Elliot was interrupted by a knock at the door. “My visitor,”
his father said, rising to get it. “If both of you keep silent, I’ll allow you to stay. I’m very near having Cathryn and Denise freed.”
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Dr. Vreeland opened the door and, even before his visitor entered, said, “Good news, we can proceed at once. You won’t have to produce my son. He is—”
“Freeze!”
It was Lorimer’s command. She had pulled her .32 caliber silenced automatic from her shoulder bag and was now in a businesslike, two-handed stance, aiming at the newcomer. The visitor, an erect, roughly handsome middle-aged man in a dark suit, only now saw her, and an expression of surprise—much milder than would be expected—appeared on his face. Dr. Vreeland had also frozen upon seeing the gun; his expression was closer to total fluster.
Elliot remained seated. He had been taken off guard at first but he understood when he recognized the visitor as a man he had just recently seen in the news. It was the director of the FBI, Lorimer’s father.
“Inside,” Lorimer ordered both men. “Keep your hands in the open.”
The FBI director entered the room naturally, preceded by Dr. Vreeland; the room door swung shut. Lawrence Powers looked at his daughter and said, “Left foot farther forward, relax your right arm a bit. Haven’t I taught you anything, Deanne?”
“You know her, Powers?” Dr. Vreeland asked.
“I never have,” he replied, “even though she’s my only child.”
Powers turned to his daughter. “If you’re intent on committing patricide, Deanne, then do it. Otherwise, let Dr. Vreeland and me get down to our business.”
Lorimer kept the pistol pointed at her father. Elliot told her sharply, “Don’t.”
She glanced at Elliot sidewise, then answered him tightly,
“You wouldn’t tell me that if you knew how lethal he is.”
“Just don’t.”
Lorimer glanced at Elliot briefly again. Then she handed Alongside Night
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over her gun to him.
The FBI director relaxed slightly. Elliot raised the pistol at him once more. “Not yet,” he said, his voice shrill.
“Elliot,” Dr. Vreeland said, “don’t be a fool! He’s come here to negotiate.”
“I don’t have any choice, Dad. Mr. Powers, please. With two fingers and slowly. Toss them onto the bed.”
The FBI director shrugged and complied; presently, a service .45 and a .32 identical to Lorimer’s lay on the double bed, ammunition for each safely in Elliot’s pocket. As a final precaution, Lorimer held the gun on her father another few moments while Elliot frisked him. He found, in a jacket pocket, a shiny metal device the size and shape of a cigarette lighter, with a tiny red button.
Elliot held it up to Lorimer. “A microtransmitter?”
“A telephone key,” the FBI director answered him, “for those who know how to use it. Which you don’t.”
Elliot considered it. Certainly the federal government would not jam telephone service to trusted employees. A device such as this perhaps could override blocks. “True,” Elliot replied, pocketing the device.
He waved Powers, Lorimer, and his father over to the chairs around the coffee table, then sat himself on the bed with Lorimer’s pistol on his lap. “Now you can talk,” he said. 188
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Chapter 20
On Saturday morning, February 24, when the FBI director had finally received from his New York field office the Vreeland
“natural causes” affidavit obtained three days earlier, he would have found it quite convenient for Dr. Martin Vreeland and his entire, troublesome family to be out of the country. (He had sent the affidavit by private messenger over to the OPI—better late than never, he reasoned.) The following morning, Sunday, after a blistering twenty minutes in the Oval Office, Lawrence Powers knew that the President of the United States now considered Dr. Vreeland’s goodwill far more valuable than his own.
It was not that the President had been piqued by Powers’
loss of the master subversives file. As a matter of fact, the President was delighted that with loss of the file went any further possibility of Powers blackmailing him with respect to the President’s agorist origins; presidential enemies would have loved the proof of a first congressional race financed with black-market profits and the blood of betrayed business partners. No. Dr. Vreeland himself had been transformed overnight from the President’s second-most-dangerous enemy to his first—ironically, also, to his only chance for political survival. “And the survival of your goddamn Holy Bureau, too,”