“Or anything about the other group?”
His lips compressed, the young man shook his head.
The senator’s fingers laced together and rested on the desk top. “I assume, though, that you have plans for finding out.”
“Uh . . . yes. Yes, we do. We’ve just about completed the preparations for a means of breaking the fraction open. We’re . . . very hopeful about it.”
“Fine,” said Muehlenfeldt quietly, the cello strings whispering their lowest note. “I suggest you hurry with it.”
His face bloodless, the young man nodded, picked up the tape recorder, and headed quickly for the rear of the plane.
When he was alone, the senator stood at the jetliner’s window and looked down at the city below. Most of San Francisco was still dreaming.
Chapter 9
Spencer pocketed the key and pushed open the door of his apartment.
“There you go,” he said, waving his hand grandly as Ralph stepped inside.
Pushed against one wall was a tired-looking sofa half-covered with old magazines and newspapers. “You can bed down here.” Spencer jumbled the papers into a loose stack and dropped them on the floor. “I think I got some extra blankets in one of the closets.”
While he disappeared into the back of the apartment, Ralph looked around the front room. A small pagoda of dirty cups and saucers tottered on a low table constructed of plywood and cement blocks. The walls were randomly spotted with pages torn from books and other sources. Ralph stepped over to one and found himself looking at a yellowing newsphoto of a kneeling man engulfed in flames. Blurred oriental faces watched with varying expressions. He glanced at the picture next to it—a glossy publicity still of a grinning dog captioned, Rin-Tin-Tin—before turning away from the wall.
Carrying a mound of wadded-up blankets, Spencer came back into the room. He tossed them onto the sofa and brushed the lint from his hands.
“That should do it.”
“Who’s Rin-Tin-Tin?” Ralph tilted his head towards the picture on the wall.
“Huh?” Spencer looked around and spotted the dog’s image. “Oh, yeah—that. He was a dog they made a whole bunch of movies about, long time ago. Mike used to go to film festivals at some of the universities around here and watch them. Rin-Tin-Tin movies were kind of a fad for a while, I guess. They really meant something to Mike, though—a lot of weird things did. He used to tell me that that stupid dog was closer to being human than most people. ‘At least he’s trying,’ he’d say.” Spencer fell silent, gazing across the room at the picture.
After a moment, Ralph spoke. “I’m sorry about what happened to your brother.” He coughed. “There wasn’t much I could do. I was pretty scared at the time.”
Spencer shrugged and exhaled noisily. “Yeah, well, who wouldn’t have been? Even Rin-Tin-Tin. That slithergadee thing sounded pretty fierce when you were telling us about it back at the headquarters. Forget it. Let’s go see if we can find anything in the kitchen.”
Ralph sat at a table littered with unidentifiable electronic parts and a soldering iron while Spencer rummaged in the refrigerator. He held a carton of milk to his nose and sniffed. “Should still be good,” he decided.
With his forearm he cleared a space on the table, then set down the milk and two unmatched cups. “Good for the stomach lining,” he said. “After all that damn coffee.”
Over the rim of his cup, Ralph watched as Spencer abstractedly pushed a couple of transistors around with his finger. They were different colors, like pills, and rolled across the table’s surface, waving their small end wires.
“How well did you get to know Mike?” said Spencer, not looking up.
“While you were out there at the Opwatch base.”
“Not very well,” said Ralph, “it’s not the kind of place where you make much contact with anybody.” Or anything, he thought to himself.
“You know, Mike was okay. As older brothers go. He was—let’s see—a junior in high school when I was in sixth grade; the school psychologist diagnosed me as hyperactive, because I threw a blackboard eraser at one of the teachers and talked a lot. So anyway, they were going to give me these pills. Doctor’s dope, right? It’s legal as long as they want you all zonked out. But when Mike heard about it, he loaded me on the back of this little motorcycle he had, and we rode it all the way to San Diego.
“Checked into a motel—he gave the desk clerk some story about us being part of a rock group and the rest of the band hadn’t shown up yet. We waited a couple of days, then he called our parents and said we’d come back if they wouldn’t make me take the stuff.” Spencer picked up one of the transistors and laughed, shaking his head. “He told me later that he didn’t do it because he actually cared for me that much. It was just a matter of principle for him.”
Ralph set his cup down. “You must have felt pretty bad when you saw those pictures Sarah took.”
“What pictures?” Spencer’s brow creased in puzzlement.
“The ones Sarah took out in the desert. By the Opwatch base. You know, of that big bloodstain on the ground.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Spencer. “Sarah’s never gone out to the Opwatch base. We decided it might raise too much suspicion if any of us were seen poking around there. And I don’t think Sarah even owns a camera.”
Frowning, Ralph watched his forefinger circle the rim of the empty cup before him. When telling the Alpha Fraction about Michael Stimmitz’s death and the other strange things that had happened at the base, he hadn’t mentioned spotting Sarah aiming a camera at the bloody spot. He had assumed the others knew about it—that she had gone out there on the group’s orders and had reported to them on what she had found. But she didn’t, thought Ralph. They don’t even know she went out there.
“You okay?” said Spencer.
“Yeah.” Ralph nodded. “I must’ve gotten confused—thinking about something else. Everything’s been going so fast, it gets hard to keep track.” So what’s it mean? persisted his thought. Something else is going on with these people— or at least with one of them. With an effort, he pushed Sarah’s now enigmatic face from his mind. “Tell me about this plan,” he said. “That I’m supposed to help you people with.”
Spencer pushed aside his own cup and the empty milk carton. He drew an assemblage of electronic parts to himself and studied it. “Remember the Opwatch recruiting office downtown?” he said, poking a finger at one of the soldered wires. “Where you first signed on with them?”
“Sure. What about it?”
“We’re going to bug it.”
Ralph stared at him for a moment before he could say anything. “That’s ridiculous.”
The wire pulled loose and Spencer looked up. “Why do you say that?”
“Are you kidding?” said Ralph. “For Pete’s sake, that office is nothing but a closet with a desk and phone stuffed in it. You’re not going to be able to pry any secrets out of a place like that—there wouldn’t be any.”
“We’ve got reason to believe differently. There’s more to that little office than you’d think. Our plan’s worth a try, at least.”
“You people are crazy.” Ralph’s disappointment had turned into anger. “This sounds like a pretty good way to get picked up by the police for no good reason.”
“Hey, we’re not asking that much from you,” said Spencer. “It’ll be safe. If anything goes wrong, you’ll have plenty of time to clear out.” He pulled another wire loose. “Of course, if that’s too much for you . . .”
Ralph snorted, but felt blood tinge his face. “When are you going to try to do this?”