by Jeff Sutton
"His papers would be of the best," Conrad agreed.
Dorrance smiled whimsically. "He's covered his tracks extremely well."
"Has he, or has he bought a cover?"
"I've considered that."
"A billion dollars can bury a lot of records," Conrad observed.
"It can't bury everything." Dorrance shook his head. "Aside from that, we can't have a private citizen in a position to influence—or should I say dictate?—the policies of another government. My concern is the national security aspect."
"Is he becoming that dangerous?"
"He could, that's the whole point. Aside from that, the term 'billionaire' is misleading. He controls many billions, and it's the control that counts. He's exerting tremendous leverage against our basic institutions—law and government."
"Does he have any weaknesses?"
Dorrance inclined his head. "Blondes, as you suggested earlier, and a penchant for good whiskey. He drinks more than he should, but that's not uncommon. He's also quite a snob. Perhaps that explains his partiality toward the eggheads."
"Anything else?"
"Not that we've found." Dorrance stared reflectively at the dossier. "His life for the last year has been pretty much an open book. I doubt that he's done very much that we haven't photographed, taped, or both. He's quite naive about ensuring his privacy."
"Naive, or doesn't he give a damn?"
"Naive. He's got a platoon of bodyguards."
"But no security, eh?"
"He might believe that he has." Dorrance pursed his lips musingly. "His house is protected with electric safeguards. So are the grounds. That shows he recognizes the need for security. But he apparently doesn't realize that telephone lines can be tapped from a distance, or that remote pickups can serve as well as a bugged room. Frankly, his lack of knowledge in that respect puzzles me."
"In what way?"
"If he were a foreign agent or an industrial spy or an embezzler or stock manipulator or what have you, he'd be wise to all that; but he's not. So who is he? What is he? What's his background?"
"How come his bodyguards aren't hep?"
"He's picked the strong-arm type," Dorrance said.
"With an industrial empire of that magnitude?"
"Oh, his security there is quite different. It's the best."
"But he doesn't relate the same need to his personal life, is that it?"
"Apparently he doesn't. His business is something else again." Dorrance grimaced. "Phone taps, hidden mikes, remote pickups—nothing has been much help. He uses public phones randomly, talks in code, works through agents who work through agents who work through agents, doesn't commit a damned thing to the mails, and all the rest of it. Oh, we've got plenty on tape but it hasn't done us much good."
"A man can never cover his past completely. He always leaves a record of some kind somewhere. There are always friends who remember him from way back, and enemies. Aside from that, a man can never hide his activities completely." Conrad's eyes glinted. "Not even with a billion dollars."
"We'll dig him out in time," Dorrance promised.
"I'll find out what makes him tick." Androki offered the kind of challenge that Conrad liked.
"There's one other factor." Dorrance made a tent with his fingers and frowned. "At the beginning of Androki's emergence—when he surfaced, if I can put it that way—he had dealings with Winthrop Farrand…"
"The multimillionaire who was killed in that traffic mishap last year," Conrad interrupted. His gaze sharpened.
Dorrance nodded. "Over a period of several months Farrand made a number of payments to Androki. The transactions were cash but he kept a record: thirty payments at twenty-five thousand each."
"Three-quarters of a million bucks." Conrad whistled softly.
"Farrand was investing heavily in the market at the time, far more than he'd ever done in the past. His whole investment pattern changed almost overnight. And he was investing without consultation, at least insofar as his regular brokers were concerned."
"Following his payments to Androki?"
"Coincident with them." Dorrance eyed the agent sharply. "Everything Farrand touched turned to gold. Like Androki, he appeared to have the formula for instant billions. Then,, suddenly, Farrand was killed."
"Anything phony about it?"
Dorrance's face became frosty. "A big semi plowed into his car as the chauffeur was turning into his driveway. Both he and the chauffeur were killed. Need I say that the semi was stolen and that the driver escaped? An eyewitness reported that he was picked up by a black car that had been following the truck. The license plates on the car were phony."
"Androki got rid of him, eh?"
"The logic weighs heavily," Dorrance agreed. "I have scant doubt but that we're dealing with a murderer. But that's not my prime concern. My prime concern is this country, his effect on national security. We have to know what he's trying to do, and why."
"Has Androki ever mentioned his family?"
"Has he got one?" Dorrance smiled bitterly. "I believe he was hatched from an egg."
"So I watch him; is that all?"
"For the present. I can't speak for the future."
Conrad rose leisurely. "We'd better discover what he's up to before we find ourselves working for him."
"How's that?" Dorrance eyed him quizzically.
"He might buy the agency."
The agent called Philip Conrad perused John Androki's file unhurriedly. There were numerous recent photographs, many made surreptitiously; others came from newspapers and magazines. He was shown at dozens of different vock-tail parties—a tall, slender, immaculately dressed man with an overly large nose, dark hair and dark, very piercing eyes. There usually was a blonde at his side, or close by; a different blonde almost every time, he noted.
Other photographs showed him talking with Max Free-land, a noted Harvard physicist, and David Cantrup, the Chicago mathematician. He sorted through many pictures of the same nature. Clearly John Androki was drawn to the academic world. And it to him, he mused.
He read through neat pages of quotes from various financial writers and columnists. John Androki variously was described as "the miracle man of modern business."
"the wonder boy of the Big Board."
"the man with the Midas touch" and other such laudatory acclaims. Conrad was left with the feeling that the financial writers had been caught by the magic of John Androki's rise rather than the manner in which he had risen, for very little of the material was condemnatory.
His eyes dwelt on quotes from various figures in Congress, the Cabinet, and other high government offices. Some were glowing, others negative. He was interested to note that the split in opinion wasn't patterned along political lines, but neither was there any clear-cut division he could discern.
He found a card labeled "Alleged Violations of Antitrust Laws"; it carried references to dozens of different reports. A second card labeled "Litigation Pending" also was jammed with file references. But there was precious little on the man as a person.
Who was John Androki? Most dossiers as meticulously complied gave Conrad a clear picture of the subject being portrayed; but not this one. It raised far more questions than it answered. Android's mercurial rise, his domestic and foreign operations, his image in the press, the Winthrop Farrand report—everything had been neatly noted; but what was the sum of its meaning? Very little, he reflected. The dossier left him cold.
What was John Androki after? Conrad didn't consider himself a brilliant man, but he knew he had the knack of tying together the threads of events to form meaningful patterns. But the threads of John Androki's affairs wouldn't tie.
He made mental notes as he went along. Androki's domestic holdings appeared to form but a small part of the total. Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru—Androki was sinking his hooks deeply into Central and South America; and into Africa, the Middle East, Europe. Conrad thought that if the financier's spheres of infl
uence were linked with gossamer threads, they would form a net enfolding the globe.
Dorrance had understated the case, he reflected. John Androki was accumulating the kind of power that defied laws, undermined governments, shook nations. He was reaching beyond the power of government to establish his own power bloc.
Conrad whistled softly. He could well see how he'd gotten into the act. The expansion of Androki's power couldn't be tolerated, not at the expense of national security. And John Androki was striking at that bastion, both openly and covertly. Charles Dorrance recognized far more than he had acknowledged. He was a man, Conrad thought, who was looking ahead.
Philip Conrad—he was getting used to the name—traveled fast and light. Within an hour after packing his few belongings into a small traveling case, he was aboard a jet airliner headed toward Los Angeles. Intuitively he felt that the trip would be quite lengthy, and that in the end John Androki was a man whose number would come up. Well, if it did, it did.
But that would be up to Charles Dorrance.
V
Bertram Kane entered Gordon Maxon's office and slumped into a chair, asking, "How's the brain-twisting?"
"Most of them are twisted to begin with." Maxon smirked. "What's your problem? Got a few kinks?"
Kane smiled. "Would I know if I had?"
"Possibly." Maxon regarded him speculatively. "What' is a normal mind? I don't know; I've never encountered one."
"Would you recognize one if you did?"
Maxon said, "By virtue of its rarity it would be abnormal, hence not recognizable as normal. How's that for a paradox?"
"Psychology." Kane grimaced.
"We do with minds what you do with mathematics," Maxon stated. "Anyone who can take three-dimensional space and twist it into multidimensional proportions—"
"You're maligning the Queen of the Sciences," Kane cut in. "How would you detect your sensitives without statistics?"
"Speaking of sensitives, have you heard the latest? John Androki's giving good old LAU ten million bucks."
"What?" He was startled.
"For a new library," Maxon explained.
"Where did you hear that?"
"From the chancellor's right-hand stooge."
"Why LAU?"
"Well, this is Androki's base of operations."
"I thought the world was. The press seems to think so."
"That's not far wrong," Maxon conjectured. "Did you read about his loan to Turkey? The State Department is screaming. The government probably would have stopped it on some technicality or other but he made it through the Swiss banks."
- "The government could still stop it if it wanted to," Kane objected. "Economic pressure would do the trick."
"Against Turkey?" Maxon shook his head. "He made the loan to Ismet Bey on a personal basis."
"I can't follow his activities," Kane admitted.
"You have to be an Androki-watcher," Maxon advised. "That's rapidly becoming a profession. I'm getting to be quite an expert."
"What's he after?"
"You've just echoed the universal question." Maxon smiled. "Remember the Bolivian loan some months back? That was a personal deal also—a hundred million bucks to Savedra's personal account."
"I remember the furor it kicked up."
"Savedra's just placed the country's key industries under a tight government control—what amounts to nationalizing the entire economy. It's a peculiar setup. In effect, he's made Bolivia a corporation, with himself and a handpicked cabinet serving as a sort of chairman and board of directors." Maxon slouched deeper into his chair. "That makes Bolivia somewhat like a division of Androki's world corporation."
"That's farfetched." Kane smiled.
"Do you believe so? I don't. He's made the same kind of a loan to a number of nations—all the small, shaky type."
"Turkey's not shaky," Kane countered.
"No, but it's controlled centrally. Ismet Bey is a dictator in everything but name. Perhaps that's the key. Androki pulled the same thing in East Africa last month."
"I hadn't heard."
"Tanzania,"* Maxon explained. "The nation's only resources were game preserves and Kilimanjaro, which you'll have to admit don't return much revenue. Androki resolved that nicely with an eighty million dollar loan, again on a personal basis."
"That still doesn't tell what he's after."
"World control," Maxon returned soberly. "Did you know that he either directly or indirectly controls the major industries of West Germany? It's a cloudy picture but Bullitt, the British economist, claims it's true. He's made a thorough study of the man. He states categorically that what Androki doesn't own, he controls, which amounts to the same thing. And don't tell me you haven't read Skyler's The Shadow of Androki. It's a runaway best seller in the hardcover."
"I heard it was quite sensational," Kane commented.
"To some extent, but Skyler's documentation of Androki's Middle East and African activities have been substantiated by other sources. There's no doubt but that he's buying those splintered governments in Africa by the bushel basket."
"World domination is quite a goal," Kane observed. Economics wasn't his field; neither was psychology nor sociology. And he definitely wasn't a political creature; he left that for others. But he found something highly perturbing about Androki's activities. He said finally, "I can't imagine that he'll succeed."
"Can't you? I'm not so certain," Maxon retorted. "All I know is that he came from nowhere and in less than two years he's the wealthiest man in the world, and probably the most powerful. Aside from that, he's certainly the most publicized."
"I can't say that the publicity matters."
"You believe not? Publicity is power, Bert, at least in the sense that it conditions people, both to Androki as a person and to his objectives. I've always heard that financiers were shadowy figures, but not that bird. He's the lion of the reception line. The PR machine that manufactures California governors would have to take a back seat to Androki's publicists."
"Could he be gunning for a political future?"
"Don't be naive, Bert. From what I've read, he's made some pretty heavy political contributions, but his reach for power is totally through the dollar. That, as the cynics say, is the ultimate seat of power."
"Do you believe he's a downthrough?"
"I'm convinced, Bert."
"Any more evidence?"
"Not that's measurable by precise figures," Maxon admitted, "but you'll have to acknowledge that he always makes the right move, at least for him. His timing is out of this world."
"Do you actually know that?"
"I'm echoing the sentiments of a hundred expert but anguished voices," Maxon replied. "The timing aspect has them all intrigued. Everyone seems to have a different explanation, but on one thing they all agreed: when he moves, the time is ripe. He never moves too soon or too late. It's absolutely uncanny."
Kane said, "Perhaps it's his move that makes the time ripe. Have you considered that?"
"That is possible in some situations but not in others," Maxon acceded. "Most of his moves, if you analyze them, are related to financial conditions. Yet it's more than that. He anticipates current events. At least you never see him plunging money on a loser. I'm thinking of some of the political underdogs he's backed in Africa, and who have come on to win."
"Perhaps they won because of his backing," Kane suggested.
"I don't believe so." Maxon shook his head. "I'm inclined toward the belief that he backs the people he knows are going to win."
"He can't always be right, Gordie."
"Apparently he is." Maxon blew softly against his fingertips, then inspected them. "What does always making the right move mean? Is anyone's judgment that infallible? I read it as an unlikely tilt on the scale of probability. In effect, that discounts the factor of chance. I say that it isn't chance; he's acting on knowledge of what is to come."
"Do you believe that because you want to believe it?" Kane challenged.
"In his case, I don't want to believe it," Maxon countered. "The thought terrifies me. But all the same, I believe it. And because I do, I'm fascinated, or perhaps I should say driven. I've got to meet the man, find out."
"Could you tell?"
"If I saw him? I believe I could." Maxon grinned. "I've got a gimmick."
The conversation left Kane vaguely depressed. Returning to his office, the thought of spending long hours in the math lab that evening seemed unbearable. On impulse, he called Anita.
"Bert," he said, when she came on the phone.
"My, where have you been?"
"Juggling the equations," he admitted wryly. "I always feel that I'm on the verge of a breakthrough."
"A breakdown will be more like it," she warned.
"How about supper tonight?"
"Well…"
"Seven?"
"That would be fine."
"Seven it is." Replacing the instrument in its cradle, he felt a flush of guilt. He wasn't fair to Anita. He neglected her for weeks at a time. During those periods, his mathematics had sufficed. Living in the strange world of the mind, landscaped by the wondrous logic created by numbers and symbols, he had shut out the day-to-day life; through the window of mathematics, he searched for unknowable universes.
But, inevitably, the magic would come to an end. It usually came in a wave of tiredness occasioned by insufficient food and sleep, or by the sudden loneliness of his self-imposed isolation.
On such occasions, like today, he would abruptly call Anita. Yet she had never protested, except to chide him for his long hours and self-neglect.
He walked to the window and looked out. The carpet of grass, the shady elms, the slender white bell tower in the distance brought a sense of peace. Could another world be more wonderful? Or was this but one of many worlds in the same space-time continuum?
How could man sense what lay beyond the senses? Yet, he felt certain, there was something more; the mathematical inferences were too strong for it to be otherwise. Not too many years ago the universe had been conceived of as a vast mechanism responding to and governed by the immutable laws of Newtonian mechanics; now those laws appeared more as but one aspect in the rivers of force which bound and stirred the cosmos. Nature was filled with paradoxes.
