incoming missile?” asked Campbell.

  “Yeah, I heard,” replied Tom. “You called it, Bob. The Republic owes you a big one. Again.”

  Campbell shook his head, although Horakova couldn’t see him. “Wait, wait, if Arne Wingard was Scorpius, which I find damned hard to believe, then we’re still looking for the hidden Jew.”

  “Correct,” agreed Tom.

  “Maybe the Jew is Scorpius and Wingard was an accomplice?”

  “Could be,” conceded Horakova. “I’m still out here at the site. I’ll wrap it up and then I’m heading back to Missoula with a team to search Arne Wingard’s home. I’ve taken the liberty of sending a couple of your Guards to sit on the place until we get there.”

  “Sure, sure. How are our foreign guests taking it?” asked Campbell.

  “The only corpse they have time for is the one who’s been dead for twelve millennia. I don’t think they’ve even noticed Wingard is gone yet,” said Tom in bemused exasperation.

  “Have you told Ally yet? I know she’ll be shocked and upset. Wingard was her professor and her mentor.”

  “I told her Bob had been in a shooting incident. I’m going to talk to her now. Not something I’m looking forward to. We still need to keep an eye on these EPs,” warned Tom. “One of them might still be an enemy agent in contact with our kosher friend.”

  “Who is probably planning more deviltry,” said Bob. “See you tomorrow.”

  XXIX

  THE SECRET OF THE MOUND

  (32 years, seven months, and eleven days after Longview)

  How have you made division of yourself?

  An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin

  Than these two creatures.

  —Twelfth Night, Act V, Scene 1

  In point of fact, Tom didn’t come by the next day to give Bob Campbell the promised briefing. Instead he called that afternoon and left a message for Bob: “Something has come up regarding the investigation, but I can’t give you all the details as yet. We’re on the track of your Red Sea pedestrian. Don’t worry, all shall be revealed in the fullness of time.” Campbell bridled his impatience, assuming that BOSS had a lead on the mysterious undercover Jew and was hunting the unwelcome visitor in some other area of the Republic, or maybe beyond. A long arm was their stock in trade.

  On his part, Jason Stockdale had a hellacious PR problem on his hands. He had to explain to the visiting foreign experts exactly how it came to be that their host scientist had turned out to be a traitor and a spy who had at least been involved in the murder of one of their colleagues, if not the actual killer himself, who had then tried to blow up the site and kill them all, and had subsequently been shot by his own country’s police force while trying to escape. It was not the positive image the Republic wanted to present to the world. But in a quiet and completely unofficial way, completely disregarding the express instructions of the British and American governments, Frederick Haskins and Amanda Wyrick stepped forward and took over the Lost Creek dig. Bob himself had spoken with Allura that morning, who took the shock better than he had hoped. “You know, I thought something was odd going on with Arne for the last couple of months,” she told him sadly. “He wasn’t himself, definitely. Oh, he was as sharp and perceptive in his work as ever, but there was something—well, off about his personality.”

  “Off in what way?” asked Bob keenly.

  “He… well, one night about six weeks ago, we were working late out in the Shack. Bobby hadn’t come out to the site that day and I was going to stay over at the Fairmont. Arne… well, he said certain things and made a suggestion . . . anyway, I figured I’d better drive back home that night after all.”

  “Did you tell Bobby?” asked Campbell.

  “No, because Bobby might have called Arne out and maybe killed him in a duel, and not only does Lost Creek not need that kind of publicity, not to mention me personally, but I was sure that it was an aberration. Arne was just having some kind of midlife crisis or something.”

  “The French call it le démon du midi, the Demon of the Afternoon,” said Campbell. �
��It’s kind of a male menopause thing that makes old codgers like me forget their dignity and go chasing after girls young enough to be their daughters, or granddaughters in your case and Wingard’s.”

  “What struck me as odd was not that Arne made a pass at me, so much, as how unlike him it was,” said Allura. “His wife has been dead for years, and of course some men in his position with all kinds of girl students around would have really gone to town if they were so inclined, no need to mess with married women, but Arne never did. I asked him once why he didn’t get married again. He held up his hand, where he still wore his wife’s wedding ring, and he told me, ‘I promised her forever and I meant it.’ This is a guy who all of a sudden propositions a married woman he’s known for years right out of the blue? Something wasn’t right. Well, I guess we’ll never know now.”

  “Then again, we might,” demurred Campbell. “This isn’t over, Ally, and we’re going to have to get to the bottom of it. All the way to the bottom.”

  “Are you going to tell Bobby about Arne coming on to me?” she asked.

  “No, although I think you should, but that’s between you and him. But I may have to mention it to Tom. I mean it, we have to know what the devil has been going on here and why Wingard did what he did.”

  “Are you coming to Adam’s press conference?” Allura asked him. The ancient skeleton discovered in the Lost Creek longhouse had been dubbed “Adam” by someone on the team. “We won’t just be talking to Northwest newspapers and media, but most of the accredited foreign correspondents in the Republic. CNN, BBC, RTE, TeleFrance, Pravda, you name it.”

  “And this is going to be you and Wyrick and Haskins conducting the conference? Are they nuts? Do they realize what they’ll face when they get back to their own countries?”

  “They don’t care,” said Allura. “There’s something about getting that iron heel of politically correct thought control off your neck, even for a short time, that seems to induce rebellious thoughts. I think they want to stay a while. They’re hooked on Lost Creek, and Doctor Wyrick wants to know why Bella Sutcliffe was murdered, who was behind it. If it turns out it was her own government, I think she’s going to raise all kinds of hell. Maybe if that’s the case they’ll back off on any retaliation for our visitors getting their hands dirty.”

  The next afternoon Robert got a call at his office from Tom, asking if he could come up. “I’m bringing somebody with me,” he explained. Bob was astounded to observe that Tom’s companion was none other than the commanding officer of the Bureau of State Security, General Stephen Capshaw, a David Niven-ish looking Englishman complete with tweeds and a Dunhill pipe. Bob stood to attention, something he rarely had to do these days, but Capshaw waved him back down into his seat. “No, no, Colonel, this is quite informal,” he said. “Captain Horakova was very insistent that it was time we brought you up to speed, and I had to agree with him, since it was your flash of inspiration that prevented the enemy from blowing a large hole in a particularly sensitive bit of the Homeland.”

  “Should you tell him or should I, sir?” asked Horakova.

  “Oh, you should, by all means, dear boy,” said Capshaw, lighting his pipe and filling the office with fragrant tobacco smoke. “Colonel Campbell might just believe you. If I tell him, he’ll think I’ve gone off my trolley.”

  “All right. You’d better have a seat, Bob,” said Tom, suiting the action to the word. “This is going to be a little on the flabbergasting side. Before I start, how’s Bobby Three doing?”

  “He’s a bit rattled still,” replied Bob Two. “Unlike most of us from Jason’s generation or mine, he’s never had to kill a man before, especially someone he knew like Arne Wingard.”

  “He didn’t kill Arne Wingard,” said Tom.

  “Uh, run that by me again?” asked Bob in surprise.

  “He shot a Jew of Lithuanian descent, name unknown, but presumably the enemy agent code-named Scorpius,” Tom told him.

  “What?”

  “When we searched decedent’s home yesterday, we really took it apart, looking for any stashes where incriminating material might be hidden. One of our men noticed some scuff marks which indicated that the work bench in the basement had been moved. We moved the bench again and found it was covering a patch of newly-laid concrete. We got in a jack hammer, broke it up, and started digging. About four feet down we found a body. DNA analysis confirmed it was the body of Arne Wingard, the real Arne Wingard. He’d been dead about three months. There was enough left for our forensic doc to determine he had been strangled, frontally, in the same manner as Bella Sutcliffe.”

  “What in the name of… ?” Bob waved his hands vaguely in the air.

  Capshaw nodded. “Exactly our feelings, Colonel.”

  Tom went on. “Bob, the man your son shot the other night, the man who has been successfully posing as Doctor Arne Wingard for the past several months, was some kind of replicant.”

  “You mean a clone?” asked Bob, stunned.

  “No, not a clone, not a true one anyway, because the DNA didn’t match.”

  “They made a duplicate Arne? How? Plastic surgery?”

  “No, the pathologists who are now examining the remains in Olympia can’t find any surgical scarring or any indication of medical alteration of this man’s face or body,” said Tom. “It’s almost like they were able to grow this guy a new skin and a new facial bone structure. Not only that, his retinas matched, the blood vessel patterns in his eyes! That’s how he was able to get into security areas at the lab and on the site that required a retinal scan. His voice pattern matches as well. We checked it using some of his recent recorded notes and comparing those with his old lectures. We don’t have a clue how they did all this. I guess the NAR aren’t the only ones who can finance mad scientists and give them their head to see what weird things they can accomplish. Bob, this man is almost a total biological copy of the original, with the exception of the DNA. Apparently whatever Israeli Doctor Frankenstein who cooked this monstrosity up for the Americans or East Canadians was able to replicate everything except that.”

  “It goes without saying that this opens a whole new can of worms in the field of espionage,” said Capshaw glumly. “From now on quite literally anybody could be not what he or she seems. The implications are staggering. It’s not just biological duplication. This was a major project. It has to be either the ONR or CSIS; they are the only enemy agencies with the resources and the obsessive hatred of the Republic required to carry out an operation this extensive and detailed. I’m rather leaning toward the East Canadians. Our existence seems to have driven them almost insane.”

  “Liberal democracies can’t keep their power grid or their transportation system running, they can’t feed their own people, half the children in their countries are without shoes and eighty per cent of the population has no medical or dental care, most of the adults are illiterate and nothing works, but they still have money to spend on madness like this?” asked Robert in anger.

  “So it would seem,” agreed Capshaw. “Never underestimate the power of hate, Colonel. Odd that they still call us that, isn’t it? Haters. And yet they took infinite pains over this project to fulfill their own hate. They were able to instill in this biocopy a lifetime’s worth of archaeological knowledge, enough of Wingard’s personal information and habits so that he was able to move among people who had known him for years without raising suspicion. Speech patterns, likes and dislikes, his gait and his mannerisms, everything. Apparently he was able to mimic the original’s very personality to the point where no one noticed anything amiss.”

  “One person did,” said Bob.

  “Eh? What do you mean?” asked Tom. Bob told them about the replicant’s attempt to seduce Allura Campbell, and Ally’s impression that something wasn’t right about her old professor.

  “Indeed?” commented Capshaw drily, swirling smoke from his pipe. “I suppose the traditional lust of Jewish men for beautiful golden-haired gentile women was one thing the re
plicant couldn’t completely suppress. I’ve never met Mrs. Campbell, but I’m told she greatly resembles her heroic mother.”

  “Greatly, yes,” said Bob.

  “Scorpius would have known who she was, of course,” mused Capshaw. “No doubt that added to the piquancy of the temptation to fall out of character for a moment.” Bob scowled as he felt bile rising in his throat.

  Tom sighed, “We figure one night Arne Wingard must have heard a knock on his door, and he opened it to find himself staring himself in the face. Then out comes the garrote and his own face was the last thing he saw as he died.”

  “Jesus Christ!” muttered Bob in shock. “It sounds like that old horror movie from a hundred years ago, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. What are you going to do now? Is this going to be classified as top secret? What about Arne’s kids? Are they going to have to go through life believing their father was a spy and a traitor?”

  “We considered trying to clamp the lid on, yes,” said Capshaw with a nod. “However, you’re quite correct. The problem with being the gents in the white hats is that we have to act like it. On most occasions, anyway. Besides, it wouldn’t do to have one of our most distinguished academics end his career with a blot like that on his copybook. We will therefore be publicizing the whole affair and also making public whatever we can find out about the medical and biochemical process through which Doctor Frankenstein created this monster. Our way of letting the noseys know we’re onto their little game. Not to mention giving a credibility boost to the Lost Creek archaeological site.”

  “Wingard’s children will be coming in for the funeral tomorrow,” said Tom. “Needless to say, the remains in the coffin will be their real father. You might want to let Bobby Three know he doesn’t have to feel guilty over anything. He didn’t kill a man. He killed a Jew.”