Pohl, Frederik - The Siege of Eternity

"You tell me."

"Because the damn terrorists have managed to get inside information from the Bureau. I don't know how. But they have, and that's how the Greater Ukraine guys knew."

"But these are my friends!" Rosaleen protested. "I trust them, and anyway that doesn't make sense. They've had all the time they need to kidnap me if they're terrorists."

"Oh, not all of them," Dannerman said. "I think only one. Which one? I don't know that, but probably you do. Which is the one who told you about my orders?"

And every eye in the room turned on little Marisa, who began to cry. "But we never would have hurtyou," she managed to get out between sobs, and Rosaleen put down the gun to take the young woman in her arms.

"My dear," she said, patting her back. "I am sure that is what you intended, but can you speak for all the others? You must tell us all you know."

"They were coming for you tonight," Marisa said. "They waited until now because they wanted to take gospodin Dannerman as well, as a hostage. I was supposed to-well, I wouldn't actually have shot any of you, I swear that. But I was to make sure no one resisted."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hilda Morrisey put the team meeting off as late as possible, because it had been one of those days. It wasn't just trying to deal with that temperamental freak, Dopey, or getting rid of the battalion of time-wasters who managed to track her down with one damn request or another. (The worst was the psychologist from Harvard who demanded-damn well demanded-that she give him access to the four Pats, or at least to the two Dannermans, because they were absolutely essential to his ongoing twin studies-and had both the Massachusetts senators insisting that she help the man any way she could.) There was still no word from Danno in Ukraine, either. And the deputy director was in a towering rage . . . and now each last member of the Ananias team was insisting on making demands of their own. Marsha Evergood: "You must let me borrow the medical Doc to see what he can do with some of our terminal cases." The astronomer: "If you want me to find the Scarecrow comet-thing you must make every large optical telescope in the country concentrate on checking for possible objects." The man from State: "We must know how to respond to this note from the Albanians by tonight-"

They all had one "must" after another, and, of course, they all had to take time to explain why their particular urgency was more urgent than anybody else's. Even the ones whose problems Hilda could do nothing about. The Albanian note was the deputy director's concern, not hers, but it wound up in her lap because the man from State hadn't been able to reach Marcus Pell.

That wasn't surprising. The note from Albania was one of the two things that were making Pell crazy because it was clearly the tip of the iceberg; every damn pip-squeak country in the United Nations was demanding a share in whatever came out of Starlab, under threat of using their collective veto to make sure none of the big nations got any either.

Well, some good, old-fashioned political horse-trading would eventually settle that. It could probably be handled with a bunch of promises, which might or might not have to be kept. But what about the other thing that fed the deputy director's fury? It wasn't a thing, exactly; it was Senator Alicia Piombero, who had most injudiciously spoken off the record to somebody who had turned around and put it on the record; and so the day's crop of news stories. NBI's New Spy Machine. Tomorrow's Prisons in the Bureau. How Scarecrow Machines Threaten American Liberties.

It didn't surprise Hilda that Senator Piombero chose to miss that afternoon's meeting of the team. She wished they all had; and when at last she was able to adjourn it she breathed a sigh of relief. She checked herself out and headed for home; because this was the evening she had resolved to take for herself, in order to deal with something quite personal and not very far from urgent.

Medical Report For Bureau Eyes Only

Agents assigned to Walter Reed Hospital report that the "medical Doc" has effected a number of apparent remissions in terminally ill patients. (Copies of charts are appended.) Some patients resisted receiving this "therapy" as an apparent "laying on of hands," but blood work and gross physical studies indicate real changes. It is suggested that the "Doc" secretes some form of metabolically active biochemicals, administered through small penetrations from the talons in his smaller arms. Attempts to secure samples of these chemicals, if any, have been unsuccessful. The cure rate, however, is significant, especially in intractable cases of immune deficiency, carcinomas and most antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases. His major failures have been on patients who already have had surgical intervention, for example cardiac-bypass procedures.

Brigadier Morrisey was not really off duty very often-she generally kept herself on call, and certainly kept informed of what was happening in her personal turf in the Bureau. But when she was off duty, she was all the way off. When she got out of her swirl tub she stood before the full-length mirror in her bath and studied herself critically for several minutes before beginning to dress. First came the underthings that no one in the Bureau would ever have imagined her wearing, the negligible panty-belt and the pushup half-bra that didn't really need to do much pushing. (But, at Hilda Morrisey's well-concealed age, she took all the help she could get.) The blouse was windowed silk, the kind that opened its mesh revealingly when the wearer was warm, as she had every hope she would be in the bar she had chosen for the evening. The skirt was mid-thigh length, not a practical choice for a Washington winter, but she had a long thermal coat to get her to and from her car.

The pickup bar she had selected was more than twenty kilometers from her little apartment. It was over the Maryland line, but conveniently close to the Outer Belt. Hilda was as careful about choosing a territory for hunting purposes as about dressing for the occasion. Most important, it had to be a place where she had never, or almost never, been before and where she thus was not known. And it had to have, in the background files of the local police, a reputation as a law-abiding and reasonably orderly singles bar. It didn't have to be fancy. Hilda had no prejudices about the economic status of her sexual partners. But it had to be fight-free and clean.

This one was at the fancy end of the spectrum. She parked and locked her car herself, ignoring the hostile looks of the valet parkers; she didn't begrudge them their tip, but she was not having any stranger poking around in her vehicle. She programmed her carryphone to store all messages lower in priority than Director-Urgent. At that point she was truly off duty; and she allowed herself to feel pleasingly expectant as she entered the bar.

It was a good feeling, and she liked what she saw. The bar possessed a two-person "band," an elderly woman on strings, a younger one on synthesizer. They were pumping out familiar tunes with a decent beat, and four or five couples were actually dancing on the tiny patch of hardwood. Hilda Morrisey was encouraged. The evening might well turn out successful, because she had almost always had good luck in bars where the customers actually danced. It was in just that sort of a place, for instance, that she had met Wilbur, the gentle (but not too gentle) and entertaining stockbroker assistant who was her most recent about-to-be ex-lover. Wilbur was a man she was going to miss. (But they'd had sex five times, and, under Hilda's self-imposed rules, that meant it was pretty near time to move on. If you carried on a relationship much longer than that you risked the kind of unacceptable complications that came along with habit.)