A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) (11 page)

“If you get nabbed you can’t even blow the whistle on him. You don’t even know where the man is.”

“One doesn’t blow the whistle on one’s associates, Rose,” said the lean scientist. “I do have some notion where he’s at, by the way.”

“You haven’t mentioned it to me.”

“You aren’t always in the mood for confidences.”

“Where is Sandman then?”

“I’ve learned Sandman’s base headquarters are somewhere under Los Angeles.”

“That’s not a very specific address.”

“There’s a partially abandoned underground transportation and living system in the Greater Los Angeles area of California South,” explained Guthrie. “I’ve found out, by subtle and roundabout means, our Mr. Sandman is down under there someplace.”

“So he has to live underground, too?”

“When he’s not somewhere in the world performing a resurrection.”

Conger nodded to himself and left the Victorian-style living room. As he climbed toward the trapdoor he heard Rose say, “Ho hum.”

Angelica walked in during the briefing and Conger missed the next several minutes of it. She was wearing a simple tan daydress, her hair pulled back and tied with a paisley ribbon. She nodded at Conger, smiling quickly, then sat down by the big blond NSO agent across the room.

Conger watched her for a moment more before returning his attention to the Greater Los Angeles Police inspector up on the dais.

“… then down on Level Three we have the off-track betting parlors, the legalized—excuse me, Miss Abril—prostitution cribs and the indoor dog tracks.” Inspector Knerr of GLAP was saying. “About 75% of this level is still functioning. The dog track operations have been suspended because of repeated malfunctions of the mechanical rabbits which the dogs are supposed to chase. As I …”

“Excuse me, inspector,” said Rowland Gull, the slight pale young man who’d been introduced as the Press Secretary of the governor of California South. “But Mad Governor Yerkzes has asked me to read this statement in the event any of his Underground Life System was criticized. The statement begins: ‘My fellow Californians, good evening …’ Well, we’ll modify that to good morning, since it still lacks a few minutes of midday. ‘My fellow Californians, good morning …’ “

“We can skip the statement, Rowland,” the short wide inspector told him. “We’ve got a killer to catch here.”

“Wait a mo,” said Linn Learmann, the big blond NSO agent. He was sitting now with his arm on the back of Angelica’s chair. “Technically Sandman isn’t a killer, inspector. All our info indicates the opposite. He brings people back to life, is what he does.”

“Whether he kills them or revives them,” said Inspector Knerr, “we want to catch him. Am I correct in assuming that?”

“Sure thing,” said Learmann, smiling. “It’s simply that I like to keep the record straight.”

“I think you ought to let me read this statement,” said the governor’s press secretary. “Mad Governor Yerkzes gets angry if he’s thwarted in any way. I hate to go back to the state capital in Burbank and have him rip down all the drapes in his executive chambers again, or eat all the artificial flowers.”

“I’ll have it put into the minutes you read the statement and it was well received, Rowland,” promised Inspector Knerr. “Now shut up.” He pointed again to the row of blueprints taped to the wall beside him. “Below Level Three there lies Level Four, a real pesthole. Things have fallen apart there completely and drifters, deadbeats and bums rule. We think probably new and even lower levels of the Underground Life System have been dug by the scum who infest this particular area.”

“Please remember, inspector,” put in the pale press secretary, “that when this wonderful complex was conceived and built back in 2016 we feared impending attack from AngloRussia.”

“No we didn’t,” said Knerr. “Mad Governor Yerkzes feared it and built this goofy mess under LA. I told him then it’d end up full of deadbeats.”

“Just a mo.” Learmann’s fingers tapped on Angelica’s far shoulder.

“Miss Abril here, and Mr. Conger, too, aren’t interested in all this local badinage, inspector. Let’s get down to Sandman.”

“I’ve been trying to explain,” said Inspector Knerr, rapping at a blueprint with his lumpy knuckles, “that GLAP, which is the Greater Los Angeles Police for any of you out-of-towners, GLAP believes if this alleged resurrectionist is hiding beneath our city he has to be down in the Level Four area or deeper.”

A lean sharp edged man sitting near Conger had not spoken before. He coughed and said, “Perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves what motivates this self-styled Sandman.” He rubbed at his sharp elbows, then his knees.

“What, as we often like to put it in the Cal South Psych Force, makes him tick.”

“Wait a sec, Syd,” said the blond NSO agent. “I think Angelica here may have some idea who you are, but for the benefit of Mr. Conger of WTD maybe you better introduce yourself.”

“Oh, hi,” said the lean man, turning to shake hands with Conger. “I’m Dr. Syd Poolhall of the Cal South Psych Force. My office frequently works, as we like to put it, hand in hand with the inspector’s.”

Inspector Knerr sighed through his wide flat nose. “Okay, Syd. Where do you think the god damn guy is?”

“Wait now,” said Dr. Poolhall. “It’s not where I think he is, it’s where he thinks he is. You see— and this may be particularly interesting to you, Mr. Conrad …”

“Conger,” said Conger.

“Mr. Conger. I wonder why I think of you as a Conrad. There must be some facial trigger. At any rate, over in CSPF we use only the best computers and simulating equipment. When I fed the available data on Sandman into them …”

“Of which there isn’t much,” said Conger.

“Be that as it may, as we like to say. Our machines suggested to us Sandman would indeed be most likely to make his nest, shall we call it, down in Level Four or beneath.” He coughed into a lean fist.

“This all jibes with the overall picture we’ve worked out here in the LA office of NSO,” said Learmann. “Mr. Conger has come into this a day or so later than the rest of us and probably isn’t filled in yet on what we intend to do.”

“I’m trying to tell him,” said the inspector, beginning to pace in front of his blueprints.

“I want to hear this, too,” said the governor’s press secretary. “I couldn’t make it to your initial Sandman briefing last night because I had to get over to the Veterans of Wars of Liberation Hospital in Glendale to read them a little cheering statement from the governor. It seems when he was over there earlier he’d taken to playfully pushing some of the fellows in wheelchairs down stairs and it caused a little furor among …”

“What we intend to do,” resumed Inspector Knerr, “is stake out Level Four. That is, implement the force we already have on duty down there. We have a very gifted Disguise Division in GLAP. When they get dressed up you can’t tell them from real bums and deadbeats.”

“I’ll attest to that,” smiled Learmann as he rubbed Angelica’s back. “Of course NSO will have its best undercover people down there, too.”

Conger looked away from them all and out the window of this tower room. Soft yellow smog was drifting by through the hot noon sky. “That’s going to take time,” he said.

“We’re a patient lot in NSO,” Learmann assured him.

“Perhaps,” said Angelica, “Mr. Conger has some alternate idea.”

Conger turned and spoke directly toward the lovely dark girl. “If we set up a fake assassination. Sandman might show himself.”

Learmann said, “Too risky. Besides we haven’t been able to track him from corpse to lab before.”

“Because you weren’t prepared for the hypnotics and so forth he was using,” said Conger. “If you can anticipate those and also set up a better electronic surveillance, you should …”

“Sandman knows how to get around our monitors,” said Learmann.

“No, I’m afraid, Agent Conger, we’ll have to fall back on patience and dogged persistence.”

“Would you mind if I set up an alternate plan?”

Learmann’s blond face puckered. “I wasn’t going to bring this up, Conger,” he said slowly. “I have an official memo from Washington, ordering you to defer to NSO. It’s signed by Sinkovec.”

“I thought Tiefenbacher replaced Sinkovec?”

“He did until the senate computers caught their little mistake and realized it was Tiefenbacher all along who’d been sending those blue messages.”

“What sort of blue messages?” asked Dr. Poolhall.

“Dirty code messages,” explained Learmann. “To girl agents.”

“Fascinating,” said the psychiatrist. “I once interviewed a computer who recited …”

“Okay,” Conger said to the blond NSO agent. “I’ll go along with you. What do I do?”

Learmann shook his head. “Right now, Conger, nothing. We may have need later on for someone with your peculiar gift. As of now, though …”

He shrugged.

Dr. Poolhall asked, “What peculiar gift?”

“I recite dirty limericks.” Conger got up and left the briefing room. He didn’t look at Angelica as he went.

Conger was looking down at the ocean. The water was black and faintly phosphorescent. A few empty beer pouches bobbed in the night water, tapping against the pilings of his rented beach cabana. He left his airfloat chair, crossed the see-through floor. From the decorative mantle he picked up a bottle of B-complex capsules, shook two into his palm.

“How about a movie?” asked the large multientertainment unit which hulked in the center of the glass-walled room.

“No, thanks.”

“I’ve got more than just current stuff,” came the voice from the speaker grid, which was at stomach level. “You may not know it, sir, but Los Angeles was once known as the movie capital of the world. So when I ask, ‘How about a movie?’ I’m not alluding to simply the current run of tri-op crap, nor even to the now popular multi-sensual porno flix—though I can run one of those if you’d care to see it—no, I refer to the entire film archives of GLA, sir. I’ve got films from such last century giants as MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount …”

“I don’t want to watch anything.” Conger returned to his chair, swallowing the B-complex capsules.

“Only this morning I got hold of the entire output of Monogram Pictures.”

“Why don’t you take the night off?” The big entertainment unit, giving a resigned snort, snapped itself off.

Conger resumed looking at the dark Pacific. Out on the balcony Canguru appeared and tapped on the glass. His one-piece GLA-style glowsuit was wet up to the knees. “What kind of front door do you have on this place?”

Sliding the balcony door open, Conger said, “Come on in.”

“They don’t keep your part of the ocean very clean.” Canguru stood one-footed at the edge of the room, tugging off a soggy shoe. “Everytime I tried to come up your front path some robot arms rose out of the ground and heaved me back onto the sidewalk.”

“This is a maximum security cabana,” said Conger. “I forgot to turn all that off.”

With his shoes hooked over two fingers of his right hand, the little blond spy walked over to sit opposite Conger. “They’re very security minded in California South. I’ve been frisked by two municipal buses and an aircab today already. You look preoccupied.”

“I look unoccupied.”

Canguru carefully unwound seaweed from his ankle. “You’re still working on the Sandman problem, aren’t you?”

“According to Geer I am,” answered Conger. “I talked to him on the pixphone an hour ago. I’m supposed to stay out of the way of NSO, though, let them try their stakeout idea for a while.”

Canguru decided to take off his rainbow sox. “Knowing who Sandman is going to revive next,” he said. “Could you work on an angle like that?”

“Yeah, I could. Do you know who he’s going to resurrect?”

“It will probably be a man who was assassinated this morning, State Senator McSherry.”

“He’s from right here in California South. I saw his funeral on the Candlelight & Wine News Hour.” The entertainment unit turned itself on.

“Would you care to see a replay of that funeral footage, sir?”

“No, go away.”

“I notice they put the wrong kind of casters under your entertainment unit,” said the curly-haired spy. “These are perfectly okay,” said the machine. “They’re factory tested to withstand up to …”

“Enough,” said Conger. “Are you sure about this McSherry guy? The news implied he’d died after a long illness.”

“Two hours isn’t a long illness,” said Canguru. “He was poisoned while cutting the feathers at the grand opening of …”

“Cutting feathers?”

“At the grand opening of a drive-in fly-in chicken shack out in Woodland Hills,” explained Canguru. “They had a ribbon of real chicken feathers surrounding the landing pad and the senator cut it as part of the inaugural ceremonies. The ceremonial scissors had been dipped in a fatal skin contact poison.”

“Who did it?”

“Probably someone working for Mad Governor Yerkzes. McSherry was a real critic of …”

“I have some footage,” put in the entertainment unit, “of Rowland Gull reading a statement from the governor expressing deepest sympathy at the passing of State Senator McSherry. I have that in both tri-op and flat.”

Canguru tangled his tiny toes together. “McSherry is one of the few outspoken liberals left in California South. He was particularly active in the movement to get the chicanos out of the relocation camps in Death Valley,” he told Conger. “AEF doesn’t want him to stay dead.”

“Are they paying for his resurrection?”

“My sources think so.”

Conger rubbed a capsule between his thumb and forefinger. “Have they got the body yet?”

“No, senhor. They’ll pick up McSherry between midnight and dawn.”

“Where is the body now?”

“Lying in state at the Forest Lawn #3 All-Faith Drive-In Fly-In Mortuary & Wee Kirk of the Good Samaritan.”

“I’d better get out there.”

“No need,” said Canguru. “I know what sort of vehicle they’ll be using, also where they’ll enter the underground life setup.” He wadded up his sox, began juggling them. “We can wait at the entry point, pick them up there.”

Conger grinned. “Your briefings are more informative than NSO’s.”

“The trouble with the National Security Office,” said Canguru, “is they expect to coast on their reputation and prestige. You ought to hear what skimpy bribes they’ve been offering around Greater Los Angeles lately.”