Short Fiction · Time Crime (3/3) (3/8)

They had a few minutes to wait, under the marquee, before the green police aircar landed and came rolling across the rain-wet surface of the landing stage. Crossing to it and opening the rear door, he put Dalla in and climbed in after her, slamming the door. It was only then that he saw Tortha Karf hunched down in the rear seat. He motioned them to silence, and did not speak until the car was rising above the building.

“I wanted to fill you in on this, as soon as possible,” he said. “Your hunch about Salgath Trod was good; just a few minutes before I called you, he called me. He says this slave trade is the work of something he calls the Organization; says he’s been taking orders from them for years. His attack on the Management and motion for a censure-vote were dictated from Organization top echelon. Now he’s convinced that they’re going to force him to make false accusations against the Paratime Police and then kill him before he’s compelled to repeat his charges under narco-hypnosis. So he’s offered to surrender and trade information for protection.”

“How much does he know?” Vall asked.

Tortha Karf shook his head. “Not as much as he claims to, I suppose; he wouldn’t want to reduce his own trade-in value. But he’s been involved in this thing for the last fifteen years, and with his political prominence, he’d know quite a lot.”

“We can protect him from his own gang; can we protect him from psycho-rehabilitation?”

“No, and he knows it. He’s willing to accept that. He seems to think that death at the hands of his own associates is the only other alternative. Probably right, too.”

The floodlighted green towers of the Paratime Building were wheeling under them as they circled down.

“Why would they sacrifice a valuable accomplice like Salgath Trod, in order to make a transparently false accusation against us?” Vall wondered.

“Ha, that’s our new rookie cop’s idea!” Tortha Karf chuckled, nodding toward Dalla. “We got Zortan Harn to introduce an urgent-business motion to appoint a committee to investigate BuPsychHyg, this morning. The motion passed, and this is the reaction to it. The Organization’s scared. Just as Dalla predicted, they don’t want us finding out how people with potentially criminal characteristics missed being spotted by psychotesting. Salgath Trod is being sacrificed to block or delay that.”

Vall nodded as the wheels bumped on the landing stage and the antigrav field went off. That was the sort of thing that happened when you started on a really fruitful line of investigation. They got out and hurried over under the marquee, the car lifting and moving off toward the hangars. This was the real break; no matter how this Organization might be compartmented, a man like Salgath Trod would know a great deal. He would name names, and the bearers of those names, arrested and narco-hypnotized, would name other names, in a perfect chain reaction of confessions and betrayals.

Another police car had landed just ahead of them, and three men were climbing out; two were in Paratime Police green, and the third, handcuffed, was in Service Sector Proletarian garb. At first, Vall though that Salgath Trod had been brought in disguised as a Prole prisoner, and then he saw that the prisoner was short and stocky, not at all like the slender and elegant politician. The two officers who had brought him in were talking to a lieutenant, Sothran Barth, outside the antigrav shaft kiosk. As Vall and Tortha Karf and Dalla walked over, the car which had brought them lifted out.

“Something that just came in from Industrial Twenty-four, Chief,” Lieutenant Sothran said in answer to Tortha Karf’s question. “May be for Assistant Verkan’s desk.”

“He’s a Prole named Yandragno, sir,” one of the policemen said. “Industrial Sector Constabulary grabbed him peddling Martian hellweed cigarettes to the girls in a textile mill at Kangabar Equivalent. Captain Jamzar thinks he may have gotten them from somebody in the Organization.”

A little warning bell began ringing in the back of Verkan Vall’s mind, but at first he could not consciously identify the cause of his suspicions. He looked the two policemen and their prisoner over carefully, but could see nothing visibly wrong with them. Then another car came in for a landing and rolled over under the marquee; the door opened, and a police officer got out, followed by an elegantly dressed civilian whom he recognized at once as Salgath Trod. A second policeman was emerging from the car when Vall suddenly realized what it was that had disturbed him.

It had been Salgath Trod, himself, less than half an hour ago, who had introduced the term, “the Organization,” to the Paratime Police. At that time, if these people were what they claimed to be, they would have been in transposition from Industrial Twenty-four, on the Fifth Level. Immediately, he reached for his needler. He was clearing it of the holster when things began happening.

The handcuffs fell from the “prisoner’s” wrists; he jerked a neutron-disruption blaster from under his jacket. Vall, his needler already drawn, rayed the fellow dead before he could aim it, then saw that the two pseudo-policemen had drawn their needlers and were aiming in the direction of Salgath Trod. There were no flashes or reports; only the spot of light that had winked on and off under Vall’s rear sight had told him that his weapon had been activated. He saw it appear again as the sights centered on one of the “policemen.” Then he saw the other imposter’s needler aimed at himself. That was the last thing he expected ever to see, in that life; he tried to shift his own weapon, and time seemed frozen, with his arm barely moving. Then there was a white blur as Dalla’s cloak moved in front of him, and the needler dropped from the fingers of the disguised murderer. Time went back to normal for him; he safetied his own weapon and dropped it, jumping forward.

He grabbed the fellow in the green uniform by the nose with his left hand, and punched him hard in the pit of the stomach with his right fist. The man’s mouth flew open, and a green capsule, the size and shape of a small bean, flew out. Pushing Dalla aside before she would step on it, he kicked the murderer in the stomach, doubling him over, and chopped him on the base of the skull with the edge of his hand. The pseudo-policeman dropped senseless.

With a handful of handkerchief-tissue from his pocket, he picked up the disgorged capsule, wrapping it carefully after making sure that it was unbroken. Then he looked around. The other two assassins were dead. Tortha Karf, who had been looking at the man in Proletarian dress whom Vall had killed first, turned, looked in another direction, and then cursed. Vall followed his eyes, and cursed also. One of the two policemen who had gotten out of the aircar was dead, too, and so was the all-important witness, Salgath Trod⁠—as dead as Nebu-hin-Abenoz, a hundred thousand parayears away.

The whole thing had ended within thirty seconds; for about half as long, everybody waited, poised in a sort of action-vacuum, for something else to happen. Dalla had dropped the shoulder-bag with which she had clubbed the prisoner’s needler out of his hand, and caught up the fallen weapon. When she saw that the man was down and motionless, she laid it aside and began picking up the glittering or silken trifles that had spilled from the burst bag. Vall retrieved his own weapon, glanced over it, and holstered it. Sothran Barth, the lieutenant in charge of the landing stage, was bawling orders, and men were coming out of the ready-room and piling into vehicles to pursue the aircar which had brought the assassins.

“Barth!” Vall called. “Have you a hypodermic and a sleep-drug ampoule? Well, give this boy a shot; he’s only impact-stunned. Be careful of him; he’s important.” He glanced around the landing-stage. “Fact is, he’s all we have to show for this business.”

Then he stooped to help Dalla gather her things, picking up a few of them⁠—a lighter, a tiny crystal perfume flask, miraculously unbroken, a face-powder box which had sprung open and spilled half its contents. He handed them to her, while Sothran Barth bent over the prisoner and gave him an injection, then went to the body of the other pseudo-policeman, forcing open his mouth. In his cheek, still unbroken, was a second capsule, which he added to the first. Tortha Karf was watching him.

“Same gang that killed that Carera slaver on Esaron Sector?” he asked. “Of course, exactly the same general procedure. Let’s have a look at the other one.”

The man in Proletarian dress must have had his capsule between his molars when he had been killed; it was broken, and there was a brownish discoloration and chemical odor in his mouth.

“Second time we’ve had a witness killed off under our noses,” Tortha Karf said. “We’re going to have to smarten up in a hurry.”

“Here’s one of us who doesn’t have to, much,” Vall said, nodding toward Dalla. “She knocked a needler out of one man’s hand, and we took him alive. The Force owes her a new shoulder-bag: she spoiled that one using it for a club.”

“Best shoulder-bag we can find you, Dalla,” Tortha Karf promised. “You’re promoted, herewith, to Special Chief’s Assistant’s Special Assistant⁠—You know, this Organization murder-section is good; they could kill anybody. It won’t be long before they assign a squad to us. Blast it, I don’t want to have to go around bodyguarded like a Fourth Level dictator, but⁠—”

A detective came out of the control room and approached.

“Screen call for you, sir,” he told Tortha Karf. “One of the news services wants a comment on a story they’ve just picked up that we’ve illegally arrested Councilman Salgath and are holding him incommunicado and searching his apartment.”

“That’s the Organization,” Vall said. “They don’t know how their boys made out; they’re hoping we’ll tell them.”

“No comment,” Tortha Karf said. “Call the girl on my switchboard and tell her to answer any other news-service calls. We have nothing to say at this time, but there will be a public statement at⁠ ⁠… at 2330,” he decided after a glance at his watch. “That’ll give us time to agree on a publicity line to adopt. Lieutenant Sothran! Take charge up here. Get all these bodies out of sight somewhere, including those of Councilman Salgath and Detective Malthor. Don’t let anybody talk about this; put a blackout on the whole story. Vall, you and Dalla and⁠ ⁠… oh, you, over there; take the prisoner down to my office. Sothran, any reports from any of the cars that were chasing that fake police car?”

Verkan Vall and Dalla were sitting behind Tortha Karf’s desk; Vall was issuing orders over the intercom and talking to the detectives who had remained at Salgath Trod’s apartment by visiscreen; Dalla was sorting over the things she had spilled when her bag had burst. They both looked up as Tortha Karf came in and joined them.

“The prisoner’s still under the drug,” the Chief said. “He’ll be out for a couple of hours; the psych-techs want to let him come out of it naturally and sleep naturally for a while before they give him a hypno. He’s not a ServSec Prole; uncircumcised, never had any syntho-enzyme shots or immunizations, and none of the longevity operations or grafts. Same thing for the two stiffs. And no identity records on any of the three.”

“The men at Salgath’s apartment say that his housekeeper and his two servants checked out through the house conveyer for ServSec One-Six-Five, at about 1830,” Vall said. “There’s a Prole entertainment center on that timeline. I suppose Salgath gave them the evening off before he called you.”

Tortha Karf nodded. “I suppose you ordered them picked up. The news services are going wild about this. I had to make a preliminary statement, to the effect that Salgath Trod was not arrested, came to Headquarters of his own volition, and is under no restraint whatever.”

“Except, of course, a slight case of rigor mortis,” Dalla added. “Did you mention that, Chief?”

“No, I didn’t.” Tortha Karf looked as though he had quinine in his mouth. “Vall, how in blazes are we going to handle this?”

“We ought to keep Salgath’s death hushed up, as long as we can,” Vall said. “The Organization doesn’t know positively what happened here; that’s why they’re handing out tips to the news services. Let’s try to make them believe he’s still alive and talking.”

“How can we do it?”

“There ought to be somebody on the Force close enough to Salgath Trod’s anthropometric specifications that our cosmeticians could work him over into a passable impersonation. Our story is that Salgath is on PolTerm, undergoing narco-hypnosis. We will produce an audiovisual of him as soon as he is out of narco-hyp. That will give us time to fix up an impersonator; We’ll need a lot of sound-recordings of Salgath Trod’s voice, of course⁠—”

“I’ll take care of the Home Timeline end of it; as soon as we get you an impersonator, you go to work with him. Now, let’s see whom we can depend on to help us with this. Lovranth Rolk, of course; Home Timeline section of the Paratime Code Enforcement Division. And⁠—”

Verkan Vall and Dalla and Tortha Karf and four or five others looked across the desk and to the end of the room as the telecast screen broke into a shifting light-pattern and then cleared. The face of the announcer appeared; a young woman.

“And now, we bring you the statement which Chief Tortha of the Paratime Police has promised for this time. This portion of the program was audiovisually recorded at Paratime Police Headquarters earlier this evening.”

Tortha Karf’s face appeared on the screen. His voice began an announcement of how Executive Councilman Salgath Trod had called him by visiphone, admitting to complicity in the recently-discovered paratemporal slave-trade.

“Here is a recording of Councilman Salgath’s call to me from his apartment to my office at 1945 this evening.”

The screen-image shattered into light-shards and rebuilt itself: Salgath Trod, at his desk in the library of his apartment, the brandy-goblet and the needler within reach, appeared. He began to speak: from time to time the voice of Tortha Karf interrupted, questioning or prompting him.

“You understand that this confession renders you liable to psycho-rehabilitation?” Tortha Karf asked.

Yes, Councilman Salgath understood that.

“And you agree to come voluntarily to Paratime Police Headquarters, and you will voluntarily undergo narco-hypnotic interrogation?”

Yes, Salgath Trod agreed to that.

“I am now terminating the playback of Councilman Salgath’s call to me,” Tortha Karf said, reappearing on the screen. “At this point Councilman Salgath began making a statement about his criminal activities, which we have on record. Because he named a number of his criminal associates, whom we have no intention of warning, this portion of Councilman Salgath’s call cannot at this time be made public. We have no intention of having any of these suspects escape, or of giving their associates an opportunity to murder them to prevent their furnishing us with additional information. Incidentally, there was an attempt, made on the landing stage of Paratime Police Headquarters, to murder Councilman Salgath, when he was brought here guarded by Paratime Police officers⁠—”

He went on to give a colorful and, as far as possible, truthful, account of the attack by the two pseudo-policemen and their pseudo-prisoner. As he told it, however, all three had been killed before they could accomplish their purpose, one of them by Salgath Trod himself.

The image of Tortha Karf was replaced by a view of the three assassins lying on the landing stage. They all looked dead, even the one who wasn’t; there was nothing to indicate that he was merely drugged. Then, one after another, their faces were shown in closeup, while Tortha Karf asked for close attention and memorization.