The photos adhered to each other as the senator pushed them aside.
“On the phone,” he said in his resonant, cello-like baritone, “you mentioned another person being there.”
“Yes, that’s right.” The young man extracted another photo from the envelope and pushed it towards the senator.
It was a blow-up of an Operation Dreamwatch FD card. Not much could be told from the blurry face-shot. He tossed it on top of the others.
The young man tapped the reel of recording tape on the machine in front of him. “From the conversation we’ve identified this other voice as that of Ralph Metric. He’s one of the watchers at the base.”
One of the senator’s snow-white eyebrows arched upwards. “A watcher? What’s he doing in L.A.?”
“He’s on vacation, I believe.”
“Come on.” Muehlenfeldt slapped the desk top. “What’s he doing there? Seems like quite a lot of initiative for a watcher to take.”
“We’re aware of that.” The young man pulled from the envelops a sheet of paper crowded with words and numbers. “We contacted the base and they wired us the record of his serotonin/melatonin activity monitoring. It’s been well below the necessary levels since he was hired over six months ago. We’re checking now to see if he has any abnormalities in his past history that we might have overlooked before.”
“Have the monitoring equipment checked out, too.” The cello’s strings grated. “First that Stimmitz person got past them, and now this one.”
In a small book the young man scribbled a note.
“Now what’s all this about?” said the senator irritably, waving a hand at the tape recorder.
“At approximately two-thirty a.m., quite some time after the weekly public forum at the Revolutionary Workers Party headquarters was over, the members of the Alpha Fraction and Ralph Metric were picked up by the device we have planted in the meeting hall. We assume they had previously been in a part of the building where we don’t have a device yet.”
The senator grunted and shook his head in disgust, but said nothing.
“From their recorded conversation,” continued the young man, “it appears as if Metric had had no previous contact with the group and was up to this point completely ignorant of its existence, let alone its purpose. Most of the discussion consists of the group members filling him in on the nature and past history of the Alpha Fraction, thus confirming much of what we had already found out about them.” He arched his eyebrows as his hand hovered over the tape recorder’s play button. When the senator nodded, he pushed it. “The first voice is that of Mendel Koss,” he whispered quickly.
A small clattering noise and a voice, slightly tinny from electronic imitation, emerged from the machine. “ . . . you see, Ralph, if we didn’t need another person—because of what happened, you know, to Mike—I’d probably tell you to get out of here and forget all this.”
Another voice, a woman’s. “But we need your help.”
“That’s the woman named Sarah,” the young man said to Muehlenfeldt.
“Well, just what is it you’re trying to do?” Another man’s voice, sounding puzzled.
“That’s Metric.”
A cough, and the voice of Mendel Koss spoke again. “We’ve been . . . kind of investigating the Operation Dreamwatch project for quite a while now—”
“Who’s we?” Metric’s voice. “The RWP?”
“No,” said Koss. “Just the Alpha Fraction. The rest of the RWP, both the local and the national organization, doesn’t even know we exist.”
“How come you call it a ‘fraction’?” asked Metric.
A second passed before Koss answered, a trace of impatience evident in his voice. “That’s just what organizations like the RWP call their committees. They have an Executive Fraction, and Publications and Fund-raising Fractions, and stuff like that; it’s instead of calling them committees. Just the way they’ve always done it. ‘Alpha?’ I don’t know—that was Mike’s idea. Had to call it something, I guess.”
“It was all Mike’s idea,” came another voice. “He created the fraction. He was the first one to suspect there was something strange going on out there with Operation Dreamwatch.”
“That was Spencer Stimmitz,” said the young man. “He was referring, of course, to his brother.” The senator nodded and leaned a little closer to the machine.
“You see,” continued Koss’s voice, “Mike had quit the RWP. He had doubts about the effectiveness of the party and the work it’s been doing.
“While he was at loose ends, he hired on with Operation Dreamwatch. He was one of the first to be recruited. It wasn’t too long before the little odd things about the project started to pile up in his mind, enough to really raise his suspicions about the whole thing. He got in touch with the few of us in the RWP that he trusted—”
“He wasn’t sure about the rest of the party,” interrupted Sarah’s voice.
“He didn’t want to hazard tipping our hand to any agents and infiltrators in the party. That’s always a problem in groups like ours.”
“Helga Warner was one of you?” said Metric.
“She hired on with the project,” said Koss, “because Mike felt that the two of them might be able to find out more.”
“Did they?”
“Not much more than you have already. Or at least not anything that got back to us before they were killed. We knew their plans for going inside the Thronsen Home, but yours is the first word we’ve gotten about what’s actually in there.”
“Do you know what it means?” Metric’s voice seemed to rush from the tape recorder. “The kids on ice and everything?”
“Hell,” said Koss. “Who can tell what somebody like Muehlenfeldt is doing with all this stuff.”
“How do you know Muehlenfeldt’s really behind it? Maybe the senator doesn’t know what the Opwatch people are doing with all the money he gives them from his foundation.”
“That’s something we are sure about.” Sarah’s voice was grim. “Mike had sneaked into the base commander’s office and found a whole file of memoranda from Muehlenfeldt. Nothing that gave away the project’s real purpose, of course, but enough to let us know that Muehlenfeldt’s been personally directing it from the beginning.”
“Don’t you think you’re kind of outmatched, then?” Metric’s voice rose in pitch. “I mean, that guy’s got billions. If Operation Dreamwatch is his pet kick, and he doesn’t want anyone to know what’s going on, how’s your little fraction going to find out? Let alone stop whatever he’s doing with it.”
“We’ve got plans,” said Koss.
“Like what?”
“Well, it’s getting kind of late—”
The young man pushed another button on the tape recorder. The voice of Mendel Koss came to a halt in mid-sentence. “That’s all the important part,” he said.
“They left the RWP headquarters and dispersed. Metric went with Spencer Stimmitz to get some sleep and to be briefed on the Alpha Fraction’s plans.”
The senator leaned back in his chair. “Let’s hear that tape, then.”
“I’m afraid,” said the young man slowly, “we don’t have a device planted at Stimmitz’s apartment. He has quite a bit of electronics expertise, and it was decided that the chances were too great of his detecting anything we tried to put in there.”
“So you still don’t know what they’re planning?”
The young man hesitated a second. “No.”