The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  He crouched farther forward.

  “How come McAdam was hiding you?”

  “He’s my friend.” I didn’t mention Beth.

  “A friend?” His voice fell to a grating undertone. “Barstow, would you shoot a friend in the back?”

  He read me my rights.

  “Rights before the rebellion,” he added. “I can’t speak for your rights here just now.”

  “Can I phone?” I asked. “Phone for a lawyer?”

  “Okay,” he muttered. “But you need a better lawyer than you’re apt to get.”

  Kit Moorhawk was the only attorney I knew here in the county. Nowr a leader of the new nation, he wasn’t likely to have time for me, but Orinda brought a phone. I was almost in shock; she looked up numbers for me. There was no answer from Moorhawk’s home, none from his office.

  Cass Pepperlake finally answered from the Freeman office.

  “Clay?” He listened in silence while I told him about McAdam. “Hit in the back by a shot through a window. It seems I’m suspected. I need a lawyer.”

  “Dunno.” He stopped to think. “Most professionals, got out of the county to wait till the dust settles, but maybe—” He paused again. “There’s Luke Huron. Bright and young and maybe still in town. He has a sick mother to care for. I can call him.”

  “You’ll have to tell him I have no money, not here in the county.”

  “Nobody does,” he said. “Not till the council decides what to do about our legal tender. But Luke’s dad used to sell ads for the Freeman. Hawk Huron. Claimed he was Indian, but black as the ace of spades.

  “Moorhawk all but adopted the kid. Paid for his law school and hired him when the IRS got on his tail. He’s a tax attorney with no criminal experience, but he’s a friend. I think he’ll do what he can for you. If I can find him.”

  Coon had listened, still grinning.

  “That nigger kid!” he snorted. “The lawyer you deserve.”

  The cops had come back from outside to show him an automatic pistol in a plastic bag.

  “Dropped on the grass right under the window,” the sergeant said. “If the light was on, he had a clean shot at anybody at the desk”

  “Foreign.” The other was inspecting the gun under the light. “Look at it. Nine millimeter. It’s one of them damned Chinese knockoffs of a Russian cop-stopper.”

  That gave me a shock. I recalled Cyrillic characters on the gun Stuart had left in the bedside stand in his room. Wondering, I kept silent, but Hawes called Orinda out of the kitchen. He showed her the gun in the transparent plastic bag and asked her if she had ever seen it.

  “Sir, I don’t know.” She shot me a glance of evident distress. “I don’t know guns.”

  “Look at it. Have you ever seen any weapon like it?” “Maybe.” She peered at it and shook her head. “I can’t really say.”

  “Look again.”

  She looked and glanced unhappily at me.

  “There was a gun. I seen it in a drawer when I was cleaning Mr. Stuart’s room before he went away. Later it was gone. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “Yours?” Hawes thrust it in my face.

  “No,” but I had to nod. “I saw a gun like that in Stuart’s room back before I was thrown out of the county. I looked in the drawer after I came back. It was gone.”

  “Sure, Barstow?” He glared accusingly at me. “Are you sure?” They took me downtown, handcuffed and locked in the back of a police car. In the police station on the ground floor, I looked hopefully for Luke Huron, but he had not appeared.

  “Dimwit nigger!” Hawes sneered, “Never trust ’em.” Fingerprinted, booked on charges that included the murder of Lydia Starker, arson, grand larceny, aggravated assault, and flight from justice, I was taken up to the top-floor jail. The jailer was Axel Oxman, a heavy, wheezy man in a shapeless corduroy jacket, his belly bulging over tight blue jeans. Chewing on a toothpick, he accepted a copy of my records with hardly a glance at me.

  “A fresh guest for you.” Hawes gave him a sardonic grin. “The missing Clayton Barstow. Worth a fortune to somebody, if you can keep him safe.”

  “No sweat. I’ll watch him like a prize pig.”

  I had to strip and surrender my clothing, my watch, Alden’s billfold, the cryptophone. Oxman gave me a pair of faded yellow coveralls and took me to a cell.

  “Come in, sir! Welcome to the guest house.”

  My cellmate was a smooth-spoken young man who wore a Yale class pin on the lapel of an expensive silk suit. He shook my hand with a warmth more genuine than Coon’s, and showed me the name Hamilton Quigg on a card embossed in gold: Global Securities, Ltd.

  “One more victim of this tinpot rebellion?”

  “A victim of something,” I agreed. “I’m not sure what.”

  “I’m in an awkward spot myself.” He seemed far more cheerful than I was. “We’ve been merchandising international securities over the infonet. I was here negotiating an arrangement with a Father Garron who runs a local Christian scam. We were selling shares in a Celestial City he was planning to develop on a bit of acreage out west of town.

  “Hick justice.” He made a face. “This Garron is a local saint, too hot for the law to touch, but the idiot cops let the Feds haul me in. They’re still tangled up in all their picayune regulations written for the old paper world. Their laws make no sense in this information age, though they don’t know it yet. They picked me up, but not for long.

  “We have resources in offshore banks and an army of top-flight attorneys in Washington. They’d have had me out in an hour, but this silly silicon thing has cut us off. I know they’re doing what they can, but all I can do is wait for my break.”

  “I’m not so lucky,” I told him. “Accused of a dozen crimes I didn’t commit. No money. No friends likely to help.”

  “Tough.” He shrugged without concern. “Whatever you scam, you’ve got to look for legal cover.”

  He had made his peace with Jailer Oxman, an easy-going, shrewd-eyed ex-tobacco farmer, arranging with him for an infotel set in the cell and catered meals from the Bristol House. Generously, next morning, he shared his breakfast with me. Before noon, however, he was leaving.

  “Thanks to a great organization. They got bail money through the barrier.” He shook my hand while he waited for the jailer to let him out. “There’re quick millions on the infonet,” he confided. “Just keep one skip ahead of the stone-age morons who think they can control it.”

  An hour after Quigg was gone the jailer brought Luke Huron to the cell. He was a slim quiet brown man in a neat gray business suit. He shook my hand with a sympathetic smile and sat gingerly on the opposite bunk.

  “Sorry for the delay,” he said. “The woman who cared for my mother has left the county. I spent the night with her.”

  I asked about McAdam.

  “Mr. Pepperlake says they removed the bullet last night and tried to repair the damage to his lung. A lot of internal bleeding. Cass is worried.”

  He listened very soberly to my problems.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Barstow.” He shook his head, frowning doubtfully. “Our situation here is very fluid, as they put it. A lot of our local officials have run for cover.”

  I asked what I might expect.

  “Hard to say.” He paused to study me. “I gather you can’t make bail. The charges are grave. So far as I can see, you’ll have to sit here till something clears up the situation.” For a moment, he looked brighter. “You do have a friend close to the council. Mr. Pepperlake. But—”

  He glanced into the corridor and dropped his voice.

  “You know Colonel McAdam?”

  “Too well.”

  “So do I.” A rueful shrug. “As you may have heard, he’s had his own legal difficulties. Five years on narcotics and conspiracy charges, though he’s now out on a political pardon. The original charges included tax evasion, and I was hired on his defense team. He fired me when the case went bad. Out of temper, he c
alled me a numbskull nigger. Which goes to show . . .”

  He shrugged, with a philosophic grin, and asked me how I’d got here.

  I told him my story, beginning with Terror in America and my murdered brother. He listened with growing concern.

  “You better hope Stuart never gets the power he’s fighting for.

  He thinks it was your brother that set the FBI on his tail. He’s convinced, in fact, that Alden was an agent.”

  “He was.” I hated to admit the fact, but Alden was beyond harm now. “Unwilling and unpaid. A debt he felt he owed.”

  “I think I see why.” Huron nodded gravely. “I admired him for the book.” His eyes narrowed. “You say you came to look for the bombers. Find anything?”

  “Nothing but riddles. This phrase, ‘Acorn Three,’ does it mean anything to you?”

  He shook his head.

  I told him about the oak acorn fragments the bomb had left in Alden’s study, the acorns left with Lydia Starker and left by my head when I was dumped in the woods.

  “A signature?” Silent for a moment, he stared at the scrawled graffiti on the wall of the cell. “Why anything so obvious? The boast of an arrogant fool? Or an effort to confuse his trail?”

  I told him about the acorns I’d found in the McAdam house, in the room where Stuart had lived.

  “Stuart?” I heard his breath catch. “Could he be the bomber?” “He has an ironclad alibi. He was still in prison.”

  “He has friends.” He shook his head, looking head at me. “If he suspects that you saw those acorns in his room, you could go the way your brother did.”

  It wasn’t a cheering thought.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE JAILER HAD been a cordial companion to both of us so long as he was sharing Quigg’s wine. Now, however, the jovial talk and catered meals were no more. When I hailed him from my cell, he paused to scan me coldly with pale sly eyes in a hard poker face.

  “Critical,” he muttered shortly when I called a question about McAdam. “You better hope he lives. Another murder rap on your book if he dies.”

  He walked on down the corridor.

  His office and living quarters were separated from the main cell block by the elevator shaft. I remained alone in the cell next to the shaft, which I had shared with Quigg. The corridor ran on beyond to the big tank that had served as an exercise and dining room.

  “Before this craziness we was full up and more,” Mrs. Oxman told me. She was shorter and fatter than her husband, with her gray-streaked hair in an untidy knot on top of her head. More talkative than he, she had a waspish nasal voice and a habit of shrill complaint. She sweated a lot and had an odor of her own. “Hopheads

  or dealers, most of them. Always scheming to get another fix or raising some ruckus.”

  I asked what had become of them.

  “That dratted council!” She sniffed, her thin lips pursed. “Damfools, hell-bent on a new name for the county. Freelandia or Free State or the Haven. Some heaven with no God in it! An oasis of freedom, they call it.

  “Freedom for what? The first damfool thing they did was call drugs legal and turn that pack of devils loose on the town. All except a few Colonel McAdam drafted into his Kentucky Rifles.

  “No good for me and Mr. Oxman. Our paid staff walked off the job when they heard our good American dollars ain’t worth pig shit here in the county. Besides the deputy, we had a trusty janitor, a trusty cook, a trusty to help me in the kitchen. McAdam’s cops turned ’em all loose to stick us up and slit our throats.”

  Her peevish whine took on a sharper edge.

  “But we still got the hardest cases here and only Oxman and me left to do all the work. We’d be out of here in half a minute if we had anywhere to go.”

  Waddling behind a jingling cart, she pushed meals down the corridor to feed those few hard cases. Dinner, that day, was a bowl of beans and a slab of cold combread. I heard howls of protest from down the corridor.

  “Pigs!” she sniffed when she brought my bowl. “Picky pigs! They’ll soon be begging for good red beans.”

  “Budget trouble?”

  “We got the budget. It’s food we need.”

  “Food?”

  “Most everything we need was trucked from outside the county. Now we’re bottled up in this damn bubble. A trick of Satan, Father Garron called it, meant to cut us off from God. He said we’re damned to starve and die here. Likely doomed to hell.”

  “That bad?” I shook my head, but nothing checked her bitter vehemence.

  “Mr. Barstow, you ought to see the stores. Shelves stripped bare. No flour. No sugar. No coffee. No cans but sauerkraut and spinach. Mr. Oxman says people won’t take this rebel shit much longer. He says they’ll fight before they famish. Colonel McAdam is bringing National Guard guns up to guard the building.”

  That startled me. “To guard it from what?”

  “Mr. Oxman is afraid of a four-way war. The council on one side, the Colonel on the other, Higgins agin them both, the rest of us caught in the middle. The council wants to turn the county into their lunatic Libertarian Haven. The Colonel wants to help his militia friends spread the rebellion all over the world. Higgins is itching to break the barrier and bomb us all to hell. God help us!”

  Anxiety pinched her face.

  “My son tried to warn us.” She shook her head, staring wistfully past me. “David. About your age, Mr. Barstow. He’s a Louisville cop. He begged us to come and stay with him but of course we couldn’t go. We depend on Mr. Oxman’s job, but I don’t know.” Her troubled eyes came back to me. “Ain’t nothing sure no more.”

  She took my empty bowl and left me alone.

  That was a miserable day. Quigg had left his infotel set for Oxman, with the understanding that I might use it till I got out. I turned it on, but all I got was military music from the Kentucky Rifles drum and bugle corps and then a rerun of the last Rebel football game. At noon, a flushed and flustered young man in rimless glasses came on the tube to broadcast the local news.

  “In fact,” he confessed, “there’s not much new. Nothing from out of the county. The council is meeting now to draft a constitution and bill of rights for the new nation. Mr. Pepperlake calls it the last citadel of liberty.

  “Maybe so, but it won’t last long. Not without money. Interviewing local businessmen, I found a few offering their goods and services for barter, but most have closed their doors.

  He went on to read a list of closed services, canceled meetings, and social activities suspended until further notice.

  A promotion film made for the Kentucky Rifles before Stuart went to prison showed men in the mud squirming under barbed wire with bullets whining over their heads. That gave way to another Rebel footfall game. I turned it off and spent the rest of the day pacing my cell and hoping for a call from Luke Huron.

  It never came.

  I begged Mrs. Oxman for a telephone when I saw her pushing a broom down the corridor. She grunted and pushed on, but an hour later Oxman brought a phone back to my cell and stood sneering while I dialed Luke’s office and let it ring till he took the phone away.

  I longed to see Beth but knew she must be at the hospital with her father. Did she blame me for that bullet out of the dark? Surely not. She had taken risks for me. I would never forget that kiss when we stumbled together in the dark. Yet she had never wanted me here in McAdam, and she must know about my fingerprints on the gun.

  That long and empty night I dreamed of Beth, and Lydia, and Beth again. What finally I longed for was simply life with her. I wanted to make the breakfast coffee and hand her a towel when she came out of the shower, wanted to sit at dinner with her and plan happier days than I was expecting now.

  That longing faded into darker dreams. I thought Rob Roy’s shield had failed when Zeider struck with nukes. Fire and ruin rained out of the roaring sky. Searching for Beth, I wandered through empty streets and stumbled into burning buildings. I never found her.

  Breakfast next morn
ing was lumpy cornmeal mush and bitter black coffee left from the day before. Mrs. Oxman was wearing a look of grim satisfaction at the yelled obscenities from down the corridor when she brought my bowl to me.

  “They’ll eat worse,” she muttered, “before they eat better.”

  I tried the infotel and found Ramona Del Rio on the tube, the silver streak in her hair now tinted azure blue.

  “. . . shattered hopes for peace.” Nothing dimmed her perky smile. “The Haven council opened a window in the wall last night for a teleconference with Senator Finn, spokesman for President Higgins.

  “Sitting in the council chamber as a special correspondent, I was not allowed to record anything, but I can say that council members were begging again for a peaceful recognition of national independence. Finn was implacable, however. For more on that, we bring you a report from Tex Horn.”

  “Washintel One, with the gig from the geiger.” Horn was on the tube, the bruises gone and the big white hat pulled resolutely low. “The McAdam county rebels are still defiant, crouching behind their mysterious barrier and demanding total independence. The Pentagon admits a military stalemate, but President Higgins still demands unconditional submission.

  “He’s determined to crush the rebellion. According to White House sources, he has ordered the National Security Agency to lead an all-out research effort to penetrate the rebel defenses. We bring you special Washintel One science correspondent, Otto Strock, to discuss what is known.”

  Strock was a pudgy, red-faced man with a yellow ponytail. Sloppily dressed in a worn brown leisure suit, he spoke in a curt, staccato voice.

  “White house sources refuse to reveal anything they know about the rebel barrier, but the riddle of it has brought excited researchers from all over the world.”

  Horn had found a few of them willing to talk.

  “Impossible!” in the words of Dr. Victor Venturi, winner of a Nobel in physics and sometimes called the new Einstein. “I couldn’t believe it till I tried to walk through it. It is already revealing startling clues to an unknown aspect of the universe that can keep physical science busy for a dozen years. That is, if its secret is ever discovered.”