Chaingang

“Nope.” Eventually he found a man who owned an ancient Piper Cub that he kept tethered at the Charleston Emergency Airfield.

“I understand you drop leaflets?” Royce asked of the man.

“Sometimes. I have a time or two. What you want dropped?” Royce told him about the circulars.

“Do you have your license?"

“License?” Royce asked, and learned about an entirely new aspect of the circular-dropping biz. Apparently you had to get a license from the city. Where did one go to get it?

Marty Kerns's office. Couldn't they “work something out?” Royce wondered.

“This baby is a J5—one of the rarest Cubs in private hands, my friend. My father won it from ‘Wings of Destiny’ in 1940! It was Grand Champion Antique three years running at the aeroplane show. I could never do anything that might jeopardize—"

“I understand.” Royce said, thanking him. Royce's picture of himself dumping leaflets from two thousand feet, his white scarf streaming over the side of the cockpit, was in tatters.

By early evening, the ink barely drying on the print job, they were no longer trying to get the circular dropped, but were still shopping around for a way to get it into the Waterton homes. The Maysburg Weekly Dispatch was out. The Jackson Grove Star was out. There was one way they could get it into area homes tomorrow morning, and that was to give a great deal of cash to one Fred Finch, who put out something called the Tri-State Shopper. They would be an “insert,” sandwiched in between coupons for discounts on rump roast (USDA choice boneless: $1.99 a pound) and hog jowls (SPECIAL! Only 59 cents a pound!).

Fifty thousand leaflets, Mr. Finch assured them, would be tucked into his two-page, two-color throwaway.

“I ain't never done this for nobody before! Hope I ain't making no mistake,” he said. Not at these prices, he wasn't.

Royce was a worrier. He worried that Mr. Finch might just dump the leaflets, which he swore would be “tucked by high-speed insertion machine into each and every Tri-State Shopper” that went into the mailboxes. Who would be the wiser? Mary was even more worried than he was.

“This whole idea was lunacy, Royce,” she raged, using his name like a knife blade. “We didn't use our heads. I'm going to be sued from one end of the country to the other—we didn't think about that. I can't believe I've been such an idiot!” Wisely, he kept still and let it pour until she wound down.

After shed calmed down considerably, she picked up their mail.

“You got these,” she said, handing him a stack of envelopes, bills and junk mail. There was something with a Memphis postmark. He felt a surge of excitement as he ripped the envelope open and read the communication.

A clerk without a name, a faceless nonentity seated in his/her workspace area in front of a flickering green screen, had processed the number search he'd requested, and the search, trace, transfer procedure had imprinted the results, sending the data back to Memphis.

Another faceless bod at the Tennessee end of ELINT's daisy chain had punched up Hawthorne's code number, got an active clearance, retrieved his mail drop particulars when they couldn't find a telephone contact number, and the printout had been forwarded, in an unmarked (except for franking stamps) government envelope to Waterton, where it had in turn been forwarded to Mary Perkins's post office box in Maysburg. A no-no. Something that was never done without prior consent by the case handler. An error that could have put somebody's tit firmly in the wringer. But it hadn't.

The communication had come the day after Royce stopped near Waterworks Hill and called the phonemen to ID that frequently dialed D.C.-area disconnect showing on Sam Perkins's telephone bill.

The printout listed the number. Gave its status as having reverted to Intercept. The official user: North American Medical Research Consultants. ELINT's probe identified it as “Control cover for military counterintelligence operational unit. Parentheses CLASSIFIED OPERATIONS slash DOMESTIC end parentheses.

“What is it?” Mary asked, reading something in his face and long silence.

“I'm not—hell, I don't know. Who did Sam know in a military counterintelligence operational unit?"

“Nobody.” Her pretty face was blank of expression for a second, then began to appear more thoughtful. “Unless ... no. Nobody. Not that I ever heard about. Why?"

He showed her.

“It was probably Christopher Sinclair. Does this mean he was in a military counterintelligence unit?"

“This wasn't Christopher Sinclair. Those calls were to New York—remember? We figured those out. This was someone else. Somebody Sam had a lot of contact with."

“Mmm.” She shook her head. “I don't have a clue."

“If it was World Ecosphere, Inc., one of their dummy phone fronts, we're in a dilly of a mess. That would mean that Ecoworld is a U.S. government drug lab. Which makes no sense whatsoever."