style="font-size:15px;"> “We won’t lose,” said Don. “But we’ll have to do it my way. It’s the only way there is.”
“No.”
“General!” Don released his pent-up temper and frustration m a furious blast of sound. “What other way is there?”
It stopped Penn as he knew it would, but only for a moment.
“I can’t risk it,” he snapped. “Klieger’s only one man, dangerous but still only one. We can handle one man, but can we handle a dozen or more? It’s treasonable even to suggest it.”
Don fumed as he recognized the emotion-loaded semantic symbol. Penn with his mania for security had probably aroused unwelcome attention in the first place. Like now when he had insisted that they meet in a car on a road in the rain for fear of some undetected electronic ear waiting to catch their conversation. For long moments the silence dragged, then Don drew a deep breath.
“Treasonable or not it’s something you have to consider. For one thing the escape was organized. The lights failed—a telepathically controlled rat gnawed a vital cable. A guard was taken sick for no apparent reason and, for a moment, there was a blank spot in the defences. There were other things, all small, not one coincidental. The whole lot could have walked right out.”
“But they didn’t!” Penn pounded the arm of the rear seat. “Only Klieger. That proves something.”
“That he wanted to run to the Reds?” Don shrugged. “Then what’s keeping him? He’s had plenty of time to make contact if that’s what he wanted.”
“What’s your point?” Penn was losing his patience. “Are you trying to tell me that those...freaks back there are holding a gun to my head? They’ll help, you say, but on their terms. Terms! His hand closed into a fist. “Don’t they understand that the country is as good as at war?”
“They want the thing we keep saying we are fighting to protect,” said Don. “They want a little freedom. Is that such an outrageous demand?”
He leaned back, closing his eyes, seeing again the faces of the men back in Cartwright House. Some of them, so Malchin had said, had been there twelve years. A long time. Too long to be willing guinea pigs so that their talents could be trained and developed and exploited. But to the general they weren’t men. They were ‘freaks’; just another weapon to be used, to be protected and hidden, to be destroyed if there was a chance they might fall into enemy hands.
“What?” He opened his eyes, conscious that the general was talking to him. Penn glowered and repeated what he had said. “Can you catch him, even if they won’t help you?”
“I don’t know.” Don pursed his lips, shadowed eyes introspective beneath prominent brows. “I feel that we’ve gone about this thing in the wrong way. We’ve thought of it as just another manhunt and we’ve failed because we’re trying to catch no ordinary man. There must be a purpose behind what Klieger did. Find the reason for his leaving and we’ll find the purpose.”
“Isn’t that what you went to find out?” Penn made no effort to hide his sarcasm.
“Yes. I didn’t fail.”
“Then—?”
“He stole a rare vase of the Ming Dynasty,” said Don. “Find out why and you have the answer.”
* * * *
Max Earlman lay supine on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The hotel room was warm, littered with the personal effects of the three men. Against one wall a large-scale map of the city hung slightly out of true, the grid pattern of streets marked with a host of colored pins. Beyond the windows the early evening had softened the harsh outlines of the concrete jungle, turning even the garish illuminations into things of glowing beauty.
Bronson stirred where he sat at a table, the thin reek of gun oil harsh to Earlman’s nostrils. He lit a cigarette to kill the odour and stared distastefully at the other man.
“Do you have to do that?” Smoke plumed from the cigarette as Max gestured towards the pistol Bronson was cleaning. Bronson continued with his business.
“What gives with you, Bronson?” Earlman swung to his feet, nerves taut with irritation. “You walk and eat and sleep and I guess you can make noises, too, if you put your mind to it, but are you really a man?”
Metal clicked with deadly precision as Bronson reassembled the gun. He tucked it into its holster, drew it with a fantastic turn of speed, and returned it again.
Earlman jerked forward, anger burning in the deep, bruised-looking eyes. He turned as Don entered the room. He looked tired.
“No luck?” Max knew the answer. Don shook hiss head.
“We’re still on our own.” Crossing the room he stood before the map, studying the clusters of coloured pins. “Have you got them all?”
“Every single one.” Earlman blew smoke at the map. “If anyone ever tells me this city has no culture, I’ll tear them apart. The place is lousy with art galleries, museums, exhibitions, antique shops, displays, missions and what have you. I’ve marked them all.” He looked sideways at Gregson’s bleak face. “There are a lot, Don. Too many.”
“We can whittle them down.” Don sighed, feeling the tension of the past few weeks building up inside, the tautness of the past few days stretching his nerves. He forced himself to relax, taking deep breaths, forgetting the urgency and Penn’s hysterical demands.
“Cut out foreign films, contemporary art, modernist paintings, exhibitions of abstract design. Eliminate the stamp collections, trade missions, engineering displays. Concentrate on the old, the rare, the beautiful.”
“How close should I go?”
“Close. Keep the unusual, the short-term, the items loaned from private collections.”
Earlman nodded and busied himself with the coloured pins and a sheaf of catalogues. Don turned and stared out of the window.
Below him the city sprawled, scar-like streets slashing between soaring anthills of concrete, the whole glittering with light. Somewhere in the city another man probably stood staring from a window—a mild man with a love of artistic things. A man who, until recently, had lived a law-abiding existence and who, suddenly, had broken the conditioning of a lifetime to rob and steal and run.
Why?
Frustration, yes, all the ‘residents’ of Cartwright House were frustrated, but they had remained when they could have fled. Only Klieger had run and had kept running. Now he was somewhere in the city, his talent warning him of approaching danger, showing him how to dodge and move and avoid so as to remain free.
Free in order to do what?
Don sighed, wondering for the thousandth time just how it must feel to be a clairvoyant. How to catch a man who was.
The others could have helped but Penn had blocked that. With a dozen other clairvoyants Don could have covered the field and trapped Klieger by sheer weight of numbers. No one man, no matter how gifted, could have beaten such odds.
Now he was on his own.
