Designated Targets

Hurley didn’t even light up a cigarette until they were about an hour into the trip. By that time they were deep into a discussion about the war, and the Zone, and the politics of both. Dave Hurley proved to be more of a broadminded character than Dan would have given him credit for. He wasn’t at all concerned about women trying to “liberate” themselves. He said that as a businessman, he’d be doing himself out of a dollar if he didn’t use all the skills his employees had to offer, whether they were women or blacks or Latinos or whatever. He didn’t even seem to mind the fact that fairies and lemons, as he called them, felt free to live openly within the boundaries of the Zone, although he did wish they’d keep it private.

“After all, it’s not like I go around groping my wife in public, is it?” he said.

No, Dan agreed. It wasn’t.

In fact, Dan Black didn’t have to share his trip with Dave Hurley all the way across America. The former sheriff left the flight in Denver, where he said he had a new branch office to visit. There was an element of truth to it, too.

Special Agent David Hurley drove to the Bureau’s field office in Denver, where he grabbed a spare secretary and a teleprinter, to immediately file a report with Washington.

He had made contact with Commander Daniel Black, he wrote, but did not think he would be willing to act as an operative, or even an informant. The commander had formed an immoral sexual relationship with a reporter from 21C, a Miss Julia Duffy (file no. 010162820). He was planning to travel across state lines with Duffy for the purposes of said immoral sexual conduct, in violation of the Mann Act, and openly admitted to having done so before.

Black seemed to share many of the subversive and Communistic leanings espoused by Duffy in particular, and the wider population of the Multinational Force in general. During their discussion, he expressed approval of many sexual perversions, including mixed race and homosexual activities. His family background may have led him to embrace socialistic tendencies, since his father had been a unionized mine worker. Black himself confessed to having been a union member, before joining the navy.

Commander Black spoke openly, without regard to security, about his duties and about developments taking place in the Special Administrative Zone, although he declined the opportunity to enter into a corrupt relationship when it was proffered.

Special Agent Hurley did not consider him to be a good American, or a friend of the Bureau. However, he did not seem to be a particularly guileful individual, and might well be cultivated as an unwitting source of information, given his lack of sophistication and his access to the highest levels of command within the Zone.

For this reason, Hurley recommended that contact be maintained.

NY MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, NEW YORK

She was never going to get used to these fucking flying coffins. It took forever to get from Brisbane to Honolulu, and then to Frisco, and New York. She traveled in a Catalina Flying Boat, and a Boeing Stratoliner, all of it supposedly first class, paid for by the Times, but Julia Duffy still got out at the other end feeling like she’d spent four days on the roof of a Pakistani goods train with about a hundred unwashed peasants and their livestock.

The period piece aesthetics of the Stratoliner had been amusing at first. The wicker chairs, the cigarette girls, the cocktails, and waiter service were all great fun if you were into historical slumming. But really, droning around the world in unpressurized tin cans that couldn’t even match the speed of a Q-class Beemer—like the one sitting back in her garage in 2021—well, that was her idea of hell.