CHAPTER SEVEN

1

The plane went into its final downward glide over Long Island, slipping into the JFK landing pattern, and the lounge hostess asked Rogers and the man to take their seats.

The man lifted his highball gracefully, set the edge against the lip of his mouth, and finished his drink. He put the glass down, and the grille moved back into place. He dabbed at his chin with a paper cocktail napkin. “Alcohol is very bad for high-carbon steel, you know,” he remarked to the hostess.

He had spent most of the trip in the lounge, occasionally ordering a drink, smoking at intervals, holding glass or cigarette in his metal hand. The passengers and crew had been forced to grow accustomed to him.

“Yes, sir,” the hostess said politely.

Rogers shook his head to himself. As he followed the man down the aisle to their seats, he said, “Not if it’s stainless steel, Mr. Martino. I’ve seen the metallurgical analyses on you.”

“Yes,” the man said, buckling his seatbelt and resting his hands lightly on his kneecaps. “You have. But that hostess hasn’t.” He put a cigarette in his mouth and let it dangle there, unlit, while the plane banked and steadied on its new heading. He looked out the window beside him. “Odd,” he said. “You wouldn’t expect it to still be too early for daylight.”

The moment the plane touched the runway, slowed, and began to taxi toward the gate, the man unfastened his seatbelt and lit his cigarette. “We seem to be here,” he said conversationally, and stood up. “It’s been a pleasant trip.”

“Pretty good,” Rogers said, unfastening his own belt. He looked toward Finchley, across the aisle, and shook his head helplessly as the FBI man raised his eyebrows. There was no doubt about it — whoever this man was, Martino or not, they were going to have a bad time with him.

“Well,” the man said, “I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting socially again, Mr. Rogers. I hardly know whether it’s proper to say good-bye or not.”

Rogers held out his hand wordlessly.

The man’s right hand was warm and firm. “It’ll be good to see New York again. I haven’t been here in nearly twenty years. And you, Mr. Rogers?”

“Twelve, about. I was born here.”

“Oh, were you?” They moved slowly along the aisle toward the rear door, with the man walking ahead of Rogers. “Then you’ll be glad to get back.”

Rogers shrugged uncomfortably.

The man’s chuckle was rueful. “Pardon me — do you know, for a moment I actually forgot this was hardly a pleasure trip for either of us?”

Rogers had no answer. He followed the man down the aisle to where the stewardesses gave them their coats. They stepped out on the ramp, with Rogers’ eyes on a level with the back of the man’s bare head.

The man half-turned, as though for another casual remark.

The first flashbulb exploded down at the end of the ramp, and the man recoiled. He stumbled back against Rogers, and for a moment he was pressed against him. Rogers suddenly caught the stale, acrid smell of the perspiration that had been soaking the man’s shirt for hours.

There was a cluster of photographers down there, pointing their cameras at the man and firing their flashguns in a ripple of sharp light that annoyed the other passengers.

The man tried to turn. His hard hand closed on Rogers’ shoulder as he tried to get him out of the way. The gaskets behind his mouth grille were up out of sight. Rogers heard his two food-grinding blades clash together.

Then Finchley somehow got past both of them, pushing through to the end of the ramp. He was reaching for his wallet as he went, and then the FBI shield glittered briefly in the puffballs of light. The photographers stopped.

Rogers took a deep breath and pried the man’s hand off his shoulder. “All right,” he said gently, lowering the hand carefully as though it were no longer attached to anything. “It’s all right, man, it’s under control. The damned pilot must have radioed ahead or something. Finchley’ll have a talk with the newspaper editors and the wire service chiefs. You won’t get spread all over the world.”

The man got his footing back, and stepped unsteadily into the debarking area. He mumbled something that had to be either thanks or a stumbling apology. Rogers was just as glad not to have heard it.

“We’ll take care of the news media. The only thing you’ll have left to worry about is the people you meet, but from what I’ve seen you can do a damn fine job of handling those.”

The man’s glittering eyes swung on Rogers savagely. “Just don’t watch me too closely,” he growled.

2

Rogers stood in the local ANG Security office that afternoon, massaging his shoulder from time to time while he talked. Twenty-two men sat in orderly rows of classroom chairs facing him, taking notes on standard pads rested on the broad right arms of the chairs.

“All right,” Rogers said in a tired voice, “You’ve all got offset copies of the dossier on Martino. It’s pretty complete, but that’s only where we start. You’ll get your individual assignments as you file out, but I want you all to know what the team’s supposed to be doing as a whole. Any one of you may come up with something that’ll seem unimportant unless we have the whole picture.

“Now — what we want is a diagram of a man, down to the last capillary and” — his lips twitched — “rivet. Out of your individual reports, we’re going to put together a master description of him that’ll tell us everything from the day he was born to the day the lab went up. We want to know what foods he liked, what cigarettes he smoked, what vices he had, what kind of women he favored — and why. We want a list of the books he’s read — and what he agreed with in them. Almost all of you are going to do nothing but intensive research on him. When we’re through, we want to have read a man’s mind.” Rogers let his hand fall to his side. “Because his mind is all we have left to recognize him by.

“Some of you are going to be assigned to direct surveillance. It’ll be your reports we’ll check against the research. They’ll have to be just as detailed, just as precise. Remember that he knows you’re watching. That means his gross actions may very well be intended to mislead you. It’ll be the small things that might trip him up. Watch who he talks to — but pay just as much attention to the way he lights his cigarettes.

“But remember you’re dealing with a genius. He’s either Lucas Martino or a Soviet ringer, but, whichever it is, he’s sharper than any one of us. You’ll have to face that, keep it in mind, and just remember there’re more of us and we’ve got the system. Of course” — Rogers heard the frustrated undertone in his voice — “he may be part of a system, too. But it’d be much smarter of them to let him go it alone.

“As to what he’s here for if he is a ringer: it might be anything. They might seriously have expected him to get back into the technological development program. If so, he’s in a hole right now, with no place to go. He may make a break to get out of the Allied Sphere. Watch out for that. Again, be may be here for something else, figuring the Soviets expected us to handle him just the way we have. If so, there’re all kinds of rabbits he could start pulling out of his hat. We’re positive he isn’t a human bomb or a walking arsenal full of other stuff out of the funnies. We’re positive, but, Lord knows, we could we wrong. Watch out for him if he starts trying to buy electronic parts, or anything he could build something out of.

“Those of you who’re going to dig into his history — if he ever fiddled with things in his cellar, or tossed an idea for some kind of nasty gimmick into a discussion, I want to hear about it quick. I don’t know what this K-Eighty-Eight thing he worked up was — I do know it must have had an awful punch. I think we’d all appreciate it if he didn’t put one together in a back room somewhere.”