Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (6 page)

"There were no
loopholes."

Bahr
jerked a chair around in front of him, sat down very close, leaning his arms on
the back of it as he faced Alexander. "What was your post before
Wildwood, Major?"

"Bureau
of Information, New York."

"Your
position there?"

"I was Director."

"You didn't like the
work?"

"I liked it."

"Then why aren't you
still there?"

Alexander's
hands clenched the chair arms. "It's on the record, you can look it
up."

"I
don't have time to look it up. Why were you downgraded?"

Not
downgraded,
Alexander's
mind screamed.
Re-evaluated.
Reassigned.
Too much pressure, they had said.
Too much aggression breaking through.
BURINF
cant
risk any instability in its personnel, Major. You can
understand that. The nation depends on BURINF for stability.

"There
was a routine stability check," he said hoarsely. "I was
re-evaluated, and reassigned."

A
cold smile crossed Bahr's face. "Your position in BURINF was an important
one, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"It gave you considerable national
prominence, considerable power?" "Yes."

"And
then they dumped you in a sludge-pot like Wildwood."

"They couldn't do
anything else," Alexander protested. "I

It was a
bueak
,-
to Julian Bahr there was no question of that, it was the break he had
been waiting for since the very beginning of it eleven months before, and now,
at last when there was something for him to grab hold of, John McEwen had
decided to put on the brakes. It was at that moment that Julian Bahr made the
decision he had known all along was coming: John McEwen was through.

"I don't like it," McEwen was
saying now, deliberately avoiding Bahr's eyes as the big man paced the DIA
teletype room. "I don't like any part of it. I've
been
liking
it less and less, and this thing puts the lid on it. Julian, I've
given you a free hand; I've backed you right from the start of this thing, but
I can't do it
any more
. We're out of our depth. We're
dealing with something we can't handle by ourselves . . ." His voice
quavered and he spread his hands helplessly.

Bahr
smashed his fist into the palm of his hand, trying to choke down the anger and
impatience. He liked McEwen. In the early days of his DIA work he had liked him
thoroughly, and felt a powerful obligation to this fatherly, impeccably honest
older man who had salvaged him from the drunken, thwarted existence he had sunk
into after his court-martial from the Army.

But
McEwen had changed. Since the beginning of Project Frisco, Bahr had watched him
crumbling, bit by bit, until it seemed incredible that this sick-looking
creature could be the same man that he had known before.

Bahr
remembered the morning five years before »when Libby had come to get him at his
dingy third-story flat over the New Jersey waterfront. She had taken in the
stacks of filthy dishes in the sink and the half-empty whiskey bottles on the
floor at a glance, and with one disgusted shake of her head, started packing a
bag for him. She got him sober with coffee and thiamin, and made him shower and
shave. "Quickly," she had urged. "We're driving to
Washington."

Then she told him why.

"McEwen!"
He sat bolt upright on the bed, staring at her. He had heard about the
DIA . . . plenty and enough to make him stiffen with alarm. "What does he
want with me?"

"He has a spot open. You've been
recommended. An old friend of yours said you could fill it." "I don't
have any old friends."

"You'd
be surprised. And even if you didn't, you've got a new one, whether you like it
or not." She had stared at him, pleading. "Julian, won't you trust me
this much? What are you going to do, just rot here? You've got to give this a
chance."

He
had driven the girl's sleek imported Sonata onto the Washington Speedway,
pushing it up to 300 and flashing past the trucks and casual traffic. Libby had
been tense at first; finally she relaxed and leaned her head against his
shoulder. An hour later they rolled into McEwen's parking channel. The very
distinguished-looking DIA Director was there to greet them; and then, inside,
grinning at the surprised and baffled look on his face, he saw Frank Carmine. .
. .

There
were others there, half a dozen of his closest friends from Fort Riley,
veterans of the 801st and now high up in DIA. With McEwen, Bahr was stiff and
reserved; then Libby got the director out of the room for a moment and he and
Carmine began to pummel each other. The rest of the 801st boys joined in, and they
were laughing and singing and more than a little drunk by the time Libby's high
heels came click-clicking down the hall at them.

Later,
they had talked, and Bahr liked the way McEwen looked at him when he talked,
and said what he meant without a lot of double-edged words. Gradually Bahr's
violent bitterness toward everything disciplined and governmental began to
soften, and he would talk. "I've got a green card," he said.
"They gave me that after the court-martial. They told me I was dangerously
unstable, and you know what that means these days when it comes to finding
work."

"I
know," McEwen had said. "Do
you
think
that you're unstable?"

"I'm like a
rock," Bahr said flatly.

"All
right, then I don't think we need to worry about your official Stability Rating
too much. With a little pressure on DEPCO from this end, we can swing it.
Anyway, you've got an inside track with your therapist." He smiled at
Libby.

"I
can handle the details at DEPCO," she had said.
"If
you'll co-operate a little."

"Hell, I'll co-operate,"
Bahr said.

They
had shaken hands on it, and when he had Libby a safe distance away in the
parking lot, Bahr had grabbed her and hugged her until she gasped. They drove
back to New Jersey slowly, and he felt that the past was falling sharply away,
the future bright before him.

After
that, his rise in DIA had been no accident. With his bottomless energy, his
genius for organizing, and his ability to command the fierce loyalty of the men
around him, Bahr had forged the DIA into a rock of efficiency such as McEwen
had only dreamed of. When Project Frisco arose, McEwen had dropped it in Bahr's
lap.

Something
out of the ordinary had been going on. There was nothing tangible: a dozen tiny
little incidents that nobody could explain, completely unrelated to each
other,
except
that they did not fit any reasonable
pattern of normal occurrence.

They
had been nebulous things, at first: the theft of a commercial codebook reported
from a San Francisco office; scattered unexplained radar pickups fanning across
the
midwest
over six months time, without
identification of target; the hijacking of a
thermite
truck on the New York-Chicago Expressway, followed a week later by six
simultaneous
thermite
fires in a pattern over a
hundred mile area, photographed by chance by a passing jet liner; the
disappearance, under questionable circumstances, of several dozen men in key
scientific and government posts . . .

No
pattern, no relevance to the occurrences, but something was going on. The
presence of
any
imponderable in the delicate social and
economic machinery of the country under the
Vanner-Elling
eco-government was not tolerable. The balance of power between the Federation
Americas in the West and the
Sino-Soviet
bloc
in the East was far too treacherous to permit unexplained incidents to remain
long unexplained. That balance had teetered once, in 1965, and the world still
bore the scars of that brief, bitter war. After the violent economic crash that
had engulfed the world in 1995, a different sort of balance had been forged,
but still the balance was there.

It
was clear that whatever was behind the occurrences had to be discovered.
Project Frisco, under Julian Bahr's diligent direction, had thrown the entire
striking power of the DIA into a swift, silent search for a pattern behind the
occurrences. And Project Frisco, until now, had failed. '

For
eleven months they had run up against a blank wall. A thousand leads traced
down, led nowhere. A thousand blind alleys were carefully explored. No clue to
the enemy's intentions,
nor
even to the enemy's
identity. Only the constantly growing conviction that somewhere in the pattern,
there
was
an enemy . . .