Jack Chalker - A War of Shadows

She nodded numbly, and tears started to well back up into her eyes. “A very good friend,” she managed, voice breaking. She took a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her eyes. He waited for her to get herself back together.

“Okay, there were fourteen people down there. Just fourteen. One of them killed him, and did it between about 4:15 and 5:00 P.M. Almost certainly shortly after his call to you. Possibly they heard the tap, but I doubt it. Maybe he went to the canteen and looked upset. Somebody picked up on it and followed him. Maybe somebody was outside and heard the conversation. We don’t know. What we do know is that he needed to talk to you. There were fourteen colleagues down there he knew well and a security force at the call of a fingertip, yet he doesn’t call in the marines, he doesn’t go to the others, he calls you. It’s his first impulse. I think we can assume that whatever he discovered he discovered between four o’clock and his call. First the discovery, then the call. Give him maybe an extra fifteen minutes to decide.” He looked at her. “I need you to go over the tapes of everything he was doing for the hour before his death. And particularly what he might have gone back to immediately after his call.”

She shook her head. “It’s not my specialty,” she protested. “Some of the other team members are far more qualified.”

He smiled mirthlessly. “But one of ’em’s the one who did it. No, they’re out. Look, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, I’m an investigator. I don’t specialize in murder. As I said, this is my first—and I hope my last—murder case. But I’m doing my best because, with the help of special Bureau teams, I’m closest to the case. Can’t you do the same?”

She considered it. “I’ll try. I might need some help on the hard parts, though.”

He looked at her. “What kind of a doctor were—are—you, anyway?” he asked, genuinely curious. She smiled wanly. “A psychiatrist.”

Jake Edelman looked up at the ceiling with a sort of resigned yet questioning expression. It faded as that dull look crept back. She now understood that it meant his mind was working hard.

He came out of it suddenly again, turned, and asked, “He did most of his work alone, didn’t he?”

“With a massive computer, part of the whole NIH ,setup,” she replied. “You don’t need more than one man for this—although Ed Turner was the alternate serologist who did some of the work, and they served as a check on each other.”

Edelman scratched his massive nose. “Doc, what would you do if, somehow, you discovered that one of your close friends and colleagues was a Russian spy? You’re all alone in a lab, you and the computer. What would you do?”

She considered it. “Call security, I guess,” she said. “Unless it was somebody so close I just couldn’t believe it.”

“He believed it all right,” the little man said. “Something nasty, he said. Pretty definite. But how would he find it out, alone in the lab there? Nobody was gumming up the works; a spy could just read all the data from a computer terminal. Nothing in or out, though, so he better have a phenomenal memory.” He paused. “You see? Nothing to catch a spy in the act, is there? So let’s say he didn’t. And let’s say it wasn’t a person at all, at least not one down there. Where else could he have stumbled onto something nasty?”

She thought about it. “The computer,” she suggested, a slight chill going through her.

Edelman nodded. “The computer. Something in the computer, something he stumbled on by accident. What? Evidence of spying? Tampering? What? I’d say the odds were a thousand to one he didn’t suspect anybody in A-complex. If he did he’d have called security or at least gotten the hell out of there. And there we also have just how the killer knew he was on to something.” He put his hand up and rested his chin in it on the desk. “Sure! Anybody in A-complex could get the transmissions he was getting. Common line. Somebody suspected he was on to something, watched his work, and when he discovered something he shouldn’t they killed him.” He leaned back suddenly and struck his left hand with his right fist. “It fits!”

Sandra O’Connell was fascinated in spite of herself. And impressed. Behind that ugly face was an amazing if highly neurotic mind.

“The work between three-thirty and the cutoff, Doctor,” he told her. “That’s the key. Somehow we’ve got to find out his ‘something nasty.’ It’s there. I know it. I can feel it.” The expression was serious but the eyes glowed with excitement. “You find it for me.”

As she sat, not deep in A-complex but at a specially constructed terminal inside NDCC, reviewing the complex symbols and biochemical models, sometimes with the help of others from serologists to top biochemists, going over and over those complex and cryptic mathematical models that must mean something, something dark and sinister, the world was changing outside her guarded doors.

Three more towns were hit, in Louisiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. One town went stark staring psychotic. Another completely lost the sense of touch. In a third all of the male citizens simply seemed to drop dead, while the women were singularly unaffected.

The country panicked. Congress, which panics only when the voters panic, magnified the call. There were demands that something be done, some sort of protection. There were riots in places. Towns barricaded themselves and shot at strangers. One jokester painted some tanks blue and left them in another town’s trash bin. A mob, discovering the hoax, tore the man limb from limb.

People started packing, deciding to move from their little, safe towns into the untouched cities. Everyone was upset at this, since it was tending to crowd the already overcrowded metropolises, and this would make it all the easier to wipe out a major city.

City folk, too, feared their own small-town kin. Relatives were barred, hotels closed down, lest the newcomers be coming with the Wilderness Organism inside them.

President Wainwright bowed to the demands to act. He revealed an Army plan to secure the U.S., but warned that it meant the total surrender of civil liberties until the answer could be found.

The people demanded it. Congress grasped at it like a drowning man. General Davis didn’t like it, but there it was, just as Honner had promised. The people demanded the loss of their freedoms.

There was resistance, of course, but not too much after it started. People who refused to go along were sometimes lynched by their increasingly paranoid neighbors.

Large numbers of troops on foreign soil were recalled, despite the protests of some conservatives that this might be just what the whole thing was about, weakening America abroad so that the Russians and Chinese could move from their generations-long stalemate.

But the Russians and the Chinese wouldn’t move, and didn’t. They were much too nervous themselves, not so much about the Wilderness Organism as about the fear that a totally panicked and paranoid America would seek someone logical to blame.

Fleets put to sea, and missile bases were raised to full war alert.

And still the string of mathematics made no more than ordinary procedural sense. Going back to the start of the work on DNA molecule matching, it still proceeded in a perfectly sound, normal, scientific manner. Nothing out of the ordinary.

She tried again and again and again as the United States went slowly mad from sheer frustration at the lack of an enemy to hit back.

He’d put out the word, of course, but he never expected anything to come of it. That’s what made the whole thing, the final agreement to help ferret out the perpetrators of the Wilderness Organism, so easy.