And that, he thought warmly, he could count on. McEwen had been doing that for twelve years.
For all the ominous reputation of investigations, arrests, and interrogations carried on by the Department of Internal Affairs, the dreaded civilian intelligence organization that had grown up in the wake of the corrupted and long-defunct FBI to serve as watchdog for the new Vanner-Elling Stability government, one single fact had always remained paramount: The DIA would never exceed the legal limits of its authority. Even Alexander, after his brief and bitter experience in the Bureau of Information, still believed this record to be accurate, and not simply a matter of silencing all witnesses to exceptional cases.
The DIA had no need to break laws. Their investigations and interrogations were so thorough that they could, on sound legal grounds, pick up a man for a misfiled travel permit, or an unsatisfactory follow-up marital survey, or even for failing to report a prostitute’s serial number correctly, and in a few days of questioning get him to confess to every crime and misdemeanor he had ever committed or even imagined he had committed. For the tough cases their legal lobby would squeeze a new law into the books in the middle of an investigation, just to fit the case.
But this time Alexander knew the law. He knew he was right, but he was a little surprised at the rapid pounding of his heart and the sudden trickle of sweat running down his arms. There was something ominous about this sudden appearance of a swarm of DIA ’copters at the site of an isolated Geiger alert.
He looked through the haze of headlights and falling rain at the tall, dark-coated figure standing there, shoulders hunched, hands deep in his raincoat pockets.
Julian Bahr . . . .
The name was oddly familiar to Alexander. So was the big, thick-set body, the hunched shoulders, the heavy face, the bark of the man’s voice. He knew Bahr from somewhere, he was sure of that.
Alexander ran backward in his mind through his career in BURINF, the huge, energetic mouthpiece for the Department of Exploitation—super press room, propaganda mill, advertising agency, motivational research center and public relations bureau without peer in the world. Faces, names, ideas . . . private conversations, board meetings, luncheons flooded his memory. He felt a wave of nostalgia begin to rise smotheringly, a pervading sense of desolation at the fall he had taken from there, so abrupt, so unexplainable.
He blocked it. Julian Bahr was not part of BURINF.
Back farther, then. Britain, Turkey, Buenos Aires, Australia . . . a dozen past assignments shuttled through his mind: the solar research project he had been in charge of in Mexico; the huge Yangtze dam at which he had been only a lieutenant, the curious Asian-Western partial truce that had resulted in the U.S. Army building the world’s greatest dam across the Yangtze to stop the floods and starvation that were driving China into ruthless expansion in spite of the brilliant economic blockade with which the West had accelerated her inflation, until the vast continent was almost entirely reduced to barter, governmental ferocity notwithstanding.
The Army, the vast administrative tool of the Department of Exploitation, since it no longer had any function as an effective fighting force. Fifteen million men and officers handling the immense problems of supply, law enforcement, transportation, engineering and education in the precise ecological reorientation that the Vanner-EIling system prescribed when it came to power after the Crash in 1995, and which DEPEX operated. That was the old Army of fifteen years ago when a man was given a job to do and the authority to do it, not like the snarled . . . Alexander blocked the engulfing bitterness. Bahr had not been in China . . . .
Antarctica . . . .
Like a key fitting a lock, something clicked in Alexander’s mind, and he realized why he had not been able to place this man.
It was Antarctica. He remembered Julian Bahr.
He jumped as the door of the Volta slid open and Bahr stood there, rain pouring from his hat. “I need your car,” he said.
“Is that an order?” Alexander asked.
“Call it whatever you want,” Bahr snapped. “A couple of our ground units have been flown in about a mile up the road, and I—”
“Strike!” The squawker boomed. “Mr. Bahr . . . there’s a strong signal on a Geiger from Unit B ’copter Number Seven. They’re holding position. Over.”
Bahr picked up the speaker, rotated the broadcast selector to the DIA frequency. “This is Bahr. Number Seven? What have you got there?”
“Can’t see it, but there’s something down here in the woods,” the voice crackled. “Got a hell of a jolt on the Geiger.”
“All right, all units,” Bahr said. “Circle at a quarter-mile radius from Number Seven. Ground units alert for encirclement. Use caution. Whatever’s in that circle, keep it in there! But do not attack. Repeat: do not attack! Out.”
He turned to Alexander as Carmine came stumbling up through the muck and rain and slid into the car without saying a word. “You heard that,” Bahr said. “I need this car to join the ground units.”
“This is a Volta,” Alexander said. “You’ll break your neck in it, if you don’t know how to drive it.”
“Then you drive it,” Bahr said. “Now get it moving.”
He knows you, Alexander thought. He knows you, and he’s playing this little game out, just waiting for you to break. There was no longer any question in Alexander’s mind about his being investigated. But McEwen could get him off the hook. He’d known McEwen back in Mexico, when McEwen was training with BRINT. McEwen would help him . . . .
Viciously, Alexander slammed the controls into full drive. The car screamed out of the soft, muddy rut, siren going, and Alexander sent it screeching along the center of the road strip, wet grass and bushes slapping at the sleek, high-speed plastic shell, headlight on high and red turret-light winking. The Volta could actually do 300 on a good road, but on this winding, gravel-shouldered road strip Alexander held it down to 120. They made a sharp turn, and he slammed the directional gyro at a ninety-degree offset, using the boosters to overcome the inertia of the loaded car. Gravel spat out under the single wheel as the Volta skidded onto the shoulder, gyros whining to keep the car from toppling. He could feel Bahr’s huge body stiffen as a tree loomed up at them, then relax as they slammed off it and kept on going after the jolt.
“Hold it,” Bahr said as they approached the helicopter cluster. Alexander hit the brake button and the Volta squealed to a halt, rocking. Spotlights were on them for three seconds before the car stopped. Carmine opened the door, and he and Bahr jumped out without a word to Alexander.
The DIA ground troops were already trotting into the drenched brush and forest, their flashlights bobbing, disappearing. They melted into the brush with a certain grim urgency . . . no shouting, no waste motion. Probably veterans of the crack 801st, Alexander thought, the legendary guerilla army that had been fighting the war of containment in the East Indies. Commanded by the British, the 801st had never been manned by anyone but Americans, the toughest, hardest, most incorrigible mercenaries the British could find, executing raids on Indonesia and South China that made Sherman’s march look like a reforestation project. British Intelligence used the 801st to forge stubborn links in the Asian economic and political situation, but BRINT’s interest in a young army sent back to the Americas each year a steady quota of battle-toughened, BRINT-trained intelligence men in their late twenties.