That explained a lot. I suddenly had as much sympathy for Little Jimmy as I was capable of having for weasels and skunks. All he really knew was that he was screwed with the mob, and that there were two Whitlocks who’d used him. He bought the real Whitlock’s story only as much as it helped him keep from going nuts, but he really didn’t know that much. I was convinced of it. They’d pulled in another Nkrumah to cover and make a more orderly exit, but then what? The new Little Jimmy had the same greed as the old one. He’d made for those boxes to recover as much of the money as possible. He couldn’t stay too long in Camden himself because the heat was on.
“He was waiting for me in my hotel room in Kingston that night,” Little Jimmy told us. “I couldn’t arrange a plane out that day. When I entered, he was there, with a gun.”
“I just wanted to meet face to face,” Little Jimmy Two had told him. “My intent, I admit, was to kill you. That would make it easy. You—I—would be legally and permanently dead. No hunters. I really intended to do it, but I can’t do it. It’s odd, but I can’t. I hadn’t really realized that until just now.”
“What—what will you do with me?” our little Jimmy asked him.
“Go to your hideaway. You have sufficient funds for quite a while. Stay there. Vanish there. So long as you do, you will live. If you show up, or get made by anyone, though, you will seal your own fate. I will not have to do it, thank God. Just stay out of our way.”
“And you been here ever since?” Brandy asked him.
He nodded. “Not moving off this boat, or out of the company of at least one of the girls at all times, so they’ll always be confident that it’s me.”
I had a sudden bad feeling about this. “Nkrumah—where’s the third girl? The Oriental one?”
“Huh? Around, I don’t know. Nan?”
“She went out earlier this mornin’,” the woman with the M16 responded. “Haven’t seen her in a while. We’re low on a lot of supplies.”
I was suddenly real nervous again, but I had to make an insurance position known. “Girls, there’s no way you’re going to shoot us all and survive, and you know it. You want to tell me who’s working for who, and maybe get us all out of this?”
Little Jimmy looked like he’d seen a ghost. He turned and stared at the pair. Clearly he hadn’t gone far enough with this replacement bit. He didn’t have all the story.
“We was only suppos’ta keep him happy,” Annie, the white girl, told us, still holding the pistol. “You got no idea what kinda life we come from, mister.”
I nodded. “I think I might. Who hired you? Who brought you over?”
Both of them looked uncertain as to what to do or say. Finally it was Nan, with all the firepower, who said, “Gritch. Sol Gritch brung us. We was in his stable, y’know.”
I looked at Brandy and Little Jimmy. “Name sound familiar?”
Both of them shook their heads no. We suddenly had a new player in the game, and that was something I didn’t like at all. “He from Camden or Philadelphia?” I asked.
“Sure. He’s big in southeast Philly. Everybody knows Sol.”
There, maybe, wherever “there” actually is. Not here.
“You never saw nobody but this Gritch?” Brandy asked them.
“Sure. Lots,” Annie replied. “But nobody else we knew or cared about.”
I had a sudden, unpleasant thought. “You had to come in through the Labyrinth. Where was the station?”
“The what? You mean that dizzy thing. Up in the middle of nowhere. You know, near Penn State.”
There was a sudden spray of bullets and we all hit the deck. I saw Annie fall, and I felt a sting in my left arm. “Stay down!” I yelled. “Brandy! You okay?”
“Yeah, for a moment. Who the hell—?”
“Mike!” I yelled, hoping the microphone was still open. “Can you make the shooter and, if so, nail the bastard!”
There was no rifle fire, which meant that either they’d taken Mike out or he couldn’t get a bead on the shooter. Suddenly there were three sharp reports, not rifle shots but pistol shots, and the sound of a body somewhere forward falling into the drink.
“Nan!” Brandy yelled. “Can you toss out that cannon to one of us without coming up? They’re sure to wipe us out!”
“To me!” I shouted. “You’re half tight and haven’t got your glasses on!”
Nan seemed uncertain as to what to do, but finally tossed the M16 out onto the deck. I crawled to it and got it; the pain in my arm was getting real irritating, but better there than in my head.
It was clear now that the shots had come through the windshield from the bow; that’s why Annie had taken it and why I’d gotten nipped. I was almost in a direct line from her.
I made my way warily forward and up the ladder to the wheel. Annie was splattered over half the side; she was out of the game for keeps. Keeping down, I cautiously peered out of the shattered windshield, but could see no one.
“Anybody alive up there?” I heard Jamie’s voice call from the water side.
“Yeah, some of us!” Brandy shouted back. “You got ’em?”
“There was only one. The Chinese girl or whatever she was. She’s meat now. Came up out of some hatch up there, crawled up, and started firing before I could react. Sorry.”
I relaxed a little and made my way back down to the others. Brandy turned and then gave a little gasp. Little Jimmy had been between Annie and me. We went to him, but Brandy didn’t need her glasses to see he’d done his last deal. One of the slugs had gone right in the back of his head.
Brandy suddenly looked at me. “Sam! Oh, my God! You’re hurt!”
There was the sound of a European-style police siren in the background, and a lot of yelling and screaming.
“Only a flesh wound,” I said bravely, and then passed out cold.
Mike came to see me in the small hospital. As the only registered member of our party not under arrest, he was the only one who could. I was sort of under arrest as well, but that amounted to a cop on the door and a search of all unofficial visitors. I figured that with all the shots flying around, the cops had never known Mike had been any part of this.
“Dey questioned me for a little, but only about all of you folks,” he told me. “I tell dem I’m just a charter pilot and dey pretty much believe dat. I wasn’t able to see either of de girls, but I made a few calls on de Company. Some folks will be in tonight if dey can get Company planes. I worry about dem two, though. Dis sorta t’ing just isn’t done here.”
“They’ll hold up,” I assured him, hoping the authorities would at least obey the normal procedures until help arrived. “Brandy’s had a lot of experience with cops and Jamie’s a pretty tough customer.”
“I’ll say! I didn’t even see dat girl wid the gun. Angle was wrong. Sorry.”
“You did your best. It’s too bad she had to be killed, though. She was their agent here, that’s clear now, although even the other girls didn’t know it. She had the answers. What about the surviving girl, Nan?”
“Oh, she’s okay. Dey got her under protective detention, as dey call it, tryin’ to get more information, but dey don’t t’ink she was a shooter. So far she’s givin’ dem the straight dope on the shooting, as far as I can tell, and odderwise clammin’ up. Says she was a whore wid Little Jimmy, dat’s all. She don’t know nuttin’ else.”
I nodded. “That’s good. I just hope we can get some big shots in fast, and, if so, they’re the right ones. You heard the whole thing?”
“Yeah. I already tell dem dis Sol Gritch character. Dey will do a big check on him. We should know what we can know by de time dey get here.”
“In the meantime, you make sure Nan stays in protective and doesn’t get released or taken away,” I told him. “If the opposition doesn’t get her, then they can’t know what we learned before their agent wasted Little Jimmy.” I paused. “Mike—how much do you really know about what’s going on here?”
He grinned. “I don’t know nuttin’
, man. I’m just a poor charter pilot for a big, big company, dat’s all.” With that, he turned and left, leaving me with the feeling I was being had. He sure was a pilot, and a good one, but he was far more than that. I wondered if even Janie knew how much more.
The bullet had taken a small chunk out of me but had only grazed the bone. My main trouble was loss of blood from moving around after being shot, although I knew I was going to have a pretty useless left arm and probably lots of bandages and antibiotics for a while. No matter what, I had to trust to Brandy, Jamie, and Mike to keep things from getting out of hand at this point. I was sure as hell stuck for the moment.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sudden turning on of my hospital room light and the entrance of two men who looked about as natural on Grand Cayman as Brandy and I at a Ku Klux Klan convention. They were both white, young, well built and trim, and wearing suits and ties. They looked like Secret Service agents.
“Sorry to awaken you, Mr. Horowitz,” said one, “but I thought you’d want the details as soon as possible. We’re working with the local authorities now to get the release of both your wife and our agent, and hopefully the outworld girl, too. I’m Bill Markham and this is Tod Symes. We’re with headquarters security.”
“I assume you mean the headquarters in Davenport.”
He chuckled. “Where else? Or, then again, is that a question I should ask, all things considered? We are who and what we say, I assure you. There are ways to determine that, and you and your wife as well.”
That was news. “Oh? How?”
“It’s a small encoded implant. Don’t worry—we’ll show you all that sooner or later. We’re on the same side in this, after all.”
I was beginning to wonder who was on whose side anymore but I let it pass. “You run down this Gritch character?”
“As much as we could. As soon as the call came in, we hopped a Company jet and got here. We’ve tracked a Sol Gritch here in the Philadelphia area, but he died nine years ago and was a real-estate speculator and slumlord. We’re now running a trace on him in other probability lines, but we don’t have much close to this one, so it’ll take some time. That’s where they can get us easy. They go into worlds we don’t cover that are pretty close, and do some development of their own. There’s over sixteen hundred lines in which all the principals in this case exist in roughly the same positions, so you can see how needle-in-a-haystack it has to be when you don’t have anybody there, not even a station.”
The concept was staggering. Sixteen hundred lines in which there was a me, and a Brandy, and a Whitlock, and a Little Jimmy, and maybe all the others. Not the same, maybe. Maybe we weren’t married, and not to each other, in all sixteen hundred, but we all existed there. Of course, the opposition would have, if anything, a worse manpower problem than G.O.D., Inc. There was probably only one of those they were using, the one in which they also found the gay Whitlock and the Nkrumah clone, but it would still take time.
“Mr. Horowitz,” Markham said, sitting in the lone chair, letting his silent partner stand leaning against the wall, “do you have any idea now what this is all about?”
“As much as I can, without knowing the full facts of this Company opposition,” I answered truthfully. “This is no band of radical nuts or malcontents. You know it and I know it. They have free access to the Labyrinth, so they have probably got the right Company credentials, and their moves are being dictated by somebody high up within the Company structure. We might sneak in and get trapped in that thing without you knowing it, and we could have even gotten out of that monastery if we’d had to, but something this elaborate can’t depend on sneaking into warehouses, monasteries, castles, or whatever, whenever somebody needs to be moved. Besides, we could get in, and out, but not control where we were going. These people can. You want to tell me just what the hell is really going on? Maybe if you do, I can give you the rest.”
Markham sighed. “You’re right, it’s bigger than a few rebels and it’s nastier. The fact is, why does anybody want to be a senator, or congressman, or the cabinet secretary? The pay’s good, but it’s not great, and almost all of them can do better in private business. And I hope you’re not going to say to serve the public or advance ideals. Otherwise, I’ll have to tell you the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.”
“Power, pure and simple,” I answered. “That’s why so many of them quit when they reach their limits. I’m not dumb. I grew up in the U.S.A.”
“General Ordering and Development is probably the largest corporate structure in human or nonhuman history, but that’s still what it is. A corporation. It runs as a business. The kind of people who run it run it because they like the power. They enjoy it. They need it. But there can only be one president, one chairman of the board, only so many board members, and even a limited number of vice presidents, although it looks like an infinite number to me. As in most corporate structures, the old men remain and refuse to give up power until they drop dead, and others are promoted as much on family or connections as on merit. In fact, often at the expense of merit. It’s a familiar structure to all large corporations.”
I nodded. “So somebody’s trying to hasten things along, or get even with the top boys for not noticing them. They’re the most dangerous, because they’re smart and motivated more by revenge than even greed.”
“Exactly, although we think this is very much a strictly business situation. You see, in many cases such large numbers of people would simply go out and form a competitive group. Often their new ideas and new slants would be so good they’d eventually sweep the old company aside, although not without a lot of nasty fighting. The problem here is that it’s of necessity a monopoly business. The Company controls the Labyrinth, and there is only one Labyrinth. As far as we know, there can be only one Labyrinth, according to the physics involved.”
“Huh! Seems to me that if you knew how it worked, all it’d take is a big machine hidden in a deep hole with lots of power to it and a camouflage structure on top.”
Markham shook his head. “No, it isn’t that way at all. Mr. Horowitz, there are no great machines under those warehouses and castles. If you think a little, you’d realize that, since you escaped the botanical station through a flag access stop in the middle of land with no buildings, people, or anything much else. They had to open the flag because you weren’t at a dead end; you were in the way, and a switch point needed to be created that spanned thirty-seven worlds, in order to get somebody from here to there. You said it yourself: power. It takes incredible power. The lone master machine exists in a universe where there is almost limitless power—and nothing much else. All the rest are the mechanics needed to make the process a controlled network. Stations to channel access. Switch points to save time and increase accuracy. The worlds aren’t in a straight line. They are at all angles to one another, including angles we can’t even imagine.”
I saw the problem. One machine, one network, and the competition couldn’t really touch that network without fouling themselves up as well. “Then the only thing you can really do is try and take over the Company.”
“Exactly. What they’re doing now is running a competitive operation on our own network, using worlds we haven’t touched, and building an organization of people recruited from those worlds. An organization that is now well organized enough to start hitting us in vital spots. It’s not a general war; it’s an endless series of little wars. The operation here is fairly large, but it’s not vital. It’s on the periphery, so it’s lightly defended compared to some other worlds, where, naturally, the bulk of personnel and resources are channeled. Because we depend heavily on organized crime in the West here, it makes it even easier to go in and make alterations at the level where things actually get done. If they succeed here, then we have to either divert major resources and personnel here to fight them off, and leave a more vital point undefended, or we have to declare them a winner and abandon further development. Either way, they win. Corporate heads
roll. Things are reshuffled. Key people move up.”
I got the picture. No wonder G.O.D., Inc. took such a liking to the Mafia. Hell, it was the Mafia, the prototypical Mafia on the grandest of all scales. All the godfathers jockeyed for control, and if they were frustrated working with the system, they fought it, sometimes violently. Board members themselves probably double-crossed fellow members if they wanted to move one way and the old guard shot down their plans.
I sighed. “All right, all I can do is figure what happened here. They fingered Whitlock, probably when he was tabbed and investigated before being handed the east-coast coordinator’s job. For some reason, they had burrowed into one of those sixteen hundred other worlds, and so they had a match—a real good one, considering their replacement Whitlock. A Whitlock loser who was common enough that he’d drool to be a winner again. And they have this State College access to the Labyrinth. It’s pretty wild, real wilderness, all around there. Mind telling me why you used Oregon with a State College station?”
“We don’t have a State College station. There’s a semipermanent flag stop there for eastern access, but it’s not a full operation and it’s totally automated. We’re checking out traffic to and from it now, but that takes time. See, we can’t handle a full station unless we can secure it through a tremendous number of worlds. When you’re dealing with truck- and boxcar-loads of stuff, you have to make sure it ships right, point to point. Other points of entry for our convenience are automated flag stops. Just sidings, as it were. Of course, if we’d wanted to get the Whitlock women out, we’d have used State College, but we wanted them to be followed and take pursuers as far away from the east coast as possible.”
I nodded. I was feeling very weak and tired but, damn it, I’d paid for this stuff with a year of my life and some blood, and twice this other crowd had tried to shoot me.
“Tell me this,” I said at last. “If Big Tony gets twenty years in Atlanta, and his organization is fragmented, who is most likely to get control of his territory? Between loan sharking, prostitution, and particularly narcotics, he controls maybe a billion dollars’ worth of business, I figure. That’s a hell of a lot. Enough even for a seat on the mob’s own inner council.” That was the board of directors, more or less, of the old-line organized-crime families.
The Labyrinth Of Dreams Page 23
