Metzger's Dog (2 page)

3
                  
“Doctor Henry Metzger!” shouted Chinese Gordon. “You’re a psychotic moron!” Trembling with fury, he shook his overalls over the balcony.

He spotted Doctor Henry Metzger sitting on the workbench along the wall of the shop where a patch of morning sunlight warmed the sheet metal surface. Chinese Gordon hurled the wet, reeking overalls at the cat. With the strength of his rage Chinese Gordon managed to propel the wad of denim halfway to the workbench. Doctor Henry Metzger raised his head to stare at Chinese Gordon for a moment, then turned his attention to licking his genitals.

Chinese Gordon looked around him for something else to throw, but with the thought came the awareness that he’d strained his shoulder with the first throw. He leaned over the railing and yelled, “You’re purring, you son of a bitch!” Doctor Henry Metzger slowly stretched his body, then walked along the bench to the end, sprang to the windowsill, and stepped through the empty panel.

Chinese Gordon turned and stomped into the kitchen to make himself some coffee. It was a hell of a bad start, he thought. The burglary had been bad enough, but this was ridiculous. He couldn’t believe Doctor Henry Metzger could be so mean spirited. Sure, there was such a thing as a difference of opinion on tactics, or even a disagreement. This was nothing less than revenge. As he waited for the water to boil, Chinese Gordon contemplated the meaning of Doctor Henry Metzger’s gesture. To a cat, a man’s overalls must seem like a cat’s fur, a neck-to-ankle cat suit. What depths of contempt must be expressed by pissing on a man’s fur?

He decided not to brood about it. Today was too important to permit him to spend time distracted with personal problems. For months he’d been preparing for this, measuring and figuring, then grinding and drilling and shaping the steel, then oiling and polishing the parts, assembling and reassembling them, then cycling the whole machine by hand, sliding the flat cam forward and back to make the cylinder turn. Then he’d taken the whole thing apart and searched for the burrs or scratches that meant something was out of balance or fitted wrong. He’d done practically nothing else when he’d been alone for the best part of a year. Chinese Gordon was a master tool-and-die maker, a man who could make a thing like this in a matter of days, but he was making only one and it had to be right.

Chinese Gordon took his coffee downstairs to the shop, opened his van, and took a look at what he’d made. It was done right and he knew it. It had been an act of will to keep himself from making it perfect. He was accustomed to precise measurements, to machining parts to such close tolerances that they seemed to have grown together. This job was different—the parts had to be fitted loosely so that when it was operated the rapid buildup of grime and residue didn’t cause it to freeze up, and of course there was the heat expansion too.

He had no doubt about this piece of work. Once again Chinese Gordon had succeeded where others hadn’t even been crazy enough to try. As his eyes moved along it, part by part, he felt proud: the butt of the cam with its powerful return springs, the smooth cylinder, then down the long, black tube to the end. There was no question about it, he had reproduced it in every detail—a working M-39-A1 automatic aircraft cannon.

He reached in and checked the feeder again, jiggling one of the star wheels to line it up with the one beside it, then examining the belt stripper. Just for luck he flipped the extractor with his thumb before he closed the van door.

Even the pride of the craftsman and the pride of ownership together weren’t enough to drive out the feel of the cold cement floor on his bare feet. Chinese Gordon climbed upstairs to search for something to wear. As he reached the top he saw Doctor Henry Metzger slip back in through the window. When Chinese Gordon stopped, Doctor Henry Metzger stopped.

“That’s right,” said Chinese Gordon. “You’re better at this guerrilla shit than I am, because you’re an animal. But that’s also your flaw, Doctor Henry Metzger. You don’t even know it’s Saturday, you shithead. I don’t wear overalls on Saturday. If it had been me, I’d have pissed on your blue jeans and shirts.” He laughed as he walked into his bedroom to dress.

He reappeared, buttoning his shirt, just as Doctor Henry Metzger finished defecating on the overalls lying on the shop floor and began his pantomime of burying the droppings by scratching the pant legs over the pile.

C
HINESE
G
ORDON SANG
“Old Dan Tucker” as he drove the van along the Pearblossom Highway. Then they swung onto Route 18 at Victorville. Just as they drove past the Roy Rogers Museum, where the gigantic statue of Trigger pawed the dry air of the Mojave Desert, Kepler poured Immelmann’s can of beer into Chinese Gordon’s boot, so it made a sucking noise whenever he lifted it off the gas pedal. Chinese Gordon launched instead into another favorite: “She lives on a cattle ranch,” he sang, “and she shits like an avalanche.” Kepler and Immelmann tolerated countless verses, but as they left Joshua Tree and moved toward Twentynine Palms, Immelmann began to glare at him, so Chinese Gordon switched to “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo.” This made Kepler glare at him. Chinese Gordon was puzzled until he remembered that Kepler had spent part of 1965 as a mercenary in the eastern territories around Lake Tanganyika. He drove on in silence, turning south again at Twentynine Palms into the Pinto Basin.

He didn’t slow the van until he neared Fried Liver Wash, where the Hexie Mountains jutted to the west and the country to the east stretched off into forbidding, empty flats that shimmered in the heat.

“This it?” said Immelmann.

Chinese Gordon didn’t answer. He swung the van off the highway and held onto the steering wheel as they bounced along the desert floor into the dry bed of the wash. They kept going until they reached the place Chinese Gordon had found weeks earlier. Two hundred yards up the wash there was the rusting abandoned hulk of a 1954 Ford F-100 pickup truck. When Chinese Gordon had found it he hadn’t been able to decide whether some fool had parked it there just before a flash flood or just driven it there, taken the tires off, and left it.

“This is the perfect spot,” said Chinese Gordon. “There’s nobody within fifty miles of us.”

“No argument there,” said Kepler, placing a cold beer can under each armpit. “A germ couldn’t live out here. Let’s get it over with so we can bury you before dark.”

Chinese Gordon wasn’t willing to be rushed. He turned the van around and lined it up on the pickup truck. “See?” he said, “I can aim the thing using this mirror on the dashboard with the crosshairs. All I have to do is steer the van so the target is lined up.”

“Clever,” said Kepler, suppressing a yawn. “Big fucking deal. You can line it up, but you can’t fire it or you’ll blow your own ass off the planet.”

“Not true,” said Chinese Gordon patiently. “I’ve got it all figured out.” He flipped a switch under the dash, and a panel in the rear of the van slid open to bare the muzzle of the M-39.

“Hold it,” said Immelmann. He and Kepler scrambled out of the van and stood a few yards off. “Go ahead,” said Immelmann.

“Really,” said Chinese Gordon, “I can do it.” He flipped a second switch, and the converted air conditioner fan added its hum to the purr of the van’s engine. “See,” he said, “this vents the gases and smoke. Now the generator.” He flipped a third switch, and there was a whining sound. “The firing voltage is 310 AC, so I couldn’t use batteries.”

The others nodded and looked at each other. Immelmann took a long swallow of the beer and burped thoughtfully. Then he said, “We should have come in two cars. We must be two hundred miles from Van Nuys.”

Chinese Gordon ignored him. He put on his earphones and picked up the hand switch that was dangling at the end of a telephone cord. He moved the van forward a few inches, steering so that the crosshairs of the mirror were on the center of the cab of the derelict pickup truck, then put the van in neutral and gently pressed the hand-switch button.

There was a roar that lasted almost a whole second. It sounded to Chinese Gordon like
Ooowoow
. For an instant he thought the van had blown up, but it was only the recoil of the automatic cannon kicking the van forward about ten feet before his foot hit the brake.

Before his head snapped back he saw that he hadn’t missed the target. The pickup truck had sat palpably and clearly in the crosshairs, then it had disappeared in fire and flying dirt. It looked as though the earth under it had exploded.

Chinese Gordon set the hand brake and looked back at his companions. Immelmann was sitting on the ground looking dazed, his hands still over his ears. Kepler was already running toward the place where the pickup truck had been. It was now just a charred and smoking hole with large pieces of twisted metal strewn about.

Chinese Gordon sauntered up to Immelmann. “I guess it works,” Chinese Gordon said. Immelmann’s mouth moved, but Chinese Gordon couldn’t hear anything. He wondered if he’d gone deaf, but then he remembered he still had the earphones on.

He snatched the earphones off and yelled, “What?” glad to hear his own voice.

“An elephant fart,” said Immelmann.

“What?” shouted Chinese Gordon.

“It sounded like an elephant fart,” said Immelmann. His eyes widened and he shook his head again. “Exactly. Not rat-tat-tat. More like Woooooow.”

Kepler was sprinting back toward them, shouting and hooting. “You’re a genius, Chinese. A genius! What was that?”

“Fifty rounds of high-explosive incendiary,” said Chinese Gordon. “Ball ammo would have done it, but we don’t have any.”

Immelmann stood up, threw his beer can, and said, “A nasty weapon, Chinese. You’re not the sporting gentleman you once were—you’re a fucking mad scientist. What do you say we stop in Palm Springs for a drink before we pick up your Nobel Prize?”

“Okay,” said Chinese Gordon. “It’ll give us a chance to look at some banks.”

4
                  
The office of the president of the Seyell Foundation was a room fifty feet long and forty across, with a vaulted ceiling eighteen feet above. The room was dominated by an antique desk of reddish maple with a hand-rubbed surface so vast that Porterfield had at first glance mistaken it for a billiard table that had unaccountably been flooded with blood.

The office had been perfectly reconstructed to look as it had when Theophilus “call me Ted” Seyell had sat at the desk to fire three hundred employees on New Year’s Day, 1932. The furniture, the old Persian rugs, even the leather-bound books that lined the walls had been moved from the old Seyell Building in New York before it had been demolished in 1946 and set down intact here in Washington. It was as though the shrine to the personality of Theophilus Seyell must remain inviolate or the immense fortune he’d amassed would no longer cling to the bank accounts that bore his potent name. Seyell had begun the Just Perfect Toy Company in 1904, making wooden cutout toys with a jigsaw at night after working as a bank teller all day, then hired an immigrant laborer after a year to help him. Soon there were salesmen, more laborers to work a day shift, and the J.P.T. Company began to grow. Through the early part of the century it flourished and diversified until the average person didn’t remember what J.P.T. stood for, although employees continued to refer to it as “Just Plain Ted” long after it ceased to be possible that many of them could ever have seen Theophilus Seyell. J.P.T. retooled to make rifle parts for World War I and distilling equipment at the end of Prohibition. It was investigated after World War II for war profiteering, but by then Theophilus Seyell had died and the entity that had been J.P.T. was already undergoing its final transformation to the Seyell Foundation. Its board of directors had become trustees and executors, its assets were converted to numbers in account books of the philanthropic and scientific foundation that Seyell had described in his will. There were no stockholders to buy out, no relatives to consult: J.P.T. had always been Just Plain Ted.

B
ENJAMIN
P
ORTERFIELD SAT AT THE DESK
examining the weekly financial statement. He felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew he’d get used to sitting in old Theophilus Seyell’s throne room. The names and titles the Company had invented over the years had brought him to worse places, but at the moment the size of the empty space around him seemed to create a vacuum that must inevitably by natural laws be on the verge of being filled. Every few seconds he found himself looking up toward the distant oak door to see who had come. The aspect of this assignment that worried him most was that it was too easy. It had been represented to him as an emergency. He was the most appropriate agent in place who could credibly move into the presidency of a major research foundation in a month’s time without some sort of publicity. He was an expert in moving Company money. When the word had come through that many of the Latin America projects must be made to disappear from government budgets, he’d been the obvious one to handle the transition. The Company had been preparing the Seyell Foundation for years, placing votes on the board of trustees, tinkering with its portfolio, waiting for the day when the Foundation would quietly become a Company asset.

When the day had come they had picked Benjamin Porterfield, and that annoyed him. The choice made too much sense, fit the pattern too well. Most of Porterfield’s contemporaries were chiefs of station somewhere or even running regional desks at Langley. That part didn’t bother him. He’d always been a field man, beginning in Special Operations in the fifties and then moving into Domestic Ops in the seventies. His last three assignments had been like this one—a quick meeting with one of the bespectacled innocents who stepped off a commuter flight with nothing but an empty briefcase, gave orders in the Director’s name, and caught the next flight home. Porterfield would be appointed president of a small airline in Miami, vice-president of the Canadian subsidiary of a large food corporation, and now president of a foundation. Always it was an emergency, always he was to head the transition team. They were pulling him closer and closer to Langley, using his gray hairs to build him a deeper and deeper cover, putting him in charge of operations so large and crucial that he couldn’t possibly move without Langley’s logistical and technical support. Having Langley’s support was like being encased in cement. In the old days the Company had been different. In 1953 he’d been given a suitcase full of currency, an airline ticket, and a list of telephone numbers to memorize. A year later his little army of mercenaries was in the Guatemala jungles. That had been another time, a different world.

The telephone didn’t ring, just lit up. He picked up the receiver.

“Mr. Porterfield, it’s Mr. Bartlett of Crabtree and Bacon to speak to you about the audit,” said Mrs. Goode.

“Tell him I’ll call him back,” said Porterfield. It was another annoyance, but only a temporary one. Until the communication between the Foundation and Langley could be moved to a safe wire of its own, he’d have to follow the procedure. In fifteen minutes he’d call back from a telephone booth in the neighborhood.

“He says it’s very important and he’s got to leave his office to catch a flight this afternoon,” said Mrs. Goode.

“Right,” said Porterfield, and pressed the button on his telephone. “Porterfield.”

“It’s okay now,” said the voice. “The wire is installed.”

“Good. Is that all?”

“No. We’re calling about one of the projects Morrison has passed to you.” The “we” was perfect, thought Porterfield.

“Which one?”

“It’s a Professor Ian Donahue at ULA. The Director himself read the grant report and ordered the whole operation placed under the highest classification. Since three this morning we’ve had someone writing a replacement report. The Director called for Morrison to be here by ten-thirty,” the voice said smugly.

“What about me?”

“You’ve got until eleven.”