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But, vacation or no vacation, he thought solemnly, he was an FBI Agent, and his motto was: "There's always a way." No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, or finding their present whereabouts, was going to work. They'd been covering themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years--and if anyone got close, a burst of mental energy was quite enough to turn the seeker aside.
Nobody, Malone told himself grimly, was perfect. There were clues lying around somewhere; he was sure of that. There had to be. The problem was simply to figure out where to look, and how to look, and what to look for.
Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. He stood up slowly and went into the kitchen to start heating water for coffee. There was, he told himself, a long night ahead of him. He sighed gently. But there was no help for it; the work had to be done--and done quickly.
But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone's interior workings, his mind was as blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent dawn began to show in the East, and Malone tendered it some extremely rude words. Then, Haggard, red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.
* * * * *
When he awoke, the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the cheerful sound of too much traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone's semiaware mind in a great tinny shout:
"The President, taking action on the current crisis, has declared martial law throughout the nation," a voice said in an important-sounded monotone. "Exempt from this proclamation are members of the Armed Services, Special Agents and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The proclamation, issued this morning, was made public in a special news conference which--"
Malone ripped out a particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. "That," he muttered, "is a fine thing to wake up to." He focused his eyes, with only slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was a little after two.
"Later developments will be reported as and when they occur," the announcer was saying, "and in one hour a special panel of newscasters will be assembled here to discuss this latest action in the light of present happenings. Any special rules and regulations will be broadcast over this station--"
"Shut up," Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a lot better and clearer-headed than he had been. Maybe the sleep had actually done him some good.
He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then padded into the bathroom for a shower and shave. After he'd changed he thought about a morning or afternoon cup of coffee, but last night's dregs appeared to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.
Now he knew that, sooner or later, he was going to have to talk to Burris. Burris _had_ to know, even if there was nothing to be done.
And now was just as good--or as bad--a time as any.
He didn't hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for Burris' office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, waiting for the well-known voice.
It didn't come.
Instead, Wolf, the Director's secretary, spoke up.
"Burris isn't in, Malone," he said. "He had to fly to Miami. I can get a call through to him on the plane, if it's urgent, but he'll be landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he'd call in this afternoon."
"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. O.K. It isn't urgent." He was just as glad of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through to a solution, and hand it to Burris on a silver platter. "But why Miami?" he added.
"Don't you hear about anything any more?" Wolf asked.
"I've been on vacation."
"Oh," Wolf said. "Well, the Governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami Beach."
"Ah," Malone said. He thought about it for a second. "Frankly," he said, "this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation. Not even to Mississippi."
"You express my views precisely," Wolf said.
"How about the killer?" Malone said. "I gather they haven't got him yet, or Burris wouldn't be on his way down."
"No," Wolf said. "The killer would be on his way here instead. But you know how things are--everything's confused. Governor Flarion was walking along Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle with, I guess, a scope sight."
"Professional," Malone commented.
"It looks like it," Wolf said. "And he picked the right time for it, too--the way things are he was just one more confusion among the rest. Nobody even heard the sniper's shot; the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been fired."
"And as I remember Collins Avenue--" Malone started.
"Right," Wolf said. "But it's even worse now, with everything going nuts. Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll, there's an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find somebody who saw a man acting suspicious in any of the nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or saw anybody at all lurking or loitering anywhere near to the scene."
"Lovely," Malone said. "Sounds like a nice complicated job."
"You don't know the half of it," Wolf said. "There's also the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart attack, and not even in Miami Beach. Everything happening down there isn't happening, according to them; Miami Beach is the one unsullied beauty spot in a mixed-up United States."
"All I can say," Malone offered, "is good luck. This is the saddest day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long."
"Agreed," Wolf said. "Want me to tell Burris you called?"
"Right," Malone said, and switched off.
* * * * *
The assassination of Nemours P. Flarion, he told himself, obviously meant something. It pointed straight toward some entirely new kind of answer. Granted, old Nemours P. had been a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be, dictator whose final act was quite in keeping with the rest of his official life. Who else would be in Miami Beach, far away from his home state, while the President was declaring nationwide martial law?
But that, Malone told himself, wasn't the point. Or not quite the point, anyhow.
Maybe some work would dig up more facts. Anyhow, Malone was reasonably sure that he could reassign himself from vacation time, at least until he called Burris. And he had work to do; nobody was going to hand him anything on a silver serving salver.
He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
"Yes, sir?" a familiar voice said.
"Potter," Malone said, "this is Malone. I want facsimiles of everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis Carter, and on Luba Ardanko. Both of these last are connected with the Society."
"You're back on duty, Malone?" Potter said.
"Right," Malone said. "Make that fast, will you?"
Potter nodded. "Right away," he said.
It didn't take long for the facsimile records to arrive, and Malone went right to work on them. Maybe somewhere in those records was the clue he had desperately needed. Where was the PRS? What were they doing now? What did they plan to do?
And why had they started the whole row in the first place?
The PRS, he saw, was even more widely spread than he had thought. It had branches in almost every major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such nonmaterialistic, un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that, Malone thought, hardly mattered. Maybe in Russia they called themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borschch League. He was fairly sure, from all the evidence, that the PRS had some kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
Money backing didn't seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and who donated a few dollars apiece to the PRS. Besides this mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and seemed actively interested in its aims.