by Ron Hubbard
Stupewitz came in and he and Maulin whispered briefly together. Then they put Heller in a chair with two chairs facing him and Stupewitz turned on a bright light in Heller’s eyes. The two agents sat down.
“Me first,” said Stupewitz. “Junior, we reported to Virginia that a wrecked Cadillac with your license plates was discovered in Maryland. We also said it had a body in it answering your description that was burned beyond recognition. The people concerned did not have your name; the hooker is dead. So you are in the clear. So don’t never mention that incident again and make liars of us. You understand?” he added severely.
The light was blinding Heller. But I suddenly realized with relief they were not interrogating him. They were briefing him! They just didn’t know how to talk to anybody any other way.
“Now, here,” continued Stupewitz, “is your car registration. It now has District of Columbia plates. The motor and body serial numbers have been changed. It is in your name now. We know you were the one who originally paid the dealer for that car, so don’t get the idea we’re doing anything illegal. Got it?”
Heller took the registration. It had a little slip fastened across the top of it that said:
All or any police: In case of contact, call Agents Stupewitz or Maulin only, FBI, D.C.
“We won’t bother with insurance,” continued Stupewitz. “But if you’re in any accidents, with your name you could be sued for your shirt. So drive carefully. No more crazy hundred-mile-an-hour chases. Got it?”
Heller got it.
“Now, here,” said Stupewitz, “is your driver’s license.”
Heller took it and, against the glaring light, saw that it had another little slip on it.
All or any police: In case of contact, call Agents Stupewitz or Maulin only, FBI, D.C.
I suddenly realized what they had done: they had put “tail plates” on the Cadillac. In the computers used by all police departments, if those “tail plates” came up, the reply would read: “This car is under surveillance by the FBI. If spotted, report it to Agents Stupewitz or Maulin, FBI, D.C.” It amounted to the FBI having a continuous tail on him!
“Now, here,” said Stupewitz, “are all your papers back.” And he gave him the birth certificate, diploma and grades. Heller put them in his pocket.
Maulin got up and hauled an old, tattered Octopus Oil Company road map out of a cluttered desk drawer. He sat back down.
“All right,” said Maulin, opening the map and putting his phone notes on it. “Mr. Bury wanted to be sure you had money and I said you did. Mr. Bury says you will probably be tired — he’s quite concerned for your welfare. So you are to go to Howard Johnson’s Motel in Silver Spring, Maryland. You leave here, go up Sixteenth Avenue, over the District line and the motel is right here. See it?”
Heller was studying the map. And I suddenly knew the why of the delay. It was not the FBI. It was Mr. Bury. Somewhere up that route, he had arranged a hit! I tried frantically to figure out how he would do it.
Heller had it. Actually, he probably had every road and byway on the east coast now.
“Good,” said Maulin. “Now, he said some reporters had gotten wind of your refusing to come home this summer. Some crazy tale that you wanted to live your own life. Maybe join a baseball team or something. So he said that under no circumstances were you to register in a motel or hotel under your right name as he wanted no news release until you were reconciled with your family and you had talked with your father who is out of the country now. Got it?”
“Don’t use my own name,” said Heller. “Got it.”
Oh, that Bury. He knew (bleeped) well there was no Delbert John Rockecenter, Junior! He was going to avoid any crazy newspaper stories by simply murdering the imposter. Rockecenter certainly had the resources and was not slow to use them. But how was he going to do it? And where?
“All right,” said Maulin. “Now, tomorrow morning, you drive up to U.S. 495, the circle highway around D.C., and you turn off to the left onto U.S. 95. You go on that highway straight across Maryland, then across Delaware to this point where you go to the right on U.S. 295 across the Delaware River and then you’re on the New Jersey Turnpike. You just follow along — actually you can’t get off it. Now, you see here, just north of Newark, the turnpike splits? Well, there’s a Howard Johnson’s Motel right here,” and he put an X on the map. “You’re supposed to be there by about 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s only a four-hour trip. No speeding! Don’t register. Just go in the dining room, sit down and have an early supper. An old family retainer will be waiting there for you and will guide you home. Got that?”
Heller said he had.
“Now, Mr. Bury said to tell you you were in no danger whatever, so not to do anything silly. In fact, he said to tell you that Slinkerton will be tailing you all the way so you won’t get scared.”
“Slinkerton?” said Heller.
“That’s the Slinkerton Detective Agency, the one your dad uses. They’re the biggest in the country,” said Maulin. “You won’t see them but they’ll be there.” He laughed suddenly. “I think he’s making sure you won’t run off again, no matter how many hookers you meet!”
Stupewitz said, “Shall we go down to the car now?”
They went down to the FBI garage and there was the car. Heller checked the trunk: his gear was undisturbed. He glanced at the new D.C. plates, front and back. Then he got in.
Stupewitz said, “So it’s good-bye, Junior.”
“Thank you,” said Heller (was that an emotional tremor in his voice?), “for making it possible for me to go straight.”
Maulin laughed, “Save your thanks until you get your hands on your old man’s money, Junior.”
The agents both laughed and then, the way Americans do — talking in front of children as though the child isn’t there — Stupewitz said to Maulin, “He’s a good kid, Maulin. A little wild but okay.”
“Yeah,” said Maulin, “you can see his family’s stuff in him. But all these kids is tamer than we used to be.”
They both guffawed and waved to Heller as he drove off.
I didn’t wait to watch Heller wrestle with the evening rush hour of Washington. I went plunging down the side tunnel that led to Faht’s office. It’s a long way and I was totally out of breath when I burst through the secret side door.
“I’ve got to contact Terb!” I shouted.
Faht opened a drawer and handed me a report. It was their daily radio transmission. It had come through at the rate of five thousand words a second, using hyper-band. It contained, however, no five thousand words. It was very terse. Heller had gotten his birth certificate, beaten up two cops, was found by Terb again through bugs in Lynchburg, had gone to Washington, been arrested by the FBI and now was safely in their hands, probably about to be imprisoned as intended.
The Hells he was! I knew a lot more than Terb or Raht!
“I’ve got to contact our people!” I blared at Faht.
Heller was going to be killed! Within the next day or two. And I didn’t have the platen! I had to get word to Terb to get into those motel rooms quick and ransack that baggage!
Faht shrugged. “They don’t have a receiver-typer.
They’re bulky and you didn’t order them to take one.”
Oh, my Gods! I slumped in a chair. The worst of it was, I couldn’t even talk to Faht or anybody. They must not know how I knew or they could get in on the lines and maybe do something wild!
“I might get word to them in New York,” said Faht helpfully. “They’ll probably report in there at the end of the week if they’re out of money.”
They weren’t ever out of money. They had it by the bucket load!
I only knew three things for sure. One: Bury was going to have Heller killed, whatever else Bury was up to. Two: Soltan Gris was going to be executed if Heller was. Three: Earth population was going to be slaughtered if they interrupted Heller’s communication line and I, right now, was part of that population!
I start
ed to ask Faht if there was a good mortuary in Afyon. At least I could have a decent funeral. But I didn’t even dare say that.
I slogged through the long, long tunnel to my room. My future looked even darker than the tunnel, and no room at the end of it — just a tomb, even an “unknown grave.”
Chapter 6
Without hope, I watched my viewscreen as Heller entered the Silver Spring, Maryland, Howard Johnson Motel. I should have been relieved, for it meant that, with luck, I myself could end, for a few hours, the marathon of sleepless vigil he had been putting me through.
He wasn’t looking behind him as he should have. He didn’t scan the desk or waiting area for suspicious figures. He was taking no precautions any normal agent would take.
He simply clickety-clacked up to the desk, told them he wanted a room for the night, laid down thirty bucks and wrote his new car license number, plain as day, on the registration form — he didn’t falsify it or even make it illegible. And then he spurred me into near fury.
With a flourish, he signed the register, “JOHN DILLINGER!” He even put the exclamation point on it! A fat lot he’d learned at FBI headquarters: John Dillinger was one of the most famous gangsters of the 1930s. Pure sacrilege!
He threw his bags carelessly in his room as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He washed up and soon clickety-clacked outside — not even looking into the many shadows — walked around the building and came into their restaurant.
Heller sat down. An elderly waitress promptly came over and told him he was in the wrong seat. She made him move to another booth in the corner with a flat white wall behind him. She fiddled with the lights until he was totally illuminated. And he didn’t even register that she was putting the finger on him! He just busily puzzled away at the menu. And a Howard Johnson menu has nothing on it to puzzle about: they’re all the same, numbers and pictures, from coast to coast!
The elderly waitress had gone off but now she returned. She took his baseball cap off his head and put it in the seat beside him, saying, “Young gentlemen don’t eat with their hats on.”
“I’ll have a chocolate sundae,” said Heller.
She stood there and she said, “You will have a Number 3. That’s green salad, fried chicken, sweet potatoes and biscuits. And if you eat all that, then we will talk about a chocolate sundae.” She imagined Heller was going to protest. She said, “I have boys of my own and you are all alike. You don’t realize you have to eat good food to grow!”
She didn’t fool me. She had for sure put the finger on Heller for someone. Helplessly I wondered if it would be a bullet or knife or arsenic in the chicken. Maybe, I thought, with a faint stir of hope, it was just a finger to identify. But she had certainly done a workmanlike job and a beautiful cover-up. One comes to learn the hallmarks of a real agent.
The food came. Heller peered about at other plates to see what others were eating. Then he seemed reconciled and fell to, even doing a creditable job of handling his utensils. He even picked the pieces of chicken up and ate them with his fingers, a thing he would never have dreamed of doing on Voltar! But although he was absorbing culture, he was also making mistakes. I realized that in D.C.; and here, he was talking in an Ivy League accent. He thought, apparently, that he was out of the South and this wasn’t so. Maryland is as south as the fried chicken he was eating. He wouldn’t be in New England unless he went just north of New York City. He was too crude and rough in his nonexistent command of tradecraft.
He had finished his meal, wiped the grease off his mouth and fingers when his attention was attracted by a movement on the other side of the room. It was hard to see as the lights were so strong in his eyes. Just a shadowy figure.
Then I froze. The figure had something held before its face. Was it a gun?
There was a bright blue flash! It was extremely brief.
My viewscreen went white with overload!
Then there were black spots dancing on it and I could not see even what Heller saw, if he saw anything.
The scene cleared. The black spots faded. And Heller was just sitting there, looking into the room. There was no figure there now.
The waitress came to him. “My, my. You ate it all. You have been a good boy, so you can order your chocolate sundae.”
“What was the flash?” said Heller.
“Oh, the cashier’s desk lamp just blew out. Did it hurt your eyes?” And with motherly concern she rearranged the lights near him so they would not shine in his face. Sure enough, the cashier was fiddling with her desk lamp.
Heller got and finished his sundae, paid his check with a generous tip and went clickety-clacking off around the building to his room, once more not even looking in the shadows. I was dealing with an idiot!
In his room, which he had entered without a fast door-swing-back and sudden spring, he did not check his baggage to see if it had been tampered with. He simply adjusted the air conditioning — no inspection for a gas capsule — and sat down in an easy chair and read the drug book again.
He did something then which put me into an idea conflict. On the one hand, he must NOT be killed until I had the platen. On the other hand, he would HAVE to be killed if he really penetrated what our Apparatus Earth base was all about.
Heller got up and found two ashtrays. He turned out the right-hand pocket of his jacket into the first and the left-hand pocket into the second. He was carrying DRUGS!
I couldn’t understand it. Then I realized he simply had taken a small handful out of each of two jars at the FBI drug lab!
He opened up his suitcase and took out a little vial. It only had a tiny amount in it, a few specks of powder. Then he took out another vial and it, too, had a tiny amount in it.
There actually had been drugs in his suitcases when the DC. policeman searched them! Microscopic amounts but drugs all the same! Where had they come from?
He inspected the vials. Then he put the contents of vial one into the ashtray over at the edge. He put the contents of vial two into the second ashtray over at the edge.
He went over to the light and held ashtray one to his eye.
The granules were suddenly HUGE!
It was Turkish opium!
He did the same with ashtray two.
It was Turkish heroin!
Then he went over to the long French doors to a porch which served as the motel room window and with a bit of fiddling got them open.
He took a book of matches and lighted one. He dropped it in the ashtray. And, of course, the opium began to burn and smoke like mad.
He coughed and put a plastic table mat over it.
He lit the heroin the same way.
He coughed some more and put a mat over the ashtray to put it out.
The room went sort of wobbly for a moment on my screen. Naturally. He had had a whiff of opium smoke followed with a whiff of heroin smoke.
Heller went outside on the balcony and took a lot of rapid breaths of fresh air. Then he ran in place a bit, breathing noisily. Of course, the wobble in the view cleared up.
He went back and dumped both ashtrays in the toilet,
washed them, washed out the vials, thoroughly dusted out his coat pockets and put everything away.
He satisfied himself that there was no trace of either one left anywhere.
But, all in all, it was a pretty amateur performance. No dope addict would ever waste drugs that way. And although you can burn heroin, it is too expensive a way to imbibe it. One has to shoot it into the blood to get the maximum good out of it.
Even though it was probably a hot night, he left the window open. Looking for something to do, he found and read The Fine Art of Angling for Beginners. Finishing that, he tackled The Fine An of Baseball for Beginners.
It was not yet eight. He got interested in the TV set. He got it on. He got a picture. And then he kept pummeling and picking at its switches. He got it all out of kilter and finally got it back in again. I couldn’t figure out what he found wrong with it. It was working, sound an
d picture.
Somewhat impatiently, he went through the whole routine again. There was a sign that said if the TV didn’t work to call the desk and he approached the phone. Then he apparently thought better of it and slumped in a chair. He addressed the set: “All right. You’re the first viewer I ever met I couldn’t fix. So just go on hiding your 3-D control. I’ll look at you anyway!”
A movie was just coming on. The title was THE FBI IS WATCHING YOU!
He sat through all manner of shootings and car chases and wrecks. The FBI wiped out all the red agents in America. It then wiped out all the Mafia in America. It then wiped out the U.S. Congress. I could tell Heller was impressed. He kept yawning and, psychologically, that is a sure sign of tension building up and releasing.
The Washington, D.C., local late news followed.
Whites had been mugged. Blacks had been mugged. Whites had been raped. Blacks had been raped. Whites had been murdered. Blacks had been murdered.
There is a law in America that TV must cover everything impartially without showing bias and they had racially balanced the program up pretty well.
There had been no slightest mention of any incident in Potomac Park. There hadn’t even been a line about a Mary Schmeck, a junkie, dying on the way to a hospital — such deaths are too common to even get notice.
Heller sighed and shut off the TV.
He went to bed.
It was just past six in the morning in Turkey. I, too, turned in. But I couldn’t sleep. He had not even put a chain on his room door or locked the French doors to the balcony. He had not even placed any sort of a weapon under his pillow!
He was going to be hit. That was for certain. Somewhere on the path he was taking, Bury had it all arranged. There was no IF about it. There was only WHEN?
An idiot had me on a chain and was leading me straight to my death! Maybe I would go as anonymously and unremarked as Mary Schmeck. The thought saddened me.