“Any more?” Lessing inquired.
“Not at this time.”
Lessing hung up and caught Wrench by his shirtfront. “Calm down, for God’s sake! Calm!”
“Pacov!” Wrench gabbled. “Pacov! We’ve got to go out there!”
“Who… or what… pushed his button?” Goddard demanded.
Lessing explained. He glared at Wrench. “Look, nobody goes anywhere half-cocked! We’re not Captain Marlow Striker and his Heroes of Mercdom on TV!”
Goddard scraped a palm across his blue-stubbled jaw. “Still, we do have to move fast before Korinek finds out we know his private number. PHASE plainclothesmen. SWAT teams. Armored support.”
“With Cadre backup!” Wrench burst in. “Just think… Korinek behind Pacov! We won’t even need a trial! Thumbing Outram is the least of his crimes!”
“I said, let’s not go off with our pants unbuttoned,” Lessing repeated carefully. “We’ll need organization… authorization… local police… a solid spesh-op.”
“Can’t bring the regular cops in on this,” Goddard mused. “Maybe as backup, but no more. Can’ t be sure of ‘em yet. Some’ve got connections to the FBI, the CIA, and other unfriendlies. Give me two hours, and PHASE’ll be ready.”
“I’m going along,” Wrench insisted. “With a Home-Net crew!”
“The last thing we want is a parade!” Lessing exploded. “You’ll find an empty house, nobody home, no prints, nothing. For God’s sake, this has to be a professional operation! We should set up surveillance… wait and watch “
“And miss the biggest bomb we could ever drop on Korinek and his Jew-lovers?” Goddard cried. “No pogging way!”
“All right, all right’. Get your people up here… Abner Hand, Gillem, and the rest. But we keep it low-key, timed to the second… and stay koozy, foozy. We watch it on TV from here. We go nowhere ourselves until our people tell us it’s green light.”
The first PHASE surveillance team reported back at 1120 hours: no sign of life. The second party called in at 1204 hours to say the same thing. A female agent knocked on the door with Born-Again religious tracts at 1314 hours; no one answered, and she went away. Two police SWAT teams were concealed in houses across the street by 1340 hours, with four light armored vehicles, descendants of the old Piranha series, in alleys nearby. Three fire engines, two ambulances, and Wrench’s full-dress Home-Net TV crew arrived — quietly — and took up positions by 1430 hours. City policemen, augmented by PHASE personnel, completed the evacuation of the neighborhood by 1505 hours. A second agent, a skinny, blonde boy with a petition headed “STOP THE NEW FREEWAY,” tapped at the door and rang the bell at 1535 hours.
Still no response.
At 1615 hours Lessing sighed, picked up his coat, slid his automatic into its shoulder holster, and asked, “You poggers coming?”
They were.
The Annandale location was so inconspicuous it almost cried for attention: a two-story, white. Colonial, middle-class house, with green-shuttered windows, a nicely trimmed yard, a one-car garage containing only a dilapidated lawnmower, and a faded, yellow smile-button stuck in the window of the tum-of-the-century, dark-oak front door.
“The neighbors say two people live here,” one of Goddard’s operatives told them. “White males, mid-thirties. One’s a foreigner… Brit or Aussie. Some people think they’re gay, but others report seeing at least half a dozen young women visiting off and on. That old lady” — he jabbed a thumb at a stucco house across the street — “says she’s seen ‘an albino man’ around too.”
“Permanent kikibird caretakers. And Korinek. Anybody else?”
“From time to time. Other males… some ‘looked Jewish or Middle-Eastern’… more we can’t identify “
“No occupants visible,” Goddard’s team-leader radioed. “Permission to enter?”
Within five minutes the big, burly officer reappeared at the front door and waved.
Nobody home.
“Now us?” Wrench was as excited as a kid at the circus. “Yeah,” Lessing acquiesced. He gestured to Goddard and the PHASE SWAT men. “Okay?”
“Go! We’re with you.”
Wrench and Lessing wandered from room to room together. The main floor contained the most average, unmemorable furnishings imaginable: a mom-and-pop sofa, two threadbare overstuffed armchairs, a rocker, lace doilies, coffee tables that had come from some discount mart, a Micronite kitchen table and four plastic-cushioned chairs, a Glassex cast of a charging lion on top of the living-room TV set, frilly curtains, cheap china dishes, stainless-steel cutlery. It was perfect middle-class America.
Or a false front thereof
The basement was different. Its big rec-room sported soundproofed paneling, indirect lighting, thick, wine-colored carpets, lifesize porn-o-rama holos on pedestals, still bigger nudie photos on the walls, six-foot candelabra, ceiling mirrors, lacquered oriental tables, couches heaped with very odd-shaped cushions: all the paraphernalia of the dedicated — and wealthy-^omster. They found video cameras and projectors, a huge stereo system, a film library, a bar, a safe — with smeared white fingerprints on it that Goddard’s experts thought were cocaine— and the most extensive collection of sexual devices any of them had ever seen. A second, interior room produced leather goods, chains, helmets fitted with gags and blinders, and other implements Lessing didn’t want to see.
Those things made him angry. He knew why: Liese.
The upstairs was interesting for other reasons. The biggest bedroom, at the front of the house, had been repaneled to hide a secret door that opened into a windowless cubbyhole. Goddard’s people had already begun to swarm over the filing cabinets that lined its walls. The beds were lavish and luxurious; the Jacuzzi and hot tub in the bathroom were well used; and the closets were stuffed with men’s and women’s appareclass="underline" dresses, lingerie, suits, jackets, even a half-dozen fur coats.
Lessing fingered the garments curiously. Something swam just below the surface of his consciousness. Something he had seen— or heard — or knew?
Wrench spoke up from beside him. “Look at these rag-a-tags, man! Expensive like you wouldn’t believe! A four-hundred-dollar shirt… a three-thousand-dollar suit…! This jacket alone costs more’n I make in a year! Hey, remember what Eighty-Five told us about finding a drycleaner’s receipt for ‘James F. Arthur’ in Detroit, just before Pacov?”
He did not recall, but he grunted agreement anyway. He couldn’t catch the elusive memory. It slithered out of his grasp like a silvery fish. All he could see was a cavernous room, lit by stained-glass windows. Somebody Ah, hell, it was gone!
“No wonder the guy took good care of his rags, with stuff like this!” Wrench piped up enviously. “Makes it easy to trace, though. Eighty-Five’ll check the labels against store receipts and customer lists.” He beckoned Lessing closer and pulled something from his pocket: a glass-lensed metal tube, covered with enigmatic knobs and knurled projections, like a kid’s toy spaceship. “Just happened to bring ol’ Eighty-Five along,” he announced in a conspiratorial whisper. “Communicator, camera, audio, the whole banana! Don’t tell Goddard!”
The bedroom at the back of the building was barred by a solid steel door with a complicated vault lock which Goddard’s experts said might be wired to an explosive device. A SWAT team used laser torches to cut a new door in the wall beside it. Inside, they discovered a communications installation that would have made Home-Net proud. Lessing sent the SWAT men downstairs; there were probably things here that no one but he. Wrench, and Goddard ought to see.
“State of the gubbin’ art…!” Wrench breathed. He moved to stand just inside the door, admiring the ceiling-to-floor array of apparatus.