The Lure (44 page)

When Noel didn’t respond, she went on: “He said I was to help you. I will help you,” she added fervently.

“Help me do what?”

“To find my husband’s murderers for one thing,” she said, with a hint of the anger he’d anticipated. “And to finish his work for him.”

“He found more dossiers?” Noel asked, already aware that she felt he owed her something for her husband’s life, that he must do something for her. The list grew every month: Loomis. Eric. Now Buddy Vega, too, from beyond the grave. And Monica, of course. His debts.

“Yes, more dossiers. Even more terrible than before.”

The big accordion folder was brought out again. Noel’s depression deepened. He’d still not gotten over the last revelations. Did he really need to see more?

Priscilla gave him not the bulky manila folder, but three finely typed pages, with photostat copies of four more assorted-sized papers attached. As he began to read the top line of the first page, she read it aloud, from memory.

“AIN memo. Re: weapon. Class B, psychological. Code name: ‘The Lure.’”

Noel reread that line three times.

“Buddy thought AIN stood for Associated Intelligence Network. A connection between the CIA, FBI, and state and municipal police. Buddy said it was constitutionally illegal, but that it existed anyway, and that the reason we didn’t hear more about it was the bulky bureaucracy that kept it from being effective.”

Noel had just fully understood the line of type. “I’m the Lure,” he said tonelessly.

“Yes. We knew that.” There was great pity in her voice.

“How long?”

“Three weeks. A little more.”

“I’m the weapon. Against whom?”

“Against Mr. X.”

“Eric?”

“Read on. Page two, paragraph four.”

He turned the page. “August twenty-third! That’s today’s date.”

“Yes. But this memo was written on March eighth. Read it, or should I?”

“By the above date,” Noel read aloud, “the subject should be in phase five, called ‘safety clip removed.’ Recent events have placed him in an all-encompassing psychosexual crisis. This, concomitant with repeated attempts on his life, ought to make him chaste, utterly confused, unable to face any major life choice such as whom to trust as his friend. He will begin to turn sharply inward. Trusting no one, he will seek seclusion, possibly even try to flee the situation. At the least, he will find psychological safety only in his own home.”

“That’s true,” Noel said. “But what’s the purpose of this?”

“It is true?” she asked.

“Pretty close, sure,” he admitted.

“You were told your mission with Whisper was to get close enough to this Mr. X so he could be trapped, right?”

Noel didn’t answer. This, too, might be a trap: or a test.

“It makes no difference,” she went on. “It says so right here on paragraph two, page one. This, however, is not your real work for Whisper. That is what is so terrible. Read, go on.” She pointed to a spot at the end of the page, but before he could read it, she said, “You are not a lure, you are the man who within two weeks will assassinate this Mr. X. You have been found, selected, and programmed to do this particular act whether you are aware of it or not, whether you want to do it or not.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table. As Noel read the page which said in different terms exactly what Priscilla had told him, he stood up, knocking the chair over behind him.
Within two weeks. That meant Labor Day.

“It is very terrible,” she said.

A curious thing happened to Noel then. He felt as though he were splitting into two selves. One Noel was absolutely astonished, crushed by this final disaster, the last blow of months of confusion and pain and uncertainty, the knowledge that he was being controlled by someone else; worse, turned into a robot with a deadly mission. But the other half—his professional, intellectual self—was utterly fascinated. Here he was, playing around with minority-group social attitudes and Loomis—a genius—was performing effective social-modification behavior—not on laboratory monkeys, not on children, but on him!

Other scientists, looking at the psychosociological model Loomis had designed, and at its solution, would call them “elegant.” Mirella Trent, for example, would rave over its structural beauties.

The fragile but very real split within himself came together with one thought: how could he ever escape the Fisherman’s control, when he hadn’t even known until now it existed? Eric’s hold on him, even Alana’s, were as ribbons to steel bands.

Or was that entirely so? Reading the condition he was supposed to be in, his first thought had been, Yes, this is how it is. But his second thought had been, So what! It’s not so bad. It’s true. All true. But despite it all, despite even the danger, I’m alive. Not unhappy, somehow; stupidly, not unhappy. Whatever happened, it was happening to him, and would never have happened if he hadn’t made a choice on that March morning at the abandoned warehouse. True, he was living on the edge. But the edge was making him more alive than ever before.

So, he didn’t believe he could kill Eric. At the same time he suspected that if the circumstances were slightly different, he really just might. That was the problem.

He stopped, realizing he’d circled the table many times. He looked at Priscilla Vega, concerned, patient, holding a cup of cold coffee in her hand. Then he sat down.

“All right,” he said. “Granted. I’m the bomb. How do we defuse me?” As though weighing something, she looked him over for a long time before she spoke.

“We did not tell you this before,” she began in a low, carefully modulated voice, “because you were supposed to become schizophrenic if you ever did find out. You were supposed to split apart into two people, and then destroy yourself.”

“I did split apart into two people,” he said. “Just now. But it didn’t last.”

“Which means the programming is not perfect. As Buddy and I thought. But why isn’t it perfect?”

“Does it say anything in here about a woman?” Noel asked.

“Much. Two women. One would put you off, reject you. Another one you would reject after abusing her in some way. They would together make you disgusted with all women, which would intensify your problem.”

Noel searched himself for the truth, then said, “But I’m not disgusted with all women. And she’s the reason why not, I think.”

“The one who rejected you? She’s attracted to you because you are fulfilling her need for a certain type of man.”

“It’s true. I know it. But I don’t care. Alana’s too good to me. She cares for me. I don’t know if anyone else does, but she does. I think that’s what has thrown off the programming.”

“Maybe,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “But what if you are not defused now? What if you are still dangerous? Perhaps even more dangerous, because now you are an unaimed weapon?”

That was another jolt. But it made sense. It would be just like Loomis to build in every safeguard. How much of his everyday life in the past six months had been predictable, given over to someone else to determine? The man hit by the car, for instance. The night in Le Pissoir. How much more? His life had been changed not only in large areas—his work, his friends—but in details, too: the hours he kept, the stimuli around him, even the music he’d been listening to was different. His schedule was disarranged, his values shaken, his former life all but gone, and his new life constantly unsettling. Could Loomis and his computer—he had to be using one—could they predict, say, when he brushed his teeth, or if he brushed his teeth? Possible. Incredible. But possible.

“Noel!” Priscilla was shouting at him, shaking his arm.

He came back to her. “It was happening again: the splitting apart business. But it’s all right. It will help me to understand exactly how to get around this.”

She stared at him.

“I’m okay. Really. Now how do we defuse me?”

“Buddy had a plan. Not based on statistics or psychology or anything fancy like that. But we discussed it several times. He thinks it would work.”

“Thinks!”

“Thought, I mean. Please. I know he is dead. Sometimes I can’t believe it. But I know it.”

Very gently, Noel asked what Buddy’s plan was.

“You know why Buddy had to leave the Navy?” she asked.

“Yes, but…”

“Not for the reason he told you. He was a thief. He was asked to steal documents from one group by another. He was caught. It was all hushed up. He became a civilian and sometimes a man from the government would come to see him and ask for him to steal something. Then this top policeman came to ask Buddy to work for him. He knew he was a thief.”

“So Buddy was supposed to steal those dossiers and show them to me?”

“Those, yes. But Buddy got suspicious about you. When he read your dossier, it reminded him of some other papers he’d come across that he later knew he was not supposed to find. Those are the reports we were not supposed to know about.” She indicated the photocopied reports attached to the psychological weapons plan.

Noel began reading one, then went on to the others. Each of them detailed the activities of a former AIN control. All were successful assassins. In all four cases, the men were now retired on some sort of pension, even though one of them was younger than Noel, and all of them were happy, oblivious to what had occured. They simply did not remember what they had done.

“Look at that last one,” she instructed. “Not the print, that mark there.”

“It looks like some sort of institutional seal,” he said, barely able to make it out

“Buddy had it blown up and copied darker. This is it.” She pulled another paper from the accordion envelope. The stamp was larger, clearer. At the top, Noel could easily read the name of the social research agency in Albany that was paying his salary for Whisper. How had Eric characterized them? “Very right wing. Very conservative. Very against social change.”

Priscilla went on: “We don’t know exactly who they are. But Loomis is connected with them. Buddy was certain the police do not know how deeply this group is involved. Only two copies of these memoranda were sent to the Police Department records files. Both were initialed by people that he discovered were merely secretaries. Then they were filed away in ‘disbursements,’ indexed only for special retrieval. Buddy was the first person to take them out since they were filed.”

“That wasn’t predicted?” Noel asked.

“Only you are predicted. You are the weapon, not Buddy. He was merely supposed to find the dossiers and show them to you. Nothing more. It was because they made it so easy for him to steal the dossiers that he got suspicious and went back to look again. This AIN and psychological weapon plan the papers kept referring to intrigued him. So he decided to see for himself. That’s how he found this. It is only you who are planned for. He was dispensable,” she added bitterly.

“But if, as you think, they killed him, then they must know he found all this, too,” he said, shaking the papers she’d given him.

“No. It was his stupid telephone call to you. Your telephone is tapped. But he was so excited!” Her voice sank to a murmur.

After a minute she told him Buddy’s plan.

It wasn’t as complex or fail-safe as Loomis’s master plan, but it sounded effective. All this material was to be brought to the attention of the police commissioner by Noel, the Lure himself. Priscilla would go with him to corroborate everything. They’d explain how a homicide investigation had been transformed by Loomis into a psychological weapon proving ground for the upstate social research agency. They’d ask to have Loomis taken off Whisper. Noel would resign. Without the circumstances, the weapon could not be used.

Noel thought about what she said. He wasn’t sure it would hold enough water with the police commissioner to disband Whisper.

“We need something more substantial,” he told her. She was silent a short while, then, “What about graft?”

“Graft? Between Loomis and this agency in Albany?”

“No, between him and organized crime.”

“How do you know that?”

“We monitored the loops for twelve days. Buddy had three other phones installed and connected up and we listened in on them. Anytime someone used the loops, Buddy or I would take down what was said. I used to be a stenographer.”

“My calls, too?” he asked. She nodded yes. “Go on,” Noel prodded. “If what you’re saying is true, this is what we have to go for.”

“It’s true. There is a fourth emergency loop. Never used to our knowledge by anyone but Loomis. He used it twice in the time we were listening, to call a man named G or Gee. They never talked more than a minute or so, even though it was a special loop. They were always brief, businesslike, usually arranging meetings. The last meeting they had was last week. Another one is due in two days.”

“So you didn’t hear anything really about graft.”

“Yes, we did. Both times Loomis reported progress on his ‘mutual’ interest with Gee. Gee in turn reported that his lawyers were working out a suitable manner of payment. They discussed the transfer of stocks and bonds over a period of a year and a half, from one dummy company to another feeding into Loomis’s bank accounts. We wrote down all the information. Some payments had already been made. For previous ‘bounties’ which Gee’s ‘associates,’ as he called them, were very pleased about.”