He got up from the chair and went back into his regular office. He had ordered a couch built long enough for even his oversized frame to stretch out comfortably upon. He lay down on it now; and let his mind run free, associating between the files he had just studied. First, the question of the second-in-command. Whoever he was, the references to him must appear more frequently than references to anyone else.
The practices his mind had developed for searching out such information went to work as he lay, completely relaxed, letting his conscious thoughts roam where they would. After a while they turned up the bit of code that had been in the files as " Id." The "one" had always been a numeral one and the "d" had been lower case.
These had always associated with something that might involve a legal component; and in some cases the legal connection was actually mentioned. It made Bleys think of the legalist who had countersigned Dahno's will. If "Id" stood in any way for him, there were certain things to recommend him for the position of second-in-command.
The first of these was the fact of his being so frequently mentioned in the secret files. Beyond that, there was the possibility that if it actually was him, then the "Id" at least signified a person; and no other bit of shorthand in context that could stand for a person cropped up so frequently.
Finally, Bleys' mind began to explore the situation—as a legalist it would be entirely reasonable that Dahno should consult with him as frequently as a second-in-command would need to be seen by Dahno without attracting attention.
Someone in Dahno's position, which was essentially that of a lobbyist, could be expected to run into legalistic problems. Particularly concerning bits of legislation with which the majority of his Member clients were concerned.
In short, it was perfect cover for a second-in-command.
Bleys tried for more evidence from what his mind remembered of the files, but nothing came. He abandoned that subject for the moment; and went instead to the one of the armed retainers.
If they existed, as he was sure they did, they would be referred to there. They would be bound to come up from time to time as decisions had to be made about them, or Dahno had some reason for having to do with them.
To Bleys' knowledge, Dahno had never made any use of them during the time that Bleys had been here with him on Association, away from the farm and in Ecumeny.
It was possible, of course, that situations had come up in which Dahno had been successfully able to hide from him that his private army had been used. But Bleys could not believe it. To a certain extent their use would be against Dahno's basic, part-Exotic attitude toward people and life. Only unavoidable necessity would cause him to use them as Hammer Martin had tried to use two of his to assassinate Bleys. It could only happen if Dahno were personally and seriously threatened. But now, he was.
For the last four years at least, Bleys had been in a position to judge pretty well whether any such threat or emergency had come up. As far as he knew—with the single exception of Linx, which had proved false—no one disliked Dahno and no one was out to get him in any way. There had been minor crises involving his clients, and to a certain extent threatening to involve him along with them, that had cropped up during that period; but none of them were the kind that in Bleys' judgment of his brother would justify Dahno's using force at any point, let alone armed force.
—But he must have had some occasion to visit them, to see them face to face in all that time. Bleys' mind ran once more through the secret files, much faster than any memory device could have done so—and suddenly something jumped out at him, dated five years ago.
It read:
hs to Moseville, 15 Circle Drive, Box 149
The "hs" had meant nothing to him the first time he had seen that entry. He assumed it was shorthand for the name of some client. Moseville was a city about half the size of Ecumeny and about nine hundred kilometers distant. It was on the edge of a resort area; both it and the resort area were surrounded by a large belt of fairly rich farmland, broken into large farms.
Now, it struck him suddenly that Moseville was in many ways an excellent location for the hidden fighters. It was far enough from Ecumeny not to be considered usually as having any connection with the governmental city. But Moseville was also large enough so that it could satisfy the recreational needs of any such group of armed retainers. Either the resort area or the surrounding farmland would be practical as a place to set up a training school and permanent camp.
The possibility that their address was in the farmlands occurred suddenly to Bleys, now.
The name "Circle Drive" implied a road that went nowhere. "Box 149" indicated that perhaps it was simply a circular post office drop-off spot, lined with rural mailboxes to which the locals came to collect their mail.
His mind, having made that jump, made another, "hs" suggested the word "Hounds"; and the "hs" suddenly connected in Bleys' mind with the thought that the legalist, who might be Dahno's shadow lieutenant, could make all the personal contacts with them. Dahno need never go near the place.
Also if "hs" could stand for "Hounds," "Id" could stand for "first dog." It was the sort of thing to tickle Dahno's particular sense of humor. Together, the two codes fitted a pattern: the second-in-command was to seem to operate within the law and the retainers outside it.
Bleys' mind ran swiftly through the secret files once more, picking up tiny little scraps and bits of possible evidence that shored up this pattern of interpretation and indicated that his translation of the shorthand in both cases was correct.
The pattern seemed to hold. Bleys checked the monitor on his wrist to find out if the legalist who had signed Dahno's will was in town, in Ecumeny itself. Norton Brawley had a legal office less than thirty blocks away.
CHAPTER 30
Bleys needed to find out about the shadow lieutenant and the Hounds as quickly as possible, so that no surprises came out of anywhere to trip him up while Dahno was gone. Norton Brawley was closer; but he preferred to confront the man— after all, it was only a suspicion—with as much information in hand as possible; and that included all that could immediately be known about the Hounds.
So, it should be the Hounds first.
Bleys flew to Moseville, in a self-drive atmosphere craft, with an auto-pilot to back up his own knowledge of handling such craft. He parked the aircraft at the local airport and rented a hovercar.
A phone call to the local postal department established the fact that 15 Circle Drive was one of many such places as he had imagined—drop-off spots for rural mail—merely a circular stretch of road with postal boxes side by side all along it. The 15, apparently, did not refer to a point on the circle drive, but that it was the fifteenth of such Circle Drives, in the southwest country just beyond Moseville.
It was late afternoon when he got there. This turned out to be fortunate because it was a time of day when a number of the boxes were being emptied by people who lived in the rural area but worked in the city, and were now on their way home and had stopped to pick up their mail.
He got back in his hovercar and drove on around the circle until he came to someone at a box who could not have seen him when he got out of the car to look at Box 149. Seated within the car, his unusual height was not so noticeable.
He stopped the car, put down the window and leaned out to speak to a man with a long narrow face under a receding hairline of brown hair, with a wart on his chin, who was just turning away from the box from which he had collected his own mail.
"My apologies," Bleys said to him, "my brother's been at whatever place that's connected with Box 149. I've been writing him at that address. I didn't realize it was a drop-off address, like this. I thought I'd surprise him. I've got some unexpected time off from the business that brought me into Moseville. Do you know the area around here? How would I find the place which gets its mail from Box 149?"
Rural people on both Association and Harmony tended to be generally friendly and helpful to strangers, as long as the prickly matter of re
ligion did not come up between them. This man was no different. He rubbed his chin with the wart on it, thoughtfully.
"Yes, I know it," he said; "it'd be easier for me to show you the way there than give you directions, though. Do you want to follow my car and I'll lead you to it?"
"Thank you," said Bleys.
He rolled the window up. The other man got back into his own maroon-colored hovercar and led the way off the circle onto the road; on which it turned left and drove some little distance, making right- and left-hand turns which Bleys stored in his memory, noting something at each turn that could be used as an identification point later on. The other car stopped at last before a long and high stone fence, with a pair of heavy steel gates set across the entrance road through it.
The maroon hovercar driver rolled his window down, stuck his head out, and called back to Bleys, who had also put his window down and looked outside.
"This is it!" called the guide. "Punch the button under the screen in the wall to the right of the gate and you can talk to them up at the house. They can open the gates from there for you."
"Thanks!" called Bleys. The other waved a dismissive hand and drove off.
Bleys turned his attention to the seat beside him and went through the motions of gathering things together, until his guide might not look back through his rear-viewer, and wonder why he had not gotten out to press the gate button.
Finally the other car turned off on a crossroad and disappeared behind some trees.
Bleys stayed where he was, looking out through the window on the passenger's side of the car at the gate and the screen with the annunciator stud below it. Gate and wall itself were built with extraordinary sturdiness. There was no sign of special protection about the wall, but Bleys suspected that there would be a variety of alarms there.
He started up his car and drove along until he found the same crossroad that his guide's car had turned off on. That vehicle was only a maroon speck in the distance, now.
Bleys got out; and, using a pair of compensating binoculars in the growing dusk, looked up and down the wall. It continued across in front of him, turning a corner visibly at last to his right and apparently went back from the road. But on his left, it stretched out for quite a ways, until it disappeared in some trees.
Bleys drove up as far as the trees and found, as he had rather thought there might be, an unpaved road leading in among them. He drove his hovercar far enough down this to hide it from anyone passing on the road, got out and walked on through the trees until he came out on their far side and could once more examine the wall. It had turned from the road already and was headed back at a right angle.
Now that he was beyond the trees, he could see that the wall ran back from the road only about a hundred yards further, then took a sharp right angle to wall the back of the estate, or whatever it was. Clearly, it was not an ordinary farm.
He went back to his car. He had come prepared for the fact that he might have to take some kind of action right away. It might be safer to leave now and come back at another time; but the chances of getting in and out of Moseville without attracting attention were greatest if he did everything on this first trip.
Back at the car he opened a suitcase and changed completely into black clothing, including a tight hood over his head, covering all but his face; black gloves and a pigment to black out the skin of his face. Finally, he put night lenses into his eyes. The lenses were made to gather available light whenever the level of outside illumination dropped below a certain level—as the daylight already had—but not interfere in the case of normal levels of lighting.
He took with him a number of small devices, some small sensing equipment; as well as a couple of throwing knives— one inside his boot, with its handle hidden by his pantleg over the top of the boot; and the other in a sheath on a cord around his neck, and hanging down under his black jumper beside his upper spine.
He also took with him a vial of specially prepared scent for any guard dogs that should be within. At last, ready to go, he approached the stone wall opposite his woods.
By this time it was quite dark. However, his lenses were picking up as much vision as a pair of night glasses held to his eyes would have done. One of the things that Bleys had included in his studies was just such burglar-type work as he was now engaged in. As with a great many other of the things he quietly studied, this had not been one he had had any particular immediate plans for using; but had only felt might come in useful, in later years. Now, he found himself putting to use his sneak-thief techniques earlier than expected.
He reached the wall but was careful not to touch it. Examining it with his sensors, he found nothing until he
climbed a nearby tree and was able to aim one of them at the top of the wall itself.
He had expected some kind of alarm system; and sure enough, there it was. The mortar between the stones at the very top of the fence was sensitized.
There was an answer to this type of situation. Bleys' instructors in this type of activity had taught him what to do; and made access for him to the equipment he needed. From a hip pocket of the suit he was wearing he took something that looked no larger than a folded handkerchief; but when unfolded appeared to be a very thin sheet of black plastic, perhaps five feet long and four feet across.
He went up close to the wall and quickly threw this blanket with one move over the top of the wall.
It was what was known as a mirror-image transmitter. Now it blanketed out the mortar that had been sensitized to transmit a picture of anything crossing it, for the distance of the covering itself. But what it showed to the sensors reading the length of mortar it had covered, was an image of the sky-scene the mortar had been transmitting just before it was covered. Bleys could, and did now, climb over it while beneath him the mortar continued to transmit a picture of the night's emerging stars.
His sensing equipment, operated from the top of the wall, reported that the ground on the inside of the wall was in no way equipped with man-traps of any kind. He dropped down lightly from the top of the wall onto the ground and looked about. Before him were more trees, although these were carefully planted, trimmed and tended trees, with an almost lawn-like ground inside them.
Dimly beyond the trees he could see illumination of some kind, as it might be the windows of a building further on.
He went toward the light. After several minutes one of the sensors on the belt around his waist began to beep, and he lifted up a small dial-faced instrument to see an arrow pointing slightly off to his right. Below this was a reading of two hundred. As he looked at it, it clicked down to one-ninety. Guard dogs, to be coming at that speed and in that silence.
They would be less than a couple of hundred feet from him by now. To the right of the number a small dot of red light had been lit. To check, he picked up another of the sensing instruments from his belt and punched for an identification read-out. The words appearing on the back-lighted screen were "dogs 2."
That last bit of information was all he needed for the moment. He found and unstoppered the vial. The stopper ended in a small device which sprayed a narrow band of almost invisible droplets. In fact the droplets were so fine that it was essentially a mist. But its effect was to lay down a strip on the ground that gave off certain odors.
He waited. Dogs like this were an expensive investment.
He could just begin to see them now with the night vision of his lenses—two large black dogs running side by side silently and eagerly. They looked like dobermans. To get such animals, it was necessary to buy frozen embryos shipped in from Earth and rear them under special laboratory conditions to the birth stage; and thereafter continue to handle them carefully until they were grown.
Bleys waited.
So far the dogs seemed to be paying no attention to the scent barrier. But their noses might already have caught it. For a moment, Bleys was afraid that after all the stuff did not work. He took the knife from his boot in one hand and the knife from his back sling
in the other-and stood ready in case the dogs reached him.
But now, suddenly, they were slowing as they approached the barrier. At about six meters out they came almost to a halt, their noses sniffing eagerly before them. Their heads dropped almost to the ground and they moved forward gradually, increasing a little in speed until they came actually to the scent strip, where they stopped to sniff directly at the spray on the ground.
The odor in this case was an artificial copy of the pheromones from the urine of a female dog in heat, with a methyl-ester drug added that would trigger off a nerve collapse when sniffed at closely, as the two dogs were doing now.
Abruptly, it worked. Both animals collapsed, twitching, completely conscious but having lost all nervous control of their bodies. Bleys walked out to where they lay and gave each a spray-injection that would render them completely unconscious for the next three hours. By the time they came to, all trace of the other chemicals he had sprayed on the ground would have evaporated.
He went on toward the lights in the distance.
As he came out of the trees and got closer to the building which was now fully visible with most of its lights lit, he was able to clearly see areas for outdoor exercise and training. He passed a running track, an exercise maze, and patches of ground that looked as if they were laid out for types of exercise which could be anything from fencing to martial arts.
He got close to the building and these gave way to lawn. He came up against the building and began to circle it, examining for ways of entry.
He came finally to a ground-level door, black against the shingle wall of the house, the color of which his lenses were not capable of aiding him to make out. He stopped and held one of the sensing devices against it. It whirred for a second and then clicked. He stood back, tilted it up from its connection to his belt and looked at its face.
Zero 4. No other, he read on the face.