Protocol for a Kidnapping (25 page)

“What’s she to you?” Coors said.

“Nothing. It’s just that she should be something to someone.”

He again shook his head.

“Find a way,” I said, “or Killingsworth finds out how you’ve played him for a fool. That’s my ace.”

“I was wondering what you would want when you played it,” Coors said.

“Now you know.”

He looked at me curiously. “Don’t you grow tired of blackmail?”

“Sure, I said. “I’m sick of it. But it doesn’t make me as sick as it did to watch a friend of mine get killed for no good reason that I can think of, unless they’re the ones that you’ve just given me and they’re worse than no reasons at all. Watching my friend die made me really sick. So blackmail doesn’t bother me much anymore. It doesn’t even make me queasy.”

“All right,” Coors said. “I’ll take care of the girl.”

“Thanks.”

“But don’t blame me for your friend’s death.”

“I’m not blaming you,” I said. “I’m blaming the stupidity of your system. It doesn’t have to work like that.”

Coors began to pace up and down. He paced quite a while before he said anything.

“You can’t blame the system,” he said slowly, “if that’s what you want to call it, because we’re all products of the system. But that doesn’t excuse some of the mistakes it makes out of sheer inadvertence or carelessness or—as you say—stupidity. It doesn’t excuse them at all.”

He paused to look at me carefully. “Still, the system protects us and that’s why we have to protect it. If we start tinkering with it, messing around with its insides, then we might change it so radically that it would no longer protect us—couldn’t even if it wanted to.”

He nodded then, as if making the next point to himself. “We have to change it, of course, from time to time. It’s far from perfect. But we mustn’t be stampeded into it. Careful, systematic development is the answer, not radical improvisation. Otherwise, we might destroy it, imperfect though it may be, and replace it with something far worse.”

When Coors was through he looked quickly around and then chuckled, almost as if he were a bit embarrassed. “Quite a little lecture, wasn’t it? Although I’m not at all sure that it did you any good.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think it did either. Not me anyway. But I know of someone you should try it on.”

“Who?”

“A guy called Carstairs,” I said. “He really likes crap like that.”

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copyright © 1971 by Ross E. Thomas

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