02. The Shadow Dancers (5 page)

"But they know about the Labyrinth," Sam noted.

"Yeah, they do-but not many," Bill replied. "The big boss has had a lodge up near the central Pennsylvania weak point for years, and this place happens to be one of those on the way from here to there that's weak enough that when we open that Labyrinth route it can be accessed without a station-like the dead end you two were shoved into that time."

"Yeah, only here nobody jumps in but something gets tossed out. All we could find was that they were being paid off to do just what they're doing and ask no questions. There's lots of ways you can do it when you have a crime boss on the hook, including checking close other worlds, getting inside information he can use, and feeding it to him. You can feed him just enough, wrapped around the parcel, to keep him quiet and on the hook."

"You mean," I said, "that somebody just pops up once and bribes this crime boss into this? We'll pay you if you find fifty or more girls and hook 'em on this?"

"That's about it. We don't know why. Makes no sense on its face, and except for the fact that most but not all of the girls they hooked are relatively young, there's no connecting thread between them. None. There's no reason to think they know much. Just hired help, like the courier-but a lot harder to snatch and interrogate. You see what kind of a bind we're in?"

We could see, too. "You can't snatch any addicts for information 'cause they'd be dead in two days," I noted. "You can't take out the courier without killin' all them girls and lettin' whoever's doin' this know you're on to 'em. Ain't nobody in this chain that knows anything worth knowin' 'cept this guy Vogel."

"Yeah. Vogel. He knows a lot, even if he doesn't know it all. He had to be directly contacted if only to corrupt him. He had to be sold on becoming a traitor, which is much harder considering the risks. He's got one hell of a racket where he is that fits his peculiarities to a T, and he's got a
reliable reputation. He'd have to be offered something really big to switch. He also knows exactly what he's got because he's in charge of the experimentation, and as a stationmaster he's well positioned to move people and goods when he wants."

"Why not just take him out, then?" Sam asked. "Get him out of there on a pretext, fry his brain, and then take what results he has as well?"

Bill Markham sighed. "I wish it were that easy, Sam, but it's not. This is a class A operation all the way. They're very good, whoever they are. Vogel will spook and run at the first suspicion, and probably has people there working for him even
he
doesn't know about whose only job is to take him out if he gets nabbed or exposed. The labs, the whole place he's got, are wired for one hell of a big explosion should anything go wrong, and we don't even know who might trigger it or how. We could kill him, of course, anytime, but that only buys us time until they can set up another site like his that we don't know about. We've tried tricking him out, but he's always come up with a plausible excuse not to leave. If we press too hard, he'll blow that joint and split to a safe line."

Bill sat back in his chair and sighed. "You see," he continued, "he's our only real lead and he's eggshells. He's no good to us dead. And we
have
to know what the hell is going on. We don't know what this stuff is, where it comes from, who's bringing it in and how, and, worst of all, we don't know what they plan to do with it. We have a lot of pieces, very few real live suspects, and none of them fit. Why go to all this risk? What's it all about? All we know is that clearly they can't synthesize it, either, so they're pretty limited, and that means they have a very specific plot in mind-but what? Something big, real big, or they wouldn't take all these risks. Very big people are involved just to do what they've done. Who are they? How did they manage it? What are they planning? You see?"

I did see. Bill had one hell of a problem on his hands. "But, Bill-you got agents, all that technology, all that power. Surely you can do a snatch-and-grab with this guy," I said.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? The trouble is, this guy's
stationmaster
and he's smart. He wouldn't have turned traitor without taking that into consideration. He knew what he was up against, and who. Cranston was a station-master, top, you remember, and he'd even set up a resort on a weak point with a Labyrinth substation in his basement, and he came damned close to getting away."

We remembered. We had to chase the bastard through the Labyrinth and he still almost killed us.

Markham slipped some switches and the room went dark and a panel came down in back of his desk. Another button, and some slides appeared on the back, the first of a really
enormous
mansion that looked like a cross between a fancy home in the country and Fort Apache.

"Looks like a federal penitentiary with a nice house in the middle," Sam noted. "Are those machine gun towers on that outer wall?"

"They are, and you have three rows of fence before you even
get
to the wall. The distance between the first two fences is wide enough for men with nasty dogs to go through, which they do, and there are sensors on the fences for any kind of disturbance. Even a rabbit brings the dogs running. The third fence line is electrified with enough juice to fry anybody. Then there's the wall, which has both machine gun coverage and is thick enough for riflemen to stand between the towers. A hundred and eighty-six guys held a far less secure wall against five thousand infantry for twelve days at the Alamo."

"But they eventually lost," Sam pointed out.

"Yeah, they lost-but you could hold this place for a while, anyway. Long enough to realize you were going to be overrun, burn the papers, get out of there and blow the whole complex. The entire estate is honeycombed with tunnels packed with explosives that would leave a crater half a mile wide."

"There's gates front and back," I noted.

"Not much better. Built like Sam's prison. Reinforced metal and concrete and heavily defended so that any assault on the gates would have to be over open ground. We could use a small missile to blow them, but we'd never get enough people inside without tremendous losses and, of course, enough time to blow the place."

"Air drop?" Sam suggested.

"Again, possible, but he's got radar and air defenses that could pick up a pigeon at half a mile. A small force could get in, we think, but it would be hamstrung. It'd have to move to get him, and to do that it would have to pass a spider's web of television monitors wired to a central security control in the basement of the place. We can get them in, but we can't get to him and take him out without discovery no matter how hard we figure it."

"Bill-if he don't know you know he's gone bad, why this fort?" I wondered. "I mean, this ain't what the average station has."

"You're right, of course. That's the station there, to the back and left of the main house. Maybe fifty yards. The other outbuildings are quarters for the guards and supply houses and-other things. The reason it is the way it is is basically because Vogel lives in a world where that kind of thing is necessary for the health of somebody in his position. In fact, we helped set up some of the defenses initially to protect the station, and we figure he's made a lot of changes since then to protect against us as well."

In the world of Rupert Vogel, it seemed, we lost World War II. I ain't top clear on the history, neither, but it goes somethin' like this: the Germans didn't get bogged down in Russia because they attacked in the spring and won before winter set in, finally gettin' the Japs to attack Siberia and put the squeeze on. Then they turned back to England and with so many men and airplanes they finally wiped out the air defenses and invaded. We, on the other hand, spent almost all our time goin' against Japan. We mighta done somethin', too, but the Germans got their missiles goin' and managed to use the time to perfect the A-bomb ahead of us. We got it about the same time they did, but they had the way to deliver it, off ships and from friendly places in South America or somethin'. They nuked Norfolk and San Diego and places like that and that was the end of it.

Not that it weren't real messy and bloody when they came in, but we never had to face this kind of army before, one that didn't care who it killed or what it had to do. Everybody got IDs and papers, and couldn't sneeze without bein' checked. Then folks got classified, kinda South Africa
style. The Jews all got shipped to camps in Georgia and Nevada and it was pretty clear what happened to them there. The folks with good German or Italian or even English names and backgrounds, they got the best treatment if they was cooperative, and lots were. We was beat good. These folks got to be the managers and bosses if they wasn't already. Then the rest of the Europeans, they got a second-class thing and they did the work in the factories, mines, you name it. All the Orientals got shipped to Japan or China or someplace.

That left the ten percent who was black, and there was a lot more of us than there were Jews or Orientals. They put us in the camps like the rest, and millions died, but they also used us. It was like they turned the clock back a hundred years. We became the lab animals for their experiments and medical stuff, others were trained as personal servants-slaves, really-to the big boys, and some of 'em, the big Nazi lords, even kept us tike pets and bred us. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach, and Sam wasn't lookin' none too good, neither. He sure wouldn't survive in this new world, and his parents woulda been gassed. Thing was, a Bill Markham woulda come put pretty good unless he was one of them patriotic principled types. With his name, looks, and background he would probably be headin' up a storm trooper division at least.

"The Nazi-style culture is based on conflict, competition, and combat," he was sayin'. "They've had a lot of tension with the Japanese over the years but no real wars with them mostly because they just don't have enough people to manage all the lands they have now. Eventually they'll go to war for the rest of the world, but there is just no way the Germans and all those whom they've conscripted can both hold their control and expand. Taking over a continent and population this size was almost more than they could chew. When that kind of thing happens to people like these, they start going at each other's throats. Tiny putsches, minor coups, knocking off the local
statenfuehrer
and his boys and replacing them with a new lot just as bad or worse. The Reich allows it, since it bleeds off steam and there's a feeling that anybody who's sloppy enough to get knocked off or overthrown deserved it-the strong replacing the
weak. How much power and strength you have is the sole measure of importance there after racial background, and they can get pretty hazy on that if they need people."

"So he's trapped inside his own fortress, afraid of his own people," Sam noted. "Some paradise."

"It's not as bad as all that. Probably no worse than guarding the President here against nuts. But when he's at home and in control, he wants to make sure that nothing happens to him and his, and, of course, we couldn't allow a station to fall into the hands of somebody we didn't control. That's why we went along with the mining and explosives part. As usual, our people set ourselves up as the standard. If we can't crack it, then it's safe, and we did a good job here. Trouble is, we never allowed for having to crack it ourselves. We can blow him and the Labyrinth station to hell, of course, but that won't get us anywhere.
We need Vogel alive.
He knows the results of the experiments. He knows the plot, at least the outlines of it. He might know just about all of it."

"You're sure he's not the ringleader?" I asked him.

"No, he can't be. He's never had any experience outside Type Zero lines, and he hasn't been involved with anybody who has. He's also a field man; he works stations, not the Labyrinth. He wouldn't have the knowledge or ability to set this off, although he's an important man in making it work."

"You think this is actually the competition, or is it maybe either an attempt by some Type One culture to take over down here?" Sam asked him. "Or, could it be some internal plot among the bigwigs of the company for control?" The 'competition' is what Company types liked to call anybody not workin' in their best interests.

Markham shrugged. "Who knows? Whoever this is is certainly in league with the competition. Vogel may know. That's why we need him so badly."

I shifted in my chair. "Look, Bill, I see this puzzle of yours and it's kinda interestin', but what's it hav'ta do with us?"

"I was getting to that. I've described to you how it's impossible to make an unobserved entry to Vogel's lair. Even inside the manor house, there's TV cameras, hidden monitors, you name it, and security all over the place.

There's only one place where the snatch could be put on Vogel, and that's a medium-sized room that's dead center of the second floor of the house. It's called the Safe Room, and its double-insulated, soundproofed, and unmonitored. It's entered, if you can believe this, through Vogel's private bathroom, and the door itself can be locked and secured from the inside. You could live through a bomb blast in there, and you could also not hear a full-scale invasion. It's his retreat-the one place in there where he feels totally safe. It's reinforced top and bottom as well, and is as secure as a bank vault. He spends a lot of time in there. We built it that way because the records and codes for the Company and Labyrinth that are the sole privy of the stationmaster must be kept somewhere safe and it was the easiest and safest point at which we could modify the place and install such a thing without ripping the old building down."

"Yeah, but so what?" Sam said a little cynically. "Even if you had some way of getting somebody in there with him, somebody who could take Vogel-and I'm not sure you can-then what? You can't get him out. I'm sure the place has no windows. So, anybody would have to take the leader out the only door, and all he'd need to do was give some signal, some indication, and you were dead."

"Give us some credit. We weren't going to build a place like that where the stationmaster, in a crisis, couldn't get put before it all blew. There's another door-an exit only, in the floor. Not even Vogel can use it to get in-it's booby-trapped and designed to jam and trap somebody inside who tried it. One way only. An emergency exit. It leads down through the walls to the basement area, then into a tunnel that runs out back of the house and all the way to the station, coming up here, near the control room stairway. The final defense is very simple, really-a bunch of rods that support a particular part of the tunnel ceiling. Even try opening or blowing your way through from the station end and the rods collapse-and so does half the tunnel. From inside, though, you only have to throw a few levers to move the rods to a safety position, allowing the door to open. When it closes again, the rods slip back into place. One way only, as I said."