A War of Shadows

TWENTY-EIGHT

Jake Edelman looked like he was about to have a heart attack at any moment. He’d aged terribly in the past few days, and he was neither young nor in the best of condition to begin with.

Bob Hartman, who didn’t look so great himself, entered, nodded, and sat down in the familiar chair.

For a while his boss said nothing, as if thinking of another world. Finally he looked over at his associate.

“It’s the fifteenth,” Jake Edelman said.

Hartman nodded. “You’re ready?”

Edelman shrugged. “Hell, how do I know? Do you realize what a long shot this is?”

The younger man knew perfectly. They had it all now, everything. Everything but a way out except for an outlandish gamble by his weakened boss.

“I visited Dr. O’Connell today,” Hartman said. “She’s doing pretty well, but it’ll take time. A lot of time. She’s a remarkable human being, though, Jake. We owe a lot to her.”

Edelman nodded. “Pity we couldn’t get to Dr. Bede. Dead in LA with those nice little suicide notes.”

“Mitoricine?”

“Who knows?” The older man shrugged. “The county medical examiner, who owes his job to Mayor Stratton, who went to college with Allen Honner, says self-inflicted with some trace of barbiturates and the like but no really funny stuff. He’s the ME. Who’s to argue? Bede’s in Forest Lawn already.”

Hartman sniffed derisively. “Well, I dropped in on our doctor after looking in on you-know-who.”

Edelman managed a smile. “Poor Mr. Honner still in C.C.U. at Bethesda? That was some heart attack! I understand they have to keep him so doped up for pain that he hardly recognizes anybody.”

They both shared a laugh over that.

Jake Edelman looked down at the thick transcript of the Honner confessions. “Jesus! The names in here, Bob!”

The other man nodded. “I know, Jake, I know. We’ll have a tough time getting them all. A slow process. But everybody in the Mickey Mouse organization has them, knows them, as do the RCMP and MI-5. They’re through, Jake, if we aren’t.”

“Hear about Colonel Toricelli’s group raiding Camp Liberty?” Edelman asked. “No wonder that boy, Cornish, saw jets taking off and landing regularly! It was forty-eight kilometers southwest of the Tucson airport!”

Hartman smiled. “Well, there’s nothing left now. The papers have been playing up the smashing of the terrorists and the discovery of domestic traitors. All the usual bullshit, except that it’s all true. We’re heroes, Jake. The President’s going to give you the Medal of Freedom and I’m going to get the New York office and all that. Didn’t you know?”

Edelman snorted. “You know he wants me to meet with the cabinet and the emergency council tonight. Wants to be sure he has everything. I’ve been asked to appear on tomorrow’s address, can you believe? He told me to bring maps, pictures, exhibits.”

Hartman was suddenly bright and alive. “He did, did he?” His expression suddenly feel. “They can’t be that dumb, Jake. They just can’t be. I mean, Allen Honner absolutely did not know what the hell Mickey Mouse was except a cartoon character. They must at least suspect that we’re on to them.”

“Arrogance, Bob,” Jake Edelman said. “Arrogance and conceit. Back in the old days, in World War II, the Germans conquered practically all of Europe and came within a whisker of the world. They did this even though their intelligence apparatus was so lousy the British were almost running it. They just couldn’t believe that they could be fooled by some slick tricksters. At the same time, we’d broken the Japanese code yet were so damned dumb we set Pearl Harbor up so it’d be easy for the Japanese to cripple us, and we even courtmartialed a general who said we’d get hit by the Japs from carriers there! They’ve got it made, Bob—and they know it. That’s our defense. That and the fact that they are men and women like Honner—they’re not used to being on the receiving end. Conspirators and masters of terror are quite often the easiest to terrorize—they assume you think like them. You watch.”

The tone did not have the full confidence the words conveyed. Hartman knew it, but echoed it all the same. “Go get ’em, Jake. All that can be done has been done.”

The old man got up wearily and started packing his exhibits case, then closed it, picked it up, and walked slowly for the door.

“Jake?”

He turned. “Yes, Bob?”

“God be with you,” Bob Hartman said.

Jefferson Lee Wainwright, President of the United States, was going over his speech before his cabinet and emergency council. It was a distinguished group: thirty-four men and women who, together, handled much of the top echelons of government and the military.

“And so, my fellow Americans,” he was saying, complete with flamboyant gestures, “these radicals of bygone days, defeated and demoralized but not deradicalized, went different ways. Some left the country, some went underground to hiding-holes, but some, the best and the brightest of them, went into normal careers and rose brilliantly in them. Men like Dr. Joseph Bede, who wormed his way into the National Disease Control Center and, there, in a major authority position, secretly used your tax money and your facilities to create what became known as the Wilderness Organism.” He paused and looked directly at the crowd, and in a lower, more normal tone said, “And, you know, the son of a bitch really was involved in the blowups when he was an undergrad? Man! Will that hold up!”

Suddenly he changed back into the Presidential orator.

“These radicals, still dedicated after a decade or two of dormancy, waited for the rallying cry. And it came! It came from those who had wormed their way into government and society and positions of importance! They trained at an abandoned Army test range near Tucson, gathering the scum of the earth from its four corners. And Bede gave them the weapon. The Wilderness Organism.”

Again he paused, but remained in his professional charismatic pose.

“Yes, my fellow Americans! But it was not complete. Oh, no. No such beast could be perfect without testing. So they tested it on you. On small-town America, where they could observe its properties and effects. And, when they were ready, they made plans to strike at the heart of our major cities. The tragedies in Chicago and New Orleans are witness to what the whole country could have undergone—and may still. For such elements as these still exist in society!”

He stopped, relaxed, and put down the sheets. “That’s all the further Barry got on it. We probably will go through another draft or two, but it’s pretty effective. The rest is spelling out the plans and justifying them, and you know all that by now anyway.”

Most of them nodded.

There was a commotion at a far door, and heads turned as two Secret Service men entered, flanking a tiny, strange-looking little man with a big nose.

“Chief Inspector Edelman!” Wainwright boomed. “Please come up here so I can shake your hand.” He turned to the rehearsed audience. “This is the man who saved the country!”

Jake Edelman came up and accepted the handshake and the polite applause of the bigwigs.

“Inspector, I would like you to brief us all personally on the plot, how you solved it, and how it all worked,” Wainwright said. “Barry Sandler, there, is writing tomorrow’s speech, and we want to give credit where credit is due and also get the thing a hundred percent accurate.” He pointed. “You can take that chair, there. It’s Al Honner’s. As you might have heard, he had a really bad heart attack.”

Edelman’s expression was grim, but he smiled slightly at the last and took the plush chair. He was at the corner of the long double conference tables; he could see just about everybody in the room.

“Go on, Inspector. Don’t be shy. We’re you’re biggest fans,” said Attorney General Gaither.

Jake looked at the President. “May I have some wafer?” he asked meekly. The President smiled, nodded at an aide, who got up, poured some from a pitcher on a little table to one side, brought it to Edelman, and resumed his seat.

The audience really was attentive and expectant. Edelman was to be the proof of the pudding; if he gave the official version, then all was well. If he did not, there was still enough time to paper over mistakes.

“Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen,” Jake Edelman began. “I wish to tell you tonight of all that my department and its capable staff, with the help of a lot of people throughout government, discovered about this conspiracy against our country. I hope you will bear with me until I am completely through.”

They were peering at him expectantly.

“The story starts many years ago, in the turbulent years when Presidents were killed or forced from office, when our enemies made spectacular gains abroad while we did nothing. A lot of people saw this as the end of civilization. Many of these were corporate heads, millionaires, men of influence and power. They formed the Institute for Values and Standards, and endowed it with over a hundred million dollars.”

There were murmurings in the room, and a few whispers of “He knows,” but they calmed down. They wanted to know all that he knew.

“This Institute endowed research in forbidden areas, masked by the corporation’s international operations, and at the same time picked the best young minds they could find in every field. Poor families in particular were targeted, and lavish scholarships were offered. Ideological purity was stressed, as well. These people were young, ambitious, bright, and, of course, malleable. The Institute saw to their philosophical upbringing—wasn’t above eliminating those who later strayed or would not stick to the path. This elite, brought up in much the same way the criminal syndicates of America were brought up and replenished, slowly attained position and power in government and industry. All doors were open to them. Their names read like a Who’s Who in American government, business, and industry. In fact, their names are a lot of the current Who’s Who.”

He paused and sipped some water. Some of the men and women he was discussing stared at him in stunned silence.

“Their eventual goal was to attain enough power, influence, and prestige that they could literally take over the government of the United States of America, take it over, totalitarianize it, and create out of it the nation that their founders had dreamed about. This they did, by hook, ability, and crook. When they had a member President, they felt no compunction about cleverly murdering a sufficient number of Supreme Court justices and other such posts so that they could be replaced with members of the club. But, still, it was far-fetched. You can’t become the Congress, for example, not only because of the value of incumbency but also because the voters are damned obstinate. And, of course, the Institute could hardly have a native son in each state and district. And, again—what about Americans used to freedom? Would they respond to a military and governmental coup meekly? Hardly—and they have the guns and the geography to make it damned difficult for anybody who did take over to ever hold on. So what to do?”

Again a sip of water, and he continued.

“The obvious answer was a popular war, but that’s out of style. Wars aren’t popular these days, and a war on the scale of a sneak attack means annihilation. So, these bright folks thought, suppose you had a sneak attack by an unknown enemy? Some of their scientific types had continued the recombinant DNA research banned by U.S. law and international treaty. True, the Institute was interested in more than just pet germs—they were interested in designing their own, superior breed of humanity, among other things. There are lots of potentials with recombinant DNA. But what they could make, easily, on the sly, was germs—bacteria, specifically. They made the Wilderness Organism. They did it right here, in the government labs, with NDCC and NIH computers and facilities. The trouble was, they had no idea whether or not their designs worked. Now came the next part of the plan.”

He paused again for a sip, and somebody whispered, “Why don’t we just shut him up?” She was waved to silence by President Wainwright.

“So,” continued Jake Edelman, “friends in the CIA, and those who could be blackmailed—and friends in the FBI as well—combed the files, scoured the world, and plugged into the international terrorist network. The word got around. A mysterious Third World nation with a lot of money and a radical leadership had a weapon to strike at dirty old imperialistic America. They needed volunteers—and they got them, sometimes with the unwitting cooperation of governments hostile to us. The first waves were double tests—first of the engineered bacillus and its properties, as well as the vaccines against it, and second of the network that would be needed for the big job later. Small towns geographically isolated were chosen. The diseases would be studied by NDCC and NIH, of course—including the creators. Modifications could be made, corrections in the biological clocks, degree and means of communicability, everything. Since they also created a bacteriophage, a bacteria-eating virus, they eliminated the evidence as well. Many of the early experiments failed completely, or failed to work as predicted. A terrible plague became a case of the town getting the sniffles. But, after a while, the right combination popped up. They began, by using the bacteria as a catalyst for certain interactions with brain cells, to be able to get just about any effect they wanted. They made a number of strains of the stuff they’d proved out, and they were ready.”

There were uneasy murmurings and shufflings in the room now, but these were quieted by the leaders. They wanted to know just how Edelman knew these things.

“A camp was set up and run by radicals for radicals. They didn’t even know where they were—they were duped and drugged and thought they were in Africa. There their old-time revolutionary religion was recharged, and they were given lessons in how to release the organisms in major cities. In the meantime, one of their blackmail victims, an FBI agent named Harry Reed, who’d worked on the radical fugitives years ago, was assigned to eastern California and ‘just happened’ to recognize James Foley, head of one of the early small-town strike teams. We jumped at it, raided the place, and discovered the Wilderness Organism and pegged it to known terrorist fanatics.”

They were getting really upset now. Jake Edelman started to feel his one greatest fear, that they would not let him finish.

“Using the idea that we had a mysterious enemy controlling a horrible fate, we scared the American people half to death. They were willing to do just about anything to feel safe from this dreaded disease. It was much worse than soldiers of an enemy. It was silent, invisible, and permanent in its effects. They demanded protection from Congress, Congress gave extreme emergency powers to the President, and we had the military state of emergency called and the mechanics of dictatorship established and tested, and some really embarrassing enemies and problem people vanishing. The American populace was militarized and computerized faster than anyone would have believed, and mostly with its willing cooperation. They were naive and terrified.”

He was out of water now.

“So now this radical step had to produce results. There was an early slip, too—much of the Wilderness Organism’s model-building was done in NDCC computers, and this was stumbled on by a brilliant doctor, Mark Spiegelman. When taps and monitors showed that he had, in fact, discovered the domestic origins, a minor flunky in the security apparatus at Fort Dietrick panicked and had the security men murder him. It was clumsy and needless, since part of the plot was to show that the thing was indeed of domestic origin. His real crime was that he had discovered the truth too soon; it’d been planted there for later, more carefully planned discovery.

“My own team was charged with solving the mystery. I was chosen because of my impeccable reputation, if I do say so myself, and my heart condition, which would prove a convenient out if I stumbled onto the wrong things or if I followed the script and retired. Now, using the handouts I got from the conspirators, I was to slowly crack the case. Plants I placed in the large body of radicals were spotted and allowed to pass, apparently undetected. They were even spread around, to make sure that I would get word on each team before it was to hit a major city. Of course, some casualties were to be anticipated, but most we got, and the communicability of the strains was kept low. We failed to get word on the Chicago and New Orleans teams, as you know, but seem to have only localized hits. Ten, twenty thousand people in Chicago, less than a third of that in New Orleans. We also almost missed the one for D.C., but got lucky. One assumes that the important people all had their shots, anyway.

“To take the blame, Dr. Sandra O’Connell and Dr. Joe Bede were put under drugs and placed under conditions where suicide would result. We rescued Dr. O’Connell, but not Bede. One assumes that there is now a list of the ‘ringleaders’ of this conspiracy, that a purge in government and elsewhere will turn these traitors up, and that these will include a large part of Congress and other agencies not under control. Using this as a guise, the Institute personnel will now totalitarianize the nation and hold it in their absolute grip for remolding. Only one thing stands in their way, though, and it’s formidible. It’s something that will have to be faced here and now, which is why I am here.”

He paused and looked around. “Can I have some more water, please?” he asked, holding out his glass. President Wainwright smiled, took the glass, personally refilled it, brought it back and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said, drinking a bit.

“And what stands in the way of this conspiratorial group?” the President asked him. “If what you say is true, then it would seem that they’ve won.”

Jake Edelman looked up at them and smiled. “The friends of Mickey Mouse,” he said.

Most of them met with blank stares, but Attorney General Gaither and Admiral Leggits both looked up in surprise. Wainwright looked at them quizzically.

“An underground group,” Gaither explained. “Using the most elaborate codex device we’ve ever seen. We’ve identified a number of them, but the codexes are self-destructing and they’ve been deep-probed and conditioned, all of them. Dig deep enough and you turn their minds to garbage, but you don’t get any information.”

Wainwright was intrigued. “Why Mickey Mouse?” he asked.

“That’s what their leader sounds like over the phone,” Leggits put in. “I almost interrupted a conversation in the Pentagon. He was a good officer, too,” he added, a trace of sadness in his voice.

“And you are a friend of Mickey Mouse?” Wainwright asked Jake.

The Chief Inspector shook his head from side to side. “No, Mr. President, I am not. I am Mickey Mouse.”

There was an uproar. It took more than a minute to calm everybody down. Wainwright was still in command here, though, and still confident. After all, Edelman was here. Alone. But that very fact suggested that there were things still to know, things that would make him admit everything openly and sign his own death warrant.

“All right, Inspector, let’s play no more games,” Wainwright said. “What are you trying to tell us?”

Edelman reached into his case and brought out a blue spray can. It looked very much like the one on the front pages of all the newspapers—a spray aerosol can in baby blue.

“When we first discovered the truth, we created our organization, feeling that if one agency could use government and bureaucracy, then so could the other. Most Americans, even those in positions of relative power, find the current emergency abhorrent. When shown evidence of this conspiracy, they are only too willing to help fight it. My team raided Camp Liberty a week ago, several days ahead of your anonymous tip. We also raided the NDCC bunkers, and we have made a lot of changes at Dugway Proving Grounds, and moved a lot of stuff. Further, loyal researchers at NDCC and NIH have been working on a problem for me for a month, since before I even guessed the scope and breadth of this thing. Ever since I discovered the computer models for the Wilderness Organism, from the day of O’Connell’s and Bede’s kidnap. We worked on it, discovering just exactly the correct sort of radiation necessary to make the Wilderness Organism cultures mutate slightly. And what do you know? They found not only the mutating method, but at the same time the simple, quick treatment killed the bacteriophage! We then wiped the Wilderness Organism clean out of the computers, to avoid making your mistake.”

H W Secretary Meekins was the first to see it, and she was appalled. “You mean that current strains won’t disappear in a day? They’ll continue to live and multiply?”

Edelman nodded. “And they’ll be mutated, beyond the vaccine’s effectiveness. There will be no defense. Oh, don’t worry. It won’t destroy the world, I’m assured. There is sufficient radiation from the sun alone to mutate it into harmlessness in a matter of a few days. But, I think, a few hundred strategic releases all over the country will be sufficient to eliminate most human life in North America.”

Again they were in an uproar. Wainwright’s eyes kept going to the blue cannister in Jake’s hand. “That can—that is the new stuff?” he asked nervously.

Edelman felt much better. That question was what he’d waited for.

“Yes, it is. This is the stuff that makes you feeble-minded,” he told them cheerfully. “Washington wouldn’t even notice. This spray can alone is sufficient to, say, infect the entire White House area if I push the little wax-sealed plunger here. See?”

Many were on their feet now. The Secretary of State started for him, angry and panicked, but was stopped by two of his fellows.

When they’d calmed down again, Jake continued. “The friends of Mickey Mouse have the cylinders.

I don’t even know who they are, nor does anybody know them all. We’ve all been deep-probed and blocked, so I haven’t any idea how anybody would know. We voted on it—you remember voting, don’t you? We decided that we’d rather have death for us and our children than live under your new order. Man will survive. But we won’t. And you won’t. And if I don’t walk out of here, at the proper time, they will know your answer.”

Wainwright was shaken, as were the others. None of them could take their eyes off the small blue can in Jake Edelman’s hand.

“And you expect us to surrender, to expose ourselves?” Wainwright said. “Hell, man, you might as well push that button. We’re dead anyway.”

Now it was Jake Edelman’s turn to smile. “No, sir, I do not. What I propose is a simple compromise, the art of political expediency. We have the names of all the Institute personnel. It was simple, once we cracked your computer code. We will be watching you. But—here is what I propose you do. I propose you change that speech of yours for tomorrow. I propose that, instead, you outline the plot exactly as you were going to—use the same scapegoats you intended to, except keep it to the dead and those quickly silenced. Then announce that the plot has been completely and thoroughly broken. Democracy is saved, freedom is restored. Slowly you will lift the state of emergency, and all constitutional guarantees are back in force right now. The computer ID system will be phased out. Military controls will be lifted. Slowly, the country will return to normal. Tell the people that Abraham Lincoln suspended constitutional guarantees during the Civil War, and instituted military government to save the nation, as you have. He then ended those measures; now you will, too. Slowly, over the next year, the majority of you in this room will retire or leave for better opportunities. After all, Mr. President, you’re nearing the end of your second term. It’s natural. You’ll retire a hero, an elder statesman. They’ll sing songs and write epic plays about you.

“Hell, they’ll probably build a giant granite statue of you on the Mall as a hero like Lincoln, and put you on the dime, you son of a bitch.”

Wainwright looked thoughtful. His eyes now left the blue cannister for the first time, going to the others in the room.

“Comment?”

“He’s bluffing!” one of them said. “We’re so close, we can’t give in now!” another echoed. But the majority had more pragmatic looks on their faces. Finally Wainwright exhaled and turned back to Edelman.

“We’ll have to check this, you know,” he said.

Edelman smiled. “Try and find a blue cannister, or a Wilderness Organism,” he invited. “Try and find the models. Your five-person team at NDCC are all dead now. They—ah, committed suicide.”

Wainwright gulped. “Leave that can there, for analysis,” he said.

Edelman shook his head. “Uh-uh. I need it with me. Find your own, if you can,” he said, and got up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” somebody asked.

“I’m going home, to a wife I haven’t seen in two and a half weeks,” he said wearily. “And tonight I’m going to wine her and dine her and romance her like there’s no tomorrow. And then I’m going to sleep. And when I wake up, I’m going to turn on my television and watch your speech, Mr. President. That’s what I’m going to do. I won’t be hard to find if you want me.”

He placed the can in his pocket, keeping a hand also in the pocket, and closed and latched the briefcase with his left hand. With that, he turned and walked out the nearest door. Nobody stopped him.

He walked wearily down the corridors, then down the stairs, and out the east entrance to a waiting car. Bob Hartman was driving, and seemed to come alive when he saw his boss.

Edelman got in, and they drove slowly off, out the gate, and down the mall, turning right and heading out over the 14th Street Bridge.

Jake Edelman stared at the muddy Potomac. “River level’s high,” he said. “Pull over to the side, Bob, and stop for a minute.”

Hartman, puzzled, did as instructed. Edelman pulled the can from his pocket and looked at it.

“You know, that was cheap spray paint Minnie got,” he said. Hartman looked at the can. Coming through the dried baby blue paint were the words Action Ant and Roach Killer and the picture of a dead roach, upside down. It was faint, but unmistakable.

Hartman whistled slowly. Edelman got out of the car, looked for a moment at the center of the river channel, and tossed the can into the water.

Slowly, looking very tired, he got back in and they started off once again. Hartman stared at him. “Do you think they’ll buy it?” he asked.

“I’m still here,” Edelman pointed out. “And so are you. They know there’s an organization, they won’t find any blue cylinders, and they won’t find any trace of the Wilderness Organism at NDCC except five dead traitors. Right?”

Hartman nodded.

“With the founders of the Institute, I think we might have lost,” he said. “But with their adopted children? Well, we’ll know for sure tomorrow.”

They drove on a while in silence, clearing two military checkpoints. Another seven kilometers and they were into the northern Virginia suburbs, and not long after that they were pulling into Jake Edelman’s driveway.

Edelman started to get out of the car.

“Jake?” Bob Hartman said.

Jake stopped, turned, and said, “Yes?”

“You’re a great man, Jake.”

Jake Edelman smiled, turned, got out of the car and slowly walked up to the front door. He fumbled for his keys, found them, and opened the front door.

Bob Hartman just watched him, a tiny little figure, ugly and unkempt, as he disappeared into his small brick house.