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forty-eight

"That was how Conrad Ashling hid himself, and how he contrived to get himself here," Ulkanov concluded. "Small wonder, then, that this 'Samurai,' as Maurice Gordon was officially designated, could never catch him. Samurai was him!"

The professor was speaking mainly for the benefit of Jason, Gunther, and the two girls—all students of his—who had helped spring the trap when Samurai got to the inst-itute. Kay and Scipio, who were sitting on one side of the center table in the small conference room adjoining Ulkanov's office, had given Ulkanov a full account of the events in Minneapolis and Chicago while they were waiting for Ashling to come around. Ashling, in his coded message to Ulkanov from Atlanta, had urged against divulging the secret about Gordon to them—in order that they would play their roles faithfully. Ulkanov, however, knew them better and had considered this overcautious. Needing all the help he could get, he had waited until they were in Europe and then filled them in on as much as they needed to know to take part in laying the trail that led Gordon to Semipalatinsk, and to act as bait for him to follow to the institute after he reached Copernicus.

Ashling, recovered enough by now to have joined them, smiled thinly over a mug of strong black coffee—not coylene. "But from the things I'm hearing now, it doesn't seem to have all gone as simply as I planned," he said. "I've been leading you people on quite a dance."

"You . . . could say that," Barbara, Ulkanov's assistant, agreed from one of the chairs opposite.

Ulkanov looked at Ashling. "Do you want me to go on with what I think? After all, it was you who set the whole thing up, Conrad. It's your show."

"You'd better," Ashling replied. "Just at this moment, I think you know a lot more about it than I do."

"Very well." Ulkanov nodded and sat back for a moment to send a look around the room, taking in the whole company. "Conrad's intention, of course, was that after he sent the parcel from the Hyatt and got the message off to me through Josef, the Ashling personality would deactivate overnight, and he would wake up the next morning, thinking and functioning as Samurai, but with his memory erased from the time he was in Pipeline's room two nights before."

Ashling interjected, "I knew that Gordon would have a gap in his recollections of what had taken place. There was no way to get around that. But I figured he'd assume that he'd been jumped by somebody in Pipeline's room that he hadn't seen, or something like that." He tossed up a hand briefly. "However, he'd find the note about Headman, Jacksonville, and Copernicus, and when he combined that information with the message I'd left for Nordens, they'd conclude that during the blank period, Samurai had established that Ashling was heading for Europe by sea."

"Hoping they'd send Samurai after him," one of the two girls said.

"Right." Ashling nodded. "The sea crossing would take ten days, and by that time I hoped the parcel would have gotten to Volgograd, and Andre would be able to set up more clues to draw Gordon on from there." Ashling looked at Ulkanov wryly. "But I, ah, gather it wasn't quite that easy."

Ulkanov sighed. "There was a lot that you had never tried before. You were working under stress and in haste. . . . I don't think Nordens knew all the answers quite as well as you give him credit for, either." He glanced around the table again, and resumed, "After they tried to cover their tracks by faking the record of Demiro's death, Nordens and whoever else was in it with him were left with Demiro, overdosed with codes derived from Richard Jarrow."

"Overdosed? He thought he was Jarrow!" Scipio said.

"Jarrow was this Minneapolis schoolteacher that they got the source codes from to reprogram Demiro, right?" Ashling checked. Ulkanov nodded.

Kay frowned and extended a finger to halt things there for a moment. Ulkanov raised his eyebrows at her inquiringly.

"Yes, I reached the same conclusion when we were back in Chicago, but there's something that isn't clear to me," Kay said. "If that happened, it means that the Jarrow personality was reactivated sometime in that interval -period at Pearse, between Jarrow's death and the creation of Samurai. And yet Jarrow had no recollection of such an event. He was quite adamant that his last memory before waking up in Atlanta was of his final visit to Valdheim." She looked unconsciously to Ashling for confirmation as she spoke, but Ashling could only shrug in a way that said that had been somebody else; it was all just as much a mystery to him too, now. Kay looked back at Ulkanov.

The professor showed his hands and sighed heavily. "Who can say? At this stage we have no idea what, exactly, took place during that period at Pearse. One possibility is that Jarrow's condition was too confused for him to have registered any coherent recollections. Alternatively, Nordens might have erased that reawakening in the mistaken belief that he was erasing the complete Jarrow personality that shouldn't have been there in the first place—as a prelude to the creation of Samurai." Ulkanov shook his head and spread his hands open again. "Whatever the true story, by the time he began building Samurai, Nordens would have believed that the scrambled Demiro-Jarrow personality had been obliterated. But that wasn't what happened. Instead of being substituted in place of the Demiro-Jarrow entity, the Samurai persona was superposed on top of it."

"You mean the time-out code that was supposed to deactivate Ashling went too deep," Barbara said.

"Exactly!" Ulkanov said, thumping the tabletop with a palm. "It not only deactivated Conrad, but Samurai as well, and then the Jarrow level that lay below that. So the person who woke up the next morning to find himself in an Atlanta hotel was Tony Demiro—completely bewildered, not knowing what he was doing there.

"What was he to do?" Ulkanov looked around, then answered his own question. "He called the person who was closest to him and the first who would naturally come to mind: the girl he intended to get married to one day, Rita Chilsen. That was on the Monday. Rita got there the same day." Ulkanov looked at Kay. This was the part that she and Scipio had supplied.

"They talked and puzzled over it, but of course they couldn't figure it out," Kay said. "Tony's last recollections were from when he was still with the program at Pearse. That had been something like five months before. He'd gotten fitter physically, and a lot tougher—that was from Samurai's training, but they wouldn't have known that. Every-thing was a complete mystery. But they were lovers, together again. She stayed that night."

"Demiro slept," Ulkanov said. "But the deactivation code set up by Conrad, which was triggered by a condition of natural sleep, remember, hadn't switched off as it was supposed to. During that night it suspended Demiro, and the self who woke up on Tuesday morning was the transferred personality of Richard Jarrow that had been in a dormant condition all the time. His last memory was from April third, which was the last time he visited Valdheim before dying unexpectedly from a stroke early in May."

Jason frowned as he thought this over. Then he turned to his colleague, Gunther. "So why wouldn't the next -period of sleep deactivate Jarrow and restore Samurai again?" he asked. Gunther could only shake his head helplessly.

"A good question," Barbara agreed. Everyone looked at Ashling.

Ashling eased himself back in his chair and returned a tired smile. "I don't know why not," he told them. "To be honest, I'm astounded that it worked the way it was supposed to at all. You have no idea of the pressure and the haste I had to work under when I set it up that last night at Pearse. It depended on a complex coding procedure that I had not devised and wasn't familiar with . . . added to a tangle of convolutions pertaining to different personalities that were already jumbled. Probably no one will ever be able to know exactly what took place."

"But whatever the reason, Jarrow he remained," Ulkanov went on, getting back to the point. He looked at Scipio. "And that was when we lost him, wasn't it?"

Scipio replied, "Josef had been away since the previous evening. He got a message from Ashling the next morning, telling him to clear out of the room in the Hyatt. But it didn't say where Ashling was. When Josef went there with a couple of the others, they found Leon and the other two out cold and Ashling gone."

"So they had no leads at all," Barbara said.

"None."

"So how did they pick it up again?"

"That was the amazing thing," Scipio said. "After what happened Saturday night, Josef just got everyone out and laid low all the next day. On Monday he went back with Leon to settle with the hotel. And lo and behold, Leon spotted the agent who had gone in after Ashling on -Saturday!"

"He was still there, in the hotel?" Barbara said, sounding mystified for a moment. Then she looked at Ashling. "But wait a minute. That's right. You were Demiro by then, weren't you."

"But registered as Maurice Gordon," Kay said. Ashling just shook his head hopelessly and said nothing.

Scipio resumed, speaking to Ashling. "Josef notified me, and we kept an eye on you. But the next morning you suddenly vanished. We didn't know it at the time, but you'd gone back to Minneapolis, now as Jarrow. All we had left to go on was Rita. We followed her back to Chicago, and then discovered that Gordon was none other than her former fiancé, who was supposed to be dead! What did that mean? Nobody had a clue. So we did the only thing we could and kept a watch on her place in the hope that you'd show up there."

"And so did the feds," Kay interjected.

"Anyway," Scipio went on, "we traced you after you and Rita got away from them, and to cut a long story short, eventually you agreed to go back to Pearse, essentially to help us find out what the hell had been going on there."

Ashling looked uncertain. "I did? . . . You mean Jarrow did? I'm surprised that he would. I mean, from what I've been told, he sounded like a dedicated servant of the system. I'd have thought he'd be more against you than for you."

Scipio snorted. "Oh, he didn't mean it. It was just to get himself away. I'll bet that the first thing he did as soon as he was back inside Pearse was to spill all the beans. But we gambled that maybe what he found out there would change his mind. What else could we do?"

"And Rita was pushing him to go back too," Kay said. "For her he was Demiro literally back from the dead, but with delusions of being someone else. She hoped that something might happen there that would bring Demiro back again."

Ashling looked at them in turn, nodding intently as he strove to keep track of it all.

Ulkanov took over again at that point. "And that was when the most extraordinary part of all happened," he said. "You see, Conrad, by then your plan was totally screwed up. Samurai hadn't been reactivated. The information that was supposed to send him after Ashling had got lost. And the situation of Demiro thinking he was Jarrow had happened all over again, only now he was loose with the FSS chasing him." Ulkanov spread his hands and pulled a face.

"A mess," Ashling agreed. He looked around at the other faces and shrugged in a way that said well, he'd done his best.

Ulkanov went on, "But we can only assume that when you went back to Pearse, Nordens put everything back on track for us by reactivating Samurai. And once Samurai was functioning again, he picked up the trail as you'd intended in the first place. The irony was that it was Nordens himself who saved it."

Ashling shuffled in his chair and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. "Fine, okay. Now this is where it gets interesting. I don't remember anything after Sunday, which was the day I set everything up. I left a message for Nordens and wrote a note that Samurai was supposed to find the next morning. Between them they should have figured that I was sailing from Jacksonville to Hamburg on a German ship called the Auriga. It sounds as if that worked out in the end somehow, in spite of all the problems in Atlanta."

"So it would appear," Ulkanov agreed. "Exactly what happened at Pearse, we have no way of knowing. But I had gotten your coded message and so knew about the Auriga."

"What did you do?" Ashling asked. "How did you get me the rest of the way here?"

"Well, whatever did happen at Pearse, they rushed Samurai over to Hamburg in time to be there with the local police when the Auriga docked. Of course, no Ashling came off it. But it so happens that there's a certain brothel in Hamburg where one of the girls does a sideline as a -police informer. Pipeline has known about it for a long time."

"Oh, God, I didn't go there, did I?" Ashling groaned.

"No, but a friend of ours called Nicolaus did. He'd had a lot to drink, talked too much, and mentioned that he was in town to meet an important scientist who was coming in secretly from the USA. He also let it slip that he was staying at a particular hotel-pub, not far away."

"Good enough," Ashling agreed. "What happened then?"

"That got back via the police, as it was supposed to. We even paid somebody who looked a bit like Ashling to put in a quick appearance there with Nicolaus. But when Samurai and the police arrived, it was too late, naturally. They should have found one of your medication containers there, though."

"So that parcel that I sent got through to Volgograd in time?"

"Yes. It made things a lot easier."

Ashling gave a satisfied nod. "Next?"

"Well, in case Samurai missed some of the other things we'd planned for later, I thought we should give an indication of your final destination right then. It turned out to be as well that I did."

"Good thinking," Ashling agreed. "How did you do it?"

"A telephone call from Volgograd, which we hoped would be picked up by the Consolidation spy satellites. It gave a rendezvous that you were supposed to make with a courier in Berlin the next day, and also your launch date from Semipalatinsk."

"And Samurai showed up in Berlin," Ashling guessed.

"Correct—which told us that the call had been intercepted. If it hadn't, we had alternative plans in hand."

"I assume that he missed me again in Berlin," Ashling said.

"Yes. However, a cooperative restaurant manager and a bribed taxi driver provided some snippets that got you to the border. You were to cross over into Bohemia at Zittau. There's a certain pair there—a border police captain and a Pole who gets people across for a fee—whom Pipeline have suspected for some time of working a double--dealing act. We set it up to look as if Ashling had gone across, and we assumed that the German authorities would let Samurai through officially. But that was when trouble hit."

"How?" Ashling asked.

"Somebody back in the States must have gotten wind of what was going on and alerted Berlin. German federal agents appeared in Zittau to take Samurai in." Ulkanov smiled impishly. "You were quite a star, Conrad. You demol-ished them with ease, from the account I heard. Then you went across after him on your own. You weren't in FER territory yet, and we were worried that the authorities would be looking for you. One of Pipeline's people in that area, an American woman called Roxy, spent half the night touring the hotels and guest houses on the other side of the border to find you. She drove you to Prague and got you on an unofficial flight into Transylvania, from where you'd be able to join the regular FER routes. That was when I was glad we'd fed you the final destination. We heard nothing more of you until you appeared in disguise in Semipalatinsk the night before Ashling was due to launch. We'd been getting quite anxious."

"We were in Semipalatinsk by then, booked on the same flight, with another Pipeline guy," Kay said, indicating herself and Scipio. "We booked a room in one of the big hotels there under the name that Ashling was supposed to be using. Knowing Samurai's abilities by that time, we figured that if he'd made it to Semipalatinsk, he'd track us down. And sure enough you did. But Ashling had flown again. You found confirmation that he'd been there, though. And, purely coincidentally of course, the exact place that he was coming to, here at Copernicus."

"Okay, very good," Ashling conceded. "So here I am. And now that I am here, let me show you something else that Samurai didn't know he was bringing." He lifted Samurai's briefcase onto the table and opened it. "Does anyone have a razor blade or a sharp knife?" he asked, looking around.

Ulkanov felt through his pockets but shook his head.

"I'll get one," Gunther said. He rose and left the room.

Ashling started to say something more, then stopped, looking puzzled suddenly as a new thought struck him. "But if I was disguised, how did you know me when I got here?" he asked Ulkanov.

Ulkanov grinned. "Do you still have a piece of paper that you found in the Kosmogord hotel in Semipalatinsk?"

Ashling frowned and searched through his pockets. "This?" He produced a crumpled scrap and unfolded it. It read: Dr. Andre Ulkanov, Neurophysiology Dept., Science Institute at Copernicus 3, followed by a phone number with a lunar access code.

"Have you got the counter, Jason?" Ulkanov asked, looking toward the far end of the table. Jason produced a small silver box with an extending probe piece, and Kay passed it across. Ulkanov thumbed a switch on the side and -directed the probe at the piece of paper in Ashling's hand. The box began emitting rapid beeps.

"Impregnated with a radioactive tracer," Ulkanov said, looking back at Ashling. "We picked you up the moment you walked in the door."

 

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