The Multiple Man

ELEVEN

Most people think that the National Archives is the nation’s treasure house of information, the memory storage bin of the country, the place where all the facts are kept neatly filed away behind a facade that proclaims, “What is past is prologue.”

But we were meeting at the Library of Congress—Vickie, Hank Solomon, and I—sneaking into that vast marble-walled building from three different entrances, at three different times, in a feeble effort to prevent anyone from figuring out that we were getting together there. It was Vickie’s idea to pick the Library of Congress, and Hank’s to stagger our arrival times. I did what I was told.

Hank’s friends had been able to piece together a lot more information about Dr. Peña and his lab than Vickie had. But it was still damned sketchy.

According to FBI and Defense Department records, Dr. Alfonso Peña had been working in biological warfare studies almost all his life. Never mind that biowar research was officially renounced by all the major nations more than a generation ago. Never mind that a treaty signed by the U.S. and ratified by the Senate has the force of law, and thus any research banned by treaty is actually illegal within the United States.

Peña had started as a brilliant, promising young biochemist more than half a century ago, accepted a position at the old Army Chemical Warfare center in Edgewood, Maryland, straight out of college. Then he transferred to Fort Detrick and biological warfare studies: how to use disease as a weapon of war. When Fort Detrick was officially “peacified” and turned into a cancer research center, Peña went right along without changing his line of research in the slightest. By then he was deeply into genetic research, tinkering with the basic chemical of life, the long double-helix molecules that the bio people call DNA.

Not even Solomon’s friends could trace Peña’s career year by year. But shortly after North Lake Labs changed owners—it had started as a dairy research adjunct to the University of Minnesota— Peña showed up there as its new director. The new owner of North Lake Labs? A consortium of businessmen whom I’d never heard of before: small-timers, all of them. Except for the majority owner: Morton J. Halliday, who at that time was neither a general nor a national hero.

North Lake prospered mainly through contracts with the Defense Department. Most of the work was so deeply classified that nobody outside the direct chain-of-command could get an eye on it.

But Solomon got something that might have been almost as good: a personnel roster of the research staff of North Lake, a roster that went back to the labs’ change of ownership some forty-three years earlier. It was a long list, and Solomon had no way of knowing if it was complete. But it was all we had to go on.

It was evening when I showed up at the Library of Congress, and yet the building was still busy with people. I had always pictured the Library as a musty old place, quiet and slumbering, disturbed only by an occasional Senator who needed a place to get away from his constituents. But the Library was alive, mostly with young people who were eagerly tapping the nation’s storehouse of books, films, tapes, knowledge. Everything and anything was on tap in the Library’s computerized memory files. This was the real information center of the nation.

It took me damned near an hour to find Vickie inside that building. She had told me the number of the room she had reserved under her own name. But I was reluctant to go blundering through the place asking questions, leaving a trail that could be followed blindfolded.

So I wandered through the high-ceilinged reading rooms, marble hallways that echoed my foot-falls, long rows of reading booths where video screens flickered with page after page of the nation’s treasure house of books while intent young students or Congressional aides studied and copied down notes, somber-faced and greenish in the light from the electronic screens.

I even wandered into the computer center, down in the first subbasement, by mistake. The machine was so damned vast that I couldn’t see the end of it; just bank after bank of man-tall consoles humming and blinking, right on down an entire level of the Library’s underground labyrinth.

No one was there except a pleasant-looking young woman who looked up from her control desk and saw me standing there, gawking stupidly under the glareless ceiling light panels that seemed to stretch off to infinity. She got up from her desk and walked over to me. She was wearing jeans and a pullover sweater; it was quite cool down there. With a no-nonsense smile she asked me where I was going. I tried to sound like a bewildered Midwestern tourist and succeeded only in sounding bewildered. I gave her a room number on a different level and she gave me polite instructions. She punched the wall button behind me, the elevator door slid open, and she bade me a polite but firm good-by. She was very protective of that mammoth computer.

I finally found Vickie, and Hank was already with her. The room was only one level above the computer area, still underground and windowless. It was a small reading room, furnished with two chairs and a picture screen sitting on a tiny desk, soundproofed in that funny airless way that makes it feel as if somebody’s holding his hands over your ears.

Hank started to get up and offer me his seat, but I told him to stay where he was. I’d been sitting all damned day; it felt good to give my butt a rest. But the room was small, too small for three people, and as I leaned my shoulder against the thin plywood of the door I felt just the slightest bit trapped, claustrophobic.

“Okay, Vickie,” I said, trying to override my inner tension, “this is your show. What’d you call us here for?”

She was wearing a miniskirt and a loose blouse, open at the throat. Hank had already taken a more than professional interest in keeping an eye on her. He had doffed his “business” suit in favor of a faded denim jacket and corduroy slacks—made him look more like an unkempt perennial student than a Secret Service agent. Except for his hair, which was too long for a modern student’s. He was even smoking. Synthetic tobacco, from the perfumy smell of it. Noncarcinogenic, according to the corporate advertising claims. The air conditioning sucked the smoke up into a ceiling vent.

Vickie tapped the computer readout screen with a fingernail.

“We’ve all been trying to get information to-gether about Dr. Peña and North Lake Labs…”

“Maybe we oughta put General Halliday on our list,” Hank suggested. “Him and those friends o’ his that helped him buy North Lake.”

“I’ve already done that,” Vickie said, very professionally competent. “I took their biographies from a Who’s Who and other references before you two showed up.”

“Okay, so we’ve got a pile of biographical information,” I said. “I don’t see how that helps us to find out who’s doing what to whom. And that’s our real goal.”

“Our first goal,” Hank said, squinting narrow-eyed at me, past the cigarette smoke, “our real objective, is t’ set things straight after we find out who’s doin’ what.”

“If we can,” I said.

He nodded grimly, and I caught a mental flash of Hank gunning down, Western style with blazing revolvers, whoever had killed McMurtrie. It was a personal matter with him.

Vickie resumed. “We have access to an enormous amount of information here. This computer can tell us almost anything—”

“Except what we want to know,” I said.

“Wrong.” She had a very serious look on her face, but there was something else going on behind those sea-green eyes. She was excited, anticipating.

“Wrong?” I echoed.

“Wrong,” she confirmed. “This computer can do something more for us. It can correlate all the information we have, find the connections, pull out the key links for us…”

Hank was skeptical. “You mean a computer can go through a pile of information and find out what’s important to us and toss away th’ rest? Like a human detective?”

“Not quite,” Vickie said, “but close enough. See, this is a specialized computer. It’s programmed to serve the needs of the people who use the Library of Congress. People come here with a few scraps of information and ask the computer for help in finding more, just as they’d ask a librarian.”

“And yore sayin’ that a librarian works like a detective?” Hank didn’t believe a word of it.

Vickie answered, “Sort of. You give a librarian a few clues and she’ll usually be able to find what you’re looking for. This computer,” she tapped the screen again, “will do the same thing. Only better, faster, and with a much bigger memory than any human librarian has.”

Hank just shook his head.

I said, “So you’re saying that if we feed the computer all the information we have, it can point out the connections—”

“That’s right,” Vickie answered, bobbing her head vigorously enough to make her golden hair jounce prettily.

“I’m not sure…”

“You’re an ex-newspaper reporter,” Vickie said to me. “Your method of getting information is to grab people by the neck and fire questions at them. I’m a researcher. I find information by going through records, dealing with computers and librarians and reference books. Your way hasn’t produced very much, boss. Not yet, anyway. I want to try my method.”

“With an electronic detective,” Hank added, still skeptical.

I shrugged at her. “Okay. Let’s see what you get.”

She started with the biographical information from General Halliday and the others who had purchased North Lake Labs more than forty years ago. Vickie typed on the computer’s input key-board a request for correlations among the biographies of the nine men involved; in other words, how they were linked. The computer’s output screen showed the shorthand words she typed:

Her words glowed green on the picture tube for a few moments while the computer considered the problem. Then a list of the nine names flashed, so briefly that I’m not sure all nine of them were there. Then the screen filled with words, pica-sized green letters covering the whole screen, from top to bottom, side to side. And at the very last was a word in parentheses that I instantly recognized: (MORE). This one screenful of data wasn’t all the computer had dug up.

We got very excited, but quickly found that the correlations were nothing more than we would have expected. Four of the nine co-owners of North Lake Labs had worked for General Halliday at one time or another. Two more were relatives of the General’s, distant cousins. The remaining two men were real estate executives in Minnesota: the front men who did the actual buying.

Of the nine original buyers, only three were still alive: the General, of course; one of the real estate operators, who now lived in Sri Lanka; and the only woman in the deal, who had been the General’s secretary back when he had served in the Pentagon as a major in the Army Research Office. The computer had no information on her whereabouts.

“Not much goddamned help,” Hank muttered.

“No,” I agreed. “Except that I get the feeling that all the money involved came from the General himself. These other eight people were just strawmen, dummies to cover up the General’s intention to own the Labs himself. And control them.”

“Where’d he get that kind of money?” Vickie asked. “He couldn’t have been more than thirty years old or so at the time.”

The biographical data didn’t tell us much. General Halliday had been thirty-two when the North Lake Labs were sold to his group. He had been working in the Pentagon at that time. His hero-making defense of Denver was still nearly ten years in the future. He had married a fairly wealthy Virginia socialite, but as yet they had no children.

“Maybe his wife put up the money,” I said.

“More likely she put up th’ collateral for a bank t’ loan him th’ money,” Hank said. “Musta been at least ten million involved. Prob’ly more.”

I thought aloud, “The Government was phasing down research funding then. Lots of economic scares, the whole Vietnam fiasco and the turbulence of the sixties and seventies. Universities were pulling in their horns; money was tight, especially in scientific research…”

“But suppose a bright, ambitious young Army officer who worked in the Pentagon…” Vickie mused.

“In the Army Research Office,” I added.

“Suppose he went to a bank.”

Hank chimed in, “Or a dinner party full of bankers, set up by his purty young wife…”

I took over again, “And offered them a scheme where he attains a controlling interest in a research laboratory, which he can set up so that it can be guaranteed a steady flow of Army research money…”

“The bank would get its loan repaid in a few years,” Vickie said.

“At the highest interest rates of the century. And Halliday retires from the Army after the loan is paid off and goes to live in Colorado…”

“Where he continues to pull the strings…”

“And becomes a rich son of a bitch.”

We looked at one another. We were grinning and nodding excitedly. Proud of our terrific powers of deduction.

Hank broke the bubble “But what in hell’s all this got t’ do with th’ President? He wasn’t even born yet!”

We went back to being gloomy. Hank produced his thick wad of biographical information about the labs’ research staff scientists. With a resigned sigh, Vickie began typing the information into the computer. Most of the data had come from standard reference sources such asAmerican Men and Women of Science, so Vickie could simply cite the reference, and the computer would know where to look. Still, it was a long job.

I ducked out to the men’s room and then volunteered to take over the typing. “Just tell me what to do,” I said.

Vickie argued at first, but finally relented and let me hammer the keys while she worked the kinks out of her hands. Hank disappeared briefly and came back with sandwiches and coffee.

“How long’s this place stay open?” I wondered.

“ ’Til ten,” Hank said. “I just checked.”

“We’ve only got—”

“We’ve got as long as we need,” Vickie said. “I commandeered this room for Senator Markley. Senators and Congresspersons and their staffs can stay all night, if they want to. The computer’s on-line twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“Wonderful,” I heard myself say.

We took a brief dinner break, wolfing the sandwiches and coffee, and then Vickie took over the input typing again.

“Should’ve brought some beer,” I said to Hank.

“Didn’t even think of it,” he admitted, looking surprised at himself.

Finally the job was done. All the biographical data about every researcher we knew had worked at North Lake was in the computer’s memory bank. Vickie punched the request to correlate the data, and while the computer chewed on the problem, she stood up, put her arms over her head and stretched hard enough to pop tendons along her spine. It was a move that stirred my blood, and I could see that it did the same for Hank. Vickie didn’t seem to notice, though. Or care.

“How long d’yew think it’ll take th’ machine to figure things out?”

Vickie shrugged. “A few minutes, maybe. That’s a lot of data to cross-correlate.”

“You really think this will give us an insight on what’s going on at North Lake?” I asked her.

“It will at least tell us the common denominators among the scientific staff there. If it turns out that they’re all specialists in building hydrogen bombs, for example, do you think the labs’ main interest would be in air pollution studies?”

“Nobody likes a wiseass,” I said.

Vickie grinned and started to rub the back of her neck. Hank was over behind her like a shot, kneading her shoulders.

“Learned massage from an ol’ Indian,” he drawled. Vickie moaned happily and I broiled medium-rare.

The computer screen came to life. A list of words appeared on it. A damned short list. We all huddled around the glowing screen, like kids peeking into a store window. The list read:

We stared at the list for a long time. At last Hank exploded, “That don’t tell us diddley-shit!”

“Wait a minute,” Vickie said. She sat at the keyboard again and tapped out a query, explaining as she typed the cryptic shorthand words. “I’m asking what kinds of capabilities these fields of interest could produce.”

The machine considered this problem for only a few seconds, then flashed a new list on the screen. It was a lot longer, and full of technical terms that I’d never seen before. But three items stuck out and hit me just as if they’d been printed in letters of fire: