1
Chinese Gordon was fully awake. He’d heard the clinking noise again, and now there was no question the cat was listening too. The cat, Doctor Henry Metzger, had assumed the loaf-of-bread position on Gordon’s blanket, his ears straight up like a pair of spoons to catch the sound and lock onto it. Doctor Henry Metzger sat up and licked his paw, then froze as he detected some variation in the sound that Chinese Gordon’s ears couldn’t hear.
“What is it?” whispered Chinese Gordon. “Somebody trying to break in, isn’t it?”
Doctor Henry Metzger turned from the sound, walked up Chinese Gordon’s chest, and stepped on his forehead on the way to the spare pillow. He’d identified it as a human sound, which placed it outside Doctor Henry Metzger’s sphere of interest.
Damn, thought Chinese Gordon. Burglars. He slipped out of bed, moved quietly to the doorway, and listened. He could hear from downstairs the faint squeaking of the garage door to the shop moving on its rollers. His eyes strained, but he could see nothing below except the familiar dim shapes of the shop machines. Then, as the garage door opened farther, he saw a man silhouetted for a moment. The man entered, followed by another, and another.
Chinese Gordon stayed low, watching from the upper landing without moving. There were three of them. The gun was locked in the bottom of the tool chest in the back room downstairs, which meant it was worse than nothing because if he gave them enough time they’d find it.
He could tell they were just inside the garage door now, probably standing there waiting for their eyes to adjust to the darkness before trying to move into the shop. It was a lousy situation, thought Chinese Gordon. They might be just kids or winos or junkies trying to score a lot of expensive tools and machinery, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill him if he switched on the light or made a noise.
Beside him he felt Doctor Henry Metzger rubbing against him, purring. When Doctor Henry Metzger stopped purring and stared down into the shop, Chinese Gordon knew the men had begun to move. He watched the cat’s face, the intent unblinking eyes focused on the darkness below. Then Doctor Henry Metzger crouched low and peered over the edge of the landing, his ears back so his head would have no silhouette. One of them must be directly below, looking up at the power tools hanging on the pegboard on the wall. Chinese Gordon listened, and he could feel the shape of the man below him, leaning forward over the bench, his face staring up at the tools to assess their value, weight, and bulk. Now he would be reaching up for the electric drill.
Chinese Gordon felt a twinge of guilt about what had to be done. He knew it wasn’t fair, and there would be resentment, there might even be consequences he couldn’t imagine. He gently placed his hand on Doctor Henry Metzger, feeling the thick, soft fur. Then, without warning, he scooped the cat up and dropped him. Doctor Henry Metzger screamed as he fell, the terror, surprise, and anger howled into the darkness in a high-pitched screech.
Chinese Gordon could tell immediately that he’d judged the trajectory correctly. Doctor Henry Metzger could only have dropped five or six feet before the tone of the howling changed and the human scream joined it. The cat had definitely landed on the man’s head, scrambling desperately with claws out for a foothold, from the sound of it tearing great gashes, because the man’s shouts weren’t just terror, they were pain.
There were other sounds now too. The shouts of both of the man’s companions competed with the howling and screaming. “What?” one yelled. “What? What?” Then he ran into the lathe, which rocked slightly although it was bolted to the pavement, and must have injured himself somehow, because then his voice came from the floor in a breathless, inarticulate moan. The other screamed, “Hold still! Freeze, you bastard!” as though he were either contemplating shooting someone or merely advocating keeping calm.
On the landing Chinese Gordon lay flat on his belly and listened. The man on the ground said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What the hell happened?” said the one with the commanding voice. “It sounded like a baby.”
“God, I’m bleeding!” said the other.
Chinese Gordon heard them move away, then peered over the edge to watch them, one by one, escape under the partially opened garage door. A few seconds later he heard car doors slam and an engine start.
2
The sidewalks on the campus of the University of Los Angeles were crowded and chaotic. John Knox Morrison disliked that part of it, the sense of all these people wandering about according to no visible pattern, sometimes two or three abreast so he had to sidestep to let them pass. The bicycles added an element of danger to the matrix as they knifed through any momentary openings in the crowd at unpredictable angles and at speeds that reduced control to the art of picking a gap and aiming at it. Whenever John Knox Morrison visited a university campus he tried to arrange a way to avoid this feeling: have someone pick him up at the airport and take him to the right building. But Los Angeles was difficult because he had too many people to see on different campuses. Back in Washington it was easy to forget what it meant to come west. It was hard to envision a city eighty miles long and eighty miles wide.
At least here at ULA he knew where he was going. If it hadn’t been so near to lunchtime he’d have stopped in the romanesque revival building on his left for a doughnut. He knew the place better than most of these young people, he supposed. He’d been coming here since most of them were babies. A young girl with a worried expression on her face stared directly into his eyes as she passed. That one was an example: a child whose self-absorbed, unconfident gaze rested on the tall, gray-haired man in a gray suit making a measured way through the crowds. For an instant he wondered if she envied him his age. She probably thought he was a dean or vice-president, someone whose gray hair and presence here meant that he had long ago passed the midterm examinations, written the papers that seemed so awesome to her now.
It almost made John Knox Morrison smile to himself as he turned the corner and walked down the broader, easier expanse of University Avenue. The irony appealed to him—the child would have been puzzled and disappointed if she could have known who he really was. But he was more important on this campus than any dean or vice-president. If that little girl took a course in physics or chemistry or biology, the equipment she used would be the equipment that came here because he’d willed it. If she took a course in any of the social sciences, it would probably be held in the building he’d approved in 1968. The list was too long to remember at the moment, and it included a number of items he found distasteful to contemplate, investments that might not yield any discernible return before the end of the century. When he arrived on a university campus, he brought with him the force of the greatest determining factor in human history. John Knox Morrison was one of four senior executive officers of the federal government’s National Research Foundation, by far the largest and richest of the agencies that dispensed government research grants. When he spoke with professors, deans, department chairmen, there was little doubt that John Knox Morrison spoke with an authority that obliterated all titles and institutional structures, reduced them to ephemeral and meaningless local customs. He spoke with the power of money.
Copyright © 2003 by Thomas Perry. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
