Metzger's Dog

14 “…the Director’s office graciously made available to the project certain necessary records.” Porterfield set the paper on the desk. As he stood up to walk to the window he realized he’d been sitting in the uncomfortable desk chair for longer than usual. He could feel his left hip joint as he took the first step—not yet a pain, just an awareness of it, of the ball and socket moving. About once a year it was more than that, a dull throb that actually weakened the leg, as though he’d been kicked, he thought—age giving him a kick in the ass. He didn’t have to remind himself that years were coming faster now, and if he measured them by the rate that things wore out, it was even faster.

Porterfield stared out at the gigantic parking lot and beyond it, at Los Angeles International Airport, stretching for miles into the morning haze. This place had changed since the early sixties. In those days the chief of station in Los Angeles had been Paul Cameron, a World War II OSS man who’d spent the fifties in the Philippines, going old-style from one remote village to another through the jungle on foot, tending his counterinsurgency program like a trapper making the rounds of his traps. In 1961, when Porterfield had met him, Cameron must have been at least fifty years old but lean and hard, as though he’d been at war so long it was too late for him ever to turn slack. Porterfield in those days had been set up as president of a Miami air freight company that was largely spurious, its only asset a checkbook that paid for airplanes and parts and the salaries of pilots, more and more of them passing through Los Angeles on their way to Southeast Asia as the sixties wore on. Soon after that, Cameron had retired. It had been years before Porterfield learned that Cameron had signed the report to the President suggesting that the whole enterprise be given up before it grew too big.

Now even the place was different, still near the airport but indistinguishable from the offices of the corporations that had grown to comparable proportions in even less time and for the same reasons. The new building, all eight stories of tinted glass and structural steel, seemed to be full of the computerized hardware that monitored and directed the satellites. None of the faces he saw in the hallways had been here in the old days. Most of the people there were too young even to have heard of Paul Cameron. The chief of station here now was a man named Gossens, who had started out as some kind of electrical engineer in a company whose only customers had been NASA and the Air Force.

Porterfield forced himself to think about the assessments that had come from Langley. Los Angeles was a terrible place to have this happen. The place stretched eighty miles north and south from San Fernando to Mission Viejo, and another eighty east and west from San Bernardino to Thousand Oaks. What was called the City of Los Angeles was only a small part of the whole, a part where over four million people lived at night. At the beginning and end of each day nearly that many cars flooded the freeways. The figures Langley provided only increased the absurdity of it.

For this area, as big and crowded as some states, there was a city police force of five thousand, a complement of sheriff’s deputies, and the California Highway Patrol. New York City had a police force of twenty-five thousand. The chance of the police finding a small band of terrorists in a place like this was so slim even Langley’s dogged theoreticians had left it out of their calculations. Within the past year, there had been other incidents here—Armenians against Turks, two factions of exile Iranians, three sets of Koreans, including a resident detachment from the KCIA tolerated by the Company in a reciprocity agreement, Irish gunrunners, Israelis against Palestinians, against Libyans, against Syrians. There were competing sets of exiles from Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia, and Cuba, each of which was difficult to isolate or watch because they faded among the estimated one million resident aliens from Mexico. There were smaller factions too, among them French-Canadian separatists, Indonesians of the far left and far right, Filipinos, Vietnamese. The Soviet consulate had been attacked five times, by Kurds, Afghans, Poles, Turks, and a group that hadn’t identified itself. Now three male Caucasians, reportedly of dark complexion, had made a raid on an undefended university building and disappeared. It wasn’t a question now of catching them but of anticipating what they were going to do and finding a way to cut the Company’s losses.

Porterfield returned to the desk and scanned the report from Langley again. The Company’s people on the major newspapers and television networks had been briefed in case it turned out to be another Pentagon Papers revelation scheme. He wished the Director hadn’t panicked and erased Professor Donahue from the equation. A denial from him, or failing that, a campaign to discredit him, might have helped if anything slipped through the mesh and made it into print. It was too late for that now. There was a team busily creating a medical history for the professor that documented repeated confinements in mental hospitals dating back to his days as an undergraduate at Michigan. There was another team using the same technique to create a bogus history of left-wing political activism, and Technical Services was putting together composite photographs of him entering both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City in case it should be necessary to build a story of that sort. Any of the possibilities would have been more convincing if Donahue hadn’t been killed, but there were people working on that part of the story too.

The main problem now was to devise a way of handling the people who had the Donahue papers. He stared out at the distant airport again. On the average day seventy-seven thousand people passed through Los Angeles International. There was no reason to watch. You had to know who they were before you could predict what they’d do.

PORTERFIELD GLANCED AT THE SUMMONS again. It was a printed card. “You are cordially invited. To. At. On.” This time it was cocktails with the Cornell University Alumni, Los Angeles branch, at the Sheraton Universal, suite 702. Next time it could be a cardiologists’ convention if the people coming all looked as though they might be doctors.

He knocked on the door of the suite and when it opened he said quietly, “You.”

The tall black man nodded and closed the door behind them, then stepped to the television set and turned up the sound.

He looked the same, Porterfield thought. He must be nearly forty by now. “Who else is here?” Porterfield stared at the table beside the sliding glass door where two glasses of Scotch sat untouched.

“Nobody else is coming. I haven’t seen you in four or five years, but you haven’t improved. Still remind me of a nasty, fat old bull. Want to sit down?”

“Thanks, J.K.” Porterfield took one of the drinks and sat at the table. “What are you doing in Los Angeles? New ambassador to Watts?”

J.K. shrugged and glanced at the television set. “I’m not in Los Angeles, Ben. If I were in Los Angeles I might be here to talk to you, and I’ve got nothing to do with you.”

“You’re here to do me a favor,” said Porterfield. “You don’t owe me a favor.” He sipped his Scotch and waited.

“They’re making some mistakes.”

“They’ve been known to.”

“First stage was when this university thing happened. They sent out a call to every chief of station in Domestic Operations to take a guess about who did it.”

“I know. I stopped it when I came on. Too late, I suppose, but—”

J.K. chuckled. “Who whacked the professor? You do it yourself?”

“I’m getting too old for that, J.K. Is that the second stage?”

“Hell no. I don’t think it was even a mistake. The mistake is more people know about this little problem than ought to know. Me, for instance.”

“I’m not worried about you. What do other people know?”

“The general version that’s going around is that this professor who worked on some psywar stuff and wrote it all down lost his papers. He was removed. But the papers are still in the hands of somebody who will find a way to use them. Is that much true?”

“Probably.”

“What are the chances you’ll be able to do something about it?”

“You know what these things are, J.K. The papers could be in Moscow Center by now. Or it could be an independent group that decides to go public by walking into one of the Company’s client newspapers and handing everything over. It could go either way.”

J.K. shook his head. “You ever think of retiring?”

“Every time I try to chew my food on the left side of my mouth. Maybe I’ll get a partial plate instead.”

“There are a lot of people who are worried about what might happen if whoever has the papers knows what to do with them. I’ve seen two requests for reassignment already, both of them from people who are afraid they’ll be in semifriendly capitals the day everybody hears what they really do for a living.”

Porterfield snorted. “Not surprising. I told the Director to try to get people like that out. Most of them are already retired.”

J.K. stood up and walked to the window. “They’re setting you up, Ben. Their responses to both requests were routed through my office, so I saw them. They turned both of them down. You know who signed the order?”

“Who?”

“You.”

Porterfield said, “I see. Thanks for telling me, J.K.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Same as always. Use your brain. Anyone who thinks he’s in trouble, is. Get him out and sign my name to the paper. Word it as though I’m reversing my own order.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Ad-lib. Maybe I’ll talk to the Director.”

“If you can get to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t in the country the year they decided to do an audit. When was it?”

“Seventy-five.”

“From what I saw in Langley yesterday, I’d say we’ve got a repeat. They’re afraid, Ben. They’re afraid somebody’s going to take the Director off the count. He’s got bodyguards with him in his office. They’re afraid they’ve blown it so bad that somebody inside the Company is going to decide it’s time for new management.”