Authors: Ben Bova
"Yew work right for th' President," Solomon said. "I don't know anybody in th' Government's any higher . . . that I can trust.".
I caught myself in the middle of taking a very deep breath, the kind that steadies your pulse rate. Or so they say.
"Okay," I said. "I don't know what the hell I'm going to do about this, but I'll do something. It sure looks as if Klienerman was killed because he was catching onto something important."
"And Mac along with him."
"Right." I could feel my jaw clenching. "I don't suppose anybody's actually checked out this man Peña and the North Lake Labs."
"Nope. But I can get that done."
"Really? When I tried it—"
"Mac had a lotta friends. In the Pentagon, too. We can find out what we have to know. Might take a few days, is all."
"Good. Now, should I keep this tape or should you?"
"Me," he said, holding out his hand. "They already know I'm sniffin' around on this. Less they know about yew bein' involved, better off we both'll be."
I handed the palm-sized black box back to him. "Hank . . . do you have any idea of who
they
are?"
He shook his head. "Wish I did."
"It's like staggering around in the dark, isn't it?"
"Yep. One thing, though . . ."
"What's that?"
"The President's ol' man is involved, some way."
It was a while before I could answer. "Yeah . . . I think you're right."
"Helluva world, ain't it?" he said, and grabbed his bourbon.
CHAPTER 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 footfalls, 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 read-out screen with a fingernail. "We've all been trying to get information together about Dr. Peña and North Lake Labs . . ."
"Maybe we oughtta 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 keyboard 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:
RE INPUT CODE 042205-B219-001
REQ CORR SCH
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 that 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 . . ."