Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 18

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Diehl slammed the phone down, the muscles of his face taut.

“We’ve got him,” he said. “Flushed him out of a house in the suburbs. Nowhere to run. Castagna’s got a hundred and fifty men converging, and my men are right on his tail. He can’t get away now.”

Lindenbaum nodded, without looking particularly relieved. The problems wouldn’t stop with Heisenberg’s apprehension. The game had yet to be played.

The meeting had broken up, or broken down. The various members of the inner circle had jobs to do, and arrangements to make. Some of them, no doubt, would already be making plans to desert the ship if it began to sink. Most would be trying to make sure that it didn’t sink. Lindenbaum, rather to his own surprise, was slowly discovering that he didn’t care as much as he ought to. He had always thought of himself as a fighter—had always been a fighter, or he couldn’t have been where he was today—but now that the long-expected crisis was at his door he found that he was just a little too tired to attack the problems with the right degree of desperation. Instead of rejoicing with Diehl, he could only think: Suppose someone screws it up again? Suppose we can’t take him—or can’t hold him—even now?

“He’s not going to be in a co-operative frame of mind,” he said. “This whole chase scene is going to make us look bad, from his point of view. It doesn’t do our image any good at all.”

Diehl shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. At least we stopped him reaching Wishart.”

“Unless it was Wishart’s people that got him out.”

“It wasn’t,” said Diehl, flatly.

“Then who was it?”

“We’ve been through all that. It was whoever hooked into your phone. I don’t know who, but not Wishart. They warned Wishart to get out, and they tried to spring Heisenberg...but if it was the Movement, I’d know about it. Believe me.”

“How can I believe you? What the hell’s the alternative, if it wasn’t Wishart? The Australians? Phantoms from the old Communist bloc? Aliens from outer space?”

“The phone call was just to show us they can do it,” said Diehl, with a confidence that was only partly assumed. “The message meant nothing...just a comic line to stick a finger in your eye. I think it’s someone a damn sight closer to us than Wishart. We ought to face that possibility.”

Lindenbaum glared at him, half-angry and half-contemptuous. “And how did they know he was going to come out tonight?”

That was the question that stopped all the theories. But Diehl had figured out a way to sidestep even that.

“He did know,” he replied. “Therefore it can be known—calculated. There must be some way of measuring something that we don’t know about. There are people at the University who’ve been working on the problem for years, trying to figure out how the jump-length can be calculated. Obviously someone managed to find out. They didn’t tell us. But they didn’t tell the Movement, either. If they had, I’d have known about it. This thing surprised Wishart as much as it surprised us—I’m sure of that.”

“What about that car—the one that crashed the barrier?”

“Marcangelo’s following that up. They’re going through the wreckage with a fine-toothed comb...everything that they could scrape up from the roadway. I don’t think they’ll find anything significant.”

Lindenbaum ground out the butt of his cigarette, and promptly lit another.

“I have a feeling,” he said, “that we’re more out of our depth than you care to think. And prayer isn’t going to help—God’s not on our side this time.”

Diehl curled his lip. Lindenbaum, staring into space, couldn’t see the small change of expression, but he didn’t really need to. He knew that Diehl didn’t like him, and would seize upon any opportunity to feel contemptuous of him. Diehl was that way about everyone. It was almost a necessary qualification for his post. To be what he was you had to hate the enemy, and in his job, the enemy was everybody and anybody.

“You’d better get back on the job,” said the president, wearily. “When you get him, tell me. I want to know everything that happens. Don’t use the phone.”

Diehl nodded, rose to his feet, and went to the door. When it closed behind him, Lindenbaum blew out a cloud of grey smoke and watched it dissipate into the warm air. His gaze wandered for a few moments, and then lingered on the silent telephone. After a few seconds’ hesitation he picked it up and dialed.

When the call was answered, he said: “If we were attacked from space, could we put up any kind of a defensive show at all?”

He received the answer that he expected, said: “That’s what I thought,” and replaced the receiver in the cradle.

Hell, he murmured, inaudibly. If it came to a fight we couldn’t even beat the Australians. But who wants to fight for a wrecked world?