by Mick Farren
Vickers shook his head. "No." Victoria's eyes narrowed.
"What do you mean, 'no.' Is this more of the I'm-too-sensitive-for-another-assignment garbage?"
"I'm not ready for another assignment but this is something different. If you're sending me after these two, you're up to something that's in no way kosher. Lutesinger is the biggest of the big and now you tell me that Lloyd-Ransom has got himself pretty damned elevated. They're not only biggies, they're Contec biggies. Anything that involves people like that isn't normal corpse work."
"You've taken out our own people plenty of times. That damned bigmouth chemist on the donut was Contec."
"I'm not talking about some lower-echelon troublemaker who has to go. I'm talking major league. When it's heavyweights like this it's called taking a side. I don't do corporation vendettas or wars between divisions. The whole corpse unit has always worked that way. We've never been compromised. I don't know what you're involved in, Vicky, but I'm not going with you."
She hated to be called Vicky but she didn't react to the goad. She reached into the top righthand drawer of her desk and took out a pack of unfiltered Camels. She put one in her mouth and lit it. Vickers had never seen her smoke before. She inhaled and coughed.
"This isn't a vendetta. This is an operation that has the full sanction of the corporation-the whole corporation."
"What operation?"
"We have lately had a suspicion that Lloyd-Ransom, and possibly Lutesinger, too, have crossed a line beyond which their behavior is no longer acceptable."
"Suspicion? Possibly? Not acceptable? This is double-talk. What are you really saying?"
Morgenstern looked uncomfortable. "It looks like Lloyd-Ransom is turning the bunker into his own private kingdom. Lutesinger may be in it with him. Have you ever met Lutesinger?"
Vickers shrugged. "I was once in the same room as him at some kind of reception. I wouldn't say I'd met him."
"How about Lloyd-Ransom?"
Vickers scowled. "I know him."
There was a long pause. Vickers waited. Morgenstern seemed unwilling to go on. Finally she took a deep breath. "The board itself has decided that, for the moment, we have to work on the premise that Lloyd-Ransom and Lutesinger are attempting to put a major corporate facility to unauthorized use."
"A whole bunker?"
"A whole bunker."
"That beats stealing the pencils. What am I to do?"
"We want you to infiltrate the bunker, observe and ascertain if there is any foundation for what's suspected."
Vickers couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. "Me? Observe? I don't observe, I kill."
"We don't yet know if killing will be necessary."
Vickers' eyes narrowed. "You don't know? If you're sending me into the bunker to find out what's going on, it's sure as hell others have been sent in before me. What happened to them?"
"There were two previous agents."
Vickers' expression was grim. "I asked what happened to them."
Morgenstern toyed with the pack of Camels. "We don't know."
Vickers started to lose his temper. "What do you mean you don't know?"
"Remember who you're talking to."
Vickers pursed his lips. "I want an answer."
"There isn't one. For all practical purposes, the bunker is a sealed enclave. Lately there has been no communication."
"People come in and out, don't they? Crews are rotated, aren't they?"
"The ones we've questioned claim everything's normal."
"So what about your agents?"
"They weren't my agents. They were from the intelligence group."
"Don't split hairs."
"They didn't come back. They may have been killed or just co-opted."
Vickers slumped in his chair. "Fucking great."
"You asked."
"And you want me to be number three."
Morgenstern nodded. It was as if she didn't actually want to say it. A long silence settled on the room. Steam from the giant air conditioner gusted past the window in unravelling swirls. Vickers slowly shook his head.
"How come nobody foresaw this? Megalomania is hardly an obscure disease. How come some kind of control body wasn't set up to guard against a particular group taking over a bunker? It's kind of an obvious move."
Vickers had only seen Morgenstern look uncomfortable on three previous occasions.
"Of course there was. There's always a regulating body. Just like any other regulating body, though, it was a compromise between the heartbleeds and the freebooters. A committee was set up but it was filled with incompetents and crazies. It was powerless. Lutesinger walked all over them."
Vickers leaned back in his chair and treated Victoria to the long, hard stare of the bitter professional. Her continuing discomfort afforded him a certain measure of twisted satisfaction.
"So what you're telling me is that Contec has lost a bunker."
Morgenstern nodded. "It's a slight exaggeration, but yes, that's pretty much the case."
"And you want me to go in and get it back for you."
Victoria allowed herself the slightest sigh of resignation.
"At least find out how we could get it back for ourselves."
Vickers knew that he had her. On a much more basic level, though, she had him. There was no way that he could pass up this job. He began to raise difficulties.
"Lloyd-Ransom knows me. He knows what I am. It won't be a case of just walking up to the door and knocking."
"We hadn't expected it to be."
"I imagine that you've formulated some kind of a plan."
Victoria smiled. "Indeed we have."
They had gone to the larger briefing room, just Vickers and Morgenstern. There had been no escort, no secretaries, no aides or flunkying subordinates. The details of the plan were for his eyes only. At the start of the session, Victoria had asked him to neither interrupt nor lose his temper. As the session progressed, this had proved not to be easy. The plan, as it was progressively unveiled, had proved to be a monster.
At the start, it had all been fairly innocuous. Victoria had been softening him up with a lot of background basics, profiles of the individuals involved and the layout and capacity of the bunker itself. He hadn't realized that they were quite as vast as they were, but it was hardly eye-opening stuff. He would have printouts of all that material and he would be able to study it at his leisure. He began to make small gestures of boredom. They stopped, however, when Victoria moved on to the actual details.
Someone had devoted a great deal of time and thought to wringing the last drop from the incident at the Plaza. Someone deep in the security think-tanks had made the connection and seized the opportunity. From their point of view, the massacre was the starting point of an ideal cover. From where Vickers sat, it was humiliating and dangerous. The first move was for Contec to publicly acknowledge that one of their security people was the target of the attack. Without admitting any measure of liability and promising to stand by their man, the corporation would express their distress at the terrible tragedy.
Of course, the signals they were giving out were quite the reverse. The implication that lurked just below the surface, plain to those in the know, was that they were embarrassed by the killings and fearful that the involvement of one of their employees would stink up the corporate image. Thus they were beating their detractors to the punch by making the admission themselves. Since the world was clearly looking for a live scapegoat, the security exec in question would be dropped down the long chute.
Vickers would be held, under guard, at a fairly anonymous New York hotel pending a final dispatch of the problem. The Holiday Inn at Kennedy Airport had been chosen for the purpose. There'd be sufficient leakage of the supposedly secret action to again let the cognisenti know what was being done. At the appropriate moment, however, Vickers would escape. Behaving like a revenging corpse on the run, he'd take a flight to Las Vegas. In Vegas, he'd hide out among the tourists and wait to
be contacted by one of Lloyd-Ransom's agents.
"What maniac thought up this scheme?"
"You don't need to know that."
"It won't work. It's insane. How do we even know that Lloyd-Ransom has agents in Las Vegas?"
"We know."
"And even if he does, why should they come anywhere near me? What the hell would someone who's got his own bunker want with a newly dumped corpse?"
"It would appear that Lloyd-Ransom is recruiting himself a smart, heavy goon squad. You'd be ideal."
"Thanks."
"We don't quite understand why and we don't know the details, but it appears that Herbie Mossman is somehow helping him in this endeavor."
Vickers was genuinely surprised.
"Herbie Mossman? The Herbie Mossman? Herbie Mossman of Global Leisure? He's involved in all this?"
"Global Leisure is a much more exotic corporation than ours. They still take pride in a sordid past, and they still enjoy the semblance of an adventure. We will make sure that he knows of your situation. You'll be the bait and we're confident he'll rise to it."
"Bait frequently gets eaten."
"If you don't have any more questions…"
"Sure, I've got a whole lot more questions. For a start, what about this escape?"
"What about it?"
"Do the people doing the guarding know what's going on?"
"No."
"Who does know what's really happening?"
"You, me and five other people whom you'll probably never meet."
"That's just great. Nobody will be pulling any punches."
Victoria smiled. "No one."
"So how much force do I use when I go through my chaperones at the Holiday Inn?"
"Anything that's necessary. It has to look good."
"The easiest way is usually the most extreme."
Victoria didn't say a word. Vickers' eyes narrowed.
"Who is guarding me?"
"Van Doren and the two Internals who picked you up. You think you can get by them?"
"Of course I can get by them. Particularly if you don't care whether I waste Ilsa or not."
"Naturally, we'd rather you didn't."
"But you don't care either way? Is dumping Nasty Ilsa policy or personal?"
"That's something else that's none of your damn business."
In the back of the car, Ilsa was pawing through a red folder. It was the same red as the disk sleeve. It was full of printouts. The two ballerinas were in the front. One was driving and the other was staring back at Vickers with his hand under his coat clutching his Yasha. The men were as skittish as Ilsa was cool. As they turned into the Midtown Tunnel, she glanced up from the folder and grinned at him.
"You know what this is?"
"Some poor bastard's file?"
"It's yours, sucker."
She held up a color eight by ten that had been taken some eighteen months earlier. Vickers grunted.
"Does it make interesting reading?"
"You're a loser, Vickers. If you get much worse, you'll be scarcely human."
"I get by."
"Barely."
"Are you going to ride me all the way to the end of the line?"
"Sure, why not. Isn't it all part of the fun?"
An NYPD cruiser cut in front of them with its lights flashing and sirens howling. Vickers scrunched lower in his seat. He was becoming increasingly certain that not only did Ilsa not know what the real deal was but that she'd also been given the impression that she'd be the one to kill him when the time came. The bitch was a sadist. She liked to talk her targets into the ground before she greased them. She was leafing through the folder again looking for more ammunition.
"You were married."
"It didn't work out."
"She took an overdose."
"She found out how I made a living. Before that she'd been convinced I was a bucket salesman."
"How did you feel when she died?"
"I had a lot on my mind at the time. There's been plenty of other bodies since."
"Is that why you've got this thing about hookers and video tapes?"
"Doesn't it say anything about hair dryers and ten volt batteries?"
For an instant, van Doren was totally taken in. She scanned down the page as if searching for the relevant item. Then she realized and caught herself. Her eyes slitted, promising Vickers that he'd pay for the lapse. While she was still off balance, he shot the question.
"Are you having an affair with Victoria?"
To his complete surprise, she actually colored. Was this a hang-up that hadn't been crash-therapied out of her?
"That's none of your goddamned business, Vickers."
Vickers settled back in his seat to enjoy the rest of the ride. Some kind of orange smoke drifted across the highway. Despite his overall sense of doom and betrayal, he had to admit that life was at least taking a turn for the interesting.
Vickers glared Wearily at the nearest ballerina.
"Why don't you make yourself useful and call room service. The scotch is almost gone again. Get some food while you're at it."
He was pretending to be much drunker than he really was. Red, late afternoon sun streamed through the half-open curtains. He was slumped in a deep armchair with his back to the light. The suite on the top floor of the Holiday Inn was starting to turn funky. Nobody had been allowed in to clean for the three days that they'd been there. Only room service with hotel booze and hotel food. Beyond the windows, the planes thundered in and thundered out again. The television played constantly and boredom was closing its grip. Control called three times a day but the lengthy instructions amounted to little more than that they should stay put and do nothing. There was also nothing to indicate to Vickers that he should make the break that was dictated by the master plan.
While he waited for a sign, he did his best to make Ilsa and the two Internals believe that he was practically harmless. He behaved like a man who truly believed that he was going to die and had given up. He drank a lot, stared out of the window and watched a lot of TV, impatiently flicking from channel to channel. He didn't shave, he didn't bathe and he didn't change his clothes. The two Internals started to behave like they were his private death watch. Their names were Malmud and Klauswitz. Out of their trademark hats and armored coats, they were almost human. They came on cheerfully sympathetic and kept offering to play cards with him.
Klauswitz shrugged as if he personally believed that Vickers had drunk enough but wasn't going to say so. Ilsa, who was standing watching the planes come and go, glanced at him with contempt.
"Soaking it up to the bitter end, Mort?"
"It stops me having to think."
"You're a loser, Mort."
Ilsa didn't exactly look like a winner herself right at that moment. She had started out bandbox fresh, going to extremes to keep her seams straight and each hair in place. Two days into the waiting, though, she had been hit by the general boredom and lowering of standards. She had taken to wearing her hair like she'd just gotten out of bed, walking around in a silk slip and chain smoking. When this had started, Vickers had wondered if she was going to go all the way and actually sleep with her target.
It didn't happen. The only outbreak of that kind of activity was when Ilsa and Malmud had ordered a mess of cream cakes and locked themselves into one of the bedrooms. The whole thing was done with such slickness it was plain to Vickers that this wasn't the first such interlude.
Ilsa managed to generate a level of tension that only evaporated when she took her turns to sleep. When Ilsa was away, the men let out a collective sigh and relaxed. They were developing the strained camaraderie of a condemned man and his jailers.
Ilsa turned in early on that third afternoon. She retired for a few hours of sack time just after sunset. The three men started a game of five card stud. About an hour into the game, the phone rang. Klauswitz picked it up.
"Yeah?" He looked a little surprised. "Are you sure about this?"
He held out the phone to Vickers. "It's for you."
Vickers was equally surprised.
"Who is this?"
"It's Victoria. Shut up and listen. It's time for you to get out of there. There's an Amjet leaving for Las Vegas in two hours. Be on it. A car and driver will be waiting outside the hotel in one hour. It's a beat-up Ford Fabian. It'll take you to the right terminal. Everything has been seen to. That's all. You can hang up now."
Vickers had a dozen questions but he couldn't voice them in front of Malmud and Klauswitz. He placed the phone carefully back in its cradle. Klauswitz looked at him curiously.
"What did Morgenstern want?"
"Basically she was telling me not to panic."
"She was probably talking about the TV statement."
"Probably."
The previous day, Contec had made its electronic confession. Anton Fellful himself had appeared on all the major channels expressing the regret of the corporation. It had been the first tangible sign that anything was happening on the outside.
The poker game was resumed. On paper, Klauswitz and Malmud owed Vickers some fourteen thousand dollars. There was much strained laughter about who would live to collect it. This game didn't, however, last for very long. It quickly started to deteriorate as Vickers appeared to grow drunker and drunker. Finally it broke up. Vickers went on drinking, Malmud stared at the TV and Klauswitz stripped down his Yasha and started to clean it.
At the peaks of his drunk act, Vickers would launch into long disjointed stories of his past exploits. The two Internals humored him by pretending interest. After all, how much longer did he have. One of his favorites was the tale of when he and Mad Jack Cardew were in Cameroon together. He reached the slurring climax of the story just as Klauswitz was reassembling his gun.
"By the time we reached Yaounde, the second biggest city, it was pretty damn clear that although we'd toppled the government, the bunch we'd put in their place was ten times worse. M'Tubo had given his troops their head, and let me tell you that their head went a long way beyond ordinary barbarism. They were going feral all over the town while M'Tubo himself was sitting in the town hall or whatever, blind drunk and yelling bloody murder at the head of some local biggie. He'd got it set up on a table. Did I tell you that the head had been cut off a few hours earlier? Anyway, Cardew, who's past caring by that point, was almost as roaring drunk as M'Tubo, walks in and starts calling M'Tubo sixteen kinds of asshole."
