Cleveland Pipeline Read online

  11

  BRAIN DRAIN

  “You can’t talk to him right now,” Freddy Bianchi advised the caller. “He had a bad night. He just now got to sleep. You give me the word and I’ll pass it when I’m able.”

  “Suits me,” the crew boss replied. “He’s not going to like this, anyway. I’d rather you tell it than me.”

  Bianchi groaned. “Okay, dammit, give it.”

  “I put crews out, like he said. I got everything covered. I had Timmy Zabo and a couple of boys covering the Coast Guard guy. Well now—”

  “Did you say you had, Gus?”

  “Yeh, that’s the problem. Tommy’s a good boy, you know, but sometimes he has trouble following a bouncing ball. You know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bianchi groaned.

  “Well, he no sooner than got the guy covered when up drives little Miss Snooper. She drove right past Tommy. He spots her right away. He’s a good boy that way, real quick.”

  “Too quick, now, you’re telling me.”

  “This time, yeah. He knew that Tony wanted the broad real bad. So he hit.”

  “What’d he hit, Gus?”

  “Nothing, it turns out. A guy showed up out of nowhere and spoiled the hit. Tommy was a mile down the road before he realizes who this guy probably is. By this time he’s on the radio, with me. I tell ’im to keep going and I send another car over for a cool look. There are cops all over. The broad’s car is sitting there with about fifty slugs in it. A window has been shot out of the house. A neighbor says nobody got hurt. But this neighbor also says the Coast Guard guy tore out of there before the cops came, says he has a sick wife and a housekeeper in the car with him. We’ve lost the gay, Freddy.”

  “Wait a minute, now.”

  “Worse than that, the broad left with Bolan—and it seems sure to me that both of them had something arranged with the Coast Guard guy.”

  “Listen. Now listen, Gus. If you think I’m telling that to Tony then you better think again. He already lost that judge and he’s plumb sick about that. I mean sick, you know.”

  “It’s not for sure he lost the judge.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No, I’m not crazy. I checked the hospital no more’n ten minutes ago. They say he’s improving.”

  “I ask again, Gus, are you crazy? That had blown to hell already. You can’t let that guy improve.”

  “I can’t let him improve?”

  “That’s what I said. It’s what Tony would say. You better believe it. You’re the tiger, guy—not me. That old guy is going to come out screaming bloody murder. You better put a stopper in that damn quick.”

  The crew boss sighed heavily and said, “Okay. I’ll take care of it. But I don’t like the way things are going, Freddy. Suddenly everything is sour. And my boys are all edgy as hell. They know why suddenly everything is sour.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Gus!”

  “Hey! What the hell! Why shouldn’t I talk like that! It’s true. That son of a bitch does it every place he shows. You can’t keep a secret like that! I’m telling you the boys are edgy as hell. Frankly, so’m I. What the hell do we look for? Who do we look for? There’s no name, there’s no face, there’s nothing dammit until the guy rears up and swats you. Then all you can do is pick up the pieces. And wait for the next swat.”

  “You want to tell that to Tony?”

  “I’d almost rather.”

  “What th’ hell are you saying! That’s disgraceful! That’s the damndest—”

  “Hold it, simmer down. You got it wrong. I’m just saying maybe we should cool it awhile. Tony should get on his jolly ship and take a vacation. We all should. Let the guy roar around town all he likes. The guy doesn’t hang around that long, Freddy. He can’t afford to. And that’s our best defense. We all know that.”

  “We’re talking about one fucking guy! You’re going to let one guy run you out of your own damn town? Gus—that’s terrible! I don’t believe it!”

  “Listen to me, Freddy.”

  “You listen! This ain’t the old days. It’s not booze and broads you can put on the shelf and come back for when you feel better! This is big stuff! It’s Wall Street and it’s Zurich and it’s Washington! It’s all tied together. One damn stagger and it all falls to hell. Do you understand why Tony is under such pressure? Every damn thing he’s got is tied up in this! These big men are depending on him to deliver! It’s a timetable, it’s a schedule—it’s push-pull click-click and that’s the way it’s got to go! Don’t start talking about vacations now! You’ve got to stiffen it up, dammit. You’ve got to get these streets swarming with tigers and you’ve got to stop that wise son of a bitch in his tracks! Now that’s what Tony would tell you!”

  “Okay, okay,” the crew boss tiredly replied. “You know I will. I was just letting off steam.”

  “Well, thank God you didn’t let it off you know where.”

  The guy laughed faintly. “I don’t have that much steam, Freddy. When Tony wakes up, tell him Gus has got it under control. By that time I hope it’s true.”

  The recorded voices were replaced by a loud hum.

  It was the end of a string of recorded telephone conversations.

  Bolan punched a button on the intelligence console and turned thoughtful eyes toward his newest ally. “That’s it,” he said quietly.

  “You sound like quite a giant in their book, too,” Landry said solemnly. “This is all very revealing, isn’t it? It’s a good thing you alerted the police about Judge Daly. What was the time on that last call?”

  Bolan consulted the electronic display. “Less than an hour ago. We’re okay there.”

  The girl shivered. “I’d give a lot to know the identities of those ‘big men’ he was referring to. What was that about Zurich and Washington and Wall Street?”

  He said, “The financial-political loop, probably. It sounds like some sort of timetable for moving money—considerable sums, I’d say.”

  “Could I get a copy of that last conversation?”

  He grinned solemnly and said, “For your scrapbook?”

  “Is that all it’s good for?”

  “For you, maybe not. If you don’t get into a ‘sources’ problem. But it would never get into a courtroom.”

  She said, “Well, I don’t give a damn about sources. I’d like to have a copy.”

  “It can be arranged, sure.”

  They were, of course, aboard the Warwagon. They had made a quiet “pass” of the Morello headquarters in suburban Cleveland and “drained” the collectors installed by Bolan on his first day in the area. The recordings were programmed through the forward console while Bolan tooled on toward the interstate route. They were now approaching the lakefront area.

  Landry had been totally enthralled by the Warwagon’s surveillance systems—probably as close to “agog” as she would ever get. She told Bolan, “I still don’t understand your system. You say you place ‘collectors’ in the house and then you just—”

  He said, “No, the collector is a transceiver. It never goes inside. If I were using bugs in conjunction with the collector, the bugs would go inside. But I haven’t yet been able to get inside Morello’s headquarters—not inside the building. This tap is on the telephone line itself. Outside the building. It’s a countermeasured tap.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that it’s rigged to defeat tap detectors.”

  “This is a whole new world,” she said, those eyes glinting. “But now, again, what is the collector?”

  “In this case it’s a miniature transceiver—that means a transmitter and receiver in a single package—ganged in with a tiny magnetic recorder. The recorder operates at very slow speed. It is sound actuated. That is, it is automatically turned on when a sound enters the tap. It also turns itself off on a time delay when the conversation ends. The transceiver, on the other hand, is impulse actuated from my console here. Upon electronic command, the recorder switches to playback mode and em
pties its banks at extremely high speed. That playback is fed through the transceiver and, of course, comes out here. It will transmit twelve hours of recorded data in about twelve minutes.”

  “I don’t understand how it can do that.”

  “The fast replay? You’ve heard speeded-up tape recordings where the voices sound like cartoon characters? It’s the same idea, except that the speedup is so fast that you would hear no more than a high-pitched tone. All of the recording is compressed within that tone. My apparatus here records the tone, then breaks it out into a normal pulse recording. And the whole thing is program coded for time imprints.”

  “But it’s still just a tone recording? I mean, inside your equipment here?”

  “Right. That allows greater storage. I have months of stuff in the memory banks. Video, too.”

  “What?”

  “Video. You know, television type.”

  “Stop, you’re blowing my mind. Don’t tell me you can squeeze television programs into a—a tone?”

  “Sure. Television is all illusion. They don’t send pictures through the air. Not like a still photograph. All those beautiful scenes on TV go through the airwaves as simple electrical impulses. Well, not so simple. But one of these days you’ll be able to buy records—you know, like an LP album. You’ll just throw the record on a turntable. The turntable will be hooked up to your television set. You’ll sit there and watch The Brady Bunch from your turntable. The engineers are also developing tape cassettes. Hell, that stuff may already be available.”

  “And you have video files? Right now?”

  “Several thousand items, yes. Mug files, terrain orientation, that sort of stuff. It’s computer programmed. Instant access.”

  “Let’s go back to those collectors,” she said. “How’d you say you get the stuff out of the collectors?”

  “I just have to get within transmission range of the transceivers. In most terrain, that’s about a mile. Then I simply push the trigger on the console—and, voila, brain drain. It is sucked right in, I have my collection.”

  “Well, that’s very space-agey, isn’t it?” she said, awed.

  “That’s exactly what it is, Susan. Our space probes use very similar gear—or so I’m told.”

  “It’s fabulous. So are you. You’re a fabulous guy. Can you accept an apology from a very dumb broad?”

  “No,” he said. “I sort of liked it better the other way.”

  “Well, you can just go to hell then!”

  “Thanks. I needed that.”

  She surged forward and snaked a hand inside his shirt.

  He slapped it through the shirt and growled, “Watch it! You’ll put us in the ditch!”

  “Not with that hand, dummy. That hand was just the feint. This hand, this hand, my love, this is the assault hand.”

  And, indeed, where she grabbed him that time very nearly put them in the ditch.

  He growled, “Okay okay. I accept the apology from the dumb broad.”

  “Too late,” she said. “I took it back. I like it better this way, too.”

  And the man in the command chair was a very troubled warrior. He was, he knew, dangerously smitten with this unusual young woman. He was, he feared, falling in love again.

  Which, he also knew, could be the greatest hazard of all.

  12

  PACT

  They had come to an understanding, of sorts—Bolan and Landry—while lying in torpidly mellow embrace in the safe house at Shaker Heights. He had asked her, “Why didn’t you simply tell me that you’re a newspaperwoman? It’s no big deal.”

  And she had stirred herself to reply: “For two very good reasons. One, it isn’t true. Two, it was none of your damn business anyway.”

  “It is now. My business, I mean.”

  “Oh wow. Yes. Isn’t it. Okay. I’m not in newspaper work now. Hate it. Hate it. Have you ever been in a city room? Noise. Confusion. A hundred people sitting there banging on typewriters. Teletypes clacking and clanging. So I quit. Anyway, I like my freedom. I’m a freelancer now. Better that way. Pick my own assignments. Work my own hours, my own ways. Much better.”

  “So you are working on a story.”

  “Sure.”

  “Back to Go, then. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You kidding? Does an undercover cop tell everybody he meets that he’s working on a case? Beside, I had squatter’s rights. You were Johnny-come-lately. Also an intruder.”

  “That’s what you meant by competition.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Uh-huh. You said we were competitors.”

  “Okay.”

  “That left the territory wide open,” he told her. “You became an unknown quality. I live in no-man’s-land, remember. Sometimes it gets a bit tricky identifying friend and foe.”

  “Awww. You thought I might be a foe? Really?”

  He said, “There were those moments, yeah.”

  “How ’bout now?”

  He punched her weakly on the thigh. “Worst one I ever tangled with. I think you’ve severely undermined the war effort.”

  “Call me Delilah,” she said contentedly.

  “How did you tumble to the action at Pine Grove?”

  She snuggled closer. “I’m being interrogated, aren’t I?”

  “Something like that, sure.”

  “Oh well. I guess you want the whole truth and nothing but.”

  “Try your best, huh?”

  She giggled. “There had been this series of violent deaths in the area. Nothing called murder, though. Accidents. Suicides. And all of them in high society. People were getting paranoid. Then it stopped. And everyone was saying the usual clichés about, you know, tragedies running together and that sort of thing.”

  “It stopped six weeks ago,” Bolan said.

  “Okay, smarty. If you know it all …”

  He told her, “I just felt that somehow it related to the problem here. But I couldn’t run down the connection.”

  “Well, of course I knew nothing about your problem here. I was simply sniffing around. Journalistic curiosity, you know. And I came upon something. It took me straight to Pine Grove Country Club.”

  “What’d you come upon?”

  “A list of names. A typewritten list of names. Twenty names. All of the accident and suicide victims were on that list. Or they had been. A line was drawn through each of those names.”

  “Pine Grove,” he reminded her.

  “First let’s have a moral understanding.”

  “Okay. Whatever that means.”

  “It means that I refuse to be an accessory to murder. Anything I tell you is privileged. You can’t use it. For—for target practice.”

  “Back to that, huh? Okay. I respect your sensitivities. But you’ll have to respect mine, too. You call it murder. I call it duty. We’ll have to reach some technical understanding somewhere between those definitions. And I agree that I will not murder anyone whose name comes to my attention from your privileged disclosures. Okay?”

  “Sounds like doubletalk to me, Sir Giant. You promise me that you will not kill anyone.”

  He said, “You know I can’t do that. I’ll do my duty as I see it. Understand it, Susan. I’m not speaking of justice. I’m wearing no blindfold. I don’t have the rigidity of a cop or, say, a prosecuting attorney or a sitting judge. My task is to identify the enemy and then eliminate him. If I—”

  “And you’ll eliminate every wolf you find.”

  “Every one I identify, yes. But I am very discriminating. I pick my targets with the greatest of care.”

  She shivered and put a few inches between them. “It sounds so cold-blooded.”

  “Would you rather the blood be running hot when I make the cut? Would you trust the result better that way?”

  She said, “I just don’t see how you can take it upon yourself that way.”

  “Someone has to,” he replied grimly. “I just happened to be the guy who was standing there with nothing els
e to do when the duty roster was posted.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I wish it were. But it’s not. Susan, I want you to give up journalism.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Seriously. You should find a good man, get married, and stay home where you belong.”

  “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”

  “Sure I am. But let’s say I’m serious. What would you say?”

  “I’d tell you to go to hell. I take pride in my work. I’m good at it. Some day I’ll have a Pulitzer. Tending house is not exactly my idea of the best way to utilize four years of very expensive educational preparation. What I’m doing is very important. Just as important, and maybe more, than being the Great Earth Mother.”

  He said, “Okay. Apply that to me. I have twelve years of very expensive education. At the time I left ’Nam, I represented a U.S. government investment of several hundred thousand dollars. I am among the most highly trained and specialized soldiers our nation has ever turned out. I am rated as expert with every personal weapon in the national armory. I can also modify, build, or design weapons of fantastic complexity. I could show you a hundred and one ways to kill a man without putting a mark on him. I have developed a photographic memory. I can live for days without food or water or sleep. I can navigate by the stars and I have night vision almost equal to that of a jungle cat. I can hear a twig snap at a hundred yards in a living jungle and I can tell you the make and approximate horsepower of an engine passing by on land, water, or in the air. I could write a training manual on explosives and I could damn near do it for electronics surveillance devices. I could also write a textbook on military tactics and strategies. I have been highly trained to detect the smallest anomaly in terrain, costume, or personal behavior—and I’ve had plenty of opportunity to develop that training to a fine art. In Vietnam, one of my standard missions was to penetrate enemy-held territory, locate and identify civil and military leaders, and eradicate them. And they all wore black pajamas.”

  “That’s all highly impressive,” she murmured.

  “It isn’t given to impress. I’m trying to impart an understanding. You’re telling this guy, now, this trained military machine, to go home and tend house. I’m telling you that I cannot do it. The enemy is the enemy, dammit, whether in Europe, Asia, or Cleveland. They all wear black pajamas. There’s no one around who can or will distinguish between the sheep and the wolves. Well, dammit, I can. I don’t enjoy it. I wish to hell there was some way I could justify it to myself if I simply turned away and let someone else worry the problem. But everywhere I look, Susan, I see wolves stalking sheep. It isn’t something I can simply turn off. I see it, dammit. And I have no alternative but to respond. So I take a practical approach. You call it cold-blooded. Okay. Pragmatics are always cold-blooded. Wars are cold-blooded. You cannot fight them sensibly any other way. So I do not respond hotly, flailing away willy-nilly at an occasional wolf as it struts past. I use my training. I plan my campaigns. And I’m killing wolves.”