Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  But the phone rang. It was the major general of the Chemical Corps's attaché, who wanted to know if anyone in their theater of operations had any idea where in Connecticut Robert Eagerly and Daniel Wolton might have taken an army helicopter that the regimental commander wanted back, pronto. G-2 pieced the scene together and called OSS, who confessed that Mr. Wolton had failed to attend a dinner party in Georgetown, to the annoyance of his hostess, who had promised everybody that the bachelor Wolton would be there. Later that night, G-2 reached Bob Eagerly's personal assistant while he was making love to his secretary in a Silver Springs motor lodge. He told G-2 that yes, Wolton and Eagerly had taken a jet to Hartford together yesterday afternoon.

  The attaché had to interrupt the major general's pajamaed ride on an electric exercise bike because G-2 had called back: G-2 was now in a red-alert flapdoodle about that damn helicopter, as the major general later, back on his bike, yelled at his wife, over his motor, and hers—she was shaving her legs at the time. He'd told them, sure, he'd gotten Bob Eagerly that helicopter; he'd done it because Eagerly'd said it was hush-hush, and he didn't want the White House officially written into the scenario, said it was just a check on a couple of characters in G-2, that's all. So that's why the general thought G-2 might have an inside line on the story, that's all.

  So that's why he'd taken the trouble to call them, just trying to help out, that's all. No, he hadn't known Dan Wolton was with Eagerly.

  No, he didn't know what they wanted the machine for. Bob Eagerly was a golf partner, that's all. Maybe they were shacked up with some broads in some cabin in the woods, wasn't Wolton big with the ladies? No, of course it wasn't funny if a White House aide and a senior official of the OSS disappeared while engaged in the performance of delicate duties. So what was so delicate? What was the score, the script, the scoop? What had they done, defected? Flown the damn helicopter to Moscow? Then G-2 hung up on him, or might as well have, the major general shouted at his wife. Sure, he added to himself, those two lucky stiffs were up to their necks in booze and hookers off in some hotshot hideaway right this minute.

  Working long after hours, G-2 called the office of the inspector general, who called the office of the adjutant general, who was out on the Potomac asleep in an industrialist's sloop and could not be disturbed.

  The next morning at a U.S. Intelligence Board meeting, a Colonel Harry of the DIA was called by an official of the OSS who wanted to know re code name Archangel, was there such a show on the road, and if so, where on the road was it? The colonel thought he could sketch that in for the official as soon as he checked with his staff. Ten minutes later, his staff lieutenant, a stern young woman who could not be persuaded to live for the moment, reported to Colonel Harry in his office at DIA headquarters. "Yes, sir. Code name Archangel. Immunodeficiency laboratory. Preliminary tests apparently were carried out but I can't give you any specifics. Top Secret classification. Initial funding in the area of two hundred M's plus by DIT of CIA. Original coordinator appears to have been W.

  Derek Palter. You remember, he's dead now. They said it was suicide.

  Additional funding thought to be budgeted by Hector Brickhart at NIC in 1969, but there is no way to check their budget on miscellaneous expenditures. Staff, twenty. This is from memory, sir.…Yes, sir, we shredded our file on this two years ago. Your orders, sir....No, sir, after the Pentagon Papers. You recall, sir, you said that we were to toss the gray area material overboard. You said the last thing we needed was the GRU to start hanging out our dirty laundry on the roof of the Kremlin. I believe I quote you, sir, that it was the CIA's you-know-what anyhow so let them get smeared with it and not us."

  On his way to meet with an OSS official and a plans division official of the Central Intelligence Agency, Colonel Harry decided he had lost all desire to seduce his staff lieutenant and would from now on confine himself to professionals when he was not being faithful to his wife, which of course was his first priority.

  The three officials met in the restaurant of the Hotel Occidental on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  "Gentlemen, we have a problem," said Gregory Thom, OSS.

  Briefly they briefed one another. John Dick, DDT of CIA, opened with a review. Yes, apparently Archangel was still on the computer payroll. Its chief of staff, one Thomas Svatopluk, Ph.D., M.D., had been placed in charge (despite everything the FBI had dug up about him, including his hawking Communist newspapers outside his elementary school) and empowered to requisition supplies from private sources entirely at his discretion from an annual budget of $2,478,795.00, after, of course, the initial cost of his laboratory.

  Really, though, the whole thing was a farcically minor bit of business, a Punch and Judy show. Naturally, it might have slipped everyone's minds when briefing the White House, though, naturally, key people at OSS and at DIA had certainly been in the picture all along, and there was no use denying they had (no use, of course, denying it privately to him here). The point was that CIA had had the impression that Dan Wolton was not, never had been, and never would be one of those key people at OSS, because he had always been on the enemy list as (1) anti-Pentagon, (2) a publicity hound, and (3) not a team player.

  "Three," said Thom of OSS, "is truer than we realized, gentlemen. We have another problem. I had Dan's chief aide in on my carpet this morning. The little stool pigeon had enough savvy to lay it all out for me about his boss. Get ready for this. That prick Wolton is State Department! The whole lousy time he's been an OSS man he's been an INR man, too. A lousy double agent. How do you like that?"

  They didn't like it. That the double-salaried Wolton should be leaking information about CIA operations to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research while masquerading as a loyal OSS liaison to CIA was double treason! Spying against his own country for his own country!

  "So you let the bastard go through OSS files," sighed Colonel Harry, DIA.

  Apparently they had. It was there in the OSS files, in fact, that Wolton had come across three increasingly outraged letters from Dr. Svatopluk about Commander Brickhart's Fascist interference with his operation, letters that apparently no one but Wolton had taken the time to take seriously. Not only taken the time, but taken the letters, too. The OSS Top Secret file on Archangel was empty.

  "So you let the bastard go running to Eagerly," sighed Dick, DDT of CIA.

  Apparently they had. But had the bastard kept running, had he raised the curtain over at the Oval Office, or at the Justice Department, or at the New York Times?

  Apparently not, since not even CBS seemed to know about it.

  However, as Wolton would shove his mother out of the wings onto the floor of a carnival peep show if doing so would get him into the limelight, the odds were heavy that making a burlesque out of his country's national security would not give him pause. Well, should they wait for his move, or should they move in on him? Should they blackmail him, promote him, transfer him, assassinate him, subpoena him, haul him in on the carpet, or have his townhouse recarpeted free of charge?

  Should they deny everything, admit everything, beat him to the punch, or let him wear himself out on the ropes? Should they terminate both him and Eagerly? Should they terminate the operation since (a) everyone seemed to think it had already been terminated anyhow, (b) nobody seemed to know it had ever been started, (c) everyone seemed to think someone else had started it, (d) nobody seemed to know who, (e) nobody seemed to know what the operation was.

  However, the problem with ordering Svatopluk's operation inoperative was (f) nobody seemed to know where the man was, except that he was somewhere in Connecticut. Therein lay the gentlemen's problem. They couldn't simply go around knocking on Federalist doors in pretty little villages and asking the residents if they had happened to notice a CIA germ warfare lab anywhere in the vicinity.

  After an interlude of gloom and tax-deductible seafood platters, Colonel Harry remembered his lady lieutenant's remembering that Commander Brickhart, formerly with NIC, was now president of ALAS-ORE Oil Compan
y. They called Portland, who said to call Anchorage. One hour later the commander spoke to them from a CB radio in his skimobile:

  "You dumb turkeys make me want to puke. You and your pansy pussyfooting around like a gaggle of gossipy old geese at a Weight Watchers meeting. Flushing this and faking that and dickering in embassy johns with Sony tape cassettes wired to your pricks. I'll tell you straight to your faces, you and all those Socialist fairies up on the Hill have cost us the goddamn ball game. Cuba down the drain.

  Chile down the drain. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cambodia, Laos, Nam, the whole shithouse. Lost! The Reds are laughing their butts off at us. It, makes me want to puke right here in God's pure snow!"

  Yes, very well, they agreed, but hadn't he sometime ago inspected the site of a project coded Archangel somewhere in Connecticut?

  Damn straight he had inspected it. And that's just what he was talking about. After blowing close to half a billion of NIC funds, that runny-nosed runt Svatopluk had had the balls to just stand there picking boogers and let the Commies call the U.S.A. out on strikes in Nam. But if they thought Svatopluk was going to shoot them the juice now, they had guano in their hulls, because he wouldn't let go of it even if he had any juice to shoot, which the commander doubted. And besides, it was too late anyhow, the winning streak was over. "Let's face it, we kissed it good-bye when we didn't keep going after Nagasaki, just keep on going and blow the Bolsheviks and the chinks right off the map, adios amigos."

  Yes, no doubt, but could the commander remember exactly where Svatopluk was?

  Hell, no, he'd tell them. In fact, he'd come show them how to shovel out from under the compost they were lying in. And it didn't surprise him one damn bit that they'd lost Operation Archangel since, as he'd just pointed out, they'd managed to lose South America and Southeast Asia, too. And since the spineless military didn't have the balls anymore to get out there and fight for what was ours, he'd turned in his uniform and joined forces with industry.

  "Because, you listen to me boys, if we're not going to take it, we sure as hell better get in there and buy it, or let's face it, it won't be long before we end up with a bunch of Jap gooks running Detroit and a A-rab sliding his greasy butt down in the Oval Office." Then before they could properly thank him, Brickhart signed off. Off into an endless day the former naval commander raced, across a sea of snow to investigate reports that a Pakistani painter named Habzi Rabies was defiling the ALAS-ORE pipeline with modern art.

  Back at the Hotel Occidental over too many mixed drinks, Tom, Dick, and Harry reviewed their reviews. Their conversation was not preserved, for each of the three (under the impression that at least one of the other two had a mike up his sleeve) had a scrambler in his pocket. As a result of their interference, a senator seated in the next booth was spared the embarrassment of rehearing some sybaritic suggestions he was making to a lovely undercover agent in the Treasury Department—which institution happened to be investigating the plump public servant's private investments. Down in the ladies' room with her fully bugged handbag, the lovely T-woman was chagrined to find on playback that she had recorded sweet nothings indeed, a dialog of woofs and tweets. She decided the senator was onto them and that he had a scrambler.

  But as CIA, DIA, and DDT browsed over one scenario after another in search of the perfect play, Fate had already concluded the drama and dropped the curtain on Operation Archangel. Far from being at this minute off on their cans with the editor of Time, or even up to their necks in booze and hookers, Daniel Wolton and Bob Eagerly (along with the borrowed pilot) were over their heads in the deep water of Bredforet Pond. According to Eagerly's smashed Omega watch, they had been there since 1:33 A.M., Tuesday, June 1.

  There in the black, muddy stillness, tangled among algae and weeds, lay the carcass of a silt-covered helicopter, property of American taxpayers. Half out of its jagged hole floated dreamily in a Brooks Brothers suit Daniel Wolton, OSS, INR. His leg was hooked through a shaft of steel. Drifting against his Bond Street shoe was the swelling face of Bob ("Bucky") Eagerly. Around them darted the little fish and big fish that lived in the pond. A giant bass swam ponderously by.

  The minnows fled. The bass lumbered through the metal scaffolding over to the pilot's seat, veered away from the wave of a distended arm, and wriggled back into the inky depths.

  Not far away, in a fenced compound beyond some marshes, scientific equipment lay gleaming in a laboratory beside an overturned counter. Sun glittered through a shattered window onto the shelves and counters and floor of broken glass. On that floor, like a yogi on a bed of nails, an ambitious young scientist lay on the jagged pieces of his final experiment. His eyes were red and his tongue was black.

  Throughout the compound, on floors, at desks, in bed, beside a Ping Pong table, in front of a refrigerator, next to a sink, lay with protruding eyes and bloated black tongues a whole team of dedicated young men who had just perfected an irresistible, undetectable, instantaneous artificial pathogen, a Lethal Dose100, a weapon flawed only, as Dr. Svatopluk had confessed to his Washington visitors before their departure, flawed only temporarily by its extremely short-lived effectiveness. For once released into the atmosphere, it killed everything within its immediate radius, but it was potent only for thirty minutes before structural decomposition took place.

  Svatopluk had been certain it would work. Sadly, as with many scientists before him, Truth had to suffice as its own reward.

  But he had been right. Precisely at 2:07, thirty-four minutes after the tail rotor of an army helicopter had splattered Dr. Thomas Svatopluk against a tree trunk and smashed itself against a building (and approximately twenty-nine minutes after the excruciatingly painful, though rapid, demise of three biochemists, two microbiologists, two virologists, one geneticist, two pathologists, four lab assistants, three security guards, one cook, one handyman, one custodian, and two German shepherd dogs), Modified Q Fever No. 61 (New Q) suffered decomposition and left not a trace behind. There were the corpses, of course; Polly Hedgerow and Luke Packer had, on the following Thursday afternoon, seen two of the victims—the dogs—lying where murder had outrun them. But of the killer, not a trace was left of that chain of molecules.

  And what of the chain of command? Could a jurist ever wind his way zigzagging like Theseus through the blind twists of a maze built to protect the vile secrets of a ruler's lust? Could he unravel a skein of tangled lines that would lead him from the lair of the monster straight back into the light of day? How could any thread possibly be brought out of that cave unbroken? Who could prove, who could believe, who could think to imagine a linked chain connecting a luncheon at the Hotel Occidental in Washington, D.C., with the body of a sixteen-year-old girl lying in an Argyle, Connecticut, morgue? Not even the links themselves. Not even the parents of Joy Strummer, in the maddest extremes of their grief, would believe that an adjutant general asleep on an industrialist's sloop in the Potomac was guilty of the murder of their daughter.

  No. The Strummers felt guilty themselves. Lance Abernathy felt guilty, Polly Hedgerow felt guilty, to varying degrees every guest at Kate Ransom's pool party felt guilty. But how could any of those who knew Joy thread such a maze, when there was no Ariadne and when the door to the secret, as close to them as the marshlands north of their own hometown, was unknown not only to them but to those whom they trusted to protect Dingley Falls for them? The town doctor had not probed fast or far enough into deaths beyond his analysis. The town editor had not pursued the disconnected highway beyond a pro forma squawk of liberal outrage. The town police chief, while he had plunged into the labyrinthine caverns, had never raised his searchlight beyond his own outmaneuvered shadow. And the man selected by heritage and birth, by appearance, wealth, and congenial authority, to be the preeminent watchman over the town? The man whose flattering provinciality kept him home in Dingley Falls, for he modestly declined all suggestions that he seek public office?

  Was it likely that Mr. and Mrs. Strummer would charge Ernest Ransom with unpremeditated
homicide? The banker might fault himself as careless with his pool, but careless with his country? No.

  The Bredforet land bequeathed him had been sold to a government whose purposes, unlike those of other nations, were—so Ransom had been taught to believe—all to the good. Only in such a country could one safely remain a private citizen. It was inconceivable that he should see a conspiracy linking the public good with the personal tragedy of a premature death in his Dingley Falls, indeed, horribly enough, in his own home.

  And so there was neither guilt nor retribution nor even knowledge anywhere along the chain of command to connect those who had never heard of Dingley Falls with the death of Joy. At Transportation Corps, at Chemical Corps, at G-2, NIC, DIA, CIA, OSS, INR, NSC, on the Hill and in the House, there was nothing for anyone to wash his hands of. Nobody's hands were soiled. There were so many hands, no one even knew how many, or whose joined whose, or in whose hands the end of the thread was held. No one Daedalus has built, no one Theseus can brave the countless corridors of the maze.

  The chain of command seemed even to its links to be a circle whose circumference was everywhere and whose center was the shifting, impenetrable cave of the hidden Minotaur, a fabled creation in whose murderous horror no one could sensibly believe.

  There is no one evil monster to slay. And if a virgin had walked into the labyrinth, who could ever prove that she had not died wandering lost there, had not drowned quite by accident in the great tortuous subterranean caves? The Minotaur deep in his own dreams had never known the human sacrifice was even there.

  part five

  chapter 45

  Already burning, the sun seeped over the ridge that hid the marshland from Dingley Falls's view. In Madder, stray dogs gathered to fight one another for scraps of garbage. They rooted in the battered tin cans that littered the trailer camp. When there was nothing left, they trotted away to find a place in the sun. The biggest dog carried a slab of stale, gnawed meat behind the cement blocks that held up Maynard Henry's now unguarded trailer.