The Delta Factor

1

The light had a strange pattern to it, striped horizontally and tinted with a pinkish glow. There was something unreal about it, like opening your eyes under water and looking up toward the sky. It rippled and swam, hypnotically out of focus, giving it an eerie dream-quality. Even the subdued sounds that rode on its current were distorted and out of reach until one particular one took shape gradually and I recognized it as Morgan. Then I let my eyes slit open a little further and the light pattern emerged as venetian blinds across the white-walled room from the bed and the sounds those of voices in quiet, cold argument.

I knew, then.

Hell, they couldn’t have reached me. The police, the great agencies subsidized in the government budget, private experts intrigued by the reward… none of them even came near me. It took a punk kid in a stolen heap being chased by a squad car to smash me through a store window, and an overzealous intern who didn’t like unidentified accident cases and submitted fingerprint samples to the local precinct house to nail me.

Now they were fighting it out over who had custody over Morgan the Raider, and Morgan the Raider was me.

For a while I just lay there listening, grinning inside, but not letting it show on my face. That would have hurt anyway. I watched them through an aperture of my eyelids as narrow as possible, enjoying their performance as the sensation of living gradually oozed back into my body. When it reached my arm I felt the bite of metal around my wrist, put a gentle pressure against it that met with solid resistance and stifled another grin again because they were afraid of taking any chances at all this time.

The doctor’s voice held a restrained anger. He said, “You can keep security around this room without shackling him to the bed, Mr. Rice. This is the fifth floor, the windows are barred, a policeman’s outside and my patient isn’t in any condition to move. Not just yet.”

Boredom comes early to accomplished cops. Explanations to civilian types become patient, paternal and positive. “This isn’t just a patient, Doctor. This is Morgan.”

“I know who he is. I found him for you, didn’t I?”

“Yes. You’ll get an official departmental commendation for it. I believe there’s a considerable reward involved too.”

“Screw your reward, Mr. Rice. I want my patient unmolested.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor.”

The white-coated medic seemed to move purposely. “I can force your hand if I have to.”

“Not this time.”

“This time,” he said deliberately.

“Why make trouble?” the cop asked him. “I can pull strings too. Look… let me put it to you again. This man is dangerous. He isn’t like an ordinary hood with behavior patterns we’re used to. We could deal with that. He’s not part of any antisocial group our people could classify and work against in a logical manner. His type comes out of another era entirely. By today’s standards we can’t even define him. Do you know what they call him?”

For a few seconds there was silence, then the doctor said, “Morgan the Raider.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Do you remember another Morgan?”

“Only the pirate.”

Like a parent pleased with his child’s correct answer, the cop said pleasantly, “Exactly, Doctor. In his own way, he’s a pirate too. You didn’t fight pirates with police techniques. It took navies and armies to wipe them out. They were a peculiar breed given to command, who drew unequaled respect from their subordinates, lived by their own rules until they were almost a government unto themselves, reaped fantastic wealth and terrified half the world.” He paused, then added, “He’s like that.”

The doctor crossed to the window and opened the blinds a little further. “Since you’re getting so historical, Mr. Rice, I’d better remind you that you’re forgetting something.”

“Oh?”

“Some of those they called pirates were privateers authorized by one government to prey on another. They held letters of marque from their governments and in their own countries were held in highest esteem.”

I knew the cop was smiling. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was. “Exactly my point, Doctor,” he said. “That is what we’re afraid of. An ordinary criminal type doesn’t plan and execute a forty-million-dollar robbery. He doesn’t have the tolerance to withstand all the efforts that go into making him reveal where he disposed of a haul of that size. He doesn’t have the aptitude to escape from a solitary-confinement cell in a maximum-security prison and stay at large three years.”

The cop leaned back in his chair and said, “Let’s say he could have been acting as a privateer, Doctor. Let an enemy government loose enough of them in this country and the destruction they could cause would be immense.”

Silently, my mouth formed the words “You stupid bastard.”

Very slowly, the doctor turned around and walked up beside me. I let my eyes close and shut him out. He said, “That’s an assumption, isn’t it?”

“In these days we have to work on assumptions quite often. You are familiar with the details of the case, aren’t you?”

“I know what the papers said. It was a shipment of currency from the Washington mint to New York, wasn’t it?”

“Forty million dollars’ worth in common bills. The paper volume would fill a medium-sized truck.”

“You people don’t take very good care of the public’s cash.”

“It was well guarded.”

The doctor’s voice had a laugh in it. “Was it?”

Rice said nothing for a moment, then when he spoke there was an edge in his words. “The aggressor always has the advantage.”

“Don’t excuse your own mistakes, Mr. Rice. You caught him once.”

“With twelve thousand dollars of recorded bills in his possession. He never had a chance to spend any of it.”

“If I remember right, that was an accident too.”

Rice let out a little chuckle. “You’d be surprised how often accidents, as you put it, pay off. The rooming house where he boarded was raided by Treasury agents looking for narcotics held by another tenant and they turned up his cache. We killed two birds with one stone.”

“Commendable. Why didn’t you keep him?”

“Maybe now we’ll learn how he broke out. If he could do it there, this place would be a cream puff, so the cuffs stay on him, Doctor.”

“Unless it interferes with his treatment, Mr. Rice. Don’t forget that.”

I opened my eyes and looked up at the medic. He was watching me with peculiar curiosity, seeing both a patient and a specimen, but his expression had a determined set to it that no police agency was going to intimidate. I said, “You tell him, Doc.”

Rice’s chair scraped the floor quickly and a blurred figure of a blocky man in a gray suit drifted into my line of vision, but only for a moment. It was all just a little too tiresome and I drifted back slowly into the pleasant void of sleep where there weren’t any aches or pains and the dreams all had nice, creamy-skinned women in them.

The netherworld is only a vacation from reality. It never lasts long enough. Waking up was a jarring thing because it happened so abruptly; every detail of the situation clear with total recall. There was no pain any more, simply a muscular soreness and a skin prickling where the stiches were still tight, but I had had that sensation so often it didn’t bother me at all. My left arm was still tethered to the bed frame, loosely enough to allow limited movement, but a complete restraint to anything further.

There were three of them in the room now, each earmarked with the odd composure that gets ground into the makeup of professional cops. Rice was there, the Washington representative who worked under the C.I.A.; Carter, the Treasury Department’s troubleshooter; and a big, solid-looking guy in a rumpled suit that bulged over a gun in a belt holster who was N.Y.P.D. all the way. He didn’t appreciate anyone infringing on his jurisdiction and looked it. Someone had given him orders and he took them, but he didn’t have to like it. When the doctor came in the cop was introduced briefly as Inspector Jack Doherty and I pegged him as the big one the mayor appointed to work directly out of the D.A.’s office on special assignment.

Man, they were sure giving me top-quality treatment

It was the doctor who saw me wide awake first. His mouth twisted in a funny little grin when he said, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” then he came over to me, felt my pulse automatically, raised one lid with a thumb and peered at my eye and asked, “How do you feel?”

“Like forty million,” I told him.

“Think you’ll get to spend it?”

I grinned back at him. “Nobody else will, that’s for sure. They pay off that reward yet?”

“You heard what I told Rice, didn’t you?”

“Sure, but did you mean it?”

“Well, I haven’t bought any Cadillacs lately.”

“You’ll get it.”

“I expect to. Ten years after I hang out my shingle.”

“That’s doing it the hard way.”

“And that’s the way it’s going to be,” he told me. “Any soreness?”

“Some. How do I look?”

He shrugged and dropped my hand. “Minor concussion, cuts and abrasions, two broken ribs. We were afraid of internal injuries, but apparently there weren’t any. You were lucky, Morgan.”

“Yeah, I sure was,” I laughed. “When am I to be released?”

“Depending upon your own complaint, anytime. You can delay it for a few days if you feel like it.”

“Hell, why bother?”

“Every day’s a day. I hear the chow’s better here than in a cell.”

“I haven’t tasted any of it yet,” I said. “At least there they don’t feed you through a tube and they let you up long enough to go to the john. I don’t go this bedpan routine.”

“Take your pick. It’s a hell of a choice for a millionaire, though.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

The other three moved in, standing there until the doctor finished, watching me like a bug on a pin. When the doctor stepped back Rice leaned forward and said, “Well?”

“Anytime, buddy,” I told him. “Make it easy on yourselves.”

For some reason the three of them looked at each other, annoyance scratching furrows at the corners of their eyes. Inspector Doherty seemed to clamp his teeth together like he wanted to swing at me and Carter made a tight-lippd scowl as if he had bitten into something distasteful.

Only Rice was impassive. He stared at me, his eyes never leaving mine, and said in almost a whisper, “Stay loose, Morgan. It’s not over. It’s just beginning and you’ll be back where you came from or else you’ll be dead. Luck can ride either side of the table, but just remember that you can never beat the house odds.”

The building as an innocuous affair, a second-story apartment over a deserted grocery in a block condemned by the city for an urban renewal project. The truck they had used for transportation was a Department of Public Works vehicle no different from two others parked nearby and if anyone was curious enough to look, we were just some of the city planning board inspecting the properties.

But it was a lot more than that. Only Inspector Doherty and his plainclothes assistant were on New York’s payroll. The rest came from the massive complex on the Potomac and acted with the strange reserve of a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was an appraisal that wasn’t far off. Each of them was the head of an agency directly responsible to the White House and if a decision or an action backfired, they carried their heads in their hands.

I kept getting those surreptitious glances of distaste from the time they outfitted me in new clothes until they sat me at a corner of the table in the dust-filled room, enough out of line with the others so that I would know that I wasn’t one of them, but something dirty yet necessary, like a squeamish woman putting a slimy worm on a hook just to catch a nice clean fish.

There were no introductions, but then, I didn’t need any. Gavin Woolart, the ace from the State Department, was running the show. He didn’t appreciate the look of recognition I gave his associates in the beginning, but was shrewd enough to realize my profession called for intimate knowledge of people. All people. He was smart enough to stay away from the antagonistic angles even if it hurt and when he was ready he addressed me so damn formally it was funny.

Hell, he could have called me by my number. Not by my first name, though. I didn’t have any.

Instead, he said, “Mr. Morgan, you are probably wondering what this is all about.”

I couldn’t resist the invitation. “Mr. Woolart, that is one bitch of a statement. So… yes, I am wondering what this is all about. I’m a convicted criminal, an escapee and here I am in a new suit of clothes surrounded by V.I.P.’s with sour looks. If you had asked me I’d say it was a new slant in trying to retrieve your forty million bucks.”

Somebody coughed and Woolart glared at him. “Let’s forget that for the moment.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I said.

“How much time did you draw?”

I shrugged. They knew the answer. “Thirty years. Nothing was concurrent so they’ll pick me up on the other charges as soon as I use up the time.” I grinned at him. “If I use up the time.”

“Please don’t try to be comical,” he said.

“What have I got to lose?”

“Some of those thirty years, for one thing.”

I didn’t get it at all. I leaned forward and leaned on the table. Something was about to get mighty interesting. “Let’s put it this way then,” I said. “What have I got to gain?”

Once more, there was an exchange of glances around the room. Woolart tapped the tip of a pencil on the tabletop and the sound was like that of a clock about to run out. If somebody didn’t wind it it would stop.

Gavin Woolart pressed down on the pencil and the point broke. It was an effectual little gesture. “Let me put it this way, Mr. Morgan. We know your status. We are fully acquainted with your background from the day you were born, through college, your wartime service to the present. Nothing has been omitted. An intensive investigation of your past has resulted in a dossier that details every facet of your life.”

“Except one thing, apparently,” I said. My voice was tight and husky and I could hardly get the words out.

“Yes.”

“Now I’ll ask it. What?”

“Your potential.”

I didn’t like the feeling I got. It started at the back of my neck like a cold breeze and made the muscles in my shoulders bunch up into knots. They didn’t even want to know where the forty million went to, so whatever it was put my neck on the line. The big No was already there inside my mouth to say but I couldn’t do it until he had laid it out and I could hardly wait until he did.

“Curious, Mr. Morgan?”

“Not especially,” I lied.

“You should be. With your next stay in the penitentiary, security will be absolute maximum.”

“That won’t help.”

Woolart let a little smile play with his mouth. “That’s what I mean, Mr. Morgan.”

I shook my head, not understanding.

“Your potential,” he said. “You seem to have something nobody else has. A strange talent indeed. You do things of major importance, then reinforce them by another action. It’s too bad your abilities weren’t directed into normal channels.”

“For me it was normal.”

“Again, Mr. Morgan, that’s what I’m referring to.”

I half stood up. “Damn it, get to the point. I don’t like being held like this. You know what a lawyer would do in court when I told him what you pulled?”

“Nothing, Mr. Morgan,” Woolart said quietly. “You have been convicted, you have escaped, and now you’re being recaptured. Legally, I think he’d advise you to shut up and listen.”

I sat down. Like I said before, I really didn’t have anything to lose. Not one damn thing at all.

Woolart glanced around the room, then out of habit opened an attaché case in front of him. It wasn’t necessary. He knew every word that was written there by heart, but it was a habit he couldn’t break. When he had the papers aligned to his satisfaction he said, “This offer is being made against our judgment, Mr. Morgan. It was suggested by an authority higher than ours, so we have to make it. However, we stipulated that if it is refused upon its initial presentation, then it never will be made again. Frankly, I am hoping that you will refuse it. Everything will be much simpler then and we can proceed in the matter normally. But as I said, this choice is not ours.”

I could feel their eyes on me. They weren’t looking… they were watching. Not one of them felt differently from Woolart and the expectation was there, clear and strong, that my answer would be negative. Anything else would be one of stupidity and they weren’t giving me credit for that.

“Say it,” I told him.

He shuffled the papers a moment, then looked up at me. “It regards the value you put on your life. Whether you prefer to spend it inside a prison until there’s nothing left of you except the remnants of a man or take a chance on losing it altogether with the possible alternative of only spending a portion of your sentence behind bars with at least a few years of active, enjoyable life left to you.” He stopped and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “It isn’t very much of a choice, is it?”

“You haven’t spelled it all the way out either, Mr. Woolart.”

“Since you’ll never be in a position to transmit any of this information… even if it is speculative… to anyone else, I’ll go a little further, but let me put it in hypothetical fashion at any rate.”

I waved my hand disgustedly. I didn’t like it at all. “Be my guest.”

“There is a certain country,” he said, “neighboring… apparently friendly as long as they receive our largesse, but in reality, closer politically to those we consider an enemy of this country. In their prison they have a person our scientific circles need desperately in order to… ah… over come certain… ah… enemy advancements.

“We can not go in and liberate this person Again, frankly, we have tried and failed. In this age of propaganda and internal unrest, the United States cannot put itself in an unfavorable position. This one country is using this person as a pawn, ready to move in either direction, looking for favors from both sides. The unfortunate part is, that the person involved is of advanced age and not expected to live too much longer. It is imperative that we have the information he can give us before it is too late. One aspect is this: if he is already dead, this other country can conceal that fact and still extract… well, tribute, from our government for any length of time.”

This time Gavin Woolart stopped his incessant handling of the papers and looked directly at me. “We need two things,” he said. “One, if he is dead, knowledge of the fact.”

“And?” I put in.

“The second… if he is alive, we need him. And that, Mr. Morgan, is where your potential comes in.”

I knew what he was going to say. I could almost smell it.

“This is the proposition… that you go into that country, commit a crime of our specifications that will get you sentenced to that prison, then effect an escape with either the information of his death or the person himself. For this action the government will take into consideration our recommendation of a reduced sentence for your prior, ah, activities and it will be acted upon.”

“All this in writing, I suppose,” I grinned.

“Nothing in writing.” He didn’t grin at all.

“Come on, buddy. I made deals like that during the war. Give me a witness that will stay alive, at least.”

“Nothing.”

“Balls,” I said. “You’re like the insurance companies these days. You get paid for taking chances, but you sure don’t want to take any.” I leaned back in my chair. “Little man, I’d sooner take my chances on getting out of your damn pen. That I can do and the odds are even better.”

Gavin Woolart’s face flushed a deep red with controlled anger. His smile was friendly, but his lips were almost bloodless. “No other deal,” he grimaced.

I never expected it, but it happened anyway. That deep, resonant voice of Inspector Doherty’s cut through the room like a knife through toilet paper and he said, “I witnessed it, Morgan. Do what you want.”

Two of them came out of their chairs like they had been shot. Carter swung around, anger contorting his face. “Listen, Inspector…”

Jack Doherty had been around just a little too long. Nobody impressed him any more. He had pounded too many beats, seen too much action, worked with too many administrations to get cut off by somebody outside his own domain. He was totally impassive, sitting there like a fight-scarred tiger, too lazy and too competent to be bothered wasting his talents on the young bucks looking for a slice of his harem when all he had to do was growl to buzz them off. He said, “I don’t give a damn for this bum one way or another. I’ve made deals with bums and politicians alike and stuck with them, but never one that was raw. This one stinks. So you’re in a bind and now it’s your turn. It’s still my territory and keep it in your heads. All you have to do is nod and he goes back in, but don’t play around with his life. He didn’t knock anybody off you know of. I’ll be a witness to this deal whether you like it or not.”

“Thanks, Inspector,” I told him.

“Don’t thank me, Morgan. Either way, you’re still a loser in my book.”

Carter and Woolart sat down slowly. “You haven’t heard the last of this, Doherty,” Carter told him.

The big cop made a gesture with his shoulders. “So sue me,” he said and took a drag on his cigar.

Woolart looked at me. “Well?”

“Supposing I get to this hypothetical country and decide to cut out?”

Bluntly, Woolart said, “An agent will accompany you. Others will be on hand. In that event you will be eliminated. This is one of the simpler phases of the operation.”

“Uh-huh.” I folded my hands and studied him again. “You’re appealing to something, Woolart.”

No mister this time.

“It can’t be to my consideration of a shorter term behind bars,” I said. “Funny enough, life in any state is better than none at all. It can’t be to what you consider my sense of adventure because the reward factor is too small. So what is it?”

“Neither, Morgan.” And he didn’t say mister either. “I have no consideration in the matter at all. I told you it came from higher up. Maybe it’s an appeal to your patriotism.”

“Then they’ll have to do better than that.”

All the eyes made the rounds of the other eyes at the table again. This time it was Carter who said, “What are you thinking of, Mr. Morgan?”

At least he kept the mister in.

“Maybe they don’t want the forty million back,” I said.

Seconds pass slowly when nobody wants to commit themselves. Only Doherty was grinning because he liked binds himself and he didn’t have anything outside a professional affection for the rest.

“We’re not at liberty to decide on that matter,” Woolart said quietly.

I had them then. “Like hell you’re not. This was dropped in your laps and you were told to handle it. You were told to make the deal and if you come back empty-handed somebody will drop a hot potato in them. Buddies, you done bought the farm. Now I’ll lay it out. If I pull it off, you knock off fifteen years, all sentences to run concurrently, and nobody touches that loot. Plain enough?”

“No.” Gavin Woolart’s tone was adamant.

“Is your boy worth forty million, Mr. Woolart? Can you do the job yourself?”

And from the rear Carter said, “Let it stand, Gavin. It’s the only deal we can make.”

For a few long seconds Woolart just stared at me. It was his kind of game, this mental cat-and-mouse bit, and he had been at it a long time where all the participants were experts. Now he was calling on all his resources to catalog me properly. Then, very quietly, he said, “No.”

“Why, Gavin?” Carter asked him. The rest of the room was very quiet.

I said, “He’s considering a possibility, Mr. Carter. A forty-million-dollar possibility. He hates to see that kind of money cut from the budget. Now let me inject another possibility… that I didn’t take it. Oh, sure, it was proven in court through circumstantial evidence, but more than one innocent person went that route before me. The cute little possibility he’s considering is that if you guarantee I can keep the forty big ones… and I didn’t heist it to begin with… but manage to get my hands on it in the meantime, you people are up the creek. Make it a public issue and some of our more progressive papers will take you apart… not to say what will happen politically. Right, Woolart?”

He didn’t answer me.

I said, “He knows I might pull it off, too.” I let a grin crease my face and relaxed in the chair. “It’s an interesting challenge.”

Gavin Woolart’s face was drawn into a tight mask. “There’s no doubt about your having that money, Morgan.”

“Or that I might get it,” I added.

He shrugged, not changing his expression. “Either way, the answer is still No.”

“You authorized to make the decision or does it go through channels, Mr. Woolart?”

He didn’t have to give me the answer. I saw the sudden narrowing of his eyes. “For your own satisfaction, you’ll get an opinion from higher quarters, but I can assure you it will be negative. However, there’s a time element involved and I advise you not to delay making up your mind or the entire situation will revert unconditionally to your recapture.”

“But the rest of the deal stands?”

“That’s the offer. Take your choice.”

I nodded. “Okay, buddy, I’ll take it.” I scanned the room and watched the small glances they exchanged, those tiny motions of relief like finding out that there was still some time left in the ball game after all. I said, “How do you know you can trust me?”

Gavin Woolart gathered his papers together and stood up. His eyes were cold beads that said he hated every facet of the arrangement, but it was out of his hands. Very tersely, he told me, “We don’t, Morgan.”