A War of Shadows

TEN

“You look beat,” Jake Edelman said sympathetically.

Sandra O’Connell smiled appreciatively. “I am a little tired. I’ve been going over that stuff for days now—and nothing. There’s just nothing there!”

Jake Edelman lit a cigar, inhaled, and blew out a stream of blue-gray smoke so dense it almost choked her. He looked thoughtful.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” she protested.

He shrugged. “Sorry about that. My office, my social conventions. No place left to enjoy things any more. No this, no that, everything’s banned. The whole damned world is bad for you and mad at you at one and the same time.” He reached over to the window, flipped a control, and a fan started dragging the smoke behind him. “Better?” he asked.

She nodded. “Thanks. But I’ve come to report bad news. There simply is nothing in Mark’s last work to show that he stumbled onto anything odd or unusual. It’s just good science, so good that I’ve had to consult with a few dozen other people just to follow it. The man was a genius. Not just in his field. In any branch of medical lab work.” Her expression grew sad. “What a terrible loss it was.”

Edelman nodded sympathetically. “I know. I broke it to his wife and kids. Toughest damned thing I ever did. Back with the Navy I once lost two young boys in a carrier accident and had to do the same thing, but this was worse. Murdered in the most secure place I know of outside of Fort Knox, in a particularly nasty way, by person or persons yet unknown.”

She looked at him, trying to figure him out. “You saw Sarah? Why? Surely there were dozens—”

He cut her off, holding up a large, vein-etched hand and reaching over for some pictures. He handed them to her.

A pleasant-looking if fat little woman. Other pictures—one a small boy on a horse, another a little girl playing with a dog. In back of them were adult pictures.

“They got their mother’s nose, thank the good Lord,” he said, and took the pictures back and replaced them in their proper position on the desk. “The boy’s now a man—a dentist in Cleveland, three kids of his own. The girl’s a pretty damned good lawyer, just got married herself to a rabbi in Philadelphia.” He paused for a moment. “I been in law enforcement since the Navy. Most of it’s boring stuff, routine work, but there’s always that chance. More with me. I live with it fine—hardly ever think about it. But I think about them all the time—they all had to live with that fear all their lives. Nadine—that’s my wife—got ulcers while I was working the New York labor front. Every day she never knew when she kissed me good-bye if somebody’d drive up that afternoon and say that somebody got me. Not much chance, but it was always there.” He looked back at her, straight into her eyes. “That answer your question?”

She smiled and nodded.

“So what’s a pretty doctor girl like you doing in a place like this?” he continued, shifting subjects. “Unmarried, too. Not even living with anybody. That’s not natural.”

It seemed like an accusation. “I just never had the time,” she said. “Long ago I had to make a choice, and up until a few days ago I was convinced I’d made the right one. But it wouldn’t be fair to drag anybody else into a life like mine.”

He shrugged. “Then you should make time. It isn’t too late. You know what one of your co-workers said about you?” He shifted some papers, brought up a typed form. “He said you were trying hard to prove something you proved ten years ago. I wonder what he meant by that?” The tone was such that it left no doubt he had no questions at all as to its meaning.

The question disturbed her, as well as giving her a chance to change subjects. “That form—you’ve been interviewing people about me?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Sure. You and everybody else down there before the body was found. Woman, I know more about all you people than you know yourselves!”

“And you still don’t know who killed Mark,” she said in a flat tone of voice.

He softened. “No, I don’t. Well, I have some ideas, but I don’t want to air them yet. This is going to be one hell of a hot potato. One of the worst in history. I have to be absolutely certain.”

She was interested. “What have you found out? What is all this about?” she pressed.

He chuckled and held up both hands as if to fend her off.

“Take it easy!” he protested. “I said nothing certain yet.” His tone grew more serious. “But when the time comes, you’ll know, I promise you.”

That didn’t satisfy her, but she had the feeling it was all she was going to get.

“You look as tired as I do,” she said.

He nodded. “I worry a lot. My ulcers have ulcers. I worry about how a bunch of overage radicals suddenly get ahold of an engineering marvel and decide to try it on small towns. I worry about how so many strangers can lug big blue cannisters through small towns without being noticed. What can their cover be? Exterminators?” He paused a moment, then continued. “I worry about lots of good men, women, and children getting crippled for life. I worry about how a damned fine scientist can get murdered under the best security we can muster.” Again he paused, then said, much more softly, “I worry about my country going quickly from a free one to a military dictatorship—so very quickly! I wonder how it’ll get out from under.”

She looked at him curiously. “That’s an odd remark. You know why it’s happening. It’s only a temporary thing. Nobody can hold this country under control forever. Such things can’t happen here.”

He smiled humorlessly. “Such faith! Well, God Bless America, it can happen here and it is happening here. Just look out that window and see it happen.”

She involuntarily glanced over at the large window to the left and behind his desk.

Pennsylvania Avenue looked almost deserted; there was a soldier on practically every street corner, and one or two were talking to civilians. An Army truck was going up the street, except for some busses the only vehicle there.

“But—” she started, but couldn’t think of any-thing to say.

Jake Edelman nodded grimly. “So you put the Army, all the troops, reservists, guardsmen, all of ’em, everyplace. Federalize all the cops, make ’em a zillion times more powerful and important. Clamp down censorship on radio, TV, everything. Slap taps randomly on everybody’s phones, but cut off long distance service. Ban the sale of gas and oil. Nobody moves except to work and back on makeshift bus routes.” Again the characteristic pause. “We’re arresting tens of thousands of people. Anybody who ever said a kind word about anything the government don’t like. They’re already building big camps for ’em out west.”

Her jaw dropped. “I didn’t—”

“And you wouldn’t,” he cut her off. “When they control the news nobody knows what’s going on.”

“I’d think this would make your job and life a lot easier,” she pointed out. “After all, isn’t crime ’way down?”

He nodded. “Oh, yeah. It’s practically nil, until the Army boys invent a new one. Safe to walk the streets of Washington at midnight—who’da ever thought that was possible? Unless an overeager soldier just shoots you for violating curfew,” he added. “Look, when I joined this Bureau it was in the middle of a big scandal. The FBI was violating everybody’s rights. Nasty old FBI. But they were wrong.”

She shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“A bureau’s not a creature. It’s just stone and paperwork. Like all man’s creations, it’s as good or as bad as the people who run it and make it up. If they’re bad, you can make all the rules in the world and nothin’s accomplished. If they’re good, you needn’t fear them at all. Hell, there was a time when marijuana was illegal in this country. There was a time when alcohol was illegal. All it did was increase the consumption rate a thousand percent on both products. A law’s only as good as the people who enforce it. That’s what’s so insidious about that, out there—the potential, anyway. In the wrong hands this won’t go away—but the people actually begged for it, just like Honner said they would. And Congress did go along. And the courts are letting it happen. It’s a horror. What kind of people will tell my grandchildren what to think?”

“You’re being too melodramatic,” she said. “As you say, it’s the people. As that Mr. Honner said, what Congress can do it can undo.”

“If it gets the chance,” Edelman said ominously. “Once you got this thing in effect, you can rig Congress and the courts at the point of a gun.”

She started to protest. “But the government isn’t going to—”

“You been around this town and you can say that?” he shot back. “I been here since before you were born. This is a company town, and the product is power. The workers are the bureaucrats who keep everything going by following orders. They like power, too. Hell, they’re having a ball with all this power. They don’t think of people as people. When you got to talk in trillions on a budget, what’s a dollar? When you got to figure a 900-page law that affects all the people, who thinks about the people it pushes around until election time?”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” she pointed out. “You’re one of them.”

He frowned. “No, never. Never one of them. I just understand them, that’s all.”

“With your attitudes I’m surprised you’re still around,” she said. “I’d think you were very unpopular about now.”

Jake Edelman shrugged. “So I’m one man still doing his job. They don’t even think about me, as long as the paperwork’s right and I don’t somehow make this speech over TV or even the Bureau intercom. But I worry all the same.”

She didn’t like the tenor of the conversation. He seemed to sense this, and changed the subject again.

“So what was Dr. Speigelman working on?” he asked.

“The Wilderness Organism, of course,” she told him. “He’d worked out a good deal about it and its behavior which tallied with the findings of the other lab personnel. In a sense, he’d finished his job.”

Edelman’s bushy gray eyebrows rose. “So? And yet he still worked? On what?”

“I told you he was a genius,” she reminded him. “Once he determined the basic nature of the Wilderness Organism—or organisms, really—he set out, it seems, to try and duplicate them, to find out how they were constructed.”

Edelman was interested. “You mean he was doing this recombinant stuff? I thought that was a no-no.”

She nodded. “Oh, yes, in real life. What he was doing was running computer models, where you take the basic chemicals and start trying all sorts of combinations and see if you can make something that matches your live sample.”

“And did he?” Edelman was more than interested now.

“Oh, in a way,” she said. “He had a start anyway. A really amazing start considering the number of random possibilities to build that organism, but, as I said, he was a genius.”

“Give it one more try, will you?” he urged. “The clue—the motive—has got to be there. It’s what I need. I need it desperately and I need it yesterday. You don’t know how bad I need it.”

She didn’t understand, and she was tired, but she said, “All right, I’ll try. Another work day. That’s about it, though. I’ve called in Joe Bede—a really fine biologist, and the first on the scene in that Maryland tragedy—to see if I’m missing something elementary. But if this doesn’t work, that’s it. I can’t do it forever.”

“That’s all right,” he said softly. “Do it that once.

Here are others working on it, of course. I just figured that, while you might not be the best microbiologist in the world, you knew how Mark Spiegelman thought better than anybody else. I want to know what would panic him and not a dozen other scientists. Go to it, Doc. Give me what I need.”

Again she said, “I’ll try.”

Dr. Joseph Edward Bede shook his head for the hundredth time. “1 just can’t see it, Sandy,” he told her. “A really good run of model work, yes, but nothing that would cause me to run screaming.” He looked up at her, and she was staring off into space. “What’s the matter? Too many tabular columns and bar graphs?”

Her expression didn’t change.

“No, it’s not that. Something the FBI man Edelman, said. About me knowing how Mark thought.”

Joe Bede chuckled, but his voice was gentle, consoling. “You were always in love with him, Sandy. We all knew it. I think he knew it. He was always Jupiter up on Olympus to you. The perfect man.”

Suddenly she was agitated, but not by Bede’s revelation that what she had always believed was her innermost secret was out.

“Maybe that’s it,” she murmured, more to herself than to Bede.

The other doctor was interested. “What? Got something?”

“What you just said, about me always thinking of Mark as Jupiter. Perfect. A genius who could do no wrong.” Suddenly she whirled around and looked straight at him, slightly excited.

“Joe, maybe I’ve put Mark on too high a pedestal.”

Now he was puzzled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Listen!” she continued, growing more intense. “Joe, how many chemicals go into making up a DNA molecule?”

He thought a second. “Four. Adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine,” he told her. “Why? You know that. You been looking at the four of them for days now.”

“Okay. Now if you’re going to build the Wilderness Organism, you first construct your DNA molecules so they transmit the right instructions, okay?”

He nodded. “Sure. You get one of twenty protein molecules made by RNA. The amount and combination of these determine the cellular makeup.”

“Joe,” she asked slowly, “what are the odds of getting several hundred correct genetic orders in a period of three hours’ research?”

He thought for a moment. “Pretty slim,” he admitted, “although not outside the realm of chance with a good mind and a good computer.”

She shook her head. “No, no. I mean getting the code right to build the specific organism under study. Think of the variables! It’s days, weeks of work at least! But Mark got almost the entire bacterium built in model in a little under three hours!”

He considered this. “But we all knew he was a genius.”

“Joe! That’s what’s caused my block!” She was almost yelling. “I was so damned in worship of him I admired how easily he did it. Joe! I don’t think he did do it!”

“Sure he did,” Bede said, still puzzled. “There it is.”

“Joe!” she persisted. “Suppose he just got the first few steps right inside the overall problem? Suppose, Joe, that the computer took his admittedly genius-level start and completed the rest of the model for him?”

Bede was incredulous. “No way, Sandy. That’s impossible.”

She sighed, seemed to collapse, and started feeling a little scared. She felt, in fact, just what Mark Spiegelman had radiated over the phone in that last, fatal coversation.

“Not if the Wilderness Organism was already in the computer, Joe,” she breathed.

Joe Bede laughed nervously. “Oh, come off it, Sandy. In order for that to be so, either somebody else would already have had to have broken the WO code makeup…”

“…Or designed it on our own damned computer,” she finished.

He shook his head in disbelief. “That’s not possible, and you know it,” he objected. “Why, that’d mean that somebody inside our own staff was behind all this.”

She was shaking now, very scared indeed. “Yeah, Joe. And Mark was killed inside the Dietrick secured labs. Imagine! A lot of trial and error, then a few combinations hit, then several—and suddenly the machine completes the model for him! My God!”

Joe Bede was looking a little nervous himself now. “Hell, Sandy, if what you say is true we’d better damned well get the hell out of here and over to your FBI friend. If they killed Mark…”

He didn’t have to spell it out.

She grabbed the phone and dialed Jake Edelman’s number. There was a click and a whirr and then a mechanical voice that said, “The-number-that-you-have-dialed-is-not-in-service-to-this-telephone. Please-hang-up.”

She slammed it down like it was an angry snake. “What’s the matter?” Bede asked nervously. “The phone.” She gasped. “I—I called Edelman on it this afternoon. To get a chance to see him.

Now it won’t connect me.”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “Probably just more of this martial law nonsense.”

“Let’s go, Joe,” she urged, getting up. “Let’s go over to the FBI Building ourselves.”

He sighed. “Okay, Sandy. Hell, I won’t look scared if you don’t.”

They grabbed their coats and walked out the door. The sentries were still there, and they nodded politely.

Sandra O’Connell suddenly felt extremely paranoid, as if unseen eyes were watching everything they said or did, as if unseen enemies were waiting to pounce at any moment.

The elevator came at last, and they got in. She pushed “G” and the doors closed and the car started up, taking an incredibly slow path by her imagination’s reckoning.

It opened and they walked out. Immediately four men converged on them. She felt panic.

One flashed a badge. “Secret Service, Doctors,” he informed them in a crisp, businesslike manner. “We’d like you to come with us for a few minutes.”

They were puzzled, but complied. It was reassuring, at least, to be in the hands of the law, she thought.

A small office door down the corridor was opened by one of the men, the other three of whom flanked them, and they entered.

“Now, will somebody kindly explain to me what this is all about?” she demanded angrily.

“This,” said one of the men, wetting down a rag from which issued the strong odor of chloroform.