path to conquest (9 page)

“You don’t look too pleased yourself. Presumably you’ve just turned down an offering of licentious togetherness?” “Yeah,” Pete said glumly.

“Why, may I ask? Not so you can guide me back to your apartment, 1 hope.”

“No—I made an appointment to see Denise Daltrey.” Donnenfeld made a disapproving face.

“Hannah, you’ve got a dirty mind.” She gave him a modest smile, as if acknowledging a simple truth. He hurried ahead with his explanation. “1 need some facts on a particular person and I figured, who’d know better than a network news anchorperson?”

“Who’re you checking up on?”

Pete tried to back away, but she latched her gnarled fingers around his wrist.

“Ow! That’s a ridiculous grip for an old lady.”

“Yeah, and old people are patient. I’ll hold on to you till you tell me what you’re up to.”

“All right, all right. I want to know more about your new friend, Neville More.”

Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“I’m not
sure
why.”

“You couldn’t even think of a
dumb
reason? You're sticking with no reason at all?”

“If I had a reason, I’d tell you. I’d just feel better knowing a little more about his background.”

Pete held his arm up, as if expecting her to release him, but all she did was look straight into his eyes. “Why?” she said. “What’re you, a scientist or a prosecutor?”

“No difference, Peter. We both ask questions till we find out what we want to know.”

“Okay. I’ve just got a funny feeling about him. It’s not something I can put into neat sentences yet. Just a feeling.” “You ball players never were the most articulate folks on earth, were you?”

Pete let out a frustrated breath. “This resistance group of ours is a very important, close-knit bunch of people. We mean a lot to each other, personally
and
as part of the fight. When an outsider comes in and invites himself to be part of that family, I want to know everything about him. Is that so wrong, Hannah?” he asked, voice rising passionately.

Donnenfeld’s lips crooked into her trademark elfin smile. “If your daughters are living with you when they start dating, you’re going to terrorize all their boyfriends.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to get crazy on you. But these days, you can’t trust just any Tom, Dick, or Neville.”

“Is that the old world-weary, cynical Peter Forsythe coming back to roost?”

He smiled sardonically. “He never left.”

The Secret Service four-by-four dropped Pete off first, leaving him at the CBS News broadcast center on Fifty-seventh Street, way over on Manhattan’s West Side. Hannah Donnenfeld waved to him from the front seat as the car pulled away, taking her back to Pete’s apartment.

The car rounded the corner, out of sight, and Pete carefully picked his way through a snowdrift that had sculpted itself around a fire hydrant. The top of the drift curled under like an ocean wave frozen in the act of breaking.

“I wonder if we’ll ever see any plows,” he grumbled half aloud.

In midtown, the most massive collection of towering buildings anywhere in the world rose like a mountain range along the spine of the sliver of rock that was Manhattan Island. But the buildings here, a couple of blocks from the Hudson River, were foothills at best. Comparatively, this was a low-rent district, with a combination of warehouses, small office buildings, and apartments. The crumbling skeleton of the elevated West Side Highway decayed three blocks to the west.

In what had once been a dairy bam, Denise Daltrey and the rest of CBS’s News Division toiled to keep the world up to date on the war—little else seemed worth reporting. But as Pete entered the small, functional lobby, he was reminded that there was still a world trying to get by, day to day. He stepped forward, head down, stomping his boots to knock off the snow, and nearly ran headfirst into news correspondent Charles Kuralt.

“Excuse me,” Kuralt said in his mellow, friendly voice. “No, sorry, my fault.” Pete started to walk past, then did a double take. “Hey, you’re Charles Kuralt.”

Kuralt smiled. “You’re a good man to have around in case I have an identity crisis.”

Forsythe decided Kuralt looked smaller and less rotund than he did on the tube—he’d always heard that TV cameras made people look wider. But the cherubic face and gently amused eyes were the same. Kuralt had gained fame for his many years of “On the Road” reports, folksy bits of Americana from the homespun tapestry of everyday life.

Struck by the sudden realization that he was grinning like an idiot, Pete stammered the first compliment that came to mind. “I’m—I’m really glad you started doing the ‘On the Road’ stories again. I think it means a lot for people to see something upbeat in the middle of all the war news.”

“Well, thanks, Pete,” said Kuralt. “It means a lot to us to give folks a reason to smile every so often.”

Pete blinked. “Have we met?”

“No, no, but I’ve always been a big baseball fan.” Moving closer, Pete lowered his voice confidentially. “Isn’t it dangerous, going around the country in that motor home to do your stories?”

“We try to stick to secure areas, but risk’s always part of what we do in this business,” Kuralt said, his voice matter-of-fact.

Pete extended his hand and they shook warmly. “Don’t take
too
many risks, Mr. Kuralt. We don’t want to lose you.” “You take care of
yourself
 too. You people in the resistance are tough to replace. Hey, 1 hear you like to fish.”

“Sure do,” Pete laughed. “I grew up near a stream in Virginia.”

“After all this is over, I’ll take you to some of my favorite spots down home in North Carolina.”

“I’d like that,” said Pete with a nod.

Kuralt zipped his parka, gave Pete a salute, and went out into the street.

Denise Daltrey brushed a strand of sable hair off her cheek, then glanced up as she heard a tapping on her open office door. Pete leaned in and she greeted him with a sparkle in her sapphire-blue eyes.

“Hey, good to see you!” She leapt up to give him a hug. “I just bumped into Charles Kuralt in the lobby. He invited me to go fishing with him sometime.”

“Charlie’s a sweetheart. Go. You’ll have a great time. Want some coffee?”

“No thanks, Denise. So how’ve you been?”

She slouched back in her desk chair as Pete sat, too. “Working like a crazy lady. Obviously we're kind of short-handed around here. And everybody donates time to working for the Freedom Network, too. Not that he likes reporting war news, but Howard K. Smith was thrilled to come out of retirement to be the Freedom Network anchor.”

“Yeah. In a way it’s reassuring to see Smith and Sevareid and Cronkite. I mean, these are the last of the guys that covered World War Two. They saw that one close up, and I really feel like they’re the best people to put
this
war into perspective.”

Denise grunted in agreement. “Well, I did what you asked.” “And what did you find out?”

She pulled a file folder from the pile of papers on her desk and flipped it open. “Neville More has quite the checkered past.”

“Tell me a story.”

Laying the folder on her lap, she went on. “Well, he’s thirty-four, devilishly handsome—”

“I know that.” Pete scowled. “The women make that very clear.”

“He’s got great hair—”

“
Denise.
...”

She held up a black-and-white glossy, a smiling corporate publicity still of More. “Well, he
does.”
She paused playfully. “Okay, okay. He’s made and lost a couple of fortunes in the computer industry.”

“A couple?”

“Mm-hm. He started from scratch, just a nobody drop-out from Oxford.”

“Nobodies don’t even get
into
Oxford, much less drop out, sweetie pie. Why did he drop out?”

“I combed the file on him, and the only reason he ever gave, publicly at least, was that he’d learned everything he needed to know.”

“Cocky son of a bitch, I’ll grant him that.”

“He evidently had reason to be. He came to the U.S. when he was twenty-two, with about fifty dollars to his name. By the time he was twenty-six, he was worth ten million.”

“What did he invent?”

“That’s just it—he didn’t invent anything. But he knew how to pull other people’s potentially useful inventions and ideas together and make them work in the real world. Shall I go into detail?”

“You made copies of everything for me?” Pete asked. “Yeah. This file is yours to cherish.”

“Then I’ll read the details myself later. Go on to the part where he lost the millions.”

“Common story. He sold out his share of Magicomp for mucho money, did some wild investing, then someone pulled the chain and it all got flushed away,” Denise said with a shrug.

“What happened to him after that?”

“Weil, he sort of disappeared for a couple of years. Some people said he went off to gamble in the sunshine, some people said he spent most of his time drunk, some people say he holed up somewhere thinking of ways to get back to the top.” “What’s your best guess, Denise?”

“I’d say some of all three. But the point is, five years later he
was
back on top. That’s when he made the covers of
Time, Fortune, Business Week,
the
Wall Street Journal, and People.
All in one month.” She flipped a page in the file.

“Okay, so everybody in the field hailed him as a genius again.”

“No, no,” Denise corrected. “Not
again.
The first time they called him lucky, and when he flopped, they called him a flash in the pan. He said in one interview that
he
always knew he was a genius, or pretty damn close to it. But he wasn’t going to be satisfied until the
rest
of the world knew it
and
admitted it.” Her mouth bent into a quizzical semismile.

“Something funny?”

“No, not funny exactly. More like quirky. When those magazines came out, he went and bought a thousand copies of each one. Kept them piled in a room in his house, and every now and then he’d go up there and just wade among all those covers with his face on ’em.”

“For all his genius, Neville More sounds pretty insecure,” Pete concluded. “You said he lost more than one fortune.” “Mmm, yeah. For the next few years he seemed to calm down. Less of the wild life, more ballets and museum openings. He became something of a patron of the arts, donating money here and there in the U.S. and the Continent. He almost never allowed interviews after those covers.” “Wouldn’t be the first public figure to want to quit while he was ahead, as far as submitting to media torture is concerned. ” “That’s true,” Denise said conditionally, “but he’d drop hints in the professional journals that he was developing something astounding. ’ ’

“What was it?”

“That was the strange thing—there was never any formal announcement or introduction. Nothing ever went on sale. One day, without any fanfare, Neville More simply filed for bankruptcy. ”

Pete squinted in confusion. “Just like that? And it didn’t make headlines?”

“Well, it would have, but look at the filing date.” She turned the folder so Pete could see, then took it back as he nodded.

“Two days later the Visitors reinvaded,” he said.

“Kind of overshadowed the other major news items of that week,” Denise said. “I tried to find some record of what he’d been working on—even speculation.”

“And?”

“What I found might not even qualify as speculation—more like totally unsubstantiated rumor.”

“Any port in a storm. ...”

Denise chuckled. “Who has the most money in the world to spend on fancy computers and software?”

“My daughter, Karen,” Pete deadpanned.

“Try again. The Pentagon?”

Peter’s eyes opened in dawning amazement. “Ahhh. Something top secret maybe? That would account for the whole thing being so quiet. Total lack of flamboyance doesn’t seem to be More’s style. Got any proof?”

Her head dropped, dark hair falling across her eyes. “Not a smidgen.”

“Hmmm. Too bad. What do you think of his story about traveling around helping computer people fight the war?” Denise placed the folder on her desk and stretched. “I don’t know. If there’s anyone who knows enough to do that sort of thing, Neville More’s the one. You say he’s out at Brook Cove helping Hannah now?”

“Yeah.”

“If you really want to know if he’s on the up and up, seems to me you should go out there and find out if he’s really
helping
them. That’s what I’d do.”

Suddenly alarms sounded in the corridor. “What the hell is
thatl”
Pete jumped from his chair.

Denise hurried out of the office, grabbing him by the hand. “Come on!”

They trotted down to the end of the hallway where there was a window. From the street they could hear the blaring of alert sirens.

Pete’s voice was numb. “A Visitor air raid? They haven’t tried anything like that in weeks.”

“Let’s go,” said Denise, pulling him toward the emergency stairwell. “The shelter’s downstairs. Teletypes, too. If there’s any information coming in, we’ll get it first.”

There weren’t many employees in the CBS building, and the downward exodus was hurried but orderly. Heavy steel doors blocked off the shelter room. It was a large chamber, an oddly high-tech bunker—sandbags nestled close to TV monitors, radio transmitter-receivers, a few computer terminals, and a variety of other electronic gear. Cartons of food and canned drinks stood in the comers.

The televisions were tuned to the Freedom Network, the studios of which were in secret locations known only to the handful of people who worked there. Even the members of the resistance didn’t know. All Pete had been told was that there were several studio and transmitter locations to help insure that the vital information source would be able to stay on the air no matter what.

Right now it was the calm face of Walter Cronkite on screen, his deep voice carefully modulated to avoid spreading panic. Pete could see a special pride in the CBS employees as they listened to their old anchorman.

“This is Walter Cronkite, with a Freedom Network bulletin. Authorities urge New Yorkers to go to the nearest air raid shelter, if you’re not already there. Shelters are marked with the standard Civil Defense insignia.” A graphic illustrating the yellow and black symbol appeared on screen next to Cronkite’s face. “Visitor skyfighters have been sighted approaching New York City. Anti-aircraft batteries installed to protect the nation’s temporary capital are manned by resistance forces, and fighters are being scrambled from bases in New Jersey. We have no further details on the strength of Visitor forces, nor are there any reports of actual battle contact yet. Stay in your neighborhood shelters until the all-clear signal has been given. That’s three short blasts on the warning siren. And stay tuned to your local Freedom Network radio and TV channels. As soon as we have further news to report, we’ll return to the air. Until then, we return you to regular programming at the point at which it was interrupted.”